The Laity in the Middle Ages. - book reviews

Commonweal, Feb 25, 1994 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

The Laity in the Middle Ages, by Andre Vauchez, University of Notre Dame, $36.95, 350pp.

There is an old saw that says "every analogy limps" (omnis analogia claudicat). Be that as it may, analogies can be very illuminating as Frances Young, Cadbury professor of theology at the University of Birmingham (England), shows. Anxious to overcome the gap that exists between technical biblical exegesis and the Bible as the text of the church, she invites us to turn to music as a fruitful place to begin to think about biblical scholarship in relation to the life of the church.

The biblical canon, in Young's telling of it, can be compared to a musical repertoire (of, say, Mozart) with selections from that corpus being the pericopes used, e.g., in the liturgy or the life of devotion. The rehearsal of the texts is the work of the exegete/students who plumb the text for meaning. Without their work, there is inadequate or shoddy music unfaithful to the text. All preachers, congregations, and individuals are performers who produce results that range from the masterly to the ordinary. The great saints and doctors are our virtuosi.

Young's key insight is that in the Christian church the Scriptures are performed rather than merely read, an insight also advanced by her fellow countryman, the Cambridge theologian Nicholas Lash. As in music, attention must focus on the disciplined understanding of the text if the performance is to be faithful to the intention(s) of the author. She fleshes out her analogy by a focused attention on the reception and use of the Scriptures in the early church. She shows to what degree, for instance, the allegorizing tendency of a writer like Origen is held in check by the demands of the text within the community of believers.

Young insists that there is still much to be learned from these early "performers" who did not have the advantage of historical-critical studies but did have a profound sense of the ecclesial setting of the Scriptures. I very much like, for instance, her suggestion that the theory of recapitulation, championed by Irenaeus, is similar to the end of a musical composition which brings together the strands and directions of the piece into some kind of synthetic and harmonious whole; think, for example of the fugue. As Northrup Frye, from the perspective of a literary critic, once phrased it, the Scriptures are endlessly self-referential.

Many readers of this very rich and satisfying study will have their own moments of saying "Yes but..." but most, save the intransigently reductionistic, will learn and appreciate what Young is attempting to do. There are lessons here both for the professional theologian and for the pastorally minded. Readers who are sympathetic to works like Sandra Schneiders's The Revelatory Text (1991) which attempt to recover our sense of the Bible as sacred Scripture will welcome Young's project. Like Schneider, Young attempts to bring back into single focus the rich heritage of critical scholarship and the even richer resource which we, as believers, call the Word of God.

I have been a reader of the Catholic Worker for over thirty years. Like most readers I almost identify the paper with the rich illustrations done by artists like Ade Bethune and, above all, the late Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990). Born into a secular German Jewish family, Eichenberg came to the United States as a refugee in 1933. He made a good living as an illustrator of the classics with his woodcuts for books like Crime and Punishment and Wuthering Heights. In 1949, now a Quaker pacifist, he met Dorothy Day at a meeting at the Quaker center at Pendle Hill. Day importuned him to produce art for her newspaper despite the fact that she could not pay him. Cheerfully, he complied and over the next forty years he produced striking woodcuts of which some, like the Christ of the Breadlines or his various saints like Francis, Benedict, Martin de Porres, have become signature pieces of the Catholic Worker movement.

Robert Ellsberg, himself once the managing editor of the Catholic Worker, had the excellent idea of gathering a number of these illustrations together; they make up the present volume which is fleshed out by an introduction by Jim Forest, an interview with Eichenberg himself, and an essay by Dorothy Day written some years ago. Paging through this volume brought back a flood of wonderful memories: as a college student of meeting Ammon Hennacy, anarchist and quondam Catholic, peddling the Catholic Worker in front of Saint Patrick's on New York's Fifth Avenue; of heating Dorothy Day, weeks before her death, speak to college students about the "unromantic" life at the Worker houses. Handsomely produced (the book's layout was designed by Eichenberg's widow), this is also a work of virtuoso theology which will be loved by those who love everything the Catholic Workers stand for as refracted through the imagination of a powerfully passionate artist.

In 1967 and 1968, Thomas Merton hosted some small gatherings of contemplative nuns at his Gethsemani hermitage to consider the problems and prospects of the contemplative life. His conferences and responses to questions put to him have been edited off tapes and make up this present volume.