There is a sarcastic German saying of which I am often reminded when reading certain German books: ‘Why do it simply, if it is also possible to make it complicated?’ Dr Urs von Balthasar, the distinguished thinker, who has unfortunately already complicated the simplest of saints, St Teresa of Lisieux, now does the same for another modern Carmelite, Elizabeth of the Trinity; and his friend, Adrienne von Speyr, even succeeds in giving us a book of highly involved and not a little pretentious meditations on our Lady. There is no doubt that we are in need of thoroughly theological and unsentimental treatment of ‘devotional’ subjects, and both these books supply this. But they are unhappily vitiated by this deadly tendency to read non-existent profundities into the most normal events and attitudes, and to bandy about concepts of Kierkegaardian ‘dread’ and existentialist ‘vertigo’ where they have no meaning whatever.

Dr Balthasar’s book has been ‘translated and adapted’, and this means presumably that some of his more recondite observations have been cut out, which is all to the good. But unfortunately the translator, A. V. Littledale, has kept far too close to the author’s highly idiosyncratic style and frequently reproduces even his word order and his substantival adjectives and verbs, an inadmissible procedure that makes the reading of the book unnecessarily exhausting. To give but a few examples of this ‘translation-English’: ‘The man of faith lives from the standpoint of his eternal election by God.’ (p. 27). ‘Faith ... is the making present to the mind of our origin and end . . .’ (p. 28). ‘Her perception that the execution of the Father’s eternal plan is the work of the Holy Spirit, is the angle from which Elizabeth came to view the whole of revelation; her perspective directs itself primarily to the Spirit.’ (p. 107.)