In 1907, Édouard Dhorme first associated the term 'ēd in Gen. 2:6 with Sumerian id, “the cosmic river.” This identification accords well with the presumed Mesopotamian background to the Yahwistic creation account, and so has enjoyed wide acceptance. The term, as was quickly recognized, also occurs in Job 36:27 with similar force. That this name for the cosmic river was normally pronounced id in Akkadian as well as Sumerian is shown from syllabic spellings, so that the loan into Hebrew offers no linguistic difficulties. In the Mesopotamian materials, a primary function of id, the (divine) River, was, as is well known, to serve as judge in certain legal cases. Trial by river ordeal was a widespread phenomenon, in which the accused was plunged into the river, where his success in withstanding the rushing waters was supposed to determine his guilt or innocence.

Since the resurgence of interest in the Augustan period, the myriad of sixteenth- seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary attacks on the Puritans have been enumerated, catalogued, analyzed, and elucidated. Although the Puritans were accused of a seemingly endless series of malefactions, most of the anti-sectarian assaults, we have been told, charged them with ignorance — the inability to see the value of the established church — or hypocrisy — the desire to use religion to advance political ambitions, secure riches, or satisfy libidinous interests. By mid-seventeenth century, however, a change occurred in the nature of the attacks which has not been adequately discussed. Instead of questioning the sincerity of the Puritans' religious countenance or ascribing the usual peccadillos to them, Puritan traducers charged the sectaries with insanity. Although societies in all ages have protected themselves from unpopular and dissenting opinions by declaring them products of a deranged mind, anti-sectarians in the Restoration and eighteenth century established a rationale for their charges of madness by employing contemporary medical theory to demonstrate that the Puritans suffered from mental and emotional disorders as a result of natural physical causes. Enthusiasts were seen as splenetic sufferers, and their erratic behavior and religious delusions were explained as the inevitable consequence of melancholic vapors.

This bibliographical listing of Christopher Dawson's works was compiled as the preliminary step to a doctoral dissertation which dealt with his representation of the Middle Ages and was presented at the Institut d'études médiévales of the Université de Montréal. One of the last representatives of a school of thought that has enjoyed a very wide audience, especially because of its interpretation of the Middle Ages and of its attitude towards the modern world, Dawson not only deserves an effort such as this but in fact calls for it if, indeed, the intricate workings of this very typical mind are ever to be delved into.

As everyone knows, Canon Muratori is a list of New Testament books that was found by Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, and is contained in a codex dating from the eighth or possibly the seventh century, which belonged originally to Columban's Monastery at Bobbio. The list of New Testament books is part of this codex, which also contains a collection of tracts and creeds that appeared between the second and fifth centuries and that seem to have been collected and transcribed in the eighth (or seventh) century. The fragment on the canon is just that, since the beginning is lost, and the text ends abruptly, showing that it was copied from a mutilated and presumably ancient exemplar. There are also some bits of the Muratorian canon that were found in four eleventh- or twelfth century Latin manuscripts of St. Paul's epistles at Monte Cassino. And it has been shown that the compiler of the prologue in which these occur cannot have used the Milan manuscript. The fact that he was working from an independent source indicates that the poor Latin of the Milan text was not that of the original author. A Greek original was suggested by Muratori when he first published the list in 1740; his suggestion has received wide support, though some have argued for a Latin original. Muratori assigned the list to Caius, a presbyter in Rome, but others have suggested Papias, Hegesippus of Rome, Rhodon, Melito of Sardis, and others.

Two at least apparently contrary developments form the context within which a contemporary interpretation of the fact of religious pluralism proceeds. The first is the incipient world culture emerging under the impetus of those processes of modernization which arose initially in the West. And the second is the continuation and intensification of diversity within the various religious traditions. Few observers would deny the existence of either tendency. Yet the combination of the two serves to complicate the problem of interpreting the fact of religious pluralism to a greater degree than is often recognized. Consequently I propose to explore the interrelated implications of both developments in some detail.

Leo XIII's letter Testem Benevolentiae was the culmination of a tumultuous period in American Catholic history which may be designated as beginning with the deliberations of Baltimore III in 1884. The issues which tore at the spirit of episcopal fraternity during this period were varied and complex. Although certain groups of prelates might be labeled as conservative and others as progressive, e.g., Bishops McQuaid and Corrigan as opposed to Bishops Ireland, Gibbons, and Keane, John Lancaster Spalding had a foot sometimes in one camp and sometimes in the other, but rarely both feet in either camp at the same time.

In the provocative eleventh book of his Confessions, Augustine mused:

What then is time? Who can find a quick and easy answer to that question? Whoever in his mind can grasp the subject well enough to be able to make a statement on it? Yet in ordinary conversation we use the word ‘time’ more often and more familiarly than any other. And certainly we understand what we mean by it, just as we must understand what others mean by it when we hear the word from them. What then is time? I know what it is if no one asks me what it is; but if I want to explain it to someone who has asked me, I find that I do not know.

The object of this study is to illustrate and to attempt to modify in favour of Rabanus Maurus the judgment of de Ghellinck — “Sa prose pratique le plagiat sans vergogne, mais en général il choisit bien les passages qui lui servent d'extraits.” Although much has been written about the identity of the so-called Hebraeus moderni temporis whose exegetical work was extensively used by Rabanus in his commentaries on the books of Samuel and Chronicles and about the Jewish sources of this material, little or no attention has been paid so far to the motives of Rabanus in availing himself of these Quaestiones or to the principles, if any, he employed in the selection of his material. A further problem which deserves to be elucidated is whether Rabanus had access to a better text of the Quaestiones on Chronicles than that which has come down to us.

John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions had its genesis in 1623 when Donne fell into a nearly fatal illness. In an age which held that there is literally no health in man — “only two degrees, sickness and neutrality,” as Donne wrote to Sir Henry Goodyer — sickness was widely taken as the visible sign of a sinful condition, and Donne's Devotions is no exception. Like “Good Friday, 1613,” “Batter my heart, three person'd God,” and “A Hymne to God the Father,” the Devotions reflects a soul distressed by sin and longing for the assurance of grace. Yet the Devotions is more than a series of meditations on his physical and spiritual condition; it is also a prose sequence on repentance that is aimed at a public audience. As Donne wrote to Sir Robert Ker while convalescing, “I have used this leisure to put the Meditations, had in my sickness, into some such order as may minister some holy delight.” Given Donne's public intention, both the “order” of the Devotions and its “holy delight” merit further examination.

One of the most significant developments in medieval Islamic thought was the emergence in the ninth and tenth centuries of a theological reaction against some of the rationalistic and deterministic elements of Greek philosophy that had begun to influence Islamic life and thought. Alongside the assimilation of Greek ideas and the development of Arabic philosophy by al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna, a counter-movement arose, among the Mutakallimun (speculative theologians), that rejected any attempt to view nature as a closed, eternal, and necessary system or to view God as limited by human conceptions of justice or by human free will.

There have been two principal ways of comparing Paul with Judaism, each of which has suffered from characteristic defects. One has been holistic in a certain sense. Taking “Paul” to be essentially represented by the doctrine of justification by faith and “Judaism” to be essentially represented by works righteousness, many Christian scholars have understood Paul and Judaism as antithetical. The characteristic weakness of this sort of comparison is that Paul is oversimplified, Judaism is both oversimplified and misrepresented, and the comparison is made in order to show the superiority of Paul to Judaism. That is, such comparisons have generally been pejorative and biased. The other principal method has resulted in more of a genuine comparison. Instead of dealing with generalized essences, this approach concentrates on individual motifs. It may properly be called atomistic, although the term Motivsgeschichte might better describe the method. Those who have followed this approach have generally answered the question of whether or not there is a positive relationship between Paul and Judaism affirmatively. The characteristic weakness of this approach — and this is a much less serious weakness than that of the other approach — is that a conclusion about some of the parts may lead too quickly to a conclusion about the whole. One may, for example, learn a great deal about the relation of what Paul says about Adam to Adamic speculation in Judaism without being able to determine whether or not Paul's religion was basically Jewish. As David Flusser has seen, building blocks from one edifice may be used to put together quite a different construction. Seeing the similarity, or even the identity, of some of the stones should not lead one to conclude that the building is the same. Thus a comparison of the two wholes as represented by their generalized essences generally goes awry, but the same may also be true of a comparison of any number of parts. Is there any way around this difficulty?

The traditional account of Berkeley's philosophy recognizes that his philosophical activity was an attempt to refound science and philosophy on a religiously acceptable basis. But it is not clear, from this account, just how he proposed to do it. The traditional opinion emphasizes the apparent claim of the esse est percipi principle to provide at one stroke a conclusive proof of the existence of God and a definitive account of the character of physical objects; according to that account, however, both of these claims are practically absurd. It is not altogether clear why Berkeley thought that such a weak proof and such a bad explanation could help the cause of religion.

There is a good deal of very interesting material preserved in the Armenian tradition belonging to the general category of Canon Lists. Some of this has been published and some not; very little of it has been translated into European languages. The series of studies of which the present note is the first will make available in a single place some of the most interesting of those lists which have been published in Armenian, as well as certain new materials recently discovered in the manuscript traditions. The translations and notes, it is hoped, will make this material readily accessible to scholars concerned with Canon Lists and the Biblical Canon.

The Chorus of Milton's Samson Agonistes is highly platitudinous because it relies on Old Testament traditional wisdom to account for Samson's experience. It is groping within that kind of wisdom to understand the significance of what is happening to Samson, while his experience cannot be made explicable on the basis of Old Testament legalism. Trying to cope with the Chorus, critics often speak of the “different levels of awareness” in the poem and tend to press a division between Samson and his Chorus, too frequently insisting that the separation obtained is even greater at the end of the work. Professor Summers, for example, ascribes this tension between the protagonist and the Hebraic Chorus to the disparity between heroic and non-heroic experience: “…the Chorus is often wrong in typically unheroic ways, and … only as a result of the action does it acquire ‘true experience’ and understanding. Those Danites, friends and contemporaries of Samson, represent the ‘conventional wisdom’ of the drama; but the premise of the poem is that conventional wisdom is inadequate for tragic experience. If it were otherwise, there would be no function for the tragedy; the community would already have been saved …” The Chorus (with Manoa) is impercipient; but the fact that it follows after Samson, noting his changes and his actions and often repeating his attitudes, attests to a unity between Samson and the Chorus which Professor Summers' otherwise excellent treatment misses. Christian heroism does not, as he seems to suggest, depend upon separation, but upon communion with others, even as a true relationship with God, for Milton, removes the obscurities from one's relationships with other men. Milton plays off Samson's former selfheroism — which does separate him from his people — against the true heroism of the ending; responsiveness to the latter pulls the Chorus and Samson together.

The subject and title for this paper came to me as inspiration from on high during the strike, Spring, 1969. A group of students in various states of hairy disarray, barefoot and grimacing, were banging on my desk and shouting over my phone when the thought for this paper cut across my consciousness.

In 1935, H. L. Ginsberg published an article demonstrating the existence of Canaanite elements in Psalm 29. Among these were: 1) the mention of the benē 'ēlīm related to the assembly of the banu ili in the Ugaritic texts; 2) the glorification of the voice of Yahweh, an adaptation of the praises of Baal, the Canaanite storm god; 3) topographical references to Lebanon, Sirion, and Kadesh, all located in Syria; 4) the first discovery in the Bible of an enclitic mem (vs. 6); 5) the kingship of Yahweh, similar to the formula of Baal's triumph over his foes. Since then, others have developed and supplemented this original investigation, especially with the aid of recent work in Ugaritic. Linguistic and textual problems remain, however. The present paper suggests that a structural analysis of the psalm not only supports the integrity of the present text but also points to some complex and sophisticated techniques of Hebrew poetry.

There has never been a form-critical study of 2 Clement. Because of this, conclusions concerning its Gattung have varied considerably. Harnack and Goodspeed, for example, have argued that 2 Clement is in the form of a letter, and beyond that, that it was sent by Bishop Soter of Rome (c. 166–74) to Corinth. Contrary to this position, Lightfoot, Knopf, and Windisch, among others, have argued that it is either a sermon or a homily. Although in recent years this latter position has been readily accepted, it always appears as an assertion without support, form-critical or otherwise.

Several Sundays ago, I sat in the congregation of a local church which is part of a black denomination. The Church was celebrating its 100th Anniversary. The pastor took his text from the psalter, “How wonderful is the Lord in all his works. In wisdom has he made them all.” The preacher's sermon title was “Consider the Camel.” He proceeded to describe this ungainly beast with broad flat feet, skinny legs, and a shuffling gait, with an unsightly hump on his back, a neck like a giraffe and a face ludicrous to behold — in short, a grotesque, the proverbial horse designed by a committee, a divine joke on all four-footed things. Ah, but not so, for it turns out that the Camel, far from being ridiculous, is in its setting a thing of beauty. Those broad feet enable it to walk across the sands when the hoofs of more traditionally shapely creatures would be hopelessly ensnared. That hump, far from being a deformity, is a marvelous storage tank enabling the beast to carry its own commissary in a land singularly devoid of any regular fruitstands or water fountains. And the eyes in that unspeakable head are equipped with transparent lids which permit the creature to see while they are closed protecting his pupils from the wind and sand. “How wonderful is the Lord in all — even his most unlikely — works. In wisdom has he made them all.” The Camel turns out to be perfectly designed for what we would regard as a harsh, unfriendly setting. He is designed for a particular kind of adversity. The preacher, however, did not have a zoologist's interest in this creature but hastened to use it as an object of comparison to the congregation, at its foundation, shortly after the War Between the States. At that time he averred, when men and women of quality worshiped in Gothic and Georgian structures lighted with beeswax candles or gas chandeliers, the founders of that house of worship gathered in a humble home. When the people of quality were driven to church in coaches or borne in sedan chairs by their servants to the door, these former slaves trudged on foot through the dust of summer and the mud and snow of winter to praise their creator. And while the better folks heard well-seasoned sermons delivered in a calm and critical mode and were inspired by string quartets or deep-boweled organs, the poor blacks hooped and shouted, lined out their hymns, and accompanied themselves with clapping hands and patting feet. To their more cultured fellow believers they must have seemed as foolish and unfortunate as the Camel. Yet — as the Camel was designed for his particular setting — it was the preacher's intent to make us see that the congregation of which he spoke was similarly designed, and that the wisdom which Divine grace lavished on the Camel, he lavished also upon the black church.

Recently R. S. Hartigan examined Augustine's position on war and killing particularly in relation to the fate of the innocent. Although attention was rightly focused on some of the difficulties inherent in Augustine's views, Hartigan's handling of certain supportive texts is, in the view of this writer, open to question. It may be profitable, then, to reconsider his arguments and, more fundamentally, to question his structuring of the problem as a whole.

The echo produced by some of my writings dealing with problems of Comparative Religions sounds to me as an invitation to restate thematically one of the main issues in the Encounter of Religions.

This present study is irenic in tone and has tried to overcome the temptation of self-defence. I shall try to rethink my approach to the problem of the encounter of the christian faith with the religions of the world, to present it for correction or even for total eclipse. How can I put forward more than a hypothesis in this field (now just emerging) of open dialogue among religions?