An exhaustive history of the most famous shrine in the Catholic world, carefully researched and skillfully narrated by Oxford historian Harris (Murders and Madness, not reviewed), who sees Lourdes as a stumbling block to 19th-century positivism. One of the most remarkable aspects of Lourdes is the fascination it has always exerted over nonbelievers who cannot accept the tenets of Catholicism but are nevertheless unable to dismiss the evidence of supernatural intervention the shrine presents. Here Harris follows in the tradition of the Viennese Jew Franz Werfel, whose Song of Bernadette made the shrine known throughout the world. But Harris writes from the perspective of historian rather than novelist, and her concern is to show that modern historiography, which has tended to view the development of Lourdes as a rear-guard attack upon the secularization of France, is misguided. In the first place, as she points out, the Catholic hierarchy of the time was most reluctant to lend credence to the veracity of Bernadette’s apparitions and found itself at nearly as great a loss as the secular authorities in dealing with the overwhelming popular response to the visions and the earliest cures. Moreover, the Church’s establishment of a Medical Board at the shrine to evaluate claims of miraculous healing was itself a major concession to the authority of secular science, rather than a rejection of it. Harris ultimately concludes that the growth of the cult of Lourdes was too immediate and far-reaching to have been the result of political or clerical orchestration and can only be explained as the sudden outlet of social aspirations that could not find release in either the Church or the bourgeois republic that was then being formed out of the Revolution’s legacy. An interesting revisionist interpretation that, unfortunately, promises more than it delivers: Harris does an excellent job of knocking down the assumptions of the 19th-century positivists but doesn—t build much in their stead. (70 b&w illus.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-87905-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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