An Admirable Woman:
Tracy, David
task or mission in the global society. The Christian church prior to Constantine was something like a movement, defined largely in ascetical and other-worldly terms. After the collapse of the...
...An Admirable Woman is Arthur Cohen's most challenging work to date...
...And yet, through Erika Hertz, we are reminded that this thought, however sobering, however welcome, is not the final word...
...His books include Religion and Alienation, The Social Imperative, and The Priority of Labor...
...The characters, the atmosphere, the life of each of his stories move the reader to a characteristic Cohenian sensibility of thoughtfulness: this is the way we live in this place and time...
...Capitalist culture with its egoism and search for personal satisfaction is undermining the very basis of civilization, including the critical movements that work toward social reconstruction...
...The theological community knows his work as that of one of our leading Jewish theologians...
...She is also a thinker forced to live a life of thought in an age of rampant thoughtlessness...
...What does it mean to live a life given over to thinking then or now...
...After the collapse of the Constantinian Age., the minority church may again become a movement, yet this time defined by an outer-oriented, critical, humanizing mission, by what has been called "the option for the poor...
...10 February 1984:93...
...BUt without the thinkers we are lost.And without the rest of us -- without history, politics, the public realm in all its confusion, evenhorror -the thinker is now lost...
...His theological range is unusual: extending Natural and the Supernatural Jew, to his extraordinary theological reflection on the Holocaust entitled The Tremendum...
...It is imperative, Harrington argues, that those who love humanity, atheists and believers alike, following the thrust of practical reason, try to formulate emancipatory values that claim universality and sustain people's struggle for a just society...
...There are greater and more admirable human types than the thinker --- the saint or witness for one...
...What makes Erika Hertz admirable -- beyond her own self-irony on that term, beyond her own attempts to live a private life with friends and family, beyond her insistence on facing her own limitations, physical, intellectual, and moral -- is that Erika Hertz will neither cease thinking nor withdraw from the public realm...
...Cohen is a theologian's theologian whose exceptionaUy thoughtful sensibility pervades but never controls his novels...
...Her very commitment to thought in this age forces her, contrary to her desires, into a life of publicness: a life dedicated to thinking upon action, history, politics, the public realm...
...Erika Hertz is a thinker...
...this is the way we could, if we would but dare, think...
...As American intellectuals now stumble into a history governed by our literally thoughtless leaders, we would do well to reflect -- on and with Erika Hertz -- on what a life of thinking can be...
...Here Michael Harrington's book makes an important contribution...
...For Erika Hertz, as a Jew and a thinker, has been forced by the history of her place and time to abandon the traditional protective device of the thinker: to withdraw from the public realm...
...As we do so, we find ourselves compelled to agree with the subtly ironic rifle: Erika Hertz is an admirable woman living and thinking in a time of the tremendum...
...Harrington's tacit expansion of his principal thesis has significantly weakened his study...
...Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt were thinkers...
...David Tracy A N ADMIRABLE WOMAN is a remarkable novel by one of our best novelists and theologians, Arthur A. Cohen...
...In a sense, in this novel both of Arthur Cohen's audiences meet...
...Indeed the novels, in a manner rare in our time, are from his early groundbreaking book, The empowered by ideas but never give into . . . . . . . the temptation of becoming, in effect, R PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY "The ancient languages are the scabbard which holds the mind's sword" [Goethe...
...FATHER DAVID TRACY iS associateprofessor at the University of Chicago Divinity School...
...ii ,, lectures with slides...
...When did any of us last read a novel whose main character actually thinks7 Not daydreams, not fantasies, not attempts at one more round of alienated "self-expression...
...His most recent book is The Analogical Imagination (Crossroad...
...Michael's College, Toronto...
...Thinking has always been an exceptional calling: as German culture with its fine distinction between a 'scholar' and a 'thinker' (ein Denker) knows...
...At the same time, the praxis of Harrington's book is fully in accord with the aspiration of progressive Christians...
...The challenge is one that few novelists have attempted and fewer still have achieved: what is it like tothink...
...He realizes, moreover, that such a project is very much in keeping with the traditional Catholic endeavor to formulate natural law imperatives...
...Harrington's brief proposals in the last chapter do not come as a surprise...
...By that rare set of choices, we discover, as the story unfolds, that she forms a character which is unquestionably admirable and a life which is a believable life here and now...
...Erika Hertz knows both these unwelcome truths: she thinks them, she lives them...
...It has been reported that Heidegger, in his lectures, could only bring himself to give the following information on the life of a great predecessor-thinker: "Aristotle was born, he lived, he thought, and he died...
...REVIEWERS GREGORY BAUM is professor of religious studies and sociology at St...
...FRED SIEGEL is the author of the forthcoming book, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (Hill & Wang...
...It is, therefore, overly hasty to anticipate the end of Christianity as a politico-cultural presence in the world...
...Most of their critics were scholars...
...08542 Princeton Theological Seminary admits students o f an), race, color and national or ethnic origin, without regard to sex or handicap...
...An Admirable Woman answers that troubling question...
...The death of the political God, Harrington argues, has profoundly shaken Western civilization...
...And through this "admirable woman" we can sense what thinking can mean as distinct from what passes for it for most of us most of the time...
...And that realm has turned upon itself in her own lifetime: the time of the obscene slogans and actions -" Nazi Germany and the genial but v l dangerously thoughtless actions of her adopted land, the United States...
...No, Erika Hertz is a rare but entirely believable creation: she thinks and she shows what it means to think not as a withdrawal from life but as an entry into it...
...An Admirable Woman is, quite simply, a great novel: a Bildungsroman in and for a period where the possibility of Bildung seems lost...
...For that realm cannot provide a natural dwelling place for the thinker...
...Perhaps, like her, we have all become Weimar intellectuals now...
...The protector of human values has disappeared...
...More exactly, what is it like to give a life over to thought in this incredible century...
...A thoughtful life / i AN ADMIRABLE WOMAN Arthur A. Cohen Godine, $14.95, 220 pp...
...Fair enough -but what is the meaning of that "he lived...
...It is even more in keeping with the self-understanding of the post-Constantinian minority church, which looks for allies among secular humanists and in the world religions in order to work with them for the transformation of society...
...Erika Hertz Commonweal: 92 knows that to expose thought to that realm is to risk self-destruction...
...SUMMER LANGUAGE PROGRAM Biblical Greek and Hebrew JUNE 4 - JULY 27 For full information write: Summer School Office Princeton Theological Seminary CN821 Princeton, N.J...
...The wider community knows Arthur Cohen as one of our best novelists -- a novelist of ideas, persons, atmospheres...
...Once again, his work extends through a series of astonishingly different novels: In the Days of Simon Stern and A Hero in His Time to Acts of Theft...
...We follow the main character, Erika Hertz, through her life from childhood in a secularized Jewish family in the Berlin of the twenties and thirties to her later life as an intellectual "celebrity" (that peculiarly American fate) in New York...
...The left itself has lost its vision of the humanum...
...Erika Hertz rejects sentimentality and embraces thoughtfulness...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 3
