Abstract
This concise book is part of Bloomsbury's Reading Augustine series, which invites personal readings of Augustine from contemporary theologians and philosophers. Accordingly, Martin Claes begins with both a contemporary concern, and a personal framing. He writes to address the fragmentation and disconnect experienced by many in today's world, and the need for unity. In doing so, he situates his own understanding of unity within a personal Catholic faith and points to Augustine as a way out of the disunity that so dismays him.
Claes takes as his point of departure several works which have highlighted the relevance of cognitive science for the study of religion (he mentions Armin Geertz, Ilkka Pyysiäinen, and Aku Visala specifically). Responding to this proposal, he seeks to bring Augustine's notion of unity to bear on contemporary discussions occurring within cognitive science of religion and philosophical theology in relation to bodily unity. In keeping with the intent of the series, there are a number of personal reflections scattered throughout the book.
Claes grounds his exploration of unity in a Christological account of the human body, further parsed through the three perspectives of kenosis, Logos-Sarx, and (bodily) resurrection. The first chapter is an extended introduction to the rest of the book, introducing the relevant Augustine texts and taking pains to demonstrate how closely Augustine's thinking about the human body was connected to his understanding of Christ's humanity.
The second chapter provides the close reading of Augustine promised from the outset. To explore the balance between kenosis and a Logos-Sarx Christology in Augustinian thought, Claes selects texts from On Genesis against the Manicheans, On Trinity, and the Confessions. The exposition of Augustine's theology of resurrection focuses on his reflections on embodiment and eschatology in the twenty-second book of The City of God. Claes thus traces a threefold movement in unity from the kenosis of incarnation through the unity of the two natures in the person of Christ to the eschatological perfection of bodily resurrection. For Claes, this picture of unity offers hope for present suffering in the body.
In chapter 3, Claes turns to contemporary debates in philosophical theology. He devotes much of the chapter to Marilyn McCord Adams’s critique of Augustine's voluntarism and his vulnerability to social Trinitarian thinking in her work Christ and Horrors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ultimately arguing that Augustine's kenotic Christology is compatible with McCord Adams’s model of horror-defeat.
In the fourth chapter Claes focuses on insights from embodied cognitive science of religion (CSR) and their intersection with Augustine's theology of healing. He describes a lack of engagement with CSR in patristics scholarship, and identifies parallels between Pyysiäinen's understanding of ententional relationships as absent essences with Augustine's kenotic Christology. Continuing the engagement with CSR, he refracts Augustine's notion of the humility of Christ (articulated in opposition to Platonic pride) through Geertz's stratified model of embodied religion. While Claes does not wholeheartedly embrace the approaches characteristic of CSR (he rejects a purely functional account of religion, for example), he points to some interesting possibilities of dialogue for contemporary theological thought. Though he claims a mutual enrichment, suggesting that patristic theology might furnish opportunities for CSR scholars to incorporate theological reflection into their research, the likelihood of many CSR scholars turning to the Church Fathers in the first instance for theological insight seems low and the relationship between the two fields is undoubtedly more one-sided than Claes would desire.
The final chapter offers a brief conclusion, recapitulating the main aims of the book: to re-read Augustine on the unity of the human body in relation to Christology and in conversation with contemporary cognitive science of religion. He closes with his desire that the embodied aspects of philosophical theology might receive more attention from CSR and yield a hermeneutical theory to guide further interdisciplinary research.
This book would be relevant for both Augustine scholars and those interested in the intersection of philosophical anthropology and cognitive science. The centrality of embodiment to present theological understanding, and the friction encountered with physical and dualist models of the human, provide the wider scholarly backdrop for reading.
Claes draws on materials ranging across philosophical anthropology, Patristic theology, and cognitive science capably; the volume's brevity belies the substantial territory it traverses. The prose itself obscured the argument and conceptual understanding at times, which is unfortunate, as the work points us to the ongoing value of reading these early thinkers in relation to today's questions around embodiment, Christology, and anthropology.