[In the following review, Edman offers a negative assessment of Of Fear and Freedom.]

The author of Christ Stopped at Eboli commands the interested attention of anyone who read that wise and touching picture of a remote, oppressed peasant community in the hills of southern Italy. One felt in Levi's admirable vignette of eternal humanity the sensibilities of a poet and something of a seer. Now comes a book, written five years earlier, when the author was living in France. It was at the beginning of World War II; Levi was depressed about the future as well as the present and disenchanted with the past. He thought it at least a good moment to make his peace with himself and his estimate of the universe. This volume constitutes a philosophy, the author's philosophy, his confession of faith, his testament of feeling at one of the darkest moments in modern history. Now, in a moment scarcely less dark, he has chosen to issue the book, unrevised.

Of Fear and Freedom is declared by its translator (the exact translation of “Paura della libertà”—“Fear of Freedom”—would have been more meaningful) to be a work of genius, of that special genius in which ideas are merged with the music of their utterance and in which everything is suggestion and intimation, stirring the paths of our subconscious with the depths of wisdom not reducible simply to logical terms. Perhaps in the original Italian, which I have not had the opportunity to see, the effect may be that of poetic magic and moral incantation. In English it reads like a curious special jargon, neither idiomatic English nor language suggesting idiomatic Italian. The book is filled with magisterial aphorisms, or what perhaps in the Italian seem to be aphorisms. I have struggled to understand what is being said. I am confused by what purports to be poetic utterance and manages only to be turgid prose. It is almost impossible, for me at least, to think that the man who wrote the succinct, evocative prose of Christ Stopped at Eboli could produce this foggy essay.

Yet a theme somehow does emerge, and a sense of the writer's seriousness and perception. The theme is that of man's fear in the presence of the sacred. Carlo Levi is sound enough in recognizing that religion is not all light, that there is a central core of darkness in it. The sacred is terrifying, and men have always proceeded to try to release themselves from the fear its idols promote. They have converted the sacred, fearsome and terrifying into mystery and ritual. They have worshiped “the divine father and the divine state [which] live eternally and jealously claim throughout eternity the slavery of women and the sacrifice of love.” They fear freedom; “a new ambiguity is taking shape, a mechanical and sportive association of power and servitude. … The sacred history of the world is a history of willing servitude, of tortures, punishments and mutilations, expulsions and ritual killings, of slaughter and intolerance, of prisons and exiles.” The state becomes a substitute god, and its dictatorial laws a surrogate idolatry. “There is the rise of human religion and its liberation.” But human nature cannot brook freedom and shudders back to new submission.

This is about what Dr. Levi seems to say, though obscurely. Poetic prophecy is possible to a Blake or a Plotinus; in lesser hands it becomes the rhetoric of impassioned and semi-erudite confusion. Christ Stopped at Eboli was a little masterpiece of reflective observation. This book is no masterpiece of philosophy; I am not even sure how much is being said, except platitudes dressed up to sententiousness and tricked out with allusions to recent anthropological studies in religion, and to the current unhappy state of man.