A Spiritual Theology of the Priesthood: The Mystery of Christ and the Mission of the Priest by Dermot Power (review)

494 BOOK REVIEWS acts. In two conceptually dense chapters on "Essence and Existence" and "Intuition of Essence," Baseheart examines Stein's phenomenological conceptions of individual and universal essences and their relation to empirical perception and Husserl's "categorical intuition." In her later works, such as Finite and Eternal Being, Stein increasingly turned her phenomenological approach to focus on issues raised by her intense study of Aristotle, Augustine, Bonaventure, Scotus, and especially Aquinas. Religious concerns become more central. She took issue with Heidegger's emphasis on Angst, calling his work the philosophy of bad conscience and suggesting that the experience of "security"-based on the feeling of being supported in one's received being-rather than "anxiety" is the more typical human experience. But as Baseheart notes, it would be a mistake to suppose that Stein ever turned her back on her phenomenological approach in her later work. It is true that even in her dissertation she exhibited a marked independence in the way she appropriated Husserl's ideas. It is also true that she sided with the phenomenological realists (Reinach, Scheler, Conrad-Martius, lngarden, Hering) against Husserl in rejecting both his turn to transcendental idealism and his transcendental reduction (though not his eidetic reduction). Indeed, Stein's abiding commitment to metaphysical realism is apparent throughout Baseheart 's book, in Stein's accent on the primacy of natural belief in the reality of the world, as in her theory of truth as conformity of intention to real object and objective being. Yet in all of this, Stein remained a true phenomenologist. Lenoir-Rhyne College Hickory, North Carolina PHILIP BLOSSER A Spiritual Theology of the Priesthood: The Mystery of Christ and the Mission of the Priest. By DERMOT POWER. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998. Pp. 178. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8132-0916-1. Dermot Power's Spiritual Theology is very much and in the first place a theology, for he is mindful that priestly life depends on prior conviction about priestly existence. He finds this prior conviction challenged by such writers as E. Schillebeeckx and J. Martos such that, were the challenge to prevail, the result would not be some merely questionable change of priestly spirituality, but its disappearance-there would no priests in the required sense to need it or have it or practice it. Power therefore thinks to strengthen this prior conviction about the existence and nature of Catholic ministerial priesthood BOOK REVIEWS 495 by gathering a theology of the priesthood from the voluminous work of Hans Urs von Balthasar. By that very fact, moreover, the theology will be a spirituality, since it was one of Balthasar's chief glories to make these two recover their original unity. The priest is the "transparency" of Christ and his representative (3, 19). This is what is today contested, and this is what Balthasar both holds in common with the theology of the Church (13-15) and yet gives new depth to. And this is why Power begins with Balthasar's Christology in chapters 1 and 2. The priest is the transparency of Christ. The structure of priestly identity therefore reproduces the structure of the identity of Christ. And the identity of Christ is constituted by a twofold transcendence: a transcending relation to his Father (i.e., a love for, a gift of self to, the Father); and a transcending relation to the world, to sinful humanity, that makes the Church (2, 20). Just so, priestly identity is a matter of a twofold transcendence: first to Christ and with Christ to the Father; second with Christ to Church and world. The purpose of a spiritual theology of the priesthood, in fact, is nothing except to keep these two transcendences alive (5). But why should doing so constitute a properly priestly spirituality? Jesus is rightly called a priest by the later theology of the New Testament, for his surrender of himself to his Father on the cross, and for our sake, is par excellence sacrificial and so priestly (22, 24). The cross, moreover, is the culmination and manifestation of the incarnation as a whole event, and therefore, it turns out that the fundamental relations of Christ's entire...