Book Review: Moses the Egyptian in the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch (London, British Library Cotton MS Claudius B.iv)

Abstract

revelations have to be believed with the highest liability, too—although they are not revealed by God. But when one looks at what counts as, or has been defined as, a second class revelation, one can, for instance, find the ban on abortion, euthanasia, and women’s priestly ordination. There may be a lot of things to say about that, but one thing is clear: the ban on abortion or women’s priestly ordination cannot be traced back to divine revelation, and could therefore be a very legitimate object of discussion, although Ordinatio sacerdotalis pretends to decree something else. This historical overview alone makes it worth reading this volume. The remainder of the book is mostly dedicated to authors and ideas relating to the concept of ‘dogma’ in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, and especially in different German schools of thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the ‘Tuebinger Schule’ with Johann Sebastian Drey, Johann Adam Moehler, and John Henry Newman or Karl Rahner SJ, Joseph Ratzinger, and Walter Kasper. By all that, Seewald shows how much, despite all attempts to negate it, dogma and doctrinal content have developed over the centuries, and how ill-founded some fears are that there might not be enough continuity with tradition, if some dogmas were to be changed or even suspended. As expressed by Johann Sebastian Drey (1777–1853): ‘Different conditions [require] different cures, different mind-sets require different light, different needs require different means’ (p. 182). Or as Georg Hermes (1775–1831) put it some years after Drey: ‘Continuity lies in the idea which unfolds in history, change lies in the shape which this idea takes on in history’ (p. 65). The volume is very readable, even for non-specialists, and sometimes even displays quite a humorous tone: when talking about the development of dogma, Seewald also refers to the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin. In this context his conclusion at one point is: ‘A dog’s behaviour constitutes an evolutionary pre-stage of religiously motivated acts’ (p. 70). Quite dog-matic indeed!