She was, when I met her two years before her death, much as others had described her decades before. I remember, when I knocked at her back door, the bright eye that peered at me over an easy chair, and the clear voice that bid me come inside. That voice was often a little breathless, as if she was having a hard time making her words catch up with her thoughts; but then, she had much to say. She was able to get around with a walker, and she insisted on coming into her little kitchen to supervise my brewing of the ritual tea. She admitted that I made a very good job of it, and not just by American standards. I remember it as one of the first times that an Oxford academic had offered me tea rather than coffee. But then, she was then 96 years old, and represented a very different generation.

Marjorie Reeves was born in the north of Wiltshire, and grew up amongst the barrows, tumuli, and other traces of a mysterious Neolithic civilization. Her family was Baptist, and had been since the 17th century (she would later join the Church of England). They had always been concerned, as she would later proudly write, for the education of their young women. In her generation this would have earned a woman the dismissive title of "bluestocking." She went up to Oxford, where she studied at St. Hugh's, one of the first colleges for women in the university. From there, she went on to the University of London for doctoral studies; Oxford was at the time not fond of doctorates, let alone women who presumed to earn them. Finishing her doctoral work, she taught school and taught teachers. She had been active in the Student Christian Movement, and in the '30s she was involved with Christian students in Germany who opposed the Nazi regime. During the war she became, as she put it to me in conversation, "a very junior member"

of the Moot, a group of intellectuals brought together from time to time in Oxford to plan the shape of a "new Christendom" that would rise from the wreckage of Europe. Her senior colleagues were some of the most luminous intellects in England at the time: T.S. Eliot, John Baillie, Walter Moberly, Alec Vidler, Karl Mannheim, and occasionally Christopher Dawson and Michael Polanyi.

In 1948 she returned to Oxford as a Fellow of St. Anne's College, another of the university's colleges for women. There she remained for many years, at one point holding the post of Vice-Principal of the college, right up to the moment of co-education. She bought a large house in North Oxford in which she hosted, as long as she lived, a steady procession of students, intellectuals, and diverse lodgers.

All of that would have been impressive enough. But she additionally maintained a rigorous and diverse publication schedule. She wrote monographs on medieval thought; on the appropriation of medieval thought by 19th-century authors and philosophers; pamphlets for Sunday school teachers and Christian educators, one of which boasts an introduction by Dorothy Sayers; a number of little history books for children, part of a series she proposed and then edited; one of the best of the many books written on the crisis of modern higher education, done from within a Christian philosophy of learning; and, along with assorted other publications too numerous to mention, a history of her church in Oxford, St. Mary the Virgin, that was published two weeks before her death.

But it was in London that she had some of her most formative intellectual and spiritual experiences. There she began her lifelong study of Joachim of Fiore, an Italian Cistercian abbot of the 12th century. Joachim interpreted Scripture to suggest a "third age" of the world, the "Age of the Holy Spirit," which would usher in the millennial reign of Christ. At a time when the Neo-Thomists were energizing Roman Catholic scholarship, Marjorie began to study a man whom they might well have regarded as representing the antithesis of Thomism, attractive to heterodox thinkers (including the poet William Butler Yeats), given to cryptic interpretations of the future rather than to the building of clear and interlocking systems of belief. But Marjorie was concerned first and foremost with what Joachim's contemporaries thought of him. "What you said," I told her on one of my visits, "or really, what you made it possible to say, was that Joachim was much more important to medieval people than was Thomas Aquinas." Her eyes got a little wide, and she stared at me with some disbelief. "Oh, of course he was," she said, surprised that anyone should still question that simple fact.

Her preoccupation with Joachim was, I think, illustrative of her many great virtues as a scholar. For one thing, she took him absolutely seriously, on the terms that he had himself established. She was determined to tease out everything she could not only about Joachim himself but also the subsequent progress of his ideas. Thus she did not write only her great The Influence of Prophecy on the Middle Ages but also The Eternal Future, tracing Joachim's influence into the Romantic era.

Yet she was not interested solely in historical context. Joachim was, in many ways, a profound influence on her personally. She had a striking affection for him, and delighted in describing how Joachim's village of Fiore in Calabria had granted her honorary citizenship for having attracted so much attention to their community. Moreover, I think that she found his spiritual combat with the meaning of history for himself and his generation exemplary for herself as well.

But another discovery at London was more influential upon her than even Joachim could be. I am fairly certain that it was at that time—I never asked her, one did not ask personal questions of Englishwomen (or men) of her generation—that her spiritual vocation to academia was formed. Certainly it was in London that she heard the lectures of the philosopher John MacMurray and gained the friendship of the Anglican missionary Joe Oldham. From both of them she learned doctrines of creation and redemption that became the heart of her intellectual work; from Oldham in particular she learned the danger of personal "dualism," as he called it, the necessity of responding to "secular" situations with the full commitment of her being. As she wrote many, many years later, mankind now finds the notion of its creatureliness repugnant, and wishes to shield itself from its Creator by building up "laws" that can feasibly deny the existence of "a universal law-giver." From Oldham she learnt to glory in her creatureliness.

If she had a vocational credo, it was this: "Glory lies all around us in academic study." But such glory, she believed, could only be appreciated by intellectual self-denial, by humility which acknowledged that there was "largeness or mystery beyond our grasp." Indeed, wonder was the aim of all her work: "Wonder and awe are the alpha and omega of the activity of knowing." Thus her learning ended in worship.

It was best, she thought, if this occurred not only for the scholar individually but for a community, a "true society" engaged in free cooperation "whose activities embody the same fundamental view of life." MacMurray, under the influence of Martin Buber, had spoken often of the human person as being a "person-in-a-relationship" rather than an "atomistic individual." Thus for Marjorie Reeves the true wonder at revealed glory comes not to the individual scholar but to a group of friends who journey into the mysteries of the Creator's work together.

"It is such a glorious experience, for that to happen," she said to me. She bent her head to her hand and mused a bit. "I have a lodger," she said, looking up at me with her wide-eyed directness. "An Italian girl. An agnostic, not a Christian. She has some friends over once a week, and they sing cantatas together. It is beautiful. That is what the intellectual community of Christians should be like."

When Dante Alighieri's journey brought him to the celestial spheres, he found Joachim there, a controversial discovery at a time when the Calabrian abbot's writings were regarded with increasing suspicion. But who beneath the Heavens can question that judgment? I am confident that Marjorie has joined him, and that she now rejoices with the great community of Heaven prefigured by the communities she cared so much about, glorying eternally in the Love that moves the earth and all the stars.

Albert Louis Zambone, a D.Phil candidate at the University of Oxford, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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