The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review

BOOK REVIEWS 323 one is interested in the vibrant intellectual milieu in which Thomas actually worked-even riveting reading. Unfortunately the cost of the volumes, which is understandable, prohibits all but committed research libraries from acquiring them, even if what they contain is essential to the scholar's task. Now, if only the Leonine Commission and Editions du Cerf can start producing manual editions of this and other Leonine texts ... Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin MARK F. JOHNSON The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200-1350), vol. 3 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Mysticism. By BERNARD MCGINN. New York: Crossroad, 1998. Pp. xiv + 526. $59.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8245-1742-3 (cloth), 0-8245-1743-1 (paper). This is a work of encyclopaedic scholarship on a Teutonic scale (over two hundred of its xiv-plus-526 pages are devoted to notes, bibliography, indices). It should really have been sent to a Franciscan not a Dominican reviewer, for reasons which will become clear. But its combination of material informativeness , religious vitality, and methodological clarity give its author an affinity with the Dominican and Thomist tradition nonetheless. In his Preface Professor McGinn explains the change of plan which leaves this book somewhat out of kilter if placed in a line with its predecessors in the early 1990s (The Foundations of Mysticism [1991], and The Growth of Mysticism [1994]). Those volumes were straighforwardly chronological in scope, assessing, as their titles imply, the origins and development of the Christian mystical tradition, above all in the West, between (as it turned out) the third and twelfth centuries. In the work under review, by contrast, McGinn determined to abandon a strictly time-based scheme for one that combines theme and context with chronology. Essentially, if I understand him aright, the first of two overlapping volumes on the mediaeval inheritance is to consider the Franciscan mystics and the women mystics of the early Middle Ages in separation from that other influential contemporary tradition, the Dominican, not simply for reasons of space (though that was certainly a consideration), but also because of a greater family-resemblance between the more devotional mysticisms of the Franciscans and the early mediaeval women, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the more speculative mysticisms adopted by the 324 BOOK REVIEWS Dominicans and (to some extent at least) the later mediaeval women. The inconveniens of this approach is that it means regarding Meister Eckhart as the fulcrum ofDominican mystical thought and sensibility, and treating the masters of the early Dominican school as harbingers and premonitions of the Eckhartian dawn, while also regarding Eckhart's "moment" as the true center from which later mediaeval spirituality is to be interpreted. Whether this (prima fade somewhat questionable) schema can be justified will of course turn on what McGinn makes of it, as a way of organizing his materials, in the as yet unpublished fourth volume of what will be eventually a five-volume series. The Preface also contains some animadversions, prompted, we are given to think, by the skirmishing of reviewers, on the method of his study-in which, in mild and courteous tones, the author announces his refusal to be shaken, either by the anti-experiential school of interpretation of the mediaeval mystical corpus whose doyen is Professor Denys Turner, or by the rumblings of feminist critics complaining that his earlier volumes were excessively dosed to women's voices. In the Introduction McGinn states his approach more positively in his own terms. We can note first that, despite (or because of?) his anxiety not to be wrongfooted as a methodical investigator of the mystical, he presents himself as above all a Church historian. The texts of mediaeval mysticism are firmly located within the wider institutional movement in the high mediaeval Church to recover the vita apostolica, not simply as the common ecdesial life ascribed to the apostolic community in Jerusalem in the Book of Acts but as an evangelical life with three key components: penance, poverty, preachingunderstanding the latter, in the case of those other than bishops and priests, as the verbum exhortationis, exhortation to conversion of life. Such a refiguring...