The Story of Christian Spirituality - Review

Commonweal, Sept 28, 2001 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

The Story of Christian Spirituality
Edited by Gordon Mursell
Fortress, $35, 384 pp.

Gordon Mursell, a British theologian who has written widely on the history of spirituality, is the general editor of The Story of Christian Spirituality. He has chosen nine other contributors, mainly from the U.K., among them the excellent hagiographer David Farmer. After an introduction on Jesus and the origins of Christian spirituality, ten chapters trace the story of Christian spirituality, in both its Western and Eastern manifestations, from the patristic period to the twentieth century.

The most striking feature of this book is its beautiful layout. It is almost a coffee-table book--with boxed features of important persons, lavish color illustrations, helpful timelines, concise highlights of a given period, and nice biographies of individuals for each particular tradition. Sergei Hackel, to cite one example, has an illuminating chapter on "The Russian Spirit." In fourteen pages, Hackel takes us from the conversion of Russia in the late tenth century down to the beginnings of the twentieth century. He highlights some of the great spiritual masters of the time, and provides a powerful page on the Russian icon with particular attention to Andrei Rublev's mystical classic, The Old Testament Trinity. Given the page constraints of the volume, he cannot take the story into the twentieth century to describe the great coterie of Russian writers connected to the Saint Sergius seminary in Paris. Nor does the twentieth-century chapter (which sprawls all over the place from great figures of our time to lightweights like Matthew Fox) resume the story. Such omissions, to be sure, are sadly inevitable in a volume which seeks completeness but cannot reach it.

The good news about this book is that it is attractive. One can learn much by simply turning the pages, admiring the illustrations, and perusing the quite readable, albeit brief, resumes of the various movements and persons. Readers will gain much pleasure, as I did, from simply browsing. A reader might then be tempted to turn to other works to supplement what is available here.

The bad news is that someone wishing to follow up on a particular author would get almost no help from the very inadequate section titled "Further Reading." For example, after the seventh chapter on "Catholic Saints and Reformers," we are sent to two authors who have written slim, and not very authoritative, books on Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. The list fails to note that both saints are well served by excellent translations of their own works with fine introductions. The bibliography too is a mixed bag of sources, with many works not cited in the best or most recent editions. Let this complaint not be seen as pedantic academic carping. There are so many excellent resources for the study of spirituality, it is a shame that such a handsome volume fails to draw attention to them. Let me end, however, on a more upbeat note: the volume does have a very good index, always a boon at a time when indixes tend to get short shrift.