BOOKS
Loewe, William P. & Hillman, Eugene & King, Robert L. & Tavard, George H. & Druska, John & Vellucci, Dennis
Jesus, Son of Man RUDOLF AUGSTEIN Urizen Books, $12.95 Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels MICHAEL GRANT Scribner's, $12.50 WILLIAM P. LOEWE Rudolf Augstein, publisher of...
...But Price's style is so like Nixon's that it constantly reminds us of the irresponsible use of logic and language that the politically powerful impose on a passive audience...
...Climate: INVIGORATING...
...water poems (boating, crabbing, night fishing) last...
...An awareness of history challenges Christians in the first place, then, to sort out the kinds of truth-claim they assert in handing on their scriptures and the doctrines they have generated...
...On the jacket-cover Augstein sets forth his program: "I am now probing how the Christian church dares to appeal to a Jesus who never existed, to teachings he never taught, to a mandate he never issued, and to a claim that he was God's son, which he never presumed for himself...
...With Nixon should have been the balanced document that some of the early publisher's blurbs make it out to be, but it is unfortunately a debater's handbook that encourages a reply in kind, as this review may too amply testify...
...Jesus, Son of Man RUDOLF AUGSTEIN Urizen Books, $12.95 Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels MICHAEL GRANT Scribner's, $12.50 WILLIAM P. LOEWE Rudolf Augstein, publisher of Der Spiegel, Germany's version of Time magazine, would like very much to be the little boy who cries out that the Emperor has no clothes...
...Phon* 814/837-9178 Kmm, Pa...
...the first is used ironically enough to suggest concern for precise expression, and the other, to suggest a pragmatic approach to problems...
...Yet the German publisher's fierce disillusionment should not be dismissed too quickly...
...Only a faith thus liberated can give a responsible account of what it does when, in the face of both Augstein and Grant, it confesses Jesus as the Christ...
...But since ssent Jesus as ist ask rhetorthere be in a he proceeds through the ling to end, h episode has g others, Old id Hellenistic the historical —remains an )ne need not his existence, the prophet)y recent res an "escha:r case, says bunded itself i imagination he real Jesus, in the more Even if the data out of ich the Goss notoriously letheless that ministry and The Jesus he ist's message eh's coming not only is already beunistry...
...Uke Nixon, Price is fond of the "not this, but that" sentence, often to set up a straw man: "It was not the cover-up that brought them on [weakened economy and damaged peace prospects], but the relentless, obsessive way in which the cover-up was uncovered...
...the media do distort reality with the devices of fiction...
...Obidea, Jesus ich confront is of God's >ut when he is homeland 0 him, and > send him 1 Jerusalem, Isaiah's Sufle probable sre...
...Yet his homeland of Galilee fails to rally to him, and Herod Antipas moves to send him packing...
...Even if the task of sifting historical data out of the faith-interpretation which the Gospels seek to convey remains notoriously difficult, Grant argues nonetheless that the main lines of Jesus' ministry and fate can be reconstructed...
...the arms float away from me and the chest swells...
...As does Hopkins, and through him the alliterative Anglo-Saxon seafaring poets, in "When the Fiddlers Gather": for three rises from bow's graze and struck strings not only land's lute, but eerie rapture stunning the sailor who feels at first daybreak a peace slicing wrist-labor as if before storm or prayer...
...Advisor: Spanish Secretariat for Ecumenical ^Relations, and John XXIII Institute, Salai manca...
...But the heroes I loved are gone...
...On the other hand Smith projects at times a heated presence of himself as distracting as theSe echoes...
...With Nixon Commonweal: 25 Nixon really meant something "far different" by "stonewall" than we were led to believe, but he widens context to include character and event when he would persuade us that an already beleaguered Nixon could have replayed the "smoking pistol" tape and innocently missed its significance...
...Do you think so...
...We read of Rose Mary Wood's devoted work in making transcripts of the tapes, but nothing of her part in making that 18r/2 minute gap which, even to Price, "seemed to stretch belief in coincidence to the breaking point...
...It's hard to listen to Smith's poems, which presume and mimic much, which achieve often enough preciosity instead of precision, without liking Cumberland Station less than you'd like to...
...For example, although undergraduates continue to be shocked, it seems fairly certain that Jesus never claimed the title "Messiah" for himself and even rejected it explicitly...
...While Grant manages to extricate far more information about Jesus from the Gospels than Augstein's mentors allow him to recognize, in neither case do their facts add up to the Christ of Christianity...
...He can create an oratorical antithesis, but it encases a false dilemma, not a sharp distinction: "I care less about whether a president breaks a law than I do about whether he keeps the peace...
...Box 429, Amherst, MA 01002 ican places, from the verdant to the embalmed...
...But if this relocation of the truth-claims which can be sought in scripture runs counter to the expectations one has nourished, and been encouraged to nourish, then disappointment and deception become inevitable...
...We are told that the press gives disproportionate emphasis to the sensational, but there is no complaint about Nixon's use of the media both as channels for public relations and as uncritical accomplices in reporting fictions like the anti-Nixon "riot" in San Jose in 1970 or the "rising" rate of drug abuse in 1969-71...
...In his chapter on the press, for example, Price uses the form of a list to give us twelve of his "concerns about the media...
...this is a demand for responsible discourse and intellectual integrity...
...Clearly, though, "Driving Home in the Breaking Season," which ends the first part of the book, shows Smith's self-consciousness at its worst, as a pose...
...Yet the force of Jesus's personality enabled some to believe that he rose again and, Grant adds thinly, his example of uncompromising commitment and individual achievement provides relevant inspiration today...
...Unfortunately, of course, his message of the coming Kingdom turned out to be mistaken...
...But since the Gospels so clearly present Jesus as the Messiah, Augstein must ask rhetorically, "What truth can there be in them...
...Using a wealth.of concrete illustrations, Dealy demonstrates that Latin American behavior patterns, often viewed as random or irrational, are in fact highly structured and rational when seen in the context of their own cultural goals and values...
...But nothing in his religious upbringing, and very little in his cultural experience as an adult, prepared him to recognize any positive, much less revelatory, value in such artifacts of the religious imagination...
...In place of the lukewarm deadpan prosiness appropriate perhaps (or is it too coy...
...Whether the poet's extended exposure of a self-centered predicament or his attempt at conjuring, through a fishing incident, a feeling of verbally-studied self-satisfaction earn that sympathy is a moot point...
...His conclusion: the historical Jesus—of Nazareth (?)—remains an elusive, shadowy figure...
...Obsessed with this single idea, Jesus preaches it in parables which confront his hearers with the crisis of God's judgment...
...Or, if one finds persuasive the prophetlike character put forth by recent research, Jesus comes off as an "eschatological crank...
...And the problem perdures: there continues to exist a vast gulf between the public discourse of the churches and the research findings of theologians...
...poems drawn as if from a fabulist's menagerie next...
...The Last Morning") I have my moments...
...Elsewhere in Cumberland Station, Smith's consciousness of the form of poetry, and of his presence within literature, produces on the one hand poems overshadowed by his masters Whitman and Roethke, replete with echoes of other greats...
...The Emperor he has in view is the Christian church in both Roman Catholic and Protestant establishments, garbed in a divine authority based on historical claims...
...Kiss and pity me now, I am the metaphor of bums...
...Theologians may find in Augstein's attack a tiresome rerun of the historical positivism of the nineteenth century, a philosophy which, in the end, seems to inform Grant's more good-natured, neighborly work as well...
...16735 car—both springs apparent metaphors for the heat and form of Smith's poem itself, his joke sprung on the Spring theme, the sonnet form, the idea of a poem...
...Jesus turns toward Jerusalem, fortified by the image of Isaiah's Suffering Servant to meet the probable outcome of his career there...
...Alienation follows from a shattered naivete1, and such alienation from the Judaeo-Christian tradition forms the heritage of modern secularity...
...Having lis homework intricacies of e scholarship 7or more than :en honing the ffer something iographies of hough undere shocked, it t Jesus never i" for himself itly...
...That's what poets are for, is my theory...
...Sometimes it strikes us as gratuitous, not of a piece with the formal control so often evident in Smith's work...
...He sets down as a general truth a shoddy maxim that "The only valid way to measure the acts of one president is against those of other presidents...
...They're rooted well in the particulars of their physical and spiritual territory —roughly the area from Roethke's Michigan country east-southeast, down through Pittsburgh and the Cumberland Gap and on into Virginia, extending to the Atlantic coast...
...For more than a century scholars have been honing the insight that the Gospels offer something other than historical biographies of Jesus...
...That's the one with the discussion with Halderman about using the CIA to obstruct the FBI Watergate investigation...
...He hits at all the old Nixon foes (the Times, the Post, the networks), and he buttresses his case with impressive authorities from Thomas Jefferson to Henry Fairlie...
...Judas, who had expected a more worthy messianic performance, betrays him, the Jews hand him over to Pilate, and he dies in despair...
...With Nixon RAYMOND PRICE Viking, $12.95 ROBERT L. KING In this book we hear the first speaker for the negative...
...Along the way, Price makes some sound points...
...Welcome: WARM...
...Like taking and retaking the old B&O route through the Gap, Dave Smith's poems make you feel acquainted, via personal and historical memories, with the attitudes and nuances of genuine AmerMASSACHUSETTS THE PUBLIC MAN An Interpretation of Latin American arid Other Catholic Countries Glen Caudill Dealy Foreword by Richard M. Morse An attempt to describe and explain the everyday attitudes and behavior of people living in Latin America and other monolithically Catholic cultures...
...Around this theme Augstein organizes a full-scale attack on Christianity, and for weapons he turns to the theologians...
...The rest of the poem discovers in Spring's heat the form of a spring thrusting up from the seat of a junked 5th Annual Season of lh« J ECUMENICAL INSTITUTE I AT SALAMANCA, SPAIN I "Christian Faith in a World of Chang*" July 28-Aug...
...In either case, says Augstein, the church has founded itself on a Christ whom its own imagination has produced and not on the real Jesus...
...He approves the slippery deception of presidential diction: "A presidential spokesman had said rather cryptically that the President would obey a 'definitive' decision [by the Supreme Court on the surrender of the tapes]—but the word 'definitive' was carefully left undefined...
...in those opening lines of "The Spring Poem," we hear expressions that come off more as intrusions of macho-insouciant diction than as American idiom uttered naturally in the course of a poem: "The big steel tourist shield says maybe/fifteen thousand got it here" ("On a Field Trip at Fredericksburg"), or My God, how long does a man have to sing to hear it be right just once, to ease out some hope for the freckled kid whose best give-and-go didn't make a diddly damn ("The Funeral Singer") These seem intrusions, I think, not because they're products of improper heat, but because the derivative rhetorical roles Smith assumes through Cumberland Station, in quest of adequate form, limit our impressions of his own vocal range...
...8, 1978 Lectures in English by Spanish ft British leaden Optional Spain/Portugal tour & low-cost trans-Atlantic jet flights to Madrid ft London...
...As language is slanted, history is twisted to fit artificial categories: "The 1960s were essentially a romantic decade...
...Price demands an exclusively verbal context to have us understand that As he worked on the speech that he hated to give, his mind kept drifting away from it and back again, his gaze shifting away to the windows and back to the fire...
...With Nixon has a nicely ambiguous title, but its tone soon becomes polemic, and its structure too often recalls the ancient form of an animadversion—the rambling point-by-point reply to an opponent's case...
...When, as a result, we do hear Smith's voice at its most characteristic —in the self-conscious extremes of passages like the ones quoted above— we're a little surprised at its sound...
...But finally, he insists too strongly that the press was responsible for Nixon's fall...
...the messenger, not the general, lost the battle...
...Pausing at a truckstop where teamsters "still hate long hair," the poet says: For one dumb, instinctive instant I touch the book in my hip pocket, then sag and pay up...
...They're often eloquent: Taking two stones I pound my shirt like a woman whose knees are slick after long kneeling...
...Symbolism is important...
...Michael Grant writes in the more moderate British tradition...
...Dylan Thomas sounds through "For the Polioed Girl Killed by Cottonmouths on Her Birthday" ("On her birthday in the greenglowing May of each year/1 hobble in my head to that ocean-side carnival...
...The New York Times "shrilled," and Edmund Muskie "cried" out, all over the firing of Elliot Richardson...
...Most of the time, his method is too predictable and his documentation too selective to be convincing...
...No longer is scientific competence claimed for the biblical authors on the basis of their divine inspiration, and they are turning out not to be modern historians either...
...If only one would listen, I could make Roethke ring and coo 6 January 1978: 24 all the hurts they haul in their grinding loneliness...
...Having staged his entry to fulfill a prophecy from Zechariah he deliberately provokes the ruling Sadducees by cleansing the temple...
...Secondly, the Enlightenment with its scientific and historical awareness has all too easily degenerated into a narrow positivism which identifies objective reality with what can be factually controlled...
...Many of Smith's forms and much of his phrasing, both so indebted to poetry past, create a sense of their containing the poet and his subjects, as opposed to what Denise Levertov might call the sense of an experience growing into the organic form of a poem, spoken in the poet's authentic voice...
...And you'd like to like the book more because Smith's musings and tales sound at their truest, in many of his lines and several entire poems, as authentic and arresting as might yours be if only your experience were to sing you the right words...
...Ironically, we come to notice most in such passages a Dickeyesque hyperRomantic strain that threatens to render their words insubstantial, their revelations illusory...
...The point remains that much that Augstein was taught to regard as fact has proved to be symbol and myth...
...But faith, perhaps, concerns not so much controllable, if bizarre, facts as a way of seeing, and here the challenge is for Christians to free themselves from the modern fetish of fact in order to vindicate human intelligence in its full, imaginaCommonweah 23 tive scope...
...On the one hand, as Augstein witnesses eloquently, modern scientific and historical inquiry shatter what Paul Ricoeur has called the "first naivete'" of an earlier age, when the Bible could be read as a straightforward account of the way things are...
...Cloth, $10.00 University of Massachusetts Press P.O...
...This then is a Spring poem...
...Substance is also important...
...To the resolution that Richard Nixon was guilty of impeachable offences, his friend and speechwriter, Raymond Price, argues that hostile media and hypocritical politicians drove a progressive peacemaker from office and that they did so for behavior that they would wink at in JFK, forgive in FDR and forget about in Lincoln...
...Prospectus from: I SALAMANCA INSTITUTE SECRETARY j ISO Grams St...
...Grant conducts his inquiry soberly...
...In similar fashion, a few longer poems ("Drunks," "Night Fishing for Blues") show symptoms of this poetic overkill...
...It is a style without a moral core, as Price unwittingly reveals when he speaks of drafting the inaugural address: "More than almost any other public occasion, a presidential inauguration has an almost sacramental element...
...Surely this magisterial distinction between symbol and substance reveals moral fragmentation...
...Prices: LOW...
...Cumberland Station DAVE SMITH V. of Illinois Press, $3.45 JOHN DRVSKA I wanted to like these poems more than I did...
...The Spring Poem," a carefullywrought piece of parodic fancy, locates Smith's concerns through all his work: "proper heat and adequate form...
...One need not be a total fool to doubt his existence...
...The Jesus he presents takes up the Baptist's message of the nearness of Yahweh's coming and adds a unique twist: not only is God's rule at hand, it is already beginning in Jesus's own ministry...
...Some accounts read like propaganda: Anthony Lewis "gasped" and "frothed...
...The Testimony of Wine") Cumberland Station perplexes me, though...
...Both Augstein and Grant embody the double challenge which the Enlightenment with its historical consciousness poses to Christian faith...
...He has done his homework well, plunging into the intricacies of radical German scripture scholarship and coming out on top...
...the press can be "too self-righteous...
...he also acts it out when he heals and exorcizes...
...As a parallel to Max Weber's work on Protestant values and their expression in society, The Public Man is likely to be a controversial work of cultural analysis...
...Finally, his voice flat, distant, defeated, he turned to' me and asked: "Maybe I should resign...
...A similar imbalance runs through the book because Price honors the rule for a rhetorical narration that a partisan may omit a truth provided he not tell a lie...
...You've always been the voice of my conscience...
...It collided explosively with the 'classic' left-brain, linear-logical forces Nixon represented, which were trying to reimpose the basic disciplines of the fifties and before...
...In this fashion he proceeds laboriously, and snidely, through the Jesus-story from beginning to end, showing in detail how each episode has been built up from, among others, Old Testament, rabbinical, and Hellenistic sources...
...If you think 1 should resign, just write it into the next draft, and I'll do it...
...Smith's words here indulge his perception of himself as poet and the truckers as slugs, and put a hell of a burden on Roethke, while demanding that the audience share in judgments imposed on the poem rather than in the poem's evolved vision...
...a right-brain age —aural, tactile, sensory, holistic...
...Only the cynic will communicate one level of meaning and then overlay the "sacramental element" as dressingRelated examples are easy to find...
...It may be that his radical historical scepticism proves as excessive and fruitless as Descartes's methodical doubt, and certainly his invective slips beyond the bounds of common decency...
...All else, the esthetic, the moral, and the religious, becomes a matter of subjective preference to be regulated only by pragmatic considerations...
...The difference in tone between the two is worth noting...
...They're nicely arranged in three sections: earth poems of traveling, hunting, historical scenes mostly first...
...He views his subject as "the most important person who ever lived," and he allows himself no more than a suppressed chuckle at, for example, the efforts of theologians to reconcile the doctrine of Christ's sinlessness with his baptism of repentance at John's hands...
...Placed strategically to conclude each of the last two sections, these poems require extended sympathy for the poet's situation during quasisociological, highly emotional narratives that recapitulate some major themes of Cumberland Station (detachment, family...
...Augstein, on the other hand, vents indignant scorn on everyone from Yahweh ("bad-tempered and inconsiderate") and the Holy Spirit (who won promotion to the Godhead by a "parliamentary trick") to contemporary theologians like Helmut Thielecke (a "bon bourgeois chatterbox") and Karl Rahner ("deceitful...
...Price also likes a couple of Nixon's wordy constructions, "in terms of and "in a way that...
...Consider, to start with, a Smith sonnet, "The Spring Poem," which bears the epigraph "Everyone should write a Spring poem" (Louise Gluck), and begins: Yes, but we must be sure of verities such as proper heat and adequate form...
...So, we listen again to the charges of media bias against Nixon, but we hear nothing of the overwhelming number of editorial endorsements he received...
...SALAMANCA, gem of a medieval city, home of one of Europe's oldest universities, founded 1222...
...Aside from some insider's anecdotes (Nixon may have been depressed enough to resign in April of '73), Price is too much the disputant to give us a fresh perspective on the Nixon presidency...
...Or, as Sporting Life more simply sings, "It ain't necessarily so...
...It is that easy to begin a passage...
...Such strategy is defensible in a debate because it supposes a reply...
Vol. 105 • January 1978 • No. 1
