Austin Farrer’s thought may be viewed as an unfolding of Paul’s assertion that ‘We have the mind of Christ’. Or, to situate this text in a true ‘Farrerian’ light, we might gloss, ‘We have been given the mind of Christ’. This givenness of finite nature as already graced, or as Farrer might put it, ‘packaged’ with the fundamental orientation towards the infinite opens key perspectives on his seminal contributions both to his time and ours. In metaphysics, Farrer offers a modified Blondelian-Thomism that paves the way for a unitive substantial philosophy of matter; in ethics and ontology, a concept of divine-human double-agency vis-à-vis the personalism of John Macmurray; in biblical studies, a ‘consolidation’ hermeneutic that permits literary craft, sacramental typology and form-criticism to speak on the same plane as it would have for the Cappadocian fathers; in preaching, the development of a unique format that spontaneously combined prayer, poetry and the exploration of some of his own major philosophical positions, transforming the mundane – perhaps Farrer alone could successfully liken the Holy Spirit to a genie in a bottle for a Pentecost sermon – by casting it dialectically into relation with the infinite.
This volume, edited by Harries and Platten, offers detailed explorations into all of these ‘offers’. As editors, they have done an admirable job delivering the thesis of Farrer’s prophetic – that is, anticipatory – standing towards important trends in the various academic cultures in which his peculiar genius fermented. Throughout the volume a mosaic coalesces: gospel as literary product (pp. 18, 33); neo-Thomist personalist metaphysics (pp. 54-55); voluntarism and Anglican ethics (p. 61); denial of Irenaean pedagogical providence in theodicy (p. 79); the possibility of a reformed analytical (doctrinal) theology as a counter to logical positivism (pp. 84, 96); conceiving the Holy Spirit as the ‘ground’ of the human heart as in the Surnaturel debates (p. 149) – Farrer commands all these position with an ingenuity and independence that later thinkers would retrace, often unknowingly. Marilyn McCord Adams, for instance, addressed horrendous evils in a manner similar to that of Farrer, and as Leigh Vicens argues in this volume, while she does so with a more satisfying conclusion about intimacy with the divine as consolation, their approaches are mirror images of one another (pp. 78-79).
But prophets do more than anticipate the future. In a bid for a people to heed their message, they recapitulate the past. To cast previous events and words into new light, they discover piercing metaphors to aid comprehension, and, as Farrer would have it, ‘settle our convictions’ about how to move forward. This, I believe, is the crucial contribution of the volume under review: it shows Farrer placing his project in relation to architectonic Western thinkers in a revisionary, dialogical key; further, with chapters comparing his thought to Gregory of Nazianzus (Ludlow, pp. 127-40), Berdyaev (G. Platten, pp. 164-82), and Coleridge (S. Platten, pp. 113-26) and others along the way (cf. the notes on Diogenes Allen by MacSwain, pp. 90-93), it exemplifies how we might read Farrer as a tool by which to measure thinkers with which he did not seem to engage but which pertain to our own interests. It is often remarked that his books are largely unencumbered by footnotes, and that his references to major dialogue partners from Aristotle and Descartes to Ryle and Bergson are cursory. Jane Shaw draws our attention to some remarkable lines that may offer a clue as to why – in his own terms: ‘After all criticism, all analysis, a man must make up his mind what there is most worthy of love’ (in a sermon Keble and his College). ‘It is this decision or this discovery that is the supreme exercise of a truth-seeking intelligence’ (p. 190). His freeform style reflects, therefore, a discerning eye, a kind of Spolia aegyptiorum in the register not of conquest and monologue but rather of benevolence and conversation.
Several of the essays show how this works in his approach to the inspiration of Scripture. As Stephen Platten points out, Farrer starts from the premise that Christianity is a historical not a revealed religion (p. 122). As such, we might say that Scripture and the natural world are contiguous sites in which the finite and the infinite are correlated for the engagement of human consciousness. From here, Farrer’s thinking-as-discernment emerges. In his essay, John Barton points to a fascinating passage in The Glass of Vision where Farrer distinguishes five ‘master’ biblical types which ‘constitute an interpretative framework for grasping the nature and work of Christ’ (p. 16): kingdom (David); Adam; family (Jacob); suffering servant; sacrifice. Farrer is working in relation to major scholarly movements of his day here, discerning in the Q-hypothesis (which he famously rejected) the narrative character of tradition-material which ‘betrays symbolical interest in the order of events’ (p. 26). From this interest Farrer consolidates dogmatic priorities, here viewed by the underlying types out of which the evangelists composed the gospels. Thus, while he may have rejected the presuppositions and some conclusions of the then prominent method of form-criticism, aspects of it serve his purpose. Morwenna Ludlow illuminates how he used this in his Christology and biblical hermeneutics. Emphasizing, like Gregory of Nazianzus, the ‘imaginistic’ mode of comprehending God, Ludlow shows further how Farrer’s vision of Scriptural composition is based on veneration and love: ‘once one claims that humans can have propositional knowledge of the divine nature, God’s nature becomes a problem to be solved, not something to be worshipped’ (p. 128). The tension between image and proposition, doxology and epistemology, is key to Farrer’s thinking. As Jennifer Strawbridge puts it, for Farrer ‘Scripture is not given to prove God, but to see God’ (pp. 37-38, emphasis mine).
The fruitful tension between cognition and spiritual sensation – Farrer was once dubbed an ‘Origen redivivus’ – also pulls weight in his ethics. Robert MacSwain interprets Farrer: ‘it is precisely through recognizing our moral obligations to others and acting accordingly that we come to recognize and respond to the divine reality as well (p. 89, emphasis original). From here, we can with MacSwain view Farrer swinging from ethics to epistemology: ‘No physical science without physical interference, no personal knowledge without personal intercourse… Theology must be at least as empirical as this, if it is to mediate any knowledge whatsoever. We can know nothing of God unless we can do something about him.’ This expression ‘personal intercourse’ from Faith and Speculation (1967) recalls for us the patristic doctrine of deification (invoked by terms like homilein, to discuss or intercourse with). But Farrer has discerned its utility in placing theology among the modern philosophical sciences.
Presaging contemporaries like Sarah Coakley, Farrer was convinced that a firm account of how the mind could process an encounter with ‘real being’ must be given, in order to articulate theology’s fundamental claims in the culture of critical (post-Kantian) modern philosophy. However, while such a transformational epistemology (cf. pp. 86, 94, ‘rightly disposed’ cognitive faculties) is appealing for what MacSwain and others have called ‘hagiological evidence’, there remains more work to be done in clarifying the extent to which Farrer held epistemology as prescriptive to the faith (Paul Griffiths has raised this problem elsewhere).
Rowan Williams’ contribution enables us to view Farrer’s ‘cosmological idea’, a modified Thomistic vision, from his theological presuppositions. ‘God extends to us’, Farrer writes in a 1953 essay on the Trinity, ‘what belongs uniquely to his co-equal son’ (p. 143), recalling the Pauline quotation which ventures to open this review. Williams interprets: ‘The Son…received this other-oriented and other-dependent dimension of divinity’ (p. 143, emphasis original), a ‘dimension’ implied to be the Holy Spirit. In his account of Farrer on the Eucharist, Jeffery Vogel states the implication clearly: ‘Those whom the Spirit indwells move out toward others because that is what the Spirit does’ (p. 202). This volume thus establishes that in Austin Farrer we have a developed theology of extension, which stands upon a working definition of God as that will-surrendering, reciprocal society which freely gives life and increase (itself) unto others.
Aquinas’s exposition of the analogia entis was primarily through the channel of the intellect; Farrer’s, through the will. That is to say, with Dehart’s remarkable essay, in true Blondelian fashion (p. 108), Farrer explained the absolutely prior act that is God’s extension ‘from within an account or estimate of the structure of human subjectivity’. Dehart shows that for Farrer, being is a ‘diversifying principle’ (p. 102), an action of self-distribution into different ‘bundles’. Farrer understands these bundles as unitive-typological patterns – ‘substances’ in the Aristotelian and Thomist idiom. From within this framework, human action gains logical coherence, for it too is a unity of different ‘bundle’-processes and whose core, the will, is unaccountable in material terms. Farrer explains in a Blondelian key, ‘our voluntary conscious acts form a continuous scale of ascent’. It is through this scale that we can analytically arrive at the ‘negative characterization of the absolute act’ of divinity (pp. 101–102). Dehart thereby shows that Farrer has discerningly preserved the possibility of the cosmological idea in the face of a scientific terrain dominated by the presuppositions of logical positivism.
Platten’s concluding essay offers cues for how to enrich our understanding of the Farrerian idiom and its possible future applications within the grammar of modern theology. Farrer’s fondness for forsaking the footnote makes difficult the task of situating his work in relation to its sources and even its intended interlocutors (cf. p. 216). One way to do this might be to track his published book reviews in relation to his published works. This is facilitated by the helpful bibliography annexed to the volume (pp. 221-22). For instance, it is interesting that his first review published is that of Erich Przywara’s Polarity (1935). Telling from this index list, he also worked on Barth, John Hick, and Josef Pieper. One may reasonably expect such engagements, but this tool furnishes a more precise navigation. Observations made in this volume regarding the importance of continental personalist ethics are confirmed and deepened by his evident keen interest in French philosophical theology; he reviewed Ortegat’s seminal Philosophie de la religion in 1939. The index is exhaustive, providing future readers a master bibliography of Farrer’s publications and those dedicated to him.
It is worth highlighting by way of conclusion that the contributors of this volume exemplify an important methodology for studying Farrer. As has been fruitfully established in the study of Augustine’s works, Farrer developed many of his towering philosophical ideas in the context of sermons. This dynamic itself might merit further, explicit study, and it certainly sets the tone for future scholars wishing to deal with Farrer’s thinking in new contexts, whether they be pastoral, theological, scientific or literary.
