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

BOOK REVIEWS 137 epistemology of Aristotle and Aquinas as against Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Derrida, while at the same time showing how human thought exists always in a cultural context. No Thomist who faces the challenges of the postmodern age can afford to neglect this massive, lively, and profound work. Saint Louis University Saint Louis, Missouri BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, 0. P. Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology ofMarie-Dominique Chenu. By CHRISTOPHE F. POTWOROWSKI. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. Pp.xviii + 334. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-7735-2255-7. As an introductory note to this book rightly remarks, Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895-1990) was, as historian oftheology, reformer ofScholasticism, and pastoral strategist, a major figure ofthe twentieth-century Catholic Church. This book would be worth buying for its Chenu bibliography alone (fourteen hundred items occupying nearly one hundred pages of text and hence almost a third of the book's length). But, fortunately, given its relatively high price, it contains rather more than that. Its title is helpful, for Christophe Potworowski seeks to make two claims. The first is that Chenu's initial attraction to the Dominican Order as essentially a contemplative Order continued throughout his life to command his theological work even though the vocabulary of contemplation ceased to play a dominant role in his later writing. The second claim is that the concept of incarnation (though whether this is the dogmatic concept of the Incarnation of the Word or the sociocultural one of human embodiment remains an open question) at all points governs Chenu's corpus as a pastoral theologian, a practitioner ofapplied theology. It is this second discussion that will arouse most interest in circles outside the limited world of the Dominican family, not least because it underlines-almost against the intentions of the author-the rather alarming ambiguousness with which the Incarnation/incarnation theme is sounded. A major lacuna in the work is apparent from its opening. Since this is the first full-scale study of Chenu to appear in English, a biographical introduction would have been useful. As it is, a great deal is made to turn on Chenu's first visit, in 1913, to Le Saulchoir du Kain, the study-house, in Belgian exile, of the Province of France. There his Dominican vocation was discovered at a stroke, thanks to the intensity of the liturgical, contemplative, and studious life so zealously represented by that establishment. Clearly, that visit was momentous for him. So much is not conjecture, but the simple sense of Chenu's own words. It seems to 138 BOOK REVIEWS have caused, however, a curious imbalance in his estimate of the Order's nature. Like at least the early Chenu, the present reviewer is also committed to a canonical, monastic, and studious view of the Dominican vocation. But to maintain that the Order is essentially a contemplative Order, some individuals within which are deputed to preaching, is tantamount to saying that it is the moniales of the Order, its enclosed nuns, and not the friars, who best represent St Dominic's intention. No wonder that Chenu was later tempted by a transfer of his vows to the Carthusians! And, more importantly for the Church historian, no wonder, too, that discovery of the crying need for apostolic preaching in the many de-Christianized milieux of mid-twentieth-century France precipitated something of a crisis in his sense of the proportions of the Dominican vocation and the practical strategies that cohere with it. A good deal of the subsequent ambivalence about incarnation language in Chenu's work (so it might be speculated) takes its rise from here. Of the book's six full chapters, two are devoted to the contemplation theme, and four to its incarnation complement. Potworowski opens by looking at Chenu's theology of contemplation, with its spirited refusal of the false oppositions of mysticism and asceticism, mysticism and intellectualism. Chenu used Thomas's theology ofthe virtues and gifts to reassert the happy conjunction of affectivity and knowing, in the appropriation of a grace to which, especially in the more advanced forms of mystical understanding, passivity ("docility" might be a better word) is all. Potworowski has little difficulty in...