Five Books on Consideration. Advice to a Pope by Bernard of Clairvaux (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 471 poetry. His attitude toward Heidegger, however, is not primarily negative; rather he seems to want to affirm Heidegger's idea that mankind is a conversation, that the being of men only becomes actual " in the organic togetherness of their sociality," but to rescue him from subjectivist interpretations . He also approves what he considers Heidegger's opposition to " the general outlook of scientific positivism," by which Scott means the manipulative tendency that Heidegger called "rechnendes Denken." This use on Scott's part of the term "positivism" is significant and may provide the key to an important aspect of the difficulty he has in dealing with a poet like Eliot. It is a very narrow conception of positivism, one that enables him explicitly to oppose it, while remaining largely unaware of the substantial residue of latent positivism in his own thought that leads him to acquiesce in the modern imagination's rejection of classical theism and of the idea of a level of being that transcends the natural and also to distrust subjectivity to the point that any interest in it (as in the case of Eliot's responsiveness to the appeal of Christian mysticism) seems infected with an unhealthy subjectivism. Neither Eliot nor Auden, however , would have been embarrassed by words such as " supernatural " or " theism," and if Eliot believed in the importance of remaining true to the objectivity of the historical world in which man is called to participate in the life of Incarnation, he also considered it essential to attend to the right ordering of the subjective pole of human intention-to join the great contemplatives of the Christian faith in " the purification of the motive/ In the ground of our beseeching." University of Washington Seattle, Washington EUGENE WEBB Bernard of Clairvaux, Five Books on Consideration. Advice to a Pope. Translated by John D. Anderson and Elizabeth T. Kennan. (Cistercian Fathers Series n. 37: The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vol. 13). Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications. 1976. Pp. 222. $12.50. The well-known De consideratione ad Eugenium papam of Bernard of Clairvaux has had at least two English translations (George Lewis, Oxford 1908, and anonymously-but by Ailbe J. Luddy-Dublin, 1921), but the present translation by Professors Anderson and Kennan is the first to be based on the new critical text of Jean Leclercq and Henri Rochais (Rome 1963). It is a judicious translation of Bernard's advice to his former subject Eugene III (1145-1153) about the papal office, and reads very well 472 BOOK REVIEWS indeed. The famous passages on the Roman people (4.~ and 4.4: pp. 111, 114-115) and on the" two-sword" theory (4.7: pp. 117-118) are rendered crisply and compellingly. The only sort of slip I could detect in the whole work was in Bernard's prologue (p. ~3}, where " Since your majesty so admirably condescends, why does my hesitancy persist," does not quite catch the rhetoric of " Maiestati igitur tam dignanter cedente, quidni cedat pudor?" The preface by Elizabeth Kennan nicely places the De consideratione in a full setting; the appendices (pp. 183-191} by Bernard Jacqueline on the manuscripts, sources and influence of the work are wellconceived ; the notes to the text (pp. 193-~05} are very helpful. Institute of Medieval Studies Toronto, Canada LEONARD E. BOYLE O.P. ...