Minotaur or Man?

By Melvin Maddocks

THE DARK NIGHT OF RESISTANCE by Daniel Berrigan, 181 pages. Doub/ecfay, $5.95.

For four months Father Daniel Berrigan, convicted of burning draft files at Catonsville, Md., was that melodramatic figure, a fugitive from justice. Before his capture by FBI agents posing as bird watchers on Block Island, R.I., that rainy morning of Aug. 11, 1970, Berrigan had traveled through his own bold underground. He gave out secret interviews to press and television, held discussion meetings within the movement, and wrote, wrote, wrote. It is safe to say that no fugitive in FBI history has written so much so fast.

The Dark Night of Resistance puts it all together. Tapped out on 18 different typewriters, the manuscript comprises, in Berrigan's own phrase, "notes quite literally on the run." Included are scraps of poetry and prose; imaginary dialogues between Disciple and Master, reading notes on Eldridge Cleaver, a commentary on Buddha, a critique on

Norman Mailer and James Dickey playing muse to the moon shot (or, as Berrigan puts it, "Court Historian"), and a brief, witty dictionary of definitions. The result is an uneven book, often written from the bottom of the heart but sometimes off the top of the head.

Striking a parallel to John of the Cross (author of The Dark Night of the Soul), Berrigan assigns himself the literary priest's ancient task: accounting for "one man's spiritual journey." It is a very special journey, however. He is performing his walk, he suggests, as a "high-wire act" stretched between contemporary politics and Catholic tradition, explaining his actions to God, the Church and himself,

National Illness. When Berrigan is talking politics, he often sounds commonplace. In a significant concession --and a dangerous one for a poet--he writes: "The gesture that counts, today, is not the word at all." Even other protesters, he admits, "all look alike to me; they all say the same thing." He makes little apparent effort to speak differently himself as he turns on the old rhetoric of the New Left. "The conflagration is rising"--as ever. It is "a time to tear and pull down," a time to "resign from America in order to join the heart of man." Like a prayer wheel, he grinds on mechanically about "national illness . . . madness . . . the latest American idiocy."

Berrigan's political models are no more defined than slapped-up posters of Che and Ho. His political villains are opposite-and-equal cliches, crude, hasty caricatures of a "Brooks-suited investor" whose "manicured fingers" are "infinitely removed from the bloodletting." When it comes to the America he wants, Berrigan sidles into a vision of "Paradise Park"--a Utopia straight out of the pixiest moments of The Greening of America: "Let the people enter, grow, run, fly, perambulate, consume, pull corks from, spread jams and peanut butter on, swim and sun in, et cetera, as the day is long . . ."

Yet the mysticism that weakens Berrigan as a political thinker is his strength as a religious thinker--and the strength of the book. When he cries, "In spite of all, what are we to do with our lives?", the man who bears witness and the man who writes at last have their agonized union. Speaking of the Christian "tradition"--a word that appears as regularly in the book as "freedom"--Berrigan confesses he is "unrecognizable to myself apart from it." The reader will agree. All the slipshod writing and hyperbolic thinking disappear when he concludes simply: "We are trying to get reborn." The sorrow is unmistakable in Berrigan's acknowledgment of his loneliness, and of his church's disapproval. "Did we once think we would count for something; or that, suffering repression, the threat or actuality of personal harm, we would win the attention of our fellow Christians, of our fellow priests?"

The ragings of political controversy keep Berrigan from being recognized for what he is. Beyond partisanship, he is a man of God risking all to grasp what that means in the secular '70s, stretching to make a perilous connection between faith and works. In religion as in politics, Berrigan is a test-case priest. The outcome of his gambles may affect the future of religious radicalism more than the future of political radicalism.

"It is a great and good thing, dignum et justum," he writes at his most aware, "when one's life is so impregnated with the values of a tradition, his life so colored, so impelled, so led as to be able to wrestle with the demons of his own (and others') lifetime. We shall see who emerges from the labyrinth: the minotaur or the man."

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