Ornament of the World by Rosa Maria Menocal

The old Arabic word for palace, al-qasr, was what the Castilians called their splendid new royal homes. The elaborate plasterwork that decorated nearly every inch of the Alcazar's interior walls was barely dry, and the Muslim emissary from Granada found himself in rooms that in every way echoed the freshly finished palaces of this Islamic city he had just left. Peter, a son of Alfonso XI and the heir to his great-great-grandfather Alfonso X (the Learned), who had died in this city, was justifiably proud of this example of his wealth, taste, and vision. All three were on display in this Sevillian tribute to the very latest architectural style of Spain. Ibn Khaldun could hardly have avoided the realization that Peter's new palaces, with their multilobed latticework arches and their pure-white arabesque ornamentation on every spare surface, were an unstinting homage to the style of the Nasrids, whose envoy he was. There, on the open and sunny plain, sitting next to the giant old Almohad mosque in Seville--the mosque had been reconsecrated more than a hundred years before and was the cathedral of the Christian capital--was an unabashed evocation of the fortlike palaces at the top of the rocky mountain retreat of Granada, the last and lonely Islamic state on the Iberian peninsula.

I had the great fortune last week to visit two of Spain's most striking and important landmarks: the Alcazar of Spain, a royal palace that is still the sometime home of the King and his family, and the Alhambra, an enormous palace complex built by the Muslim Nasrids of Granada. The Alcazar is a Christian edifice, done in what's known as the "Mudejar" style, meaning Christian architecture with Muslim edifices. It really does look a lot like the Alhambra, and visiting the two, someone who didn't know exactly what to look for might get the impression that they were built by the same people for the same purposes. The two structures are, to author Maria Rosa Menocal, powerful symbols of one of history's true golden eras: medieval Spain, when Muslims, Christians, and Jews existed side by side in a culture of tolerance and cultural exchange. A Christian ruler might, even after the reconquest of much of the Iberian peninsula, in which Muslim rule in Spain was shrunken down to just the city-state of Granada, recognize Islamic art and culture as part of his own powerful patrimony, and built a palace worthy of such creative and intellectual forebears.

Menocal frames her book as a series of biographical sketches of figures who typified the 750-year-ish era that constituted the golden age of al-Andalus. Among them are Samuel the Nagid, an influential Jewish poet and leader who served as a general in Muslim Granada; prolific Islamic writers like Ibn Hazm and Averroes; the Christian warrior known as El Cid; even apostates who rejected the world of philosophical tolerance like Jewish thinker Judah Halevi. This format made it a little hard to grasp some of the overarching historical narratives at play, but I think I more or less got the gist: survivors of the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in Baghdad arrived in al-Andalus around 750 CE, where they created a Muslim state centered on Cordoba that incorporated Christians and Jews but also cemented Arabic as the primary language of both knowledge and art. These Umayyads were eventually conquered by a pair of strict invading Islamic states, the Almohads and Almoravids, who were supplanted by a system of individual city-states known as taifas. The taifas lasted until the reconquest, ending with the loss of Granada and the edict of Isabella and Ferdinand--a pair of history's great villains, no doubt--expelling the Jews from Spain, cementing the entire peninsula as a Christian polity.

I had a vague idea, of course, that Muslim thinkers protected and progressed the traditions of Greek philosophy during the time that much of these sources were lost to Christian Europe. What I didn't know is just how much of that happened in Spain. It was Averroes, the Latinized name of Ibn Rushd, for example, whose commentaries on Aristotle kept the Greek philosopher's legacy alive, later to be integrated into the Christian philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Nor did I realize that Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales has its roots in the writings of Petrus Alfonsi, a Spanish convert from Judaism to Christianity, whose "Priestly Tales" held little interest for his own countrymen but which Englishmen had never seen. Nor had I ever really thought about the fact that, as must be true, even the Jewish and Christian thinkers of the time period wrote in Arabic, a language that had come to supplant Latin as a lingua franca. Even the great Jewish writer Maimonides, for example, wrote his commentaries on the Mishna in Arabic. One of the great, perhaps even tragic, turning points for Menocal, is when King Alfonso the Wise chooses to elevate the vernacular romance language of Castile to official status.

It's clear that Menocal sees the story, or perhaps stories, of medieval al-Andalus as not just history, but a model for the way society could be. A postscript notes that she finished the book shortly after 9/11, when the book's pleas for tolerance--especially in relation to the contributions of Muslim and Arabic thinkers--became especially ignored, and especially needed. As Menocal shows, much of the great philosophy, poetry, art, and architecture--the Alcazar of Seville and Alhambra of Grenada among them--were only able to exist because a culture of tolerance and free exchange allowed them to exist. 25 years later, it's hard to see that a society like this remains a probability for us, though the book shows quite effectively that such worlds are possible.

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

I have dwelt on this sequence of stories, one after another, exploring the ways in which the faithfulness of God is manifest in the world of fallen humankind. This kind of interpretation might seem ingenious and little more if there were not essential truths lying behind it. The first of these is that these divine likenesses among whom we live are of the highest interest and value to God. We have been given the coin of wealth to barter among ourselves for the things we need or want. We assign worth to persons, consciously or not, and then to prestige and property and ease, all the things that compete so successfully with the claims of justice and righteousness, kindness, and respect, which would follow from a true belief that anyone we encounter is an image of God. and the second is that we do not know how to judge or where to blame because events are working themselves out at another scale and toward other purposes more than we can begin to grasp.

I had the good fortune to be able to see Marilynne Robinson speak about her now book, Reading Genesis, at the New York Public Library last week. Robinson is, to me, a living avatar of wisdom. She looks wise, with her leonine gray hair and bearing; she sounds wise, with her quiet and well-measured statements. Reading Genesis, which might be described as a work of theology, seems to me a part of that old and forgotten tradition called wisdom literature, of which Robinson herself perhaps is the last and greatest living practitioner.

Robinson begins by observing that it is trendy to pick Genesis apart. A common viewpoint holds that it is the work of many authors, and that each author's particular political or cultural agenda can be traced in the text. In this way, the text is deconstructed and falls apart; it is a text at odds with itself. So the first thing that Robinson does that is quietly radical--in our times at least--is to read Genesis as a single text, with themes and ideas that animate it from beginning to end. For me, too, this was rather radical, because even growing up in the evangelical church, I don't think I was ever asked to read Genesis, or any book, from beginning to end. I know all the stories here, but seeing them laid out as a single narrative made me understand that I'd been missing something fundamental by dealing with them piecemeal.

What does animate Genesis? For Robinson, it is that fundamental truth which lies at the heart of scripture: that human beings are at the heart of creation. Robinson makes much of comparisons with Babylonian and other Near Eastern literature, like Gilgamesh, many of which have been taken as the "sources" from which Genesis stories, like the flood and the tower of Babel, have been borrowed. But Robinson points out that in these stories, the gods have a tense, inimical relationship with human beings, whose sacrifices they must have in order to eat. The God of Genesis, of course, does not eat; he does not need human beings, yet he created them and the world for their purpose and enjoyment. Genesis is a creation story, and one that places mankind at the center of everything. It's a story that unfolds in the lives of very ordinary people, shepherds like Abraham, Isaac, Joseph; it's through these humble people that God will create a chosen lineage, and through this lineage with which he communes with the entire world. (She asserts also that the family trees of Genesis clearly show that Gentiles are more closely related to the chosen people than one might think; in Genesis, we are all neighbors.)

The other big theme that animates Genesis for Robinson is mercy. She takes exception to the image of the raging, vengeful Old Testament God, and the belief common even among Christians that the God of the New Testament is somehow a different character. Look, for example, at the story of Cain: God spares Cain's life for the killing of his brother, and the famous "mark" that is placed upon his forehead is not actually one of shame, but a kind of protection; it demonstrates that wherever Cain goes he is to be protected from those who wish to slay him for his misdeeds. Cain is the ancestor of the human race, and by saving him from what he deserves--punishment for his murder of Abel--a greater purpose is worked. Robinson notes that this kind of story is told over and over again; characters in Genesis are made to suffer far less than we might think they deserve: Noah, Isaac, the brothers of Joseph.

I often wonder who Robinson writes for. Her firm Calvinism puts her out of step with most of the secular world, and her understanding of scripture certainly doesn't seem to fit in with that of Christian America; I can't imagine Reading Genesis on an endcap at Lifeway, if Lifeway still exists. And yet, the room at NYPL was packed with people who came to enjoy her wisdom. She speaks to some much deeper need in us, I think, to understand the way in which we ourselves are part of a universe that has only become stranger and less familiar in the age of the Big Bang. 

Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Those lamenting evangelical's apparent betrayal of "family values" fail to recognize that evangelical family values have always entailed assumptions about sex and power. The evangelical cult of masculinity links patriarchal power to masculine aggression and sexual desire; its counterpoint is a submissive femininity. A man's sexual drive, like his testosterone, is God-given. He is the initiator, the piercer. His essential leadership capacity outside the home is bolstered by his leadership in the home, and in the bedroom. The responsibility of married women in this arrangement is clear, but implications for women extend beyond the marriage relationship. Women outside of the bonds of marriage must avoid tempting men through immodesty, or simply by being available to them, or perceived as such. Within this framework, men assign themselves the role of protector, but the protection of women and girls is contingent on their presumed purity and proper submission to masculine authority. This puts female victims in impossible situations. Caught up in authoritarian settings where a premium is placed on obeying men, women and children find themselves in situations ripe for abuses of power. Yet victims are often held culpable for acts perpetrated against them; in many cases, female victims, even young girls, are accused of "seducing" their abusers or inviting abuse by failing to exhibit proper femininity.

The evangelical church I grew up in prided itself on being "seeker friendly," which meant that, in practice, it avoided a lot of the topics that were otherwise important to the Southern Baptist Convention, of which it was a member, though it avoided having "Baptist" in its name--because that might scare away the seekers. We heard a lot about husbands and wives forgiving each other, and how to manage household finances, but sexual purity and the roles of men and women were not topics for the pulpit (which was really a Plexiglas lectern). But I got the message of complementarianism--that men and women are inherently different, and have different roles, usually with men at the "head" of the marriage--in other places, and at other times: at church camp, at retreats, in videos and books. It only took a couple of weeks of attending an evangelical church with me in college--a place I expected to be equally "seeker-friendly"--for my girlfriend at the time to hear that wives should submit to their husbands, and decide that she was done with this Christian stuff more or less for good. For my part, I didn't know what to do with these beliefs; they weren't important to me, nor did they make much sense, but I was never presented with any alternative.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne is a history of the evangelical movement in the United States, and how its commitment to complementarianism, and a network of associated ideas about race and gender, were developed. One thing that Du Mez makes clear is that it might have been otherwise; even back in the heyday of arch-evangelical Billy Graham, a more liberal strain of evangelical Christianity--anti-war, pro-abortion, anti-segregation--competed for dominance. Individual evangelical leaders, including Graham himself, even mixed these strains, but with the election of Ronald Reagan, a more militant and sexist version of evangelicalism crowded out its ideological competitors.

In a way, I knew the broad strokes of this history, because I lived inside of it. But there are few things that Du Mez's book made me appreciate, which I'll list here in no particular order. For one, the title isn't just a catchy bit of alliteration; Du Mez persuades that the swaggering machoism of John Wayne really has served as a symbolic lodestar for the evangelical movement. (Every fucked-up Christian bestseller Du Mez describes and analyzes seems to name check him as an antidote to a "feminized" culture, or feminized Christianity, that they see as ascendant.) For Du Mez, Wayne, a misogynist and racist, thoroughly enmeshed with Hollywood and not particularly religious, becomes a kind of avatar for later evangelical icons like Reagan and Donald Trump. None of these men was Christian in any real sense, but through their appeal to aggressive masculine values, they captured evangelical hearts. It's a mistake, Du Mez writes, to think of evangelicalism as a specifically, or even particularly, theological movement; as these men show, its accompanying cultural values or as important, if not more.

Secondly, I was struck by how much much of a business the evangelical movement is. Ideologically, Du Mez traces evangelical roots back to Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, a 100-year old bestseller that imagines Jesus as an executive. Practically, the evangelical movement is driven by a handful of enormous corporate entities, some of which are non-profits, like James Dobson's Focus on the Family, but also mega-corporation Hobby Lobby and the Christian bookstore Lifeway, without which there is no evangelical movement, and which has immense power to push evangelicals in ideological directions by what it chooses to sell and promote.

Thirdly, I was really shocked by the enmeshment between the evangelical movement and the American military. I've always been aware of the way that the evangelical movement pushes "military values," though seeing all the seminars and bestselling books collected in on place, with their language about being a "warrior for Christ," is stomach-turning. More than that, though, I don't know that I had considered how the evangelical movement has captured the military. Du Mez presents a picture of the U.S. military and evangelical Christianity as mutually supportive entities: military values of violence, self-sacrifice, and authoritarianism are transformed by churches into a form of Christianity that the military then promotes among its members. Put this way, the culpability of evangelical Christianity in the worldwide violence wrought by the U.S. military after 9-11 is especially troubling.

Unsurprisingly, Du Mez's book has made her a popular target for evangelicals on Twitter, and elsewhere. But I had actually been expecting, and hoping for, something a little more polemical: though Du Mez's sympathies are not hidden, Jesus and John Wayne is mostly a straightforward history of an ideological movement. It does a great job of examining the way that patriarchal values came to be so defining of the evangelical worldview; on the topic of race--the book's subtitle is How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation--it actually has far less to say. (Which is fine, I think--perhaps a topic for another book.) But in the end, the facts speak for themselves: Du Mez devotes the book's final chapters to the recent spate of sexual abuse scandals that have rocked evangelical churches and their governing bodies, like the SBC. These victims, Du Mez shows, are not the victims of Christians who have "betrayed" their values, but Christians who have lived out the very patriarchal and violent values which the churches have embraced.

Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin B. Curtice

And so, I loosely call myself a Christian. And so, I also call myself Indigenous. I am Potawatomi, constantly being called to my belonging with the love that only Creator, Mamogosnan, can hold, has always held, and always will hold for all of us. It is a difficult journey, and I don't know where it will lead. Years from now, I may no longer call myself Christian, no longer engage with the church, and if so, I will still call this journey sacred as the thing it is, the truths it has taught me, the people it has brought into my life. My faith is not a faith to be hold over others or a faith that forces others into submission but an inclusive, universal faith constantly asking what the gift of Mystery is and how we can better care for the earth we live on, who constantly teach us what it means to be humble. 

"Every day I would sit on our living room couch and watch live streams," Kaitlin B. Curtice writes in Native about the standoff at Standing Rock in 2016, "from my phone, my laptop--horrified, surprised, but also coming alive to the realization that it has always been this way. History herself was coming to tell me that I belong to her, that I belong to all these stories that have been covered up in dust, covered up by  whiteness." These lines hit me with force as I read them today, the day after a mob of pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The uncanny sense of watching history unfold from a distance, and trying to situate your own place into it, the understanding that whiteness has brought us to this point--well, who can reasonably deny it? It brought me low to see that the rioters had put up a cross on the lawn of the Capitol and carried signs with Jesus' name; it's enough to make you think that Christianity is not worth rescuing from the mess it's made for itself.

Curtice's story should be familiar, at least in part, to those who grew up in evangelical culture, which is toxic in ways many don't see or understand until they've grown out of it. Curtice talks about the misogyny of purity culture, and the way the American church centralizes whiteness. When it circles the wagons and acts as if its only goal is self-preservation, the church is preserving whiteness, too. For Curtice, the way out of the poison of evangelical culture is the embrace of a side of her identity she barely recognized as a young person: her indigeneity. Learning about her Potawatomi self allowed Curtice to rethink her Christian self, and to envision a kind of Christianity which is "loosely worn" and which looks outward. In this way Curtice's individual experience seems to suggest a way forward for Christianity as a whole; only decolonization can make it a worthwhile endeavor.

What kind of book is this? It's not quite theology--there's little scripture--and it's not really memoir, though the points Curtice makes are rooted inextricably in her own experiences. The word that kept coming to my mind is testimony, a genre I recognize from my own evangelical upbringing and which has no real analogs, I think, in the secular world. Testimony shares the same root as the word witness, and though that word makes slightly different demands on evangelicals, it seems to rightly emphasize the first-person. Testimony emerges from identity, it is an expression of one's indelible and irreproducible experience. Strange to observe that when so much of the Christian world has become inimical to the word identity at all. There are a lot of books like this, I bet, in the testimonial mode, but I don't think I've read any. I was touched--sometimes quite deeply--but I didn't ever quite feel invited into the deep thinking I was hoping for.

One of the things that will stick with me, though, is Curtice's interpretation of the story of the prodigal son. The church, Curtice tells us, think of this as a story about itself: a boy returns home to God's people. But there are more kinds of returning than this. We can return, perhaps, to the land we have brutalized. We can return to the identities that have been repressed and made invisible, like Curtice's Potawatomi self. We can return at last to each other--not merely the "church" but brothers and sisters of all kinds. Just to hear that such a return is possible was comforting in these difficult times.

God is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria Jr.

American Indians and other tribal peoples did not take this path in interpreting revelations and religious experiences. The structure of their religious traditions is taken directly from the world around them, from their relationships with other forms of life. Context is therefore all-important for both practice and the understanding of reality. The places where revelations were experienced and remembered and set aside as locations where, through rituals and ceremonials, the people could one again communicate with the spirits. Thousands of years of occupancy on their lands taught tribal peoples the sacred landscapes for which they were responsible and gradually the structure of ceremonial reality became clear. It was not what people believed to be true that was important but what they experienced as true. Hence revelation was seen as a continuous process of adjustment to the natural surroundings and not as a specific message valid for all times and places.

Vine Deloria's influential comparison of Native American religions and Western Christianity begins by making a really fundamental and thoughtful distinction between religions of space and religions of time. Christianity, in Deloria's description, is a time-obsessed religion, articulated as a historical progress beginning with creation, moving through the fall, the crucifixion, and looking forward to Christ's return. Native American religions, on the other hand, are largely religions of space: they describe a particular relationship between a community and a place, and for their ceremonies to be fully articulated they cannot be severed from the place they describe.

God is Red is perhaps harsher than any book I've ever read toward Christianity. It's Christianity's time-orientation, Deloria says, that has made it the engine of colonialism and imperialism: the forced conversion of indigenous people is part of God's temporal design, and their subjugation a sign of progress toward Christianity's ultimate eschatological goals. Furthermore, that time-orientation has led Christianity to believe that its message is universal, and cut it off from its context as a religion particular to a community in the Ancient Near East.

It's hard to disagree with Deloria's sober assessment of Christianity as a force in the world. Most of the social ills of the past millennium, at least, are tied up with Christianity: imperialism, colonialism, slavery, racism, you name it. How can you argue with someone who looks at the state of the world and decides Christianity has failed it? The only real response to this, I think, is to note that there is a version of Christianity practiced throughout the Global South that is directly opposed to these forces. Deloria would say, well, where are these Christians in history? But that's the nature of power--it's visible in ways the powerless simply aren't. But you can hardly quibble with Deloria here; if more people in North America, at least, were honest assessors of the state of things, more people would probably see it his way than mine.

What I actually wanted more of from God is Red was a systematic, positive case for Native religions, but to the extent that Deloria does this, it's dwarfed by the criticisms of Western Christianity by at least two to one. That's in the nature of Deloria's argument, perhaps: because the indigenous religions of the Americas are community-oriented, it makes little sense to advocate for them; these religions have no missionaries and admit no converts. Native religion, Deloria says, flies in the face of our Eurocentric notions of what a religion even is: not a system of beliefs but a lived national, tribal, or communitarian experience. It's not enough to put a dreamcatcher in your window, or step into a sweat lodge. While that's certainly correct, Deloria leaves a lot of really pressing questions unaddressed, I think. For example, it seems clear that sacred Native spaces across the Americas need protecting because they are so crucial--and in some cases, equivalent--with Native religions. But how can a religion like that ever survive in an increasingly global world? If Christianity is to be abandoned in favor of religions that are national or ethnic in character, how can White Americans do this without resorting to literal white nationalism?

The weirdest thing about God is Red is that Deloria spends much of the book advocating for pseudoscience. The roots of Middle Eastern religions, he speculates, are probably ancient aliens, and the events of the Old Testament are probably reflections of ancient cosmic disasters. In this he relies on the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, a notorious but popular crackpot, one of those guys whose dismissal by fields of real scientists becomes part of his own legend. But in a weird way, Deloria's need to find Christianity's historical roots seems to me like a desire to make it cohere to the role he's assigned it, and to square his frustration with the ways in which Christianity can actually be ahistorical. Mostly, the attention to bad science undermines what's most captivating and thoughtful about the book: its vigorous defense of a religious outlook that's been ignored, undermined, and systematically oppressed for hundreds of years.

American Jesus by Stephen Prothero

The subject of this particular story of American religion is Jesus, more precisely Jesus as Americans have understood him.  So on its face, this book would appear to fall in the Christian nation camp.  Yet many of the most interesting appraisals of Jesus have emerged outside the churches: in music, film, and literature, and among Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and people of no religion at all.  To explore the American Jesus, therefore, is not to confine oneself to Christianity.  It is to examine how American Christianity has been formed by Christians and non-Christians alike, and how the varieties of American religious experience have been shaped by the public power of the Christian message.  Finally, to see how Americans of all stripes have cast the man from Nazareth in their own image is to examine, through the looking glass, the kaleidoscopic character of American culture.

It's easy to imagine that the story of American devotion to Jesus has been singular, steady, and monolithic.  I see it when my students transpose their own perceptions about modern Christianity onto older books, a way of flattening and disengaging not only from the text but from modern religious life.  But did you know that the America of the 17th and 18th centuries wasn't very religious at all?  And that Christianity as it did exist was not very interested in Jesus as a figure, much preferring the stern but guiding God-the-father?

Prothero traces the blossoming of a "Jesus culture" in the United States to the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century.  It transformed American Christianity by emphasizing the importance of Christ, but in doing so it unleashed the figure of Jesus onto the American landscape where it could be reimagined and reconceived.  Prothero covers a number of the various incarnations of Jesus in American culture, beginning by contrasting the loving, feminized Jesus of the 19th century with the masculine Jesus of the Teddy Roosevelt era.  He talks about the friendly, hippie-ish Jesus of the Jesus Movement of the mid-20th century, and connects it to our modern megachurches, which he describes, quite accurately, as "mimicking malls, with their large, open spaces, filled with light."

But some of the most interesting chapters cover the versions of Jesus that come from outside of what we might call the mainstream.  There's black Jesus--bringing to mind an argument I had, baffled, with a friend in youth group decades ago who insisted Jesus was black--but also the "elder brother" of Mormonism, as well as Jewish and Hindu versions of Jesus.  I was surprised to see just how important Jesus is in these communities: the first Hindu evangelists in the United States claimed Jesus as one of their own, and the proper Jewish attitude toward Jesus was apparently a huge controversy in the mid-20th century.  This goy had no idea.

Some familiar patterns recur.  From the moment when Thomas Jefferson took his scissors and snipped all the miracles and mysticism out of his Bible, Americans have gone to great pains to distinguish Jesus the figure from the religion he inspired.  Christianity sucks, the familiar line goes, but Jesus himself was the tops.  Prothero argues that this idea shows us just how attached American culture is to Jesus; even when it seeks to reject the Christian religion, America thinks Jesus is pretty much tops.  But the sheer variety and vitality of the different Jesus traditions is perhaps what makes the book so interesting, and eye-opening.  It's easy to get blinkered by one's own tradition, religious or not, and forget what a multitude of perspectives there are.  And there's something admirable, perhaps quintessentially American, about the diversity of Jesuses in our midst.

The Damnation of Theron Ware by George Frederic

His views on this general subject were merely those common to his communion and his environment. He took it for granted, for example, that in the large cities most of the poverty and all the drunkenness, crime, and political corruption were due to the perverse qualities of this foreign people—qualities accentuated and emphasized in every evil direction by the baleful influence of a false and idolatrous religion. It is hardly too much to say that he had never encountered a dissenting opinion on this point. His boyhood had been spent in those bitter days when social, political, and blood prejudices were fused at white heat in the public crucible together. When he went to the Church Seminary, it was a matter of course that every member of the faculty was a Republican, and that every one of his classmates had come from a Republican household. When, later on, he entered the ministry, the rule was still incredulous of exceptions. One might as well have looked in the Nedahma Conference for a divergence of opinion on the Trinity as for a difference in political conviction. Indeed, even among the laity, Theron could not feel sure that he had ever known a Democrat; that is, at all closely. He understood very little about politics, it is true. If he had been driven into a corner, and forced to attempt an explanation of this tremendous partisan unity in which he had a share, he would probably have first mentioned the War—the last shots of which were fired while he was still in petticoats. Certainly his second reason, however, would have been that the Irish were on the other side.

This book was written in 1896, if you've ever wondered how much people don't change. Change "Irish" to "Muslim" up there and this could be a snippet from Breitbart.

I didn't intend for several of my early reviews to be politically tinged, and I didn't think The Damnation of Theron Ware would likely be very political. I was expecting--hoping--for something along the lines of The Scarlet Letter when I saw this in the remainder bin at Barnes and Noble. And in some ways, the comparison is apt, mostly in the heavy emphasis on Christianity and a few very strange passages that belie the simplicity these sorts of themes sometimes engender.

But mostly, Ware is a different kind of book, telling the story of the titular Theron and his journey away from primitive Methodism, a movement in which he is an up-and-coming pastor. The book opens with a sermon at a new, much-desired post, but by the end of the first chapter, Ware and his wife are dealing with the disappointment of rejection and shunting out to a small church in the middle of nowhere, victims of petty fractures in the leadership.

Theron meets the elders of the church, who, again, spout monologues not too different from some I heard growing up:

Brother Pierce’s parchment face showed no sign of surprise or pleasure at this easy submission. “Another thing: We don’t want no book-learnin’ or dictionary words in our pulpit,” he went on coldly. “Some folks may stomach ‘em; we won’t. Them two sermons o’ yours, p’r’aps they’d do down in some city place; but they’re like your wife’s bunnit here, they’re too flowery to suit us. What we want to hear is the plain, old-fashioned Word of God, without any palaver or ‘hems and ha’s. They tell me there’s some parts where hell’s treated as played-out—where our ministers don’t like to talk much about it because people don’t want to hear about it. Such preachers ought to be put out. They ain’t Methodists at all. What we want here, sir, is straight-out, flat-footed hell—the burnin’ lake o’ fire an’ brim-stone. Pour it into ‘em, hot an’ strong. We can’t have too much of it. Work in them awful deathbeds of Voltaire an’ Tom Paine, with the Devil right there in the room, reachin’ for ‘em, an’ they yellin’ for fright; that’s what fills the anxious seat an’ brings in souls hand over fist.”

After this dressing down, Ware is out for a stroll when he stumbles into, and follows, for some reason not even he entirely understands, a Catholic funeral procession that meets its terminus in the administration of last rites by one Father Forbes, a veteran parish priest. He also meets the redheaded Celia, who eventually changes his perceptions about the Irish, among other things.

Celia is a very interesting character to exist in a book this old. A Hellenistic libertine, she worships the Greeks and their "gods", though she doesn't believe them to be real. She's a vivacious, complex character, and, in a lesser novel, one might expect her to end up in a pool of regret, repenting of her ways, similiar to the disappointing penultimate chapter of The Scarlet Letter. Instead, her ending is much more ambiguous. But more on this shortly.

The wake leads to Ware deciding on the one hand to write a book about Abraham, and on the other, to have supper with Father Forbes and his off-putting friend, Dr. Ledsmar. Upon sharing his book idea with them, rather than the affirmation and encouragement he expected, Ware finds himself awash in a sea of biblical criticism and liberal theology, things which have, to this point, been completely unknown to him. By the time he leaves, he's been introduced to the idea that Abraham was not a real person, the various supernatural events in the Bible are myth, that Jesus is a mythological/literary descendant of a snake god, and so on.

Again, in a lesser novel, I think the author might've felt compelled to take a position on what theology was right or wrong. After all, the Methodist elders early on are not sympathetic, though Ware's wife is, and grows moreso as Ware himself moves further and further from his original beliefs, culminating in a sex-fueled fever dream listening to Celia play Chopin in her quarters.

And Ware slowly distances himself from his church, his wife, his God, and becomes less and less likable, even as his newfound friends begin drawing further and further away, culminating in a surprisingly devastating and ambiguous speech from Celia, after Ware has determined to leave his wife and follow her to New York City:

"Let me go on. But then it became apparent, little by little, that we had misjudged you. We liked you, as I have said, because you were unsophisticated and delightfully fresh and natural. Somehow we took it for granted you would stay so. Rut that is just what you didn’t do—just what you hadn’t the sense to try to do. Instead, we found you inflating yourself with all sorts of egotisms and vanities. We found you presuming upon the friendships which had been mistakenly extended to you.

Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing to contemplate. You thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you ridiculing and reviling the people of your church, whose money supports you, and making a mock of the things they believe in, and which you for your life wouldn’t dare let them know you didn’t believe in. You talked to us slightingly about your wife. What were you thinking of, not to comprehend that that would disgust us? You showed me once—do you remember?—a life of George Sand that you had just bought,—bought because you had just discovered that she had an unclean side to her life. You chuckled as you spoke to me about it, and you were for all the world like a little nasty boy, giggling over something dirty that older people had learned not to notice. These are merely random incidents.

They are just samples, picked hap-hazard, of the things in you which have been opening our eyes, little by little, to our mistake. I can understand that all the while you really fancied that you were expanding, growing, in all directions. What you took to be improvement was degeneration. When you thought that you were impressing us most by your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the fable about the donkey trying to play lap-dog. And it wasn’t even an honest, straightforward donkey at that!”

In the end, Frederic refuses to provide any pat answers. Ware leaves the ministry, still feeling as if he has been wronged, Father Forbes continues to minister to his parish, in spite of his lack of belief, and Ledsmar... well, Ledsmar is an unlikable jerk, but he also never receives any kind of comeuppance. So although it can't help but feel like this book is a morality tale of some sort, exactly what the moral is eludes me... but it's a wonderful tale.

The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson

The fact, or at least the degree, of human exceptionalism is often disputed.  In some quarters it is considered modest and seemly for us to take our place among the animals, conceptually speaking--to acknowledge finally the bonds of kinship evolution implies.  Yet, in view of our history with regard to the animals, not to mention our history with one another, it seems fair to wonder if the beasts, given a voice in the matter, would not feel a bit insulted by our intrusion.  History is the great unfinished portrait of old Adam.  In the very fact of having a history we are unique.  And when we look at it we are astonished.  Only in myth or nightmare could another such creature be found.  What a thing is man.

Say, however, that God is a given, the God of the psalmist and of Jesus.  Then it is possible to claim a dignity for humankind that is assured because it is bestowed on us, that is, because it is beyond even our formidable powers to besmirch and destroy.  Say that the one earthly thing God did not put under our own feet was our own essential nature.  The one great corrective to our tendency toward depredation would be a recognition of our abiding sacredness, since we are both, and often simultaneously, victim and villain.  The divine image in us, despite all, is an act of God, immune to our sacrilege, apparent in the loveliness that never ceases to shine out in incalculable instances of beauty and love and imagination that make the dire assessment of our character, however solidly grounded in our history and our prospects, radically untrue.

I believe in God, and with some trepidation I will admit that I consider myself a Christian.  I don't say that often, and I can recall clearly several instances in which people I know otherwise quite well have been shocked to hear it.  Mostly I keep it to myself, partly because I don't want to be associated with a religious culture that feels to me increasingly shallow, mindless, and vicious.  (Robinson talks about "the growing numbers among our people who have begun to reject [Christianity] as ignorant, intolerant, and belligerently nationalistic, as they might reasonably conclude that it is, if they hear only the loudest voices.")  Partly because a belief in God is increasingly difficult to defend under the hyperrationalist terms that characterize our century.  Partly it is just good, old-fashioned shame.

Robinson's new collection of essays, The Givenness of Things, addresses all of my misgivings directly.  But it's the lack of shame about her that captivates me most; the lack of any sheepishness or need to apologize for this belief.  Robinson happily identifies herself as a throwback, a mainline Protestant with a fondness for the language and ideas of hymnals and prayer books, at a time when that seems an endangered species:

There is a word that fell like a curse on American religious culture--"relevance."  Any number opf assumptions are packed into this word, for example, that the substance and the boundaries of a life can be known, and that they should not be enriched or expanded beyond the circle of the familiar, the colloquial.  We encouraged ourselves to believe that our own small, brief lives were the measure of all things.  Wisdom would have told us that our lives are indeed small and brief, like the billiosn that preceded them and the billions that will follow, but this information was precisely not welcome.  Wisdom would have told us, too, that, by grace of our extraordinary gifts, and theirs, we are heirs to the testimonies of unnumbered generations.  But these gifts, of course, failed the test of relevance, which was a narrow and ungenerous standard, systematically unforgiving of anything that bore the marks of another age, era, or decade.

The Givenness of Things is divided into a number of essays with short titles that promise reflections on broad, if profound topics, like "Grace," "Fear," and "Metaphysics."  The first chapter, "Humanism," recently published in The Nation, shows that each can stand alone.  But the book is really a single essay, with a few key themes that Robinson hits again and again.

First, she objects to rationalist and positivist ways of thinking which deny the reality of much of human experience.  Neuroscience, for example, tries to reduce the very essence of our being to a series of physical, chemical, and electrical interactions, but this is a definition of the real which lops off, wholesale, thousands of years of human culture and learning.  "Our realism," she writes, "distracts us from reality, that most remarkable phenomenon."  But Robinson is far from anti-science; rather, she argues that positivists ignore the implication that the last century of scientific progress have led us to: that our old "nuts-and-bolts physics" is thoroughly insufficient to describe the world.  "The antidote to our gloom," she writes, "is to be found in contemporary science," not least because the strangeness of the new vision of the cosmos--with its multiple dimensions, dark matter, and quantum entanglement--have resurrected the need for a metaphysics that positivism sought to bury.

Second, she argues that we have made a great mistake by removing human beings from the center of the cosmos.  She puts the lie to the humanism of those "secular humanists" who diminish the uniqueness of the human being:

A number of times I have read or heard from the scientists and the rationalists that the brain is a peice of meat.  This being true of the brain, then the brain/mind, the mind/soul, are degraded or dismissed by their being revealed in their actual, brutish nature.  But why limit this insight to the brain?  The entire human person is meat, except where it is bone, no enhancement.  If it is reasonable to say the brain is meat, it is reasonable on the same grounds, the next time you look into a baby carriage, to compliment the mother on her lovely little piece of meat.  I could as reasonably say that pieces of meat come to my classes, sit in the chairs, and gaze at me with something that looks for all the world like interest or indifference.  Whatever else might be said of these living hams and chops and ribs, they seem to bore easily...

More to the point, what is meat?  Complex life.  And what is that?  The universe's greatest mystery.  It is meat that sings and flies and fledges, meat that makes civilizations and pulls them down.

Robinson labors over this point again and again, because as moderns we have trouble believing it, though it seems, by the time she's done, entirely self-evident.  "Our brilliance," she writes, "has shown us grounds for utter humility.  We could vanish into the ether like a breath, leaving nothing behind to say who we were, what we were.  No doubt we will vanish in fact, mere transients in a cosmos that will realize itself over eons.  How astonishing that we know this."  That is, those rationalists who show us how small and insignificant we are in relation to the cosmos often take the wrong lesson, for no ape, bird, plant, or stone has any conception of what its relationship to the cosmos is, or can even conceive of a cosmos.  Even our immense capacity for evil sets us apart, because "[t]here is something inversely godlike in our potential de-creation of the biosphere."

Finally, she argues that the exceptionalism of the human being is at the heart of Christianity.  The book, toward its end, becomes a theological defense of Robinson's conception of Christianity and of Calvinism.  She speaks beautifully and persuasively about the meaning of the Incarnation, which, she argues, isn't so much God taking on a human form as an expression of the way in which human beings, and Being itself, share and have always shared the nature of God:

I have spent all this time clearing the ground so that I can say, and be understood to mean, without reservation, that I believe in a divine Creation, and in the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and the life to come.  I take the Christian mythos to be a special revelation of a general truth, that truth being the ontological centrality of humankind in the created order, with its theological corollary, the profound and unique sacredness of human beings as such.  The arbitrariness of our circumstance frees me to say that the Arbiter of our being might well act toward us freely, break in on us, present us with radical Truth in forms and figures we can radically comprehend.

As ever, Robinson's careful prose contains its own wonders; only now, typing that passage out, do I notice the exquisite application of the word "radically" to the verb "comprehend."  Of course, that is part of Robinson's argument: comprehension itself is radical, and implies radical things.  I will risk sounding like a fanboy, but I believe there's nothing short of remarkable in Robinson's gift for uniting beautiful ideas with beautiful words.  In that way reading The Givenness of Things is not so different from reading Robinson's fiction.  And as much as I have loved and treasured Housekeeping, Gilead, and Lila, I think perhaps this book has meant the most to me.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I feel bad that I've fallen so far behind on my reviews, because I've read some great books this year that are definitely going to get the short shrift because it's been so long since I read them. That includes this one, possibly the most widely-disparaged book ever to find its way onto high school reading lists.

Of course, it's not too surprising that The Scarlet Letter doesn't connect with most high-schoolers. For those unfamiliar, the story concerns Hester Prynne, a single woman in a strict Puritan community, who is discovered to be pregnant and sentenced to spend the rest of her life wearing a red letter "A"--for adultery--as punishment for her transgression. As for the father, well, that's the Reverend Arthur Dimmsdale, the town's most respected citizen and the next thing to an angel in the eyes of the townfolk.

What follows from this is a long meditation on sin, guilt, the nature of love and religious belief, all written in Hawthorne's typically slow-moving and flowery prose. Oh, and the book opens with a fifty-page framing story about an accounting house where the record of The Scarlet Letter is found, to discourage the rare kid who found the adultery story compelling.

And, in spite of all this, I loved it. It might be the best thing I've read so far this year.


Some of this is just my literary taste--I love Hawthorne's baroque verbiage and slow pace, but I can see how it could be a turn off--but there's more to the story than that. For one thing, the novel is full of ambiguity. As I recall, it never even spells out that Rev. Dimmsdale was the father until the very end of the novel, although the reader is expected to have intuited it pretty early. The meaning of the scarlet "A" is never explicitly mentioned either, and those are two of the main plot points of the book! They aren't hard to discern but it does demonstrate the confidence Hawthorne has in his readers.

 Hand in hand with the plot ambiguities, Hawthorne allows a lot of moral wiggle room as well. Until a short speech at the end, which feels shoehorned in to please censors, Hawthorne casts no shade on Hester. In fact, as the story progresses, she sometimes seems like the only moral person in a town full of hypocrites. Knowing how Hawthorne felt about Puritans, it seems likely that he DID feel this way, but it's still strange to see a woman have an illegitimate child and come out of the situation better then she went in. I don't know that I've ever read a book this old that was so loath to pass judgement on its characters.

Also, despite its stuffy rep, The Scarlet Letter is a deeply strange book. Occurrences throughout--Hester's vindictive ex, a vision in the sky, Dimmsdale's ever-increasing torment, and Hester's possibly-demented daughter--point to supernaturalism without ever spelling it out. At points, it feels almost like a Gothic novel, with "ghosts" everywhere, and skeletal hands behind the scenes pushing things along, except in this case, the hands are God's and the devil is a disgruntled ex.

The Myth of Persecution by Candida Moss

Let’s start with my biases. In some ways, I might not be the target audience for this book. I’m a pretty conservative Christian and believe that the Bible is what it says it is. I don’t put a lot of stock in biblical textual criticism that appeals to things like “Q”, and I think a lot of liberal theology is a joke. On the other hand, maybe I’m exactly who it’s for: a believer who wants to know the truth even if it’s difficult or different. Unfortunately, The Myth of Persecution was disappointing--not only did I disagree with Moss’ conclusions in many instances, but I also didn’t find many of her arguments rigorous enough to be worthy of serious consideration.

But first, the good. Moss is a good writer, and the book moves along at a nice clip, covering a lot of material that could have been dull in a quick, enjoyable way. I also really appreciated her attitude throughout, and her desire for open dialog and honest examination of even the most sacred of Christian cows. When she discussed Christians and their modern day martyr complex, I found myself agreeing with her that positing an “us-vs.-them” approach to life ultimately stifles dialog and and prevents open communication and fellowship from taking place. I’ll even go a step further and say that, when Moss draws conclusions at the close of each section, I often agreed with her big picture points, even while i disagreed with the manner in which she reached them.

I don’t want to go through the issues I had point by point, but here’s a summary, followed by a couple examples. Primarily, Moss seems to operate from the perspective that Christian writers can’t be trusted. In virtually every instance where a Christian document disagreed with a non-Christian document--or, in some cases, was simply not corroborated by a secular one--the Christian document is treated as though it were clearly incorrect. Christian writers are repeatedly referred to as “shrill” and Moss clearly views them as uncredible. There are a lot of semantic games as well, one in particular that I’ll touch on below, and data that seems to contradict the thesis of the book--that Christians never experienced sustained persecution--is frequently glossed over lightly.

For example, when discussing Saul, who later became the Apostle Paul, and his persecution of believers, she allows that this may, indeed be an example of actual persecution; however, she then reframes it thusly:

“It wasn’t until the end of the first century that Jesus followers began to refer to themselves as “Christians”. The historical period when Stephen died and Paul was writing cannot be considered a period in which Jews persecuted Christians, because Christians did not yet exist.”

This is semantic hair-splitting of the worst kind. “Christian” literally means “little Christ” and the obvious implication is that a Christian is simply a Christ-follower. By Moss’ logic, Christ-followers who call themselves something besides “Christian” cannot be broadly thought of as persecuted Christians even if they are identical in all but name.

This isn’t the only instance of such pedantry either. Moss develops much of her thesis by carefully delineating between persecution and prosecution. Persecution, in the sense Moss uses it, covers only instances of violence targeted toward a specific group. Therefore, when Decius passed a law forbidding Christians from defending themselves in a court of law, this is not “persecution” but “prosecution”. She draws this same distinction between governmental “persecution” and personal “prosecution”. This seems ridiculous on its face: would anyone seriously argue that the Jews were not persecuted when they were ghettoized in Germany? Did their persecution begin only when violence against them was systematized?

Throughout the book, Moss relies on specious constructions like these, as well as examples that end with “We simply can’t know for sure” but carry the strong implication that her conclusions are correct. She takes traditional stories of martyrs, picks apart the embellishments, and then, frequently, dismisses the story altogether. She even does this with the story of Christ himself, whose death she unconvincingly compares to Socrates, after which she states,

“Every time someone is referred to or described as dying like Christ they are actually dying like Socrates and the Maccabees”

Moss is a scholar of martyrdom, and to some extent, I’m willing to believe that her more scholarly works--this is her first for a general audience--are more substantially argued. The history she covers is fascinating, and her advocacy for historical skepticism is valuable. Her ultimate point--that a martyr complex inhibits, rather than enhances, the Christian life, is strong, and one that many Christians I know could stand to learn. Unfortunately, Moss’ biases and over-reliance on semantics severely undercut her arguments and the book as a whole.

A positive review of the book, from an atheist perspective

Revealing Heaven by John W. Price

I enjoy reading things that I know I probably won't agree with. It is an important exercise, helping me to either strengthen, refine, or substantially rethink my opinions. So when I read the brief synopsis of Revealing Heaven, I thought to myself, "Well, this will be different and interesting."

I gave myself an extra day after finishing this book to collect my thoughts, and I'm still of two minds about it. On one hand, I appreciate and applaud what I see as one of Rev. Price's major arguments: God wants people to love one another. The main argument, the purpose even, of the book is that near-death experiences are real and should be embraced by Christians. In making this argument, Price continually claims that the primary object of a Christian should be to love his fellow man. This I like.

Ah, but on the other hand. Too often Price's main argument, regarding the veracity of near-death experiences, relies on conjecture, leaps of logic, and sometimes poor reasoning. Many of his conclusions feel unsubstantiated, or at least under-substantiated. The most common example of this is Price drawing conclusions from low amounts of data. One such instance comes from the chapter titled "Hellish Experiences". As you might imagine, this relatively small chapter was about those who have had near-death experiences that were unpleasant in some way. In the last page and half of this chapter, Price concludes that there are two types of negative experiences. However, Price began this chapter by stating, "Twelve people have related to me near-death experiences ranging from distressing to utterly hellish." Twelve people is a small group, and two sentences later, he shrinks that number even more, saying, "Nine of them were mean-spirited, cruel people. Drawing broad conclusions based on the experiences of such a small group people strikes me as ill-advised. A few chapters later, Price makes an argument based on the experiences of only two people.

On this same objecting hand lies critique of another of Price's arguments. He spends the better part of chapter talking about what he calls fear-based Christianity. Price is referring to "fire and brimstone" preachers, and even mentions Jonathan Edwards' sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". His general argument is that people should not be scared into Christianity. But isn't this what Price is doing, at least in part, with this book. If not, then why spend a chapter talking about "Hellish Experiences"? Why make such thinly substantiated statements about these experiences. Granted, this chapter is just a small portion of the book, and Price could hardly be accused of anything worse than try to scare people into being more loving, hardly insidious.

So, I am essentially right where I was before I started this book. "Well, that was interesting." Persuasive? Not really. Thought-provoking? Yes.

Not Less Than Everything, edited by Catherine Wolff

The concept of discipleship is helpful here: obedience to external commands is never enough. Our behavior, our motivation, our identity should reflect the teachings and the example of the one we are following.

Heresy is a tricky thing. Do it right, and you end up Martin Luther, lionized for throwing off the shackles of a legalistic and ungodly institution. Do it wrong, and you end up ostracized, forgotten or, worse, mocked by history, a cautionary tale.

The original blurb for Not Less Than Everything was something along the lines of, “Catholic writers write about their favorite heretics,” and, of course, how could I pass that up? Having read the book, I don’t think the description does it justice, but it was helpful in keeping me in the right mindset--namely that striking out, passively or actively, against the Catholic Church was a big deal. As a Protestant, I can just find a new church. A devout Catholic may believe, like the Whiskey Priest in The Power and the Glory, that excommunicated from the church he's damned. It adds weight to the decisions faced by the various “saints” in the book, not all of which have been--or, in the case of a few, ever will be--beatified. What they have in common, however, is their willingness to put their fate in God’s hands, trusting that following Christ’s example takes precedence over strict adherence to every papal edict.

As in most essay collections, the quality of the writing in Not Less Than Everything varies a fair amount. Some of the essays, such as the one on Max Scheler, are a bit esoteric; others, such as the scintillatingly titled, “A Pastoral, Person-Oriented Theology Worthy of Vatican II”, are just dry. Most, however, take an interesting approach to their subjects without lapsing into hagiography or strict biography. The best essays, in fact, tend to be the ones that treat their subjects as a jumping-off point, like Tom Beaudoin’s essay on Ignatius of Loyola, which he uses to make a larger point about the unstable relationship between critically thinking about one’s religion and blindly accepting it, and Ann Patchett’s The Worthless Servant, which tells a simple but powerful story of a priest who goes out to the highways and byways, giving cold glasses of water in Jesus’ name.

My favorite essay in the collection is the most different. “I Pray I May Be Ready With My Witness” tells of the conversion and struggles of troubled poet John Berryman. Berryman is one of my favorites, and reading about his childhood, his conversion, and his eventual suicide was heartbreaking. It is written by Paul Mariani, who I’d never heard of, and I’d like to close the review with an excerpt:

Protesters were being tried, imprisoned and fined, while others--college students--were being gunned down for refusing to participate any longer in the madness of Vietnam. The homeless were still homeless and the hungry went on being hungry. And, yes, his own body was failing and, yes, he had made mistakes and, yes, he was a human wreck, but he would bear witness in a terrible time as best he could. He hoped and prayed the heretic Origen was right after all and that Hell was “empty / Or will be at apocatastasis,” that is, at the end of time. Human failure--sin--seemed inevitable, given who and what we were. And, yes, no doubt we would suffer for it “now & later / but not forever, dear friends & brothers!”

I like to think of John Berryman as the patron saint of purgatory, shoulders hunched, still climbing on all fours the steep inclines of those mountains toward that distant summit shimmering in light, relieved to know he can sin no more.

VALIS by Philip K. Dick

The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer.  It is more elusive than the merest phantom.  Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.

VALIS is simultaneously the most bizarre and the least fantastical book of Philip K. Dick's I've ever read.  It is bizarre because it is about a man, Horselover Fat, who has prophetic visions implanted in him by a benign force through a pink beam of light.  It is not fantastical because it is, almost to the letter, completely autobiographical.

Dick makes no effort to conceal the fact that Fat is himself; he announces it in the first couple of pages.  "Horselover" is a translation of the Greek word Philippos, and dick is the German word for "fat."  And yet in his capacity as narrator, Dick speaks to the man he lovingly calls "Horse," interacts with him, tries to guide him through a long series of griefs that include the suicide and cancer deaths of friends, divorce and alienation.  When Dick says, "I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity," we are in the uncomfortable space between the canny tricks of an accomplished writer and the neurosis of a madman.

But that's one of the most interesting questions VALIS tackles: what separates sanity from insanity?  If Dick admits that he, as Fat, has become unhinged, does that somehow make him less unhinged?  The pink beam that hits Fat reveals to him, piecemeal, a religious cosmogony that he records as a massive exegesis, like Dick did in his own life.  It is a semi-Christian, explicitly Gnostic theology that says that the years between 103 and 1974 AD were imaginary and that the times of the Roman Empire still continue behind the illusory 20th century.  But it also says that the world is inherently irrational, created by an irrational God (this is a quintessential Gnostic tenet) and that the pink light, beamed in by what Dick calls "God," "Zebra," and "VALIS" in turn, is a rational source breaking in through the irrationality.  This source is not divine but human, transmitted by a group of our beneficent kin who never let themselves slip into the mad, unreal world in which we live.

I do not think, as Dick did, that he received information from three-eyed humans residing near the star Fomalhaut.  But there are ideas in here that are compelling, that cannot be dismissed as one man's quackery, and that seem to me to be genuine and heartfelt responses to deep suffering.  I have immense sympathy for anyone who has come to believe that the universe is essentially irrational.  What is most remarkable to me is Dick's ambivalence about whether his/Horselover Fat's cosmogony is sense or sheer senselessness, and the nakedness with which he seems to confess that the fictionalization of his experiences, and perhaps his entire  career as a science fiction writer, represent a desperate attempt to corral the world into sense:

You can understand why Fat no longer knew the difference between fantasy and divine revelation--assuming there is a difference, which has never been established.  He imagiend that Zebra came from a planet in the star-system Sirius, had overthrown the Nixon tyranny in August 1974, and would eventually set up a just and peaceful kingdom on Earth where there would be no sickness, no pain, no loneliness, and the animals would dance with joy.

It is the highest praise I can give the novel that, while I was reading it--and perhaps even now--I couldn't differentiate between fantasy and divine revelation.  The second highest praise I can give it is that, though it serves mostly as a frame for the presentation of Dick's cosmogony, it remains a highly entertaining and deeply moving novel.  The mixture of grief and humor Dick applies to Fat's life is some of his best satire.  Here's Fat's suicide attempt:

What had saved his life initially emanated from a defect in the choke of his car; the choke hadn't opened properly as the engine warmed, and finally the engine had stalled.  Fat had made his way unsteadily back to the house and lain down on his bed to die.  The next morning he woke up, still alive, and begun to vomit up the digitalis.  That was the second thing which saved him.  The third thing came in teh form of all the paramedics in the world removing the glass and aluminum sliding door at the rear of Fat's house.  Fat had phoned his pharmacy somewhere along the line to get a refill on his Librium prescription; he had taken thirty Librium just before taking the digitalis.  The pharmacist had contact the paramedics.  A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.

I particularly liked the cynicism of Fat's skeptical friend Kevin, and the incredibly dark humor of Sherri, the awful, parasitic cancer patient that repays Fat's kindness with utter cruelty.  The book's second half, which becomes more clearly fictional (and includes plot elements lifted from Dick's first attempt to fictionalize his exegesis, Radio Free Albemuth), is unpredictable and absorbing: Fat and his friends make contact with a two-year old girl, Sophia, who seems to be the earthly avatar of VALIS who commissions them as her emissaries on Earth.

Certainly Dick felt that way--did he, or did he believe, that he had met someone like Sophia?  Or is the book's latter half merely a madman's rationalization his mad philosophy?  The book ends in an unsettlingly ambiguous place, and that its ambiguity speaks for Dick's rationality and reflectiveness makes it no less difficult to evaluate.  As we rev up for "a national discussion on mental illness," I value VALIS, as I do One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, for its urgent reminder that mental illness and mental health are not clear opposites, and that prophets and geniuses are not always easily indistinguishable from madmen.

Brent also reviewed this book in 2010.

The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis

But man, without God, born as he is unarmed, would have been obliterated by hunger, fear and cold; and if he survived these, he would have crawled like a slug midway between the lions and the lice; and if with incessant struggle he managed to stand on his hind legs, he would never have been able to escape the tight, warm, tender embrace of his mother the monkey... Reflecting on this, Jesus felt more deeply than he had ever felt before that God and man could become one.

I have never seen Martin Scorcese's Last Temptation of Christ, but I know the controversy: Willem Dafoe's Christ experiences a sort of dream sequence as he is crucified that tempts him with the life he might have lived as an ordinary man, married to Mary Magdalene, for whom he has long held romantic and sexual feelings.  That may depart fairly radically from the Gospels, but there is something appealing in the idea of a more human Jesus who suffers greatly under the yoke of his task and yearns for the simple pleasures of human life.  The modern, evangelical conception of Jesus seems to me to render the scenes of his temptation in the desert inexplicable.  How could Satan hope to penetrate such a bulwark of mildness?

I thought Kazantzakis' original novel might be a picture of that more human, more palpable Jesus.  I was pretty wrong.  I was hoping that it would put Jesus in a historical context, against a realistic backdrop of Roman Israel, but Kazantzakis' Temptation seeks to outdo the Bible itself in visions, signs, and wonders.  Here's one I picked at random from about two hundred:

Suddenly he uttered a cry.  He felt a horrible pain in his hands and feet, as though he had been pierced by nails.  He collapsed onto a rock, the sweat pouring over him in cold granules.  For a moment his head swam.  The earth sank away from under his feet and a fierce dark ocean spread itself out before him.  It was deserted but for a tiny red skiff which sailed bravely along, its sails puffed out, ready to burst... Jesus looked and looked, then smiled.  "It is my heart," he murmured, "it is my heart..."

That's fairly effective, isn't it?  The vision of Jesus' heart as a small red boat in a great dark ocean is very powerful.  But there is no ground to the novel, these visions come so frequently that there is no non-visionary mode to provide contrast.  By the end of the novel, I grew extremely weary of them.  Kazantzakis, I think, is trying to recreate some of the inherent wonder and mystery of the Gospels (and probably even moreso books like Daniel and Revalation).  But what is the point of replicating the style of those texts, which, let's be honest, succeed pretty well on their own?

And yet, I did like some of the ways that Kazantzakis manipulates the fundamental Gospel story: He makes Jesus not just a carpenter but a crossmaker, reviled by his community.  He makes Judas into a brother-rival figure that personifies a more militant, revolutionary vision of the Messiah as a Jewish warrior-hero.  Judas remains fiercely loyal to Jesus, though there is immense philosophical tension between them, and ultimately Judas' betrayal is depicted by Kazantzakis as a planned event.  (This is, I think, the basic idea represented in the recently discovered "Gospel of Judas," too.)  And yet, I would have enjoyed the tension of that relationship much more if I had felt that Jesus and Judas approached any reasonable human likeness.  In a book of symbols, they remain symbols, and get lost in the crowd.

The Good Pope by Greg Tobin

Giuseppe Roncalli. Pope John XXIII. Il Buono Papa. Whatever name he is called by, he is an emblem of the modern Catholic church, the initiator of Vatican II, which brought about massive and controversial changes to the Catholic church. I knew nothing about John XXIII when I received this book, and I was impressed reading his story.

Unlike many popes throughout church history, John XXIII didn’t come from an aristocratic or high church background. He was the son of a poor farmer who rose to prominence on, essentially, his good reputation and seemingly inexhaustible compassion and willingness to work for the poor. This led to his promotion through the Catholic ranks and his eventual election—by electors who probably expected him to be a placeholder pope—to the highest office in the Catholic church.

I am not Catholic or exceptionally well-versed in Catholic history, so I can’t speak for the accuracy of Tobin’s book. Based on the material presented here, John XXII comes off extremely well—devout without being a scold, committed to his work without neglecting his friends and family, able to lead without being haughty. My favorite anecdote in the book concerns Paul XXIII’s modifications to the papal gardens: he had a sprinkler installed with a remote control so he could soak cardinals as they walked through the garden. It’s a funny story, but also serves as a fitting metaphor for John’s entire papacy, as he attempted to puncture some of the unnecessary pretentions of the church, such as the Latin mass, without losing what he saw as truly important. Tobin does a good job through this short biography of making John XXIII an interesting character in spite of the fact that he seems to have very few dramatic flaws. The Good Pope is, then, primarily the story of a good man who does great things within his sphere of influence. There’s very little in the way of scandalous secrets or backroom dealings—with Rocalli, according to Tobin, what you see is what you get. 

Although I’m not Catholic, I am a Christian and found portions of John XXIII’s life inspiring. I wonder, however, how interesting a non-religious person would find this bio. I found the political aspects surrounding Vatican II extremely interesting, but John XXIII’s spiritual journey is undeniably the core of the book (Vatican II has hardly begun when John passes away). I suppose that, religious or not, we can all find something inspiring in a man who put feet to his beliefs so effectively and consistently. I’ll be interested to see what Carlton has to say about the book when he reviews it later this month.