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Journal of Early Christian Studies 12.1 (2004) 131-133



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Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God. New Haven: Yale University, 2003. Pp. xxii + 368. $29.95.

To read this book is simultaneously to be invigorated by immersion in a people forging an identity and to be challenged by highly trained, inventive minds contending to give reasonable utterance to the unutterable. The book is not a history of Christian thought. Wilken holds that "the study of early Christian thought has been too preoccupied with ideas. The intellectual effort of the early church was at the service of a much loftier goal than giving conceptual form to Christian belief. Its mission was to win the hearts and minds of men and women and to change their lives. Christian thinkers appealed to a much deeper level of [End Page 131] human experience than had the religious institutions of society or the doctrines of the philosophers" (xiv). So Wilken allowed the agenda of his book to be " set by the things Christians cared most about" (xvi). He sees that Christians reasoned "from history, from ritual, and from text." For them "concepts and abstractions were always put at the service of a deeper immersion in the res, the thing itself, the mystery of Christ and of the practice of the Christian life. The goal was not only understanding but love" (xvii-xviii).

The first three chapters of the work deal with these foundations (history, ritual, and text) which are equally important although they are treated sequentially. First is history; in chapter 1 the author considers how "God was made known in the history of Israel and in the events of Christ's life." Then ritual; in chapter 2 he examines the ways in which the liturgy, which made present the events of the gospels, gave Christians immediate access to Christ, especially to his death and resurrection. Third is text; in chapter 3, the author explains how the event of the resurrection, the experience of liturgy, and the texts of Scripture worked together to shape the doctrine of the trinity. Thus, the first four chapters of this fine study would constitute an excellent teaching unit.

For this reader chapter 5 is the most memorable one. Here Wilken deals with the humanity of Christ and makes use of the theological reflection of Maximus the Confessor on "not my will but thine be done." What results is a theologically solid and humanly gripping presentation of the usually esoteric subject of monothelitism. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa oversee a workmanlike presentation of the teaching on creation and human beings in chapter 6.

Turning from what is believed to the believers themselves in chapters 7 and 8, Wilken has Augustine mediate a discussion of faith as a way of knowing and of church as the community of believers in relation to society. Though Christians are part of society and are shaped by its culture, they are developing their own culture in this period, and that culture is the topic of chapters 9 and 10. Prudentius highlights Wilkens treatment of Christian poetry in chapter 9, and just as in chapter 1, the incarnation dominates discussion. The continuing influence of the incarnation on the ways in which material things relate to the spiritual comes to the fore in chapter 10, where attention is focused on the defense of icons.

Two chapters dealing with Christian life complete the book. Chapter 11 is a useful synthesis not only of the way in which discussion of the virtues in classical Greek and Latin authors influenced Christian moral writing but also of the ways in which reflection on the end of Christian life, i.e., likeness to God, transformed the classical tradition. Ultimately, in Augustine, virtue "is nothing else than perfect love of God" (288). Finally, chapter 12, entitled "The Knowledge of Sensuous Intelligence," uses Origen's insight that God became human to "implant in us the happiness that comes . . . from knowing him" to draw together the themes of the...

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