BOOK REVIEWS 482 reading, in distinction to the apparent thrust of some historical-critical practitioners, of the scriptural letter. Each author has brought distinct expertise to this project. Marmion has published on Rahner and spirituality. Van Nieuwenhove is an expert in late medieval spirituality, including the spiritual theology of Ruusbroec. He is also the co-editor of a well-received collection of essays on Aquinas’s theology (in the interest of full disclosure, I am the other editor). Their collaboration on the Trinity has turned out well, and to the benefit of readers. Their hope is that this book will stimulate greater interest in the tradition and more fruitful reflection on the Trinity. To that end, each chapter concludes with a list of suggested readings, highlighting significant secondary works. This book would have been even more serviceable if it had a bibliography that listed the primary texts (in the original and in English translation, where available) and a more comprehensive guide to the secondary literature. Yet, this is without doubt a first-rate, suggestive study, one that should find its way into graduate seminars on the Trinity. JOSEPH WAWRYKOW University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity. Edited by PAUL L. GAVRILYUKandSARAH COAKLEY. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 338. $103.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-521-76920-4. The editors of this collection of essays are well-known and respected theologians. In 2002 Sarah Coakley published a very helpful book on issues of spirituality and gender, Powers and Submission, and in 2004 Paul Gavrilyuk published an admirably documented book on an aspect of patristic thought, The Suffering of the Impassible God. It comes as no surprise that their introduction and respective input (one chapter each) to this volume are excellent. Moreover, the editors must be commended for their choice of contributors, which include a good number of established scholars. In fact, as the foreword explains, a series of informal meetings and consultations began in 2007, which amounted to a cooperative endeavor that prepared the way for this publication. Although the input that the editors have received from a good number of highly competent scholars is manifest in the twenty-page introduction, the editors themselves must be credited for its synthetic presentation. After a section on the vocabulary of spiritual perception and another on Rahner’s seminal article of 1932 about Origen’s innovative view on the topic, the editors propose an allimportant distinction between the vocabulary as including “ordinary mental acts such as imagination, reflection or understanding” (emphasis added) and the BOOK REVIEWS 483 vocabulary that designates “a special mode of perception,” which refers to the cases where God becomes the object of a vision, audition, olfaction, touch, or taste. Thereupon follows a presentation of the biblical loci regarding the spiritual senses, as interpreted by Philo and patristic authors. The introduction ends with a detailed overview of the book. The sixteen studies of the book appear in chronological order, from Origen to twentieth- and twenty-first-century analytic philosophers of religion. I will now offer a summary of each chapter, concentrating on the spiritual senses and, for lack of space, leave aside the other related themes that the authors sometimes dutifully detail. In chapter 1, Mark McInroy deals with the initiator of the tradition that this book explores. Having noted that Origen’s interest in the spiritual senses emerged at the beginning of his erudite career and that one cannot observe in his writings a shift from a metaphorical sense to an analogical sense, McInroy questions John Dillon’s assertion of precisely such a shift. He tells us that Rahner, in face of the enormous range of sensory terms he found in Origen’s works, adopted a highly differentiated approach that has the merit of respecting this range, but the demerit of straying too far from Origen’s literary practice. As McInroy points out, “Origen moves with remarkable fluidity from sensory language that could be deemed analogical to a use of such language that is clearly metaphorical or figurative” (25). He explains the metaphorical use as follows: “Origen clearly states that when he says ‘seeing’, he means ‘understanding’, and when he says...
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Sep 1, 2013
Jason Mcmartin 
Open Access