BOOKS:
Tracy, Thomas A Dine, Elizabeth Knies, David
In Cuba ERNESTO CARDENAL New Directions, $10.50 inside Cuba JOE NICHOLSON, JR. Sheed &. Ward, $8.95 THOMAS A. DINE Sixteen years since Batista was forced to flee from Cuba and Castro and his...
...This spirit is infectious...
...and of the metamorphosis of old into new selves: To live you leave your yesterselves to drown without a funeral...
...Most of the poems are short...
...That proposal seems to this reviewer sound both on general and methodical terms and in clear continuity with Lonergan's Method In Theology...
...Cardenal's interviews and observations, although sometimes repetitive, provide a clear and engaging portrait of contemporary Cuba...
...Each of the book's four sections is captioned with a short quote from the poem "Quartered" and with a few words excerpted from a poem within the section...
...He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds...
...The blockade has been defeated," a fishing port director told Nicholson, "because of the efforts of Cuban workers...
...He thrives on the David-Goliath confrontation...
...because of the diplomatic and economic wall it has built around the island...
...Perhaps this surely obvious structural difficulty accounts for Tyrrell's seeming failure to come fully to terms with the arguments of Lonergan's critics that his philosophy of God imports rather than critically defends traditional Aristotelian-Thomist conceptions for God...
...Images float freely, forming their own associations...
...Our shoulders touched...
...Cardenal quotes a Catholic teenager, "every night we hear the Voice of America, and the ones who always talk are those who have left Cuba, and I've noticed that they always say: 'I left because there are no nylons, because there are no good beauty parlors, because there aren't any good shoes, because you can't get any butter.' Never, really never, have I hear anyone say: 'I left because there is no freedom.'" Cuba arouses an irrationality that saps America's interest in maintaining democratic political principles...
...This seems to be an intrinsic demand in the basic argument of Insight itself for a critical defense of each new term...
...Politicians and groups promote plots to assassinate Castro...
...As readers of Lonergan's Method In Theology will recall, 'systematics' is a functional speciality which provides not proofs, but systematic understanding of what the theologian has already discovered through research, interpretation, history, dialectics, foundations and doctrines...
...I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That'll be the life...
...Cardenal believes the institution is an anachronism...
...I work hard," Gilberto the driver told Nicholson, "but at least I know that everyone else does too and we all live equally...
...Sheed &. Ward, $8.95 THOMAS A. DINE Sixteen years since Batista was forced to flee from Cuba and Castro and his Sierra Maestra companions triumphed, the Revolution is working well for the Cuban people...
...Shorter pieces, equally controlled, sometimes use a comic doggerel, as in "This Be The Verse": They fuck you up, your mum and dad...
...The skeletons of his poems are fleshed and muscled with not one ounce of excess weight...
...The words from the "Magnificat" of Luke apply to both...
...The Cuban Church resists Castro...
...Such questions seem legitimate ones for anyone committed, as Bernard Tyrrell so clearly and eloquently is, to the demands of the further, relevant questions of the process of authentic contemporary theological inquiry...
...Part I analyzes the 'new context' for Lonergan's later thought...
...In the book's title poem another meaning is divulged-that the writer feels himself being drawn and quartered by four identities, until he is left holding on, holding my bones together...
...the vast majority of the country's nine million wholeheartedly support Castro and his hopes...
...The request was not denied...
...the Soviet Union underwrites the regime, the latest development being the agreement to dovetail Cuba's new five-year plan with that of Moscow...
...Over the last generation the United States has consistently failed to understand revolutionary situations...
...What benefits have accrued to the U.S...
...But there were priests who, even so, refused to read the letter and there were faithful who walked out during the reading, furious because the Church was 'taking the side of Communism.' The error of Catholics was to identify Christianity with anti-Communism...
...Cardenal compares favorably two radical revolutions, Cuba's and early Christianity's...
...For the crucial relationship of systematics to the other specialties, however, the reader will have to return to Method itself, aided by Lonergan's own footnote references to the relevant passages...
...Japan just extended export credits to Cuba...
...And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass...
...At any rate, until that defense is forthcoming, there exist reasons to suggest that other thinkers have reformulated notions of both 'experience' and of 'God' directly relevant to Lonergan's own argument for the existence of God...
...What the "more" is, is hard to say-perhaps it is just that some poems allow more of a glimpse of the man of flesh and blood beneath the disciplinarian- , I would like to quote "High Windows" in its entirety, because it is the most far-reaching poem in this current collection and shows Larkin at the height of his powers...
...He preached, "At least, you can give thanks to God that here there are no longer any rich men...
...They may not mean to, but they do...
...Here we may find the clearest exposition of Lonergan's delineation of the 'new context' of theology and the first major application of his recent method to theology...
...When will Washington look out from its national security shield and see its integrity diminishing, and the same with the liberty of its own citizens...
...The poetry amplifies this theme a hundredfold, examining, but never self-indulgently, the processes of time and change...
...The first chapter provides Lonergan's understanding of the term 'philosophy of God.' Besides providing the clearest analysis available of Lonergan's position here, the chapter also concentrates, in a highly concise and impressive fashion, upon Lonergan's still too little noted insistence upon the priority of method over logic in the contemporary context...
...Will the roof fall in...
...It concludes: Here, sitting up late, with a friend, listening, talking, touching her hand, his hand, I touch your hand...
...To those who know her as a poet, this body of work, intelligently conceived and finely wrought, is the consummation of a distinguished career and a major achievement in its own right...
...Indeed, the analogue of war comes up over and over again in his speeches and banners...
...It has taught us to work for ourselves, to lift ourselves up...
...Cardenal observed Havana: "Here I see the immense joy of a metropolis without poor people, without misery...
...Still, the fact remains that from the viewpoints of alternative interpretations of the meanings of religion and of God in contemporary scriptural exegesis, history of religions, social scientific studies of religion and philosophies of religion, there are several and not easily reconcilable concepts of 'religion' presently available...
...The adherence to meter and rhyme, the dry witticisms, the tolerant weariness verging on despair-these are the qualities that Larkin's admirers most admire...
...Still he seems not to realize that his own appeal in Part I for historical consciousness should alert him (as it alerted Lonergan's earlier critics) to question whether Lonergan's use in his philosophy of God of standard Thomist vocabulary really follows directly from the earlier argument of Insight and does not demand further defense...
...It's taken Time, many years and places...
...The guerrilla warfare mentality of Sierra Maestra has not ended for Comandante Fidel Castro...
...but they are, even when about himself, somewhat aloof, like a good reporter's coverage of a rather depressing event...
...In the early poem "Prayer before Work," May Sarton addresses her muse ("great one, austere") and asks to be given "that ease," "precision," and "strict form" that are the measure of song...
...He says he still wears a uniform and a beard because he is still at war, promising to cut it off the day that all the promises of the Revolution are fulfilled...
...Washington's relations with OAS members are at a low ebb...
...The Anglo-American revised 'comprehensive' understanding of experience, for example, could prove to be a genuine development upon Lonergan's own notion of 'experience' without cancelling out his correctly esteemed analyses of the relation of 'experience' to 'understanding' and 'judgment.' A bi-polar concept of God might, if allowed, prove a genuine correction of Lonergan's full adherence to classical theism's understanding of the nature of God, without having to cancel out the articulate 'argument' Lonergan actually provides for the existence of God...
...It is not that his observations are callous...
...But for Cardenal, the Cuban people are "living the ideal of evangelical poverty, together with equality and fraternity, and Christians ought to be the first to defend this system...
...Father Cespedes told his Nicaraguan counterpart, the Marxists "did what we Christians should have done, and we didn't do it...
...Samuel Hazo is director of the successful International Poetry Forum and a professor at Duquesne University...
...Michael's lectures, now published under the title Philosophy of God, and Theology...
...The present work, therefore, may be read as Lonergan's methodical and substantive proposal for the development of a philosophy of God within systematics and based on his own method...
...To those who know May Sarton as a novelist (she is the author of fourteen novels) the poems may come as something of a surprise...
...Bernard Lonergan's own major interests seem to have moved from the discussion of a philosophy of God to the question of the relationship between his philosophy of God in Insight and his development of the notion of systematic theology in Method In Theology, as can be seen by reading the elegant little volume entitled Philosophy of God, and Theology...
...The major difficulty of the book is that, perhaps unavoidably, its structure may prove confusing...
...The Bay of Pigs invasion permanently scarred the New Frontier...
...No-where else in Latin America have common laborers gained such respect and felt such a strong sense of personal pride...
...To state the matter briefly, if perhaps too cryptically, Lonergan believes that a philosophy of God should be worked out within the context of a systematics...
...No one leaves anyone...
...In "After Elegies," a beautiful, enigmatic poem, images work by simple juxtaposition: We notice things differently: a child's handprint in a clay plate, a geranium, aluminum balconies rail to rail, the car horns of a wedding...
...The First and Only Sailing") The strength of Hazo's poetry is in his wry, clear, and sometimes very beautiful use of language...
...religious experience) and both head towards the same goal (viz...
...However, based on the first four chapters of Method as well as the chapters on dialectics and foundations, there seems every good reason to hope that his foundational position could be articulated in more inclusive terms...
...Burning" ends: The hunter's buck rides home across the fender of a truck his mountain eyes glazed open to the ice, his life a clotting trickle lacing from one nostril...
...The clergy before the Revolution were evil: bourgeois, retrogressive, Batistan...
...Listeners were outraged or indignant...
...No one says anything much...
...I use the word practitioner deliberately, because Larkin's verse is so polished and worked...
...Both authors record how the Cuban nation is better able than ever in its tortuous history to meet the basic needs of the Cuban people...
...Celebrating mass in Havana, Cardenal gave a sermon denouncing the desire for money...
...Nothing near, now or here meant more than something anywhere tomorrow...
...He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree...
...The poems are all about Hazo, and it is clear that his schizophrenia is not acute...
...I wonder if the unsmiling stoic of the jacket photograph would be pleased by the comparison...
...it creates believers and has produced astounding results in a short time...
...Mention must be made of the two monumental poems "She Shall Be Called Woman" and "My Sisters, O' My Sisters," and of the moving cycle that ends the book, "Letters to a Psychiatrist...
...Cuba stresses the values of sacrifice, heroism, working for the community...
...Furthermore, Lonergan takes pains to remind his readers that his position on the central questions of method, values, meaning and especially religion have already been defended in Insight and in the first four chapters of Method In Theology...
...In Lonergan's own customarily precise terms in the preface, there is a complete abandonment of the language of any traditional 'faculty psychology' and the further development of the 'intentionality-analysis' initiated in Insight in cognitional terms into the new areas of moral and religious values...
...A lay theologian tells Cardenal, "What atheists least like about Catholics is their lack of vitality...
...Perhaps it is too much to ask that Lonergan himself engage in this exercise, given the extraordinary contributions he has already made to philosophical theological method...
...This is fair enough since chapter nineteen of Insight is still the locus for finding Lonergan's actual 'philosophy of God.' Still, on Tyrrell's own terms, this philosophy of God is not worked out in terms of the new context...
...Now I Become Myself") May Sarton has been celebrated as a great solitary...
...Ending economic and social misery on a wholesale basis, the constitution of Cuba's new freedom, is the Revolution's most significant result...
...As a challenge to the classical Catholic notions on science, philosophy, theology and scholarship, Lonergan's proposal here is both illuminating and persuasive...
...I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people's faces, Run madly, as if Time were there, Terribly old, crying a warning...
...High Windows is his first book to appear in ten years...
...Counterrevolutionary Cubans whom Cubans label as gusanos, literally worms, wage war against Castro from the eastern seaboard and Gulf of Mexico area...
...Today, the ratio's reversed...
...In fact, the present volume consists of Lonergan's three St...
...What is the situation of the Cuban Church...
...Others informed him, "Priests do not have a good image" in Cuba...
...Similarly, in "Fidelities," fragmentary jottings convey a whole fabric of past and present alliances, losses, and reveries...
...Enrique Lopez Oliva, a Communist who studied with Castro at the Jesuit school in Belen, said that last year "for the first time in a pastoral letter, the bishops condemned the blockade," although doing so rather gently...
...What lies ahead for Cuba...
...Still embodying the spirit of the new beginning, the Revolution fits Carden-al's conception of justice...
...The second chapter specifies the kind of theology in question as an explicitly systematic one...
...What one cannot but wish for is a further clarification by Lonergan of the roles of philosophy of religion and of God in 'dialectics' and especially in 'foundations.' Lonergan's own position on the nature of religion as a being-in-love-in-an-unrestricted-fashion has both clear scriptural warrants (especially in his favorite text from Paul, Romans 5, 5) and warrants from Friedrich Heiler's work in the history of religions...
...Philosophy of God, and Theology BERNARD LONERGAN Westminster, $4.50 Bernard Lonergan's Philosophy of God BERNARD TYRRELL V. of Notre Dame Press, $12.95 DAVID TRACY In Bernard Lonergan's Philosophy of God, Bernard Tyrrell performs the real service of providing an extensive analysis of both the context and the content of Bernard Lonergan's philosophy of God, up to and partially including Lonergan's own St...
...I came back to help the Revolution and I didn't care what standard of living I had," Julio Martin, a construction worker who once lived in Brooklyn said...
...Nowhere else in Latin America can governments come close to claiming that for their citizens...
...There seem to me good reasons to believe that this is unlikely...
...Their mutual interaction, Lonergan believes, can be aided by a recognition that both proceed from the same origin (viz...
...Now I become myself...
...The worst effect of Washington's desire to destroy Castro has been to unlink America from its traditional values...
...to help Peru during its catastrophe...
...You were just saying ordinary thingsThese oddly haunting lines convey the far-from-ordinary atmosphere of the whole book...
...the meanings elusive, suggestive, personal...
...I hope that Tyrrell will take up these questions in the future in more than the somewhat peremptory manner that he judges process theism to be 'anthropomorphic' in the present work...
...How does it enter the Revolution's spiritual lifestream...
...Chalk lines still mark the floor just where you stood...
...A 17-year-old from a petit-bourgeois family explains, "Many things that we read about in the Bible are things that they (the revolutionaries) are doing...
...Cintio Viter, a Cuban Catholic poet, told Cardenal "over and over again Fidel keeps assaulting Moncada...
...Understandably but disconcertingly, however, Tyrrell then returns to the 'old context' to analyze Lonergan's argument for the existence of God in Insight...
...The title is taken from the poem 'Twenty Days' Journey" by the contemporary Dutch poet Huub Oosterhuis, translated by Jean Valentine with Judith Herzberg, that occupies the central portion of the book...
...Now there are few young men in the Church because "in Cuba there are very few priests who are attractive to young people...
...Lines move down the page in clear progression and with often arresting images...
...What is striking in the Collected Poems 1930-1973 is the craftsmanship, control and inspiration that permeate her work...
...Here you work to construct something for the future...
...Eisenhower's destabilization policy, still in effect, has provided a strong impetus to the Cuban people to make the Revolution work...
...The Papal Nuncio said Fidel is "ethically a Christian...
...A local poet and skeptic of the government's centralized rule told Cardenal that "the Church committed suicide" a long time ago...
...High Windows PHILIP LARKIN Farrar, Straus, $6.95 Quartered SAMUEL HAZO U. of Pittsburgh Press, $6.95 Ordinary Things JEAN VALENTINE Farrar, Straus, $8.95 Collected Poems 1930-1973 MAY SARTON Norton, $10 ELIZABETH KNIES Impassively gazing out from the jacket photo of High Windows, Philip Larkin looks the part of the middle-aged librarian he is...
...Cuba's citizens have the right to a decent job, wages sufficient to cover basic needs, an equal share of rationed food and clothes, inexpensive housing, free health care, and free education...
...Communism doesn't go away...
...Equality is the Revolution's most important ingredient...
...And most recent is the Cuban connection to Watergate, starting With the role of burglar Eu-genio R. Martinez, whom the CIA now acknowledges was receiving a $100 a month retainer as a Miami operative...
...Shall I die today...
...I was afraid...
...Highly personal, a poem like "Autumn Day" represents Jean Valentine at her best-the poet's clear unflinching eye, sense of mystery, danger, isolation: strange quiet with time for work, your evenings, you will write long letters this winter, you have your friends and the names of friends of friends...
...In Cuba the new name of charity is Revolution...
...The poems "Couvre Fou: after Paul Eluard" arid "Autumn Day," with its epigraph from Rilke and its allusion to Jung, summon further affinities and cross-references...
...Cardenal quotes the Cathie olic poet Eliseo Diego, "Cuba was the first country...
...It would be wrong to imply that highly skilled, punctilious versifying is all there is to Larkin, since poems like "Dublinesque," "Sad Steps," and "Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel" prove there is more...
...Still holding...
...At that point, the present volume would become one part of a larger whole wherein philosophy of God would be related not merely to systematic theology but more completely to foundational theology as well...
...Throughout both parts of the work, Tyrrell makes major contributions to a fuller understanding of Lonergan's work...
...In this situation of a 'conflict of interpretations,' a theologian , needs further work in 'dialectics' and 'foundations' to articulate with contemporary adequacy the horizon proper to an explicitly systematic position...
...Part II, moreover, includes the best analysis available of the major components in Lonergan's actual argument (in Insight) for the existence of God, along with some critical comments on several of Lonergan's critics (Burrell, MacKinnon, Ogden and the present reviewer...
...Especially valuable for this reader were Tyrrell's delineation in Part I of the Platonic influence on the development of Lonergan's notion of 'conversion' and his carefully argued insistence that the 'existential' thrust of the 'later' Lonergan can be found as early as Lonergan's largely overlooked and still valuable work in christology, De Constitution Christi...
...This conclusion is shared by a variety of North and South American travelers...
...He is also, however, one of the two or three most highly regarded practitioners of verse in Britain today...
...No God any more, or sweating in the dark About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest...
...They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you...
...Quartered, his sixth book of poems and possibly his best, is so called for the cardinal points of the compass (reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop's North & South...
...Cubans interviewed believe they eat, work, and rest better than they did before the Revolution...
...The writing is spare and precise...
...That presence demands, in my judgment, that the contemporary theologian engage in what Lonergan has aptly labeled explicitly dialectical analysis of the significant similarities and differences between various notions on religion and God...
...Ordinary Things is Jean Valentine's third book of poems...
...The longer, poems "To the Sea," "The Old Fools," "The Building," and "Show Saturday" develop their subjects in long, slow-moving lines...
...In the meantime, his book should prove a real service to all those interested in understanding both the context and the content of Lonergan's philo-ophy of God...
...Who wakes in a house alone Wakes to moments of panic...
...Tyrrell does score some fine philosophical points on Lonergan's critics here (especially, I might add, against my own inadequately formulated argument of 1970 that Lonergan's position on morality and religion was not 'critical' but 'dogmatic...
...The two disciplines remain distinct but not, as in classical Catholic theology, separated into 'natural' and 'revealed' non-conversation partners...
...Who wakes in a house alone Wakes to inertia sometimes, To fits of weeping for no reason...
...Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan poet-priest, writes eloquently and in depth about the Revolution, talking and debating with dissimilar people as well as comparing notes with other Latin intellectuals serving on the jury for the 1972 House of the Americas poetry contest...
...The heart of the book may be found in the final and third chapter on the relationship between philosophy of God and the systematics...
...And the joy of everybody being equal...
...Solitude swells the inner spaces Like a balloon . . . ("Gestalt at Sixty") The Collected Poems, drawn from eleven books published over a period of lorty-three years, cannot be covered adequately here...
...This gives the book a certain feeling of structure, though personally I feel it was not particularly necessitated (or justified) by the material...
...The poetry records many tangible things, but primarily it is a testimony to an enduring inwardness...
...It's really funny here * in Cuba, there's a scarcity of everything, but when it's a question of giving help, we give away what we don't even have...
...In the meantime, however, the theological and philosophical communities owe yet another debt of thanks to Lonergan for this analysis of a methodical relationship between a contemporary philosophy of God and a Catholic systematics...
...Washington remains unable or unwilling to deal with the new Cuba as it is...
...For the sake of accuracy, the two books under review should switch titles...
...Recent newspaper descriptions by Mankiewicz and Jones, Shaw, Morgan, and Cooney reinforce the 1973 observations of New York Post reporter Joe Nicholson, Jr., that the Cuban government's efforts at economic development are solid and significant...
...Rather, what emerges is a portrait of a reflective, somewhat self-centered man who writes candidly about his experiences...
...There are recurring themes-awareness of time as the balance tips away from youth, as in "Breakfasting with Sophomores": When I was what you are, the world was every place I'd yet to go...
...No economic or political advantages...
...Michael's lectures delivered in 1972 at Gonzaga University along with the excellent summaries of the question period following each lecture...
...The idle person used to occupy a place of honor in Cuban society," Castro recalled, "now that place is oc-cupied by the workingman, and that is what the Revolution has meant...
...Two commissioned occasional poems, "Going, Going" and 'The Explosion," are exemplary of his complete technical control...
...The chapter itself provides an excellent summary of and expansion upon what the reader of Method may find in the chapter on systematics...
...the development of Lonergan's own demanding, transcendental model for authentic, as self-transcending, persons...
...The major components of that 'new context' are well delineated in Tyrrell's analysis...
...Part I of Tyrrell's work provides analyses of Lonergan's own historical context and what Tyrrell accurately labels the 'existential dimension' of Lonergan's 'new context' Part II turns to the 'content' of the strictly philosophical argument Lonergan provides for the existence of God in the famed chapter nineteen of Insight...
...like Colette's, her prose writings on the subject (Journal of a Solitude) provide insights into the life of one who has lived alone...
...has not recovered...
...Elsewhere there still exists the contradiction that there are rich Christians and a rich Church...
...The hostility of five Presidents and their ministers of national security has strengthened Castro's rule and role...
...But, paradoxically, the anti-Castro policy helps the Revolution...
...High Windows When I see a couple of kids And guess he's fucking her and she's taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives- Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly...
...And that they don't participate, they don't share their things like revolutionaries, they are not loving...
...And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing and is nowhere, and is endless...
...LBJ feared "another Cuba" and invaded nearby Santo Domingo...
...The assassination in Dallas, associated with the Cuba controversy, is a tragedy from which the U.S...
...That context can, in general terms, be described as a far greater insistence upon both historical consciousness and values...
...the message so civilized, resigned and world-weary, that it calls for a special kind of appreciation...
...For example, in the actual argument of chapter nineteen, as Tyrrell makes clear, Lonergan does reformulate the traditional Thomist theory of causality in accord with his own critical philosophy...
...The transition from the vernacular of the opening stanza to the middle section with its curious dis-illusioned remarks about shifting standards of morality, hardly prepares the reader for the breathtaking ending, as apocalyptic, in its way, as the ending of Auden's "Limestone Landscape...
...Cuba is being reincorporated into the Latin community without the U.S...
...The Cubans are doing it by work...
...It's been his ace in the hole,' reports Nicholson, "always available to inspire nationalist loyalty for the Revolution and cajole countless hours of volunteer work...
...No longer is the society inflicted from head to toe with the cancer of poverty, with the decadence and moral degradation that were Havana's fame...
...Perhaps he could also defend, by critically reformulating, all the traditional Thomist attributes for God...
Vol. 102 • July 1975 • No. 8
