Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity
By Gillian T. W. Ahlgren
Cornell University Press
240 pp.; $29.95
More than anything else, Teresa of Avila (1515-82) “taught women . . . about the process of survival in the church,” contends Gillian Ahlgren in this thoroughly researched and thought-provoking first book. To survive, play by the men’s rules. Behave the way men think women should behave. Submit to men’s judgment. And, once you have died, prepare to be immortalized as someone you weren’t.
Ahlgren, an assistant professor of theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, makes her case through two contrasts. First, she highlights the changes Teresa made, under threat of the Inquisition, in subsequent editions of her published works in order to mollify or forestall her critics. Second, Ahlgren opposes the solid accomplishments of Teresa’s life-monasteries founded, books published, bishops counseled-to the image of her presented for canonization only a generation after her death. Mother Teresa had been a strong-willed entrepreneur, if not a revolutionary; Saint Teresa, by contrast, embodied the female virtues of humility and obedience.
Teresa’s humility and obedience, says Ahlgren, were less her natural characteristics than the result of “a process of self-construction.” Widely read but uneducated in Latin and Greek, she willingly submitted her writings to theologians and continually proclaimed her obedient loyalty to the church and its representatives, even when her own cherished projects were at stake. By thus conforming to the Counter-Reformation’s image of the ideal woman, Teresa was able to transcend the limitations imposed on women and achieve a sort of transgendered success. As her biographer Francisco de Ribera put it in 1590: “Those women who with fortitude overcome their passions and submit to God must be called men. . . . Much attention must be paid to [the revelations] of a woman more manly than many big men.” This strategy resulted in Teresa’s canonization, but it also perpetuated stereotypes and, Ahlgren argues, “effectively blocked other women’s bid for autonomy and authority within the Roman Catholic Church.”
The context of Teresa’s lifework, however, was not so much gender as the perennial fight between letter and spirit. A religious revolution raged in Northern Europe: The church’s authority was spurned, heretical writings poured out of printing presses, schismatic groups broke from Rome and then from one another. Terrified Spanish churchmen, aware of an increasingly popular lay mysticism that emphasized direct revelation rather than dogma or tradition, responded by reigniting the Inquisition, establishing an Index of Prohibited Books, forcing religious women into cloisters. (Significantly, dogmatic theologians were called letrados, while mystical theologians were known as espirituales.) Enter Teresa: mystic, writer, monastic reformer, public speaker, woman. At least six times she was denounced to the Inquisition; a papal nuncio described her as “a troublesome, restless, disobedient, and stubborn female, who under the guise of devotion invented bad doctrines, running around outside the cloister against the order of the Tridentine Council and prelates, instructing like a teacher in defiance of what St. Paul taught.” And yet, with all cards stacked against her, she secured for the mystical tradition an esteemed place at the heart of Catholicism and was later proclaimed a saint and a Doctor of the Church.
What Teresa saw, that many of her contemporaries did not, was that tightened controls cannot, must not be allowed to quench the Spirit. She did not want to put the institutional church and mystical experience on opposite sides of a chasm. Was her chosen posture of humility and obedience only a persona designed to ensure the survival of her mystical ideas in spite of unwarranted authoritarianism? Ahlgren’s short treatise seems to favor such a cynical response, without ruling out the possibility that Teresa genuinely believed in ecclesial authority.
Whatever Teresa’s motivation, her political astuteness showed that “charismatic experience did not have to be viewed as a potential danger to the institutional church, but could instead be an important source of Roman Catholic identity.” More than anything else, Teresa of Avila taught the institutional church to welcome the Spirit, and mystics to find a home in the church.
-LaVonne Neff
Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment
By Geoffrey Sutton
Westview Press
391 pp.; $29.95, hardcover;
$14.95, paper
In traditional accounts of the history of science, acceptance of the new science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries requires no explanation. Clear away myths and superstitions, and the facts and formulas impress themselves upon the mind of every reasonable person. But this view is too simplistic, writes Geoffrey Sutton in this light-hearted but serious revisionist history. The truth is that the new science was accepted long before convincing justification was available. What accounted for the broad social acceptance of the new way of thinking was not a body of self-evident facts but the use of science as a source of amusement and spectacle.
In literary salons and lecture halls, popularizers of science dramatized theories by rubbing glass rods to create startling electrical sparks or mixing chemicals to produce window-rattling explosions. The sheer entertainment value of these clever demonstrations (electrified kisses were common) played an important role in making science part of elite culture. Amusing parlor experiments, Sutton writes, “rather than the elegance of Newton’s descriptions of the motions of the planets, convinced the eighteenth century of the power of the new philosophy to describe and especially to control nature.”
In turn, Sutton argues, it was the science demonstration that helped create the positivist ideal of science as a collection of self-evident, undeniable truths, read right off the face of nature and free from philosophical taint. Scientists might disagree over the philosophies of Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz, but everyone could watch collisions between suspended ivory balls or hear the sound of the first electrical buzzer. Public spectacles gave audiences “a sense of actually witnessing the truth of natural philosophy,” making it easy to conclude that scie nce provided a “transparent window” into nature. Though Sutton does not draw the connection, his account gives one source of the naive Enlightenment epistemology that so often undergirds attacks on Christian faith from the supposedly neutral ground of “science,” while in fact concealing a commitment to materialistic philosophy.
-Nancy R. Pearcey
Marching to Glory: The History of the Salvation Army in the United States, 1880-1992
Revised and expanded edition
By Edward H. McKinley
Eerdmans
451 pp.; $25
Christians of all types struggle today to create strategies that can both speak to the public crises of our age and preserve the heart of traditional Christianity. Edward McKinley, a historian from Asbury College, reminds us in this much-expanded version of an earlier book that the Salvation Army has been there and been doing it for over a century. Although Marching to Glory was written with the cooperation of Army officials, it is not just an insider’s celebration. McKinley knows where the skeletons are buried and is not afraid to dig up a few. He also has an eye for the quirky, as in the several occasions throughout its history when the all-captivating question of the hour for the Army was the size, disposition, use, or even volume of its brass bands.
Much more seriously, McKinley’s portrait of how the Army has succeeded for more than a century at maintaining aggressive programs of social service in some of the most needy urban areas of the United States while at the same time holding true to its style of holiness evangelical Protestantism should be an inspiration for others. It can be done. Others, however, may well want to learn from the Christlike humility that the Army’s generals, privates, and ranks in between have displayed in their final moments. If the soldiers of Christ ever “succeed” in meeting the daunting tasks facing the church, the history of the Salvation Army suggests that it will occur as believers act in the spirit, as well as in the name, of their Commander-in-Chief.
-Mark Noll
States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
By Wendy Brown
Princeton University Press
202 pp.; $39.50, hardcover;
$12.95, paper
A work of highly specialized political theory, Wendy Brown’s States of Injury nevertheless tells an important cautionary tale. Behind the dense and turgid text lies a warning for would-be emancipators of all stripes. The author (professor of women’s studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz) follows Foucault’s insight that political resistance is often formed and shaped internally by the very regimes of power that are the objects of resistance. So the critiques of liberalism and patriarchy, which have become standard fare for contemporary feminists and cultural theorists, themselves mask some hidden dependencies on the key symbol of modernity, the regulatory state. Brown suggests that such progressive perspectives “have grown disoriented about the meaning and practice of political freedom.” If the embedded narrative of modernity is one of hierarchy, power, and injury, and if the prevailing critiques of this narrative are themselves parasitic upon this condition, how can true emancipation be realized? For Brown, it comes by moving from an injury/dependency status of thought and practice to that of collective and transformative freedom.
While very few readers of this journal would consider themselves in Brown’s postmodern feminist terms, I am nevertheless struck by her description of the dimensions of masculinized state power. Could not a comparable work be written by means of the Christian substitution of an ecclesiological perspective for that of Brown’s gendered account? Analysis, following Brown, of how the demands of the regulatory state have inflicted states of injury upon the emancipatory life of the church and of how Christian detractors of the state often mask their dependency on that very state of affairs may go a long way toward providing the space necessary for critical Christian reflection and refigured practice.
-Ashley Woodiwiss
Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea
By Irving Kristol
Free Press
493 pp.; $25
Neoconservatism has proven to be not a waystation halfway along the road from Liberal City to Conservativeville but a suburb of the latter, a fast-growing town that continues to incorporate its environs. And Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, doesn’t mind. For what he championed was not a free-standing movement but an impulse, an evolving persuasion felt by a number of liberals that their old dwelling place was falling into ruins and provided no good home.
This volume collects Kristol’s best essays from a half-century of intellectual journalism, many of which would otherwise be quite inaccessible. Bracketing the essays are memoirs; the long opening piece is indispensable. The intervening essays are grouped into sections entitled “Race, Sex, and Family”; “From Adversary Culture to Counterculture”; “On Capitalism and the Democratic Idea”; “The Conservative Prospect”; and “On Jews.” Although Kristol’s odyssey has taken him from Trotskyism to liberalism to neoconservatism to unprefixed conservatism, what most impresses the reader of these essays, clustered as they are by theme rather than chronology, is, paradoxically, the consistency of vision over time. For example, “Socialism: An Obituary for an Idea” sounds like a piece out of the nineties after Soviet Communism collapsed, but it was written in 1976.
Among the leading constants in Kristol’s world-view is his high respect for traditional religion and its civilizing effects upon public life, a sentiment he held even in his socialist youth. That Kristol’s increasing conservatism is not merely a concomitant of aging is suggested by the increase of his intellectual progeny. He perceives its cause to be, rather, a narrowing of liberalism and a broadening of conservatism.
Kristol’s great gift as a writer is to say much in little. Whether the specific topic be aids, multiculturalism, welfare, democracy, party politics, or any of a host of others, Kristol speaks such common sense in such plain and incisive language that it startles; it startles for its rarity. Although the likeliest readers of this volume are conservatives hungry for confirmation as a beleaguered minority among intellectuals, the best readers would be liberals, especially religious liberals who wonder if maybe liberalism today, enmeshed as it is with secularism, really “is at the end of its intellectual tether” but don’t know how to resolve their quandary.
-EEE
The Dissenters: Volume 2, The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity 1791-1859
By Michael R. Watts
Clarendon Press/Oxford
University Press
911 pp.; $89
Michael Watts’s massive, fact-laden tome is the second of a projected three volumes devoted to the history of “chapel-goers,” non-Anglican Protestants in England and Wales. His earlier volume (published 18 years ago) had taken the story from Dissenting origins in the English Civil War to the time of the French Revolution. Watts needs to be read in conjunction with other learned interpreters of his subject (like David Bebbington, David Hempton, Deryck Lovegrove, Deborah Valenze, and John Wolffe), for the mass of detail presented in this book sometimes dulls his interpretive edge. But Watts still does at least two things as well as any other historian now writing on the subject.
First, he shows that the Dissenters succeeded in their efforts to embody an active faith because they were able to bring the Christian message to where Britain’s rapidly changing social conditions had left the people. Dissenters (including Baptists, Independents, Methodists, Primitive Methodists, Bible Christians, and others) never succeeded at reaching all classes with equal success, but they adjusted both message and means sufficiently to make notable progress in finding the people where they were.
Second, Watts presents the fullest picture now available of how Dissenters’ gradual rise in wealth, status, stability, dignity, and political influence related to the Christian foundations upon which their various churches rested.
The story leaves a mixed conclusion: Dissent flourished when it appeared most starkly as an alternative to the privileges of established Anglicanism; in the end, however, the greatest threat to the dynamism of Dissent was its very success in establishing that alternative. There is much not only to read, but to ponder, in this big book.
-MN
Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Postmodern America
By Peter Sacks
Open Court
208 pp.; $17.95, paper
Is American higher education as corrupt as the pseudonymous Peter Sacks says? Yes. Is he the right messenger? No. The catalogue of horrors is real, if familiar: grade inflation, dumbed-down courses, time-serving teachers, enrollment-driven administrators, cap-wearing back-row students with their consumerist “entitlement paradigm.” But this journalist-turned-teacher (at a community college) reports from behind enemy lines that the main conflict in the culture wars is generational.
He is-oxymoronically?-“a driven Boomer,” and the bored Generation X-ers, who “stood in this fortress against me as a Boomer,” are “such fundamentally different human beings than students a decade ago.” What most galls Sacks is student evaluations. In my long experience of reading evaluations of colleagues, demanding professors receive strong evaluations. Sacks whinily says otherwise, and “call me Peter” launches his “Sandbox Experiment” of “teaching to the evaluations” to “prove” it.
In the second half of the book, Sacks starts to shift some of the blame. “We’re all postmodernists now,” he says repeatedly, liking his invention but making hash of his big subject. Wandering clueless in the thicket of postmodernism, he has eyes only for threats to his knee-jerk secular liberalism: satanic cults, militia groups, angel-believers, Vaclav Havel(!), ufoers, Rush Limbaugh. Soon enough, he shifts his aim back to his favorite target, Gen-X slackers, making me feel sorrier than ever for today’s college students.
If we are to play Sacks’s game of generational blame, why not shift most of it to his cohort, which is arguably the most self-indulgent in America’s history and has shaped the postmodernist world that the young must live in? Of the tough love they need, Sacks came bearing only the “tough.” Even the intellectually slovenly, if there is to be any hope for them, need professors who they know are “for” them. Only in the epilogue, after further time as a teacher, does Sacks show some sympathy for students. He should have waited awhile to write about them. We must look elsewhere for good sense about the academy’s decadence.
-Edward E. Ericson, Jr.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine
September/October 1996, Page 38
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