Reforming the Church before Modernity: Patterns, Problems, and Approaches (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reforming the Church before Modernity: Patterns, Problems, and Approaches Glenn W. Olsen Reforming the Church before Modernity: Patterns, Problems, and Approaches. Edited by Christopher M. Bellitto and Louis I. Hamilton. [Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West.] (Aldershot, England and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2006. Pp. xxiv, 224. $94.96.) This book, the product of a conference, Ecclesia semper reformanda, held in 2002 at Fordham University in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, is devoted to ecclesial reform from the late ancient to early modern worlds. Some of its authors are concerned with institutional reform, others with cultural approaches to their subject, and some are interested in the characterization of reform. Louis Hamilton introduces the book with a poorly written and not-always-precise essay, which nevertheless makes a number of shrewd historiographical observations. The book is divided into four parts, the first on "Social Change and Religious Reform." In the first of two articles in this part, Robert A. Markus explains the implication for all subsequent history of the late antique Church's understanding of itself as primarily mystical rather than institutional, and of reform as primarily personal. Markus' is an essay in ambiguity, holding that, on the one hand, the Church should be judged by a standard external to itself, and on the other hand, that it should always be critical of whatever society it finds itself in. In the second article John Howe thoughtfully concentrates on recent scholarship on the eleventh century, which tends to demote such turning points as "the year 1000" in favor of centuries-long shifts and a society of great variation. Howe gives monasticism a central role in change and reform. Part II, on "The Idea of Reform and the Intellectuals," begins with a well-informed and substantial, if modish, article by Wayne J. Hankey on "Self and Cosmos in Becoming Deiform," studying "Reform by Self-Knowledge from Augustine to Aquinas." Here the argument is that the Neoplatonisms of Augustine and Aquinas have often been opposed to each other and to a modern "turn to the subject" in a way which in the case of the two medieval thinkers obscures a shared "conversion to deity" and in the case of the medieval thinkers contrasted to "the modern," obscures commonalities. The idea that there had been many "turns to the subject" before the modern period is suggestive, but also seems equivocal. Marcia Colish emphasizes the variety of early scholastic thought about and practice of reform, and especially stresses "reform as improvement," rather than simply as recapture of earlier practice. Colish's excellent article is followed by a satisfying essay by John [End Page 600] O'Malley on the differences in style and substance between the approaches to reform of Luther, Trent, and Erasmus. Rita Lizzi Testa begins Part III, on "Clerical Reform," with "Clerical Hierarchy and Imperial Legislation in Late Antiquity," mostly in the fourth century, and more detailed than the other essays in this book tend to be. Then Louis Hamilton examines Peter Damian's and Bruno of Segni's commentaries on the dedication of a church and the promotion by Bruno, first of papal authority, and then after his relations with Paschal II had soured, of a more episcopal-centered idea of authority. Giuseppe Alberigo turns to the Libellus ad Leonem X for a humanist notion of reform. Part IV examines "The Processes of Reform." Claire Sotinel gives a fine study of how, without much reform vocabulary, change was effected in the Church from the third century. Martha Newman subtly uses manuscripts from the 1110's to suggest a solution to recent debate about the Charter of Charity. She compares the original charisma of the Cistercians with their later legal reality, showing how Stephen Harding's understanding of the Benedictine Rule carried the Cistercian charisma. Susan Dinan details how, much later, the Daughters of Charity avoided claustration, in the process illustrating how one "negotiated authority" in the Tridentine Church. Glenn W. Olsen University of Utah, Salt Lake City Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press