Volume 4, Number 11 · July 1, 1965
The Transformation of the Church
By J.M. Cameron
Honesty in the Church
by Daniel Callahan
Scribners, 188 pp., $3.95
The Third Session
by Xavier Rynne
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 399 pp., $4.95
When the cake of primitive custom is broken the range of possibilities open to a people is immeasurably wider. As social anthropologists know very well, there is no guarantee that this wider range will be viewed as a positive opportunity, soliciting new experiences and new achievements. On the contrary, there may be symptoms of withdrawal, of psychic sickness; and people may even die of the experience. When a man is plunged into a landscape in which the very configuration of the hills seems bizarre, for they no longer have the friendly function of symbolizing the anatomy of the soul, in which the heavenly bodies are no longer familiar lamps, in which the wind and the thunder no longer speak to man, this change must be the most terrifying of all experiences. That space is infinite was not what Pascal found terrifying; what terrified was its silence. The ineffable music of the spheres no longer sounded.
Review, 2347 words
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