From Augustine to Eriugena: Essays on Neoplatonism and Christianity in Honor of John O'Meara (review)

460 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3I:3 JULY ~993 implications of the gulf it posits between virtue and vice. But caution and good sense pervade the book; its proposals are well documented and seldom implausible or unargued. Brevity, on the other hand, leads to neglect of some fundamental issues. More needs to be said about the place of justice in Zeno's city; and while I sympathize with Schofield's silence on 0/ke/os/s, the topic seems crucial for any account of the Stoic conception of natural law. Particularly striking, given his thesis that the idea of the cosmic city "mediates the transition from republicanism to natural law theory," is a curious reticence about the content of this law. Schofield has excellent things to say about its basis in a substantive conception of reason and its bearing on Stoic communism , but I think he is too quick to present it as narrowly "moral" and "social." When the polls becomes the universe, severing politikon from its civic moorings deserves more defense; and by limiting the scope of natural law solely to human interactions, Schofield leaves it oddly parochial. Our impression of anthropocentrism in Stoic teleology comes largely from hostile sources, and the intimate link Chrysippus saw between natural law and fate suggests he thought that the wise act on behalf of a good extending well beyond human society. The Stoics were not the original Green Party, but their interest in cosmic nature makes me suspect they might have sown some of its seeds. Reservations like these, however, indicate points for further discussion and study, not serious flaws. There is more to be said on many of the topics discussed in the book, and the significance of later developments, especially in the work of Diogenes and Panaetius, has yet to be addressed. But Schofield has succeeded admirably in unraveling some terribly tangled skeins of testimony and working them into a philosophically respectable and very instructive fabric. The prospects for continued advance are greatly enhanced now that he has set out the scope and substance of early Stoic political theory so clearly and carefully. STEPHEN A. WHITE University of Texas at Austin and Institute/or Advanced Study F. X. Martin, O. S. A., and J. A. Richmond, eds. From Augustine to Eriugena: Essays on Neoplatonism and Christianity in Honor of John O'Meara. Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, x991. Pp. xx + x9o. Cloth, $49.95. This fifteen-essay collection boasts pieces by some major names in the study of Neoplatonism and its Christian transformations, including A. H. Armstrong, Henry Chadwick , Mary Clark, John Dillon, Robert O'Connell and Gerard O'Daly. Armstrong's "Apophatic-Kataphatic Tensions in Religious Thought" asks why positive theology tends to push negative theology into the background in Christian and Neoplatonist writers of the third through sixth centuries. Armstrong suggests two reasons. One is that religious lives in both traditions involved the interpreting of sacred texts (16), be they Biblical or such Hellenic authorities as the Orphic poems. One gives a definite interpretation of a text about God only by making posidve claims about God. The second is a need for self-definition, particularly in polemic against other traditions (17). For a religious tradition must give its claims about God positive content if it is to BOOK REVIEWS 461 distinguish its claims from its rivals'. Chadwick's "History and Symbolism in the Garden at Milan" asks whether the conversion scene in Augustine's Confessions is factual report or poetic fancy. Chadwick gives Augustine's hermeneutics and the "purely literary" elements in Augustine's writing careful, sensitive consideration, but in the end contends that Augustine's story is "factual and correctly remembered" (55). Thomas Finan returns to Augustine's garden in "A Mystic in Milan." Finan argues that despite Augustine's talk of being "unable to see" and "beaten back by" God, Augustine's was a "successful" though transient mystical experience. Mystics talk of inability to see, Finan reminds us, to express the transcendence of that which they experience, not to deny that they experience it. In "Augustine the Christian Thinker," Mary Clark suggests the "radically evangelical character of Augustine's thought...