BOOKS
Sale, Kirkpatrick & Meyersb, Jeffrey & Swidler, Leonard & Schroth, Raymond A. & Proffitt, Edward & Kuczkowski, Richard & Hillman, Eugene
The Resilient Church AVERY DULLES Doubkday, $7.95 EUGENE HILLMAN By its title and sub-title, and because the author himself prefers the model of the church as sign, this book promises to...
...Adaptation is thus narrowly conceived with reference only to selected "Inner-Catholic problems," especially the tension between the church and the secularizing forces of the modern Western world...
...But if his thesis is right, young children should exhibit bicamerality in that Jaynes holds that consciousness is purely a learned cultural phenomenon...
...It is 'within' not in extenso...
...Selected issues are discussed with DuMes's usual clarity of style and attention to relevant historical antecedents...
...It seems to have been the idea of Lynda Rosen Obst, who has no apparent qualifications for the job other than she was, it says here, "editorial consultant on the national stage production, Beatletnania"—which gives you some idea of the sophistication of the project —and is married to David Obst, a clever young man who publishes books through Random House, which published this one...
...Or Benjamin BracHee, for God sakes, on the Kennedy assassination, who manages to make it a big maudlin affair from which every drop of political signicance—even political speculation—is drained...
...The greatest "writer" is in touch with Shakespeare...
...That is a very great deal indeed...
...Here we are brought up to date on the changing concepts of interchurch membership, on the problem of eucharistic sharing, and on die new ecumenical strategies for a pluralistic age...
...The following passage, for example, might lend itself to such a pejorative interpretation, if we were to ignore what Dulles has written elsewhere, and even in the present volume, on the meaning of faith in relation to justice: Because we Hve in an imperfect world, it is inevitable that many deserving people will never receive an abundance of worldly riches . . . Many will be crushed by unfavorable circumstances, whether by natural catastrophies, innocent miscalculation, human malice, or unjust social systems . . . Christianity, however, has a message of hope even for these victims...
...The first lesson might be that the church's agenda tends to be dictated by the needs of those who are served...
...It is just the other way around, really...
...it "not only uses reincarnation to explore problems of human godliness, but to reintroduce the problem of pride which led to the Fall originally...
...Or are you supposed to keep it around as some kind of reference book for the period that our media have packaged for us as "the Sixties...
...The artist must directly manipulate his materials and thus charge them with emotion to create unique but essentially representational objects or performances...
...and no profound investigation of the nature or ethics or art—just workmanlike, imaginative stories that exploit essentially nineteenth-century conventions of form and content for fun...
...Is this criticism or academic overcompensation...
...In virtue of the same hermeneutical principle, it would be unfair to call Dulles a legitimizer of the present socio-economic status quo, or a peddlei of pie-in-the-sky, because of certain points emphasized in this book...
...With a sub-title like "The Necessity and Limits of Adaptation," one might have expected to find a treatment of the church's concern with the New Testament's oikumene, understood as the whole earth: the ethnically and culturally diverse peoples to whom the church is sent, from whom the church's members are called, and without whom the church cannot begin to be a universally intelligible sign...
...Thomas and St...
...The only thing I find lacking here, for a church that aspires to become catholic, is some explicit recognition of the need for input from nonWestern cultural zones...
...Canovan traces modern manifestations of populist thought—disillusionment with industrial progress, fear of government power, concern for environmental conservation, distrust of technocratic experts, return to agrarian communes and sympathy for Third World peasants...
...Sin and penance are now conscious desire and consciousness contrition, rather than in the external behaviors of the decalogue and the penances of temple sacrifice and community punishment...
...A deft mixture of fantasy and frisson, it tells of a man whose art consists in rearranging the universe through complicated energy exchanges between the end of time and the past...
...Note, however, that a tragic love affair and contact with the music of the past vitalized his technically good but "cold, emotionless, unfeeling" playing...
...surely they are T.S...
...Jaynes does not mention Aquinas—nor any other major theologian, for that matter, and that fact itself leaves one wondering—but he does devote a chapter to the subject of poetry in which he overlooks completely the role of consciousness in the process of creation...
...both science and science fiction make a conscious effort to recognize their beliefs and examine their validity...
...Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision ROBERT SCHOLES and ERIC S. RABKIN Oxford Univ...
...A missionary living in one of the poorest regions of the Third World and a theologian living in one of the power centers of the First World are apt to develop rather different ecclesiologies, influenced profoundly by their respective vantage points...
...The mission has a church...
...But Jaynes is in no way a dogmatist, though he is something of a reductionist (which he himself admits...
...For example, the very last person —the absolute bottom-of-the-hst-list person—that I would pick to tell me about Columbia 1968 would be a wise-ass lightweight like James Simon Kunen, who, you- may remember, wrote The Strawberry Statement, a mindless apolitical mish-mash and perhaps the single most pointless book to have come out of that college generation—especially since there are at least six other people who have done books on that particular demonstration who could have offered a serious commentary...
...By means of a synthesizing machine named Ludwig, he then attempts to construct the "Ultimate Melody" which composers throughout history have been trying to create...
...Then, too, Jaynes nowhere relates his theories of physiology to those of depth psychology (his grounding in behaviorism shows here), nor does he say a word about the physiology of the brain as operative at this juncture in history...
...The focus is more on the limits than on the necessity of adaptation...
...But the long history of the church, and Dulles's own fine writings on the reinterpretation of doctrine, touched upon even in chapters three and five of this volume, should remind us of the dangers involved in such an exercise...
...After surveying •x fiction and briefly : and pseudo-scienfrequently turn up ce ten novels they :ive of the range of the genre...
...But the impulses of his artistic nature jeopardize the survival of his sister, himself, and the world at the end of time...
...SF, in other words, seems split between radical exploration—testing beliefs, creating myths, pushing metaphors to their limits and beyond—and conservative or nostalgic consolation— transposing familiar ideologies into technological fancy dress, extremes of space and time, etc.: the art of making traditional notions of human nature or society and value conflicts seem natural and universal...
...He exhibits an odd primitivism here, for though one cannot quite pin him down, one feels that he does not quite trust the intentions of the conscious mind nor the works of the ego...
...But this consistent effort to displace the center of interest in SF from entertainment to high seriousness amounts to destroying the genre in order to save it for academia...
...There are photographs on almost every single one of its 316 pages: some small snapshotty things, some full-page jobs, some double-page spreads, and a few of them elaborate three-page puUouts...
...But for a long period, some men still heard their voices spasmodically (they retained bicameral powers to some extent...
...To this thesis Jaynes brings the evidence of a polymath...
...For play amidst and with the conventional probabilities of commercialized pop mythology— even the evasions of lightweight escapist forms like "space operas"—can be as illuminating of our hopes and fears as conscious exploration of more respectable literary and moral values...
...We are now roughly at 800 B.C., when men learned the arts of supplication...
...Many authentic Christians throughout the world—not just a few "progressive theologians"—believe, and with good reason, that the Catholic Church is still too introverted, and that its adaptation to non-Western cultures has not even begun, because this incarnational process is not permitted by the ethnocentric keepers of Europe's traditional religious forms and structures and conceptions...
...His masterpiece blends creation, destruction, and revenge into a new standard for art—a new old master to be copied...
...I'm not quite sure what to make of this new territory...
...It may even be misleading to say that the church has a mission...
...J.J...
...Another, certainly, is its style...
...This is, as you may have gathered by now, a really hopeless book, the kind that might give the concept of "nonbook" a bad name...
...One question that nags at me is, what of the East...
...The gods withdrew to Olympus or above to the heavens, but were still remembered and still needed by men not quite capable of self-authorization...
...As this cry was heeded, the churches began to concern themselves again with faith and worship...
...Great art derives from the artist's great personal suffering, vital isolation from society, technical skill, and need to create—an irrational, even desperate instinct...
...After surveying the history of science fiction and briefly explaining scientific and pseudo-scientific concepts that frequently turn up in SF, they analyze ten novels they consider representative of the range of 17 March 1978: 188 sanitary cottage...
...Indeed, the nondogmatic approach that he takes is one of the pleasures of the book...
...indeed, it can enhance the scope of art and the complexity of the finished work...
...Cano; his personal relaion men nor identi1 elite" who inspired nergetic dogmatism, fusion of the book :s modern manifeshought—disillusional progress, fear of , concern for encation, distrust of i, return to agrarian empathy for Third t she does not make tion between these >orary unrest and yet reactionary bedvocacy of Chesterlieve he will be rehis social and po;or his vitality, exy and good nature...
...Mutual understanding is not, in any case, promoted by attributing their differences to the sinister influences of "secularistic ideologies," or "atheistic Christianity," or "secular theologians," or "the Enlightenment...
...It und, really...
...What with its heft and size, however, I think I'll use it to prop up that wobbly shelf in the back of the garage...
...These others are the majority of humanity, to whom the church is sent in order to become through them the universal lumen gentium...
...This book is concerned with a different question How resilient are the church's Roman forms, structures and doctrines...
...This short but repetitive book tends to treat Chesterton in a rather sketchy and superficial way...
...A previous chapter on the renewal of the papacy, which is still "the gravest obstacle in the path of ecumenism" (Paul VI), reflects the hope that the papacy might eventually become an accepted sign of Christian unity, by finding new ways of exercising "single and joint ecumenical leadership," and by burdening itself less with the running of "the ecclesiastical machine...
...It is a large tabloid size, about 11" by 15", for no particular reason, so there's not a shelf in my whole house that it will fit on and I've had to keep it down beside the bookcase jammed against the wall...
...Some of the stories seem to argue that departure from these rather reactionary tenets is dystopic, dangerous...
...And I don't know what it's for 17 March 1978: 186 even if I did have a place for it...
...It will also need, or its thesis will, much greater refinement and a widening of its historical base if it is to be as revolutionary as Jaynes seems to mean it to be...
...They make much of the fact that "serious" writers like Pynchon, Vonnegut, Burroughs, Barth, Burgess, Golding, and Coover have produced works that are similar to those of serious or literary SF writers...
...The thesis is worth exploring and testing, and over and above its thesis, the book gives, as I have suggested, a thrilling sense of the sweep of human history...
...But he also delves into archaeology and anthropology with convincing rigor, and discusses language and literature with the expertise of a linguist and the subtlety of a textual critic...
...But this is what Dulles does, for example, when rebuking those who "popularized the idea that the Church had hitherto been too introverted and narcissistic...
...How odd to call these black spheres of impersonal emotions "palparia...
...Nevertheless, apparently feeling like one of "a harassed band of moderates . . . hooted at from both sides," Dulles tries to show that the target of the Hartford Appeal was not straw men, but some well known scholars...
...Canovan never explains his personal relationship with common men nor identifies the "intellectual elite" who inspired and opposed his energetic dogmatism...
...A psychologist himself, he of course brings to bear the most recent work in brain physiology and schizophrenia (a contemporary example of bicamerality...
...Bonhoeffer...
...It could also provide a balance against the weight of Western historical and cultural data which, while representing only a minor portion of the universal human experience, tend to be taken as normative, especially in Catholic moral teachings...
...The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind JULIAN JAYNES Houghton Mifflin, $12.95 EDWARD PROFFITT We are possibly at an end and almost certainly at a beginning: the end of all externalization of religious impulse and thus, ironically, of the Enlightenment and its progressive stages of secularization...
...There could have been a fuller discussion of his personal and ideological relations with Shaw and Wells and with Belloc, who, like Chesterton, wrongly believed that progressive social legislation would lead to the oppressive authority of the "servile state...
...But the overall vision of the church offered here, and the impatience reflected in several of the chapters, leave me uneasy...
...Dulles is at his best in his lucid and sensitive treatment of the structure of doctrinal authority appropriate to a pilgrim church...
...Is the clear echo of Stephen Daedalus meant to suggest that Wells, Asimov, LeGuin, et al...
...Almost impossible...
...The Origin of Consciousness birds, which Jaynes does account for, but snakes and cats and cows...
...Ronald Cain's 'Telepathos" concerns a new art form in which the artist painstakingly analyzes a complex emotion, then directly but telepathically imprints its pure form upon a sphere of sensitive material which imparts it to the "spectator...
...Unlike certain liberals," the author is "deeply concerned that the church, in its efforts at adaptation, should avoid imitating the fashions of the non-believing world . . ." He is also critical of "those conservatives who . . . balk at adapting the doctrines and the institutions of the church to the times in which we live . . ." But the principal thrust is "against those liberals whose programs of adaptation are 'based on an uncritical acceptance of the norms and slogans of Western secularist ideologies...
...those who are concerned more with nonbelievers than believers...
...Three thoughtful chapters are given to the "inner-Catholic problems" associated with ecumenism in the narrower sense of the relations between the separated denominations and traditions of Christians in Europe and North America...
...G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist MARGARET CANOVAN Harcourt, Brace, $10.95 JEFFREY MEYERS The purpose of this book is to examine the thought and writings of G. K. Chesterton (1873-1936), who was once a significant and popular writer...
...Having just finished The Origin of Consciousness, I myself feel Commonweal: 185 something like Keats's Cortez staring at the Pacific, or at least like the early reviewers of Darwin or Freud...
...The past is the repository of masterpieces...
...Directed by the right hemisphere of the brain, which we know to be nonverbal, though important to problem-solving with respect to spatial relationships, men literally heard voices, voices that directed their actions with the authority of deity...
...Cheap synthetic materials and computer-directed processes do eliminate the sculptor's skilled handiwork on recalcitrant stone or metal in Kornbluth's "With These Hands...
...The twelve stories in The Arts and Beyond manipulate conceptions of art and the artist which, extracted and strung together, compose a solemn credo: Art is the record of the artist's feelings...
...In any case it is regrettable that Dulles was unable to take account of two important works, published almost simultaneously with his own, on the purpose of the church: The Flaming Center: A Theology of the Christian Mission, by Carl Braaten (Fortress...
...Most are so dreary and ordinary—a nothandsome bikini bather to illustrate Tom Wolfe's surfers, Kennedy shaking hands in Ireland...
...Using Karl Rahner's notion of "latent heresy," and guided by James Hitchcock's list of "twenty-six heretical attitudes characterizing radical Catholicism," Dulles begins to sound a bit like an aging Jacques Maritain or a declining Dietrich von Hildebrand...
...But emotionless intelligence aided by sophisticated technology can only produce disaster, not art...
...Yet SF also "has often implied that 'there are some things man was not meant to know.'" Indeed, SF "actually only uses science—accurately or not—in order to achieve its primary aim of exploring the life and mind of man," and "trying to allay" fears of the vast, inhospitable universe which science has revealed...
...I would urge everyone to read the book if for no other reason than that it opens out a vista of human history before, say 800 B.C., about the cutoff date, I believe, for most of us with respect to our knowledge of our species...
...In this way both arrive at new, and potentially more useful, fictions...
...Is one supposed to read it...
...Although one may not agree with all of Dulles's reactions to the influence of the dominant Western culture in the life of the church today, this book is well worth reading precisely because these reactions are so sharp and provocative...
...the artistically barren society tolerates no original creation...
...The result was the fading away of bicameral voices and, thus, the withdrawal of the gods...
...Was Aquinas, for example, only a hangover from an older physiological mode...
...But do the writers of normal science fiction in fact pursue these sober, earnest ethical ventures of exploration and consolation...
...and how much further can they be stretched to accommodate changing conditions among various Western peoples...
...as forgers of the modern conscience...
...Are they still bicameral...
...What does it say about the Catholic Church in America that these seminarians have been more interested in self-fulfillment and therapeutic counseling than in social activism and serious scholarship...
...Well, for twenty bucks it makes a kind of expensive reference tool, but the real trouble is that there's no one here you can really imagine ever wanting to refer to...
...This church is a symbolical instrument for continuing the one incarnational mission of Jesus Christ to the whole of humanity 17 March 1978: 184 stern cultures ise this incarmitted by the urope's tradind structures hermeneutical mfair to call the present , or a peddler e of certain s book...
...Also, though in no way obtrusively, it makes one feel the human condition with poignancy and individual difference with new insight, and thus heightens one's human sympathies...
...Another question that I would like answered concerns totemism and animal worship...
...My greatest reservation concerning this book arises from Dulles's rethinking of the church's mission, and from his manner of reproaching those who do hot share his viewpoint: those who see the mission more in terms of the social than the private needs of people...
...They should be able to learn much from each other...
...It ass a loving the possiness...
...One ends up wishing the author had more fully elaborated some of his critical comments: not just his thrusts against "naive progressives" and "the liberal clergy," but also his passing remarks on such topics as our "noisy, talkative, demonstrative liturgies," or our seminarians during the past decade...
...The ample, might orative interignore what :re, and even the meaning dee: imperfect that many ver receive Idly riches led by un5, whether i, innocent malice, or . . Chrismessage of :ims...
...Abbie Hoffman on Berkeley in 1960, Stan Lee on Spiderman, Richard Speck's defense lawyer on his client's innocence, Stewart Brand on something about the whole earth, Viva on Max's, Wavy Gravy on Woodstock, things like that...
...and for his Father Brown detective stories...
...Eliot's objective correlatives...
...Nor is there any consideration of the "wider ecumenism," understood as the church's belated dialogue with the followers of the religions that still serve most of humanity...
...Jaynes's thesis, which is all but impossible to summarize in brief, concerns the physiology of the brain and its evolution as affected by human culture, especially as manifested by the evolution of language...
...Further, Scholes and Rabkin feel that it is the destiny of SF to transform the shape of "serious" literature, then to disappear...
...Though scholarly, the book is lucid and lively, a joy to read in every way...
...Such, at any rate, is what Jaynes can and would make his reader feel...
...Canovan is forced to concede, are simplistic and incoherent, vitiated by silliness and prejudice, and conveyed through tedious paradox (Dickens "did not always manage to make his characters men, but he always managed, at the least, to make them gods") and resounding banalities ("There are only three things in the world that women do not understand...
...If not, why not...
...and Why the Church?, edited by Walter Burghardt and William Thompson (Paulist Press...
...f Chesterton's ideas tnsiderably more efext of his life and ght, for Dr...
...Canovan points out, his writings have all the vices of populism: the appeal to emotion, disillusionment with parliamentary government, ignorance of the complexities of politics, tendency to support a popular dictator, attraction to conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism...
...Despite the advocacy of Chesterton's thought, I believe he will be remembered not for his social and political ideas, but for his vitality, exuberance, generosity and good nature...
...The Resilient Church AVERY DULLES Doubkday, $7.95 EUGENE HILLMAN By its title and sub-title, and because the author himself prefers the model of the church as sign, this book promises to deal with the Christian outreach to the whole of humanity...
...The text is 71 separate, usually two-page, pieces by a bunch of famous and not-so-tfamous and famous-for-»the-wrong-reason people out of the 1960s and '70s, commenting on a single event they are supposed to have a cosmic perception of...
...Yet Scholes and Rabkin would make exploratory, moral, and consciously literary SF the paradigm for the whole genre...
...Though attempting to account for the origins of consciousness, Jaynes underplays the role of consciousness at every point...
...And perhaps the mission of popular literature is simply to counteract the inroads of seriousness...
...the beginning of a new humanism, or of a new way of systematically conceiving man's history and evolution...
...but its expanse lies before me and I am startled by its power...
...Thus the gods came into being...
...Some of the pictures are nice enough, but you've probably seen them before, and very few are of the kind that you'd want to keep going back to, it seems to me...
...And in Grant Carrington's "Stella Blue," a virtuoso can play a guitar/computer hybrid even better with an artificial limb than with his real hand...
...The book will need to be addressed by theologians and ego psychologists alike, by literary critics and anthropologists, and even by behaviorists and other such mechanists...
...Are we to believe that the Chinese did not develop consciousness...
...for his critical studies of Chaucer, Blake, Cobbett, Dickens, Browning and Stevenson...
...udies of Chaucer, kens, Browning and ' his Father Brown ion: History, , Vision WHOLES and RABKIN . Press, $2.95 eyond: Vision* thetic Future :d by tfONTELEONE ay, $7.95 UCZKOWSKI >kin take this stuff ed...
...Francis...
...Arthur C. Clarke (tongue somewhat in cheek) tells an amusing tale of a physiologist whose "purely cerebral" interest in music leads him to determine scientifically the principles by which tunes from great works or commercials embed themselves in consciousness...
...They were the prophets, the oracles, the sibyls...
...The one may be more taken up by the material needs of the poor...
...To be sure, there is always and everywhere a need for Christians to examine critically their contemporary cultural perceptions and presuppositions, and even at times to "ferret out and denounce the prevalent forms of idolatry...
...But Jaynes hopelessly confuses poetry and meter, the language of feeling as it merges with thought and oracular messages...
...in the present or future technique is degenerate and content is debased...
...Commonweal: 189 Technology itself, however, need not be the root of unhappy endings or dystopias...
...There was a time, according to Jaynes—before the middle of the second millennium B.C...
...I have other reservations as well...
...and they are Liberty, Equality and Fraternity...
...It would have been profitable to explore the significant influence of The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) on 1984 on "The Road to Wigan Pier Diary," though Orwell, criticized the naively idealistic Chesterton for wanting "to see a free peasant or other small-owner living in his privately owned and probably insanitary cottage...
...And his fiction is "full of cheap jokes about pawnbrokers' noses and sinister figures of Jewish plutocrats...
...In the brief conclusion of the book Dr...
...In the third major section of the book, subtitled "Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World," Jaynes nowhere mentions children or contemporary psychology of (contemporary) human development...
...Behavior now must be changed from within the new consciousness rather than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from without...
...Jaynes's account of the development of consciousness focuses almost solely on the no doubt apocryphal "cradle of civilization," with an excursion here and there into Central and South America...
...It assures them that God, as a loving Father, opens up to all the possibility of eternal happiness...
...Am I some kind of cryptoheretic for preferring this extroverted symbol to Dulles's concept of the church's mission "to become the Church again"—a slogan he borrowed from Protestant reactions in the 1930s to the "social gospel" movement in American Protestantism...
...But, as Dr...
...Hallucination was the mode of communication between the right and left (verbal) hemispheres, with the voices hallucinated usually being those of the recently dead...
...Such input could serve as checks against EuroAmerican ethnocentrism in the teachings of the church and "the approved theologians...
...For a century and a half, science fiction has been making a serious and dedicated effort to create a modern conscience .for the human race...
...But in William Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts," sophisticated holography enables the artist to create elaborate 3-D sculptures that rival— even perfect—life...
...In a chapter, longer by one-third than any of the other eight chapters in this book, the Hartford Appeal is vigorously defended...
...I suppose I am expected with this, kind of book to rush out and buy a cocktail table to slip under it so that at least I'll have a place to put it...
...Who are they...
...And in so doing distorting the whole thing out of historical reality and substituting only symbolism, which this sort of book only- helps to foster...
...In fact, the history of the last five hundred years is a history of the adjustment to the loss of seemingly exterior or bicameral authorization entirely, a loss speeded by the growth of science, itself a result of the evolution of consciousness...
...22-23) Nor do I see the validity of Dulles's objection to the idea that "the church is the church only when it exists for others...
...Since the 1960s, Catholicism has been passing through a similar crisis . . . At present . . . many are asking that the Catholic Church be the Church again...
...And what of contemporary primitives...
...But it takes the raffish genius of a Leslie Fiedler, discovering archetypes as he slogs merrily but observantly through the trash, to realize that...
...Press, $2.95 The Arts & Beyond: Visions of Man's Aesthetic Future Edited by THOMAS F. MONTELEONE Doubl'eday, $7.95 RICHARD KUCZKOWSKI Scholes and Rabkin take this stuff very seriously indeed...
...the In the 1930s, after some years of being distracted by the exaggerations of the "social gospel," the Protestant churches fell to a very low ebb...
...About that time a cry was raised, "Let the Church be the Church...
...Russ's "The Masterpiece" focuses on an excellent copyist and imitator, of "old masters" (such as Warhol) who produces a series of brilliant original works during schizophrenic seizures...
...SF can use the discoveries of science "to motivate inquiry into age-old human problems" (such as divided loyalties in Simak's Way Station and "the conflict in man's nature between pre-determination and free will...
...His ideas were unrealistic and ineffective in his own time, and the author does not succeed in making them interesting and significant today...
...In spke of my various reservations, there is still much to recommend this book...
...And who are the others, anyway, if not the non-church, the outsiders, the gentiles, the unevangdized beyond the immediate environs of the church (Karl Barth...
...It must weigh more than five pounds, so you can't exactly cuddle it on your lap and it's a full two-handed job just to pick it up...
...One would like to know much more about the theological influences on his religious thought which led to his conversion to Catholicism in 1922—long after he had formulated his basic ideas—and about his books on St...
...But as language evolved and as natural and cultural pressures changed (over-population plays a key role here for Jaynes), the metaphors of the internalized self emerged and the left hemisphere became increasingly dominant...
...Against the hierocratic and democratic theories of doctrinal authority he sets forth a pluralistic theory in which several organs of authority (scripture, tradition, the sense of the faithful, gifted individuals, appointed officials, and three forms of the ministry—doctoral, prophetic and pastoral) serve as mutual checks and balances...
...Harlan Ellison's "Shoppe Keeper," perhaps the best story in the collection, takes the form of virtuoso variations on themes of Michael Moorcock and Twilight Zone-y SF...
...But there is no wrestling here with the incarnational theme of the church's necessity to take on the cultural flesh of these peoples in the non-Western world where, after all, most of humankind actually lives...
...And would you believe that John Dean is the one they picked to write on the Washington anti-war demonstrations in 1969?— even though he's so atrocious that he even tries to paint a sympathetic picture of Richard ("Put 'em in concentration camps") Klemdienst...
...Chesterton did, in fact, sympathize with Fascism and defend Mussolini in The Resurrection of Rome, published the year after the Roman Catholic Church compromised with the Fascist regime and signed the Concordat of 1929...
...No consolation in The Arts and Beyond (despairing suicides or deaths are fairly common...
...And if Jaynes can be so wrong about poetry as practiced in the last millennium, can we credit him on the equally serious matters of theology and its motive force...
...The same straw men, it seems, that were set up and toppled by the Hartford Appeal in 1975...
...It is also widely informative—what Jaynes says about the Iliad and the Old Testament, for example, sheds much light—and supremely challenging...
...Or Julie Nixon Eisenhower on being a college student in 1968...
...Or are you only supposed to look at the pictures...
...their ten "representative" novels (including Frankenstein, The Time Machine, We, Childhood's End, A Canticle for Liebowitz, and The Left Hand of Darkness) as well as most of the works they comment on contain rather higher levels of these qualities than is usual in normal SF...
...Failing to distinguish between the intentions of latterday poets and the possible origins of poetry, he sees poetry as a remnant of pre-conscious millennia, as a hankering after the bicameral voice of the muse only...
...But his ideas, as Dr...
...This church for continmission of jf humanity in its historico-cultural and ethnic diversity...
...are in the same league as Joyce, Faulkner, Conrad, Hardy, et al...
...Chesterton's idiosyncratic populism was based on a faith in ordinary people (he felt the divine origin of man was the basis for democracy) and a commitment to the impractical social ideal of a self-governing peasant nation which would recreate his vision (inherited from William Morris) of the Merrie England that had been destroyed by Protestant capitalism...
...And his knowledge of history is vast...
...when men did not possess consciousness as we know it...
...The argumentation is much too thin, but some good questions are raised and bold challenges are offered...
...If the gods were originally hallucinated as human 'beings, how did they ever become animals—not only . . . the attempted reformation of Judaism by Jesus can be construed as a necessarily new religion for conscious men rather than bicameral men...
...Subsequent history, 'however, is a history of increasing left hemispheric dominance and of solidification of the metaphors of self...
...Roger Haight's contribution to the latter volume is especially relevant...
...SF is based on a "radical dislocation from present reality," and "concerns itself powerfully and continually with the examination of symbols central to our vision of ourselves...
...What is actually delivered is something else...
...But she does not make any direct connection between these signs of contemporary unrest and Chesterton's radical yet reactionary beliefs...
...It is metaphorical not literal...
...It is an effort, we are told in the introduction, "to appraise and carry forward the theological work of Catholic ecciesiology in the decade since the Council...
...That would explain their inscrutability, but not their culture...
...David Tracy, Gregory Baum, Gabriel Moran, Leslie Dewart, and Piet Schooenberg are among those named...
...to illustrate his assassination, a close-up of Dylan that makes him look like your nephew Elmer in a snk—that you wonder why space was given to them...
...not I in an excellently lion flat and tied is as to sanitation...
...The divine kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical...
...But the matter that nags at me most involves consciousness itself...
...The Resilient Church other by the spiritual needs of the affluent...
...Here is the origin of Greek and Roman polytheism as well as of the Judeo-Christian tradition...
...Only a few stories stretch beyond hoary conceptions of art to deal with material that even approaches the revolutionary quality of much current artistic theory and practice...
...The blessings of eternal life are so great that, 'in comparison with them, all this earthly suffering is as nothing, (p...
...Let us hear more from Scholes and Rabkin...
...There was a great renewal stretching through the 1940s and 1950s...
...Many of the issues he wrote about—Distributism and Temperance—are now dead...
...How, I would like to know, does the right hemisphere now communicate with the left...
...The Sixties Edited by LYNDA ROSEN OBST Random House, $19.95 KIRKPATRICK SALE - First of all I don't even know what to do with the damn thing...
...These last are the most mysterious: one, for example, of the hosing of blacks in Birmingham, is an unfocused blur, and the third page, once you pull it out, turns out to be a totally abstract and unreadable swirl of black and white...
...And the analysis of Chesterton's ideas would have been considerably more effective in the context of his life and contemporary thought, for Dr...
...Still, even if Jaynes proves wrong, the book is one that must be read...
...In Charles L. Grant's "Eldorado," a city designed to be "the world's cultural womb" and to disprove the myth that for artists "starvation equals brilliance" coddles, cuddles, and caresses them into sterility...
...But it does so only for the West...
...Nothing that you'd particularly want to read about, probably, at least not from these people, at least not in the kitchy-cutesy fashion the editor has apparently encouraged...
...Can a genre be said to have consciousness and intention...
...All are "works of practical and speculative philosophy" for "science fiction has used its special vision and its unique knowledge to trace the history of human power over nature and to ask how that power ought to function...
...If Christ is the man for others, can his church exist for itself...
...In George Effinger's "The Ghost Writer," an advanced society idolizes "writers" who, like mediums, achieve contact with dead masters and publicly recite incomprehensible but moving bits of their works...
...not a wage-slave living in an excellently appointed Corporation flat and tied down by restrictions as to sanitation...
...The fe are so ison with uffering is y of Dulles's "the church it exists for Christ is the church exist others, anych, the outnevangdized irons of the e others are o whom the to become srsal lumen lisleaddng to mission...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 6
