Ethical Patterns in Early Christian Thought by Eric Osborn (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 805 interpretations and misinterpretations occasioned by them, there is a synthesizing vision animating Ricoeur's work that does not shrink from the mobility and complexity of the real. And this vision in turn stimulates anticipation of the " poetics of the good " with its promise of further reconciling divergent perspectives and of alleviating some of the " conflict of interpretations." John Carroll University Cleveland, Ohio ROBERT D. SWEENEY Ethical Patterns in Early Christian Thought. By ERIC OsBORN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Pp. 252. $21.00. Urged on by certain trends in contemporary ethical thought, among them "a thoughtful rejection of Christian claims" at whose basis rests the judgment that religion and God are incurably unintelligible, Eric Osborn's first concern is to lay bare the principal characteristics, or "patterns ," of Christian ethics. He postulates four, and seeks them out as they appear, with considerable variation, in the New Testament, in Clement of Alexandria, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom and Augustine. These four patterns, namely, righteousness, discipleship, faith, and love, are in turn viewed with respect to their tendency to be distorted by a drift towards contingency (i. e., legalism, concretization) on the one hand or perfection (i.e., enthusiasm, abstraction) on the other, a phenomenon which occurs whenever one of the two does not take sufficient account of the claims of its opposite. It is an excellent and apparently all-inclusive framework within which to set the development of Christian ethics, and the New Testament and the Fathers offer extremely apt-and, in the former case, normative --illustrations of that development. For example, discipleship in the New Testament, the "deep intention to carry out the will of Christ," not as one who is separate from Christ but as one who is in Christo, is capable of becoming hardened either into the ecclesiastical authority which Paul speaks of in 2 Cor. 11:5 and 12:1the contingent, legalist distortion-or into the enthusiasm of the Corinthians who were already "reigning in Christ," whom he mentions in 1 Cor. 4: 10-the perfectionist, abstract distortion. The Fathers are not always so capable as the New Testament writers of seeing the pitfalls represented by the contingent and the perfect. Clement, despite his attention to the minutest details of Christian life in the Paidagogos and his nearly dangerous glorification of the Christian gnostic in the Stromata, perhaps comes closest of the four Fathers to main- 806 BOOK REVIEWS taining a balance: for " the true gnostic finds God in the contingency of his daily work" (p. 80). Basil, however, although his own instincts in the matter were sure, placed an emphasis on asceticism and on the monastic life that later ages were to find all too easy to exaggerate. Chrysostom, for all his burning zeal and often intemperate language, is impressive by reason of his sanity as well as his enthusiasm; but his notion of free will and grace is such that Pelagius can cite him in his own defense. Finally, in Augustine, Osborn finds that the doctrine of" Love, and do what you will" (In Ep. Joan. 7, 8) could unfortunately exist in neat relation to to the Catholic persecution of the Donatists: Augustine " worked out the order of love so badly that it was possible to persecute in love. He developed the notion of order and law so thoroughly that he lost the freedom which his plausible words suggest" (p. 18~) . Osborn illustrates each section of each chapter with citations from the Fathers which, if not exhaustive in the area, seem more than adequate. They come marching out in the author's somewhat abrupt style, one after another, and fairly overwhelm. Occasionally it is difficult to see why some of these many examples fall under one heading and not another, under " faith " or " love " rather than " discipleship," for instance. This sometimes suggests a bit of forcing of the categories, which are valuable in themselves and which do in fact succeed in expressing very well the characteristic patterns of Christian ethics. The major criticism of Osborn's treatment of the Fathers, however, is that he cannot do them real justice in the thirty or forty pages he has allotted to each of them...