UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS
Arnold, Walter & Vawte, Bruce & Elshtain, Jean Bethke & Sisk, John P. & Murchland, Bernard & Merchant, Norris & Ratte, John
8ome Om~tmulbqf Books of the Y~r 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS Walter Arnold "Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Emerson's leading...
...Professor May distinguishes four phases of the Enlightenment period: The Moderate Enlightenment (Newton, Locke, Pope) stressed balance and order...
...The case of "du ]eune sauvage de FAveyron" promised to help determine, once and for all, what is man...
...The Abb6 shortly gave up on the wild boy as hopeless...
...At this juncture a remarkable young man enters the story: a twenty-six year old doctor, Jean-Paul-Marc-Gaspard Itard who, in 1800, undertook the wild boy's education...
...But what of liberalism...
...And in "Feeling as Insight" this observation is fully worthy of his master James: "How frequent it is that people retreat to a studied anonymity because the complex quality of their experience defies the recognized patterns of expression and explication...
...Emerson's leading question to Americans of any century (I almost said of any country), always too ready to take their culture packaged, is the spur to John McDermott's philosophicad raids on the inarticulate in this exemplary, generative book, The Culture of Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain (New York University Press, $13.75...
...the primacy of the incarnation...
...Hence that "sacred "discontent," that creative "alienation" in whose praise Schneidau writes in his first chapter...
...Schneidau is Professor of English at the University of California and his work witnesses to the mastery of his discipline...
...May makes them work very defensibly indeed...
...McDermott's book only sends his readers back to his sources, particularly Dewey's remarkable Art as Experience, it will have succeeded so far...
...Of it he writes: "It has successfully defended itself not only agaln~ strong reforming emotions in the nineteenth century, not only against rightwing demagogy in the twentieth, but against direct attacks by the most popnlar and skillful leaders of the people: against Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt...
...A classic example is the early imaginings of the transMississippi West, growing out of the Jeffersonian ideal of a nation of subsistence farmers rather than an accurate understanding of the territory itself, that led to some of the more disastrous limitations of the Homestead Act...
...The question admits of no easy answers for man is, from birth, a being profoundly influenced by culture...
...It was, however, the Moderate Enlightenment in tandem with the Didactic Enlightenment that was to have the most lasting influence on American institutions and mores...
...University presses should be proud of doing such books and should get the word out a little louder...
...347...
...For those who have read Northrop Frye over the years, the first and fifth essays---"The Search for Acceptable Words" and "Expanding Eyes"--in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society, (Indiana Univer27 May 1977:$46 sity Press, $11.50) are likely to be particularly welcome since their subject in great part is the mental history of one of our most important critics...
...and "modifications of the more rigorous doctrines concerning God's sovereignty, human wickedness, and the exclusiveness of Christian revelation" are the liberal principles...
...After a series of escapes and recaptures, during which a naturalist made a detailed description of him which has survived, the wild boy was placed in the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris under the tutelage Of ~fie-Abl~ Sicard~ an authority on the retraining of the deaf, and a member of the Society for Observers of Man who had taken a special interest in the case...
...Itard was handicapped by the absence of a theory of moral development which incorporates sexuality systematically into its account...
...For general readers, Lane's account of Itard's devotion and indefatigability will prove fascinating and moving, particularly his efforts to instill in Victor a disinterested sense of justice and to arouse the complex human emotions of gratitude, pity, and remorse...
...Two 2 week seszlons: July 17th to July 29th and July 31st to August 12th Resident Accomodations for 100 Students & Scholars at Mount Baldy_ Credit available" through UCLA Extension to qualified ~udent& with: Kees Bolle, Phd...
...Catholics who know they must still come to terms with their own phase of "the modernist impulse" will learn much from this splendid piece of engaged, scientific, and lucidly written history...
...Itard took precisely the opposite tack: he saw in the wild child one who was "an idiot because he was left in the wild...
...For further Information write: CIMARRON ZEN CENTER 2505 Cimarron Street Los Angeles, CA 90018 the works and lives of a variety of theologians, popular preachers, and publiclsts, from the Unitarian movement in the 1870's to the eclipse of modernism in the years after World War I, when modernism and liberalism were over-whelmed by what Professor Hutchison calls "the neo-orthodox onslaught...
...They posed, quite unabashedly, the _9 most fundamental of questions: what is the nature of man...
...The Old Testament, contrary to the world about it, refused to canonize culture, the cosmos, time, space, even ideals...
...No one sounds more like a well-integrated self than Frye, whether he is writing about Yeats's A Vision, the Elizabethan masque and antimasque, the letters of Wallace Stevens, Blake's illnstrations for The Book o! Job, the dismal sexual symbology surrounding the humanities, Darwin, the equidistance of the humanities from the social sciences and sciences, the place of charms and riddles in literature, the relation between Milton's Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, or the advahtage of a metaphor of interpenetration over the more familiar "horizontal" metaphors of connecting, uniting and reconciling...
...Without society we could neither identify objects, nor categorize, nor speak, nor engage in social relationships...
...Considers new political praxis of Christians...
...ohn Ratte Religion can, and must exist in the modern world...
...This book, written by a former nun, is one of the first sociological investigations of women's religious orders in the United States and the changes occurring within them...
...Itard attended to each of Victor's (as the wild boy came to be called) sensory modalities separately---first to arouse them and then to "organize them...
...What is especially interesting about this field is that in addition to studying the conventional topics of the physical environment-topography, climate, etc.--and interactions with organisms, the historical geographer seeks to know the human perceptions of the environment and the effects of that perception on the use of the land...
...Abbot Thomas Keating O.CS.O...
...Martin Marty's A Nation o/ Behavers, a study of changes in AmerCommonweal...
...Nevertheless, sufficient instances are given of the secular clergy's failure, during the early phase of their disestablishment, to appreciate these somewhat humiliating equivalencies, remembering as they did the power and pomp of earlier times, and desiring to reinstate perished magnificence with the help of nation-shaking interventions...
...Spiritual heirs of Matthew Arnold, please note...
...His scope and method of inquiry is that of John Dewey, but his spirit is ever ebulliently that of William James...
...Accordingly, the most common themes of these diverse essays on community, radicalism, religion, education "cultural pedagogy," aesthetics, social medicine, and the city are a plea for a "radically empirical" openness to experience in all things and a plea for an aesthetics (in the feeling sense) of everyday life and a concern for the aesthetic dimension of social problems...
...Those, like the Abb6 Sicard, who had given up on the wild boy, insisted that he had been left in the wild because he was an idiot...
...Press, $24.95) Dr...
...rather novel vernacular prayer services...
...Bossy shows a remnant of the faithful forced by their minority, suspect status into innovative, meaningful resolutions of lay-clergy conflicts, questions of liturgy and of lay participation in parochial decisions, and matters of relationship with other Christian minorities...
...The seculars were then preponderantly sons of the gentry, whose religious longings evoked a feudal romanticism...
...The first essay is much concerned with the university as a special kind of community for humanists, in which teaching and research cannot be separated "even in emphasis," in which the pseudo-scientific analogy is as much a threat to literary studies as the "neo-Nazi slogan of relevance," and in which it is important for the literary scholar to pick "a major writer of literature as a kind of spirit preceptor for himself...
...orthodoxy as well...
...Hutchison sees modernism as the "central force" in the liberal movement in the period 1870-1930, and defines the larger enterprise of Protestant ideas as older, and as an impulse which survives not only the modernist phase, but neo...
...These are some of the conclusions he reaches...
...K.Wako Kato, Phd...
...Itard discovered that, outside of human society, even our most basic senses remain unfocnsed and unintegrated and center upon one thing only: the stomach...
...And hence much, if not all, of the dynamism, the personalism, the view of history as a means of learning, and the refusal to acquiesce in what is that are some of the better traits of the western tradition...
...God is imm~em in human culture and is revealed through the development of culture...
...Extreme beliefs in radical perfectibility or some "fiery millennium to come" were less influential...
...Rev...
...Norris Merchant In The English Catholic Community IJ70-1850, (Oxford Univ...
...To put it briefly, the American nation was formed dialectically out of the clash between the faith of the Christian tradition and the ideas of the Enlightenment period...
...Philosophy as McDermott practices it ceases indeed to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method cultivated by philosophers for dealing with the problems of people...
...Human society is moving towards the attainment of the Kingdom of God preached by lesus---"even though it may never attain the reality...
...It is more than a pleasure to record that even in the realms of academe and of scholarship the majesty of the English language remains a willing tool for one who has learnt how to use it...
...The Society believed the wild boy would help to resolve their philosophic speculations concerning man's nature, the relationship between nature and nurture, whether there were innate ideas, and s o On...
...This seminu is an excellent opportunity to introduce Buddhist Wisdom in an authentic setting...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain The savants and philosophers of the nineteenth century, heirs of the Enlightenment, were not timid men...
...Cloth $12.95 Paper $6.95 JESUS AND FREEDOM by Sebastian Kappen, S.l...
...Hutchison builds his own odyssey, as Christian thinker as well as historian, into the tale, and treats each of his men (and many of them will be obscure to even the sophisticated general student of American religions culture) as what they were, religious creatures of passion and intensity...
...results were semi-congregational forms of policy in several noted parishes, especially in Lancashire...
...Of special interest is his account of the importance to his development of the work of Sir James Frazer, Jung and Spengler, the latter of whom ought to be read "as a Romantic and symbolic poet...
...The "wild boy" was captured in 1800 in a district of southwestern France...
...May cites the durability of the anti-majoritarian institution of judicial review as evidence of this conclusion...
...Just as a piece of elegant prose this book is a delight to read...
...And unlike other students of fascinating period, who can find little to rescue from the shipwreck of European optimism in the future in the era of total war, Professor Hutchison reminds us that the other two modernist notions, the sense of divine immanence, and the ability of the religious impulse to adapt to human history, are still a vital, "ff controversial" inheritance from those decades...
...John P. Sisk Though there is God's plenty--including some extremely useful autobiographical information--in this collection of twelve recent essays, it must not be thought of as a grab bag...
...Harlan Lane's second book, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Harvard University Press, $15), depicts, strikingly, why the boy who had aroused such initial curiosity and enthusiasm, rapidly invited disinterest and disgust...
...Lane documents Itard's arduous, painful, sometimes hopeful, often despairing efforts both to educate and to humanize the wild boy of Aveyrou...
...Cloth $8.95 Paper $3.95 Write for free catalog: over 100 titles ORBIS BOOKS Maryknoll, NY 10545 Out of the Cloister A Study of Organizational Dilemmas By Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh Since Vatican Council II, convent walls have crumbled and the structures that once separated nuns from the world are gone...
...Containing some 345 paperbound pages and twentythree plates, at $5.95 this has to be one of the real literary bargains of the year...
...good works seen over "professions and confessions...
...Rather, Schneidau challenges western man to recognize how different he is from most other men who have ever lived, and to acknowledge how much this difference is due to the Bible--by which he means, mainly and quite rightly in this case, the Old Testament...
...Few opportunities for direct observation, for what scientists call a "controlled experiment," present themselves...
...McDermott is a famously effective teacher of undergraduates, and reading him is almost as good as having him in a course must be...
...Universal religious sentiment behind "the variegated forms of religious experience" and creeds and churches...
...And this is the best American work in philosophy that I have read in some time...
...Bossy's largely sociological perspective poses English Cathoficism, sans hierarchy, as a dissenting, separatist denomination, thrown together with, and having surprisingly much in common with Unitarians, Quakers, and Presbyterians...
...Leo Pruden, Phd...
...Frye, incidentally, confesses to being p - ~ l e d with the influence of a "poet" so antipathetic to him in so many ways...
...Neither a priorism nor empiricism settles the problem...
...Its larger dimension of interest stems from the fact that it also raises "most of the assumptions around which my work at present revolves...
...The struggle between faith and knowledge (which is an ancient one, predating even the Greeks) is ultimately a struggle for control and direction of our basic psychic energies...
...the Revolutionary Enlightenment (Rousseau, Goldwin, Paine) announced that a new age had dawned on the ruins of the past and proclaimed that the perfectibility of human nature would lead mankind to virtually unimaginable heights of achievement...
...Far from portraying Catholic survival as purchased by surrender of vitality, Dr...
...Without civilization he would be one of the feeblest and least intelligent of animals...
...The Sceptical Enlightenment had least influence on the new nation...
...Itard's Herculean efforts came to a dramatic halt with the onset of puberty...
...How is one to disentangle man's "natural" nature from his "social" nature...
...BOOKS CHARTING RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPES PAUL R. MESSBARGER A Natiow o f Meh,see~a MARTIN E. MARTY U. o~ Chicago, $8.95 The New R e l | g l o t m Consctmumess EDITED BY CHARLES Y. GLOCK & ROBERT N. BELLAH U. o~ Cali/ornia, $14.95 Some years ago I was introduced to an academic discipline called Historical Geography...
...Joseph's Abbey Spencer, Mass...
...the sense of being a missionary enterprise, with subsequent energy and expansiveness...
...The Revolutionary Enlightenment, at least insofar as it inculcated a belief in moral and political progress, was of some considerable influence...
...Lane's book itself doesn't end with Itard's work with the wild boy of Aveyron but goes on to trace Itard's contributions to methods of education for deafmutes and the mentally retarded...
...Many of the regular clergy seem to have assisted the victors in this seventeenth century revolution...
...Jnshu Samki, Roshi Frederick Streng, Phd...
...John Bossy has produced an unconventional portrait of English Catholicism from the time of its loss of legal status under Elizabeth I till its "Second Spring" (as Newman put it), the hierarchical restoration of 1850...
...14th to Aug...
...The strong, implicit suggestion of this careful, elaborately learned study is that a minority faith, in a world that snubs it, may awkwardly fight its way to unforeseen forms of inner vitality and external influence...
...The antipathy, if not the p-~,lement, is sufficiently indicated in his remark about theories of recurrence as he finds them in Nietzche and Yeats: that cyclical images seem "to be central and indispensable to fascist and Nazi views of history...
...n l q t l c e Vawter One of the most exciting books from a university or any other press to cross my desk in recent times is Herbert N. Schneidau's Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition published in 1976 by the University of California Press at Berkeley...
...the Scepticai Engiightenment (Voltaire, Hume , Holbach) was essentially iconoclastic in its thrust, denying not only the grounds of traditional belief but attacking the claims of reason as well...
...Our survival, history would seem to suggest, depends upon some creative compromise between the claims of each...
...I would hope that all who read it will find this book as stimulating as I did...
...Lewis Lancaster, Phd...
...The fruit of more than a decade of anguishing search for relevance, inspired by students, seminarians, and intellectuals whom Kappen addressed at seminars or in classrooms...
...Although the author states that he is doing classical intellectual historym"the development.., of particular ideas over long spans of time" --these ideas are given a broad setring in American culture and linked constantly with the European Protestant background...
...Among the...
...Connecting associations of ideas and striking insights bestrew these pages...
...20th...
...177 pages, $9.95 IJnlvemlty of TexM Press Post Office Box 7819 Austin, Texas 78712 Commonweal: $45 pltoV mtB and UCLA EXTENSION Announce A SUMMER SEMINAB ON THE SUTRAS At Mount Baldy, Calif...
...The nature of that difference, however, may not have been equally clear, nor to whose advantage it has been...
...For, rather than some incarnanation of Rousseau's noble savage, what those who observed the wild boy disCommonweal: J43 covered was "a disgustingly dirty child affected with spasmodic movements, and often convulsions, who swayed back and forth ceaselessly like certain animals in a zoo, who bit and scratched those who opposed him, who showed no affection for those who took care of him...
...and who was, in short, indifferent to everything and attentive to nothing...
...Scholars are left with a metaphysic, a system of a priori abstract generalizations, or with a series of empirical observations detailing the characteristics of man as opposed to those of other creatures...
...In the poignant words of Itard himself: Cast upon this globe without physical strength or innate ideas, incapable by himself of following the fundamental laws of his nature which call him to the first rank of the animal kingdom, it is only in the heart of society that man can attain the preeminent position that nature has reserved for him...
...The ruling ideas of a nation are, to paraphrase Marx, the ideas of powerful historical forces...
...in other words, be hadn't the benefit of Freud...
...It was they who accused the most autocratic of their already shorn bishops, Richard Smith, of treason, and forced him to seek a two-year refuge in the French embassy before fleeingRan event that helped to end clerical predominance in the community for two centuries...
...Bossy shows, managed to preempt their priests...
...Liberalism emphasizes God's immanence in human nature and history...
...Categories like the above have evident limits and are defensible only insofar as they throw light on the subject matter under study...
...This was not Aristotle's view but it seems to me existentially the case that history furnishes us with the raw materials of choice and identity as well as of ideas...
...27 May 1977:344 Bernard Murchland History holds the deep and often dark secrets of cultural identity...
...His subject is primarily American philosophy, that is the American experience of nature, history, and culture seen through, in his phrase, "the American angle of vision...
...These are the marks of American Protestant modernism traced in The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, by Wiltiam R. Hutchison (Harvard University Press, $15), ti~rough New from ORBIS THE MILITANT GOSPEL by Alfi'edo Fierro An analysis of contemporary political theologies...
...finally, the Didactic Enlightenment (based primarily on the teaching of the Scottish Realists) opposed both scepticism and revolution but was sympathetic to such Enlightenment values as rationality, progress and a moral sense...
...But the book really lives and breathes in the section on Victor, a peculiar being not, as some would have it, like the beasts--who, after all, are adroit and adept within their habitats-but a less-than-human human being, one who reminds us that our "debt to nurture" is "very heavy indeed," extending even to our most "elementary sensory discriminations...
...They are the marks as well of the European Catholic modernist episode which covered approximately the same decades, and which succumbed, not only to the strictures of Pins X, but to another kind of neoorthodox resurgence...
...Thus Itard was not prepared to deal with Victor's explosive and unsocialized sexuality and the wild boy's program of education came to an end...
...The excitement and elegance of major work in the history of religious ideas comes from the care with which Hutchison keeps both the larger liberal movement, and the intense modernist 'impulse' (the word is precisely chosen) before the reader as he learns about pulpit battles, and the struggles of schools of theology in universities and seminaries...
...Unfocused, unchanneled sexuality proved to be too much: earlier efforts were, in part, swamped and the boy regressed back to a more "wild", that is, unsocialized state...
...Frye considers the second of these two essays to be the keystone of the book...
...The Enlightenment in America by Henry F. May (Oxford University Press, $15), impressed me as a superb study of certain key ideas that shaped the American nation...
...A devotee of a sensualist epistemology which opposed the doctrine of innate ideas and argued that man was utterly dependent upon society, Itard developed a rigorous program of education for the approximately twelve-year-old youth who had been deprived of human company, so far as could be determined, from the age of three to five on...
...For that reason good history (understood here as the history of ideas) is necessarily good philosophy...
...and unusual collaborations, when "dissenters" (including Catholics) with a distaste for enthusiasm "attended sermons in one another'~ chapels...
...Zen Mcditztion Retreat to follow, Aug...
...So, in "Nature Nostalgia and the City" it is surely true that "one of the deepest and most pervasive sources of our alienation [is] the separation of the affective life from the processess of urban experience...
...Thus contests raged between those who held to the notion that man in the state of nature was a Rousseauian "noble savage," pure in heart, affectionate, as yet untainted by a corrupt society and those who argued that, apart from society, there was no "human" nature at all...
...But Schneidau has also made himsalf thoroughly conversant wtih mythopoeic thought and biblical scholarship as well as with the associated archeology and anthropology, and it is because of these attainments that he writes with such interest to me...
...If Mr...
...May's study gives an illuminating account of how that balance was struck in the formative years of the American character...
...The Culture of Experience is a true artifact of active mind, which philosophy should ever be at its best...
...Americans were not then nor are they now very good sceptics...
...Trade publishers should be ashamed that they do so few...
...This is not your predictable book on "biblical relevance...
...H.Graham Lamont, Phd...
...Anyone at all familiar with the "high cultures" of antiquity--to which, of course, we are also clearly tributary in countless ways--is aware of their radical difference from the world of the Bible...
...Given such an opportunity, the landowning laity, Dr...
...Membership in the human species is settled by reference to those elements of the human condition which appear to differentiate us from others...
...His own "original relation" to the sources and ongoing stream of the distinctively American experience is virtually named by his book's title...
...This book should aid the clarification...
Vol. 104 • May 1977 • No. 11
