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The Downside review | 2003
Daniel Rees
La. montre combien les convictions de Ch. Butler etaient en phase avec les conclusions du concile du Vatican II. Ch. Butler a dailleurs ete particulierement actif dans la reception et la mise en oeuvre des orientations du concile.
The Downside review | 1994
Daniel Rees
For Lord Rawlinson, the former Attorney General, More epitomizes the ideal public servant an ideal to which all can aspire but few can emulate. His contribution, an apposite one in Britain at the moment, has all the clarity expected of a distinguished legal mind. For me, the best, most balanced, most appealing portrait of More was that of the Anglican religious, Geoffrey Curtis C.R. Here is a snippet:
The Downside review | 1989
Daniel Rees
BEFORE the advent of this fine study Blanco Whites memory survived only because of the walking-on part he acted in Newmans drama at Oxford. He was a fellow-member of the Oriel Senior Common Room, who used to play Beethoven quartets on the violin along with the future Cardinal who always retained for him a lively affection and an esteem for his integrity throughout all their subsequent vicissitudes:
The Downside review | 1988
Daniel Rees
NOTHING short of a masterpiece was the verdict on this volume by its reviewer in the Church Times, David Edwards, Dean of Norwich, himself a pastmaster at the church historians craft as well as a protagonist in many of the movements the book analyses. And one cannot but concur. The author, however, modestly disclaims his achievement to be anything more than a work of synthesis, deriving entirely from secondary sources. But his tour de force is that the tertiary source which has resulted is shot through with penetrating and persuasive interpretation, discerning in the flurry of happenings and personalities, of reports and congresses, the whole apparatus of our poor talkative Christianity, those elements which would be growth-points for the future. This quest for the sources and for the continuity of development is the books chief merit. Thus the modern architects of Protestant Ecumenism are shown as they serve their apprenticeship in the Student Christian Movement, while the breakaway Christian Union, together with its counterpart at public-school level, The Crusaders, was the breedingground of our present Evangelical helmsmen (one might add, also, of such post-Evangelicals as Professor Wiles and Archbishop Habgood), during the long years when Evangelicalism was very much a sleeping giant. So too in the preconciliar Roman Catholic Church the ethos in this country was a carry-over from that of the English College, Rome. At the same time the Sword of the Spirit, even if it was soon to be put back into its scabbard, gave a flash of hope to lay elites, who would feel their time had come in a subsequent era. Then university graduates who had themselves been formed in Catholic urban grammar schools greatly increased after 1944 had swollen the ranks of the articulate middle classes just in time for Vatican IIs call to the laity to come of age. 1920 is the proclaimed starting-point a strange choice except that it is the beginning of the Twenties, the first of the decades, each with its own mood, which are the panels into which the author articulates his lengthy canvas. But he has first to flash back to two towering but opposed realities which overshadow the era he is considering the Victorian golden age of religious observance
The Downside review | 1971
Daniel Rees
to theology, emphasising its rational rather than its supernatural concepts. They usually avoided open conflict with the Church (most of them were clerics), but did not submit their speculations to the bondage of its dogmas. They did not prosper like their Western counterparts. The two features of their movement which, as Professor Henderson rightly says, make the study of it a fascinating one also explain its failure. One is its very great concern to show that the pursuit of such knowledge in unsettled and uncertain times . . . will both restore the Greek people to its dignity and be a real condition of the ability to live independently. But if a philosophy exists for a contingency and looks to an end outside itself, however laudable, it will either never attain it, or in attaining it will destroy itself, and this is in fact what happened. Granted that Greece owes to her Intellectuals the moral vigour that enabled her to break her chains, no sooner did it become a practical possibility to do so than the intellectual movement withered away. The standard at Kalavryta was raised not by a Koraes or even by a Mavrocordato but by a bishop. It is the irony of this that provides the fascination of the other feature, the desire . . . to work out a territory for philosophy and science in face of a well-established theology. From the point of view of the Enlightenxad ment, which is that from which the author writes, apophatism will appear in the guise of obscurantism. His references to the continuing Orthodox tradition express impatience and irritation, and he ends by seeing his characters as examples of a humanistic concern which maintained itself like a tough plant amid the bleak rocks of ecclesiastical conservatism. The simile is memorable and apt to the writers purpose. But another view is possible, in which the rocks are a broken edifice, Professor Runcimans crumbling buildings, falling mosaics and fading frescoes perhaps, and the tough plant a corrosive ivy accelerating the ruin. It may well be in the former rather than in the latter, in the memories of an idea of the world that could not be maintained rather than in this movement conducted by Greeks in Greek that the Hellenic spirit, for better or for worse, resides. i. p. SHELDON-WILLIAMS
The Downside review | 1968
Daniel Rees
northern devotio moderna tradition, transmitted chieflythrough Benedictine sources. This would seem to be the view of later scholars as against the arguments of Jesuit writers such as Hugo and Karl Rahner. Dr Bossy has some interesting pages examining Evennetts view of Jesuit spirituality in the light of recent work. The Society itself, he writes, seems to be finding that its own period of nineteenth-century restoration manifested a rigidity and a literalism hardly in keeping with Ignatiuss original thought ... Few religious superiors can have told members of their order so firmly to forget the rules and do what they thought best. A reader of the lectures will find almost no mention of the Council of Trent. As Dr Bossy points out, Tridentine interpretation has gone into some kind of crisis since 1951,and views on the importance of the Council have changed so much that one scholar can regard it as the end of an epoch rather than as a beginning. It is not possible in a short review to cover all the points of interest raised either in the lectures or the postscript, but the reviewer wasdelighted to find the editor confirming his view of the incompetence shown by the Papacy in its handling of north-European problems.
The Downside review | 1967
Daniel Rees
rather. But I think there is one important divergence. While the Cardinal sees the apostolate as the all-important need, more important than nursing, teaching, etc., the nun, without denying that need but with a greater sense of realism, recalls that the service given to others is given to Christ. Whatsoever you did to these ... and needs no further justification. There are times furthermore when such serviceis the only apostolate that awakens a response. The author has not escaped the dangers of compiling a book based on articles previously published in magazines. The overlapping repetitions and constant qualifications called for in footnotes could have been avoided had the matter been more integrated. On p. 155, for instance, the reader is informed that the pages were written before the idea of the juniorate, discussed in an earlier chapter, was launched. An enclosed nun may be forgiven for finding the treatment of Witness and Consecration, which purports to cover womens orders today, inadequate in her own regard. Her problems are completely different from the activeapostolate, yet they receivelittle consideration in a volume of over 300 pages. A BENEDICITNE OF STANBROOK
The Downside review | 1967
Daniel Rees
based on sound principle, that In a school, the work comes to the monk or sister in the shape of a boy or girl; the monk or sister does not have to leave the monastery or convent. In a word, the situation does not differ essentially from that of St Benedicts own community in which children were present; it does not break the principle of enclosure, and for this reason differs altogether from work on parishes and from retreats given over the country after the manner of modem religious institutes. When monks undertake these latter works, enclosure (including the rather wider enclosure of a school) disappears, and the specific character of the different organs in Christs Body becomes confused. The eye, it seems, is trying to hear, and the ear to smell. As the author himself says (p. 55): So long as the religious do the work of the seculars, so long will young men, really meant for the parochial clergy, become religious. Even so difficulties admittedly remain, since the activity of school work can all too easily disfigure the authentic image of the monk, who should always be monk first and foremost, a man of God whom all can recognize. This demands control, and it may perhaps help to remember that not every monk in such a community should be bound automatically to teaching, since monasticism is not ex professo a teaching Order as are some modem institutes. In an address to Italian superiors last year the Holy Father, with reference to the Councils decree Perfectae Caritatis (A.A.S., 29th December 1966, p. 1181), said Our times have seen a certain rediscovery of the proper value of the monastic state in itself without the priesthood, and the Council has ratified the possibility of such a monastic state. On p. 47, reference is made to just such a community in Kerala of which Fr Bede Griffiths is co-founder, basically rooted in St Benedicts Rule but adapted, in the ancient Syrian rite, to Hindu conditions of life. As Fr Bede tells us in Christian Ashram, they live in a simple bungalow monastery, wear the kavi habit, go barefoot, sit on the ground (having almost no furniture), feed on a native diet with their hands, and sleep on mats. Dom Columba gives lucid expression of his spirit of renewal when he says Of all monastic experiments at the present time, this is the most original and radical and probably the most important.
The Downside review | 1967
Daniel Rees
IT would be a pity if the title of this bulky volume should mislead the general reader into believing that it caters only for those with specialist, not to say outlandish, interests. It is true that, retailing as it does the acts of a learned congress, its contributors in devising their papers were primarily aware of their fellow-experts, physically present at their discourses, while the impact of their remarks on a wider public could not but be regarded as little more than a second effect. It is true too that the merit of many of the papers lies chiefly in the exemplary manner in which they rigorously and patiently analyse some circumscribed and often local sector of the eremitical phenomenon in these two centuries. To this class belong Dom Jean Becquet treating of hermits in the West of France, Dom Hubert Dauphin who deals with them in England, and those who study the same movement in the Slav countries, in Germany, among the Greeks in Sicily and Apulia. These articles are frequently models of their kind, but their chief value lies more in the aptitude of the methods they demonstrate than in the modest, tentative and sample conclusions they furnish. But those of us who are not professional ecclesiastical historians will find that the essays which attempt a more general synthesis, those of Dom Jean Leclercq (Leremitisme en Occident jusqua lan mil), Professor Genicot of Louvain (Leremitisme du XIe siecle dans son contexte economique et social), Professor Meersseman of Fribourg (Eremitismo e predicazione itinerante dei seco/i XI e XII) and above all Canon Delaruelle (Les ermites et la spiritualite populaire), show that the theme of this symposium is not some anarchic and peripheral outburst in the irrevocable past, but rather a spiritual movement that is both of central importance for the history of its own age and that of the ecclesiasticalinstitutions in the age that followed,and of no small relevance for the needs of the Church today. Many observations made in the course of this book could well bear a contemporary application. The two centuries under review were une periode de crise, devolution. Mais elle avait ete precedee par un long passe de possession tranquille (p. 28, Leclercq). Un des facteurs de succes de Ieremitisme (etait) ... le monolithisme du monachisme latin depuis la periode carolingienne. En Orient le monachisme est reste plus simple et plus diversifie; chacun peut trouver une institution dont le
The Downside review | 1967
Daniel Rees
IT was ordained in the Didache that the Lords Prayer and the Lords Supper were two matters to be revealed to Christian neophytes only after their Baptism, probably to safeguard these spiritual bequests of Christ from profane misconstruction. This affinity between the two persists also in the critical problems raised by their formulations in the Bible their transmission in several forms substantially in agreement but with significant differences which are rather startling, occurring as they do in passages where modem writers would have spared no pains in order to be word-perfect; the degree to which they have been moulded by the forces and predilections inherent in liturgical usage which was the channel by which they were passed from one generation to another; the relative importance and interaction of the different time-dimensions in which they operate recall of the past, consciousness of the present reality and tension towards the future consummation of all things. The two books under review are also very much of the same genre and designed to serve the purposes of the same class of people highlyeducated laymen who would know more of these subjects but naturally have no relish for the role of passenger on some pedantic mystery tour. Perhaps in this respect Professor Jeremias work now after twenty years revised with several retractations and taking into account the conjectures on Eucharistic origins advanced since the Qumran discoveriessucceeds better because of its clear marshalling of arguments, its pungent commonsense and summary trouncing of outlandish hypotheses, its vivid reconstructions of the background of Palestinian daily life and Passover practices. Indeed it seems one of those books born to occupy an imperial, if not a pioneering, position in its own field, the coping-stone of all that has been accomplished during the last half-century. English readers are fortunate in having this work available to them in a translation of peerless limpidity. In this comparison Professor Lohmeyer is at a disadvantage, because he is dealing not with an event in human history but with something less congenial to our mental processes. But his work is further obfuscated by his own failure to define at the very beginning his understanding of the word eschatological, a word which recurs in almost every sentence and which he maintains to be the primary, indeed the sole senseof every petition of the Paternoster, all of which are concerned with the same basic reality, different renderings of the call, Maranatha. Our Father for example is a mode of addressing God possible only for the community of those who have abandoned human security and staked their all on an eschatological assurance (p, 62), having united themselves to the eschatological figure of the Son of Man. This is the omnivorous interpretation which is sustained throughout. The over-riding concern too, classical in the Lutheran tradition, to
