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
The ever-popular and highly readable C.S. Lewis has "done it again." This time with a book beginning with the premise "God is Love" and analyzing the four loves man knows well, but often understands little, Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity, exploring along the way the threads of Need-Love and Gift-Love that run through all. It is written with a deep perception of human beings and a background of excellent scholarship. Lewis proposes that all loves are a search for, perhaps a conflict with, and sometimes a denial of, love of God. "Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?" To relate the human activities called loves to the Love which is God, Lewis cites three graces as parts of Charity: Divine Gift-Love, a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one another, to which God gives a third, "He can awake in man, towards Himself a supernatural Appreciative love. This of all gifts is the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true center of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible." From a reading of this book laymen and clergy alike will reap great rewards: a deeper knowledge of an insight into human loves, and, indeed, humans, offered with beauty and humor and a soaring description of man's search for God through Love.
Pub Date: July 27, 1960
ISBN: 0156329301
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
A fine thematic introduction to gnosticism, concentrating on the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi (Upper Egypt) in 1945. Pagels teaches the history of religion at Barnard, and she has spent practically all of her young academic life working with the Nag Hammadi manuscripts in one way or another. She brings her considerable competence to bear on the subject without overwhelming the reader with scholarly minutiae. Pagels sees in gnosticism a "powerful alternative to. . . orthodox Christian tradition," an alternative she clearly finds attractive. Gnostics treated Christ's resurrection as a symbolic rather than a corporeal event. They rejected the authoritarian, bishop-dominated structure of the orthodox church. They looked beyond the masculine imagery of the patriarchal God to various concepts of a feminine or bisexual divinity. They avoided the excesses of the martyrdom cult and its apotheosis of the suffering Jesus. In surprisingly modern fashion, they cultivated a religion that stressed personal enlightenment over corporate belonging, insisting that "the psyche bears within itself the potential for liberation or destruction." These and other gnostic tenets were repressed by mainstream Christianity because, Pagels claims, they constituted a political threat to the hierarchy. In the calmer, freer atmosphere of contemporary Christianity, they can better be appreciated for their intrinsic richness. Pagels' advocacy of gnosticism is restrained and responsible—she admits, for example, that its elitist, intellectualist qualities made it ill-suited as a faith for the masses—but this partisanship, plus the absence of solid explanation of the movement's historical roots, may create a misleading picture of it as a sort of heroic prototype of liberal Protestantism. Otherwise a clear, reliable, richly documented guide.
Pub Date: Nov. 26, 1979
ISBN: 0394502787
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979
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