Word: moralizers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Between them, the foursome manages to get through the piece roughly as written-with a few soppy sequences thrown in to justify everyone's moral lapses. The more sparkling passages, alas, lie smothered under Hollywood's big-screen Technicolor treatment. The tone is too strident, the color too bright, the running around from rooftop cafes to picturesque playgrounds too aimless...
...this does not seem revolutionary today, it is because 20th century man has already shown himself itching with the Rousseauean complaint that civilizing institutions have suborned man's true nature. But in the ceremonious, hierarchical, class-structured France of the 18th century, romantic individualism and moral egocentricity were new, sensational and heady stuff...
...years in Rome constitute a unique opportunity to learn the subtle ways of Catholicism's capital and to study under some of the church's best minds: English Jesuit Frederick Copleston, a distinguished historian of philosophy, or German Redemptorist Bernard Haring, generally considered Catholicism's top moral theologian, who teaches at the Academia Alfonsiana (a branch of the Lateran). Otherwise, the training is not much better-and in some ways worse -than what they would receive back home. While U.S. seminaries have all but abandoned Latin for lectures and brought their curriculums closer to those of secular...
Scientific Skepticism. At the subterranean level, the book deals with moral issues that seem remote from spydom's amoral domain. As a schoolboy, Roper applied scientific skepticism to religion. "Does Christ reside in the molecules themselves," he asked, pondering the Eucharist, "or only in the molecules organized into bread?" Later, war service destroyed both his worlds, religion and science: "What's the point of fighting if we don't believe that one way of life is better than another...
...these activities are Hillier's veils, and soon they must reveal his deepening moral crisis. Once behind the Iron Curtain, he finds Roper and discovers that the scientist did not turn his coat after all: he was shanghaied. Furthermore, nobody really wants him: neither the Russians, who accepted him only as a useful political pawn, nor the English, who jobbed him for much the same reason. Hillier also finds that nobody wants him either. He was sent to Russia so that an assassin, hired by his own intelligence agency, could erase a mind already too full of dangerous secrets...