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Cally Hammond, The Sound of Liturgy: How Words Work in Worship

same time, surely the servant’s action is not to be held as no less evil than the master’s. It seems we need some satisfactory way of distinguishing the wrongness of cooperating with evil actions from those evil acts themselves. The issue provides both the title and the starting point of this interesting and wellwritten book. It also generated an intense discussion among catholic thinkers in the decades following Innocent XI’s condemnation, a discussion that culminated in the Theologia moralis published by St Alphonsus Liguori in 1753. St Alphonsus held that, while the servant did have a charitable duty to prevent harm to the sleeping girl, the cost he would bear as a consequence of defying his master could be held to outweigh that duty. Cummings finds this position unsatisfactory, and he charts the moral, theological and philosophical debate that has spanned the centuries that followed. A key to the issue is the relation between the causal consequences of an action and the intention with which it is performed. The animating moral issue – what we should think about cooperation with evil – is of no less importance now than then, but Cummings’s detailed exploration shows that resolving it cannot avoid complex issues in the philosophy of action. His book is somewhat unusual in this respect. Though it is primarily an exercise in catholic moral theology – and especially well informed about the tradition within which he is working – the book also engages with an important strand of twentieth-century British moral philosophy. One of the most original and influential contributors to this – Elizabeth Anscombe – was herself a catholic. But Cummings is no less willing and able to engage profitably with the work of the legal philosopher Anthony Duff who has no such theological interest. Like all the best moral theology, the argument is replete with arresting and perplexing examples. Cummings’s own solution relies on a relatively unfamiliar concept –‘remote formal cooperation’ – combined with the much older distinction between ‘mortal’ and ‘venial’ sins. The servant’s sin, Cummings concludes, lies ultimately in failure to show a degree of courage and heroism, which, had he shown it, would have undoubtedly have merited praise. In short, it matters when Christians fail to act in commendable ways, but this is nevertheless morally different from acting in ways that ought to be condemned. No solution to a theological issue with this degree of difficulty and complexity will end the debate. But some contributions to it are much more valuable than others, and this is one of them.