A Deplorable Treasure

Self-Rescue By John Cantwell Kiley McGraw-Hill, 224 pp., $7.95 Reader, I owe you a confession. The author, Jack Kiley, alias Johannes Eff, is an old and dear friend of mine. So is the author of the introduction. As for Jack, he is a philosopher with whom I can hardly spend ten minutes without getting into a jovially violent argument. This review takes the argument into the public arena. I enjoyed the book hugely, and I will keep and treasure it—though I also deplore it.

Bill Buckley wouldn’t go that far, but his introduction takes issue with the book’s apparent pantheism. “The existence of everything is included in the divine existence,” Kiley writes. “This means that absolutely everything is God.” Buckley praises the book’s “practical wisdom”—it is, after all, a self-help book—but argues that pantheism is “a shrinking up into the ego,” and counsels the reader to prescind the advice from the doctrine. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Self-Rescue By John Cantwell Kiley McGraw-Hill, 224 pp., $7.95 Reader, I owe you a confession. The author, Jack Kiley, alias Johannes Eff, is an old and dear friend of mine. So is the author of the introduction. As for Jack, he is a philosopher with whom I can hardly spend ten minutes without getting into a jovially violent argument. This review takes the argument into the public arena. I enjoyed the book hugely, and I will keep and treasure it—though I also deplore it.

Bill Buckley wouldn’t go that far, but his introduction takes issue with the book’s apparent pantheism. “The existence of everything is included in the divine existence,” Kiley writes. “This means that absolutely everything is God.” Buckley praises the book’s “practical wisdom”—it is, after all, a self-help book—but argues that pantheism is “a shrinking up into the ego,” and counsels the reader to prescind the advice from the doctrine. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done.