Women Preachers and Prophets.

edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle & Pamela J. Walker University of California Press, $17.95, 362 pp.

Under the general editorship of Thomas Oden of Drew University, InterVarsity Press is publishing a series of books drawn from the writings of patristic biblical commentators. The editors, thanks to the enormous data bases now available, found thousands of citations and comments from the Greek, Syriac, and Latin writers of antiquity. In this volume on Mark, for example, the pericope describing the stilling of the storm (Mark 4:35-41) is meditated upon and scrutinized by Athanasius, Origen, Gregory Nazianzus, Basil the Great, Ephrem the Syrian, Saint Augustine, and the ancient hymn writer, Prudentius.

Thirteen volumes of Old Testament and twelve of New Testament commentary are planned. The result will be somewhat similar to what the Middle Ages called the "glossed" Bible. I keep this volume on Mark at my desk and read a bit each day. Other readers, to be sure, will use it as a resource for sermons, lesson plans, and so on.

I have a great love for the patristic writers, and I read both the biblical text and the comments in this handsomely turned out book with great pleasure. At times the commentators gloss the plain sense of the text and in other places they seek for the "spiritual" sense or allegorize the passage for moral or eschatological reasons. Those who use these commentaries will need to know something about the different levels of patristic interpretation. Origen, for example, does not "read" the way, say, the Venerable Bede reads. In future volumes the editors may wish to say something about this as a guide for the uninitiated.

How valuable is this project? It certainly reminds us that biblical exegesis did not begin in the postenlightenment period - there is hardly a textual problem in the entire Bible that Origen did not spot in the third century! It is also true that although someone might believe that he or she is reading the Bible "alone," the plain fact is that all biblical interpretation, either consciously or not, stands on a vast tradition. Thus, this series is a highly salutary call to take part in the great conversation about the meaning of the Word of God.

One final cautionary note. Our understanding of the Scriptures did not end with the eighth century. Even though it is tempting to argue that this approach of seeking the patristic consensus is a deeply ecumenical enterprise, as the editors intend it to be, it is equally true that it is only partial and not to be seen as normative. Medieval, Reformed, and modern commentators have equally interesting and perceptive things to say about the Bible. In other words, this useful new series should be regarded as the first stage of an extended immersion in Scripture. As the Second Vatican Council wisely said, the apostolic preaching contained in the sacred books was "to be preserved by a succession of preachers until the end of time..." (Dei verbum, 2.8). As Gregory the Great reminds us, Scripture is like a vast river where lambs can wade near the shore and elephants swim farther out.

Ultramontanism is the name given to that tendency, most conspicuously prevalent in the nineteenth century but still apparent in certain contemporary quarters, that exalts the prestige, power, and authority of the papacy. Avery Dulles once called it "papalism." As such, the ultramontane forces of the last century crystallized in Vatican I's definition of papal infallibility. Conventional wisdom would have it that the ultramontanes were all of a piece. The studies in this instructive collection of essays argue that, even among papalists, there was a spectrum of views about papal power and jurisdiction. The essayists focus on six cardinals whose lives cross a continuum of time from roughly 1844 (when Cardinal Johannes von Geissel became archbishop of Cologne) to 1945, the year the less-than-lovable William O'Connell, archbishop of Boston, died.

It is a caricature to paint the ultramontanes only as a hide-bound group of reactionaries combating the more liberal streams of Catholic thought. As some of these essays show, for the cardinals from Germany and France and to a degree even those from Ireland and Italy - the exaltation of the papacy was a conscious strategy to combat the hegemonic character of secular authority. In Germany the threat was Prussia. In France it was the postrevolutionary anticlerical secular state. In other words, by appealing to a supreme jurisdictional authority beyond the confines of the state, these churchmen found a way to stand against the pretensions and considerable power of the nation-state. Ireland's Cardinal Cullen sought a similar end, if one more focused on the rights of the church, especially concerning education.

There were other motives as well. Westminster's Cardinal Manning, a leader of the ultramontanes at Vatican I, stressed the critical need for church unity. Manning believed that papal authority was a sure bulwark against the increasingly secularized, positivistic, and agnostic forces abroad in English culture. Pace John Henry Newman, Manning was convinced that the assertion of papal power in general, and papal infallibility in particular, would instigate a mass conversion of Anglicans to the church of Rome. Dogmatic certitude was Manning's aim. At the council he argued against the historical objections to infallibility made by Dolinger and others. "Dogma overcomes history," Manning famously asserted. The Roman theologian Camillo Mazzella, S.J., who taught for a time at Maryland's Woodstock theologate, was the theorist behind such claims. Among other things, Mazzella was a shaper of the anti-Americanist condemnation issued under Leo XIII.

Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston notoriously instrumentalized papal allegiance as a way to consolidate his own hold over his archdiocese and his influence over the American church. Since the power of the bishop reflected the power of the papacy, he wanted no dilution of papal authority.

Varieties of Ultramontanes is short but very instructive. Casting the reactionary elements who controlled Vatican I against the progressives of Vatican II (and the latter did correct the direction of the former) as good guys versus bad guys oversimplifies. As these well-written essays demonstrate, at least some of the ultramontanes had good reasons for their passion for papal privilege, reasons deeply rooted in the convulsions of European society in the nineteenth century. In a curious way, to borrow from Manning, history did not overcome dogma, but it most decidedly shaped it.

I received a copy of Ray Brown's retreat notes just two weeks after the shocking news of his death last August. My admiration for Brown's work goes back nearly forty years, but our ties were even deeper than that of admiration. We both graduated from the same Florida high school - I was an altar boy at his first Mass! We stayed in touch over the years. He was, as it is universally admitted, a world-class scholar. But while composing his massive commentaries, Ray always found time to write books of a pastoral quality meant for the ordinary Christian.

Brown takes an original tack in introducing a reader (presumably one on retreat; there are seven reflections) to John. He imagines himself a "translator" of John, querying the Beloved Disciple (whom he describes as a "crusty character") about what he wrote. He gets off to a bad start by mentioning the writer's "gospel" only to be told that the author did not use the word; he preferred "message," but the original translator, not wanting to use "message," reluctantly called John's work the "gospel message."

Each "day" of the retreat follows a pattern. There is an opening prayer consisting of texts taken from John. In the body of each chapter the author explains to the translator why he wrote a particular scene, how it might have differed from the other Gospels (the translator explains something about these Gospels because John did not know them at first hand), how some of the things in the gospel message were elaborated in the writings of others in his circle (that is, the three "epistles" ascribed to John); how John's words could be misread, for example, by those who do not understand the context of some of the anti-Jewish polemics, is also touched on. At the end of each chapter, the translator, in lieu of a technical summary of the main points, appends both a contemporary reflection and a final prayer summarizing the discussion.

The precise merit of this little work is to remind us of how seamlessly Brown interweaves historical-critical scholarship into a deeply felt spirituality. In a few pages, and with some wit, he shows how the book came into its present form (the Beloved Disciple refuses to say whether he is John the Apostle but, teasingly, says, he is never mentioned by name in what came to be known as the New Testament). These minor observations are made while the author explains to the translator what he means and how he understands the person and significance of Jesus.

Brown points out that he wrote his first article on John in 1955, but, after many books and articles, he says he can still pick up the text and find things he has missed. Many of the things he has not missed are shared with us in these pages. It is this kind of writing that reminds us how much Ray Brown is going to be missed.

Over the past two decades there has been a steady stream of publications, of varying quality, attempting to retrieve the voices of women in the Christian tradition. These works have either been anthologies of translations of works by women or studies of women in the Christian past. The Kiezle/Walker collection of essays has a very precise focus: How did women "preach" (or: Did women preach?) in the Christian past. Both the editors and the contributors understand the word "preach" to include public teaching, uttering prophecies, writing for the public, constructing messages through song, and so on. Such a broad understanding of preaching is not special pleading since it has the warrant of the tradition. One of the authors (Nicole Beriou) points out that some medieval scholastic writers considered the public reading of Scripture a form of preaching, since the reader proclaimed the literal sense of the text in the very act of reading aloud. If we take that medieval observation seriously, it follows that every reader at our liturgical assemblies is, in fact, a preacher.

The essays fall into four groups: studies of early Christianity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One leitmotif is the different ways in which Paul's injunction for women to remain silent in church (1 Cor. 14:34-36) played out. In the case of the seventeenth-century Ursulines, the admonishment was hauled out to force women to keep silence even when they only taught catechism to youngsters. On the other hand, it was also explained away in order to laud the fact that Mary of Magdala was the first witness of Christ's Resurrection, and hence the apostle to the Apostles (apostola apostolorum), or to justify the polemics against the learned pagans described in hagiographical accounts of Saint Catherine of Alexandria . What is very clear from these essays is the persistent attempt to restrict women from any activity in the public sphere.

Another common thread is the belief that if a woman of sanctity was inspired to speak (if she had a prophetic gift, for example), then it became a grace from God that was not to be easily ignored. The prophetic impulse, in other words, allowed for some exemption from the Pauline prohibition. The public preaching of a Hildegard of Bingen or the public remonstrations of Catherine of Siena or the mystical gifts of a Rose of Viterbo are good examples. Indeed, the various canons, synodal laws, and episcopal restrictions forbidding women to teach and preach in the medieval period suggest that many women were in fact speaking and teaching in their cloisters to audiences that included those from outside the monastic congregation.

In discussing the early modern and modern period, these essays tend to focus on the new forces brought about by the Reformation, where women had more space to preach and teach. Women were active, for example, in the Society of Friends and among the Moravians - two groups that put a high premium on religious experience as the source for authentic religious testimony. Later, in the nineteenth century, women had central roles as preachers and evangelists in the Salvation Army. In a fascinating essay by Jacqueline devries, we learn how the women's suffragette movement in Great Britain borrowed quite consciously from Free Church methods of mass evangelization to rally support for the right of women to vote. One offshoot of that movement was its concern with the rights of women within the church and the concomitant worries of Anglican divines that too much elasticity in these matters (we are talking about the 1920s) would inevitably lead to demands for women priests. Roman Catholic women who supported the suffragette movement entertained the same idea.

There are nearly twenty essays in this volume. Since historically women did not have many opportunities to write, these scholars read carefully in ancillary material. Thus, female "Orantes" figures from paleo-Christian art as well as other iconographical, hagiographical, and sermonic sources are analyzed. Such studies are interesting in their own right, but for a theologian they raise important questions about the meaning of preaching and its relationship to teaching. Finally, the struggles over preaching and teaching influenced movements for social justice and equal rights in ways that now seem obvious, but did not at the time.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.