WILLS'S BOOK IS VERY GOOD : It could have been terrific.

Garry Wills's Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (Doubleday) is an important book. I think Wills gets many things right. Of course, as a member of the Eastern Orthodox church, I could be expected to agree with him about Vatican I, papal infallibility, and Pius IX. His points about the way the argument against the ordination of women has changed, over time, are also convincing, and his outline of the papacy's sorry record on anti-Semitism is excellent. The overall contention that the church has too often been more concerned with its position than with the truth is on target (and true, of course, not only of Catholicism).

But as Eamon Duffy pointed out in his Commonweal review [July 14], there is something too open-and-shut about Wills's approach. More than that, there are a lack of nuance and an unnecessary either/or-ishness to many of Wills's arguments that weaken what might otherwise be a good case. In at least one instance there is either an unawareness, or a deliberate ignoring, of evidence that contradicts his position.

One problem is the structure of Wills's arguing style, which often comes down to this: It isn't in the New Testament, it isn't in Augustine, Aquinas is ambivalent, and therefore it doesn't really matter. The witness of other church fathers, and of the Eastern church, is almost totally ignored, and where it is not ignored it is used selectively. I want to mention three cases: Wills's treatment of apostolic succession, the Real Presence, and abortion.

Wills says that since most scholars agree that Peter almost certainly did not exercise episcopal functions and was therefore not a bishop in our sense, and since the people, and not the pope of Rome, chose their bishops, the modern priesthood is not rooted in the apostolic succession. That is true, if you limit the idea of apostolic succession to something that depends on the laying on of hands by people who (when you trace the chain back) had hands laid on them by an Apostle. But the term is more generally understood to mean a continuing link to the earliest communities that preached the apostolic teachings (that is, the teachings of those who were the witnesses to Jesus' Resurrection), and the fact that bishops from other such communities had to be present for the ordination of new bishops. A bishop was not seen as someone who could, all by himself, ordain another bishop. The most ancient practice, still the norm in Orthodoxy, required at least two, and preferably three, bishops for the elevation of a new bishop. This continuity is the point of the apostolic succession, not a magic link to Peter, but Wills implies that if it is not the limited thing he describes, it doesn't exist in any important sense at all.

With regard to the Real Presence, Wills argues that there was no one celebrant of the liturgy in the earliest church (something that is not as clearly established as he seems to think), that the priest should not be seen as someone who plays the role of Jesus, and that the important change is not in the elements but in the people. Augustine says that the faithful are to be transformed by the Eucharist, and never mentions the power of the priest to consecrate. "Augustine says that we cannot take Christ into us. 'The symbol is received, it is eaten, it disappears--but can Christ's body disappear, Christ's church disappear, Christ's members disappear? Far from it.'" According to Wills, "Western theologians are more and more agreeing with Eastern ones that the actual consecrating words are the call (epiklesis) on the Spirit to 'come upon these gifts and make them holy,' not the words quoted from the Last Supper."

While it is true that the Orthodox idea of priesthood is not one who is alter Christus but rather one who, as a representative of all the people, invokes the Holy Spirit, and while it is granted that the faithful must be transformed, the words of the epiklesis are these: "Send your Holy Spirit upon us, and upon these gifts here offered, and make this bread the Body of Your Christ, and that which is in this cup the Blood of Your Christ, making the change by the Holy Spirit." There is no contradiction between the idea of Real Presence and the transformation of the faithful. Wills is right not to want to see the Eucharist removed from its communal context, and even the most conservative theologian would agree that a magical approach to the eucharistic elements is a corruption. But Wills sets up an unnecessary either/or here.

Finally, Wills does not find abortion mentioned in the New Testament (though Paul condemns pharmakeia--usually translated as "sorcery"--in Galatians, and the same word is used not long after in the early Christian writing, the Didache, as an argument against abortifacient medicine. Wills says that Augustine and Aquinas are ambivalent about the status of the fetus, and the church does not baptize fetuses; Q.E.D., the current arguments against abortion are overblown and excessive. (I heard Wills, during a radio interview, refer somewhat dismissively to "this fascination with the fetus.") He seems unaware of the "long" and "ancient" anti-abortion tradition in Christianity. The Didache says, "You shall not slay the child by abortion. You shall not kill what is generated." Clement of Alexandria associates the destruction of the fetus with the loss of love for humanity. In the second century a Christian convert, answering anti-Christian allegations that Christians were engaging in human sacrifice, wrote, "How can we kill a man when we are those who say that all who use abortifacients are homicides, and will account to God for their abortions as for the killing of men. For the fetus in the womb is not an animal." Saint Basil rejected the distinction (found in Augustine) between the formed and unformed fetus as beside the point, and Saint John Chrysostom, attacking married men who encouraged mistresses and prostitutes to abort, said: "You do not let a harlot remain only a harlot, but make her a murderess as well." (These examples are all found in John T. Noonan's excellent essay, "An Almost Absolute Value in History," in The Morality of Abortion, edited by Noonan, Harvard, 1970.)

Such lapses are among those that weaken what might have been a better book. Wills has written brilliantly about many things, ranging from Hollywood to Saint Augustine. He tries to make an important case in Papal Sin but doesn't quite bring it off. This is a shame, because the subject is important not only to Roman Catholics but to all who are, or want to be, in honest dialogue with Catholicism.