CORRESPONDENCE.

And the same to you

Note: This letter accompanied a one-year subscription renewal. Sandra Smith manages Commonweal's circulation and signs our renewal/expiration reminders.

Dear Sandra and friends,

We do indeed live in interesting times. Like a space voyage, my cancer has now been given a number, making it likely that the two expirations will be close. In a week they will do another CAT scan and read the batwings and lizard tails. I believe they should add the eye of the newt.

I have read Commonweal for more than fifty years--one thing I will miss. But my spirits are good, my coffin (juniper) is complete, and my humor remains. True, chemotherapy for seven-and-a-half hours on Good Friday was not humorous but a deeply spiritual experience.

With deep gratitude, I wish you the best.

(REV.) EMMET HARRINGTON Portland, Oreg.

Not for the garbage can

Your woes touched me to the point of writing out a check. This is despite my being highly offended by your unfunny "New Ostrich Review" ad some time back. Actually, some good came of it: I subscribed to the publication in question and sent them an even bigger check.

I guess I continue to read your publication out of habit. I'm occasionally amused and enlightened but more often incensed by your positions. But, even though I get mad at the New Yorker, the Nation, and the New Republic, there's nothing I can do about it there, whereas I feel reasonably confident that my letters are not immediately tossed into the garbage can on Dutch Street (wherever that is). I'm also hoping that some day you will return to being a Catholic publication.

I'd be curious to know how many of your feminist, liberal subscribers heed your call in a tangible way. Damn few, I suspect. Anyhow, I'm relenting on my "not another dime" pledge of some time ago. So good luck.

PHILIP ERARD New York, N.Y.

Some are more unequal

Brian Lennon's "A Nation of Victims" [March 14] is an insightful view of the situation in the north of Ireland; his presentation of the victim status of the Protestant community in Ulster is an important message heard too seldom in this country. But, though his "double minority" analysis is helpful, I find that it goes too far toward leveling the status of the two minorities.

The Protestant community has indeed been the victim of many horrible atrocities, but the events of last summer's unrest show that it still holds the dominant hand in the life of the province. During the stand-off at Portadown it was able to cripple the province economically, virtually closing the airport, isolating towns and villages by barricades with little or no interference from the security forces, which reacted far more drastically when members of the Catholic community rioted after Unionist marchers were allowed to enter Catholic areas. Many Protestants in Ulster, knowing that the security forces are overwhelmingly Protestant, felt compromised by their evident bias.

The "field" mentioned by Father Lennon's high school friend is only a metaphor for a more general sense of security, of having some sense of control over the economic, social, and political life of the land under one's foot. In that light the sense of displacement felt by the Catholic community, expressed by the young man in the phrase "they robbed our land," is very understandable.

Surely all of us who care about the future of the province must continue to pray and work for peace and for the creation of the new "myths" of which Father Lennon writes. But, though we may begin by recognizing the double-minority status that exists, we must also acknowledge a fundamental inequality between the two minorities.

Though I was born and educated in this country, virtually the whole of my family lives in Ulster, and I spend several months at home there every year. I am currently a novice in the California province of the Society of Jesus.

SEAN D. MICHAELSON, N.S.J. Culver City, Calif.

Two-sided `Troubles'

Brian Lennon's article is on the mark in finding victims on both sides in the struggles in Northern Ireland. But I am appalled by his remark that Unionists might be justified when they ask, "Why do people make such a fuss about what may have been an `overreaction' by the British army on one occasion?"--that is, the events of Bloody Sunday, 1972.

Bloody Sunday and its cover-up constitute only a small part of a British army program of killings, prison internment for years without charges, late-night break-ins, destruction of homes, job discrimination, lack of police protection in Catholic areas, armed British troops among the baby carriages, and death-dealing Unionist paramilitary attacks--which are never described as terrorism in the British-controlled media.

Lennon does recognize that "the British failed once again to respond to an IRA offer of a ceasefire." Until it is clear that British and Unionist negotiators truly care about justice and human rights for all, there will be frustrated, uncontrollable "wild cards" on both sides who cannot resist resorting to violence.

RUTH B. MOYNIHAN Storrs, Conn.

The author replies:

I certainly did not want to give the impression that the Unionist view of Bloody Sunday is justified. It is not. Ruth Moynihan is quite correct in pointing out that this atrocity is simply one of many carried out by the British government in Northern Ireland. Further, one should expect higher standards from a government than from a paramilitary group. Nevertheless, many in the United States still focus only on abuses by the British government and seem to ignore those for which the Irish Republican Army is responsible, although this tendency thankfully has changed somewhat in recent years. It is worth noting that more than half of Catholic victims in Northern Ireland have been killed by Nationalist paramilitaries.

Sean Michaelson argues that I go too far in leveling the status of the two minorities. But does this matter, if the members of each group see themselves, with some legitimacy, as victims? The only way in which we in Ireland can move out of reciprocal victimhood is by doing so together. On this journey we need to distinguish between a human-rights agenda and a nationalist agenda.

Nationalism--the theory that the boundaries of the nation and the state should be congruent--is sometimes presented as a way of achieving human rights. It won't work in our context. That is why we need a new structure to replace the traditional nation state, one in which both Nationalists and Unionists will be as concerned about the human rights of the other as they are about their own, and in which these rights will be protected by the two governments.

BRIAN LENNON, S.J.

Bare bodkins at 10 paces

Will poor Richard Alleva challenge Commonweal's staff to a duel for allowing his review of Hamlet (March 28) to be corrupted with a reference to the Dane's "marital" (should be "martial") tirade?

Confirming my suspicion, I opened my Penguin edition of the play and found the very page bookmarked to the tirade, which is certainly martial, with its

   Rightly to be great/Is not to stir without great argument/But greatly to
   find quarrel in a straw/When honor's at the stake.

That passage was marked because it too had a misprint: "It not" for "Is not."

Does Shakespeare haunt the printshops that distort his lines? Will Alleva find quarrel in a last straw?

LEON LUKASZEWSKI Walnut Creek, Calif.

The twain once did meet

I am grateful to Jerry Ryan for his striking essay [April 11] on the Eastern and Western interpretations of the dead Christ's descent into hell, but surely the further back in Christian history one goes, the closer one comes to a time in which these now divergent emphases were still convergent. The Eastern emphasis on the defeat of Death is audible, for example, in the ancient Western hymn,

Victimae paschali:

   Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando. Dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus.
   Translating, all too prosaically: Death and Life fought a wondrous duel.
   Life's dead champion living reigns.

The same agonistic emphasis lives on, if barely, in the Western tradition of the harrowing of hell--that is, not its plowing but its pillage--by a Christ who falls not just into it but upon it as an aggressor upon territory he will take. Christ descends, we might well say, as a wolf on Death's fold, though he is the Lamb:

   Agnus redemit oves. Christus innocens Patri reconciliavit peccatores. The
   Lamb has saved the sheep. Innocent Christ has reconciled sinners to the
   Father.

The usual statement of the difference between the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity is that the Eastern is mystical and liturgical, the Western theological and legal. On that spectrum, however, this poem occupies a middle position. The Victimae paschali poet, as I read him, sought to recapitulate a myth rather than either summarize a theology or convey a mystical experience. The poem may imply both a theology and a mysticism. It directly expresses neither. No poet writing in English has yet put this masterpiece into adequately compelling verse. Someone should try.

JACK MILES Pasadena, Calif.

The writer is the author of God: A Biography (Knopf).

War on the needy?

I have read enough of Gertrude Himmelfarb to know that she is capable of expressing quite clearly what she intends to say. I was surprised, therefore, to find in your editorial rejection of a balanced-budget amendment ["Just Say No," February 28] a quotation of hers followed by this: "The rage for balanced budgets, in other words, is really a war on the idea of government's responsibility for the common good, and especially for the needy--a war being waged by fiscal strangulation" (emphasis added). I blinked. That didn't sound like what I had just read. I went back to the Himmelfarb quotation: "[T]he devolution of relief to the states is not merely a considerable move toward federalism ... [but] a considerable step toward the abolition of relief as an entitlement."

Hmm. What a deep reader the writer of the editorial must be, I mused, to find a declaration of war in that statement. Try as I may, I still cannot.

Do those of us who favor a balanced budget--President Clinton, many Republicans and Democrats, etc.--really reject "the idea of the government's responsibility for the common good"? I don't think so, although we may have different ideas than the writer of the editorial of how best to serve that common good.

I was reminded somehow of the divine who, noted for his learned and eloquent preaching, heard himself declaiming in the middle of a sermon, "What I think the good Lord is trying to say here...." He instantly gave up the use of "in other words...." I think there might be a lesson there.

For the record: I favor a balanced budget but believe a constitutional amendment to enforce one is a miserable idea that deserves a permanent burial.

JAMES FINN New York, N.Y.

The editors reply:

Perhaps we read too deeply, perhaps not. But we agree with our friend Jim Finn that Gertrude Himmelfarb clearly expresses what she intends to say. In this case, we read "the abolition of relief as an entitlement" as a very familiar neoconservative call to arms in the ongoing Republican battle to end the welfare state. Himmelfarb's critique of the welfare state is well known, and is an important intellectual resource for the "broad and disturbing political agenda" to which we referred. It is no secret that, like the Reagan administration's cynical expansion of the federal debt, the balanced-budget amendment is an attempt to place the federal government in a fiscal position that will require the elimination of discretionary social spending. That is what we meant by "fiscal strangulation," and we consider it a lethal threat to the poor.

It is good to have Finn and Himmelfarb's endorsement of "government's responsibility, for the common good." But if government is to meet that responsibility, it will have to have the revenue to do so. The policy of the Republican party is designed to deprive the federal government of that revenue. That is why the balanced-budget amendment is "really a war on the idea of government's responsibility for the common good, and especially for the needy."

Jesus & the Qur'an

In his "The Pillars of Islamic Faith" [January 31], David B. Burrell writes that "the Qur'an ... is taken by Muslims to be the Word of God made Arabic just as orthodox Christians take Jesus to be the Word of God made flesh." And again: "[T]he Qur'an remains God's Word, not Muhammed's, so that Christians should liken the Qur'an to Jesus rather than to the Bible."

Here Burrell appears to echo the renowned Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who in his Ideals and Realities of Islam [1966] writes: "The Word of God in Islam is the Qur'an; in Christianity it is Christ." Granted the Islamic belief that, as Nasr puts it, the Qur'an "is the Word of God revealed to the Prophet through the archangel Gabriel" so that "both the spirit and the letter, the content and the form, are divine," the comparison between the Qur'an and Jesus is, I believe, a forced one unable to be sustained. What creates a gulf of difference is the Christian belief in the Incarnation, that Jesus is true God and true man--a belief abhorrent to Islam. Nasr himself hints at the inadequacy of his analogy when he qualifies the Qur'an, the Word of God, as corresponding "in a sense to the body of Christ" (emphasis added). When, however, he holds that "the form of the Qur'an is the Arabic language" which "religiously speaking is as inseparable from the Qur'an as the body of Christ is from Christ himself," he strains the comparison beyond comprehension.

The basic analogy is also an invidious one which cannot be allowed as an irenic bridge between Islam and Christianity. The very real and fundamental doctrinal differences remain to be faced and the ongoing Islamic-Christian dialogue may yet help us to approach it with insight through the mystical theologies of the two faiths. Thus it is worthy of more serious and respectful thought on both sides. Whatever the case, vive la difference that grants challenging and enriching perspectives as we together plumb the reality of the "incomprehensible Creator."

(REV.) JAMES R. ROBERTS Burnaby, B.C., Canada

Phone System

Commonweal has a one-year-old Toshiba DK16 phone system that the magazine will not need in its new offices. The system consists of a main switch box (8-line capacity), connectors, two 20-button phones, and nine 10-button phones--all fully programmable. The new equipment was installed at a price of $4,010 in February 1996. All reasonable offers considered. Please contact: Business Department, Commonweal, 15 Dutch Street, Rm. 502, New York, NY 10038, [phone].