The Story of Christian Spirituality: Two Thousand Years from East to West (review)

The Story of Christian Spirituality: Two Thousand Years from East to West. Edited by Gordon Mursell. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2001. Pp. 384. $35.00.)

Responding to the current interest in Christian spirituality, this volume offers essays by ten scholars on different periods and traditions: New Testament origins, the patristic era, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon spirituality, the medieval West, Eastern Christianity from the fourth to the eighteenth century, the Protestant tradition in Europe and America, Roman Catholic spirituality from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, "the Anglican spirit," Russian spirituality, and spiritualities of the twentieth century. All this is framed by a short prologue and epilogue by the general editor, Gordon Mursell, who understands spirituality to denote "all that is involved in living 'according to the spirit'—a free dependence on grace, longing for what Paul calls the 'fruits of the spirit'... and above all the experience of God the Holy Spirit at work within us" (pp. 9-10).

One point that distinguishes this book from a number of other histories of Christian spirituality is the large number of color illustrations, often taken from great works of art and flawlessly reproduced. Another characteristic is the frequent inclusion of brief passages (including poems and hymns) drawn from the works of spiritual writers, many of these set apart from the main text in boxes. The art in particular will surely contribute to the popularity of this book for the general reader.

Although the publisher advertises the volume as being addressed to college and seminary students as well, it may not serve so well as a basic textbook for introductory courses in Christian spirituality. One drawback for classroom use is the very plethora of figures treated, sometimes in the briefest of ways. For example, the chapter on twentieth-century spiritualities includes a short paragraph on Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, that does little more than list the titles of five of his books. Or again, the concluding section of the chapter on the medieval West includes the sentence: "Nor should the contribution of vernacular poetry from the eighth-century Dream of the Rood to the fourteenth-century Piers Plowman be forgotten" (p. 124). True enough, but it is not very enlightening merely to mention such works but say nothing more about them, nothing about just what they were and why they ought not be forgotten. While these examples are somewhat extreme, they do point to problems that students would confront if this were their main textbook. For classroom use, a leaner treatment of truly major personages and movements, together with much lengthier excerpts from classic texts in a separate anthology, would probably give students a better grasp of the current of Christian spirituality over the past two millennia. For such readers, The Story of Christian Spirituality would serve better as a reference work, whose endnotes could provide an excellent guide to further reading.