Oxford’s Pusey House concludes a triad of Conferences on the Trinitarian Persons by authorizing the publication of this impressive set of contributions to Pneumatology. Edited by the House’s entrepreneurially gifted Principal, a specialist in E. B. Pusey’s writings, and its Matraszek Fellow, a jurisprudent shared with the adjacent St Cross College, the essayists included here are chiefly Anglican, and yet the Orthodox and Catholics (including an English Dominican) are also represented. James Clarke & Co., the publishers of Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, with its celebrated lament for the deficiencies of the Western doctrine of the Holy Spirit, are now, ironically, the bearers of this weighty cargo of Occidental writing on the topic, for even the Orthodox authors found here began life in Western churches.

N.T. Wright kicks off by making a robust claim for a high Pneumatology in the earliest Christianity. For Paul, the Spirit corresponds to the Tabernacle/Temple presence of YHWH in the Old Testament, proving that in the Messiah, the Lord has indeed returned to Zion. Two Old Testament scholars (Susan Gillingham and Jack Levison) then take contrastingly minimalist/maximalist views of how much Pneumatology Hebrew traditions carry. One woman’s eisegesis is another man’s exegesis, but much of the reason lies in the woman’s exclusive concentration on the Psalter, read without attention to other pertinent texts. Though the latter are ascribed to the Babylonian and Persian periods and thus come comparatively late in Israel’s development, they constitute a re-reading of the Exodus as the Spirit’s distinctive work, a concept readily applicable to the New Exodus of Messiah.

Moving from exegetes to patrologists is inevitably, by contrast, to enter the world of ‘Canon Criticism’, albeit avant la lettre. John McGuckin makes the case that Athanasius’ Pneumatology is far from being an afterthought, as much modern patristic scholarship has suspected, or grossly deficient, as in the twofold objections lodged by Sergei Bulgakov: it left in shadow the Spirit’s relation to the Father (the converse of later Photianism!) and saw the Spirit only charismatically – not to say a-cosmically, with no proper role to play in the world’s creation. Sanctification, for Athanasius, is the telos of that creation. Meanwhile, the ‘new and theanthropic anthropology’ to which, as taught at Alexandria, the communication of the Spirit leads was explored experientially farther East, in the Mesopotamian Pseudo-Macarian homilies whose content is set out here by an acknowledged expert, Marcus Plested. Though the preambular account he offers of the inadequacies of Western Pneumatology is eirenic, the topic is one that would require far fuller historical discussion for an adequate adjudication. The last patrologist to write is Carol Harrison, who builds chiefly on Augustine for an essay on the ‘loving’ tone of voice of the Spirit – with the implication, made explicit at the close, that this might form a strategy for the avoidance of inter-Christian doctrinal conflict. Good luck with that.

The transition to the mediaeval contribution in the West is represented by Richard Conrad of Blackfriars, Oxford, who wrestles with the issues left to Lombard, Bonaventure, and Aquinas by Augustine’s tentative speculations on the Spirit in the De Trinitate. Thomas’s resolution is commended: that Father and Son love each other ‘by the Holy Spirit’ is not a description of an enabling but of their union as the Spirit’s one source. ‘Bond of love’ can only be accepted in terms of the perichôrêsis of the relations of communion, not of the relations of origin. Cautioning against too facile a ‘reading’ of the Economy as revelation of the Trinity in Itself, for an exitus of the Persons intended to enable our reditus to God will not be an unfolding of any straightforward kind, Conrad nevertheless rejects Balthasar’s notion of a quasi-crisis exhibited in the Triune relations by the economic necessity for full human salvation of the Death and Descent of the Word incarnate. After this conceptually demanding essay, the value of the Thomist tradition in Pneumatology is further accentuated by Robin Ward’s discussion of the ‘spiritually inspiring doctrine’ of John Poinsot (‘John of St Thomas’) on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, surprisingly rather pooh-poohed by Yves Congar in his own three volume Pneumatology, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, but here praised for the lyricism of its Baroque rhetoric.

That neatly segues into David Curry’s discussion of the notion of perichôrêsis (in Jacobean usage, ‘circling’) in the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, comparing these to Charles Williams’ employment of the term ‘co-inherence’ in, among other writings, The Descent of the Dove. That the sermons are homilies for a liturgical calendar allows Curry to argue that, to Andrewes’ mind, one key expression of that ‘circling’ is the way Incarnation and Pentecost inter-depend in giving ‘purpose and meaning to all of the feasts’. The imagistic character of Andrewes’s writing offers a foretaste of the ‘poetry of the Spirit’ in the English tradition, which a practising poet, Malcolm Guite, takes further in a study of how the Spirit is portrayed in writers from George Herbert to T. S. Eliot (including a radical Protestant in Milton and a convert to Rome in Hopkins). Their voices sound antiphonally in an ‘auricular chapel’ – a new and rather attractive way to practise ecumenism as well as an exhibition of the cumulative character of the poetic tradition. A comparison, by Matthew Levering, of Congar and Abbot Anscar Vonier of Buckfast on the relation of the Spirit to the Bride stresses the significance of more standard ecumenism: Congar’s chastened account of a Bride in constant need of both purification and growth in ‘catholic fulness’ till her nuptials are complete stands over against Vonier’s pre-ecumenical celebration of the victories of Christ’s grace in the Church in communion with the Roman see (though the book length treatment of nuptial ecclesiology in Vonier is patently considerably richer than Congar’s late period discussion).

There follow an investigation by Lewis Ayres of the theologian’s métier: service of the Spirit in His drawing out the contents and implications of divine revelation requires the theologian not only to study hard but to attend to the judgments of those who, by the Spirit’s gift of Wisdom, are connaturally inclined to grasp that same content and implications; a meditation by Andrew Louth on the Holy Spirit in the Liturgy: the number, crucial positioning, and sheer variety of petitions for the Spirit’s coming in Byzantine worship indicate how the Church of the Spirit is essentially an ‘epikletic’ or ‘suppliant’ body; a searing exploration of ‘pneumatic abandonment’ by Ephraim Radner, stimulated by little known letters of Teresa of Calcutta in which she testified to the apparent absence of the Holy Spirit – which can also be, for the saint in fieri a mode of his presence; and a highly disciplined disquisition by Oliver O’Donovan on the Spirit as Life-giver, identifying the role of the Spirit in theological ethics in terms of the assisted emergence of appropriate aspiration, speech, feeling, community, and hope. Speaking of feeling, Gary Thorne added a recommendation of Charles Williams’ theology of ‘Romance’ for the way ‘our Lord the Spirit’ can use the human body (and, for Thorne, tactile or ‘haptic’ realities at large) to make possible epiphanic invitations to sanctity.

After a brief reflection on George Herbert’s poem ‘Grace’, Rowan Williams brings up the rear with a synthetic reading of all the papers in his own characteristically nuanced, and sometimes elusive, manner. It says much for the reputation the Pusey House Conferences are gaining that the former Primate undertook this exercise of scribal summary, if also theological evaluation.