The way reputations get off the ground is nearly always something of a mystery, and the reputation of Fr Karl Rahner is a more than usually interesting case. It must by now be so internationally complex that some aspects of it deserve consideration in their own right. The appearance of an English translation of volume III of the Theological Investigations may perhaps be taken as an appropriate occasion to look at this reputation in the light of some of the diverse activities on which it is based. For the pieces collected in this volume on the Theology of the Spiritual Life, which range in interest and difficulty from a sort of exalted pamphlet on the ‘Apostolate of Prayer’ to an absorbing and exacting introduction for a book of verse by a fellow Jesuit, are a reminder of the many claims upon a theologian who has never been allowed, or at least taken, time to write a single sustained work of theology. The very fragmentary character of his written achievement, the limitations within which it moves, and the yawning gaps it leaves behind it are, granted Rahner’s undoubted intellectual calibre, a singular testimony to the situation for the theology of the spiritual life today. It is a testimony all the more eloquent for being that of a man who, whatever his professional qualifications, establishes himself in the mind as first and foremost the dedicated priest. When, in an essay on the priestly existence reprinted in this volume, he says (p. 258) ‘even leaving aside for the moment the general question whether it is not the case that every existentially significant truth cannot be genuinely transmitted from one person to another unless it is possessed by the teacher not merely intellectually as a proposition but as something existentially realized by him’, we feel confident that this is the one question he is never really able to leave aside.