The publication in March 1980, one month before Sartre's death, of his conversations with his assistant, Benny Lévy, created a stir in the world of Sartre's long-time friends, faithful readers, and authorized commentators. The surprising nature of his positions throughout the exchange convinced Simone de Beauvoir and other intimates that the aging, ailing philosopher had been brainwashed and manipulated into denouncing most of his deeply held political and philosophical convictions by his younger interlocutor, a former leader of the Maoist group La Gauche prolétarienne recently converted to orthodox Judaism.
In the preface to the English translation of L'Espoir maintenant, Ronald Aronson, a noted Sartre scholar, takes issue with such a simplistic, Manichean interpretation. Sartre, who remained quite clear-thinking throughout the interviews, seems, in the years following May 1968, to have abandoned a good deal of his earlier beliefs. Far from being a passive victim in the hands of an ambitious ideologue, Sartre had drawn all the consequences of the failures, both theoretical and practical, of his past engagement, without jettisoning the main tenets of his vision of the social world. The main objective of the 1980 interviews was, to quote Aronson, "to develop a new ethical basis for the left" (13). Sartre is explicit about what he hopes to achieve: "I would like our discussion here to sketch out an ethics and to find a true guiding principle for the left." This attempt takes place against the backdrop of the demise of Marxism in French intellectual life and, more generally, of the global context of what Sartre calls "the triumph of right-ideas, at least on the part of governments, in almost all nations" (109). The content of the Sartre/Lévy dialogue, if only because it consistently links ethics with politics, is continuous with most of the Sartrean project, where ethical questions have always loomed large. Francis Jeanson wrote some years ago that "in truth, the most constant of Sartre's preoccupation has been to deal with the moral problem" (Sartre dans sa vie, 230).
The articulation between ethics and politics involves both rupture and continuity. Rupture first, since under Lévy's relentless, sometimes arrogant, prodding, Sartre engages in undeniable, if limited, self-criticism. The failure of the left to bring about the long-awaited revolution in advanced capitalist countries is related to the Master-Thinker's own inability to supply the philosophical underpinnings of a truly ethical political praxis. Sartre repeatedly states that "we must admit that we were wrong," acknowledging that he is "no longer of the opinion" that violence is the midwife of history, as when he eulogized Fanon's anticolonial writings, in a gesture of masochistic "national self-flagellation" (95). Looking back on his fellow-traveling with the French Communist Party, he admits that his stance was an illusion, explaining it by way of the intellectual's "need to find something to cling on to," while reminding Lévy that his support for the party lasted only from 1952 to the Budapest uprising. In a way, his allegiance to the party was a prime example of Sartrean bad faith: "I wasn't playing a double game. At certain moments I persuaded myself that the Party's pseudo-ideas must contain some truths and have a solid base and that what seemed stupid was only on the surface" (64).
Far from stopping with the "world-historical" consequences of Stalinism, the critique of the revolutionary tradition goes back, beyond 1917, to 1793 and the mythical figure of the sans-culottes. We learn that the fateful mistake of the Jacobins, who left a durable mark on the French left, all the way down to the militants of May '68, was to link fraternity with terror. It is precisely this unfortunate historical connection that the new ethics of obligation and reciprocity, grounded on the Judaic tradition, is called upon to sever forever. Lévy repeatedly tries to bring his interlocutor to share his own rejection of the Hegelian legacy. In fact, although he disowns at one point what he calls "my tradition," which Lévy immediately labels as a "specific theological tradition [stretching] from Christianity to Hegel" (59), Sartre's break with his conceptual family is far from being complete. His latest philosophy of history was still informed by the humanistic eschatology of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition.
The end of history is now reconceived as the actualization of a genuine ethics of fraternity, defined as the goal of the human adventure: "when, at last, man truly and totally exists, his relations with his fellowman and his way of being himself will be the object of what can be called a humanism" (68). Up until the very end, despite the Nietzschean and, later, Tocquevillian turns of contemporary French thought, Sartre will have remained an unrepentant metaphysician, the last of the great thinkers of totality. He remained faithful even to his old-time propheticism and critique of the progressive bourgeois intellectual: "There will be, as I have explained, mass movements for definite, specific goals. In these mass movements, the notion of fellow traveler will no longer make sense" (63). Last, but not least, despite his apostasy from the Cartesianism of his youth ("it left the individual too independent"), he reasserts his long-held existentialist credo: "As you know, for me there is no a priori essence; and so what a human being is has not yet been established" (67).
Sartre's rejection of parties and of electioneering, another recurring theme of his life-long engagement with the political, does not lead to an outright disavowal of collective action but to a reformulation of what the ultimate objective of political mobilization must be. To prevent fraternity from turning into totalitarian terror, the whole mythological culture of the left must be redefined by separating the ultimate goal of revolutionary action from the trials and tribulations of its historical embodiment. The engine of world-transforming practice does not lie any longer in the action of the group in fusion (as in the Critique of Dialectical Reason) but in the intention of the actors, which always runs the risk, unfortunately, of being led astray into terroristic violence. "The radical positioning of the intention is," Sartre argues, "transhistorical. . . . and in this sense it doesn't belong to history. It appears in history, but doesn't belong to history" (82). Admittedly, this sounds a lot like the Incarnation of the (Divine) Word, but it may be hasty to conclude, as did Simone de Beauvoir, that Sartre had been coerced into renouncing his life-long atheism. In any case, there is a clear political profit to be derived from this meeting of the eternal and the transitory: the transcendence of the objective safeguards of the world-historical project of the left while rendering its autocratic deviation impossible. What we are left with is "fraternity without terror."
Michel Rybalka once remarked that Sartre's philosophical trajectory "can be seen as evolving in three stages: liberté, égalité, fraternité." His new ethics of fraternity rests on a dynamics of obligation strongly reminiscent of Lévinas's philosophy (Sartre describes it as "the self considering itself as self for the other"), undoubtedly via Lévinas's influence on Lévy. In Sartre's words, moral action is the result of a "kind of requisition. . . . a kind of inner constraint which is a dimension of my consciousness" (70). This dialectics of the same and the other (by no means unprecedented, albeit in a different form, in Sartre's earlier thinking) is grounded in an ontology of the social that exposes "a bond among people that's more basic than politics" (86). Sartre III remains faithful to another of his postwar convictions, expounded in the Critique of Dialectical Reason: the truth of being human lies in group solidarity. This holistic vision of Being, a radical departure from Sartre's prewar individualism, takes here an almost spiritual form, no doubt in relation to Lévy's mystical Jewish messianism, and stems from a deeply dialogical conception of the human condition, a Buberian "relation of each to each which preceded the creation of the closed whole or even prevented the 'wholes' from ever closing" (71). The openness of this relation, posited as an ontological principle, is illustrated by the very structure of the Sartre/Lévy dialogue, "a thought created by two people": the two partners are "equals" and one often completes the unfinished sentence of the other.
Anthropologically, the interdependence of individuals harks back to the quasi-animalistic solidarity of the originary clan, "the womblike unity" of "the children of the mother." This primitivist tribalism is, like Rousseau's state of nature, the image of true fraternity. At this point the latter takes precedence over equality, and democracy, rather than the political regime it was in the eyes of the Jacobin and the Marxist, becomes the actualization of authentic existence, the "humanization of Man." Sartre's rejection of Jacobinism and of the unitarian ideology of democracy that has dominated the culture of the French left since the First Republic is only partial; he retains a nostalgia for unity, the need for "men who are united, because one unit alone or even several separate units will not be able to shake the social body and make it collapse. One must imagine a body of people who struggle as one" (65).
Hope Now is Sartre's testament, touching at times, as when the ailing philosopher reflects, in characteristically phenomenological fashion, on what it means to be old in the eyes of others. No doubt the book will irritate all of those who would rather have been right with Raymond Aron than wrong with Sartre and his disciples. This may not be first-rate work in philosophy (Lévy's Presentation and Last Word, which frame the text of the interviews, are far from impressive), but it remains a fascinating testimony to the considerable changes that occurred in French thought in the mid-seventies, and to the way the man who had been the most revered incarnation of the postwar oppositional intellectual dealt with the critical left's ideological and political decline. At one point Sartre claims, with a bit of cynicism, that he never actually experienced anxiety, that despair was always for the others. He wrote about it, he says, because it was the fashionable thing to do, since "everyone was reading Kierkegaard then." Sartre's last message to the disoriented members of what's left of the left, is one of hope, not despair. Hope is hope in the face of failure, and failure itself may be, in a strange new rendition of Hegel's cunning of history, the way humanity blindly stumbles toward truth. "We must believe in progress," Sartre tells his readers from beyond the grave, adding, with a touch of self-deprecating humor, "and that, perhaps, is one of my last naïve ideas" (61).
JEAN-PHILIPPE MATHY
Every year some new writer appears to begin his or her run for the top. In 1996, a notable collection of short fiction by one such newcomer appeared at about the same time as did similar books by two veteran writers and thus invited comparison with them. The stories of the vets are mostly reruns; Bellis's fiction appears for the first time.
The setting for Andre Dubus's stories is the 1970s, when yuppies started jogging but were still smoking, and post-Vatican II Catholic liberals had gone through Vietnam and the sexual revolution. Dubus is an expert at re-creating the new Catholics who made their own rules regarding sex, e.g., "the hot purity of her passion kept her in [the] Church. When she loved, she loved with her flesh, and to her it was fitting and right, and did not need absolving by a priest." The mere coupling of purity and passion was enough to send oldtimers into a rage.
Despite their individuality, all fourteen of Dubus's stories can be read as scenes from a single canvas attesting to the awesome power of sex. A woman uses sex to lure a sixteen-year-old boy into a plot to kill her husband; a wife is too sexually fulfilled to realize that her model husband has increased her insurance because he wants to blow her head off. Sex is so much its own reward that a third woman drifts through one affair after another until at thirty-five she realizes with alarm that it may be too late to get what she really wants. Another cheats on her quadriplegic husband with the man hired to take care of him. An old veteran of three failed marriages is on the prowl again, his latest attraction being a woman half his age. An almost perfect wife has an affair when her husband is laid up indefinitely because of an accident. A perfect wife is already stripping for adultery when circumstances prevent her from going through with it.
These Catholics never feel guilty about sex. The perfect wife ("The Timing of Sin") knows she will always be ready to commit adultery if the occasion arises. All she can do is try to avoid the occasion. She will go to confession. "To be forgiven?" / "No, I'm always being forgiven. But I'll get strength from it." Will she tell her husband? "No. It wasn't him in the car. And why ever tell him there was a time when there wasn't him?"
In "The Colonel's Wife," no yelling, accusations of betrayal, or threats of divorce spoil the scene when the nearly perfect wife is found out. She has cheated before and will not promise to be faithful in the future. So has he. Their revelations are matter-of-fact, as if both acknowledge that sex is so powerful that cheating is irrelevant to a good marriage. He is just "glad that damned horse fell on me. It made me lie still. . . . and look at you." This is a new (voyeuristic?) model for responding to infidelity.
The old lover ("The Lover") regrets the broken marriages and the pain he has caused his wives and children. But sex has always renewed him. Even now, as he walks with the young woman to her apartment, he is happy. "His life was repeating itself, yet it felt not repetitious but splendid, and filled with grace."
Despite this heavy dose of sexual freedom, however, Dubus's new Catholics are "old" Catholics as well. They seek old goals. In "All the Time in the World," LuAnn realizes: "You're not a man. You're a boy. You all are. You're all getting milk through the fence. You're a thief. But you don't have balls enough to take the cow." Using countryfied (perhaps Dubus's native Cajun) imagery, LuAnn speaks up for the ideals of marriage and family. These ideals come through in all of his stories, along with hints here and there of divine intervention, i.e., the workings of grace, to keep life from getting too messy. Together they make Dubus's stories reminiscent of another new oldtimer, Graham Greene.
In William Trevor's twelve stories, subtlety is the game, though he might do better with less. Subtlety can be wearing. One pattern is evident throughout: a series of events and an eccentric center, often a bit quirky, to explain things, the events sometimes testing the limits of our capacity to be bored, the center sometimes arriving at the artificial, more often hitting paydirt, some unexpected mystery or truth. A few summaries will illustrate.
A man sends a substitute to a party for him in "Timothy's Birthday." The sub is a hoodlum whose very presence in the home of his parents is spiteful. He eats their food, drinks their liquor, and steals a little keepsake which he later pawns. He also steals the birthday boy's car. One might think there is something wrong with Timothy for setting this all in motion. But, no, the wrong is with the parents. They loved each other too much. The son was always jealous of their love because it excluded him.
Two more hoodlums ("A Bit of Business") find the Pope's visit to Dublin an opportune time to go on a spree. They steal a car, burglarize several houses, sell the goods to a fence, and celebrate their success with a night on the town topped off by midnight sex with two bar girls. When all is over, they feel something is wrong. It is not remorse for wrongdoing, but regret for not having killed an old man who saw them steal. They walk home, "both of them wondering if the nerve to kill was something you acquired."
The title story, "After Rain," hints at inevitability. We are forever encountering the failed romance of a sensitive woman who tries to shake it off by taking a holiday at an Italian pensione which she knew as a child. In this story, Harriet walks, she observes, it rains, she examines a painting of the Annunciation in the local church. When it stops raining, she thinks: "the Annunciation was painted after rain. Its distant landscape. . . . has the temporary look that she is seeing now. It was after rain that the angel came: those first cool moments were a chosen time." And the reader wonders whether these lines suggest that Harriet is also pregnant.
To hear Gilbert's mother tell it, people just don't like Gilbert. There's something strange about him. His presence causes his father to split, it ruins her chances with subsequent lovers, it leaves his co-workers cool towards him. She suspects him of secret crimes: car theft, arson, the murder of Carol Dickson. But this is not a whodunit. It is another kind of mystery, the mystery of Gilbert's birth. The mother knows that given his start in life, anything could go wrong. ("She had willed him to be born" suggests that his father had wanted to abort him.) That is why she worries.
A deal is made with Mulreavy ("The Potato Dealer") to marry Ellie and keep her shame a secret. For ten years she is satisfied with the arrangement. Then she suddenly decides that the daughter should know her real father, a young priest whom Ellie has not seen since but still loves. When Ellie gives away the secret, she calls down upon herself and her family the shame they had tried to hide. Why this single-minded urge to destruction? The story's answer says something about being at once Irish, Catholic, and female.
In "Lost Ground," sixteen-year-old Milton Leeson sees a vision. St. Rosa, dressed in black, approaches him in the apple orchard, kisses him on the lips, and moves him to tell the people about her. That creates a problem. His minister says Protestants do not obey Catholic saints; the parish priest says Catholic saints do not appear to Protestants. Milton is rejected by both sides. His own family considers him a disgrace. They imprison him in his bedroom to prevent his preaching. But since the urge will not leave him, they eventually must find a permanent solution. The ending is as black as it sounds, the mystery of it even blacker.
Trevor's stories engage the reader more than Dubus's and his quirky characters are perhaps as fascinating. That brings us to Peter Bellis, who belongs to the generation that grew up on reruns of The Wizard of Oz and Monty Python's Flying Circus and then turned South of the Border, to magical realism, for its fiction -- the world as it is plus a bit of magic to get one in touch with the supernatural. In this collection of four short stories and an excerpt from a coming novel, the "magic" is always symbolic. In a little town in Minnesota, a bunch of ten-year-old boys are playing baseball. There goes a long drive toward the flower beds. Suddenly Mrs. Rottweiler, a seventy-year-old WWII widow, races over, sticks up her gloved hand, and catches the ball on the fly. In a garage apartment in Jacksonville, Florida, a drunken sailor is engaged in an epic fist fight that only his wife can interpret. A young man in north central Florida looks behind a mystic elixir for the spiritual insight that will set aside a curse uttered against him. A corpse in south central Florida, about to go through the important business of being buried, takes time to sit up, solve a mystery, and assist a young man in discovering himself.
The unfolding of these stories also engages the reader. In "The Lingering Death of Eamon Patterson," Eamon exposes a traveling "snake oil" salesman, who drops a curse at his feet and speeds away: "In three days you will begin to die, and your death will be a lingering death." Eamon spends the rest of his life writing futile letters to the company which makes the elixir, apologizing for his remarks and asking them to remove the curse. Whatever answer the company has is withheld, and Eamon becomes an image of Everyman pleading to an unanswering sky to remove a curse which applies to all humankind.
"Love's Baby Gone East of the Redneck Riviera" is about a woman who conceals the existence of her parents and siblings when she gets married. She still cannot face the truth when her stepbrother, his wife, and their three children show up homeless and nearly penniless, looking for a few days shelter until the stepbrother can find a job. She cannot believe her husband will accept them -- or her either -- once he sees them. So she continues her past practice, this time trying to hide the relatives in the apartment until she can think of something. But the plot miscarries, the catalyst-fight begins, and out of it comes the revelation.
Blue Henry, a young Florida orange-picker, easily distracted and highly imaginative, has a talent for projecting himself into the lives of other people. When his boss gives him twenty dollars to buy a suit for the funeral of rich Thomas Christian Cavanaugh, he goes to town, where he hears some curious talk. Some folks say the old man was murdered, others say he isn't dead at all. Blue Henry imagines himself Cavanaugh's murderer, goes to the funeral parlor to find out what's what, and there, in an absolutely comic sequence, finds his own identity.
Buddy Boy ("One Last Dance with Lawrence Welk") grumbles because he has to go with his dad every other Saturday to do good deeds for a neighbor. He learns from the experience. He learns from an owl that is trapped in Mrs. Rottweiler's bedroom, a cake on her kitchen table, the eleven baseballs she has appropriated, the Lawrence Welk show she forces him to watch, and her funeral, attended by people near and far. He learns she is not just a wacky old lady who protects her flower beds with an outfielder's glove. He learns enough to do the one thing at the end that will synthesize all of his experience.
Readers of these stories are moved through a time they cannot pinpoint and a space or landscape that is realistic and ordinary but unfamiliar, peopled by countryfolk and non-stereotypical rednecks who surf the skies for news of immortality. Treated to both ordinary and magical events, they enjoy the tone and style of the narratory voice en route. Waiting for the final message, they are put off by a lull, a pause in the action.
What comes next is a Joycean epiphany, a flash of insight by which the story reveals its own meaning. Dubus occasionally uses this technique, but basically is not willing to let everything hang on a single statement. Trevor is a master of it; his epiphanies implode, flash inwardly, generate insight to a specific situation. They also arouse strong emotion at times, which is specifically directed, e.g., anger at the Leeson family for killing Milton. By contrast, Bellis's epiphanies explode: they reveal the entire story in a moment as well as the larger vision to which it opens out. The emotion which they arouse is also strong but more universal; Lawrence Welk, the superlative among Bellis's stories, makes us cry for the human condition. Finally, Trevor stops with the epiphany itself. Bellis, a little neater, sometimes finds a device to clear the stage, close the door and turn out the lights -- waving a formal goodbye to the high road upon which he has placed us for a brief thirty minutes. All three collections are well worth the price of admission.
MARGO WILLIAMS
In this collection of all thirty of her short stories to date, the Scottish novelist and theologian Sara Maitland demonstrates her characteristic combination of literary invention and religious suggestiveness. She reinhabits myths, fairy tales, and history with the fresh eyes and voice of a contemporary woman, revealing depths and twists in the old characters and actions that we have never suspected before.
The voice always comes first, and almost every one is so credible you suspend belief without a murmur. "Gretel will come through the forest again this afternoon, as she has come so many times before, since that first time," begins the Hansel and Gretel witch of the title story, who still lives in the gingerbread house in the woods with spun sugar windows. But this witch loves women and children and wants to help them with all their problems no matter how foolish they are. Though she performs abortions on demand, she is even happier to provide the natural magic necessary for conception. "I do not choose. . . . I do not judge. . . . I bind up her wounds."
There are light and heavy stories here, almost all rewarding. Perhaps the lone exception is "Fag Hags: a Field Guide," which seems very British and doesn't quite make it to this side of the ocean. Some are humorous. The humor has great poignancy in "The Flower Garden," in which a young girl plants carefully selected flower seeds in her uterus with astonishing results. (One of the rewarding extra pleasures of reading Maitland is that she knows a great deal about many things, among them science and gardening, which she shares richly as part of her stories.) Sometimes the humor is black, as in "Apple Picking," which contrasts the lives of two women, one a self-absorbed new mother, a restaurant critic who craves sensual pleasure; the other a medieval ascetic, always hungry, who chides herself for her weakness and remains loving. The ending is as surreal as a Bosch painting in the clarity with which it exaggerates the human effects of good and evil in these characters. Readers of Maitland's Big Enough God may be reminded of her statement in that "feminist search for a joyful theology" that incompatible discourses may sometimes be needed to provide a full description of human or divine reality.
Many of these stories are revisionist readings, emphasizing injustice to women, focusing on betrayals women have experienced from parents, lovers, society, even doctors. "Forceps delivery" is a horrifying recreation of an historical experience -- painful and dehumanizing -- of a women dwarf giving birth under the care of a French doctor concerned only about the new techniques he wishes to patent after this 'experiment'. In the poetically evocative "Siren Song" the brutal rape of the innocent young Persephone becomes the reason the sirens grow talons and take to luring sailors to their destruction. "When they die. . . . we laugh; and for a few moments our pain is softened, our grief is comforted, our anger is slaked, our desire is fulfilled." "Burning Times" evokes a village in late medieval times which turns against two women who love one another and burns them as witches. Told from the point of view of the daughter of one of them, it conveys the harsh world of intolerance and repression which leads the narrator to conclude: "They say it is better to marry than to burn, but only just I think, only just."
But it would be a great injustice to Maitland's fiction to emphasize the themes of these stories and not their power to move the reader. The range of narrators and settings is breathtaking, from acrobats and long distance runners to mythical figures (like Daphne and Artemis) and even the Biblical characters of Sarah and Hagar. The stories span the centuries and the globe, with male as well as female narrators: a reformed Conquistador sails the Amazon seeking a different sort of power than that of the sword. The author's imagination flags only once, when she tells us -- in Victorian authorial fashion but in her own words -- that she simply cannot make the effort to inhabit Abraham's psyche when he banished Hagar and prepared to sacrifice Isaac:
I thought, I really did, in all sincerity, that I would write Abraham's story too. . . But I'm not going to. . . . not because I don't think I could do Abraham's story, but because I can't be bothered.
Of course, this is not a failure of imagination, but just another instance of the astonishing freedom of style and voice Sara Maitland exhibits in these stunning stories. If you try Angel Maker and like it, be sure to go on to Three Times Table and Ancestral Truths to meet this challenging author at her novelistic best.
SALLY CUNNEEN
Rejecting the argument that Luke did not have a coherent theology of the cross, Peter Doble discerns its rudiments in three distinctive elements in the Lukan report of Jesus' death: Jesus' dying utterance (Luke 23:46), the statement that the centurion "glorified God" after he saw what had happened (23:47a), and the centurion's declaration that Jesus was dikaios (23:47b).
The centurion's declaration is the key element. After demonstrating the inadequacy of the widespread translation of this occurrence of dikaios as "innocent," Doble translates it as "righteous." The centurion was voicing not a political apology for Jesus' innocence but a religious assertion about his righteousness. Luke characterized Zechariah, Elizabeth, Simeon, Joseph of Arimathea, and Cornelius as "righteous" people who delighted in God's will and demonstrated this commitment in their actions. Luke also used the word three times when referring to Jesus in Acts. In Acts 7:52 and 22:14 it serves as "shorthand for a christological model which highlights the unexpected vindication in the presence of his persecutors of God's humiliated man" (150-51). This christological model is based on various scriptural passages, especially passages in the Psalms and the Wisdom of Solomon. Less convincing is Doble's claim that Luke was thinking of this model and not of the Suffering Servant when composing Acts 3:14. The centurion's declaration that Jesus was righteous (23:47b), Doble claims, also reflects Luke's use of this scriptural model.
This dikaios-model also lies behind the wording of Jesus' dying utterance (23:46), for these words faithfully express the character of the righteous man as portrayed in various psalms and Wisdom 3:1. Luke's desire to portray Jesus in accordance with this model precluded his retention of the cry in Mark 15:34; Luke required a dying utterance which expressed Jesus' confident trust in God.
Luke opened 23:47 by declaring that the centurion "glorified God" when he saw what had happened. Doble argues that the words "glorified God" are a Lukan verbal signal that an aspect of the divine plan of salvation had just been fulfilled. Six occurrences of these words in the gospel are in stories of Jesus' healings which fulfill aspects of the Isaianic quotation in Luke 4:18-19 and/or illustrate aspects of Jesus' response to John's disciples in Luke 7:22. While Doble's discussion of these six passages is suggestive, he concedes that the words "glorified God" occur in less than half of the gospel's miracle stories. The shepherds were also "glorifying and praising God" in Luke 2:20. Doble argues that this language represents Luke's way of showing that good news had been proclaimed to the poor. This interpretation is strained, for Luke did not announce this theme until Luke 4:18. Though the words "glorified God" occur only three times in Acts, two of the three follow reports of God's work among the Gentiles, a distinct step in the plan of salvation. The occurrence of these words in Luke 23:47a is also significant, for Luke wrote them to depict "a Gentile recognising and responding worshipfully to God's salvation being unfolded before him" (68). But can this interpretation be sustained?
Various scholars have observed that Wisdom 2-5 contains several elements which can be compared with elements in Luke-Acts, including a reference to God as a father, the designation of the righteous man as God's son, the plot of the unrighteous against the righteous man, the death of the victimized righteous man, and his post mortem vindication. Several of these details occur in Luke 23:46-47; these verses, Doble argues, provide a "focal allusion" to Wisdom's dikaios-model. He attempts to buttress this conclusion by identifying other allusions to Wisdom in the Lukan passion predictions and passion narrative; however, these alleged allusions are neither numerous nor compelling. Doble's thesis is also weakened by the fact that Luke never quotes Wisdom.
ROBERT L. MOWERY
In Uncivil Rites, Robert Detweiler, professor of comparative literature at Emory University, describes how American works of fiction (novels, drama, and film), especially through their expression of religious concerns, shape the way Americans publicly engage three contested issues areas: the body politic (the nurturing of a just state); the body erotic (sexuality and the responsibilities of reproduction); and the body apocalyptic (persistence of aggression amidst human struggles for survival).
The body politic is shaped by two fictional works that respond to the execution of the Rosenbergs for treason in 1953: E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel and Robert Coover's The Public Burning. Through detailed, nuanced readings of the historical circumstances of the Rosenberg trial, the two novels, and Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Detweiler outlines the features of a body of public discourse about justice distorted by a quasi-religious dynamic of accusation and confession, the self-serving deflection of evil from the human to the supernatural realm, and the creation of an exhibitionist-voyeuristic public space in which the scapegoat drama obsessively unfolds. Detweiler exposes the unwitting symbiosis of victim and victimizer at work here as the need of the powerful to isolate victims. The willingness of some to be victimized, the desire of the powerful to locate evil in the alien outsider, is matched by the outsider's ascription of evil to the accuser, and the drive of those governing to humiliate victims publicly is aided by the exhibitionist urges of those who find themselves on display.
Detweiler notes early in his discussion that he is not concerned with whether the Rosenbergs were guilty of treason or whether execution was the punishment they deserved (Detweiler himself regards the sentence as "deeply wrong and immoral"), but rather with "what the public lust for punishment conveys about us." Part of what is conveyed is "the frightening power of the drive to find victims who are assigned the guilt of society and whose punishment seems, for a time, to set things straight" (5). This may indeed be the salient message of the literary responses to the Rosenberg affair, but it would seem inappropriate to describe the victims of the Oklahoma bombing as "lusting" for punishment when so many of them say they seek the death penalty to secure what they call "justice." Detweiler's perceptive literary analysis tells us a lot about the unflattering and self-protective impulses that shape contemporary American thinking about guilt, punishment, and justice. But I suspect there is another story to be told as well, one that might engage more directly the views of those who would vehemently resist the characterization of their sense of the appropriateness -- indeed, the moral necessity -- of capital punishment as simply a lust for punishment or the designation of a scapegoat.
"The Body Erotic" is Detweiler's corporeally attentive rubric for what is often referred to as the realm of sexual politics. Detweiler wants to emphasize the positiveness of the bodily dimensions of sexual and familial relationships against what he regards as the tendency of religions in America to diminish or repudiate the body. In John Pielmeier's Agnes of God, Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, and Mary Gordon's The Company of Women, female characters find themselves caught up in a struggle between their own efforts to live fully embodied, erotic lives and the church's desire to control eroticism by spiritualizing it through disembodied practices of piety or domesticating it through marriage. Toni Morrison's Beloved and Nella Larsen's Quicksand depict black women struggling in opposition to a Christianity that condones racism and repudiates the supernaturalism of African-based spiritualism to forge "normal" love relationships in the face of sexual stereotyping from black men as well as whites. Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn's Many Things Have Happened Since He Died explores the intersection of fundamentalist biblicism with late twentieth-century consumerism, offering a chaotic vision of the world in which all productive relations between sex and religion have disintegrated and whatever hope remains can come only at the price of apocalypse. The organizing theme of this part of the book is not a historical event like the Rosenbergs' execution, but an "archetypal sequence" in American life and letters consisting of seduction (vs. romantic courtship), abuse (vs. a happy family life), and abandonment (vs. life-long fidelity). The O. J. Simpson affair reminds me dramatically of just how apt this three-part sequence is, right down to the dovetailing of that trial's racial complexities with Detweiler's analysis of the place of racism in the archetypal sequence lived out by the African-American characters of some of his texts. Detweiler seeks to nuance his analysis of this recurring narrative pattern by examining how four themes -- shame, pain, awe, and mystery -- provide glimpses of the various ways the protagonists of these works seek to bring their bodies into alignment with their religious faith. But the contexts in which this alignment is sought are oppressive, and the stories told are largely, though not entirely, stories of failure.
In "The Body Apocalyptic" Detweiler demarcates the space of three related American urges: the lust for revelation through dramatic, supernatural channels; the urge toward envisioning the revelatory future as a violent, victim-creating apocalypse; and the acceptance of environmental destruction as the consequence of apocalyptic revelation. This part of the book is structured around the deep metaphorical, moral, and literary resonances between two historical events otherwise seemingly unrelated: the 1890 massacre of the Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee and the Vietnam War. The texts under discussion are the film Apocalypse Now, Philip Caputo's Vietnam War novel, Indian Country, and Louise Erdrich's depiction of Native American life in Tracks. Detweiler argues that these texts display a deep American urge to conquer the "threatening Other," an urge that now extends to the decimation of the natural environment. He draws on the organizing and thematic structure of the preceding part of the book in order to demonstrate the continuities and discontinuities between erotic and apocalyptic desires. The Native Americans were, like the participants on both sides in the Vietnam War, variously seduced, abused, and abandoned. The literary texts in this section take up again the themes that surfaced in the narratives of eroticism, but apocalyptic sensibilities have transformed shame into paranoia, pain into trauma, awe into simulation, and ecstasy into melancholy. Once again, a recent American incident -- the orchestrated suicides by which members of Heaven's Gate relinquished the "vehicles" of their bodies -- highlights for me the contemporary relevance of Detweiler's insightful analysis. Also, as in the preceding parts of the book, he sees religion in American life, at least as expressed in these works of fiction, largely as a negative force, in this case both abetting apocalyptic scenarios that give shape to public aspirations for the future and shaping (and misshaping) human beings in ways that make those scenarios compelling for them.
Detweiler concludes his study by seeking to redress an imbalance created by the fact that the texts he examines are largely critical of the role of religion in American public life. As he observes, despite this criticism, the characters themselves seem reluctant to discard religious belief and practice altogether. He concludes, then, with more optimistic remarks gathered under the themes of family life, confession, and language. Although the families presented in the texts are dysfunctional, within them one nonetheless catches glimpses of respect, compassion, and reverence amidst desperate struggles for survival. By offering a series of confessions to their readers, the texts' narrators implicate readers in the narrators' private visions, thereby rendering them public. In the interaction between narrator and reader, private fictions become available for public discourse, and public life is enriched with new possibilities. Finally, the language of the fictions is itself revelatory and apocalyptic, but what is finally unveiled is the potential of metaphor (and of narrative as extended metaphor) for new expression. While few of the characters of these fictions "learn to live fully and artfully toward the end," "such education is what their authors fashion in their texts and offer to us as an exemplary way of embodying the public realm" (214). At the end of his account, then, Detweiler discerns hope just where one might have expected a professor of comparative literature to find it: in the language of literature itself.
Uncivil Rites is a rich and engaging study by a thinker of impressive knowledge and insight. I have done little justice to the subtle and complex literary readings that comprise most of the book and make it so rewarding. I wonder, however, whether all the larger claims of the book are fully warranted by what is actually demonstrated. For example, I am not sure how representative of American urges and desires this selection of fiction really is, or how to know when what an imaginative literary artist thinks about something is also what "America" thinks. Likewise, how representative of American attitudes about religion or American religious practices are the highly charged and often polemical depictions of religion in these works? What religion may or may not be outside these fictions is little examined, and yet rather large claims about religion in American life (and not just in these texts) are advanced on nearly every page. Of course, Detweiler's project is not to correlate texts with extratextual realities, but rather to show how these texts shape and constitute subworlds of public attitudes and discourse. Nonetheless, he has a confidence in the representative and culturally revelatory character of fiction that others may not share. Finally, the book seems a bit overdetermined by a desire to organize and schematize. In the end, I am a bit uncertain how to move from this organizing, conceptual architecture to Detweiler's concluding agreement with the authors of these fictions that these texts constitute "an exemplary way of embodying the public realm." Even when I freely acknowledge that these works provide examples of the ways some literary artists shape distinctive public realms in the ways Detweiler has described, I am less sure in what sense these examples should be exemplary for us. Yet to ask for something more may be to ask for something that religion rather than literature should provide -- namely, an account of the end not as termination but as telos and an answer to why one should live toward it (and preserve the possibility for others to live toward it) at all. Such a productive possibility for religion in American life remains largely unexplored in Robert Detweiler's provocative and rewarding study.
JOHN DAVID DAWSON
As a philosophy professor at a liberal arts college, I frequently come across parents who doubt the relevance of philosophical study to the lives that their sons and daughters will lead after graduation. At the root of such doubts, of course, lies the widespread assumption that philosophical theory is one thing, ordinary life another, and that each exists pretty much independently of the other. What this assumption ignores, however, is that our understanding of the so-called everyday world is in large part the result of our internalizing, in ways most of us are unaware of, ideas and attitudes that are the subject of enduring philosophical debate. To the extent that we remain unaware of this influence, we lose sight of alternative and potentially more fulfilling ways of ordering our lives, both individually and collectively. The task of elucidating this interplay between philosophical theory and everyday practice thus takes on signal importance, and there may be no philosopher alive who does it better than Charles Taylor.
The thirteen essays in Philosophical Arguments (most of which have appeared elsewhere) range over a diverse number of topics, but they are largely unified by Taylor's commitment to elucidating the ways in which our unwitting adoption of controversial philosophical positions structures our lives and sense of possibilities. The first essay, "Overcoming Epistemology," which considers Descartes's seminal work on the foundations of knowledge, offers a particularly nice example of Taylor's approach to the history of ideas. As Taylor reminds us, Descartes's quest for certainty led him first to the individual's private mind as the ultimate guarantor of truth ("I think, therefore I am") and then, more dubiously, to a procedure (the famous test of clarity and distinctness) for verifying ideas generally. For Descartes, the mind achieves knowledge only by following fixed rules of procedure, at its best operating in a computer-like manner so thoroughly disengaged from its surroundings that both our physical bodies and social communities must appear only as obstacles to knowledge, as distorting distractions whose influence we must try to escape. This isolated and disembodied subject is, for Descartes what human beings essentially are.
But as Taylor demonstrates, this epistemological model is flawed and seriously distorts our approach to human inquiry. Human beings do not attain knowledge only or even primarily through the episodic, disengaged, and monological process Descartes describes. Instead, argues Taylor (following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein), the world always appears to us fundamentally as a practical fact of engagement, as something we must negotiate in the course of getting on with our lives; and our pursuit of knowledge relevant to human experience must reflect this relation. While Descartes's computational model of the mind may be appropriate for some areas of inquiry (such as mathematics), it has serious weaknesses if endorsed as the paradigm of human knowledge generally. It undervalues the importance of inquiry undertaken with our fellow human beings; it fails to recognize that our physical embodiment is not simply a contingent fact that can be ignored, but a defining element of our humanity; and most importantly, in modeling knowledge claims on the type of apodictic certainty attainable in mathematics, it demotes judgments of morality and value to a rank below true knowledge and helps prepare the way for the kind of relativism that sees moral debate as nothing more than the assertion of individual preferences.
Many of the other essays explore similar ways in which philosophical assumptions shape our ways of thinking, with the topics of language and politics receiving special attention. Regarding language, Taylor considers the still-popular view, whose roots go back to Locke and Condillac, that language is simply a device for relating ideas in our head to an already existing world, and he shows how this impoverished conception ignores language's role both in shaping our understanding of the world and in making possible emotional and expressive experiences that help define what it means to be human. On politics, readers will find particularly helpful Taylor's discussion of how the doctrine of individualism endorsed by utilitarians, rational-choice theorists, and some liberals has led to a conception of politics, dominant especially in the United States, in which political communities can provide only convergent individualized goods (e.g., protection of each individual's rights) but no genuinely common goods of the sort that rely intrinsically on community with others (e.g., the good an orchestra affords its members). Citizens who accept this atomistic conception, argues Taylor, not only close off potentially valuable ways of living with their fellows, but also tend to become disengaged from their political institutions and more vulnerable to the soft despotism Tocqueville warned about. Other essays offer illuminating insights into various topics including the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, the distinction between myth and science, and Heidegger's connection to deep ecology.
It should be mentioned that most of these essays were written for professional philosophers and assume some familiarity with important figures and movements in that tradition. And the arguments Taylor presents, though accessible to nonspecialists willing to read carefully, are demanding and complex. This could not be otherwise, however, for Taylor's goal -- to disclose the prereflective assumptions that shape the way we understand ourselves and our world -- is perhaps the most difficult of all philosophical tasks. Since Kant, we have known that such assumptions constitute the necessary framework that allows us to make sense of our experience at all, and so no attempt to render this framework wholly transparent can ever be successful, as Taylor recognizes. Nonetheless, this exercise in hermeneutics is essential, for it is the only way we can, if not escape what we are, then better understand ourselves and shape our world in appropriate ways. Several years ago Taylor wrote an important essay about human beings entitled "Self-Interpreting Animals." That's as good a description of the human condition as one is likely to get, and Philosophical Arguments should help us reach better and more enriching interpretations of just what kind of animal we are. Absolute self-knowledge is probably an incoherent notion, and in any case is something human beings shall never attain. What we can hope for is an ever-increasing degree of self-awareness. It's no small achievement that these essays significantly further that goal.
DAVID MCCABE
For many peace activists and others of good will, Daniel and Philip Berrigan are heroes and prophets whose strong moral stances command respect even when their actions seem useless. But for many others, they are annoying nuisances or even threats to the nation's defenses. This book probes the character of these charismatic Catholic brothers: their strong faith, the depths of their convictions, and their uncanny influence on others. It portrays them as two supremely self-possessed men who have taken lots of slings and arrows over the past three decades but are not about to be deterred by critics no matter how well-meaning.
The two youngest in a family of six brothers, they feared their hardworking, authoritarian, Irish Catholic father, and loved their patient, firm, German Catholic mother. In early childhood Daniel and Philip endured the bleak winters of northern Minnesota, then struggled through the Depression during their school years in Syracuse. Both boys were nurtured by their mother's love of literature and the traditional Catholic pieties of parish and parochial school.
Dan, physically frail and introspective, entered the Jesuits after high school in 1938, inspired by the Society's mixture of practicality and spirituality. Phil, three years younger and the All-American Boy of the family, was drafted into the Army in 1943. The racism he encountered in the South during his military training appalled him. After the war, and college at Holy Cross, he joined the Josephites, a small religious congregation whose apostolate was to work among black Catholics. Phil was ordained a Josephite in 1955, three years after Dan was ordained a Jesuit.
Despite the conformist ethos of the 1950s, the Berrigans quickly showed their independent streaks. Dan, stirred by controversies about the worker-priests during a tertianship year in France, persistently advocated the church's involvement in the everyday realities of people's lives. Phil castigated the racial evils of segregated Washington during his first postordination assignment in a black parish there. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a revelatory moment for both. It showed that awesome world-destroying power was in the hands of otherwise "good" people who seemed firmly committed to unleash it if the other side didn't back down.
Two years later, the Berrigans were among the first American priests to recognize the immorality of the Vietnam War. They began to oppose it strenuously, to the consternation of their religious superiors. For many of us involved in the peace movement in the 1960s, the Berrigans' 1968 burning of Catonsville draft files was a defining moment. It moved opposition to the war from protest and noncooperation into active intervention.
As the war finally ground to its sorry end, the Berrigans directed their attention to the nuclear threat which put the entire world in peril. Their bold leadership inspired others to join with them in a series of Plowshares actions -- hammering nuclear delivery systems, pouring blood on the grisly weapons, prayerfully awaiting arrest, using their day in court to shine a public spotlight on the obscured obscenity of nuclear deterrence.
Disarmed and Dangerous is a biography that reads like a novel. It tells the story with a journalistic flair that makes the reader keep turning pages to see what happens next. In outlining the Berrigans' journey, however, the authors underestimate the impact of the Second Vatican Council. For priests ordained in the 1950s, the Council was both energizing and polarizing. While generating new life and spirit in those already motivated to improve social conditions, it became a sign of contradiction in a church where too many were ill-prepared to absorb its sudden epiphanies.
The book is neither hagiography nor exposé. It quotes veterans of the peace movement who believe that the Plowshares actions with their inevitable prison terms are "yielding diminishing or even self-defeating returns." Many who agree that the nation's militaristic streak, of which nuclear weapons are the most blatant feature, infects the whole of society and needs to be resisted nonviolently, doubt that pouring blood on nose cones and hammering on bombers and submarines is the most effective way to resist it.
But, as Dan said after a recent trial of Phil and others who damaged a nuclear weapons ship in Maine, "God says to the prophets, 'No one is going to hear you, but keep talking.' "
GERARD A. VANDERHAAR
The feeling that something is wrong with today's democracy in America is pervasive in every corner of our society. Drugs, crime, child abuse, illiteracy, poverty, homelessness, discrimination, racism, inadequate health care, lack of trust in our public officials, bureaucratic insensitivity, decreased return on one's wages, a deepening divide between rich and poor, fear of a permanent underclass, and home-grown terrorism produce widespread paranoia, fear, and insecurity. Democracy no longer seems able to deliver on its promises of the good life and the American dream, of equal treatment and opportunity for all, of faith in progress and confidence in a better future, and more importantly perhaps, of providing us with the opportunity and capacity to play a constructive role in self-government.
How explain this lamentable state of affairs? Current literature on the status of today's democratic theory and practice takes the form of a debate between two groups, those who favor a communitarian approach, stressing community and the common good, and those who favor a liberal approach with its emphasis on pluralism, individual freedom, and rights. While the former locates the source of our democracy's problems in the loss of community and civic-mindness, the latter locates it in the lack of public reason and justice.
Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent contributes to the communitarian side of this important debate by locating the sources of the discontent with today's American democracy in our impoverished vision of citizenship, in "the fear that, individually and collectively, we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives,. . . . [and in] the sense that, from family neighborhood to nation, the moral fabric of community is unraveling before us" (4). American politics, we learn, has lost the civic voice and the civic engagement that self-government requires. The result is tragic for us all: civic disempowerment, erosion of community, loss of civic life, and retreat from civic engagement.
Reflecting his interests in the merits of republicanism and communitarianism, Sandel undertakes three important tasks: tracing the genesis of today's dominant liberal ideology and the public philosophy which it informs -- what he calls the "procedural republic" (4); charting the decline of the civic-republican tradition which dominated the early American republic of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, et alia, and which in the last forty or fifty years has collapsed into the liberalism of today's procedural republic; and envisioning how the republican tradition, with its emphasis on self-government and community, may offer a corrective to our currently impoverished civic life.
Democracy's Discontent reiterates and strengthens Sandel's criticism of liberalism and liberal ideology. The vita publica which gives rise to democracy's present predicament is the construct of a version of liberal "public" philosophy which emerged from the tradition of liberal "political" philosophy which runs from John Locke to John Rawls (4-5). It is in the concepts espoused by this recent version of liberalism and in the particular public life which these concepts affirm that we find the source of the disempowerment, disillusionment, and discontent that afflict our present public life.
Particularly damaging to democratic life, liberty, and community is the liberal concept of neutrality. This is the idea that, given a plurality of different moral and religious conceptions of the good life, the government should refrain from affirming or promoting any one particular view, the intent being to protect the citizen's persona, will, and freedom of choice from being controlled by the government.
In this view, the right is prior to the good, and the liberty of the citizen is a constraint on the power of the government; what is primary is the framework of rights by which persons are accepted, treated, and respected as free, independent, and unencumbered selves, each capable of choosing his/her own values and ends. These rights, as well as the principles of justice that secure them, claims the liberal, are not subject to political bargain, nor can they be sacrificed for the interests of society at large or for the sake of the common good. And each citizen, for whose benefit the rights are secured, is to be treated as a separate person and is to be respected as an end-in-itself.
This liberal vision of democracy, according to Sandel, lacks the "civic resources to sustain self-government," and affirms a public philosophy which "cannot secure the liberty it promises because it cannot inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that liberty requires" (6). It transforms citizens into self-sufficient atomistic individuals, each a separate world unto itself, lacking a sense of community and belonging. In contrast, "republicanism affirms a politics of the common good. . . It seeks to cultivate in citizens the qualities of character necessary to the common good of self-government" (25). And, in contrast to the liberal claim that liberty consists in the capacity of persons to choose values and ends, republican theory affirms that "liberty depends on sharing in self-government" (5).
Contra liberalism, republicanism does not remain neutral toward the values and ends that its citizens espouse. The republican notions of freedom and self-government require more than the liberal capacity to choose one's ends and respect others' rights to do the same. They require a formative politics, a politics that cultivates civic virtues, without which "deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good. . . . [and] helping to shape the destiny of the political community" are not possible (5-6). Acquiring a "knowledge of public affairs. . . . a sense of belonging, a concern for the whole, [and] a moral bond with the community whose fate is at stake" are normative requirements; otherwise the common good of sharing in self-government cannot be achieved (5).
These republican and communitarian themes, central to Sandel's work, emerge from a varied and rich tradition which can be traced as far back as the ancient Greeks. In Aristotle, it finds the sources of its notion of community and the common good, while in republican Rome, in republican Florence, and in the early American republic, it finds the sources of its concept of civic virtue.
Democracy's Discontent is clear, readable, and important. Particularly suggestive is the effort to demystify liberal ideology by placing liberalism in an historical context. The meticulous historico-philosophical analysis of key supreme court decisions, showing the historical transition from the republicanism of the past to the liberalism of today, is ingenious and enlightening.
Sandel's exposure of the debilitating consequences of liberalism for our public life should have been matched, however, by an equal effort to explain, and not merely allude to, the debilitating aspects of public life with which the republican tradition coexisted in the past -- "slavery,. . . . the exclusion of women from the public realm,. . . . property qualifications for voting,. . . . [and] nativist hostility to immigrants" (6). Could it be, the liberal might ask, that the past experienced these injustices because of the absence of liberal theory and praxis? Would there have been slavery in ancient Greece, and Rome, or in early America, if the liberal precepts of treating the person as an end-in-itself and respecting the person's rights had been established facets of the ethic of the times?
Democracy's Discontent criticizes liberalism for its failure to instill in the person a sense of community and a propensity for sharing in a common good. Unfortunately, it does not make a similar effort to explain why citizenship and inclusion, which republican and communitarian theories accept as prerequisites for the good life of the community, might not also be used as instruments of exclusion and discrimination -- against the noncitizen, the conscientious objector, the nonconformist, or anyone who remains unconvinced of the goodness of the community's version of the common good.
JOSEPH TUSA
Pascal claimed that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the God of the philosophers. The Jewish philosophical tradition holds the reverse. In God of Abraham, L. E. Goodman presents an extended argument that draws out the implications of that identity thesis, an argument that draws heavily on biblical, rabbinic, and philosophical traditions. His central theme is that God, an absolute and perfect being, is the source and locus of moral, aesthetic, and ontic values.
The author begins by arguing that the sole coherent notion of God is that of a perfect being. His examination of numerous religious and philosophical traditions is guided by two assumptions: anything that will count as God must be exceedingly great; and the notion itself must be coherent. The notion of the divine is fundamentally a value notion: "it is the source of every value -- truth, stability, unity, constancy, integrity, sameness, intelligibility, and beauty" (9-10). Focusing on Abraham's command to sacrifice Isaac, Goodman argues that Abraham recognized the angel's command not to sacrifice Isaac as divinely instituted insofar as he recognized that evil is inconsistent with God's nature (21-23). Like many of the philosophers, Abraham construed God as a perfect being.
Goodman goes on to examine the ontological and cosmological arguments for the existence of God. He holds that the former is ineffective as a polemic, but that, according to the cosmological arguments, the ultimate being would be self-explanatory. This is puzzling. To claim that God explains God's own existence may be understood in two ways. 1) God is God's efficient cause, or 2) God's existence, by its nature, does not need to be explained. The latter position does not make God self-explanatory; rather, it makes the existence of God an ultimate fact -- a position consistent with a positivistic account of explanation, an account that Goodman rejects (74-75). But the former position fares no better. As Caterus and Arnauld objected in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge, 1984), the notion of an efficient cause requires that the cause be distinct in concept and reality from its effect, and so the notion of self-causation (and self-explanation) is incoherent. Thus, it is unclear that any version of the cosmological argument which alludes to self-explanation can succeed. But, perhaps, I have misunderstood Goodman's version of the argument, since early in the third chapter he claims, "Because God's reality is the apex of reasoning, the summit toward which all explorations point, the monotheist's affirmations of God's existence can bear no certainty" (79).
Goodman later examines the relationship between God as a perfect being and moral values. "Ethics" is construed broadly. God as the exemplar of perfection is not merely the source of a moral code. The perfect being is taken as the end toward which all humans ought to strive. This striving toward perfection is a way of life. It has intellectual implications, aesthetic implications, implications for health and fitness, as well as moral implications. Goodman's properly moral considerations are broadly Kantian in orientation.
While the first three chapters, as well as the last, are concerned with fairly broad issues in philosophy of religion, chapters 4 through 7 center on issues in Jewish philosophy of religion; the interweaving of the Mosaic tradition, the prophetic tradition, and the rabbinic tradition regarding moral praxis. Chapter 5 is an extended discussion of the development of moral philosophy in the traditions of Saadiah Goan and Maimonides; the meaning of ritual, weaving together various strands of the tradition from Saadiah, the rabbis, and Maimonides. Goodman stresses the symbolic role of ritual, arguing that rituals intend values and express attitudes toward those values. His treatment of "biblical laws of diet and sex," draws on biblical, rabbinic, and philosophical traditions to explicate the notions of purity and contagion, personhood and its violation, dietary rituals and the abhorrence of violence, and circumcision as an expression of the precedence of the ethical.
God of Abraham is a scholarly work whose author is equally at home when discussing the Bible, the rabbinic tradition, and Saadiah and Maimonides, not to mention Islamic and Western philosophy. It is also an ambitious work, at points, perhaps, overly ambitious. In arguing that the core notion of God is that of a perfect being, Goodman surveys Western and Mideastern religious and philosophical traditions, but devotes little attention to Eastern traditions. In some of the latter, it is less clear that there is a core notion of divine perfection. Hence, he might have done better to indicate that there is a well established philosophical and religious tradition according to which God is a perfect being, a claim that is unquestionably true. Those who question Goodman's analysis of the notion of God will have similar misgivings regarding some of the conclusions he draws.
Nonetheless, Goodman's is a fascinating book. For specialists, he advances scholarship on Saadiah and Maimonides. And for those who can claim only a limited background in Jewish philosophy of religion, his careful interweaving of the biblical, rabbinic, and philosophical traditions should prove both fascinating and informative.
DANIEL E. FLAGE
For many people, Roman Catholics included, the inner workings of the Vatican seem an impenetrable mystery. The function of cardinals, the operation of obscure "congregations," the private life of the pope, and the finances of the Holy See all exist as curiosities, not quite hidden, but inaccessible nonetheless. Thomas Reese, in his excellent new book, has brought this hidden world into public view. In a succinct style, he leads the reader on a tour through the Vatican's inner world. Nine chapters explore the role of the pope, the college of Bishops, the function of synods, the College of Cardinals, the operation of the curia, the Vatican Staff, papal leadership, Vatican finances, and relations with the outside world. In a final chapter Reese reflects upon the particular challenges that the Vatican faces as it moves into the next millennium. While Reese offers fascinating descriptions of the various functions of the Vatican, he has also managed to weave into the narrative a subtle yet thoughtful critique.
As a source of information about the operation of the Vatican, the book excels. Reese reminds readers that Vatican City is the smallest independent state in the world and that it is the only remaining absolute monarchy in Europe. He explains the difference between "Ordinary" and "Extraordinary" synods, the complex history of the College of Cardinals, and new rule changes that make it possible for a new pope to be elected by a simple majority (instead of the old system requiring two-thirds). He also details the internationalization of the church under John Paul II. Reese notes, amusingly, that the "Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith" is but the current name for the old "Inquisition," and he explains the way in which the various Vatican congregations carry out the agenda of the pope. He claims that the Vatican has taken steps to clean up its finances in recent years, even submitting to an external audit for the first time in history. As a large, multinational and highly compact organization, the Vatican that emerges from Reese's text can only be called impressive.
Reese handles Vatican officials equally well. Although the Vatican is a large bureaucracy and many of the workers are "careerists," he is careful to note that most do their work out of deep commitment to the church. Turnover in various Vatican offices is low, firing nearly unheard of, lay workers are paid better than their Italian counterparts but lay professionals somewhat less. Like any large organization, the Vatican has its own centers of power and its own powerful men (and it is almost entirely men). Bishops who head congregations, for example, are likely candidates for promotion. The Secretary of State is the second most powerful person in the Vatican and the pope's personal secretary (a man) is the third. The Vatican diplomatic corps is well respected internationally at least in part because of the excellent training they receive at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy. We learn that John Paul II has a more relaxed leadership style than his predecessor but enjoys a working lunch with intense intellectual conversation. Cardinal Ratzinger meets with the pope every Friday, but other cardinals must often wait. The mountain of information Reese presents offers the reader a rich sense of the complexity of this deeply traditional, yet surprisingly responsive, center of Catholic ecclesiastical life.
Inside the Vatican offers more than details about the organization of the Vatican, however. Each chapter includes a subtle assessment of the implication of a given policy for the health and future of the Catholic Church. As Reese explains, historical forces operating in the West since the Enlightenment have had the interesting effect of liberating the Vatican from external pressure and control. The governments of Europe no longer care much about the election of bishops or the direction of internal Vatican affairs. As a result, the church is more centralized in the late twentieth century than it has been at any time in its long history. For Reese the increasing ease of communication and travel make it likely that this centralizing trend will continue. Indeed, many inside the Vatican would very much like to see a more tightly controlled, albeit smaller, church. Reese, however, believes that this centralizing trend will only damage the church in the end.
Examples abound. Reese claims that the Synod of Bishops has not succeeded in carrying out the mission intended for it by Vatican II because episcopal appointments have become so tightly controlled that Synod participants simply defer to the pope. He is highly critical of the pope's decision to allow the next conclave to select a pope by simple majority; this has increased the likelihood of a conservative victory and decreased the need for dialogue and compromise. Vatican offices have too much control, Reese believes. Consultation is uneven, and when it does occur, dissenting voices are rarely heard. Reese much prefers wider involvement of local churches in church governance. He envisions something like a "communion of churches" rather than a rigorously controlled and centralized hierarchy. He also suggests reducing Vatican bureaucratic bloat by ending the requirement that all high-ranking Vatican officials be bishops or cardinals. In this way individuals could return to their dioceses at the end of their terms.
Reese is particularly critical of the Vatican's current leadership style, a style that he believes will not enable the church to meet the challenges of the next millennium. The pope's desire to foster unity through the appointment of conservative bishops has often resulted in deeper alienation of local churches. Reese claims that "the relationship between theologians and the papacy is worse today than at any time since the Reformation" and that the number of theologians under investigation is at an "all-time high, even exceeding the numbers during the modernist crisis." The situation with theologians is particularly troublesome since the Vatican will need them to respond to the intellectual challenges of the next century: "a breach between the intellectual and administrative leaders of an organization is. . . . a recipe for disaster" (260). Equally troublesome are the alienation of women, whom Reese refers to as the primary religious educators, and the statistics that show that 73 percent of the adult Catholic population claim that what the pope says makes no difference in their lives. Reese's assessment of the situation is that the Vatican ought to use the new advances in communication not to centralize even more but to explore the possibility of creating a "communion of churches" with a stronger college of bishops and a more restrained curia.
Reese has written a very good book. He combines mastery of the details of Vatican organization with a trenchant and fair critique of that organization. All those interested in the complex web of Vatican affairs and who care about the Roman Catholic Church will benefit from its pages.
JOHN J. O'KEEFE
There are a couple of things that characterize Robert Wuthnow's work (the part of it I know) that I really like. First, in contrast with the unconvincing pose of "objectivity" that so many social scientists feel obliged to adopt, he cares deeply and personally about his subject matter and is not ashamed to put forward his own view of how things should be. In the present work, Wuthnow makes it plain that he is disturbed by the decline of church membership, commitment, and support, especially in the mainline denominations. He believes that the churches are not speaking to Christians' everyday concerns. Spirituality includes all of life, and too many people are separating their religion from their economic life. Helping the poor is an important aspect of the Christian life, and churches should be doing more in this area, not just volunteering with poor individuals, but organizing responses at the institutional level. If the churches preached more convincingly about stewardship, and offered more practical help, they would be more relevant to people, and would gain support. I agree with his basic position on these issues, and I admire him for founding his sociological research program on this normative foundation.
I also like the way the sociology is done, and the way it is presented. This book is about what is going on at the grassroots of American Christianity, out in the parishes. It is not a book about what seminary professors think, or about what the National Council of Churches is doing and how CBS is reacting to it, or about the politics of denominational pronouncements on economics. What Wuthnow offers us is more rare, but more relevant, because it is about the church as ordinary people experience it at the local level. In addition to the usual type of questionnaire material, Wuthnow and his staff have done open-ended interviews with pastors and laypeople, and have collected and analyzed sermons. The author can therefore present vivid anecdotes and quotations with some confidence that they are representative of a substantial group of the population. The reader doesn't need to question the accuracy of Wuthnow's characterization of the situation, but can learn from the wealth of quantitative and qualitative information that is presented.
Still, some things about this book frustrated me. I wonder whether the long, slow decline of the mainline churches is best described as a crisis. I suppose historians talk about thirty-year crises -- this one is at least that old -- but most people think of a crisis as a sudden event. If we try to apply the term to the churches' difficulty speaking to economic life, however, then we're dealing with a problem that is at least a thousand years old. In short, I think the book would have benefitted from some historical perspective.
Giving the book a longer historical outlook might have made it seem less pessimistic. Wuthnow seems disheartened by the lack of spiritual depth in most Christians' views of the concept of stewardship. Yet the evidence he presents suggests to me that over the last thirty years we have come a long way toward a broader and deeper view of stewardship. In the 1960s and 1970s, all that stewardship meant to most people was their level of giving to the church. Some of that persists, of course, but Wuthnow's interviews suggest that many ministers and laypeople have come to accept a concept of stewardship that encompasses all of their economic lives, and expands to include environmental issues as well. In fact, some of the lay discontent is the product of the clergy's failure to articulate an expanded concept of stewardship in a time when fund-raising seems more urgent. I agree with Wuthnow that there is a long way to go. The practical importance of the stewardship concept has not been worked out well enough yet, let alone articulated from the pulpit. But let's acknowledge the progress that has been made.
The pessimistic tone of the book is reinforced by Wuthnow's tendency to find fault with whatever strategy clergy use to broaden the stewardship idea. The old idea of stewardship as giving is not broad enough, but stewardship as responsibility is too burdensome to speak to overworked, overcommitted modern Americans, and may collapse to mere middle-class virtue. Or stewardship as good management or trusteeship turns into a form of deism, not a satisfactory modern Christianity. Any way of treating the stewardship idea in sermon form can, pushed far enough, be made to seem theologically weak or absurd. The author is not being helpful when he pursues this rhetorical line too far.
The solutions Wuthnow offers are sometimes little different from the ones he criticizes, and some are vulnerable to the same difficulties he sees with others. It is fine to teach about generosity, responsibility, and the temptations of greed, but couldn't this become just more middle-class virtue? Holding personal-finance training in the church is a good idea, but what's so spiritual about it? Having small groups in the church sometimes discuss economic matters (best in conjunction with appropriately themed sermons) is Wuthnow's strongest suggestion, and it's well worth pursuing. But, as he admits, it could easily become just a way for people to find reinforcement for ideas about economics that come from the secular culture, not from Christian spiritual reflection. There are no easy answers.
Wuthnow's suggestions about the churches' response to poverty are sound. Action for the poor must be based on our sense of faithfulness to the will of God, not on guilt about our affluence or inflated expectations about the effectiveness of our efforts. The poor deserve our help because they are fellow image-bearers of God, whom God loves, and not because of their personal characteristics. The church probably accomplishes the most, and sustains participation the best, when it operates at the community level in cooperation with other churches and agencies.
This book is well worth reading for church leaders and concerned laypeople. There is a lot to be learned from it about the dilemmas the church faces in America in the 1990s. If the solutions do not always seem to be clear or compelling, it is because the problems are extremely difficult -- problems the church has struggled with in different forms from its very beginnings.
JOHN P. TIEMSTRA
In this broad-ranging and engaging work, Ninian Smart, J. F. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religions at the University of California, presents an anatomy of religious life, describing seven broad dimensions that characterize religions and worldviews, especially as found in the modern period. Bracketing the questions of truth and value, Smart examines "with informed empathy" how the practices and beliefs of religions and worldviews function in human life. Despite the subtitle, the object of study is not only or even primarily the world's beliefs, but rather the complex interaction of various dimensions of belief and practice.
To accomplish this task Smart proposes a phenomenology that is both "dynamic," i.e., examining how religions constantly change, and "dialectical," i.e., exploring how the various dimensions of a religion interact with each other. He finds seven basic dimensions of a religion or worldview: (1) ritual or practical, (2) doctrinal or philosophical, (3) mythic or narrative, (4) experiential or emotional, (5) ethical or legal, (6) organizational or social, and (7) material or artistic. To this list he adds the political and economic, though these are discussed only briefly. While Smart admits that the order of presentation is somewhat random, he also finds that some dimensions lead logically to the next: e.g., ritual worship calls for doctrinal explanation of the One who is worshiped; these doctrinal explanations refer back to concrete narratives; narratives in turn make available particular experiences, which also bring in the other three dimensions of ethics, organization, and matter.
Smart rejects the attempt to find a single essence of religion, and proposes a more pluralistic model of intertwining strands. His central contrast is between religion of bhakti (devotion) and religion of dhyana (meditation or contemplation). Bhakti presupposes a personal God or gods, whereas meditation can concentrate the attention without a specific personal focus. Noting that Western descriptions have often been one-sided and insufficiently comparative, Smart uses Theravada Buddhism as a counterexample to usual Western generalizations about religions. Characterizing this tradition as "atheistic," he notes how it violates many of the expectations of Western students of religion. Throughout the discussion, Smart moves back and forth between broad generalizations and exceptions. Every pattern is relatively adequate, but not absolutely.
The discussion proceeds according to the various dimensions, with the inevitable danger of discussing rituals from a wide variety of traditions under the rubric of "The Ritual Dimension." Nonetheless, Smart has many years of experience in describing such patterns, and his discussion of the world's religions is always nuanced and informative. One disappointment, however, is his curt dismissal of the theory of René Girard. Citing only one early work of Girard, Smart poses questions concerning Christianity to Girard that the latter has repeatedly addressed in more recent works published since the 1970s. One need not accept the totalizing ambitions of Girard's system to see that he has an important insight to contribute.
Nonetheless, this is a minor point in what is overall a powerful achievement. Dimensions of the Sacred is an important contribution to the understanding of the complexities and interrelationships of the world's religions.
LEO D. LEFEBURE
Those who have waited more than a decade since publication of Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus Through the Centuries (Yale University Press, 1985) for the appearance of his companion study of Mary have not been disappointed in their hopes. This handsome book, a staple of many Christmas lists last year and likely to remain so for a long time to come, is more than just a gift item. It is the product of the immense learning of our foremost living historian of Christian doctrine and belief, presented, as we have come to expect, in a readable and thought-provoking style. Begun as the DeVane Lectures at Yale in 1995 to commemorate the author's fifty years of teaching there, the book is more properly seen as the product of a lifetime of immersion in the sources of Christian tradition and reflection on their meaning. Pelikan has organized his study as a succession of what he calls "vignettes" exploring Mary's various roles and titles: as second Eve, as mediatrix, as immaculately conceived, as model of both virginity and motherhood, and so on. Use of the word vignette may be justified by the succinctness and approachability of these discussions, but does insufficient justice to their richness. Many readers will find portions of the book familiar; most will also find much they never knew and much whose significance has escaped them until now. All will be encouraged to further study.
The avowed purpose here is not to describe who Mary "really" was -- whatever that word may mean: the explicit scriptural references to her are far too brief for that. Rather, Pelikan's purpose is to examine what Mary has been "experienced and understood to be." His focus is as much on the centuries of believing Christians as it is on the woman who has occupied so central a role for them. Thus, statements (official and otherwise) of belief offer important evidence for the discussion, but just as significant are devotional emphases that grew up and were sustained by the Christian community. As in his monumental history of Christian doctrine, Pelikan relies on the worship and prayer life of believers as crucial evidence. His treatment of the understanding of Mary as Theotokos (generally, though not quite precisely, translated as "Mother of God") is a good example of this method. The often divisive title seems not have been used before the fourth century, but was firmly rooted in the piety and practice of Alexandria and elsewhere. It was there that Athanasius encountered it and, as Pelikan says, "aligned himself with the orthodoxy of popular devotion." The phrase is a telling one for understanding the author's approach to his entire subject. Religious ideas do not spring fully formed from the brows of theologians; they are grounded first in the faith experience of the community, which thus provides what Pelikan calls "the normative content of devotion."
The same may be said of his discussions of the several apparitions of Mary in the modern era, especially Guadalupe (the subject of much inventive recent scholarship), Lourdes, and Fatima. These episodes all follow a common pattern: stories of Mary's appearance to the poor and lowly with a distinct message (doctrinal, political, or both); initial skepticism from the official church; an undeterred popular response, often in the form of massive pilgrimages; and finally official acceptance and the "purposive" creation of a cult at the site by the church. The inversion Pelikan thus sees is striking. Rather than being, as some skeptics have it, imposed from above by manipulative hierarchs allegedly interested primarily in social control, devotion to the apparitions is in fact "imposed from below" in an essentially democratic manner. The results are hard to ignore: he estimates, for example, that Lourdes has attracted more than twice as many pilgrims since 1858 as have gone to Mecca in the last thirteen centuries.
The reference to Mecca is appropriate because Pelikan gives welcome attention to what might be called the "multicultural" Mary. He devotes a concise chapter to Mary's appearance in one of the longest surahs of the Qur'an, a privilege accorded neither to Eve nor to Hagar (the mother of Ishmael by Abraham and thus, in a sense, the true genealogical mother of Islam). He parses this portion of the Islamic holy book carefully, highlighting both the continuities between Christian and Islamic belief and their significant disagreements on the role of Mary and, more importantly, that of Jesus himself. Understanding Mary in this context is a useful tool in exploring the relations between these two religious traditions, a task that will become increasingly important in the future. The evenhandedness with which Pelikan covers this territory is also evident in his discussion of the differing views of Mary in the Protestant and Catholic versions of Western Christianity. Rejecting easy caricature which sees only Protestant hostility toward Mary and her cult, he describes the more positive views of the reformers, particularly Luther, whom Pelikan, an editor of the reformer's works, knows well. Intent on "freeing" Mary from the layers of medieval piety which they thought simply missed the point, the founders of the Protestant movement saw her instead as a model to be emulated: she had, after all, responded to God at the annunciation "by faith alone" and was thus the foremost example of the Reformation faith that "came through hearing."
Any study covering two millennia in two hundred finely crafted pages will naturally give short attention to subjects about which many readers will want to know more. The admittedly "creative biblical interpretation" involved in the establishment of belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary is one example. The New Testament says nothing of the matter -- neither Paul nor Mark, the earliest gospel, even mention the virgin birth at all -- but it was by a "retro" reading of a passage in the Song of Songs that Jerome and others vindicated the long popular tradition on this point. Pelikan's discussions of the definition of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and the Assumption (1950), two of the three "new" dogmas of the Roman church in the last century and a half -- the third is papal infallibility -- are likewise tantalizingly short. These are certainly the most controversial cases of the "development of doctrine," with important, ongoing implications for ecumenical discussion. Similarly, he explores ever so briefly the devotions, including the rosary and the angelus, that have focused particularly on Mary's role in worship. I for one wanted to hear more on all these subjects, but to say so is to admit having fallen into the reviewer's trap of asking an author to have written a book different from the one actually at hand. The book that is here richly deserves all the praise it has received.
JAMES M. O'TOOLE
Seeking to understand and describe "how Mary's role developed over the last two thousand years" and "how she functioned as a symbol" in both past and modern cultures, Sally Cunneen's In Search of Mary always complements and sometimes surpasses the distinguished Jaroslav Pelikan's Mary Through the Centuries, which was published about the same time. Even the colors used on the covers of both books are the same, making them seem almost interchangeable. But the cover images tell a different story. Giovanni Bellini's pensive, frowning Madonna and Child aptly represents Pelikan's more distant, strictly intellectual narrative. In contrast, the sensitive, smiling Mary of Jean Miralhet's Mater Misericordia, enfolding the people of the world in her cloak, well represents Cunneen's all-embracing approach to her subject.
When Sally Cunneen began searching for Mary, she did it both as a competent scholar and as a woman seeking to clarify her own spiritual roots. What she found was a treasure trove of scholarly information, popular folklore, theological insight, and individual commentary -- all of which make up a book which no interested scholar or general reader can afford to ignore. Making use of recently available manuscripts, apocryphal texts, Eastern icons, and little-known medieval art, Cunneen also draws on her extensive knowledge of modern literature, contemporary women writers, and Jungian theory -- all of which enrich her "midrash" on the biblical story and popular "myths" about Christianity's most notable woman.
Cunneen's narrative and choice of illustrations bring the whole subject up to date. While Professor Pelikan's book seems to stop around 1950, Cunneen's begins and ends with a thoughtful analysis of changes in the perception of Mary during and after the Second Vatican Council, among modern artists, and within modern feminist theology.
For Cunneen, Mary's changing cultural roles over the past two thousand years are part of an ongoing relationship with God and his son Jesus. Mary is not only the woman whom God chose as his mother, but also the woman who herself chose to accept the responsibility of being Mother of God. In doing so, Mary became a model of action, compassion, and human-divine relationship -- a woman of such "remarkable power that she transcends cultural and religious bounds and speaks to perennial human need." Mary, says Cunneen, has always been "the most flexible of symbols," taking on a "different appearance and significance" in every era of human history (xxi). To rediscover her "as a vulnerable human being through our own day-to-day experience, contemporary biblical interpretation, and the recovery of the Wisdom tradition," says Cunneen, helps one to understand God's nature in new ways (301).
To cite only one of many Marian symbols which Cunneen explores in her book, the medieval Black Madonnas and Thrones of Wisdom -- the person of Mary depicted as a throne upon which her Christ-child sits -- are particularly fascinating. Usually carved from single blocks of wood and then vividly painted, and portrayed with deliberately blackened faces, the statues were designed to be carried in processions where they would be accessible and touchable by the people. Cunneen found evidence of more than thirty of these statues, especially in France where she did extensive research. The pose appears to be Byzantine, derived from the Eastern Christian icon tradition -- which also influenced the enthroned madonna depicted in Ireland's eighth-century Book of Kells. Many statues, however, also have a long local history, with legends about being found in pagan sacred places or at shrines to mother goddesses like Ceres and Cybele. Like Mary of Ephesus who replaced the great Aphrodite, the Madonna of Marseilles, for example, seems to have replaced images of Epona, "the Gallic divinity of the moon and wild nature, as well as those of Diana and even of the dark Hecate"(175). Sometimes the statues are even associated with a bull, more evidence of ancient Mediterranean cultural origin. The seated figure comes from the liturgical notion of Mary as the Throne or Seat of Wisdom. The blackness of her face seems to be rooted in folk memories of black fertility goddesses as well as in the Song of Songs, which medieval spirituality often interpreted as a reference to Mary -- "I am black but beautiful. . . ."
Near the end of his book, Pelikan remarks, "Because Mary is the Woman par excellence for most of Western history, the subtleties and complexities in the interpretation of her person and work are at the same time central to the study of the place of women in history." Sally Cunneen's In Search of Mary is an impressive contribution to that study of women in our Western history, and to the study of Mary's countercultural support of the poor, the marginal, and the revolutionary.
RUTH B. MOYNIHAN
Plato may well have been right when he dismissed the nature/nurture issue: "All things are in Fate, yet all things are not decreed by Fate." But the dispute remains with us.
The singular quality of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve was its extreme genetic posture at a time when our society is engaging the persistent problems of race relations. In their response, the authors of Inequality By Design -- Claude Fischer and associates, sociologists all -- approach the issues with admirable restraint, however much their conclusions flow from prejudgments. They go well beyond assaulting Murray and Herrnstein as they move toward a constructive analysis of systems and policies that contribute to the inequalities of opportunity in our culture. Their nine chapters grasp yarn from The Bell Curve's genetic determinism, join it with their own political policy choices and weave the fabric of their three important but still unproved theses:
1. The dice of destiny are not genetically loaded. The Bell Curve is wrong in its genetic conception of intelligence and in its reliance on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (which measures the effects of schooling and other environmental factors rather than inborn intelligence). "Research has shown that 'nature' determines neither the level of inequality in America nor which Americans in particular will be privileged or disprivileged" (xi).
2. Past and current social policy choices have shaped class and racial inequalities. "Americans constructed the inequality we have" (157). To make this point, the authors use George Wills's comments to the effect that the market produces disparities in the distribution of wealth, and that this uneven distribution is morally unacceptable. To the authors' credit, they sidestep a head-on moral clash, pointing out, instead, that political policy choices determine how the market selects those who get more of that which is distributed. The subsidy of suburban home ownership by building new roads and allowing mortgage interest to be deducted from gross income is the best known example.
They mention other middle- and upper-class subsidies that are omitted from conventional liberal discourse, even providing a cute boxed page headed, "How am I subsidized? Let me count the ways" (138). These ways include the subsidies given to higher education which enable tuition to be lowered to a point below the actual cost of such education. They assert that such broad subsidies are not awarded to the proprietary schools chosen by the less "academic" among us: (barber, beauty, secretarial, heavy-truck driving schools and the like). To their list we might add that the primary "tool" of well-paid professionals like attorneys, is their schooling -- heavily subsidized by the government. Contrast this with the absence of aid for requiring the tangible tools required by plumbers, loggers, and carpenters. The chattering class get the tools and the fabricators of our material culture pay for them.
Their expression, "Americans constructed the inequality we have," is strikingly similar to the language of Critical Race Theory. Taken naked, decontextualized, and unelaborated, the expression appears harsh and may not get careful consideration. Ann Swidler, one of the authors, expands its meaning in "The New Sociology of Knowledge" (Annual Review of Sociology 20 [1994]: 305), where she asserts that patterns of authority affect both the content and structure of knowledge and that this influence is embodied in institutional practices. However nonintuitive this radical critique may be, it deserves attention.
3. Social policy can and should be directed toward decreasing these inequalities. "[P]eople, acting through its government, can contract or expand that inequality" (128). The authors' detailing of this principle is preachy, weak, and at such a level of transcendental abstraction as to inhibit consideration of the policies they wish to advance. Here, they descend to the netherworld of unassailable and unrealizable vapors, and do nothing more than recognize post-Rooseveltian progress and ask for much more of the same:
The authors do not pretend that these are novel goals, and choose to discount the totalitarian concomitants of the large increases in state power that must attend the implementation of their ukase.
Despite the accusatory tone of their title, the authors work professionally, lapsing into a strident hyperbole only here and there: "This chapter settles the issue of why some people get ahead of others" (19). "[O]ur society today is structured so that a college diploma is necessary even to imagine success" (68).
The relative contributions of heredity and environment to intellectual or any other kind of performance is not yet known. Sadly, these many empty spaces within our social knowledge invite occupation by ideologues. As one of our truly great educators, Jeanne Chall, said, "Where uncertainties abound, people tend to take strong stands: some resist change and overdefine their positions; others, convinced that change is necessary, tend to oversell and overdemonstrate." Fischer and his associates have neatly packed their baggage of fact and fancy and moved into this empty space. They have successfully evicted Herrnstein and Murray, but their own lease is finite.
STANLEY WOLF
Reviewers in this issue:
Sally Cunneen, professor emeritus of English, Rockland Community College, is the author of In Search of Mary.
John David Dawson is Constance and Robert MacCrate Professor in Social Responsibility and Associate Professor of Religion and Comparative Literature at Haverford College, Haverford, Pa.
Daniel E. Flage teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Va.
Leo D. Lefebure is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake, Mundelein, Ill.
Jean-Philippe Mathy teaches French at the University of Illinois, Urbana.
David McCabe is professor of philosophy at Colgate University.
Robert L. Mowery teaches religion at Illinois Wesleyan University.
Ruth B. Moynihan, editor of the two-volume Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women, teaches women's history at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Conn.
John J. O'Keefe teaches theology at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb.
James M. O'Toole teaches history at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.
John P. Tiemstra is professor of economics at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich.
Joseph Tusa teaches philosophy at Iona College.
Gerard Vanderhaar is Professor Emeritus at Christian Brothers University in Memphis and a Pax Christi-USA Ambassador of Peace.
Margo Williams has taught English literature at several Midwestern universities.
Stanley Wolf is a retired New York editor living in Pennsylvania.