Carol Harrison

The art of listening in the early church

It would not be a wild overestimate to suggest that around two-thirds of the early Christian texts which we now read were originally spoken, rather than written, and were intended for hearers, rather than readers. They sounded, resonated, and impressed themselves upon the mind and memory through the ear rather than the eye. A significant part of this literature consists of sermons, which were often delivered ex tempore and recorded by a secretary, perhaps for later revision. Similarly, the records of ecclesiastical conferences, or public debates with heretics, are written transcriptions of originally spoken words. We also possess catechetical addresses, perhaps prepared by the bishop in advance, but almost certainly delivered directly to those who were being inducted into the faith prior to baptism. Other texts were perhaps originally written down, but even they are records of what was intended to be spoken aloud and heard by others: liturgical texts, creedal statements, prayers, poems, hymns, and, to an extent, letters.

Book Reviews : Fine Study of the Letters of Paulinus

century bishops modelled a distinctive style of masculine self-imagining: the horizon of human becoming is God, Father, Son and Spirit, construed in terms of an idealized masculinity and a masculinized transcendence; and that against which the ’supposedly ungendered divinity’ is defined is the stubborn particularity of created matter, with which ’femaleness is allied’, and from which the ascetic properly retreats. Consequently, Burrus asks, ’have we not found that there is, after all, much to be said about this indeed rather sophisticated theological move on maleness?’ (p. 185), which resulted in a heightening of the claims of patriarchal authority and a cutting manhood loose from its traditional fleshly and familial moorings. Burrus admits that her aim is to read theological texts as sources for a cultural history of the masculine gender, in order ’to vivify theological material that has become so deadeningly familiar that we can no longer perceive some of its most fascinating and indeed downright queer aspects’ (p. 3). Whether Burrus’s exegetical method is appropriate when reading the writings of Fathers for whose theologies anthropomorphism was clearly held to be inappropriate needs further exploring; and whether the writings which she has chosen to study have become so deadeningly familiar needs establishing and not merely stating. Interesting as Burrus’s book is, things sometimes seem to have been taken for granted rather than argued convincingly. ALVYN PETTERSEN, FRENSHAM

Book Reviews : Augustine Addressing our Concerns

In his book, Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1999, £37.50/

Book Reviews : How Deep-Rooted Arianism Was

59.95, pp. xii + 229, ISBN 0-521-65048-8), Garrett Green comments: ’if we could discover why it is that virtually every important religious issue from the late-17th century onward leads ineluctably to hermeneutical questions, I think we would have the key to modernity itself’ (p. 2). Whereas many writers on this subject begin with Schleiermacher, the author begins with the earlier work of Hegel in 1795, to trace divergencies between contingent ’positivity’ (in Hegel’s sense of the term), and appeals to the supposed universality of natural religion, reason, or law. Green perceives the illusory epistemological foundation of the Enlightenment as a dubious ally for theism or authentic Christianity. By contrast he stresses the role of creative imagination, even if this brings us to

Book Reviews : Good Introduction To a Ugustine

Tertullian did not separate from the episcopally governed church, nor change from a ’Catholic’, institutional view of it to a ’Reformed’, prophetic one. He changed only by sharpening his ideas about the holiness of the church: the real church must have been, Rankin thinks, a great disappointment to him. Starting always with the New Testament, Rankin sifts judiciously through the images used for and notes of the church, and the terminology of ministerial office, and finds Tertullian’s position the same in both his early and later (Montanist) period. Himself a layman, he holds the threefold sacerdotium of bishop, presbyter and deacon to be of apostolic appointment, but

Being Christian in late antiquity : a festschrift for Gillian Clark

to contribute, perhaps even more than is evident in F. V. Norris’s essay on Nazianzen and Wittgenstein. Inevitably, indeed designedly, as with an efficiently run archaeological site, the overall effect of these essays is patchy but promising. Perhaps in time more general findings of wider application will emerge. It may be that it is not so much ’Arianism after Arius’ that ultimately counts, as what always seems to happen to the Christian