The book of this name by Professor Norman Sykes is a learned exposition, as impartial in the circumstances as it could well be, of the mind of the Church of England upon the problem of the Church’s ministry. It examines the way the originating formularies of Anglicanism concerning the nature and necessity of episcopal rule have been understood and acted upon during the course of Anglican history. Professor Sykes’s conclusion, after reviewing the relevant evidence, may be summed up in his own words:

Since I am myself a Jew and the nature of my work constantly involves me in the activities of the Jewish people, I had supposed that the preparation of this paper would occasion me very little trouble. But the more have considered the matter the more I have been forced to the—perhaps salutary—conclusion that really I know very little indeed about my own people.

In the first place we have to ask ourselves the apparently simple but perhaps insoluble question: what is a Jew? It has been truly remarked that a Jew is very easy to recognize and very hard to define.

There are, of course, definitions, but none that seem to me very satisfactory. According to Jewish religious law, a Jew (other than a proselyte) is the child of a Jewish mother—the faith of the father is not an essential factor. The test is, of course, logically indefensible, since we are bound to ask what made the mother Jewish, and to reply that she in turn was the daughter of a Jewish mother who derived her Jewishness from her mother, and so on for ever. We are thus landed in one of those infinite regressions that bedevil all logical argument. The same objection—together with a host of other objections—applied to Hitler’s Nuremberg laws, according to which a Jew was a person, whatever his or her faith, who had one or more Jewish grandparents. That grandparent presumably was Jewish by reason of having the same stain on his or her escutcheon, and so on ad infinitum and ad nauseam.

This book is intended to be read both by the specialist and by the more enterprising general reader. From the point of view of the specialist it reviews and makes new use of familiar material and also exploits the field of social anthropology in an experimental way. At the same time it is written clearly and readably and, together with the same author’s Muhammad at Mecca, constitutes a very full guide both to the life of Muhammad and to his social, political and religious background, for any reader who is already interested in, or is at least not put off by, themes and settings outside the European tradition.

In Muhammad at Mecca Dr Watt presented the prophetic call as a response to the individualism of the tribal system in decay. In his new book he shows himself particularly aware of two aspects of the Prophet’s reforms: of the individualistic trend of the legislation, and of the institution of the religious community. It is the sense of this community which has always been so characteristic of Islam, and this aspect appears especially clearly in the chapters on the ‘Unifying of the Arabs’ and on the ‘Character of the Islamic State’. Dr Watt expressly sees the whole of Muhammad’s work as a ‘building on religious foundations’, equally when it is political, social or economic. The early unifying of the tribes under Muhammad prefigures and leads onwards to the later unity of the Islamic world under the Caliphs. The section on the character of the ummah is one of very great interest. The community (ummah) to which a prophet is sent, and which may reject him, develops as the Qur’anic revelation continues into the ummah which is itself the religious community.

This book gives one the deepest kind of delight. It is intensely moving spiritually and morally. Too often the word of God, which in the Scriptures moves us so compellingly, seems to lose all its power when clothed in theological language. The book that can present theological truths so that they move the spirit to love and follow God with spontaneous joy is a rare exception: among such works in English I remember the books of Dom Anscar Vonier. Many attempts make shipwreck at the start by relying on a pious emotionalism foreign to the theological truth itself. Here, however, in Father de Lubac’s Sur les Chemins de Dieu, theology moves the soul by its own power, by the presence of God’s word within it. Fr de Lubac succeeds in the task he explicitly set himself: to help men to find God, not merely to indicate to them that there is a God to find. He convinces the reader experimentally of a difference between proving God’s existence and revealing God as present and essential in our own Eves. He succeeds in showing that God is not just a need of the human mind, but my need.

This is what Fr de Lubac would most want to hear, I think, from someone who has read his book: and he would be prepared, I am sure, to enter into discussion about difficulties and infelicities of expression with anybody sincerely concerned to enhance the books power to lead souls to God. Behind the rather unmoving nature of what follows, there lurks such a concern.