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The World of Bede . By Peter Hunter Blair. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1970. x + 340 pp. $10.00.

Few revisions are made in this edition; the only ones of any consequence are on pp. 30 and 171-173. There were more changes made in the second edition (1964), e. g., on pp. 90, 108, 114f., 568, and 606, but neither edition differs significantly from the first (1956), which has been both highly praised and severely criticized. I find myself more in sympathy with the criticism. Admitting that Wolfson has given a virtuoso performance in classifying doctrines and collecting texts, I find the book disappointing as the "historical research in philosophy" (p. vii) which it claims to be, and this for two reasons. First, it takes too much freedom with the texts. A recurring form of this freedom is the frequent assumption of influence upon the Fathers by Philo, Aristotle, and others without any attempt to demonstrate the textual basis for such influence. Following a detailed exegesis of Metaphysics V, Wolfson says, for example, "It is with this Aristotelian analysis of the five kinds of relative unity in the back of their mind that the Fathers, we imagine, started on their search for an analogy for the relative unity in the Trinity. . ." (p. 315), but he does not investigate whether Metaphysics V was known to the various Fathers. Wolfson's method allows him this freedom, for it begins with the assumption that uttered words are "nothing but floating buoys which signal the presence of submerged unuttered thoughts" (p. vii) and has the goal of reconstructing the "latent processes of reasoning" behind the uttered words. By "latent" Wolfson apparently means that the reasoning is hidden not only to us, which may be a truism, but also to the Fathers themselves. In any case, the book is written as though all philosophical thinkers participate in a Neoplatonic universal mind which includes the doctrines of all earlier philosophers. This results in interesting speculation but in little historical demonstration. The second reason that I find the book disappointing as an historical work is that there is no generalization organizing the whole. To put it aesthetically, there is no story by which the mass of material might take on significance; many lines are spoken, indeed the book is almost doxographic, but there is no plot. Lacking from the account is anything like Harnack's theme of Hellenization or Jaeger's theme of paideia or Augustine's image of "spoiling the Egyptians." Historical writing which makes the past come alive to our understanding seems to involve such themes and images. For this reason Wolfson's book seems to me more a chronicle, a taxonomic chronicle of ideas to be exact, than a history. It may be unfair to judge the book in this way until Wolfson completes his series on philosophic systems from Plato to Spinoza, but surely the patristic period need not await accounts of later periods to be given a significance of its own.