Faith and Theology by M. D. Chenu, O. P. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Faith and Theology. By M.D. CHENU, 0. P. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968. Pp. Qfl7. $6.95. There is a prophetical ring to the titles of these chapters collected from articles published by Chenu over the last forty years. The contents range over the relation between biblical and theological language, the relationship between theologians and bishops, the spirituality of matter, corporality and temporality as human situation, the solidarity of the proletariat and the solidarity of the Mystical Body, and the condition of man in a technological civilization. Many of these essays owe their origin to Chenu's remarkable availability to all the important movements of French intellectual life. Father Chenu's Parisian study is today, as it has been for forty years, the gathering place for historians, scientists, sociologists , philosophers, artists, and theologians. For the American reader, it is not out of place to mention what is well-known to the French. Anyone hoping to explain the development of the Catholic revival of the last quarter-century will find the personality of Chenu frequently an important factor in some of its greatest moments. Returning from doctoral studies in Rome, Chenu became in the late 19QO's the disciple and protege of Mandonnet, the historian. After him, and along with Etienne Gilson, Chenu produced a theological style which has marked the whole school of French Dominicans in this century. He was sensitive to Sertillanges's proposal that theology must relearn to respect the revealed datum as the fundamental norm of true theology. He also followed Mandonnet in promoting an historical study of St. Thomas. His then controversial book, Le Saulchoir, une ecole de theologie, published in 1937, was effectively an appeal to go back to the sources of Christian theology precisely in order to do justice to the great medieval theological tradition of St. Thomas and his commentators. It is noteworthy that this work, which today strikes us as in no way remarkable except for the enthusiastic vigor of its style, met with extreme disapproval in Rome and was subsequently removed from circulation. Despite Rome's disapproval, however, Chenu's influence did distinctly mark the development of one of the most important European theological schools of this century, viz., Le Saulchoir, the Dominican House of Studies of the Province of Paris. Both during its location at Kain, in Belgium, and later in the 1930's at Juvisy and Etiolles (its present location) , Le Saulchoir has been the school of a number of important theological personalities . Yves Cougar must be numbered as the most prominent of these; 171 172 BOOK REVIEWS he has long been Chenu's most famous disciple and colleague. Likewise Dominique and Andre Dubarle, Andre Liege, Claude Geffre, and Edouard Schillebeeckx have all been affiliated at some time with Le Saulchoir, as have been such biblical scholars as Roland de Vaux and Pierre Benoit. It was Chenu more than any other who saw this extraordinary theological school through the teeming excitement, the frequent conflicts, and the shifting climate of the past twenty-five years. Chenu taught Greek, History of Dogma, and began a course introducing the beginners in theology to the literature and thought of medieval theology . This course eventually led to his book, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas (English translation, 1964). This introduction is a total history: the social and economic dimensions of the period are blended with a philological and literary understanding of the period. It is a sort of history of whatever manifestation of human vitality might give added meaning to the theological phenomenon which was the corpus Thomisticum. Chenu's most respected work, La theologie au douzieme siecle (1957), is another product of this same methodology. It is not quite so surprising, then, that Dominique Chenu, known principally as an historian and medievalist, should have produced the present thoroughly contemporary and relevant work. His approach to the ~Oth Church is much like his approach to l~th and 13th century Christendom . He finds clues to the real work of theology in the increased socialization of man, the economic organization of nations, and new patterns of class structure. Pope John XXIII's by-word becomes a keystone for Chenu's theology: " The signs...