Abstract

"Did you ever practice eutrapelia?" So begins the final chapter of this slim volume on play. Eutrapelia is the name Aristotle gave to the virtue that is the mean between buffoonery and boorishness and it seems sufficiently aligned with the spirit of play for a treatment of it to be included in a book which deals primarily with the latter notion. As for play, Rahner gives it psycho-cosmic interpretation. Thus, play is the archetype that symbolizes the free spontaneity characteristic of the Judaeo-Christian idea of God as creator. Similarly, it is the intermittent archetype for man of his lost-but-ultimately-to-be-recaptured paradisic state. One of Rahner's more interesting theses about play is his claim that the dance is the core phenomenon permeating all art and play; he extends this theory about the dance to religion also, at least so far as the latter is liturgical. The chief drawback of the book is that it does not give a critical development of the concept of play, i.e., it does not really consider possible alternative interpretations of the phenomenon of play, e.g., a Freudian interpretation of play. But the book does give a suggestive historical account of the notion of play, where the historical sources are the pre-Christian Greek and Latin writers, the Fathers of the Church, and the mystics and the Doctors of the Church of the Medieval period.--E. A. R.