Catholicism
McKenzie, John L.
the benefit of the Daughters of the Confederacy, and her own pride? Flannery O'Connor was interested in the country people around her, in their pride, in their sinfulness, in their less-than...
...Eschatology is the weakest part of McBrien's book...
...Considering the complexities of O'Connor's work, and the peculiarities of the world she presents to a reader (what world could be more foreign to most of mankind...
...I hope this description of the book makes it clear that a detailed criticism is impossible within 900 words...
...Purified by these events he now dedicates himself, in a midnight ceremony involving fh'e and water, a self-baptism, to his mystic task...
...I am compelled to suppose that only the hazards of publishing deadlines is responsible for the omission in the treatment of the virginal conception of Jesus of the best treatment of the question in English (and possibly in any language), the article by Joseph Fitzmyer in Theological Studies in 1978...
...Leaving school early Matty works in a decaying old-fashionedhardware store, itselfa symbol of one of the novel's major themes, the accelerating entropy of the modern world...
...The key to his approach, as he states in the accompanying quotation, is the historical understanding of theology...
...By the world I mean the complex of human achievements by which we believe that human life is enriched...
...Isaiah hints a presence, and it is possible that other prophets like Habbakuk, Obadiah and Hagai may be lurking there too...
...The reviewer is tempted--at least I am--to compare McBrien's compendium with some of its predecessors...
...I know that the generalities which every reviewer has in his clich6 box are unfair to a work of this magnitude...
...Optimism is a refusal to accept the reality of sin, death and judgment...
...McBrien's readers will not be grossly misled...
...Each treatment is concluded by a summary and a synthesis of these materials in contemporary language...
...I have done this too often to repudiate it...
...is consistently misspelled Ligouri...
...Readers of this review would be surprised if I did not embrace this approach...
...Readers will say, rightly: Here is a psychiatrist who can read complicated fiction without Freudianizing the author, and who can admit development in his own point of view...
...John's Revelations and Ezekiel and his wheels are buzzing about...
...I have to ask whether the very brief treatment of angels should not ha~/e adverted to some more recent interpretations of the reality of angels...
...This optimism is reflected in the keneral rejection of eschatology by modern theologians...
...I must ask, simply as a matter of terminology, whether the distinction between faith and belief is valid and illuminating...
...Let me say finallythat my delay in reviewing two volumes of this size was not due to any difficulty in reading the books...
...At the risk of some shallow spots the reader will find in one work--not small--an understanding of what is going on in the theological world, and some good guesses of its future directions...
...Goldingplaysnumbersgames throughout the book...
...His insights are serious and thoughtful...
...In Australia, after various drab adventures he realizes he must go out into the wilderness...
...McKenzie RICHARD P. McBRIEN has without doubt produced his magnum opus, and I do not thereby mean to imply that he has produced his last major work...
...It is inevitable that McBrien's method will have some shallow spots...
...It is a dubium which should be entered at much greater length, but it would go beyond the task of reviewing McBrien's book...
...29.95 JohnL...
...now to the clich6 box...
...I find some ambiguity in defining "the powers at work in the world which are hostile to god...
...It tells us more about Coles than about HistoricalO'Connor...
...The world includes the price which was paid for these achievements...
...We now watch as this maimed and fearsome-looking person, semi-literate, utterly deprived of most "normal" human contacts and feelings, gradually develops into a visionary who can "see into a still dimension of otherness" and who can offerhis vision to others because he is "near the centre of things...
...Pedigree, a pederast and schoolmaster who lives in and out of jail, who hates the ugly boy and blames him for the untimely death of one of his eleven-year-old paramours, and lust.for a pretty shop assistant at the hardware store...
...I am sure that those who write compendia of theology, like those who write dictionaries of the Bible, hope they' are producing something which has not been produced before...
...Alphonsus Liguori...
...Matty reads his Bible daily, and memorizes it, occupies himself with menial chores,, and struggles with his love and lust...
...Individual persons and even nations and civilizations die, but the world of human achievement, we think, is secure from death...
...About the book I have more to say than the allotted space permits...
...His reasons would serve as a model for much theological writing and deserve to be set forth...
...Sin is denied when the II Manichaean depressive II DARKNESS VISIBLE William Goiding Fm'rm', Strsus, Giroux, $10.95, 265 pp...
...The shattered building he emerges from, for example,human will for evil is denied...
...For his purpose he omits the conventional apparatus of erudition and limits himself to suggested readings from theological sources and theological writers...
...It is they, and not his fellow-theologians, whom he addresses...
...In the anonymityof a hospital and an orphanage he is partly patched up, given a name at random -Matty -- and launched on the "broken business of living" in Golding's world...
...The work is divided into thirty-one chapters u~ader five headings: human existence, God, Jesus Christ, the church, and Christian existence: ethical and spiritual dimensions...
...I do not suggest that there is no room for a sketchy treatment of some topics which cannot be omitted entirely when the general public is addressed...
...II I is called "a burning bush," the firemen stare into "two pillars of lighted smoke," the child walks with a "ritual gait," he appears to have been "born from the sheer agony of a burning city...
...Without a personal devil as a scapegoat ora cop-out (and McBrien keeps him) wickedness is either denied or becomes a human responsibility...
...the book to which he has added a significant chapter will never be closed...
...There are certain limits to reconciliation imposed by what is or what is thought to be a demand for unconditional surrender...
...I understanding of theology IIII CATBOLICISN Richard P. McBrien Winston, (2 vols., xcii & ixxx & 1186 pp...
...and considering the bias that Robert Coles might have been expected to bear with him on his journey south, he has written a kindly book...
...Now Golding's story becomes deliberately grotesque...
...But a two-volume compendium of Roman Catholic theology of nearly 1400 pages is major enough to permit him to rest on his laurels or on his oars, whichever way one prefers to think ofy.it.I do not think he is likely to do either...
...There is indeed a "mystery of iniquity," but this mystery is not rendered tolerable by the dualism implicit in a belief in personal demonic beings, a dualism from which McBrien has not clearly extricated himself...
...Others will notice them in other areas...
...And he sojourned there for many months at peace," and so on...
...What I wish to say about the theologicai optimism of the book is addressed not just to McBrien but to the theological world of which he is a competent spokesman...
...Matty's provisional "name" in hospital is "number seven," laterhe is called Septimus: from his Bible he learns that "John writeth his revelaCommonweal: 534...
...He wanders into the out-back and in that desert, at the hands of a cruel "Abo" he endures a non-fatal crucifixion (Golding calls it, uncomically, "a cruci-farce or a crucifiction") and a semi-castration...
...One can only invite them to do it...
...I reject this temptation...
...The fire-bombing and rescue-work and Matty's appearance are described in painstaking realistic detail, but we are also pressed to see the boy as a symbolic and apocalyptic figure...
...Roman Catholic theology has long been dominated by the bitter quarrel between those who accept theological development and those who resist it...
...But I have to mention that the family name of St...
...This, as I said, is addressed less to McBrien than to his peers in the theological world...
...BernardMcCabe DARKNESS ¥1$1BLE'S striking opening pages present a small child, horribly burned, horribly disfigured, who walks out of the flames at the height of the London blitz...
...Troubled by these distractions from his Bible-reading, and already aware of a power of seeing, he decides to prepare himself for some mission he does not yet understand ("Who am I?" he asked himself, "What am I for...
...Flannery O'Connor was interested in the country people around her, in their pride, in their sinfulness, in their less-than heroic virtues, and in themselves always as possible vessels of grace...
...He tries to show them that the pre-Vatican I church and the postVatican II church have a fundamental unity far deeper than the causes of division...
...I notice them most quickly in his treatment of the Bible...
...Although most of this story is told with the utmost seriousness not to say solemn portentousness -- "he understood the roundness of the earth and theterrorofthingshungin emptiness"--Golding's curious strategyseems to be to cover his tracks by shifting into irony...
...McBrien does answer one of the'reviewer's questions at the beginning of the book: why this book...
...He has read and pondered her fiction...
...The normal treatment of each topic comprises a review of the material from the Bible, theological development from the Fathers through the Middle Ages and the Reformation to contemporary theologians, including Protestants, and the official statements of the church...
...He presents a tidy small list of references to books about her and her work that he has profited from...
...this indicates that the book is stimulating...
...this reflects the state of theological thought...
...Or he will slip into contemporary jargon...
...If you are interested in theology, I can find at random a dozen contemporaries who are harder to work through...
...There would be points for discussion...
...they would, I think, be just as surprised if those who resist theological development did not resist this approach as well...
...The young man is lost, hungry and thirsty in the desert: "The literature of survival had passed Matty by...
...Lengthy appendices quote various ecclesiastical documents and some theological writings, the use ofwhich is not always apparent...
...McBrienbelieves that an effort at healing and reconciliation can be made and should be made...
...after the school of Ernest Jones, and the industrious analyzers of Hamlet and Sylvia Plath...
...If the Lord didn't get around to gifting Robert Coles with a sense of humor, or any comprehension of irony, Flannery O'Connor would be the first to understand...
...By this optimism I mean a basic acceptance of the world and a belief that the world is an object of salvation...
...We are invited to find acomicelementinMatty's predicaments...
...How nice...
...McBrien is best on the church, weakest on God and the Trinity...
...And these are really all the nits I have to pick...
...Under these headings the elder theologian can discern the tractatus dogmatici of his youth, with some philosophical prolegomena and a discussion of the basic principles of Christian morality...
...So Golding switches into Biblese as Matty wanders in the desert: "And Matty came in the evening into the city of Gladstone which is a great city...
...To escape the "fierce wine of fornication" he hits on a trip to Australia...
...I simply wonder how close we have come to denying the difference between good and evil...
...It is a risky operation always open to criticism from one's colleagues who will have each his own opinion on some 26 September1980:533 things which should have been done at greater depth...
...love for a decayedclassical scholar, Mr...
...Throughout these odd chapters the reader becomes aware that St...
...If we are wrong, the price of correcting our error could be very stiff...
...Most Catholics, he believes, sit unhappily amid the turmoil...
...When it is denied,judgment becomes an archaic anthropomorphism which comes between us and the vision of God...
Vol. 107 • September 1980 • No. 17
