From Magic to Metaphor
Powers, Joseph
of the flames consuming a favorite passage. It is then that she saves the rest of the pages from the fire, sitshersdf down, and spends the rest of the night writing down her experiences in...
...Neroo g. Condini IN THIS anthology of Octavio Paz's works published by New Directions, the impression we receive initially is that of a Mexican poet exposed for the first time to his European peers' influenceand s.ubmerged in a rhetorical roil of surrealist images smacking more of virtuosity than honesty.The poems mirror Paz's experiences as his country's ambassador to India and his subsequent trips to England, France, and the United States...
...He then moves through Geertz's analysis of patterns of behavior and Durand's theory of structured imagination into Brinkman's four modes of sacramental structure...
...N.E.CONDINIis a freelance writer and critic...
...Even the language reneges on its former surrealist associations and gets closer and closer to the utterings of a Tao sage waitcolgmonHeol available in microform...
...The second section of the book surveys the insights of psychology, the sociology of religion, anthropology, language philosophy, theory of imagination and the philosophy of co-existence and transcendence to find "lines of convergence" on the meaning of ritual for REVIEWERS 9 ROBERTHASSENGERis coordinator ofStructured Programs at Empire State College, State University of New York...
...Ann Arbor, M148106 U.S.A...
...It is then that she saves the rest of the pages from the fire, sitshersdf down, and spends the rest of the night writing down her experiences in Longxiang...
...The opposition between air and stone, and nature and the city, is also opposition between law and the spirit of the law, thebody and its shadow:~ Ideas scatter, the ghosts remain: truth of the lived and suffered...
...If I were to change anything, I would revise the subtitle to indicate the exploratory nature of the enterprise...
...Poetry is the means of this discovery...
...saving) reality-event...
...So, though unseen, they become visible, just as the ruins of an Aztec temple become visible again in memory's eye...
...18 Bedford Row Dept...
...Manipulating concepts from the Bhagavad-Gita and Saint John's Gospel he accentuates the importance of the word as an "island in a sea of perplexities'" and the stand of the poet as a bulwark against history and its concern with death and the past, instead of the mobile and religious uniqueness of the present...
...I take this in Gilkey's sense of the distinction between "meaning" and "validity" in which "meaning" can be discovered within human experience but "validity" needs a cultural referent beyond the structures and interests of believing communities...
...when, more and more secluded, you perfect your reality...
...A Commonweal: 572 final reflection offers a new model for sacramental .theology: a "celebration model in which the community manifests, symbolizes and makes present a...
...As a matter of fact, they are the real ones...
...Finally, he moves through the sociology of religion from Parsons to Luckmann, Berger and Bellah, to the anthropological studies of Victor Turner in order to demonstrate "ritual's indisputable role in cultural and social existence...
...RONALDDiLORENZOteaches in the English department at St...
...But in them there is none of the drama faced by Paz on his return to Mexico...
...This is an exploration into a general theology of the sacraments informed and criticized by the findings from personality and social sciences which precede...
...His work has appeared in The Village Voice and Review...
...men strive to create paradise on earth, mindless that gain is only inwardly secured...
...The incessant motion from light to total darkness and then back to light displays a concern that is not only poetic...
...In the city of cement, language is fragmentary...
...this book is presumably built in large part on her memories of those years in the Northwest...
...Worgul attempts (largely successfully) to bring together these divergent strands of contemporary reflection on the sacraments...
...Further, I would The bridge of negative A DRAFTOF SRUOWS Octavio Paz New Directions, $9.95, 186 pp...
...By denying the worlds, that is, by stripping them of their illusory bodies, Paz makes them actual for a moment, celebrates the reality of their obscure anonymity, their dark secrecy of pain...
...Paraphrasing the Eliot of The Four Quartets and Saint Augustine's view of memory and time, Paz intimates that between light and shadow, action and contemplation, time and myth, the poet raises his bridge of negative words...
...words most of the poems composed between 1971 and 1976, from "Immemorial Landscape" and "Return," through "The PetrifyingPetrified," to the haunting "San Ildefonso Nocturne," in a whorl of imaginative complexity...
...Using Erikson's analysis of the role of ritual in the development of human personality and Bro's analysis of the function of ritual in the reconciliation of "binary oppositions," Worgul concludes to the psychological necessity of ritual for the healthy maturation of human personality and the resolution of fragmentation which codefines human experience...
...But the studies have been occasionaland scattered...
...FATHERJOtEI~IM.POWERS,S.J..teacherand author on sacramental theology, is professor of systematic theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley...
...01oi.,~ R. Cl.IJq~RDis chairman of the history department at Middlebury College in Vermont...
...Your introspection, your shadow, the knowledge of your self, becomes thus the real meaning of your body...
...Whether as an indignant protest at the infamy of the present with its "cannibal deities," or as the painful realization that cities are petrified forests withoutsoul, Paz's lament shapesre-think the christological foundations of sacramental theology as outlined in the theological section...
...He redefines "sacrament" (in the light of the Baltimore catechism!--I suppose that we must all still deal with that), shows the inappropriatenessofthepostreformation debate over the primacy of "word" vs...
...KELLYteaches in the sociology department at Fordham University...
...Picking upWhether or not Chen went through such an episode herself is beside the point...
...The names of Geertz, Turner, Erikson, Fowler, Austin and Bdlah, among others, have i~een heard more and more often among sacramental and liturgical theologians alongside those of Rahner, Schillebeeckx, AUaincourt, Gdineau and other more traditional experts in the history and theory of sacramental life...
...If at all, the joyful paganism of the Indian experience is interesting because it anticipates the essential humanism of the poet, staunch enemy of the city of stone, and melancholylover of the passing garden of nature...
...This serves as foundation for understanding the Christian ritual of the sacraments...
...the primacy of "sacrament," stresses the ecclesial reality of the medieval theory of the "res et sacramentum," and breaks through the disputes about sacramental causality by moving from a matrix of "causality" to one of "encounter" and "presence...
...Poetic language is the tool that allows us this interpenetration of the visible with the invisible, of time with eternity...
...Both point, rather, to the very experiences Worgul discusses: reconciliation, community, witness and apostolate as constitutive of the "Easter experience" and the on-going sacramental character of the church...
...In his survey of social sciences,Worgul moves from Austin's analysis of the "speech act" to Brinkman's analysis of ritual language to show that ritual is essential for the introduction of people into a social reality as well as for a community's sense of identity and survival in the world...
...After a brief philosophical note on the philosophy of transcendence (Rahner) and the "co-existential" character of human existence (Levinas), Worgul moves into his exploration of the theological dimensions of the sacraments...
...London, WCIR 4EJ England Name Institution Street City StateZip _ _ 10 October 1980:573...
...San Ildefonso Nocturne") This intuition is stressed to obsession inlaterpoemswhere recorded sorrows--seen as shadows, flashes, echoes, and reflections--are more meaningful than the actual bodies...
...As he points out, the confusion stems partially from the "helterskelter" pattern of the release of the reformed rites and partially from the paradigm shifts which have finally invaded the understanding of the church and its functions both in the mind of the theological "experts" and the theological "laity...
...Paulist, $8.95, 232 pp...
...University Microfilms International 300 North Zeeb Road Dept...
...Paz is no saint or prophet, nor does he claim to be...
...Joseph Powers TO MY KNOWLEDGE,Worgurs book represents the first attempt to pull together in some sort of systematic fashion trends which have been developing in the understanding of the sacraments in the midst of the confusion of the postVatican II era...
...Theologians and liturgists alike have been searching for a way out of the theological and ecumenical impasse inherited from the counterreformation versions of a medieval theology of the sacraments...
...We have seen studies on the significance of ritual for the patterns of human development, the power of civil religious ritual in a so-called "secular" society, the prescriptive and performative power of language, the reality of transcendence as a human process as well as a divine prerogative and the critical and creative character of the "limit" or marginal situation in human experience...
...So much of theology today is exploratory precisely because of the fragmentation of modern culture and the church...
...Concluding the theological section, Worgul returns to an existential method to present the sacraments as bearers of "ecclesial root metaphors," with all the power that this process involves...
...Incepted as an antithesis to history and time, it then struggles to unite being and non-being in a single moment of stasis: body and soul together in the timeless synthesis of the resurrection...
...JAMESR...
...money has left its mark on every forehead...
...II|l the fragments FRON NAEICTO NETAPHOR A VAHDATIONOF CHRISTIANSACRAMENTS George S.Wm~ul, Jr...
...Accordingly the book divides into an "existential" section in which "an attempt will be made to uncover those areas of human existence which could be labeled 'religious' and 'sacramental,' " and a theological section, constructing a system which will allow an integration between the theological dements and the anthropological resuits...
...His subtitle uses the expression "validation" of Christian sacraments...
...They are charged, even humorous, forcedly brilliant...
...At this point Paz's poetry turns, for all it denials, blatantly metaphysical...
...Clarity, to Paz's mind, rises when signs are erased and buildings fall...
...Worgul's book is an impressive survey and synthesis of the impact of personality and social sciences on the understanding of sacramental language and activity...
...Louis University.individuals and societies...
...m~leas~se~mmeaddttionalinfo~"mati~n...
...In the fifties, Rahner and Schillebeeckx may well have used a neo-chalcedonian model for their understanding that Jesus is "sacrament of God" (viz., that, as a divine person, the actions of Jesus have a divine power for grace), but I doubt that they would speak that way today...
Vol. 107 • October 1980 • No. 18
