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both graphic and revealing. Vivas does notflinch or hold back ashe stri ps away layers ofpretense, and some will doubtlessly find thisunpleasant and distasteful. But upon reflec-tion o w must admit that there is importanttruth here, and in the end it i s the booksrelentless commitment to honesty, coupledwith the authors abiding love of wisdom andeminently readable prose style, that raise thebook to the level of the exceptional.Two Roads to ignorance: ti Quasi-Eiogra-phy is a book that informs and enlightenswhile at the same time it engages us fully. T hefinal chapter alone would warrant the bookspurchase, as i t is superbly written and attimes deeply moving. L ike the book as awhole, it especially marks the philosopher-poet V ivas as an exceptional man-if wedidnt know that already.

TheMan Who Killed WoodstockConfessionsof a Conservative, by Garry

Wills, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday andCompany,1979. 231 pp. $10.00.

No one in the history of political philosophy,or in most other fields for that matter, is moreimportant than A ugustine. Nor is anyonemore sane, wise, memorable, and delightfulthan G. K . Chesterton, unless it be perhapsSamuel Johnson. That is why, in recent years,I have insisted that my students exercise theirfreedom to read The Confessions, Orthodoxy,or Boswells &e Rarely do those studentsrash enough to follow my injunctions return asthe same persons. That Garry Wil ls confessessuch truths is, I confess, refreshing andimportant for a generation just learning aboutits accumulated emptiness from a RussellK irk (whom Mr. Wil ls seems not to have l iked)or even from the need for curriculum reformat Harvard.Throughout Western, particularly L atinliterature, the shadowy figure of the ex-clericspending the rest of his days building on or,,

more usually, destroying the capital heaccumulated during his seminary days, is afamiliar one. It would indeed be interesting tocompare the ex-clerics of the eighteenthcentury i n particular with those of morerecent vintage. During the past quarter-century no organization has financed theearlier (and higher) education of more variedwriters, philosophers, and pundits than theSociety of J esus. A nd, generally speaking, itis fairiy ciear at what stage the particuiarperson in question left the Orders (at thattime) long years of study-a salutary trainingnow largely abandoned by the Order itself.Governor Jerry Brown, for instance, onlyhad his two years of novitiate spiritualtraining and perhaps a year of classicalstudies, while Malachi Martin was ordainedwith a degree in biblical studies. Garry Will shad the novitiate, classical and philosophi-cal, but not the theological studies.Furthermore, a good insight into thecharacter of an ex-clerical author can begained from noting how he recalls hisrelationship to his religious experience. TheSociety of J esus, in the United States at least,has been rather fortunate in having somany--coul d they be called?-alumni whoretain a great if bemused affection and senseof debt to the Order. The fact is that withoutthe J esuit training, its giving time and spaceand incentive, few would have ever had astarton the intellectual life; few would have hadthe financial and spiri tual resources. In astrange way, I think, religious orders arealmost the only real classless societies inthe modern world. I t would be fruitful tosuggest that the very concept is a seculariza-tion of religious life. Few campuses today, inany case, are without at least a token ex-J esuit or two, where they do not actually havea live one. On the other hand, the fact thatthe J esuit and other Catholic religious orders,particularly the Dominicans, no longer give along and solid intellectual training to theiryounger members may well be the mostserious crisis in the contemporary Church. Itwill be interesting to see how the Philoso-pher-Pope confronts this issue.Several years ago Carry Wills wrote a

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bitting, satirical essay in New York M agazineabout the life-style, academic and other-wise, of the J esuit theologate called Wood-stock in New Y ork City. As the most famous ofthe A merican J esuit theologates, its conditionand eventual demise were to become some-thing of asymbol of the chaos of the AmericanCatholic Church. Not a few felt that the Willsessay was significant in the killing of Wood-stock, or at least calling its conditions topublic attention that could not be ignored..From that time on Wills took on the functionof calling the Church and the orders back tothemselves, as he saw it. T he emphasis on theunattainability of justice in Confessions of aConservative puts him in great critical con-trast to the trend of Catholic religious andintellectual life today, which seems sonaivelybent on preaching the opposite that justice isalmost the sole content of the religious andtheological enterprise.In the present book Wills confessions tellus very little of the seminary period of hislife, except that he does speak of theenforced somnolence of his seminary days.This seems curious and rather ungracioussince it i s clear that much of what i s valuablein this book originated and germinated then.One of his classmates of that period when atSt. L ouis University, which in his time had aquite excellent philosophical faculty-col-li ns, K lubertanz, Henle, Bourke, Thro,Wade-told me Wills used to read muchA ugustine during this period. Wil ls admits hedoes not like Aquinas much, and this turnsout, I think, to be one of the problems of hispresentation, for in any sane conservatism,Amicus Augustinus, Amicus Aquinas. Hesimply had to have read Chesterton onA quinas.Professor Vernon Burke, moreover, wasespecially interested in Augustine at St.Louis, so that I suspect Wills remarksomeplace (there is no index) that Augustinewas neglected isslightly exaggerated. I was ina simi lar J esuit philosophate at about thesame time, and A ugustine was there, as werealso the novels, the poems, and the classics.We read about what we wanted. But Willsadmits to being troubled during this period.

There is a brittleness in some of Wills thatsomehow I found annoying. I think theultimate reason for this latter l ies in the title,Confessions, in the way this A ugustinianword isused in a rather man-centered fashionto explain primarily politics. We need Au-gustine to explore politics, of course, butoften I felt Wills used the most spiritualelements of A ugustine as if the object ofAugustines quest were rather incidental toexplaining contemporary politics.This book is an account, partly auto-biographical, of Wills various encounterswith American conservatism and its compli -cated relationship with the dominant liberalestablishment. Wills traces his way from TheNational Review and its various early starsthrough his experiences of writing in thesixties and seventies. T he dramatic andintrospective part of thi s book is based on thequestion: Am I a crypto-liberal? Am I aconservative? Many of Wills critics seem tohave suspected the former, so that he has toexplain the sort of conservative he is, that is,one with a lot of liberal sympathies. Hediscovers all kinds of conservatism, some ofwhich he is not. H e recently, somewhatpetulantly, gave back a book reward becauseof its overly right-wing origins.Wills seeks to co-opt the openness tochange, presumably a liberal characteristic,though an element of conservatism at leastsince Burke. A good deal of the book i s castin terms of discovering conservative roots forliberal moves. This is fair enough. Wills isamused by the paradox of ihe Americanliberal wanting to conserve what he haswrought, whi le American conservatives wantto change things around. In this process Will srediscovers some of the ideas implicit in hisCatholic background. He discovers more indistributism than most. He argues thatproperty today should also be conceived as aski l l or job or profession, without everreferring to J ohn XXIIIs elaboration of thisidea in M ater et M agistra (1963). Wills hassome good words for business and othereli tes, the real changers of society. L ikeChesterton, he would like to see unions morein the tradition of guilds.

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Wills distinguishes prophets and politi-cians in a way Thomas Gilby used to do. H epraises prophets, mainly, alas, of a certainideological hue, and we look in vain for anyprinciple uf pruphecys proper order or limita-tions, except perhaps by the politicians. H eattacks the attackers of radical chic, with agood word for L L enny Bernsteins salon ful lof Black Panthers. Someone has to speak forthe poor and weak-a position religiousieaders especiaiiy of recent years have gener-ally been scrambling over themselves toembrace. Paul VIs United Nations Address(1964)was perhaps the best statement of thi strend.

Elements of Wills struck me as fresh out ofAndrew Greeley or M ichael Harrington.Wills use of Newman to justify ecclesiasticalopposition-M ater si , Mugistru no-is alongthese lines in the areas of social and birthcontrol questions. But his interpretationseems to turn the English Cardinals meaningupside down. The point about Newmansdevelopmental study of fourth century Arianswas not that the Church was right and thePope wrong. Newmans problem was ratherhow could the A nglican episcopacy be wrong?His study showed that individual and nationalbishops can be in heresy over against papacyand faithful. Wills tries to use this avenue tomake a Paul V I wrong. But of course, if Paulwere right, then in Newmans real tradition,true conservatism takes quite a different pathfrom the lines Wills implies in his argument.A s I read this book I had the uncannyfeeling I was reading a living example of whatCharles N. R. McCoy used to hold aboutmodern conservatism, namely that often muchof it had the same intellectual rootsasmodernliberalism, roots different from medieval andclassical thought and another kind of conser-vative tradition. If this be the case, we canexpect modern conservatism and liberalismnot to differ somuch after all. Wills treatmentof the Vietnam War and its surroundingsmakes his brand of conservatism seem with-out basic moral purpose or stability. I said tomyself a couple of times, J ane Fonda couldhave said this! Wills, too, reduces the war toan internal A merican problem that seems

quite indifferent to the subsequent events inthat area. T he Vietnam War, I suspect, wasnot an immoral war in any sense uniquelydifferent from other wars. I t was a worthycause we lust, not always doing wise ur goodthings. Had we lost World War 11, it stillwould have been worth fighting. This recentwar was lost largely listening to the prophets.Wills, in the name of morality, minimizesmorality-this in the holy name of A ugustine.A quinas is stii i needed here.I am rather out of sympathy with ourcurrent justice theories, which propose toestablish this blind virtue among us. Y et,things are right, others wrong. A quinas wasthe first to admit that most of the just things ofsociety were extremely difficult to clarify andset forth in the world. But some things wereright and could not be ignored. And this latteris not merely what the prophet tells us, butalso there is need of philosopher and evenpope. Wills conservatism does, I think, re-emphasize the serious danger in justicephilosophies and theologies and presents aviable alternative. Y et, I likewise feel that heis not sufficiently clear that conservatism ofhis variety, for all its merits, does need atheoretical corrective that transcends thecnmmon things. This is the weakness ofA ugustine in this world, as it ishis strength inthe next. Wills confessions, in other words,still bear too much of a kind of blindintelligence that finds rather an oversupply ofthe ought in the is. True conservatismultimately is that theory that includes both.Wills, I think, needs to reinterpret hisemphasis on change so as to include, asChesterton always insisted, the direction ofchange.There are a couple of minor errors: RegisHigh is in Denver, not Omaha. A nd wasAeneas virtue Piestas or Pietas, as Ialways remember it? I do not think that usingthe expression Concept for Word in St.JohnsPrologue isan improvement. While it istrue that the greatest works made are thosethat involve a remaking of their maker-Dorothy Sayers also held M an is like God,and never more like him than when makingthings-stil l the classical primacy went to

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contemplare not agere orfacere. The ultimatething to be conserved is that which cannot beotherwise, asA ristotle saw. Change is not theultimate conservative category or problem.The last lines of Wills book are these: Inthe beginning God made the heaven and theearth. And tomorrow morning, when we wakeup, we must make it al l over again. Thismight be a definition of some sort ofconservatism, but it also might be a definitionof hell.These are the last words of AugustinesConfessions:

But Thou, being the Good which needethno good, art ever at rest, because Thy restis Thou Thyself. And what man can teachman to understand this? . . . Let this beasked of Thee, sought in Thee, knockedfor at Thee; so, so shall it be received, soshall it be found, so shall it be opened.(Book XI I I , E. Pusey, translator, New

House 1949 pp 337-38)Given achoice between the confessions of Mr.Wills and those of A ugustine, we would dowell to conserve A ugustine, the repose overthe continual remaking every morning whenwe wake up.

Reviewed by J AMES V. SCHALL,.J .

schall wills

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