Breathed into Wholeness: Catholicity and Life in the Spirit by Mary Frohlich

Abstract

Reviewed by: Breathed into Wholeness: Catholicity and Life in the Spirit by Mary Frohlich John J. Markey O.P. (bio) Breathed into Wholeness: Catholicity and Life in the Spirit. By Mary Frohlich. Foreword by Ilia Delio. A volume in Catholicity in An Evolving Universe. Series Editor, Ilia Delio. Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019. 242 pp. $28.00. In this impressive work Frohlich desires to develop an enhanced interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit within the broader context of the term catholicity in its renewed meaning advocated by the series of which this book is a part. To accomplish this end, the author has set for herself a threefold task. First, she explains the internal relationship between doctrine of the Spirit and that of catholicity as implicit in the doctrinal tradition and in the extended treatment the term catholicity in the series. Second, she attempts, successfully in my opinion, to trace and articulate the "trajectory" of the inter-relationship of the theology of the Spirit of God and the human spirit as it has been understood in the Christian tradition. Finally, she seeks to re-imagine this relationship through an exploration of these themes in the context of Christian spirituality by which she means that field which primarily describes the experiential dimension of the relationship between traditional pneumatology and theological anthropology. Frohlich begins with an extended investigation into the concept of catholicity that discovers it initially signifies that the Church embraces and fulfills everything that is fundamentally human. Catholicity then implies that God's grace, through Christ and the Church, extends to all aspects of human experience and beyond human experience into all of creation to varying degrees. This understanding of the extensiveness and inclusivity of grace in turn expands traditional notions of the role of the Holy Spirit in human history and creation. Drawing on biblical and patristic sources, Frohlich chooses to highlight the interpretation of the terms ruah and pneuma as "breath," and so the Holy Spirit is the "Divine Breath" that flows within human beings and the world as a whole. The Divine Breath animates and enlivens all things metaphorically through as process of breathing "in and out." Frohlich extends this metaphor throughout the rest of the book as a way of re-imagining the traditional mission of the Spirit as well as reconceiving the implications of a robust pneumatology for both Christian spirituality and moral/ethical action. Frohlich, therefore, sees the Spirit as a "total environment that exerts influence" in unique way throughout the whole of creation (21). This also allows Frohlich to define the term "panentheism," one of the most important theological themes of the last century, in terms of pneumatology. From this starting point, Frohlich proceeds to analyze the traditional issues of Christian anthropology and spirituality. The Spirit as Breath is at the very heart of even seemingly "natural" human experiences as the "inner-dynamism that urges toward the maximum awareness of being inter-connected, whole or in harmony" with oneself and the wider social and created reality of which each person is a part (42). Chapter Three explores the contemporary crisis of what Frohlich calls the "Anthropocene." The Anthropocene is defined as the era of earth's history when human beings determine the primary structures of the earth's ecosystem. The potential and constantly looming destruction of earth's existing ecosystem by human beings creates the context in which all contemporary interpretations of Catholic person-hood must be done. In the following three chapters of her book, Frohlich examines [End Page 330] the various theoretical and methodological challenges to developing an integrative concept of catholic personhood. In these chapters Frohlich discerns that an authentic notion of catholic personhood must be rooted in a vision of an "apophatic" self that possesses real agency that enables it co-creates itself in cooperation with the Divine Spirit that universally works to bring each person and the whole of creation into a broader and deeply inclusive reality that offers a way through the present crisis of our time. The third part of this book, Chapters Seven through Nine, examines and describes the various practices–both traditional spiritual practices and contemporary modes of expressing the...