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Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstracts Hide Ancient Realities by Carlin A. Barton, Daniel Boyarin (review)

the two statements could have been easily avoided had the author appropriated the contemporary concept of “integral dreaming,” which presupposes a holistic framework where dreams and visions are as much a part of one’s personal rapport with reality as any other. The hagiographical material analyzed in Chapter Two coheres with this concept. A weakness of this otherwise excellent book is its lack of patristic contextualization. True, readers are warned that it is about the reception of Augustine and Gregory in the early medieval west and so, apart from mentioning Tertullian as a forebear, no other source of Augustine is addressed. This gives the impression that all began with Augustine or Tertullian, and that western Christianity evolved in complete separation from its eastern counterpart. Nevertheless, before Tertullian, it was Clement the Alexandrian who, in Stromateis, theorized about dreams and visions. Likewise, traces of Greek patristic thinking are inescapable in Augustine and Gregory. Furthermore, at least the insular literature of that age—material culture and documentary evidence prove it—was not free of eastern influences. But this limited contextualization takes nothing from the valuable contributions of this book. Doru Costache, St Cyril’s Coptic Orthodox Theological College