Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition ed. by Matthew L.
Lamb
and Matthew Levering (review)
Aidan Nichols
The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, Volume 72, Number 3, July
2008, pp. 501-504 (Review)
Published by The Catholic University of America Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tho.2008.0019
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/636309/summary
Access provided at 13 Jan 2020 02:47 GMT from University of Technology, Sydney
BOOK REVIEWS 501
Christ's passions and defects are deprived of any soteriological significance
except exemplarity. This implies that exemplarity has to be literal: Christ must
experience life in absolutely the same way as we do; otherwise his example
would be insincere. Then a final step comes: the parting of soteriology from
Christology.
All said and done, did the mediaeval theologians sever from their patristic
predecessors as Madigan asserts? Did a shift occur in the doctrinal history of
Christianity? I think that the so-called shift is merely a kind of optical illusion
created by the use of flawed theological lenses. Madigan has assembled texts and
organized them in a clever thematic synthesis. Needless to say, he must have
spent a lot of time becoming familiar with them. In spite of all this effort, it is
amazing that something of great importance remained unperceived by him: in
their attempt to organize the many quaestiones fueled by their biblical teaching,
twelfth-century theologians were relying on patristic anti-Arian material, but
they were no longer tied down to the Arians' agenda. For many reasons the
passions and defects were to be studied in medieval treatises for their own sake,
each one in particular, and were related to both the Incarnation and the Passion.
This shift from the vantage point of the Fathers allowed for a clarification of the
distinction between the natural reality of passions and defects in Christ and their
soteriological significance (in more or less satisfying ways, but this is another
matter). Through rewriting and reverent exegesis, this makes for continuity with
the patristic period and constitutes a development. Madigan knows the texts: he
quotes them; he comments upon them, and shows that he understands them; but
something prevents him from grasping their thrust and the continuous line they
were drawing. It is as if he was a still prisoner of the Arians' perspective. His
inability to integrate the consideration of nature in a consideration of the person
of Christ keeps him from perceiving one of the most fascinating progressions in
the history of Christology. Beauty can deceive.
EMMANUEL PERRIER, 0.P.
Dominican Studium
Toulouse, France
Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition. Edited by MATTHEW L. LAMB and
MATTHEW LEVERING. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2008. Pp. xxiv + 462. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-19-533267-9.
This collection of essays answers to the call of Pope Benedict XVI for a
reading of the texts of the Second Vatican Council within a "hermeneutic of
continuity," for which, as a matter of course, conciliar documents are interpreted
by way of anamnesis (i.e., against their de facto doctrinal background in the
502 BOOK REVIEWS
tradition) and not by way of prognosis (i.e., in terms of their possible
contribution to a speculatively constructed future). The address of the pope to
the Roman curia on 22 December 2005, which suggested this desideratum, is
printed here as a kind of preface to the whole work. The task the editors have
set themselves is certainly both desirable and necessary. Firstly, it is desirable
because too many versions of what the council said or intended have assumed
the alternative-a hermeneutic of rupture, with consequences often unfortunate
for the life of the faithful. Secondly, it is also necessary because what Benedict
XVI requested is simply the normal way to proceed when handling such texts in
an intellectually responsible manner. No historical theologian, or Church
historian, should treat Vatican II as a sketch for a hypothetical Vatican III. What
should we make of a student who decided to interpret, say, the two-wills
doctrine of Constantinople III, not against the background of Chalcedon and
Constantinople II, but in terms of a proleptic account of Trent on justification,
or even, for that matter, of Nicaea II (the council immediately following) on the
portrayable character of the hypostasis of the Word incarnate? At least Nicaea
II and Trent have a measurable reality quotient, which is more than can be said
for Vatican III.
A substantial introduction by the editors ascribes the lacunae of much com-
mentary on the council texts not only to Church politics but also-and more
profoundly-to the loss of a sapiential culture, whereby all such documents
would be approached in a manner reflecting the holism of genuine Tradition.
They also offer a key to reading the essays that follow, signaling key features of
each contribution. This is useful because, in their entirety, these articles on,
respectively, the constitutions, decrees, and declarations of the Council, occupy
well over four hundred pages of text. Contributors are overwhelmingly
American, at any rate by domicile. The exceptions are all Dominicans (one
Nigerian, one French, one Swiss). Painting with broad brush-strokes:
contributors can be described as chiefly belonging to either the Thomist or the
Communio schools.
An inevitable commonplace of reviewing multiauthor works is to notice that
not all essays are equally successful. Here the problem is compounded by the
variable quality or at any rate the importance of the conciliar texts on which
particular authors were commissioned to write. Plainly, it was much easier for
Avery Cardinal Dulles to produce something theologically meaty on the
ecclesiology of the first four chapters of Lumen gentium, the Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church, than it was for Richard John Neuhaus to extract
ecclesially nutritious elements from Inter mirifica, the Decree on the Instruments
of Social Communication. Accordingly, this review will concentrate on those
essays where (a) somewhat surprising points of particular importance are made,
while (b) comment is being offered on the four principal documents of the
council, its constitutions. In effect, I shall concentrate on essays that are striking
in that they flout commonly received Church opinion, especially when the latter
is shaped by the hermeneutic of rupture. At the risk of misrepresenting the ethos
of the text, which is more likely to point to precedents in the Church Fathers,
BOOK REVIEWS 503
St. Thomas, or the papal magisterium than to stir up the nests of hornets, the rest
of this review concerns this "shock criterion."
I have already mentioned Cardinal Dulles. Massive experience of theological
writing and an increasingly focused theological mind makes his essay, relatively
short though it be, as memorable as it is trenchant. A summary might run as
follows: despite the wider range of images for the Church it sanctioned, Lumen
gentium's teaching on the structure of the Church is basically the kind of
doctrine the First Vatican Council would have produced had it remained in
session. A point Dulles underlines-and I have to admit it had passed me by
though its significance leaps to the eye-is that the celebrated phrase subsistit in,
whereby the Church of Christ is said to "subsist in" the Catholic Church, was
not proposed (as is widely alleged) as a minimizing alternative to esse-to be that
Church. Rather, it was voted into the text as a maximalising alternative to the
formula adest in-to be present in that Church (which makes, as they say, a
whole load of difference). Almost at a stroke, the "revolution in ecclesiology"
beloved of liberal commentators evaporates. Something remains behind,
however, like the smile on the face of the Cheshire cat. And that is the
impression careless talk has left on plain persons-in-the-pew that "all the
Churches are the same now" (i.e., after Vatican II).
Abbot Denis Farkasfalvy tackles the topics of biblical inspiration and
interpretation in Dei verbum. Though in part he is seeking elegant solutions to
aporiae in the council texts, or the filling in of lacunae in the thinking of the
council fathers, he also meets the "shock criterion" in two respects. Firstly, he
considers that "standard" (my term) Old Testament exegesis as now practiced by
Catholics as by others in the academy fails to correspond to the provisions of the
conciliar constitution, which sought rather to foster for the Elder Covenant a
neo-patristic typological exegesis centered on the mystery of Christ. Secondly,
the account of the origins of the four Gospels commonly taken for granted in
median historical-critical study cannot be squared with Dei verbum's affirmation
that they stem from the apostles and/or their collaborators.
In an account of the theology of the liturgy in Sacrosanctum concilium Pamela
Jackson shows that by "pastoral" efficacy the bishops at Vatican II did not mean
a liturgy that was "less demanding, more interesting and enjoyable, and perhaps
even entertaining" (116), but one that draws the faithful along the way of
holiness by joining them more deeply to Christ in his high priestly worship of the
Father. Some might think that this hardly needed stating. They should recall the
pit into which the beautiful word 'pastoral' has fallen when used in this context.
Finally, when tackling Gaudium et spes, ]. Brian Benestad finds that the
invocation of the distinctive experience and expertise of the laity in the
document's forty-third section was never intended as an invitation to reformulate
Church teaching on "certain moral matters." Rather, the bishops sought to
release the initiative of the laity in making "prudent application of Catholic
social principles to public policy" (162). When we read in a correspondence
column that the "official Church" must cease to reject the "relevance of lay
504 BOOK REVIEWS
experience," it is not, I think, this modest (yet crucial) task letter-writers
generally have in mind.
I have singled out four neuralgic points. My selectiveness should not be
misinterpreted as lack of enthusiasm for the project of this book as a whole, or
want of admiration for the competence with which its project has been brought
to completion. Many essays are of value simply by being sober and workmanlike
(e.g., Francis Martin on revelation and its transmission in Dei verbum, or
Matthew Levering on the closing chapters of Gaudium et spes). What I have been
terming the "shock criterion" is inadequate to portray the riches of this
collection. But is the best reason why this book is needed. Fortunately, owing to
the distinction of the publishing house which produced it (wisely, the editors
eschewed the more obvious choice of conservative Catholic publishers), it is
likely to be widely read by those who would profit from hearing its message.
AIDAN NICHOLS, 0.P.
Blackfriars
Cambridge, England
John Paul II and St. Thomas Aquinas. Edited by MICHAEL DAUPHINAIS and
MATTHEW LEVERING. Naples, Fla.: Sapientia Press of Ave Maria
University, 2006. Pp. 259. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-932589-28-3.
There have been many studies of John Paul's thought and certainly even
more of Thomas Aquinas. But those that compare them one to another are few
and far between. This collection fills an important lacunae in this regard. Many
of the essays are well done and generate some significant insights.
In their introduction, the editors point to what Aidan Nichols has described
as "a new Thomistic renaissance" that has begun to emerge within (and in part
to be shaped by) the pontificate of John Paul II. This renaissance was a
correction of the neo-Scholastic theology that flourished prior to the Second
Vatican Council, which neglected biblical and patristic sources in favor of an arid
rationalism. John Paul II, particularly in Crossing the Threshold of Hope and in
his encyclicals Veritatis splendor and Fides et ratio, appropriated Aquinas as a
contemplative spiritual theologian whose thought was profoundly immersed in
biblical and patristic sources, even while articulating with great clarity the
metaphysical basis of the relationship between creatures and God as both
Creator and Redeemer.
The first of these essays is the one which is perhaps the most out of place. It
is not really a scholarly essay like the book's other chapters. It is rather a homily
given at the Dominican Priory of Ibadan, Nigeria on 6 April 2005 by Anthony
Akinwale, O.P., in a Mass offered for the repose of the soul of the late pope .. It
