The Mind of Latin Christendom
Vol. I, 373-496 A.D.
by
[Oxford University Press, $5.00]
MR. PICKMAN is a religious historian, but not in the sense that, Berdyaev is one. That is to say, he has not that passionate interest in religion that only the devout can have. He is, however, an historian of religion par excellence in that he is passionately objective — if I may perpetrate so glaring a paradox — in his scrupulous examination of the historical factors which in the later fourth and fifth centuries have made of Christianity what it more or less remains to this day.
This is no small matter; for most of our histories of Christianity have been written by theologians, by men who love their dogmas too much ever to step outside of them — hence interpreting them by arrested emotions rather than by the knowledge that takes cognizance of time, the knowledge that distinguishes the legitimate historian from the theologian. Mr. Pickman, indeed, seems to have tackled his difficult subject in a mood reminiscent of his co-Bostonian, William James, when he said, ‘Let’s have less generalities and more simple facts.’
And that is really the admirable thing about Mr. Pickman. He has simplified and reinterpreted religious history in a manner that makes it palatable to the layman who would like to know but has been put off by such celestial metaphysics as exclude the average cultured reader from a world which should legitimately interest him. After all, such a reader, whether he knows it or not, lives in a world which is a superstructure of the world Mr. Pickman describes.
Most persons take their Christianity for granted. So they should, if it only involved the Gospels. Actually, the Gospels are a relatively simple matter when compared to the processes which began soon after Paul’s conversion and did not cease for centuries thereafter. It took three centuries to put the final official stamp upon Christ’s divinity. The centuries which followed, treated in Mr. Pickman’s book (this is only the first volume), were devoted to developing a spiritual dialectic, designed as a method for answering uncomfortable and often unanswerable questions.
Many of the Church Fathers were, no doubt, zealous and honest men who had an inner need for satisfying their own inquiring intellects, and they built up systems of theological thought which, in a manner, survive to this day. Held up to the light of modern scientific judgment, their precarious balance suffers a jolt that is all but fatal. Not that science can answer those questions either: questions of faith, of omnipotence, of good and evil, of grace, and of what not.
To take but a single aspect of a single question that bothered men in those early centuries and bothers men to-day, what Mr. Pickman calls ‘the supreme delicacy of Christian doctrine: we emphasize God’s omnipotence and His benevolence contracts, or we emphasize His benevolence and His omnipotence suffers.’ Yet, as the author so well puts it, ‘Through the effort to keep this paradox in equilibrium the Christian has been able to penetrate psychological depths of which no pagan had ever had any conception.’
It must be remembered that, quite apart from having to explain evil to himself, the early Christian was under compulsion to explain evil to the pagan. The value of Mr. Pickman’s book is that it takes great pains to make clear the processes of thought and experience that have contributed to the making of Christendom. His great figure, of course, is Saint Augustine, and he would have all his readers read him. Yet I venture to say that many readers who will read Mr. Pickman will not read Saint Augustine, which is nothing against either.
JOHN COURNOS