Holl, chaplain of and a theology lecturer at the University of Vienna, was suspended from teaching in the Catholic Church for some of his heterodox notions, but this book is a mellifluous testimony of faith from start to finish. Holl captures the contradictions inherent in the personage of the Holy Spirit, who is described one moment as a pacific, “still small voice” and the next as a tongue of fire. He takes as his canvas the history of Western religion and philosophy (though his attention to Judaism and Islam, which he examines as manifestations of the Holy Spirit, suffers when compared with his easy familiarity with Christianity). Holl is also conscious of the Holy Spirit’s role as a political subversive—the oppressed can tap into the Spirit’s immediate authority, which transcends all earthly control. The book is arranged somewhat chronologically, beginning with a quick look at the Old Testament, followed by New Testament events like the unexpected descent of the Holy Spirit onto Jesus and the gift of tongues on the Day of Pentecost. (Holl pairs this latter incident with an account of the Pentecostal movement in the US in the early 20th century; he does history a real service by crediting the movement’s founding to its true leader, the African-American preacher William Seymour, rather than to the white pastor who has traditionally gotten top billing.) Holl continues the story of the Holy Spirit’s workings through the rise of Islam, as well as the monastic movement and various “heretical” groups in Christianity. The last third of the book explores the Spirit’s entanglements with some great modern thinkers, including James Joyce, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone Weil, and Sigmund Freud. This section is, of course, less overtly “religious” than what precedes it, but its implicit message seems to be that the Spirit is at work even in a modern society where philosophers have found it irrelevant. A provocative read, gracefully translated from the German.
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-49284-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
An absorbing, challenging work of ``bottom-up'' history that gives a voice to the unlettered and the disempowered. Blackbourn (History/Harvard) transforms an apparently minor historical curiosity, an instance at best of religious pathology, into a fascinating, surprising, and moving picture of cultural turmoil in the new German nation-state. The event in question is the alleged visitation of the Virgin Mary to three schoolchildren in the remote Rhineland village of Marpingen in 1876, and the response thereto. With sure control of his material and an archaeologist's reconstructive gift, Blackbourn deftly reveals the Marpingen events as a tangled but telling intersection of multiple cultural currents: religious strife, both interdenominational and between competing tendencies in the Catholic hierarchy itself; local communal rivalry; class tensions; grassroots populist activism; Bismarck's ongoing Kulturkampf (``cultural war'') against the Catholic Church; and the upheavals in work and family life provoked by the confrontation of a traditional rural culture with the very different rhythms of a 19th-century industrial state. Blackbourn brushes against the grain of readers' expectations: He encourages us to regard the widespread popular support of the visionaries not as superstitious medieval credulity but as a sophisticated mobilization of deep-rooted cultural resources by a community beset by social dislocation. Conversely, the ``progressive'' modernizing forces of state authority, whose response to the apparitions varied from patrician condescension to outright contempt or suspicion, stand revealed as at least as self- righteous and blinkered (by a faith in secular rationality often as unyielding as religious dogma) as the peasants they undertook to control. The Church itself is riven and ambivalent, its sponsorship of the cult of the Madonna at odds with the increasingly authoritarian bent of the 19th-century Vatican. This dense, authoritative book demands and deserves an attentive reading and offers rewards few recent historical narratives can match.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41843-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A markedly contemporary study that navigates the New Testament scholar past the perils of Pauline theology. Boyarin (Talmudic Culture/Univ. of Calif., Berkeley; Carnal Israel, not reviewed) attempts to ``reclaim Paul as an important Jewish thinker.'' He goes on to establish this primary apostle as a Hellenized Jew whose Platonic sensibility calls for a universal sameness that negates the divisions separating Jew from Gentile and man from woman. The disembodied spirituality of Platonic dualism allows females (especially virgins) to be equal to men under Christ, and allows an uncircumcised Christian of any gender to ``circumcise the foreskin of her [sic] heart'' with Hebrew Bible commandments universalized and allegorized. Boyarin does not glibly valorize Paul as a champion of feminism and an opponent of Jewish exclusivist chauvinism. After crediting Paul for being a radical social critic, the author makes clear how the apostle's pre-Marxist universalism too easily slid into violent coercion in the later, blood-soaked chapters of Christian history. Boyarin analyzes the work of many Christian scholars in concluding that Lutheran misinterpretations of Paul allow us to consider the apostle to be far more antagonistic to Jews and Judaism than he really was. The benefit of Boyarin's Jewish defense against hermeneutical Christian anti-Semitism is tempered by his disdain for a Judaic ``tendency towards contemptuous neglect for human solidarity'' and his anti- Zionism (``modern Jewish statist nationalism has been...very violent and exclusionary''). Sometimes he confuses Christian ``salvation'' theology with Jewish belief, and he fails to find any similarity between Pauline Platonism and the allegorical and universal levels of Torah laws. The final chapter digresses to a personal view of the ``essentialist/social constructionist dichotomy,'' but the book does end with ample notes and bibliography. A rewarding read for students of Christian theology willing to be challenged by today's multicultural, poststructuralist, postfeminist scholarship.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08592-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
