BOOKS
Christ, Ronald & McKenzie, John L.
contemporary theory and practice in media design and others not, Hence The Responsive Chord. It is clearly enough written so that those readers with the specific concern of...
...Similarly, we see that Paz's own work fully lives up to his definition of the image in "The Poem" so that his own critique is also his best example...
...This book is a tissue of relations," so is the best of all Paz's work and Alternating Current is among the very best...
...31-74 31 May 1974:318 turns us to his originating notion of the image as synthesizing without suppressing...
...Either way--as well as both--Paz is a great writer who has determined a great subject--relation: the universal,, existential--and a perfectly adjusted means for expressing that subject-conjunctive units of imagery and grammatical parallelism...
...The title Conjunctions and Disiunctions, for example, fits both Paz's general method as well as his specific subject in that book: the differing approaches of East and West to an integrated view of reality expressed in a subtle, erudite choreography of words and notions like Siamese twins: "life with death, sex with spirit, body with soul...
...That lucidity which again is both Paz's subject and his mode provides for "neon jewels" but never says "what time says in hard sentences of stone, in vast gestures of sea covering worlds...
...It is equally without evidence that Peter ever served as a bishop for any particular congregation...
...Here a committee has attempted what many have said a committee cannot do, to write a book...
...The contrast between this slender volume and the solemn high ecumenical dedication to Peter struck me as paradoxical...
...Sometimes the richness of his production, only partially reflected in these four books, obscures the dialogue of unity and multiplicity which is both his persona and his theme but any prolonged acquaintance with his work discovers that inhering principle...
...Every text where Peter appears in the New Testament is studied...
...The authors speak somewhat ambiguously of the "image" of Peter and the "trajectories" of the image of Peter--or rather of the images...
...The same ecumenical commission which produced this study has another committee working on Peter in patristic literature...
...City, State, Zip...
...Ecumenical union cannot be reached on either the Roman position on the Papacy or on the primitive Protestant position (symbolized by such phrases as the Great Whore of Babylon...
...and in fact the authors could agree because the New Testament contains no reliable evidence that Peter had any kind of primacy...
...Among these books, The Bow and the Lyre is the most ambitious with the least pretense...
...at least the authors do not mention any evidence...
...It is not like reading two books at once...
...That Lutherans and Catholics could agree on a statement of Peter's position in the New Testament suggests certain features to be expected in the conclusions...
...Ranging over literature, mysticism, eroticism, ethics and politics--with especially charged passages on Cernuda and Andr~ Breton --Paz creates a "contrapuntal unity" echoed in his contrary title The Bow and the Lyre...
...This develops into a duel between author and footnotes in which the footnotes finally win and the text entirely disappears...
...If at times you get impatient with his subject or his representation, his praise of the East, his pairs of tugging doubles, you should remember, rephrasing what Hugh Kenner said of G. K. Chesterton, that Paz is not a great writer because he is important...
...Address...
...I0022 Commonweal: 317 respond to the phases of that implication...
...In the third, "Poetry and History," Paz argues that "man's true history is the history of his images: mythology" and explains surrealism as the poetic attempt to ground society on a poetic, imagistic and, thus, a liberated basis correspondent to a world view...
...Well, so do his successors often appear in history...
...I was offended by the footnotes...
...For those who remember some of the things Martin Luther wrote about the successors of Peter it is highly significant that the theologians of the Lutheran Church and of the Roman Catholic Church could reach the agreement exhibited in this book...
...Yet the committee is willing to concede that there is more to be said about Peter than the New Testament says...
...Charles Warren vard University nd drawings $7.95 Gi PRESS I York.N.Y...
...At the same time, Paz is cool...
...it is more like watching two different football games on two TV screens in two different rooms...
...0,0 0 0 9 9 9 9 9 Michael Novak (Cont...
...Peter In the New Testament Edited by RAYMOND E. BROWN, KARL P. DONFRIED and JOHN REUMANN Augsburg, $1.95 JOHN L. MeKENZIE It is not written in John 3:16 that God so loved the world that he did not send a committee, but this ecclesiastical irreverence has circulated for a long time...
...The fragment is not so much a seed as a stray atom that can be defined only by situating it relative to other atoms: it is nothing more nor less than a relation...
...I say that not forgetting Paz's many poems, because "The Middle of the Night" describes what I see in all his verse: "Thought shines, goes out, returns,/ identical with itself it consumes itself and begets, recurs,/ neither alive nor dead,/ turning forever around the cold eye thinking it...
...Paz is a very good poet but by the measure of his own prose he is not a great one...
...how did the Seal Of the Fisherman become the symbol of supreme authority on documents addressed to the whole Church...
...I prefer a one-year subscription at $14...
...This too seems impossible...
...If he has made the inner chamber of his office a soundproof bunker where he must retreat from bad news and criticism, the willing prisoner of his Junker guards, we might question more than his judgment...
...He writes as with a diamond-tipped stylus on sheets of clearest crystal and what he writes is incandesced by a lunar imagination streaming in images like moonlight through stained glass: Paz illuminates glowing hues in whatever he writes but always pours through, pure, fine, uncolored by anything but himself...
...I am reminded of something produced in The New Yorker about 1940, I think by the late Frank Sullivan, in which the first word was footnoted...
...In the second section, "The Poetic Revelation," Paz links the poetic with the sacred by means of wonder which inspires man: "he poetizes, loves, divinizes" under its spell...
...one is moved to ask whether Peter is more important than Jesus or--since this seems impossible--Peter is more troublesome than .Jesus...
...They are both dominical sayings, as the exegetes call them...
...If he knew what was going on--and we believe he did he either directed or connived in the most far-reaching attempt to undermine the democratic process in our history . . . . -----Commonweal, May 25, 1973 Send ]or a Trial Subscription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Issues for $3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS ONLY COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...The ecumenical impact of this agreement is enormous, and that word is O O0 O O O O00 REVIEWERS DANIEL MACK was until recently a talkshow host on Station WRVR in New York...
...Peter is called a shepherd in the New Testament, but so are others...
...31 May 1974:316 not used lightly...
...The proper exercise of the Presidency, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, is moral leadership...
...In this backward glance, Paz reImpeachment 9 . . IT IS TIME to speak seriously about removing President Nixon from office...
...RONALD CHRIST is editor of Review, published by the Center for Inter-American Relations...
...For years I have been telling students that if they cannot get it into the text, perhaps it is not worth saying in the context of their writing...
...It is clearly enough written so that those readers with the specific concern of counterbalancing commercial media power can at least reach a good understanding of the rules of battle...
...Peter's the line in which Jesus tells Peter to get out of his sight, the only disciple who was ever addressed in these terms...
...When I began to read this book I had just finished a review of a short book which attempted to present recent developments in Christology to the general public...
...Even so vulgar an index as Bartlett's Familiar Quotations reflects this neglect by quoting Ortega y Gasset but not Octavio Paz, Yevtushenko but not Neruda...
...introduction FIERY TRIAL a life of Lincoln ERBERT MITGANG "If will h~ p~n,~ri~lly appealing Particularly r. Mitgang's Jch subjects : life and his ) much good o few pages...
...Octavio Paz is a great writer because he is right...
...Like that unpolarized moonlight, whether in poetry or prose, Paz is always inspiring even when not inspired, always novel and always consistent...
...The answer of the authors is that these questions cannot be answered from the New Testament...
...In a time of confused sexual roles, when both the role of women and the role of men have undergone profound symbolic changes, there might well be a special social value in insistin...
...We know, of course, that it is not Peter but the successors of Peter who cause concern, and that the reason for a study of Peter in the New Testament is to see whether the New Testament offers any theological justification for the position claimed by the successors of Peter...
...Early Poems OCTAVIO PAZ Indiana U. Press, $7.95 Alternating Current OCTAVIO PAZ Viking, $7.95 Conjunctions and Disjunctions OCTAVIO PAZ Viking, $7.95 The Bow and the Lyre OCTAVIO PAZ U. o/ Texas Press, $8.50 RONALD CHRIST Another way we ignore South America is by denying it any philosophy, any fund of critical, esthetic or systematic thought--in short, any wisdom...
...The major sections of this book cor"This spirited account is the best to Lincoln's life that I know...
...As the authors say, this is nothing new in the world of theology, although it has not been said by many Catholics until quite recently...
...When I view the coolness in his "dialogues of transparencies" as disassociation toward sensibility, then I see Paz's verse as the negative charge to his positive prose, his essays as the poetry of prose...
...it is not surprising that the line in the dome, Matthew 16:18-19, gets more attention than any other passage...
...But the line does come from the same context from which the line in the dome comes...
...Peter was a fisherman, but so were others...
...The things suggested are perhaps most sharply expressed in a sentence which I am sure the writers did not intend to be so sharp: "Historically, we have no reliable evidence that Peter ever served as a presbyter for a particular congregation, not even for the Roman congregation" (154...
...I would not want to inscribe in the dome of St...
...One must admit that this committee exceeded its estimated competence...
...The committee effectively agrees that the position of the successors of Peter in the Roman Church was created by the Roman Church...
...This surely is what is meant when the authors conclude by calling the New Testament study of Peter "background for ecumenical discussion of the role of the Papacy in the universal Church...
...FATHER JOHN L. McKENZaE, author of Did 1 Say That...
...they will favor with the protection of law...
...This "binary relation between the I and the Thou" is again the form and content of the mimetically entitled Alternating Current, a small masterpiece of miscellaneous fragments of which Paz writes: "I believe the fragment to be the form that best reflects the ever-changing reality that we live and are...
...If the Catholics have given something to Scripture, the Lutherans have given something to tradition...
...Committees produce non-books...
...But such wisdom in both its systematic and quotable forms does exist and nowhere more impressively than in the works of Octavio Paz which are a colossal pinata, spilling prizes, unexpected and fabulous, stylistic and topical, for any who will crack the books...
...There appears to be an implication that Christians are in much more substantial agreement about Jesus than about Peter, and this in turn has implications on the degree to which Christian unity has been achieved...
...No, not a pihata, a fiesta----one of Paz's favorite images---where individual aper~us explode brilliantly in throngs of thought...
...nevertheless, signs of multiple authorship appear...
...If the present trend of disclosures and indictments continues, the President's claim to moral respectability will be so destroyed and his capacity to lead so crippled that his very presence in the White House will be a national embarrassment . . . . If he knew nothing of the sabotage, espionage, perjury and fraud that has emanated from his own offices for years, he is an incompetent --a bungler whom any private corporation (like 1TT) would bounce in a minute...
...Here, Paz has worked a poetic of dominion and majesty from sources as diverse as Mallarm6, Whitman and Juan Ramon Jim6nez and done it in such a way as to implicate us fully--socially, spiritually and sexually...
...The studies may have to go even beyond this period...
...10016 Please send the next 17 issues of Commonweal to: Name...
...This study gives a background for a future agreement which obviously will be beyond the background...
...and other books, teaches theology at DePaul University in Chicago...
...With all due veneration to his sainted memory, Peter often appears in the New Testament as a jerk...
...Surrealism, he recognizes, failed and in a section of his epilogue, Paz looks back to the Aztecs whose works of art were literally their religion---"living manifestations of the sacred"--and that religion literally their state...
...why and how did Peter become the chief shepherd...
...One sees clearly enough that the New Testament contains no evidence for a Roman primacy...
...Yet that judgment in itself is a disjunction...
...In "The Poem," Paz concentrates on elements of poetry, culminating with imagery containing "many opposite or disparate meanings," which it embraces or reconciles without suppressing, thus providing "the key to the human condition"--just as Paz does...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 13
