This is a beautifully mounted and exquisitely illustrated, learned expedition through the worlds of myth and dream. "Imagery, especially the imagery of dreams, is the basis of mythology." The illustrations range from Michelangelo and Blake to Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock; many of the photographs are in color and all are striking. The underlying psychology is Jungian, the Oriental discipline accompanying it is that of Yoga, and the intellectual conception throughout focuses on the interleaving of the nonliterate or primitive traditions with the highly literate and convoluted traditions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Joseph Campbell's concern with comparative religions has always been weighted in favor of the mystical elements inherent in any creed rather than the ethical or social values which are also a part of religious formulations. His mammoth Mythic Image naturally follows this familiar trajectory. The book is dazzling but frankly a bit difficult to follow if not to grasp. It has an air of academic psychedelia. Everything is forever flowing into everything else: the Gospel account of the Last Supper is related to the last meal of Buddha, a few lines from Wordsworth are juxtaposed against lines from the Chhandogya Upanishad. Or everything is being balanced by some opposite: "male and female, active and contemplative, light and dark." And there are so many variations on the theme of "unity in duality," so much talk of gods and fertility cults, cosmic wheels and cosmological views, the four elements and the four seasons, that the reader is soon lost in reverie. Not surprisingly, the most interesting writing doesn't come from Campbell at all, but is to be found in a long extract he presents from Captain Cook's eyewitness account of a bloody sacrifice in the South Seas. Much thought and preparation went into this laudable undertaking; unfortunately it never quite reaches the level of significance its subject warrants.
Pub Date: April 1, 1975
ISBN: 0691018391
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A well-told, sweeping, and often incisive portrait that needs to be taken cum grano salis.
A quick study of the world’s largest and oldest Christian church, from a Swiss priest whose unorthodox views on the subject have kept him simmering in hot water for the last quarter-century.
Probably the most famous Catholic theologian of the late 20th century, Küng (Infallible? An Inquiry, not reviewed) lost his license to teach Catholic theology in 1979 precisely as a result of his theories regarding the development of church offices (especially the papacy) and doctrines. Here his aim is much simpler, and he manages to provide a good, readable narrative history of the church from the apostolic age to the present day—although there is a continual background hum from the axes that he keeps grinding throughout. The true miracle of Christianity, as the author points out, was its explosion as a world religion during late antiquity—a development that could not possibly have been imagined by anyone who knew it only in its earliest incarnation as an eccentric Jewish sect competing for adherents in the wake of the Temple’s destruction in
Pub Date: April 27, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-64092-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
This academic analysis of Descartes's (15961650) mathematical and philosophical studies traces the development of his work more than the patterns of his life and times. With an emphasis on reason over passions and the body that Descartes would no doubt have approved, Gaukroger (president of the Australian Society for the History of Philosophy) approaches him through his childhood education by Jesuits and his early experiments as a mathematician and natural philosopher rather than as the Enlightenment's ``Father of Modern Philosophy.'' The expanding cultural context of 17th-century Europe and a classical education drew Descartes's analytic and inquiring mind into the new scientific possibilities that were being pioneered by Galileo and Francis Bacon, and Gaukroger shows how Descartes's first work in geometry informed his desire for ``clear and self-evident distinctions'' in his later philosophy, as well as how his experiments in hydrostatics, optics, and anatomy supplied him with his models for general physics and perceptive cognition. Although rigorous in reviewing Descartes's various treatises, particularly the Regulae and Le Monde, and studious in rescuing his reasoning from the Newtonian and Lockean hindsight of later commentators, Gaukroger skims over his life far less illuminatingly, whether his effective exile in the Netherlands and Sweden, his close if sometimes touchy friendships with other philosophers, or his repressed and reclusive personal life. Even crucial events receive summary treatment, such as his famous three dreams that inspired his career (Gaukroger hypothesizes these occurred during a nervous breakdown) and his reaction to the Catholic Church's condemnation of Galileo, which Gaukroger suggests turned him from his Copernican natural philosophy to a skeptically driven epistemological one that he could justify in relation to Church doctrinebut which would help to inspire the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Gaukroger's book lives up to its subtitle: It does valuable research in analyzing Descartes's work over his shifting career and in its proper context, but it wholly eclipses the biographic element. (67 figures, 4 halftones)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-823994-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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