Baptism and Change in the Early Middle Ages, c. 200-c. 1150 by Peter Cramer (review)

BOOK reviews731 ens the explosion of new finds in the years 1965-1990 to Pandora's Box, I presume without its lid. How this fits with his overall view that more is better and less leads to ossification (as cited above) and methological navel gazing I do not know. Paul Corby Finney University ofMissouri Baptism and Change in the Early Middle Ages, c. 200-c. 1150. By Peter Cramer. [Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth Series, 20.] (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1993. Pp. xx, 356. $59.95.) This book is part of a very distinguished series and was written by someone who, the reader quickly discovers, has an amazing depth of understanding of the thought of the Middle Ages.The axis of Cramer's thesis is the viewpoint of eleventh- and twelfth-century thinkers who question their past. Indeed, the entire book is an attempt to account for the eventual twelfth-century loss of understanding of sacrament, or at least a loss of confidence in it.The genesis of the development is best captured by the word "change" in the book's title.This "change" is described in the six chapters which comprise the book. Cramer views them as essays which are to some extent independent of one another. The first essay or chapter treats Hippolytus of Rome, author of the Apostolic Tradition, m Hippolytus, the natural symbol ofwater provides the ground for a moral approach to baptism, and this is set in the context of a certain "crisis": "I will try to show from the Tradition and elsewhere that the 'crisis' ofbaptism reflects this leaning to the abstract, and is partiaUy a crisis about what it is to know the divine" (p. 23). Cramer indicates how the baptism of Hippolytus is comparable to entry into Gnosticism. Indeed, the use of older forms, with new meanings, partiaUy accounts for Christian baptism's constantly shifting perspective as it develops through the centuries. The second essay traces the contribution ofTertuUian and Ambrose in this shifting perspective.The key themes here are conversion and martyrdom, myth and dream. One suspects that Cramer has spent years studying TertuUian and Ambrose. The third essay deals with the contribution ofAugustine.This contribution is so rich and Cramer's analysis so thorough that it is unfortunate that the reader wasn't given a summary at the end of the chapter. It is with Augustine that the "sacramental and the ethical become one" (p. 88) and one sees "the need to baptize early, the necessity of infant baptism rather than its possibUity or desirabiUty , is perhaps the most obvious legacy ofAugustine to the Middle Ages" (P- 125). The fourth essay goes from Augustine to the Carolingians.The change here is from the ethical understanding ofAugustine to the juridical.The certainty now comes from the forms of the rite of baptism themselves. 732BOOK REVIEWS The fifth essay describes the Carolingian age and is labeled the diminishing of baptism. It is a time when "the momentary effulgence of baptism was pushed out on to the periphery" (p. 206) and when "sacrament turns into magic" (p. 219). The sixth and final essay treats what was Cramer's starting-point, the viewpoint of the twelfth century, which he caUs a time of "falling short" or a time concerned with a sense of loss. His insights into baptism come frequently as parallels to the twelfth-century thinking on eucharist. The six chapters are complemented by two Excursuses on the baptistry. They include fourteen illustrations which, unfortunately, are a bit dark and thus hard to appreciate. The book concludes with a twenty-five-page bibliography which is extremely helpful. This book is not for the beginner. Cramer interweaves history, theology, philosophy , poetry, semiotics into a tapistry that is masterful, but complex and dtfficult . The reader would have been greatly aided by summaries at the end of each chapter and especiaUy by a synthesis at the end of the book. StiU, the book is to be read, and indeed re-read. In so doing, one will learn not only a great deal about the sacrament of baptism, but also a great deal about the Middle Ages in the West. Gerard Austin, O.P...