Nuclear Catholics and Other Essays.

Nuclear Catholics and Other Essays

THAT learning, piety, and eloquence do not always go together is apparent to all reflective observers of twentieth-century life and writing, where learned foolishness and eloquent barbarism are rife. Yet the traditions of reason wedded to religion, and of rhetoric as the servant of ethics, are old, deep, and durable. Some of the appeal and authority of T. S. Eliot's prose is surely due to its exemplifying these traditions, and the nonfiction writings of G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis are perhaps even better examples.

Though neither so eminent nor so prolific a figure as any of these, the Anglo-Canadian scholarly essayist J. M. Cameron, a philosopher and a Catholic, deserves mention in this connection. His prose contains, in the finest equilibrium, the fruits of a sensibility at once aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and religious. His mind is deep and articulate, critical and orthodox. One senses this even when disagreeing with him, as, at least in part, one may upon reading the title piece in this outstanding collection of essays. In fact, one may regret the book's title: it suggests that Cameron is a left-wing or pacifist Catholic, which he certainly is not.

If one does disagree with Cameron's negative verdict on Michael Novak's "Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age" [NR, April 1, 1983], I think it nonetheless unquestionable, in the case of so momentous a moral issue, that Cameron's essay properly forces Christian defenders of nuclear deterrence to exert themselves to make their best logical arguments. If ever we needed sharp thinking and writing, it is on this issue. Even if--God help us--we are ultimately willing in our present, anxious era to say, with Paul Fussell, thank God for the atomic bomb, we had better welcome, and respond as rigorously as possible to, the challenging arguments of so fair-minded a critic as Cameron.

His fair-mindedness is also abundantly evident in his essay "Morality and War," a review--and defense--of just-war doctrine. Yet it would be wrong to give the impression that these essays are mainly about war and politics; in fact, most of them are about literature, education, ethics, and religion--topics Cameron unfailingly illuminates. The eloquent orthodoxy of his essay "Sex in the Head" shows up the trendiness and superficiality of so much contemporary thinking about sexuality: what Richard John Neuhaus has called our "lethal liberationisms." Yet Cameron is never smug or unfeeling about contemporary confusions. He knows how baffling modern life can be.

For this reason Cameron, a noted Newman scholar, also writes to fine effect about the only sane sources of renewal from, and civilized antidotes to, our pluralistic and protean confusions: liberal education and orthodox religion, forces almost equally attentuated in our time. Cameron's view and voice remind one not only of John Henry Newman (to whom he devotes a fine essay here) but also of Richard Hooker and Samuel Johnson. Although many of these essays were first published in The New York Review of Books, Cameron is blessedly free of the pompous moralizing that so often characterizes that journal. He not only has--like Johnson--"common sense to an uncommon degree" and great learning, but also possesses an understated faith in revelation and tradition. He is an orthodox Catholic, but a rationalist too--neither a liberal nor a bigot.

Perhaps the finest examples of Cameron's substance and trustworthiness as both moralist and critic are found in two superb reviews, "Can We Live the Good Life?" (on Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue) and "The Bible Today" (on Northrop Frye's The Great Code: The Bible and Literature and Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative). In the former essay his discussion of emotivism, subjectivism, and relativism in ethics--the idea that "moral questions can no more be matters of dispute than can questions of taste"--is masterful, itself a fine example of the moral intelligence at work.

In his analysis of fellow Torontonian Northrop Frye, perhaps the most influential literary critic since World War II, Cameron, surprisingly, does not discuss Plato, gnosticism, or Jung, but the review is nonetheless memorable and important. Certainly there is no more important an issue than the nature and authority of the Biblical canon. As critic, the profound and exhaustive Frye is an heir of Plato and the Protestant radicalism of Milton and Blake, while Cameron speaks with the accent of Aristotle baptized, in the tradition not only of Newman but also of Etienne Gilson.

In so short a review as this, only the most cursory sense of the riches of Cameron's book can be given. Some titles alone can perhaps help: "History, Realism, and Henry James," "Dickens and the Angels," "The Idea of Christendom," "Poetry and Dialectic." From this last, the introductory sentences give a taste of Cameron's judicious mind:

Philosophy is essentially, irredeemably, hopelessly dialectical. This is its glory and its shame: its glory, because it is in and through the play of dialectic that the powers of the mind are most fully known and manifested; its shame, for it is precisely the enchantment of dialectic that seduces us, so that we fall into sophistry in a moment.

This is a voice at once pious and learned, classic and contemporary. In an era of towering eccentricity, of self-styled heroic readers of texts--lector agonistes?--Cameron is a man in his right mind. If we wish to be wise, we will drink at his well.