Theology, Rhetoric, Manuduction, or Reading Scripture Together on the Path to God (review)

Do not be put off by the unfortunate title of this thought-provoking book. Candler's aim is to reorient theology by recovering the medieval practice of reading. Unlike post-Reformation, post-print, post-Cartesian reading, understood as a transfer of data from the page to the reader, medieval reading leads the reader by the hand (hence, "manuductio") along an itinerary toward the wisdom that is the Son of God (p. 48), a journey that repeats the exitus / reditus pattern of Scripture. This practice of reading is learned in liturgy, where the Book of Scripture is carried in procession into the congregation, so that the people draw near to it. Likewise, the readings pass from Old Testament to Psalm to Epistle to New Testament, drawing toward the center and aim, Jesus. Theology nurtured on such reading does not aim to produce systematic, complete, closed, encyclopedic structures of propositions but rather participates in the ongoing community of interpretation that is the church (p. 125). Past masters are engaged in a continuing conversation that leads along an itinerary to knowledge of God that is not cognitive, but moral, an apprenticeship in divine love (p. 124).

Candler terms this practice of reading a "grammar of participation" (in contrast to a modern "grammar of representation"), and he analyzes its operation chiefly in Augustine's Confessions, the Glossa Ordinaria, and Thomas' Summa Theologiae. Augustine reorients rhetoric from persuasion to conversion, centering reading and preaching Scripture on memory (not recollection of the past but remembrance, keeping in mind, as when we speak of "remembering where you came from"). Memorial reading leads to the right relation to God, caritas, joining the individual to the Church's peregrination through the world back to God.

The Glossa, he argues, is misread if seen as bringing the biblical text into relation with the text of commentary. Rather, Scripture echoes in memory as heard in liturgy. In the pages of the Glossa, the voice of Scripture gathers voices that respond to it, forming an icon of the indivisibility of Scripture and tradition while keeping them distinct (p. 82). Tradition here is no deposit of knowledge but an activity, the ongoing interpretive conversation that is the life of the Church. By contrast, the Reformation principle of sola scriptura silenced this conversation, clearing Scripture's margins of exegetical accretions and loosing the text directly on the reader (p. 75), isolated from the body of the Church.

Thomas' Summa resituates moral teaching within a theological itinerary of the soul's return to God (p. 91). Sacra doctrina aims not at irrefutable arguments but at a contemplative way of life (p. 135). The reduction of the Summa to an encyclopedic tabula of propositions distorts its real nature as a dialectical narrative that brings together the continuing community of interpretive voices so as to manifest truth more clearly (p. 106). Candler rejects Derrida's claim that "the book" is totalizing (applied by Jesse Gellrich to the medieval book). Such a view of the book is a product of printing and the Reformation. The Council of Trent unfortunately modeled tradition on this reification of the book, turning it into a "container" of truth, a second book "alongside" the Gospel, itself a thing to be interpreted instead of being the continuing practice of interpretation.

Candler writes eloquent pages describing liturgy as "a peripatetic passage through the great halls and storehouses of the church's memory, along whose way are placed the imagines which recall the story of the church as the tale of God's love for his people" (pp. 155-156). The supporting evidence is strained or speculative, but the general idea seems persuasive.

Candler's book is a dissertation revised for publication; it is an acorn that falls not far from the tree of radical orthodoxy and appears appropriately in the series Radical Traditions edited by Stanley...