The Recovery of the Sacred by James Hitchcock (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 145 hen equivocation with all other beings, since, to the extent that it is actual , every being but God depends on Pure Act to be. So it can be said that metaphysics for Aristotle is primarily about Actuality itself and secondarily about those things which are a composite of act and potency. The final chapter deals with Aristotle's logic. Here, to a greater degree than elsewhere, Veatch contrasts Aristotle with modern and contemporary thinkers. The basic difference between Aristotle and modern logicians is that, while the latter do not use logic to gain an understanding of the world, the former sees logic as an instrument for disclosing what and why things are. This difference in turn accounts for the difference in the semantics between Aristotlelian and modern logic. No longer, for example, are all propositions cast in the subject-predicate form and no longer is the syllogism considered by itself an adequate mold into which all arguments can be put. And the reasons for these changes is that for contemporary logicians the disclosure of what things are in themselves and why they are the way they are is in nowise the function of either logic itself or the logic of scientific discovery in our own day and age. Rather, Veatch suggests, modern logic and science has taken a " transcendental turn " according to which logical forms and patterns are imposed by us on being in order that we may organize, calculate, and predict things with accuracy and efficiency. And so these same logical structures become instruments of knowing not what and why things really are but how we must understand them to be if we are to successfully organize, control, and predict phenomena. University of Rhode Island Kingston, R. I. JoHN F. PETERSON The Recovery of the Sacred. By JAMES HITCHCOCK. New York: The Seabury Press, 1974. Pp. 187. $6.95. The Recovery of the Sacred is an expression of the anguish felt by a great number of Roman Catholics in the face of a profound sense of loss. For them, the liturgical renewal of the Roman Church has not brought with it a deepening of the richness of the corporate prayer of the Church but rather its impoverishment. There is no question that James Hitchcock's work is an articulate and often moving commentary on the state of affairs in present-day parochial liturgy in countless Roman Catholic parishes. That situation is a cause for concern to other Christians for whom the liturgical tradition of the Church has been known and lived as a great sign of the unity of the Church at all times and in all places in a common prayer which cuts through divisions of time and place. Hitchcock's com- 146 BOOK REVIEWS ments are not to be dismissed as the ranting of a reactionary who has failed to sense the need for reform; rather, his book is the thoughtful expression of a person who is quite well informed about what the liturgical movement set out to accomplish, is basically in accord with its principles, and yet is pained to see how its development has gone awry. The chief complaint of the present reviewer is not that Hitchcock's criticisms are wrong-headed, but rather that he does not see the situation in the right perspective and thus places the blame in the wrong quarters. This will immediately appear as special pleading, because Hitchcock plaees much of the blame on the liturgists who, he feels, perpetrated the situation. He is not alone in this attitude: shortly before his death, the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, said in an interview that the liturgists are the true enemy of the Church today. The reviewer, who· is a liturgist as well as a priest of the Episcopal Church who completed his doctoral studies at the lnstitut Catholique in Paris and is currently Professor of Liturgics in an Episcopal seminary, begs to differ. For the most part, those who have been trained in liturgy and sacraments are as concerned about the present state of pastoral liturgy as any in the Church. Since Hitchcoek himself admits the sound quality of the principles of liturgical reform expressed in...