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598 BOOK BEVIEWS Brooks, and Elizabeth Jennings. He also observes that Mark Van Doren, Elder Olson and Yvor Winters seem to believe everything that a Christian should believe "except the Christian Faith itself." But the problem of religious poets is greater now than ever before, for, as Auden says, there is a lack of belief in the endurance of the physical, the reality of the evidence of the senses, the perdurance of human nature, and the loss of the public realm as the sphere in which personal deeds are actually revealed. Nor does the traditional shoptalk of Catholicism engage with modern life and the " unbaptized raw material of our time." After examining the work of professedly Christian poets, most of whom are either Roman Catholic or Anglican, Fairchild asks what the future may hold for a Christian poetry that appears to be " often submerged in the Situation which it seeks to amend." And his conclusion is scarcely comforting in tone: " Quantitatively it is almost negligible in comparison with the output of writers who ignore or oppose supernatural religion. Qualitatively, it is torn between the dread of pious triteness and the dread of heresy; the desire to edify and the desire to make works of art; the desire to communicate and the desire to be modishly inexplicit. These conflicts can be exhausting." To those who may share Professor Fairchild's devotion to classical Christian orthodoxy, but not his use of labels and his delight in the abusing of the various shades of " romanticism," this book will prove at times irritatingly simplistic in its judgments. But it is nonetheless an imposing enterprise in apologetics supported by an equally imposing array of literary historical scholarship in a tradition of which this volume may be the last example ever to appear. Providence College Providence, R. I. PAUL VAN K. THOMSON A Trilogy on Wisdom and Celibacy. By J. MASSINGBERT FoRD. Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967. Pp. 256. $7.95. This attractively-produced book sets out to challenge four common assumptions: 1) " that the words bethulah, parthenos and virgo denote virginitas intacta" (they have, in fact, the author says, wider connotations than is generally believed, and the contexts in which they appear must be scrutinized to discover whether they should bear the meaning of " youthfulness " or " celibacy ") . 2) "that from the earliest times these terms in the Latin and Greek BOOK REVIEWS 599 tongue were used as frequently, or more frequently, in reference to women than to men" (in fact, linguistic evidence suggests that the word parthenos was used as frequently for men as for women, and that the word eunuchos was the most common word for a celibate man). 3) "that the earliest written record of Christian teaching on celibacy is found in I Cor. 7, and that the recipients of this epistle included a group of women (and possible men) celibates who had already established themselves in the newly founded Christian community at Corinth " (in reality I Cor. 7 is speaking of young widows and widowers living in a Jewish-Christian community which clings rather tenaciously to traditional social patterns, class distinctions and questions that exercised Jewish teachers both before and after Paul). 4) "that numerous Christians contemporary with Jesus (for example, Paul and some of the disciples) and also those of the sub-apostolic age embraced lives of consecrated celibacy" (in fact, these do not appear to have embraced any form of absolute celibacy). Mrs. Ford's conclusions are based on a striking familiarity with exegetical writings and techniques and with rabbinical sources. There is not, she states, any clear reference to the practice of celibacy among peoples of the Jewish faith in the pre-Christian era. (pp. 23-58) As for the Christian era, celibacy became practical and popular only in the mid-third century, which is much later than the time usually assigned to it. Chapters on celibacy in the New Testament (pp. 59-128), in the writings of the subapostolic Fathers and of the Apologists (pp. 129-145), in those of Clement of Alexandria and Origen (pp. 146-164) and of Tertullian (pp. 165-215), serve amply to document her point. For Dr. Ford, indeed...

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