A Poetic Christ: Thomist Reflections on Scripture, Language and Reality by Olivier-Thomas Venard (review)

This book is an anthology of the author’s doctoral dissertation at l’Université de la Sorbonne-Paris-IV, as it has appeared in the trilogy Thomas d’Aquin, poète et théologien, I: Littérature et théologie: Une saison en enfer (Geneva: Ad Solem, 2002); II: La langue de l’ineffable: Essai sur le fondement théologique de la métaphysique (Geneva: Ad Solem, 2004); III: Pagina sacra: le passage de l’Écriture sainte à l’écriture théologique (Paris: Cerf/Ad Solem, 2009). Professor of the New Testament at the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem, Olivier-Thomas Venard is a graduate of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, and a Dominican of the Province of Toulouse.

Translated and edited by Francesca Murphy and Kenneth Oakes, and comprising five main sections, it introduces Venard’s prodigious scholarship to an English-speaking audience. The first section, drawn from Pagina sacra, begins with a presentation of the Gospels as conveying not merely an ensemble of performances, but a capacity for encountering and living with Christ in faith. It then examines, among other matters, human understanding and language as originating in and participating in God’s Word. The second section, from Littérature et théologie, begins with a consideration of the literary vocation, described as prone to two opposite pitfalls. One is the tendency to present pure ideas by way of literary language, removed from lived experience and ordinary speech. The other is the crass trivialization by which literature is reduced to the demands of consumerism. As a third way the author proposes the literary vocation understood as engagement with symbolic experience, made possible by a theology of the Word. To illustrate art of this kind Venard presents Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, noting that it was written with a view to meeting the concrete practical requirements of instructing Dominican students, yet in its every detail is animated by and ordered to a unique transcendent end, God’s Word. The third section, from La langue de l’ineffable, undertakes a theological examination of language and its origin, God’s Word, again with reference to Aquinas, as well as several of his twentieth-century commentators. Here the author whom Venard has in mind is God, who has left us two books, one of nature, the other of Scripture. Mutually interpretative, the two are engaged in an ongoing dialectic which culminates in discourse on God. Aquinas is once again taken as a model in the fourth section, drawn from Pagina sacra, which studies the centrality in Christian culture, especially in theological culture, of devotion to the cross, considered as an efficacious sign, at once the summit and source of speech about God. After discussing the cross as the means by which the incarnate Word speaks his love by the language of the body, and which becomes a true word, the author then turns his attention to the Eucharist, reflection on which, he endeavors to show, sheds light on our experience of signs and language. In the final section, also from Pagina sacra, Venard reflects on the epistemic force of Christian speech about God in a disenchanted, de-Christianized world, and considers the prospects for dialogue between the believer and the nonbeliever. After mentioning a few paradoxes inherent in rationalistic historical criticism, he points to the persuasiveness of the metaphysics of participation implied by the Christian doctrine of creation and to the enduring beauty of Scripture and the Church’s sacraments as reasons for confidence. Against the symmetrical intolerances of rationalism and fundamentalism, the author optimistically proposes the aforesaid symbolic communication at the service of the Word made flesh (449).

It is symbolic communication of this sort that is suggested by the book’s title. As Venard indicates, poetics here is less a matter of rhyme or meter than of...