Phillip Freeman's "The Gospel of Mary": Book Review

Since I was a teen reading James Michener's "The Source," I've had a weakness for "So-and-so has discovered a missing Gospel" yarns. I liked the prolific Professor Freeman's recent Oxford UP retelling of Celtic mythology, so I gave this a try. Via an e-galley, I did not know until I finished that this is the third in his Sister Deirdre series. That explains some backstory I kept wondering why not more was divulged herein. I had no trouble following along, but it's better I assume to have caught up with the previous books, for the main character evidently has a complicated past and much to tell.

Not be confused with another, recent Irish-oriented story, Colm Tóibín's drama "The Testament of Mary," Freeman's "The Gospel of Mary" features the rapid pace, genial tone, and expository dialogue that fills us in on an Ireland when Christians still number few. Deirdre's grandmother was a druid and she claims the same identity, although when her mother died, her grandmother fulfilled her promise to raise Deirdre in the new faith. With allusions to a failed marriage, other past liaisons, and a child who died young hovering about, it's clear that Freeman's protagonist has had more adventures than most nuns might have, at least in later times. She lives with her friend and sidekick Dari in a monastery founded by Brigid, which to Rome's discomfort hosts celibate men and women together.

Rome's unease deepens as it sends a clever emissary to find out what the truth might be to a manuscript smuggled into the island with haste, secrecy, and danger. It is, naturally, the tale of Jesus told by his mother, and its passages intersperse, as they are translated by Dari from the Aramaic, with the fate of the two women as they get caught up in keeping their treasured text safe from the Church. The Church, after all, fears that its integrity will crumble if Mary's words are proven true, and even if they are not able to be verified, that the heresies and tumult generated by them will bring down Rome

It all moves satisfactorily. I read it in a sitting. Freeman has done his biblical homework, and he blends it with a quest that dashes about Ireland. There's plot complications, but the story line as a whole does not surprise. It's a pleasant narrative, and it likely will educate as well as entertain you.
(Amazon 9/5/17)

Jean Raspail's "The Camp of the Saints": Book Review

Recent flotillas of refugees from Africa and Syria caused a few bookworms and pundits to name-check this 1973 novel. Liberals practically put "scare quotes" around a mention of what they term a racist screed. Conservatives may praise it as a "classic." I knew of it way back via the maverick Garrett Hardin's perspective; he appealed if in different aspects to both ends of the political spectrum.

It popped into my mind the other day so I sat down and read it. It took two sittings. Raspail, as here translated by Norman Solomon, has a feverish, testy style that Michel Houellebecq, in his formative years in France, I suspect may well have come across. However, as Houellebecq's mordant fiction gains the same condemnations in bien-pensant right-thinking and left-leaning circles as Raspail's book, readers familiar with H. may find an encounter with R. bracing, infuriating, or baffling.

Raspail is credited on the blurb for The Camp of the Saints as a prize-winning author in his native land. Yet this novel flails from the get-go. The end of the story, or near it, jumbles up chronology. The sneering tone of the misanthropic narrator, the overabundant detail, the cardboard characters, the fact you don't care about anyone in the entire storyline: Raspail has scores to settle, but whether you'll be cheering him on or chasing him away depends not only on your own ideological bent, but your tolerance (a theme put through the wringer herein) for prattling. Raspail has it in for his countercultural era of the slightly aging hippies and the faux radicals of the early 1970s. He also despises the press, and some of the admittedly best barbs come as his narrator skewers the posturing.

I thought of the New York Times, for instance, when I found a similar send-up of earnestly PC journalists, who lambaste capitalism and despise corporations and capitalism in the same pages whose sponsors are those fat cats, and whose underwriting, so to say, supports the fulsome claptrap.

The key criticism, as Hardin reminded American readers decades ago, is that the "lifeboat" (here not symbol but story itself, multiplied all over the ocean as refugees set sail for Europe and the rest of whatever is the Western world circa 1973) cannot hold everyone. Either the rich have to share, and become poor themselves as such largess will not balance but tip over everyone into poverty, or they have to defend their realms with force, and "contempt" as Raspail later put it, lest they lose it all.

Odd tangents speckle this work. Clement Dio, a preening poser of the Third World solidarity his own bloodline allows him to capitalize on in more ways than one, is the best of a bad lot. But Raspail's mouthpiece hates worker-priests (back when there were enough clergy to go around), and the Dominicans (not for once the Jesuits) come in for comeuppance. Funny that one Benedict XVI reigns. Along with the Church, the unions, the press, and the military all get their turn at this "roast."

Yes, Raspail makes some points early on about the hypocrisy of the West, the implosion of its value system in a secularizing (well, not quite as it's still France in the post-Vatican II guitar mass phase) and skeptical society, and the contradictions inherent in the post-colonial world supported by the five (now more like six and a half) billion whose labor and losses prop up the seven hundred million whites. "The Last Chance Armada" makes a few at first hesitate but the pressure to welcome the human tide from over the sea leads many addled or idealistic Westerners, guilt ridden and excited to expiate their sins of neglect and greed, to proclaim "We Are All From the Ganges Now" as the first wave from India crests and others then join the exodus to the Northern Hemisphere, at least the wealthy part.

The narrative, such as it is, lurches through scenes of the army, a strange tangent with Benedictine monks, the chattering classes, a token couple from the working class, and those in factories and offices who find, as all anticipate the Easter Sunday mass landing of the sordid ships and their cargo, the early advantages taken by those in France itself who have earlier emigrated, and who maneuver their own prospects, eased by the care or fear taken by their "host nation," as it capitulates to them too

Interesting idea. Promising set-up. Fumbled execution. Fizzled climax. Ho-hum resolution as the narrator and Raspail seem too wearied or jaded to bother carrying on after so many pages of rants.
However, the relevance of this scenario cannot be gainsaid. Look at headlines. (Amazon US 6/5/17)

Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s "Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol": Book Review

Look around an Eastern-themed gift shop or Asian-inspired garden and you may see a benevolent, rotund and inevitably smiling Buddha. Imported into Western culture, the familiar icon enters popular culture as a good luck symbol and a self-satisfied sage. What today's viewers of such images forget is that, less than two centuries ago, whatever was known or rumored about this wisdom teacher emanated more often from demonic or pagan connotations, rather than cheerful or chubby depictions.

This shift in representation has taken nearly two thousand years to spread, far from the homeland near the Himalayan foothills and Indian plains of the historical Buddha. An expert scholar on Buddhist culture at the University of Michigan provides readers with a compendium excerpting over eighty accounts of what the Buddha meant to the forebears of Christians (and, now and then, Muslims and Jews) who attempted to fit this acclaimed personage into their worldviews. Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s {Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha} takes up the conversion of the Buddha "from stone to flesh." That is, the statues and the portraits of this venerable personage filtered into the imagination of travelers and scholars. They might be mystified or terrified of what they heard or guessed about this fabled or feared entity, and they regarded him or it with "profound suspicion." Simply put, until 1801, the Buddha was not recognized as the founder of what the West invented as Buddhism. For previous tale-tellers, he was known only as an idol.

Lopez records over three hundred names for the Buddha between 200 and 1850. The litany stretches back to Clement of Alexandria around that first date. This Church Father distinguishes the Hindu Brahmin priests from non-Hindu followers of the "Boutta, whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours." Not bad for the first attempt at defining the change from Gautama to Sakyamuni, from a pampered prince to a wise deity bestowing favors on his worshipers.

The professor's introduction sums up the intricate patterns of information about the Buddha as they were transmitted from the Indian subcontinent into the Middle East and across the many Christian and Islamic empires. Tellingly, for nearly a millennium, few reports of the Buddha found their way west. Marco Polo's celebrated chronicle ranks sixth among eighty-odd entries, for instance. After this report, however, versions multiplied along the trade routes set up by Christian missionaries and traders with China. Emissaries at the Great Khan's court linked with Armenian, Persian and papal contacts visiting Mongol rulers. These East-West ties tightened in the 1600s after the Reformation.

Among these, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci epitomizes the ambition of the Catholic Church to win over the Chinese. Fr. Ricci also speaks for the dismissal of the Buddhist teachings brought to China from India as a "disaster." Neither a "genuine record of the history of this religion" nor "any real principle upon which one can rely" exists within this faith. For it "lacks the arts of civilization and has no standards of moral conduct to bequeath to posterity." Ricci credits the lack of knowledge of Buddhism abroad with a rationale for denigrating its doctrines. The Jesuits may have adapted Chinese customs as their own to win over the rulers, but they persisted, as with Ippolito Desideri in Tibet, to oppose Buddhism

Other Westerners added their own reactions. These tended to be negative. They offered many adaptations of the Buddha, often without recognizing the true roots of the idol in a historical figure. Yet, Lopez cautions, no single Buddha biography is accepted across Asia. No canonical text exists.

Rather than posit a true Asian vs. false Western dichotomy, Lopez asks "whether the Buddha, then and now, here and there, is the product of a more complex and interesting process of influence." Therefore, Lopez allows many texts to nestle and jostle against each other, refusing to rate them. This approach fits into Lopez' career, spent producing learned works demystifying Buddhist tropes. While the collection of polyglot voices may daunt, he offers cogent introductions for each diverse inclusion.

For then as now, knowledge of languages varied. Motivations multiplied. Conversion of the "pagans" led to negative attitudes, such as Ricci articulates. Catholics encountering monasteries eerily like their own recoiled as if they walked into the haunts of devils. Gradually, spurred by archaeological, linguistic and military exponents, interest in what became defined as Buddhism supplanted a terror of its teachings. Ethnographic enthusiasm grew in the 1700s and 1800s. This anthology concludes, fittingly, with the 1844 monograph of Eugène Burnouf. This scholar of Old Persian and Sanskrit pioneered the presentation of a human Buddha, rather than a stone idol. And from that juncture, Western sympathy began for the founding figure of a world religion and/or an appealing philosophy.

"The myriad idols coalesced into a single figure, who then became a historical figure, a founder of a religion, and a superstition became a philosophy." So Lopez sums up the transformation. Textually-based Buddhism remains dominant in the West, parallel to the quest in the 19th century for an historical Jesus. Whether such pursuits have resulted in reform or regression is left up to the adept. (Spectrum Culture 4/4/17; Amazon US with slight changes 4/20/17)

Newton's Third Law

Even if New Year's is two weeks away, I've resolved this past year to expand my reading material. The echo chamber's become a common phrase the past few months, derided by some who blame whatever ideology one leans to for keeping half of America tuned out from the other half. Both sides sometimes could care less about the other (small 'o' rather than The Other elevated by one side). But I figure it's stimulating to do so, and besides, I've always had unpredictable (a bit at least) and contrarian ideas.

So, I read Ross Douthat in the NYT regularly. This conservative Catholic intellectual's an anomaly, certainly. His take on the campaigns and culture wars from his perspective reminded me not of my Jesuit college, which was decidedly of the "social justice" tilt, but of a few authors I tried out in the stacks during my stint. I roamed them to find among the Eric-Gill- Hilaire Belloc- Chestertonian axis an argument for distributism, a return to guilds, and a William Morris-inspired direction of a benign reform less hostile to the spiritual than the Marxism and/or liberation theology favored by certain professors. I mulled over these issues in my undergrad years, during Reagan's first term, and while I opposed him, I found that the knee-jerk denigration of those like my family who voted for the Gipper as an antidote to the identity politics promoted by the Dems diminished the voices of "my" folks. Unions declining, education faltering, the Church diminishing, their trusted verities faded rapidly. This white working class is mostly mocked, but I understand it.

Not that I backed the GOP, but I didn't cotton to the attitudes of those limousine liberals either. The earnest Michael Harrington's version of democratic socialism appeared as one option some of my circle entered, if gingerly. We were from the blue-collar ranks, the first to go far with higher ed, from average parishes and schools. But the Jane Fonda-Tom Hayden in the People's Republic of Santa Monica's noblesse oblige the DSA exuded for L.A.'s NPR crowd on the Westside, few of whom were natives and many from New York and other bastions of privilege, rankled me instinctively. (I get that way whenever my hometown is critiqued by airy arrivals from wherever.) And when I questioned proto-Maoist radicals at UCLA a few years later during my doctoral quest, as to where their efforts to recruit among the likes of my father's machinists would wind up, as factories left the U.S., I did not get much response as to a shift to consciousness raising among the temps in their monitored cubicles.

Now, as many may have buyer's remorse as to whom they voted for to bring back those tool-and-die jobs my dad did, the choice of the right-wing, as fickle as predicted in their embrace of cronies from capitalism's elite to fill the Cabinet to come, bodes poorly for reforms. No surprise there. But in retrospect, an April 23rd 2016 piece by Douthat I found this morning in the paper pile shows how the lately fevered fears of certain "alt" sites and voices can be placed within a larger context, one the media pass by. I'm unsure how much aligns with what I stumbled across in college, but here goes.

Douthat documents the roughly 2/3 bias in programs (highest in my field of English Lit) against conservative candidates otherwise equally qualified for a post competing with a liberal applicant. 10% of the humanities professoriate total its right-wing. A minority no advocate lobbies for more spaces in the ivory tower. This movement Douthat labels as '“neoreaction,' which in its highbrow form offers a monarchist critique of egalitarianism and mass democracy, and in its popular form is mostly racist pro-Trump Twitter accounts and anti-P.C. provocateurs." (See here for more on the latter contingent's variety, tallied by one who delights to épater le bourgeois.) Douthat suggests these two phenomena emanate from a common core: "the official intelligentsia’s permanent and increasing leftward tilt, and the appeal of explicitly reactionary ideas to a strange crew of online autodidacts."

The Whiggish expectation that we advance inexorably towards a better future outweighs the Newtonian third law of actions triggering equal and opposed reactions. They may be balanced in that one President follows another, and their racial and social stances may be seen in opposition. But are they equal in reactions? Both kow-tow as any elected figure in the U.S. of any stature to bankers, developers, lawyers, tax-dodgers, connivers, and cabals. A shadow government runs our real system. For me, a change of the front man does not mean the backing band has changed utterly for the better. It's as if the lead singer lip-synchs what the talented songwriter pens, the charmer out of the spotlight,

Going beyond the easy depictions of idolizing Him, Douthat discerns a void on campuses. If a discontent wants to revolt against "tenured radicalism," what to do? Those think-tanks don't attack
"the very roots of the modern liberal order." (Deft spin to the derivation of a less-heralded radical.)

"Deep critiques" abound on the left.. Douthat notes that while scholarship on Carlyle or T.S. Eliot or Rudyard Kipling continues, few publishing on these writers would admit any admiration for their politics. Their often racist and anti-semitic outbursts, akin to the antebellum South, make this sympathy taboo. Yet when we erase polarized opposites of Foucault or Zizek, we may lack contexts.

But while reactionary thought is prone to real wickedness, it also contains real
insights. (As, for the record, does Slavoj Zizek — I think.) Reactionary assumptions
about human nature — the intractability of tribe and culture, the fragility of order,
the evils that come in with capital­-P Progress, the inevitable return of hierarchy, the
ease of intellectual and aesthetic decline, the poverty of modern substitutes for
family and patria and religion — are not always vindicated. But sometimes? Yes,
sometimes. Often? Maybe even often.
Both liberalism and conservatism can incorporate some of these insights. But
both have an optimism that blinds them to inconvenient truths. The liberal sees that conservatives were foolish to imagine Iraq remade as a democracy; the conservative
sees that liberals were foolish to imagine Europe remade as a post­national utopia
with its borders open to the Muslim world. But only the reactionary sees both.
Is there a way to make room for the reactionary mind in our intellectual life,
though, without making room for racialist obsessions and fantasies of enlightened
despotism? So far the evidence from neoreaction is not exactly encouraging. The official intelligentsia’s permanent and increasing leftward tilt, and the appeal of explicitly reactionary ideas to a strange crew of online autodidacts. is also evidence that ideas can’t be permanently repressed when something in them still seems true.
Maybe one answer is to avoid systemization, to welcome a reactionary style
that’s artistic, aphoristic and religious, while rejecting the idea of a reactionary
blueprint for our politics. From Eliot and Waugh and Kipling to Michel Houellebecq,
there’s a reactionary canon waiting to be celebrated as such, rather than just read
through a lens of grudging aesthetic respect but ideological disapproval.

Now, where are the insights Douthat invites? Tribalism has been blamed for the intransigence of the divides into which we are born, are classified within and expected to uphold for a demographic tick-box or a employer-mandated form. Order is fragile, but as with global warming and neo-liberal pieties, do these impacts merit dismissal as we crest into planetary chaos? The ebb of standards in the arts and discussion we lament within the chattering classes (at least of a certain age, before the advent of word processors and smartphones), but we engage in the same technologies and share the same memes as our younger charges. I personally get frustrated by the casual reversion to f-this and s-that all around now, but my peers shrug it off. I'm happy that the definition of family expands to same-sex couples and any whom have long faced ostracism. But I worry about the "single mom" trope as if this origin excuses any criticism of blame for the damage a fragmented home may inflict on young or old.

As for patria, I suspect this when nationalism stands for inbred mores and backward selfishness. Much as I have a soft spot for the Irish Tricolour, I remain detached about flag worship, and even the standing for the Pledge discomforts me as I've grown to realize this compromised U.S. Yet I defy its liberal norm in arguing if fruitlessly against open borders as I believe any jurisdiction by its nature should exercise self-deliberation among its citizens as to how many newcomers it can include. This clashes with everyone around me, but it's a tenet for me squaring with sustainable economies, eco-friendly lifestyles, and populist decision making rather than the centralized dictates that the au courant  musical hit Hamilton champions, if glossing over the real Alex's pro-British elitism and trade that favored the wealthy and the Feds rather than the states and those resisting Beltway power.

Religion needs no debate here. It's been contemplated for all my life, let alone many of my posts. The appeal of the atavistic and the ancestral pulses strongly within me. Its dangers and its delights create discomfort and rouse discussion. Suffice to say that "its strange viral appeal" buzzes in my sly soul.

"Silence": Film Review

Back in the early '80s, I bought Shusaku Endo's novel Sílence. Finally issued in paperback, and with me enrolled at a Jesuit university, I rushed to savor it. A harrowing novel (see my linked review), this angered at least on Amazon the likes of sensitive Catholics unable to accept that a priest under pressure after witnessing the torture and death of others who died for one's presence might succumb.

The end of that same decade, Martin Scorsese read it. It was recommended by New York's Episcopal bishop in the wake of the controversy over his adaptation of another controversial work, The Last Temptation of Christ. Marty vowed to make it a movie, if he could figure out how to capture its hold.

He did, and as the scholar of American Catholicism Paul Elie's The Passion of Martin Scorsese in The New York Times Magazine observes: the book and the film join well. For the subject "locates, in the missionary past, so many of the religious matters that vex us in the postsecular present — the claims to universal truths in diverse societies, the conflict between a profession of faith and the expression of it, and the seeming silence of God while believers are drawn into violence on his behalf." Elie locates in the filmmaker's oeuvre a pursuit of the "poisoned arrow of religious conflict" and poison indeed surfaces in the film. I saw it at a premiere in Westwood, a block from the bookstore where I found the novel decades ago. The excitement of seeing this in the Regency, a cavernous 1931 Art Deco palace filled with maybe a thousand people, was palpable, for the director would be there for a panel afterwards. But I was unsure if many there knew what a story they'd face.

Face, as the image of Christ, in the film as Scorsese explained taken from El Greco --for the original work's use of Piero della Francesca did not transfer to the big screen when tested-- confides a human trust in its viewer, that He would accompany its beholder through whatever moral perils lay ahead. The divinity of Jesus is of course in Christian orthodoxy inseparable from his humanity, but for the director, the eyes had it. They convey the distance and the direction proper to a bold Jesuit follower.

The film itself, 2:40, unfolded slowly. It was difficult for me to gain full immersion as a woman two seats down connected as she proclaimed to the producer checked her smartphone regularly, and a man behind me kept chuckling at dramatic moments perhaps taken by the nervous or shallow as comedy. There is a bit of levity, in the tragic Judas-figure of Kichijiro keeps popping up at tense moments begging for the protagonist Fr. Sebastian Rodrigues' confession, Yet that moved me, not to laughter, but to their poignant bond, which gains significance as the narrative turns to the priest's struggles.

That Japanese convert-traitor asks where is the place for a weak man in this world. A common plaint. Scorsese's vision raises up Rodrigues as an alter Christus in Passion Play form, entering twice cities on a donkey while being pelted with stones and abuse. I suppose this fits, on the other hand, any priest. Yet the acting skills and the power of the necessarily didactic script by Jay Cocks and Scorsese project Endo's investigation well. As a child he was baptized, and he questioned here and in The Samurai (set among Franciscans of the Mexican conquest) the ability of a foreign people to truly give in to an invader, or a promise of liberation for the poor within a peaceful and carefree paradise, when the basic tenets of this faith were garbled, as the "Son of God" comes rendered from their native Sun.

As Rodrigues replies, that land is poisoned. Nothing can grow there, the Japanese powers reason, as all rots in this island swamp. The tension between apostasy and martyrdom, fidelity and surrender tightens the energy. Early on, all is painterly fog in the cold and chilly islands where the renegade Christians have gone underground as relentless crackdowns have reduced the 300,000-strong community in the wake of St. Francis Xavier to a remnant, hunted down and all burnt or drowned.

Later, in Nagasaki, clarity returns, amidst the regimented architecture, ranks, and sumptuary distinctions. Rodrigues' predecessor, Ferrara, speaks eloquently for moral compromise, to spare pain. As their translator adds, no man should take away another's spirit. I watched this with engagement. I presume it may not have swayed all (my wife advised cutting twenty minutes and squirmed at the debates I found in jesuitical tutelage as fascinating and stimulating). But as Scorsese mentioned in the after-film panel (joined by production designer Dante Ferretti, actors Liam Neeson, Adam Driver, Andrew Garfield, Issei Ogata, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and producer Irwin Winkler--and a fawning host who called the director "Maestro"), he hoped the film would bring "peace of mind."

I second his ambition. Elie's skillful article locates the film within the inculturation aims of imperialism and religious missions. (But he overlooks as do many that the novel was translated by a Belfast Jesuit, Fr. William Johnston, who taught at Sophia University run by the Society in Tokyo, and who himself embraced Zen.) Do we insist the newcomers to a practice go over to the practices of the faith? Or as the Jesuits did in China, do we accommodate the faith to indigenous folkways and traditions? St. Boniface, when he preached to the Frisians in the 8th century, was told he should not destroy the temples and groves, but make them into centers of worship and pilgrimage for a new generation. Clever, as this supplants rather than terminates the sacred connection. But the fervent and fundamentalists may refuse compromise, and thus this challenging film and novel remain relevant.

As Pope Francis, the first Jesuit installed in the Vatican as such, told Scorsese on the film's first showing in Rome, may the film bear much fruit. That's a message all of us can applaud, this season.

Bernard du Boucheron's "The Voyage of the Short Serpent"

Yes, that title is symbolic. This short novel can be read in a sitting. It takes a mock-medieval style to report, from alternating and eventually contrasting narrative voices, what happened on an episcopal mission commanded by the Pope to reclaim the Norse lapsed into heathenry in faraway Greenland.

It's more of a conceit than a full-fledged work. Hester Velmans' translation may capture the starched, satirical, and savage qualities of the original French, but the effort feels fussy and overly stylized in English. So does the effort to which the author strains to capture the tone of a chronicle or correspondence, given the friction of the attempt to counter the wiles of the Inuit, here titled "publicans," who lure the dwindling Norse into their seal-hunting, sexually suspect and sinful mores.

A few good lines show the potential. Early on, frostbite claims victims on the bishop's ship. Having been forbidden to eat their own rotting flesh to survive, one shipmate rebels. "One of them replied that the season was not Lent, and proceeded to devour his own toes." I admit I liked some of the dour and deadpan recitals of increasing woe, as the rescue attempt to scare and shame the Norse back to Christian fidelity, compared to the odd temptations of dissolute abandon among the natives, lure the Catholic contingent into their compromises, to survive in New Thule increasingly hostile threats. (Amazon US 11/25/16)

Michel Houellebecq's "Submission": Book Review

While the release of this book in its original French will be inevitably tied to the article about its author, Michel Houellebecq, featured in Charlie Hebdo the week of the Parisian murders of its staff and other innocents last January, the novel itself merits attention.

Readers of Houellebecq's previous fiction will recognize familiar elements. The discontent of his early middle-aged, educated, ornery French narrators in Whatever and The Elementary Particles repeats. The unease in {Platform} that lust brings to those with sagging bodies and ebbing desire persists. The longing for an escape from a declining European culture returns after The Possibility of an Island with its utopian fantasy, and aesthetic debates dramatized in The Map and the Territory.

After this newest novel's French publication, critics sought to blame, once again, its satirical author. Inevitably, Soumission entered the bestseller charts in first place. Some on the left regarded its themes as needlessly provocative. Many called them racist, appealing to baser instincts among French nationalists. Taken by English-language audiences at more of a distance, these issues may recede.

If treated as another in a series of Houellebecq's jabs at coddled liberal sensibilities, Submission loses some sting. Houellebecq proves rather, once again, he delights in the novel of ideas. He places his narrators within unbearable situations. We then watch them try to wriggle free. Within a French situation where the thought-police seek to patrol the sensibilities of all who reject secular platitudes as much as they may religious ones, the topics Submission investigates enrich its suggestive title.

Suffering from "andropause," our forty-something narrator encounters the steady decline of literature, values, culture and his libido. The teller of Submission is an expert on J. K. Huysmans, who over a century ago startled an earlier French readership with decadent novels, considered "sodomitical" and Satanic. Like Houellebecq, Huysmans' erudition enhanced his fiction's barbed, bohemian contents. Unlike Houellebecq, Huysmans began a gradual conversion to Catholicism; he eventually lived, if in less than austere style, as a lay oblate attached to a Benedictine monastery. Houellebecq had drafted this novel with a template of a protagonist emulating Huysmans' path; this story becomes in the revised version we have its sub-plot. Meanwhile, the main plot dramatizes French Islamization.

For an acerbic author regarded as unsentimental, Houellebecq begins this novel with a tender, if bitter, homage to the power of literature. It channels for the living the voices of the dead. Directly, by no other means, a reader can enter by a book into the mind of its creator, the spirits of the departed.

The narrator loves this quality. In his dissertation on Huysmans, he sums up an outlook in common with Houellebecq. "Even as he grew to despise the left, he maintained his old aversion to capitalism, money, and anything to do with bourgeois values." The professor avers that "the only thing left to people in their despair was reading," but that solace is chosen by far fewer than in Huysmans' era.

Instead, much of the initial action in this fiction, concerned more with lofty concepts than realism or politics, takes place in languid dialogue or heated exchanges between the narrator and a louche colleague at the University of Paris, Steve. The protagonist spars with him often, in "that odd ritual,. part buggery, part duel" that is "conversation between men." When the teller is jolted enough by the violence breaking out as the far-right spars with Islamic factions during the Presidential primary, the empty rural roadscape he sees, static on the radio, a clerk shot dead at a convenience store, feels less real and more contrived. It is akin to horror as glimpsed in a J.G. Ballard novel, drained of emotions.

After all, Houellebecq detaches himself from his narrator--and through him. He leaves enough of the Huysmans-driven plot to move him along, as he attempts a retreat himself at a Catholic monastery. But this fails. He has no deep contempt for his former "fellow believers" who cling to the Church. Rather, he blames "laicism" and "atheist materialism" for the death rattle of Western European values. This critique carries more weight in France than in the U.S. Despite Lorin Stein's flowing translation, readers of Submission distant from the issues that divided France after the Charlie Hebdo shootings and those limits or liberties of freedom to mock any religion may feel that this novel's impact fades.

What international readers, who may be baffled by the dense if understandable references to French media pundits and political maneuvers, are left with is a more classic contribution to a French model. The narrator who employs satire to comment on his homeland from abroad, reporting from a fabled or foreign land, emerges. As Montesquieu's Persian Letters or Voltaire's fiction transported French concerns to imaginary lands, to sidestep censorship and clerical reaction, so Houellebecq places his nameless narrator within a French polity a few years into the future. In Submission to counter a threat by Marine LePen and National Front, other French parties cast their lot with the Muslims. We hear far too little about what follows in practical terms. This lack weakens the novel's impact. Yet the tale-teller laments, typically, the loss of the ability to admire women, now that so many are veiled.

The indulgence granted such a sly teller of edgy commentary enlivens comparisons between French and Muslim mores. Late in the story, the scholar's supervisor--who has converted to the faith that has bought the Sorbonne with Saudi money and rewarded those faculty who give in--links "woman's shamanism to man, as it is described in The Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man's submission to God." The appeal of bonus brides as recruited from two or three female students from the realm of Islam, who are the few remaining who enroll in literature classes at the University of Paris, beckons the narrator to contemplate joining the favored elite of Muslim converts. Huysmans' path diverges from those 120 years later in this French novel, but Houellebecq and his narrator agree. If he submits to God's call, this dissolute intellectual will find favor in the eyes of the pious, and the well-endowed.

We leave this predicament as the protagonist mulls over his choice. Will he embrace "a chance at a second life with very little connection to the present one?" He admits, "I would have nothing to mourn." Christian France is dying. With the nation under Muslim leadership, in a coalition with the Socialists and a center-right party, such are parliaments in a strange land of the near-future, those who wield power and issue paychecks have changed. At this point, the novel sidles away. Submission chooses to remain chary about the full force of such momentous transitions. It prefers to stay coy, and like the delights of the women hidden behind gowns and veils, it retreats into its own fantasy again. (Amazon US 10-20-15; Spectrum Culture 11-8-15 a few days before the [latest] Parisian massacres.)

Michael Mott's "The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton": Book Review

After a visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani, I wanted to find out more about where Merton had spent half of his life, and how the famous depiction of his first half, in 1948's The Seven Storey Mountain, differed from or confirmed what Michael Mott learned in his diligent research for this 1984 biography. Mott's documentation makes this the authorized biography, for he had access to primary sources and archives which previous scholars and biographers did not, and as he had the cooperation of the Order to enhance the interviews and correspondence he incorporates into a comprehensive representation. Luckily for all involved, this is no hagiography. It fairly analyzes what Merton wrote and what we know, apart his many writings in print or not, as judged in the context of his friends and his lifetime.

Highlights for me began with Mott's eloquent parallel of Merton's troubled year at Caius College, Cambridge, reading Dante with Professor [Edward] Bullough. But Mott does not give the professor's first name, presumably relying only on Merton's unpublished notes, and such small details, despite the meticulous attention the author devotes to his subject, sometimes disappoint slightly. For instance, while this is meant as a biography rather than a critical work, one finds many of the three-dozen-plus titles and countless essays or reviews Merton published in his lifetime mentioned as if in passing. A few gain from Mott's insightful excerpts or summaries, but more context on the rest of them, even if minor by comparison, would have enhanced the value of this book. Admittedly it's already long, but it's not dull or rambling. Snippets on Buddhism, for instance, late in the narrative could have also benefited from elaboration, as Mott compresses complex and disparate intellectual and spiritual contexts which Merton expanded. The shift of Merton towards the East is not an easy one to reduce to a few pages. The focus on main events is understandable, but again, the endnotes could have extended discussion.

He was full of contradictions. Gregarious, he chose a cloister. Restless, he wanted to be a hermit. Affable, he withdrew from a wide circle of friends. Proud, he resented his monastic discipline. Mott handles the tensions calmly, illustrating how Merton's early infatuation with his Trappist community gave way, as he matured, to conflicts with his fellow monks. However, when by the mid-1960s his dream of a hermitage on the property came true, Merton kept appealing for chances to travel, and opportunities to chat with visitors. He swung back and forth, longing for solitude but wandering back to the world, with dangerous results as have been revealed concerning his affair with a student nurse in Louisville when he was around fifty years old. I kept noting how Merton, vowed to poverty, somehow accumulated his beloved LPs by Dylan and Joan Baez and Mozart, so many books he needed a big set of shelves, and beer and brandy (the latter might have been sneaked in by visitors).

Certainly, he felt after a quarter-century of service as novice master, and as a productive if sometimes too prolific author, he generated attention and income indirectly or directly (how did royalties work out? Another area I puzzled over, as I figured the Order garnered the sales but somehow Merton had money to spend inside and outside the monastery during his later years at least there as a hermit...). So, he figured he had earned his keep. But I understood how his fellow monks may have rankled at his barbed wit and quick tongue, and also how Merton tried to make right some of the wrongs he inflicted on his confreres and his friends, given the pressures of living so long in such close quarters.

Mott delves into such difficulties well. "It was a voice breaking the silence to praise silence." (251) As acclaim for Merton made him a celebrity after his autobiography appeared, he sought the attention but also retreated from it, if it was not from those closest to him, perhaps. Some of the liveliest passages here are about the monastic hubbub that ensued when unwanted callers tried to crash in, or apply as postulants, drawn by Merton's fame. For a while, the abbey had to house monks under a circus tent, so great were the numbers. But that passed, and Vatican II itself, with the renewal Merton helped progress, led to the diminution of much that made religious life in the Cistercians so austere.

Social changes drew Merton into the conversation in the rest of the world beyond the walls, as the late-1950s agitation filtered into his reading and correspondence. Marco Pallis and Merton wondered in letters if the atrocities attributed to WWI sparked WWII propaganda, and Mott shows how Merton evolved from a Cold War proponent to a more balanced observer and challenger to capitalist cant. Opposing the Vietnam War, in 1965 he wrote "The Answer of Minerva." If the question is "Why must this pointless war go on?", then the goddess' response is: "You must fight on, for if now you make peace with the enemy, you will offend the dead." (qtd. 416) A perennial, if unfortunate, exchange. 

The reforms that changed Catholicism, I always figured, would have been supported without delay by Merton. But Mott shows more ambiguity in Merton as the 1960s revealed immaturity among clergy freed from restraint, and as a rush to improve liturgy and architecture and ritual threw out some of what made the Church so cherished by many. A letter in 1968 finds him at odds with both extremes. "Paralyzing incomprehension--what does one do when he realizes he is part of an organization whose members systematically try to 'make a fool of God'? I suppose I begin by recognizing that I have done it as much as the best of them." A characteristic note, for Merton in his private journals strives to meet the nuanced note, less combative or preening than some of his public proclamations betrayed.

He took a long time to get over the priggish or self-righteous attitude. After all, he was an intellectual probably more than the playboy his youthful memoir made him out (despite censorship from within or outside himself) to be. He talked his way around and in the monastery, where a promise of stability and discretion overruled his natural ebullience, if not his concomitant despair and self-loathing, the balance between good conduct and righteous morality never lasted long. He lived in tumultuous times, and he continued in one of those years, 1968: "But then a 'God is dead' Church is no better, or are the 'God is dead' Christians are an improvement over the others. Just the same established flippancy and triviality. And even more successful." He ends with "They make a good living out of God's death." (527)  A fitting sample of Merton's ability to turn a phrase, to cut through pretense. 

I liked the hints of how Merton related to his friend, the artist Victor Hammer (whose drawing of Merton graces the back of the dust jacket) as an "unbelieving believer." I would have liked more about this, as to how friends of Merton managed to align their own beliefs or lack of such with his. (Some material here, as in his affair, was redacted or limited, as at the time Mott prepared this, it was less than the quarter-century moratorium that Merton requested for release of his private documents. Since Mott's book, some of the journals and letters have been published, for better or worse, maybe.)

An "existentialist contemplative," Mott avers on the next page, beckoned as ideal. Not only for the hermit-despite-himself, as he prepared to depart for the West Coast and then a tour of the Southeast Asian landscape and monasteries who increasingly loomed as his final set of mountains to argue with, in Mott's construct (playing off of Merton's title and that Dantean depiction of Mt. Purgatory). Merton wanted not only to write about life, but to live it. He wanted to demonstrate his contemplative commitment and to withdraw (at least some of the time, him being Merton), from all the attention. 

In his Asian journal, his last set of writings, he muses over what he has learned after living with himself, itching to travel but insisting he was called to a vocation apart from even his fellow monks. "Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary for us to respond to this action. . ." (qtd. 543)  He was open to this spiritual evolution, and he struggled to progress. 

Mott can lighten the mood. As to the journal Monks Pond in its last year of the monk's life, "Merton made the mistake as editor of including the work both of poets who were friends and of friends who claimed to be poets." (503)  While his last recorded words in public have been taped in Bangkok, that day nearly twenty-seven years exactly from the time he entered the monastic life at twenty-seven, many cite the eerie premonition of the first clause. The second one also shows Merton, in his everyday side, that made him so much a figure of devotion or imitation or even excoriation by many.

"So I will disappear from view and we can all have a Coke or something." Then, a "Thank you very much" concludes his final address, preceding his electrocution by a faulty fan's wiring in his hotel bathroom. (564) That "you may know the Christ of the burnt men" in premonitory fashion also serves as the last phrase of his autobiography, another circle rippling across many decades and mountains. (Amazon US 12-17-14)

In Rome

Our Rome landing found us at the revolving baggage terminal. Electronic ads for a luxury Swiss watch kept changing. A happy family in Manhattan in some elevated townhouse. A happy father showing his son the skyscraped skies from a similarly elevated corner office suite in Singapore. A happy father in London leaving a black cab to show off to his son his brand-name watch. These all symbolized and commodified the bonds that cement us, apparently, in this age of global consumption. We share in that guilt.

Adding our widow's mite to that sum, thanks to a cheaper euro-dollar exchange rate. we waited to spend our euros in Italy. I got to watch those ads so often since I waited in vain for our second suitcase to join mine. But, Layne's luggage had been left behind with that of a few other of our Aer Lingus passengers back in Dublin. So, we left the terminal later than expected, dealing with red-tape and claim forms. We were driven into the city by the friendly couple of women who ran the b+b we stayed in there also ran a few others, and we figured they made a handsome living off what seemed an unending stream of travelers. They offered a welcoming flat, charmingly laid out, and admirably located. To get there, we passed the Synagogue and congestion north of the Tiber. It looked as if London with beige concrete and similar graffito.

Rome does not reveal its iconic views easily. As we would find in Siena, Florence, and Venice too, you can round a corner or come out an alley to find the horizon suddenly filled with a postcard image. We found our walk-up off the Piazza Farnese, where soldiers guarded the French Embassy. In front, big concrete tubs designed by Michelangelo, but to me still looking like tubs or planters, sprouted fountains. As I peered in, I saw the back of six heads in the distinctive habit of the order founded by St Bridget of Sweden in her church occupying one side. Restaurants sprawled. The flag of the Cypriot consulate filled a window over a hair salon, a tiny druggist where three clerks all glowered at Layne when she went in to buy some cosmetics, and the inevitable pizza stand. Near the Campo dei Fiori, where poor immolated Giordano Bruno's statue sulked over Moroccan vendors tossing up rubber lights and slammed down squishy toys emitting a squeak onto the pavement, we could hear the commotion in our room from a restaurant's kitchen from a site we never placed on the ground floor. It kept me up every night, the dishes clatter and the glasses crashing, inescapably Rome.

For the Eternal City never slept either. Adding to my collection of souvenir magnets, I found one with a Vespa and over its little motor, the Colosseum. This combination epitomized the past and present. Both contributed to noise, and both stood for the commotion which, perhaps as in Manhattan or London, Paris or Tokyo, may entice the hardy and reward the intrepid, but which wearies the rest of us. For the constant huckstering for every other (if we were lucky and avoided eye contact or walked a little away) restaurant got to us quickly. Yet we trudged on and although it was only 23 C, I felt the sun burn my scalp. It was humid, and I was thankful that it was not summer here. For the Chinese with their selfie sticks thronged, and despite very off-season, the easy proximity of Europe by rail, car, and plane to millions of us meant that such centers must never now have a truly quiet season.

We nudged the throngs into the Pantheon first. I mistook this marvelously preserved sanctuary for a tribute to the ancients rather than a Roman original,, so intact was it. I learned on the way back home via an in-flight choice of an engrossing BBC documentary with Michael Scott about the invisible Rome that the concrete layers of the roof allowing a larger space to be encompassed under its grand circle of light let in above than even that of St Peter's came from the innovation of lighter mixtures as the dome rose. I looked up and saw the sky, as if no glass. The god's eye perspective, we were told.

Even the Catholic intrusions and the two tombs to Italy's first two kings could not detract from its might. The buttresses outside illustrate that the discovery the Gothic cathedrals made to let in their own filtered beauty were engineered over a thousand years before. It remains a monument, surely.

The days in recollection from a month ago jumble, but we ate at a place recommended on Yelp as  locals' favorite. Tired after circling around the streets in hopes of finding a nightgown for suitcase-less Layne--and a few minutes from our flat nonetheless having done so at a Jewish-run store that had sold "intimates" since the 1860s--we were discouraged as our server, and all who worked there, pushed aside our attempts to speak Italian to inquire "where are you from?" in English. She angled the Belgian couple next to us, telling her name, Raffaela, and obviously seeking a mention in whatever online review they'd post. My anchovy pizza was fine, but Layne's pasta needed more finese, a fact even my Irish culinary palate could discern instantly. I don't think any of the clientele spoke the native language. Still, we needed to eat, right? After, she sought out gelato and we walked.

There was no television, and the net itself was dicey (as often on our journey), so I read up in a fine guidebook there, The Companion Guide to Rome by Georgina Masson and updated by John Fort.  Its density enticed rather than discouraged me, and I wish I'd have known of it sooner to plan the trip. But, as I reasoned to Layne, I'd rather have less of a forced march through the throngs and more of a happenstance approach, and for her as to eating and me as to sights, this worked out better for both.

The next day, we struck out past the Pantheon. But the St Maria Minerva church and gallery of the Dominicans nearby was for no reason we could figure out closed. As elsewhere on our trip. We headed past the Vittoriana's "wedding cake" palatial grandeur, and a old man in gladiator costume, up the hill to another Dominican outpost, their Angelicum seminary. On the way up, we passed the stark facade of the only proto-Protestant sect to survive the medieval times, the Waldensian church. Now its acoustics hosted not a dissident preacher, but performances of La Traviata. Next to it was a hotel named Pace Helvetica, and this appeared not a coincidence. At the hill's height, we took a turn into the imperial fort of Trajan's ruins, and without warning descended into the Forum. I suppose I thought of Gibbon, inspired there to write his history, after his own Swiss stay and Roman holiday. But the roads now rise over the structures' remains, so you look down into them as they creep up or lay flat. I always figured I'd be like one on a Grand Tour, staring up into the sky to see those fluted columns.

The sun beat down, so my peering at them was brief. The Colosseum loomed soon above, and so did a subway under construction across the street from it. I imagined what archaeological discoveries awaited the diggers. More touts urged us in "the last tour of the day," but despite our shared desire to peek at the cats, we opted for the cheaper view. We peered through the bars at the inside arena, and after all, that BBC documentary above gave me a fine perspective of the inside, and the interior below. The hydraulics involved, the flooding of the floor, the capstans and pulleys: truly a marvel.

But that came at a price. Half a million animals killed. Men and women mauled to death for the dim amusement of fans. Slaves laboring beneath the bread and circuses. Those who, Scott tells, were too late in opening the trap doors from which beasts popped out to fight were themselves summarily compelled to replace the lions as their instant bait. This cruelty tempered the awe I felt for this site.

We kept going, towards St John Lateran. We reckoned that basilica might host some fine art. But after going quite a stretch up a long incline, and at last entering a street where for a few minutes no other pedestrian, car, or Vespa thundered us aside. we ate late lunch at a cafe where, truly, the locals did eat. So much so it took us a while to get our own meal, a basic and hearty pasta. Revived, we found the basilica closed (why?), but the slight decline down the street past remnants of imperial walls on the left and a hospital on the right led, eventually, to San Gregorio al Celio, as the name indicates, on one of the capital's seven hills. You can even, as I later found out, stay here as a guest of the Camaldolese monks. Not the most peaceful location for a retreat, but a few might welcome a chance to do so in a five-hundred year old setting where the Church has had a presence for a millennium before.

We then threaded down a shady path, into tunnels, with the Baths of Caracella between us and the river, into the park around the Palatine. Passages cut into stone and hills felt much more antiquated than they might have been. The Circus Maximus lived up to its name, as we crunched the gravel and I mused at the horses and chariots that once rushed past. It was good to be away from the urban hustle.

Returning to it to cross the Palatine Bridge, we followed the east bank of the Tiber. Shouts of swallows and martens shrieked, filling the riparian dusk with clouds of black wings. We noticed and so did many. Some women walked under umbrellas. Some cars were entirely pattered in bird crap. We later found out this was not out of the ordinary, but it went on for a long while, disturbingly.

On we went, as the tall dome of St Giovanni Battista stood in for St Peter's until Castel S. Angelo signalled that Vatican City neared. As we waited to cross at the Amadeo bridge intersection, we watched tour buses shove cars into the junction so the buses could turn left. So much for piety.

Whatever slope the historical Vatican was on, we bypassed it down a darker street, named after penitents. For a short time, we had escaped the constant hum, past a church that creeped out Layne. It had a banner proclaiming Mother Teresa and under it, a beggar woman slouched. Congregants streamed out of an evening mass. Not for the first time, Layne logically wondered why Rome boasted so many churches when it boasted already the largest one in Christendom. I guessed that that same proximity to papal power attracted other affiliates, hangers on, and wannabees, much as Disneyland spawns around it more hotels, Knott's Berry Farm, a pirate restaurant, a wax museum, and fast food. Not the most elegant analogy, but from Constantine on, this pilgrimage site meant business for many.

Under the lights, the space in front of St Peter's looked handsome. As it was so familiar to my eye, seeing it up close (we did not go on the tour as it required hours in line and a security check to boot), I marvelled still when we crept up through the throngs of smokers (so it seemed, a bit sacrilegious). I tried to imagine it as a medieval pilgrim, staff and wide hat in hand, a palmer as they called them, who'd walked across Europe, head craned to take in the figures of the apostles atop the facade, and all the saints' statues high over the two arched pavilions gracing it. We had checked into tickets to teh Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel, but even off-season, they were sold out. Barriers prevented us from going in through the exit, as an endless stream of people exited the sanctuary. I caught a glimpse of Swiss Guards behind a half-plywood wall, so I felt my visit was complete. We were jostled by people of every land and shape as I found my souvenir, a magnet with Pope Francis' thumb's up.

Its message was  simple. Even my Italian grasped it. "La carita, la pazienzia e la tenerezza sono tesori bellissimi. E quando li hai, vuoi condividerli con gli altri." Fine by me to motivate. Layne mused about the trinkets that Benedict must have generated, and their mercantile fate, compared to the sales of his successor. I doubt our dour Tubingen theologian profited from bobblehead royalties.

Heading back, we stopped in the San Giovanni church before heading down the way I liked best in my short stint in Rome. Via Guilia was dark, damp, cobblestoned, lined with old walls the whole way. A few artisan shops stayed open. In one, two burly bearded men reclined, each on a divan, reading. It seemed so stereotypical, as did a elderly man I glimpsed looking exactly like Marcello Mastroianni. A younger man strutted in a lavender scarf, many men sported ascots, and when apparently the weather dipped anywhere on the peninsula below 20F, woolly scarves draped both men and women against the dire chill. People did dress better in Italy, testimony to their stylish flair.

We ate baccalao, fried fish but better than that British version with chips, at a famous cafe for it. We drank cheap beer and made a whole meal in basic Italian, for they were about the only items sold. A constant stream of customers came and went, and by the end, the line for a later dinner was out the door. Down the street, three smiling Pallottine fathers, two younger Africans, one elderly Italian, stood in their vestments, maybe after mass, maybe not, to welcome and bless--or was it to solicit alms from--passersby. Somehow this alienated rather than charmed me, and I don't know why.

In the Campo de' Fiori, North African vendors again tossed the lights high and slammed the squeaky toys down. Three of them mocked a competitor, who across from them set up a cardboard table and set out a handful of travel converters. The trio aped and gawped at him, but he gamely persisted. An African woman, in her fifties at least, in a tank top and short skirt, dishevelled, ate a meal on the steps of Giordano Bruno's statue. On the small plinth, where this Dominican friar was stripped, gagged, bound, and set afire in 1600 for many heresies, cans of Foster's Lager were quaffed by reclining couples. I was pleased to see a wine bar or 'enoteca' (the Greek word attesting to the antiquity of such stands) on the piazza named Nolanus, after his Latin name, one celebrated in its Irishness by Joyce.

In the narrow street off the square, a pretty student sold the Communist paper, its headline the perennial one of "guerra." Nearby, a small bookstore with the stenciled hammer and sickle on the stone wall hosted its cabal of bearded youths, huddled around inside. The other end of the Campo, an attractive tall girl in black hair in an American accent kept hustling passing tourists to enter the sidewalk cafe, and it bugged me that each time we went by, we were targeted. I wanted to blend in.

Our last day in Rome to wander, Layne had to eat at a well-reviewed place on the other side of the city. So, off we went. I petted a cat, we strolled up the narrowing streets of Travestere on the other side of the Tiber, and edged up the hill, despite the rush of cars and motorbikes, past monuments to Garibaldi. Great view back over Rome, but it was hot, mid-day and I was cranky. What was on the GPS a half-hour turned nearly two hours. A policeman shrugged as we showed him our destination.

We passed apartment flats, into a decidedly non-touristed working-class district. On we went, despondent, until finally we figured the way to lunch. It did not live up to my expectations, but Layne was pleased. We ate outside on a patio as a large group gathered for their meal, with younger people late and older ones scowling. Pressed for time, and tired, we agreed a taxi was a must back, as our tickets were reserved for 4 p.m. at the heavily advertised Balthus exhibition at the Quirinale. Our genial, blonde, scruffy, longhaired cabdriver practiced his English, about the trouble he had with Russian, as he tried to learn its difficult grammar from his girlfriend, and of his love for barbeque.

We found the Balthus pieces but intermittently engrossing. Each room represented a phase in the artist's career. Of Polish-Russian bohemian-Jewish origin, he excelled at the famous depictions of "The Street" and of course female pre-pubescent awakening, but after that, he settled into photography and landscapes that could have been anyone's. Oddly, the exhibit petered out after showing his brother Pierre Klossowski's and other contemporaries' work. Still the splendid vista over the city from a window was worth the admission, and we neared dusk braving the crowds at the nearby Trevi Fountain. So jammed were its tiers that I was unsure if our coins tossed for us, our sons, and for luck and health made their mark in the water, rather than falling on the heads of our fellow tourists. Our day would end with takeout pizza and the Prosecco bottle our hosts had left for us in the fridge, but first, we headed past high-end stores in the Via Tritone and Via del Corso, glad to find room on the sidewalks, full of shoppers. The Spanish Steps were scaffolded, but I recall the stop I insisted we make at the little chapel of Santa Maria in Trivio. The photo I post above is set there.

Layne and I looked at the tomb of St. Gaspar de Bufalo. She noticed his pose, different than other effigies. Look at his position. He holds his crucifix lovingly, curled up like a cat, comfortably. He seemed a fellow we could relate to, more like one of us than a stiff ecclesiastic. I learned about him later. Son of a baker who worked for a noble, he grew up humbly in Rome. He preached to "brigands," reminding me of a tale I have begun and enjoyed, the first real novel in Italian, Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), begun about the same time as the saint died. In the photo, Bro. Krzystof Surowaniec, C.PP.S., from the Polish Province of the Precious Blood Missionaries, prays at the altar of their founder. I chose this image as it sums up a lot about Rome.

We think of cassocked clergy in pious poses, but fewer walk the Roman paths today as recognizably such. They do good deeds by blending in, so we may not notice them. Perhaps this is more true to their Christ-like mission in a post-Catholic, global, challenging era, rather than standing out from us?

John Boyne's "A History of Loneliness": Book Review

“Sure the mammies pushed us all into it.” Early in John Boyne’s novel, Father Odran Yates blurts out this explanation to the Archbishop of Dublin about why so many men once entered the priesthood there. A History of Loneliness dramatizes Father Yates’ (and given his insistence on keeping up appearances, it’s either Odran to his family or Father Yates to everyone else, not Father Odran) determination to continue as a good man. This becomes tougher during the last thirty-five years, as Ireland reacts to revelations of sexual abuse by too many in the clergy, and the government-sponsored collusion in shielding offenders from justice. Starting with his admission into the seminary as a teenager in 1973, up to the 2013 realization of his complicity in enabling his classmate, Tom Cardle, to avoid accounting for his own crimes against young men, Father Odran, in Boyne’s narrative, leaps back and forth in time as he tells us his story. He and Tom are men with a “history of loneliness” who have found their long-held position in Irish society erode, as challenges to traditional power have undermined the status of the Catholic Church.

Boyne carefully examines Father Odran’s predicament. While as a young man, he was brought up by his widowed mother to believe he had a vocation, he admits that this calling suited him nonetheless. He was brought up in the last generation to regard the priesthood as a respected career, and in the early 1980s, on a crowded train, the young priest resents the fawning attention given him, constantly, by all whom he meets. Wishing for everyone to leave him alone, he wonders “how a small twist of white plastic could inspire so much devotion.” He remembers, as always in public, that he wears his clerical garb. He chats with a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust, who reminds him not to resent those who pay him respect. “And one day that might change. And then there will be no more food for your friends. And you will all go hungry.” This moment will come two decades later, after the reports on clerical abuse and state cover-ups will enrage many Irish men and women. How one priest shifted from the moments of praise to the years of contempt creates a fluent narrative, through moral heft and measured judgments. While it wobbles through digressions, the central character holds one's interest.

Terrified of difference, seeking conformity, a few idealistic or resigned young men entered the seminary. Some found themselves pressured, as in Tom’s case, to remain there despite their unfit nature for the priesthood. Boyne illustrates the demands placed on those channeled into the clerical system, and the indifference with which many were treated by their superiors in the hierarchy.   The archbishop responds to Father Odran’s question in 2007 about Tom’s guilt in the crimes for which he is accused: “you can go back to your precious school and teach the little bastards about respecting the church.”

Soon, however, the Archbishop is disgraced for his own role in the abuse scandal, as he moved priests such as Tom about from parish to parish for decades, to evade accounting for his sins.  At his classmate’s trial, Father Odran notes the prevalence of black in the courtroom. He and the judge share “the pigment of power” in their garb; Tom appears in layman’s attire. His classmate reflects: “Of course the shades in my profession changed as one advanced through the ranks, from black to scarlet to white; darkness, blood, and a cleansing at the very top.” Boyne’s way with a phrase works well here, and the ease with which the author intersperses an occasional analogy or image into the priest’s first-person narration convinces the reader of the self-awareness of Father Odran about his own difficulties with his role. 

While a backstory placing Odran as a seminarian during his last terms of study in Rome, serving as a papal assistant in the Vatican chambers in 1978, the year of the three popes, remains a somewhat melodramatic if clever device engineered to account for his subsequent lack of rank in the Irish power structure, it does feature a sympathetic portrait of the Patriarch of Venice. Cardinal Luciani treats Odran kindly. This thoughtful man reigned for a month as Pope John Paul I. His predecessor, Paul VI, ends his only conversation with the seminarian by asking the unanswered query: “What will we do with Ireland?”

The answer comes after more popes, as the Vatican’s corruption reveals the Church’s inability to justify its control, given clerical misdeeds and a culture of protecting its own against the law and the laity.  Father Odran hears Tom’s plea of not guilty and feels a “darkness stirring” about his own fault, “for I had seen things and I had suspected things and I had turned away from things and I had done nothing.” Again, the direct style Boyne uses to convey his protagonist’s epiphany keeps the reader listening to Father Odran, but also able to distance an ethical reaction to his self-realization as it unfolds, after he has suppressed it for decades, from the seminary on. He struggles with how to treat Tom: “If I cannot see some good in all of us and hope that the pain we all share will come to an end, what kind of a priest am I anyway? What kind of man?” Throughout the narrative, Father Odran strives for decency, but he appears to have done so too quietly, as he has been spared the torments of some of his sexually frustrated or temperamentally warped colleagues, for the most part. Yet, he suffers, as this novel shows.

The guilt Father Odran finally articulates eludes facile resolution. Boyne leaves him at the end of this novel lamenting the current state of his homeland. In 2013, at fifty-eight, Father Odran speaks perhaps for his author and for many Irish who watch as European bankers intervene to impose austerity measures. Neither politicians nor priests command respect any more. Ireland has become “a country of drug addicts, losers, criminals, pedophiles, and incompetents.” Among them, Father Odran finds himself despised, as a survivor of clerical abuse hisses “pedophile” at him, not the only time in this narrative. 

Boyne’s story is recommended, along with Kevin Holohan’s satirical 2011 take on this serious subject, The Brothers’ Lot, as a depiction of the institutional breakdown of a pillar of Irish society. The fall of the Church from grace has received belated scrutiny by journalists and historians.  But for fictional treatments, which allow us to enter the minds of those who entered the ranks of the clergy under the pressure or cajoling of mothers once not long ago, A History of Loneliness fulfills a need for a novel on this timely, sad, subject.

This appeared in altered and shorter form on Spectrum Culture 2-5-15. See also Amazon US 2-2-15.

Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age": Book Review

The first half of this massive 2007 study by a Canadian philosopher has appeared as Gifford Lectures, the prestigious Scottish series which since 1888 has featured leading thinkers discussing "natural theology." In the third and fourth paragraphs of his preface, Taylor admits the sketchiness of much of what follows, and his determination nonetheless to map out a vast intellectual terrain, in hopes others will fill in the blanks. While the results may frustrate those who find his habitual enumeration and his tendency to go two steps forward and one step at least back, as he zig-zags across the past five centuries, and while the prose leaves one wishing for the grace of his predecessor at the Lectures, William James, it nonetheless represents a formidable achievement that kept me thinking, annotating, and reacting.

As Taylor does often, one must sum up his argument by his own numbers.
David Ewart paraphrases Taylor's three stages of secularism thus:

1. "The first stage is characterized by the withdrawal of the religious world-view from the public sphere. This is the result of much more than just the rise of scientific world-view. This is the disenchantment of the cosmos. Secularism is the move from the enchanted reality to the de-enchanted reality - this freed science to follow its own trajectory. In an enchanted worldview science, politics and religion all shared the same world view. When that enchanted world-view disappeared science became free to follow its own rationale.
2. The second stage is seen in the decline in personal religious practice and commitment. This is a individual's withdrawal from the community. People shift the source of meaning away from external 'eternal' sources to more personal choices.
3. The third stage is the most recent development, which has caused a fragmentation of our ideas of social order. This is the shift in the culture away from assuming Religious Faith is the norm, or the default expectation of how to live your life. Faith is now one option among many. This is society living in a universe which has no central point around which it revolves."                 

Some of this, of course, is familiar. Max Weber's theory of "disenchantment" as driving secularism inspires Taylor's first parts of his schema. But he denies "subtraction theory" as the fullest explanation for why people don't believe like they used to. Simply saying religion retreated as science advanced leaves us wondering about the contested turf, for the same pre-modern landscape did not exist, for two worldviews to fight over. Instead, since 1500 or so, Taylor accounts in part three of his stages for the key difference making his analysis fresh. He shows how a "buffered" sensibility in modern people supplanted the "porous" reception of impacts and influences which characterized our forebears. They saw themselves as open to the spirits for better and worse; the divine bulwark of intercession and protection helped people withstand trouble and attain reward. A "buffered" identity keeps us at a distance; we can no longer be "naive," whether believers or skeptics, in a system where the "cosmos" ordered by God or gods becomes a "universe" which includes us, but removes most contemporary adherents from the nearby intercession and interference of an intimate divine presence.

This hefty narrative stumbles along. Taylor keeps glancing ahead and then looking back as he tries to progress. He does not translate all of the French and German he cites. Some thinkers or scholars are not credited except by surnames. Taylor presumes erudition on his audience's part, so academic references may lack context or introduction. Quotes may not be integrated or identified clearly. Endnotes are uneven: they can provide valuable insight, or they can be terse and formulaic; the reader of the text proper, from that alone, may have no idea which without checking out each enumeration. Sharper editing would have improved this. This thesis did not need a hesitant, repetitive elaboration.

However, it gets easier halfway in. The Victorian doubters (even before Darwin, and this is Taylor's point proven, for it was not as if one day evolution shoved aside faith for believers) such as Carlyle, Arnold, and his niece, novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward (the last in a novel about a clergyman's unease with his creed and his replacement of a messianic Jesus-as-God with an ethical figure as a model) emerged on behalf of those unable to countenance childlike faith. This era's gradual slip, starting with these intellectuals, from confidence in religion to grudging or fuller conviction in modernism means that the Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism, and political- economic changes in the "North Atlantic" (his term for "the West") had to precede "science" as we know it. That transition and reorientation sets us in a universe edging on darkness, rather than an ordered cosmos full of light.

The conditions for "human flourishing" alter any modern believer or non-believer's reception of the religious messages we inherit. Taylor in his later chapters considers the difficulties of the therapeutic (human-potential movement, therapy, transformation from within) and transgressive (anti-humanist, Nietzschean, revolutionary) responses to religious hegemony, as neither to him satisfy the yearning. This inner longing persists no matter if the conditions for religion fade, and while Taylor never appears to question his own Catholicism or the reality of the Incarnation, he examines how the opposite, an "excarnation," has weakened the ability of many believers or skeptics to handle the needs of the body, from which we have become detached, dismissive, or destructive. He looks with caution at regarding only what Jesus taught and not what Christ did, and while Taylor's faith persists a priori, I would have liked the professor's insight into why this is so for him; this appears to limit the applicability of his lessons to non-Christians. Whatever one's identity, Taylor locates the loss of the "equilibrium" most of us need between fervor and denial; if not religion as we've known it, he reckons desire for the transcendent beyond existential limits or hedonistic immersion may endure.

He suggests that poetry, as in Jeffers, Hopkins, or Péguy, might heal the divided contemporary consciousness. He applauds church reform, but he also sympathizes with those who find, whether they themselves believe, in a weaker cultural impact for this force. Younger people are losing "some of the great languages of transcendance," and "massive unlearning is taking place" in consumerism.

In conclusion, neither "exclusive humanism" nor the Nietzschean revolt against restrictions convince Taylor. His drifting final section passes intriguing terrain. Part 5:17 has a great survey of how Christianity incorporated violence into its purportedly peaceful preaching, and death and sexuality earn attention in this chapter. But that ends not with a bang but some whispers about two stories we share. "Intellectual Deviation" tracks our cultural evolution away from medieval religious conformity imposed by a clerical elite and then upon a post-1500 community freed from "priestcraft" but a regimen insisting on communal piety, into "the rise of a culturally hegemonic notion of a closed immanent order". "Reform Master Narrative" required all to be 100% Christian, but this discipline discouraged many. The elite looked to Providential Deism as a halfway point to a mechanical model that broke away from the need for a Creator, and by the Victorians, this began to spread into the middle classes. While many adhere to fundamentalism and obedience today (an aspect under-examined in what is admittedly a rambling study and one far too long as it is), Taylor combines the theoretical ID with the RMN mass phenomenon explanations as two influences making up the "social imaginary" we all agree has replaced in the North Atlantic civilization the state-clerical polity. This prepared the way for Darwin (Marx and Freud are barely mentioned!) and the massive shifts in contemporary mindsets. Out of this two-track path, we emerge. So, we can "explain religion today."

(The above appeared with my reduced summation of the Ewart enumeration at Amazon US 1-2-15.) P.S. The Divine Conspiracy provides a pdf (search at the site) of Taylor's introduction and of Chapter 10 "The Expanding Universe of Unbelief."

Diana Walsh Pasulka's "Heaven Can Wait": Book Review

What happens to a belief in a doctrine once those who teach that try to sidle past it, in hopes of moving on? For purgatory, the Catholic concept has always been elusive to pin down. Diane Walsh Pasulka excavates its concrete aspects. In this short but well-documented work, she reveal practitioners' views of the afterlife, of their attitudes towards the dead, and of their interpretations of Catholic history. The chapters treat the evolution of the purgatorial dimensions, over many centuries.

Pasulka examines devotional and popular culture as they intersect to inculcate and elaborate this puzzling notion. For, since it was first formulated in the Middle Ages from vague suggestions found in Scripture, to meet the demand for a transitional stage of cleansing a sinful soul before it could enter heaven, purgatory presented a problem. How to align earthly time within a waiting-room into the eternal after the specified duration of a soul's sentence has been carried out challenged the Church.

First, Catholicism long defined purgatory as "a physical place of real, not symbolic, suffering". Second, it has been clarified in the post-Vatican II era as a condition, rather than a tangible state or site, of purification. Its position in the afterlife has been occluded. Growing up, I heard my family often urge us to "offer it up for the Poor Souls". This notion captured the expectation one's own sacrifices on earth were transferred to the faithful departed. Over the past half-century, this concept has faded for the majority of Catholics now. Those who aim for an afterlife expect they'll make it into heaven, with little or no preliminary cleansing from sin. But a few Catholics try to remind others of the poor souls, who seem to have been placed there by a harsher, more judgmental, more sin-concerned Church than the one that has replaced it with cheerier assurances of divine love and God's forgiveness. Pasulka investigates those today who revive apostolates aimed at succoring souls needing earthly assistance. She precedes this section with a detailed look at the one place where medieval Christians asserted an underground cave entering purgatory existed, Lough Derg in Ireland.

As a religious studies professor, Pasulka places the concrete manifestation of purgatory within what Pope Benedict elaborated in 2005 as a "hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture". Purgatory, facing nearly the same fate as the now-discarded otherworld of limbo, languishes. The Vatican, stressing a "hermeneutic of renewal" as it reforms what it deems outmoded teaching and ritual, leaves those still believing in purgatory in a neglected niche. The bulk of this book explores these niches, as they were made real for believers in the past. These existed outside the official dogma dispensed by medieval and early-modern Rome. Whether purgatory was a literal fire or not, whether its punishments had to take place after death or during life, and the nature of the punishments as physical, mental, or spiritual were all left, in Pasulka's narrative, open to conjecture. Pilgrims to Lough Derg flocked to a place where they could endure fasting, kneel on rough rocks, and cleanse themselves of their sins.

She diligently collates archival data and scholarship on this place. However, the experiences of the thousands who still make the "stations" on this small island in Donegal today gain far less attention. The narrative favors scrutiny of previous Lough Derg events, whereas the subtitle or her book promises a focus on "devotional and popular culture". Her narrower perspective, dominated by Lough Derg's history, does not provide the reader with enough instances of how purgatory's physicality has emerged in the material practices of many Catholics, not only in Ireland but beyond, over the centuries. Instead, most of this book places Lough Derg within sectarian debates, within the Church, documented in periodicals between 1830 and 1920. These also influenced Protestant opponents.

An engaging look at the Museum of Purgatory in Rome, purporting to display proof of those who have received messages or encounters from the Poor Souls, prefaces the chapter about those desiring to revive attention to the plight of those left languishing. Pasulka summarizes a recent attempt to figure out how many of the departed need prayers. "The Mission to Empty Purgatory" uses calculations to tally how many remain in that purging place, and how many prayers are needed for their release. She adds: "The calculation also takes into consideration the number of future souls who will be in purgatory and publishes the number of prayers needed to account for the current birth rate."

Here, the tone lightens. Pasulka speaks of those she interviews, and of her own uncanny brush with the inexplicable connected to her research. If more of this study could have been given over to contemporary attitudes towards purgatory, as it recedes from many memories, the narrative would have increased its relevance for today's audience. Some typographic errors remain. The scope of this welcome view of a concept many Catholics once knew well and many non-Catholics once derided is narrower than the title promises. Perhaps other academics or theologians will return to this subject, which reminds us of how many or how few Catholics nowadays counter the "anti-materialist bias" of the Church as they insist on the reality of relics, imagery, rituals, concrete structures, and empirical evidence to support their traditional beliefs in purgatory and the connection it has with life on earth. ("How Do You Pin Down the Concept of Purgatory" to PopMatters, 7-21-15; Amazon US 8-1-15)

Richard Kieckhefer's "Magic in the Middle Ages": Book Review

This book meets the needs of advanced students who need a introduction to this topic. Richard Kieckhefer specializes in medieval belief systems, so he is suited for this difficult subject to summarize in 200 pages. He examines magic as a "crossroads" where high and low, clerical and folk, popular and learned cultures intersect. He stresses a difference, however, between natural and demonic models.

He reminds us on pg. 16 that our data is tainted. Those attacking magic tended to record their critiques. Those practicing it tended to hide their lore from the persecutors and the client alike. And for the illiterate, their attitudes are difficult to recover, given the power of the elite over this knowledge, used both to suppress and to spread practices often outside the ambit of the Church. Yet here, too, overlap occurs, for clergy sought to learn secrets, and rituals involving magic took elements from the dominant as well as the indigenous suppositions still surviving from paganism and classics. Islam disseminated its own concepts, and so did alchemy, nascent science, and astrology. The author gives a cogent account of the last category; he captures the appeal of love charms well on pp. 81-3. (I cite the 1990 ed.)

"Historians can set up all the conceptual walls they want, but they should not be surprised when medieval people flit through them, like ghosts." (18) Magic was not the province of women, monks, or physicians. Kieckhefer follows distribution as a "common" type over much of medieval Europe.

Yet as he concludes, he turns to the witch hunts of late medieval and early modern times, and he notes how women were made vulnerable to attack. They lacked the power men had to resist, when the clerical and legal institutions were arrayed against them, and when suspicion by neighbors heightened the precarious condition of a local healer, a midwife, an herb-gatherer, or a quarrelsome village scold.

These everyday events were exaggerated into terrors perpetrated as a conspiracy of devil worshipers was imagined, and when those putting trust (and this itself is hard to measure) in spells or potions, charms or amulets, fearful of exposure, gave over the weaker among them to save their own skins. Reading Kieckhefer, as a counter to the more sensationalized depictions of this era, or the more romantic fictions, a balance for the reader will arrive, and one may want then to explore this deeper. (6-13-15 to Amazon US.)

Christopher Hitchens' "The Missionary Position": Book Review

Reading this on my Kindle, I was surprised it ended so suddenly. I wanted more. Subsequent events since this appeared in 1995 show that Mother Teresa is on the fast track to canonization after her 1997 death led to her 2003 beatification. In retrospect, the furor over Christopher Hitchens' little book reveals a more-carefully considered study of her media impact and the finagling of her financial empire behind a sort of calculated willful ignorance. He starts each section with apt and clever quotations from earlier skeptics and in tying the Albanian woman to cronies as far-flung and as dreadfully connected to filthy lucre such as Duvaliers in Haiti, Hitchens makes the case with wit but also sorrow that so many of us fell for this.

The money amassed by the millions, the donations to her by Charles Keating of some of the $250+ million he gained by fraud and deceit, and the destitution in which both the Sisters of her Missionaries of Charity and those whom they care for are skillfully narrated and analyzed by Hitchens. As in much of his journalism, he can show signs of too brisk or showy a dash over territory that requires slow navigation. The Albanian context examined late on saps the momentum of his earlier chapters, although his interest in the Balkans surely contributed to his decision to cover this.

His moral is simple. “The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.” We shift a guilty conscience to the admittedly devoted Missionaries of her Order, he suggests, and we let them and its idolized founder act in the name of an apostolate that, however well intended, manipulates the poor to score points against contraception and abortion but neglects any critique of overpopulation. Poverty rather than fought against is embraced. While the Sisters may accept this, their patients, Hitchens reasons, may not.

After all, as a noted atheist, Hitchens has the advantage of standing apart from such as Malcolm Muggeridge, a journalist predecessor who was taken in by her glow, attributing a miracle not to Kodak film stock but to Mother Teresa's intervention while she was alive to illuminate an interior. Against such shenanigans. a rationalist like Hitchens offers a counter-argument, lest the credulous trust too much in clerical leaders like her.

“It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.”

While some of this spirited polemic rushes by too rapidly, Hitchens provides a look at what is necessary. Believers in this mission may cringe or carp. But a service, however cattily aimed at generating controversy from the title on, is rendered. The faithful need to heed views of such skeptics. (8-7-15 to Amazon US.) P.S. After her planned canonization, in 2016, see Eamonn McCann in The Irish Times, and in Salon, George Gillett.