The Current

The fall issue of The Current, published by the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Club, is a carefully put together magazine, and the writing is anything but illiterate. It has, however, an undue fondness for the ponderous sentence, the indirect statement, the complicated construction, and the rhetorical question, which makes it very difficult to read.

The contents, other than Thomas Hargadon's regular column, divide rather nicely into two parts: the literary, consisting of a short story, two brief and rather mediocre poems, and a review of two books about Adolf Eichmann; and the theological, consisting of the rest of the magazine.

The short story, a not particularly interesting offering by novelist Joseph Dever, has the sort of pointless quality which suggests an assignment prepared for a course in creative writing.

Paul A. Lee's review of the two books on Eichmann is far more engaging. He defends Hannah Arendt's thesis that Eichmann is "banal," rather than a "monster of evil," characterizing him as "an efficient, hard-working administrator, who took no thought of the moral consequences of his actions because such reflection was beyond his capacities."

According to Lee, Miss Arendt's analysis of Eichmann's character is confirmed by William L. Hull's The Struggle for a Soul, in which the author, a Protestant missionary in Israel, describes his attempts to convert Eichmann before his execution. After condemning Hull for being "puerile" and for attempting "to browbeat Eichmann into a 'repeat after me' attitude," Lee accepts his claim that Eichmann never recognized his own guilt. He was therefore, Lee says, "no willful Edmund, Richard Ill, Iago, or Flamineo, for the willful ones find out." Men like Eichmann, on the other hand, "have engaged in no quest, no pact, no pursuit in the name of something, they have no moments of lucidity in which they stand judged."

Almost half of the magazine is taken up by two articles attempting to refute Sidney Hook's contention "that religious faith is superfluous except as supplying an emotional need and that this function hardly warrants complicating the issue with the incomprehensible concept of God." The Rev. David Burrell counters with the claim that the concept of God is inherent in any notion of morality. Michael Novak, author of the other article, claimes that religious faith does not in fact satisfy the emotional need that Hook discusses.

The Current can hardly pretend to be a magazine of general interest. The material, what there is of it, hardly justifies publishing a magazine, especially one so well edited and printed. Its more particularly religious articles, on the other hand, are comprehensible only to those with some background in philosophy or Christain apologetics. However much the magazine may assist its Catholic readers in relating their faith and background to their College life, it provides less help than it might to other attempting to understand that faith and background.