Johannes Blund, Tractatus de Anima ed. by D. A. Callus, O. P. and R. W. Hunt (review)

700 BOOK REVIEWS Prayer-forms are not seen as part of a cultural style, and prayer-content is not envisaged as an expression of the cultural needs of a people. Or again, immortality is singled out as an important attribute of the gods. But why this is the case is never spelled out; nor does the author put much emphasis on immortality as a human ideal which leaves enormous impact on burial customs, legal practices of child-adoption, and so on. At one point the author makes the appropriate remark that anthropomorphic elements, which are characteristic of the gods, are symbolical in nature. Much light would have been shed on these religions had the symbols been examined and analyzed. One is never sure of what the author is really doing in the final section of his book. His claim might be that he is trying to place Greece and Rome in the general framework of the history of religions. His most important statement is that the two classical religions have features common both to Indo-european and Mediterranean religions. Such features are not examined, and the significance of the similarities referred to is not explored. Most of what the author writes in these final eighty pages could be described as haphazard reflections. Why he has to end with a theological postscript which explains all religions-Islam excepted, or left out, or possibly ignored-as a " praeparatio evangelica " to Christianity is not clear at all. In short, this book says a lot about Greek and Roman religions, but it still leaves the reader in the dark. One can hardly say that his understanding of these religions has been enhanced. How the various gods and cults formed part of the people's religious experience--a concept the author ignores-remains a mysterious puzzle to be solved by the reader himself. University of Detroit Detroit, Michigan JoHN A. SALIBA, S. J. Johannes Blund, Tractatus de Anima. Ed. by D. A. CALLUS, 0. P. and R. W. HuNT, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi, 2. London: Published for the British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1970. Pp. 147. $20.00. When Father Daniel A. Callus died in Malta, May 26, 1965, in the 78th year of his life, he left many unfinished projects behind him. Before he died he asked that Dr. Richard Hunt and Miss Beryl Smalley be his literary executors. One of the more important projects in his mind was the publication of John Blund's Tractatus de Anima. Both John Blund and his treatise on the soul were, in a sense, Fr. Callus's personal discovery BOOK REVIEWS 701 while working on his D. Phil. from Oxford. One of the more important studies to come from his pioneering research was his paper on " The Introduction of Aristotelian Learning to Oxford," published by the British Academy in 1943. At that time only one Ms was known of the Tractatus de Anima, that of Cambridge, St. John's College Library 1~0. In 1955 he announced the discovery of a second MS in Vatican, Vat. lat. 833. A third MS of this work was later discovered by Pere B.-G. Guyot, 0. P., in Prague, Bibl. Univ. cod. IV. D. 13 (667). Father Callus was unable to collate the text of either the Vatican or the Prague MSS. Before he died he had transcribed the whole of the Cambridge MS with variant readings and most of the sources. But it remained to Dr. Hunt to collate the three known MSS, supply the variant readings and complete the apparatus fontium. This was a formidable task for anyone not specializing in the intellectual history of the period and for one who had to step into the middle of a project only half completed. No one but Dr. Hunt with the help of Fr. Daniel's friends in Oxford and on the Continent could have managed so courageously and faithfully the rendition of this important text. The importance of the Tractatus de Anima lies basically in its scholastic antiquity, being an early work, falling between the years c. 1197 and 19.04, that is, before Alexander Nequam entered the abbey at Cirencester c. 1197 and before news...