Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton by Christopher Pramuk (review)

502 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE by this vision would educate people to serve their local places in humility and discipline (190-91). In this book, Bonzo and Stevens certainly achieve their purpose of introducing an evangelical audience to Berry's thought. As its lack of bibliography and scant index suggest, this book does not intend to offer a serious, scholarly assessment of Berry's writing, and yet most readers of Christianity and Literature would find in the last two chapters an insightful vision of the good that their churches and universities should consider. And for those readers unfamiliar with Wendell Berry, this book can provide an overview that will encourage them to make their own foray into his writing. JeffreyBilbro Baylor University Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton. By Christopher Pramuk. Collegeville:Liturgical Press, 2009.ISBN978-0-8146-5390-6. Pp.xxx + 322.$29.95. In this perceptive and complex study of Thomas Merton, Christopher Pramuk addresses two of the most important issues facing Merton scholars: Merton's inclusiveapproach to religion and to culture generally and his paradisal vision. Although both of these phenomena have been linked in the past to Merton's Romanticism, Pramuk here associates them with sophianic theology. Merton's attraction to sophianic theology Pramuk traces to certain Russian Orthodox theologians in whom Merton became interested in the 1950s.Moreover, Pramuk attempts to square the circle in Merton studies, as it were, by uniting Merton's literary way of thinking, particularly his intuitiveness and his reliance upon the imagination, with his Christology . In part, Pramuk is attempting to raise respect for Merton in the theological community where Merton has often been relegated to the more modest role of spiritual writer rather than theologian. While Merton is not viewed as a systematic theologian, Pramuk attempts to make a case for him as a mystical theologian. Pramuk discusses Merton's sophianic spirituality largelyin the context of three Russian theologians-Sergius Bulgakov, Paul Evdokimov, and Vladimir Soloviev. The breadth of this spirituality is laid out in such a way that one sees the connection between it and Merton's writings from the late 1950s until his death in 1968. Beginning with the centrality of Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs, a conventionally seen, anticipatory image of Christ, Pramuk develops the thesis that Merton, like the Russian theologians mentioned above, perceived creation as wedded to God from the beginning even if the historical Christ only lived on earth at a specific time. In this context one recalls Merton's frequent observations that human beings have access to paradise in the present moment. The sophianic, it is argued, gave rise to what Merton thought of as an existential approach to theology whereby one BOOK REVIEWS 503 lived in the presence of God, a closeness that allowed the reality of a loving God to develop one's understanding of God's life and reality. As has been suggested, this is made possible by a human nature that had been transformed by the Incarnation from the beginning oftime. Pramuk considers divine wisdom or Sophia from two different angles, the presence ofwisdom as the love that flowsbetween the divine members of the Trinity and the presence of divine wisdom in individual souls and by extension in human culture, especially religion. In this regard Pramuk suggests that Sophia or holy Wisdom can become a "privileged meeting place for the encounter with God, the one God of all peoples" (209). Moreover, contact with the divinely created wisdom in the soul allows one to see not only the wisdom in culture but also in nature, in its Edenic character as it were. Overall, a sophianic perception reveals God's mercy and love for creation. As part of a response to the sophianic in God and in oneself Pramuk observes that Merton relied at times on the imagination. Citing the case of Newman's reliance on Coleridge, who conceived of the imagination as a cognitive faculty, Pramuk argues that much of Merton's creative writing is also epistemological in its effect even if not primarily rational and analytical. In this connection a centerpiece of Pramuks investigation is the prose poem, "Hagia Sophia;' which grew out of Merton's experience...