The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (review)

One of the great tests of scholarship is to write a good general introduction—a book that surveys a field simply enough to open the gates to a non-specialist, yet with enough synthetic power and maturity of judgment to offer the more advanced reader new perspectives, insights, and connections. Robert Louis Wilken's The Spirit of Early Christian Thought passes the test admirably. It is a beautiful book, in every sense: handsomely produced by Yale University Press, elegantly written, rich in the wisdom and vitality that can be offered only by a veteran scholar of the highest caliber, who lets his subject nourish his soul.

As he explains at the outset, Wilken does not intend this book to be a comprehensive history of early Christian theology (although theology is its constant subject), much less a survey of the Church's institutional or social life in its first six or seven centuries. "My aim," he writes, is to show "how Christians thought about the things they believed" (p. xiv): to map out the points of contact between biblical faith and disciplined, culturally sophisticated reflection, as forming the skeleton of an organic religious consciousness sustained by and expressed in formal theology, liturgy and art, community life and individual spiritual growth. Commenting on Gregory the Great's remark that "love is itself a form of knowledge," Wilken later observes: "For Gregory, as for all the figures who have made an appearance in the pages of this book, thinking about the things of God, like grammar, was not an end in itself; its aim was the love of God and holiness of life. He did not construct a world of ideas for others to admire but one to live in" (p. 313). Wilken's project here is to give the modern reader an intuitive sense of what life in that world was like.

His book is not simply ordered chronologically, but is also organized around themes. The first three chapters deal with the intellectual sources of second- and third-century Christian theology, in philosophical apologetics, the language of worship, and the emerging biblical canon. Drawing on some major writings of the fourth- to seventh-century controversies, he then deftly sketches out the main lines of an emerging Christian understanding of God as Trinity, of the complex yet subjectively single person of Christ, and of the material and human world as created to reflect and share in God's goodness. Chapter 7 turns to Patristic understandings of faith itself as a reasonable activity, and chapter 8 offers a dense and balanced discussion of early Christian views on the relationship of Church and society. After a lively presentation of the beginnings of Christian poetry and a brilliant treatment of early religious art as a Christ-centered way of seeing divine beauty through material forms, Wilken concludes with chapters on early Christian moral teaching and on the Patristic understanding of the affections and the passions in the spiritual life. He personalizes each of these themes by developing them in terms of the representative work of one or more major Fathers, offering generous and readable translations from their work.

As a historically sophisticated, theologically profound treatment of the beginnings of Christian culture, this book meets a real need. It would be an excellent textbook for undergraduate or seminary courses on the early Church, and a superb general introduction to Christian theology. But it is also a book for lectio divina, one that will nourish the reflection of any reader interested in thinking further about faith, culture, and the life of the mind. A presentation of the religious heart of classical Patristic literature, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought seems destined to become a classic in its own right.