Chang, Curtis. Engaging Unbelief: A Captivating Strategy from Augustine and Aquinas.

Meconi, David Vincent

Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000. 187 pp. Paper, $11.99 -- The head of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Harvard, MIT, and Tufts, Curtis Chang turns to the seminal works of Augustine and Thomas as a way of engaging the challenges of postmodernity. He accordingly argues that Aquinas's De Civitate Dei (DCD) and Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles (SCG) were composed precisely to challenge a world growing suspicious, if not negligent, of the Christian story. The rhetorical strategy Chang cleverly uncovers in both DCD and SCG is threefold: both Augustine and Thomas enter their opponents' unique stories and worldviews, both retell that story by reinterpreting that story on their opponents' own terms, and finally, each capture that retold tale and tell the eternal story of Christianity in a way that is now intelligible and attractive to their interlocutors.

Chang begins by looking at the Roman Empire and the fall of Rome in 410. The symbols and the narratives that maintained the Roman way of life for centuries were crumbling and in his treatment of this disintegration, Augustine foreshadows Nietzsche by dismantling the entire history of Rome to show it for what it really was, the mere masking of human power. Thus referring to the DCD, Chang concludes: "Before Antonio Gramsci coined the term `ideological hegemony' to describe how the powerful shape popular belief for their own ends, before Michel Foucault claimed to have revealed previously unsuspected tools of oppression, this masterpiece of political deconstruction had been sitting on the shelves for over a millennium" (p. 74). This section ends with an examination of how Augustine next enters and captures Plato and the dynamics of Roman religion.

Like the DCD, then, Chang next looks at Thomas's SCG as a text written as a direct response to a call for evangelization on the eve of an all-encompassing cultural and religious challenge--Thomas's response to Raymond of Penafort paralleling Augustine's response to Marcellinus. As Chang's thinking goes: as Augustine faced the breakdown of Roman unity, Thomas's Christian Europe faced the threat of Islam. Thomas is presented as the most respectful of opponents, never attacking Averroes and other Muslim philosophers directly, and always inviting those who reject Christianity to see "how that particular experience makes sense only in a more coherent and wider story.... If the challengers do not join Aquinas's wider picture of reuniting with God, they will remain trapped in the viciously shrinking cycle of attachment to lesser things" (p. 127). That is, Thomas invites his readers to look at their own experience and attendant longing for perfection and completion in light of the Christian promise. Thomas's understanding of creation in time, God's knowledge of particulars, and the Incarnation are also taken up here.

Each section on Augustine and Aquinas also includes brief biographies and Chang's Appendix takes the reader through the scholarly dispute surrounding the SCG as a missionary text. What Chang does throughout is helpful: turning to the Christian Masters to offer a modern-day piece of apologetics. One should, however, consider the following critiques. We must be very careful when imagining Augustine's age as one "fully Roman and Christian," as Chang does throughout. Augustine did not live in a "Christian society." The later Roman Empire was perhaps no longer legally hostile to Christianity but it was far from embracing it. For example, there are no instances of the state assisting financially in the erecting of Christian buildings or statues, Roman buildings were void of Christian symbols, and bishops played no role--neither official nor ceremonial--in the selection and installation of public magistrates. At the time of Augustine's composing DCD, Donatists equaled Catholics in North Africa in number and importance and as Raymond Brown has recently confessed, Augustine's world was "not the orderly structure" once believed (see "New Evidence" in his re-released Augustine of Hippo). This critique is valid for Chang's view of Aquinas's world as well. That is, Thomas never saw Islam as the immediate threat of Christian culture. It is true that the SCG is directed toward Muslims, but it is also directed toward "Jews and other errantes." Its intent is thus greater than presented here: not only directed against the errors of Islam but against all "falsehood opposing the divine truth" (SCG, I.1.4). The lamentable irony is, of course, that the medieval synthesis achieved by Thomas came under more attack from his fellow Christians than it ever faced from Muslim thought. Finally, Chang's call for the postmodern world to find ultimate meaning in the Christian lecture or sermon (for example, p. 156) would sound quite strange to both Augustine and Aquinas. Whereas Chang calls for a "new media" in proclaiming the Christian story, such as film, Augustine and Thomas continue to direct their interlocutors back to the ancient liturgy, the Eucharistic drama in which the Christian story is not only proclaimed but continued.--David Vincent Meconi, S.J., University of Innsbruck.