BOOKS
Wilde, Alexander W & Tucker, Martin & Fontinell, Eugene
Toward The Future PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN Harcourt Brace, $6.95 Man Without Tears CHRISTOPHER F. MOONEY Harper & Row, $7.95 EUGENE FONTINELL When Teilhard de Chardin was alive his philosophy...
...It was in their choice of means to carry on that fight-violence to fight violence-that Torres and Paz parted ways with other radical Christian perspectives, such as that of the Catholic Workers...
...In what way does Joseph's embrace of death advance anything except his love of drama and self-knowledge...
...It was his urge to action, to involve himself everywhere from governmental offices to the hovels of the poor, that fundamentally shaped his life...
...Joseph's friends include Dulpert, who teaches him the meaning of friendship and satyagraha (Dulpert had studied under Gandhi at Ahmedabad...
...They did not lose this capacity, or need, even as they made a radical break with normal life by joining the guerrillas...
...But one wonders how much his (and Broderkk's) ethical position, which lays such stress on objective historical conditions, may be undermined by a failure to grapple with real complexities...
...The result is a vivid and evocative density of detail about all stages of Camilo's life...
...It deserves the attention...
...Like his hero, Brink explores questions, poses issues, then moves on...
...modern, because they were, in the name of that love, willing to kill...
...Adam murdered the Baas whose son had been directly responsible for the death of Adam's wife...
...Brink's novel is, like its Russian counterpart, more than an exposure of repressive conditions in a local country...
...I leave to the feminists consideration of Teilhard's view of the role of "woman" manifest in a statement such as "initially, man will gravitate to woman...
...The first principle of any Christian's life must be love of his neighbor...
...Aptly subtitled, Soundings for a Christian Anthropology, "each chapter is intended as a 'sounding,' an effort to measure the depth of a given experience using the weight of Christian revelation...
...But a society may be so fundamentally corrupt that the individual, despite his or her best personal efforts, is prevented at every turn from making that love effective...
...This is as true of Torres, whose voluminous writing publicly charted his whole adult evolution, as it is of Paz, whose only published record is his brief, affecting, posthumous diary...
...Teil-hard fears that in physical love "we burn away part of our 'absolute.'" Hence, he is led to speculate that in accordance with "the inflexible laws of evolution" and "in order to continue to possess one another more fully in spirit, the lovers are obliged to turn away from the body, and so seek one another in God...
...It is doubtful that anyone unpersuaded by the older argument will be won over by Teilhard's...
...In Joseph's background are the inevitable white overseers who have raped Hottentot, African and Asian women and left them to bear the burdens of the experiences...
...Certainly some of his tribesmen, the Boers, feel he is a traitor, but Brink remains on the side of liberal and peaceful tradition...
...Brink's evasiveness does not spoil his novel...
...that Christian love implies social justice...
...Three of these essays are particularly worthy of note...
...In attacking the "old" chastity he tells us that he finds it very difficult to accept "that our heart necessarily becomes less for one being, by giving itself to another...
...The most unusual and in some ways the most provocative essay in this collection is "The Evolution of Chastity" (1934...
...In the eleventh volume of his Collected Works, Toward The Future, Teilhard unequivocally asserts that "we have not only to ease but to develop...
...And, what is the force of that choice for anyone who would live a Christian life in today's world...
...The lack of an analytical framework also limited the contribution that the book might have made to the Theology of Liberation or to debates over revolutionary theory (in particular, the Guevara/Debray foco line...
...And yet some unsettling questions remain...
...That may well have been the way that Camilo himself understood them...
...His hero is always hoping for a nonviolent solution to the South African separatist issue-an integration of white and black and Hottentot and Coloured and Asian...
...Both died in the jungle-Torres in Colombia in 1966, Paz in Bolivia in 1970-as guerrillas...
...Joseph is a Coloured-the name is given to humans in South Africa of mixed color ancestry...
...But the questions raised by these men are much less answered by any abstract analysis they advanced than, more simply, by the way they lived...
...Indeed, he comes perilously close to simply rephrasing the argument which he allegedly rejects...
...They are talking about a Christianity that is just as much to be created as a Christianity which has been created...
...Such views, however, seem to imply that the differentiation of human consciousness from Nature was a tragic mistake (never adequately accounted for) which can be redressed only a process of reabsorption or re-pristination in which we allow Nature or Being to have its way with us rather than wilfully impose our desires and purposes upon them...
...The one question before which Brink shrinks is this question of violence...
...But one day Joseph wakes up to the fact that he must return to bis country -to fight for the rights of those who will come after him and to redress the wrongs done his ancestors...
...Brink's novel has caused a sensation in his home country where the work has been attacked as pornographic, and a ban on its publication upheld by the South African Supreme Court...
...Broderick is particularly percipient about what the priesthood meant to Camilo, and his long, imaginative, and sympathetic re-creation of life among the guerrillas is superior to anything on this phase done before...
...BY ED GARCIA & JOHN EAGLESON Orbis, $4.95 ALEXANDER W. WILDE Camilo Torres and Nestor Paz are modern Christian martyrs...
...It is one of the many virtues of Brod-erick's excellent biography that he understands his subject as foremost a man of action rather than of thought...
...Its underlying logic is simple...
...He has an affair with a rich and lovely girl, Beverly, who would marry him if he wished...
...In Jessica, Joseph finds his deepest tie...
...Their deaths, and lives, embody a religious position which has been elaborated and broadcast by the theoreticians of the new Latin American theology...
...What is to be noted is that Teilhard is not arguing for virginity as a way of union with God but as the way, if human beings are to move to a higher evolutionary stage...
...The Christian life is a fight against the violence of the existing order...
...These thirteen essays dating from 1929 to 1954 present in a most readable form such Teilhardian themes as the coming of a new humanity, evolutionary progress (not merely "process"), the superiority of the Western path over that of the East, knowledge as power to transform the earth and the cen-trality and indispensability of Christianity for the realization of the human potential...
...A fitting gesture for the theater...
...Joseph's family history is one long litany of men and women who have been beaten, castrated, bruised, abused, and murdered by South African whites...
...reform is impossible, given the violence of the ruling classes...
...Zhivago...
...Both, too, had a great capacity for love, in the immediate, ordinary sense of knowing and sharing the lives of other human beings...
...At times there is an air of unreality which surrounds the Christian values or Christian principles which are described by Teilhard and Mooney...
...It is just such "creative possibilities of experience" that the distinguished Teilhardian commentator, Christopher F. Mooney, sets out to explore in his fine little work, Man without Tears...
...Martyrs, because they were, for love of their fellow human beings, willing to give up their lives...
...In each instance, the author, continuing Teil-hard's effort, attempts to overcome any destructive opposition between religious man and secular man...
...This is a great accomplishment when a man's name is already mythic across a continent...
...Camilo had enormous energy and a capacity to operate simultaneously in many different spheres...
...Since Teilhard and Mooney are engaged in speculative undertakings, it is surely legitimate for them to project the positive possibilities of Christianity as they might be if liberated from those negative features which partially constitute past and present Christianity...
...While I find the directness of their Christian witness refreshing, I often find it unsettling and even frustrating...
...He has been convicted of the murder of his lover, Jessica Thomason...
...But their deaths do not prove they were wrong in their pessimism...
...Colombian history and politics are simplified into a kind of morality play, like street theater...
...But what it sets out to do, it does so well: it depicts a human being...
...These two biographies offer abundant materials to ponder these questions...
...But that, if it comes to that, will happen after Joseph is a "smooth round pebble contented in its fall, dust unto dust, true to itself...
...What is accomplished by Joseph's gesture of death...
...and Richard, the troubled white novelist...
...There will be others who will find optimism-in their witness and, as they did, in the Gospel itself.find optimism-in their witness and, as they did, in the Gospel itself...
...Broderick's Camilo is no paragon People's Hero, but rather (to borrow Graham Greene's phrase), "a sort of revolutionary...
...Joseph acknowledges that his friend Jerry may engage in violence...
...Perhaps Brink's dream of integration will come true...
...And so, one night, Joseph "murders" Jessica in a mutual pact, though he does not kill himself, he allows the South African courts to do that...
...This approach frames marvelous insights about people and events as Camilo experienced them, but it does have limitations...
...They were too optimistic and, in an immediate sense, they failed as revolutionaries...
...A striking and significant feature of both works under consideration is their unequivocal affirmation of Christianity...
...a positive view of themselves and the world, at their core, that was, without doubt, a gift of grace...
...Unless this is sufficiently stressed, Christian witness conveys a triumphalism that is basically alien to both Teilhard and Mooney...
...Hence, it would seem quite consistent with the fundamental thrust of Teilhard's vision to project a future in which human beings will relate to God in a variety of ways through the free expression of the creative possibilities of experience rather than being compelled to one form of union by "the inflexible laws of evolution...
...Mooney "sounds" seven themes-survival, conflict, play, failure, old age, death and Christ...
...The question is significant, for Brink has been hailed as revolutionary...
...Its style is narrative, its voice omniscient author...
...Brink has been compared to Solzhenitsyn-particularly because of the government harassment each has encountered-but in style and temperament he is closer to Pasternak and Dr...
...Of the utmost importance is that fact that this creating must take place in a changing context that henceforth must be ecumenical in deed as well as in word...
...In "The Sense of Man" (1929), Teilhard describes the new vision which has only recently developed under the influence of various sciences...
...He avoids it by having Joseph and Jessica choose the passivity of death to active communion of struggle...
...This "contemplative" tradition, so widespread and recurrent, undoubtedly touches a depth in human experience which forbids us to dismiss it "as primitive or archaic...
...What I am asking for is a clear and unequivocal recognition that these "positive possibilities" are always matters of faith rather than matters of fact...
...This is incomparably the best book on Camilo Torres-and one of the best biographies ever written about a public figure in Latin America...
...But how fitting for the honesty of * this novel...
...Such a witness is in danger of giving the impression that the solution to the human condition is already realized and waiting to be acknowledged, rather than there being an offer of life manifest in reality to which we are not only called or invited to join but also to help create...
...Toward The Future PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN Harcourt Brace, $6.95 Man Without Tears CHRISTOPHER F. MOONEY Harper & Row, $7.95 EUGENE FONTINELL When Teilhard de Chardin was alive his philosophy of hope was desperately needed as a corrective to the corrosive and stultifying nihilism which emerged during the first half of this century-Today, while this nihilism has remained and in some sense deepened, there has also emerged, in both sophisticated and unsophisticated forms, a "nature nostalgia" which threatens to bring forth a new passivism and quietism...
...A novel is not a tract, no matter how many plots of land it may traverse...
...The novel is structured in the form of a confessional...
...One is killed by the police...
...He writes his "confession" because "it is necessary to empty myself completely, in order to return into myself," it is essential "to fight my way thorugh a web of syntactic certainties towards a final, possible glimpse of truth...
...Both had an abiding enthusiasm, a profound kind of optimism about the liberating direction of their times, and a deep conviction about the role that they personally should-and could-play in it...
...Instead they chose the romantic note of dying for love...
...Richard, writes Joseph, is the last man to trust, because his liberalism, however well-intentioned, is a cover for his guilty conscience...
...They grow so close they cannot break apart without destroying a part of themselves...
...Their love is physical, symbiotic, unbreakable...
...Clearly the novel is going to be discussed as work of artistic merit (or lack of it), a document of liberal suasion and plea for change, a propa-gandistic statement of the horrors of South African policy, and a herald of South African literary development...
...Who they were and what they did: this is where we find their religious significance (theology as praxis, perhaps...
...Like Joseph, he has done his share, fulfilled his duty, broken and bled his heart...
...They could have departed for England and lived there as man and wife (each rejects this as a "betrayal...
...Even then, Adam waited passively to be taken away by the Baas's neighbors and brutally slaughtered...
...Not even the pretentious device of reprinting Shakespeare's sonnets (the last things Joseph wrote, from memory, the night before he died) adulterates the story's passion...
...It is in the great line of romantic fantasy rooted in a naturalistic setting...
...In "My Fundamental Vision" (1948), we have a mini-version of Teil-hard's renowned Phenomenon Of Man...
...Brink includes everything in his novel-his hero's literary aspirations, his love of poetry, his dedication to art, his penchant for endless discussions on the artist's role...
...The truth is, he and Jessica could no longer live in subterfuge in South Africa...
...Joseph's death erases the need to answer questions put to him by his friends, the most profound of which is the extent of his commitment to the revolution in his land...
...Camilo Torres: A Biography of the Priest-Guerrillero WALTER J. BRODERICK Doubleday, $10 My Life for My Friends: The Guerrilla Journal of Nestor Paz TRANS...
...He allows it partial hearing in the form of speeches by various adherents, but he does not deal with it...
...Such a facile dismissal in the name of science or evolution or progress has resulted in a variety of superficial sci-entisms and progressivisms...
...Only in one case does Joseph's ancestor defy authority, the one named Adam, whose end presaged the fall of those after him...
...counter-violence" and revolution are the only realistic Christian response...
...This was something beyond any scientific certainty they could have been given by Marxist analysis alone...
...It is a universal restatement of man's hopes, his flagging desires, and despair...
...The ecological sins and Promethean excesses of a human community which several hundred years ago began to reject a conformist and spectator role in relation to nature are all too evident...
...They are the inheritors of some ancient curse, they must wash away their skin in penance till the day of forgiveness: absolves them from this world...
...He is the only one to pursue an education beyond high school...
...Joseph has two other friends whom he comes to love: the British girl Jessica, again rich and lovely and wayward in her toilet (she, like Beverly before her, is more a hurricane than a whiz in arranging the dressings of her life), and Father Mark...
...We can see certain common characteristics in their lives...
...The South African government's rabid reaction to the book speaks more to the fear of repressive governments than to any just justifiable literary criticism...
...Particularly noteworthy is their willingness to affirm a belief and a hope in personal immortality in an age which is most suspicious of such an affirmation...
...He and Nestor Paz felt themselves driven to violence both by a pessimism about the possibilities of change without revolution and by optimism about the possibilities of revolutionary success...
...Yet he later gives a negative response to the question "Is it really possible, without loss, to give oneself twice...
...not only to repair but to build...
...Ironically, Teilhard, more than most "philosophers of unity," has struggled to retain the features of individuality and diversity which would seem to be true fruits of an evolving reality...
...Joseph had just mounted a production of "Othello"-he knew his penchant for allowing life to follow art...
...William de Villiers, the Boer financier on whose father's farm Joseph and William had shared their adolescence...
...A charming, energetic bourgeois, of enormous good heart, sometimes naive, sometimes blundering -bis example cuts all the deeper for his very human imperfection...
...The censorship issue has raised a furore among various arts organizations throughout the world who have hailed Brink's fiction as a searing indictment of apartheid...
...It is a compelling tale of a man willing to die for love...
...They had a choice of three roads, and they chose no one of them...
...ED...
...It is going to be one of those works that will make people angry, rapturous, and in any case keep them reading till the pots on their own kitchen stoves boil over...
...It is quite consistent with, even demanded by, the developmental metaphysics of these two thinkers to admit that they are describing, a Christianity which never was but hopefully will be...
...Because Teilhard was so sensitive to the mystical dimension of reality he was able to avoid (some critics notwithstanding) both an easy optimism and a demonic Prometheanism...
...Mooney is hopeful without being naively optimistic or sentimental...
...The style of the novel is compelling: it is a work that throbs with personal intensity...
...Looking on Darkness ANDRE BRINK Morrow, $8.95 MARTIN TUCKER A profound love that is made to know every bond in a repressive state -these are the "givens" in the new novel by Andre Brink, a Dutch South African who has translated his own work into English...
...Teilhard concedes that this "sense of man believes in the magnificent future of the tangible world and the gospel seems to despise it...
...Jerry, the black who works with a secret revolutionary movement...
...Joseph Malan sits in his jail cell, awaiting execution...
...Yet Joseph is lucky: he has friends, and he has the will to continue to strive for his goal of community theater...
...Why did they do so...
...It is not only that we are presented with a Christianity shorn of those historical, psychological and sociological dimensions which are always attached to concrete Christianity...
...Father Mark and Dulpert are the most idealistic characters in the book...
...In Capetown Joseph forms a dramatic company, but he is harassed by police and planned bureaucratic pitfalls...
...They could have separated, knowing each had another role to play (yet each refuses this way out, suggesting their commitment to each other is as great as their commitment to the cause of South Africa...
...They do not rebel, the will to fight has been stolen from them...
...Joseph has one benefit none of them had...
...In the face of such sins and excesses one can appreciate and even welcome a Heidegger's persistent call to "let Being be" or the Eastern mystic's rejection of the ego and its accompanying desires...
...I will confine myself to the central theme of this essay in which Teilhard first gives us a critique of the traditional argument in favor of virginity and then presents us with his own argument for its "absolute superiority...
...They continued to reach out, to those they had left behind and to those with whom they lived in the jungle...
...This would be a good beginning essay for those wishing a succinct overview of Teilhard's thought, since, as he tells us, it presents "an authentic and complete summary of my present intellectual attitude to the world and to God- the essence of my faith...
...In the remaining annals, Joseph's descendants may try to escape from their slavery, may rob to feed their young, but they accept their punishment as the Lord's will...
...He makes no pretense of "proving" his positions but instead strives to share with us the fruits of his reflections...
...Nevertheless, he argues not only that this new sense of man is a religious phenomenon but that "the cause of Christianity and the cause of the world are inextricably linked...
...He is sent to a Capetown university, and from there he moves to London and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art...
...the other is exiled because of police pressure...
...His writing and thought were, to a degree unusual in a trained scholar, distillates of his experience...
...There is a concreteness, directness and sensitivity in Mooney's presentation which cannot help but touch a range of persons of varying philosophical and theological sophistication...
...At the same time, he refused to back off from the modern vision of the exciting and dangerous task of attempting to create a new world and a new humanity...
...His dating of Torres' arrangement to join the guerrillas before launching the United Front political movement of mid-1965-rather than as a result of frustration at its failure-is original and persuasive...
...Broderick did impressive research- in the abundant public materials, in private documents and archives, in many dozens of interviews-and notes sources by topic and chapter in an appendix (though he does not footnote...
...In London Joseph scores several professional successes...
...The Christian comes to understand that "love" must go beyond face-to-face contact to the "structures" that shape the context of human relationships...
...Is it a full share, or is any reader asking too much to have a novelist go beyond the sleep of death, the fashion of lyric surrender, the ache of weary fatigue...
...to bring peace, the Christian should not preach some specious harmony but participate in the struggle of the poor and dispossessed...
...The formal arguments are there: society is inevitably marked by conflict, and more specifically, by class conflict...
...It is, above all, a. book about a man's life...
...Some of the passages on art, on commitment, on the theatre, on the gay life in Capetown smell of the novelist's greasepaint, but such spots do not matter in the total canvas...
...They could have openly defied the law and made themselves martyrs...
...I would suggest that Teilhard is here a victim of the most distinctive and strongest feature of his thought, namely, his passion for unity...
Vol. 102 • September 1975 • No. 13
