Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of Marie-Dominique Chenu by Christophe F. Potworowski (review)

humanities 515 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 transformation as a key to his poetics.= In other words, Glazov-Corrigan=s work acknowledges the constant recurrence of images in Mandel=shtam=s writing over three decades, but also provides for the change and evolution of those images. Glazov-Corrigan=s careful close readings allow her successfully to challenge major Mandel=shtam critics such as Ronen and Terras, who hold that Mandel=shtam=s poetic views underwent no significant change from the 1920s to the 1930s. This book also presents a few important correctives to Harris=s Mandelstam: The Collected Critical Prose and Letters (1979), long established as the definitive translation and commentary on Mandel=shtam=s theoretical writings. Glazov-Corrigan herself makes use of Harris=s English-language translations throughout, making this book readily accessible to a non-Slavic reading audience. Mandel=shtam=s Poetics B A Challenge to Postmodernism convincingly demonstrates the intersections between Mandel=shtamian and postmodern theory on a number of levels, including the privileging of the blank or absence over presence and the notion of the text as >a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash= (Barthes). Glazov-Corrigan also cites Mandel=shtam=s long-term engagement with artistic apprehension as a foreshadowing of the concerns of reader response theory. The author clearly anticipates objections from poststructuralist quarters and has attempted to head them off by employing poststructuralist methodology throughout, culminating in a two-page chart detailing >Changing Stages in the Apprehension of the Poetic Landscape: Communication as Simultaneous Performance of Differentiated Strategies.= Elena Glazov-Corrigan is to be commended for this lucid, original, thorough book. Well-researched and sure of foot at every stage, GlazovCorrigan =s work takes its place beside Cavanagh=s Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (1995) and Pollak=s Mandelstam the Reader (1995) as one of the most important contributions to Mandel=shtam scholarship in recent years. (MEGAN SWIFT) Christophe F. Potworowski. Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of Marie-Dominique Chenu McGill-Queen=s University Press. xviv, 330. $49.95 This is a splendid systematic account of the work of one of theology=s giants, who preceded, affected, and effected the Second Vatican Council. The task of theology is about a centre that holds the whole inquiry in balance. Very few find it, and Chenu is among them. He saw his vocation, from the beginning, to be Dominican and thus contemplative. He sought that kind of life, misleadingly called >mixed,= in which contemplation is outward-going, finding the Incarnation through all its reaches. From this centre, Chenu=s work went outward in a series of concentric circles of world 516 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 involvement. At every point of this outward search for meaning, the centre is touched. When, for instance, he is exploring the act of faith, he accepts the received belief that this act is of the will in the intellect, but he goes on to point out that >the will= here is our radical desire for limitless beatitude, whose appetite is, to my understanding before, and it transforms a juridicalsounding statement into something quietly ecstatic, and in character. A key idea is summed up in his axiom, >humanization is the path of divinization.= This statement is centred, that is to say contemplative and incarnational. From this centre, divine and human consort in a manner beyond dualism, and indeed the whole work of Chenu was process of discovering dualism in conventional thought and overcoming it, with the Incarnation contemplatively rested in as the controlling image. I remember so well how the theological taste of Chenu excelled over all the other pioneers of those early days of theological recovery. This excellent book is explaining why and how I felt this way. As it becomes clearer and clearer that the better one=s anthropology the deeper one=s sense of deification, one looks back gratefully to Chenu. Maritain used to say that clear thinking issues in axioms, and these abound in Chenu. >Humanization is the path of divinization= is an example. Or, >there is no...