Tournament of Novels at First Thoughts

If, like me, you think the annual college basketball championship is less interesting than a good novel, then you might want to take a gander at First Thoughts' Tournament of Novels. There's only one word for it: AllKindsOfAwesome.

First Thoughts, by the way, is the weblog of First Things, a journal founded by the late Fr. John Neuhaus, and now maintained by Christians of a more traditional persuasion. This tournament was set up by Joe Carter, an evangelical writer for FT. So people given to certain cultural fashions of the moment may be surprised to find that Left Behind and Father Elijah are not on the list. No, they have genuine, classic novels—and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is on the list—but it faces off against Dune in its first round, which probably isn't fair at all. Paul Muad'Dib FTW!

(Honestly though, the choice in sci-fi should have been between Dune and A Canticle for Leibowitz. Maybe next time.)

Speaking of the uncultured ignorance of traditional Christians, some readers are complaining that Daniel Deronda was chosen for George Eliot instead of Middlemarch. I haven't read either myself, but I have read Silas Marner, which hopefully mitigates my sin.

I hope The Brothers Karamazov wins. In the first round it's paired up against Anna Karenina. Sorry, Clemens, but this time I hope Tolstoy loses, and badly. ;-)

Update: Okay, I was wrong: the voters are clearly misinformed clods. How do I know? Dune lost to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Look, I've read both of them, multiple times, and I love the Hitchhiker's Guide series, but the dinner scene in Dune is by itself higher quality writing than anything Douglas Adams put together in his entire life.

On the other hand, the Hitchhiker's Guide series was dismissive of religion, whereas Dune is the story of a galactic messiah.

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Chesterton on monogamy

If I ever felt any allure from adultery, polygamy, or promiscuity, then marriage has cured me of it. One family is sufficiently expensive (and exhausting) for a lifetime. So I enjoyed the following passage from Orthodoxy:

Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.

The larger passage also makes for an enjoyable read. I've added some paragraphs breaks, since Chesterton was happy organize his thoughts in a somewhat German style*:

I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pairs in mere absence of mind.

The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice.

Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense for the cowslip.

Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

---

*By "German style" I mean long sentences and endless paragraphs. Although, from what I've heard Germans actually enjoy endless sentences and interminable paragraphs.

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Yes, he said it! Yet again!

Dear reader,

I am stubborn as a mule. Kindly pardon me while I record that once again in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky writes what some claim he never wrote, namely,

IF GOD DOES NOT EXIST,
THEN EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.

I've previously grumbled about this here and here.

In a conversation between Ivan Fyodorovich and Smerdyakov, the following exchange transpires between Ivan (the first) and Smerdyakov (the second):

Listen, you showed me that money, of course, in order to convince me.

Smerdyakov removed Isaac the Syrian from the money and set it aside.

Take the money with you, sir, take it away, Smerdyakov sighed.

Of course I shall take it away! But why are you giving it back to me, if you killed because of it.

I've got no use at all for it, sir, Smerdyakov said in a trembling voice, waving his hand. There was such a former thought, sir, that I could begin a life on such money in Moscow, or even more so abroad, I did have such a dream, sir, and even more so as "everything is permitted." It was true what you taught me, sir, because you told me a lot about that then: because if there's no infinite God, then there's no virtue either, and no need of it all. It was true. That's how I reasoned.

Did you figure it out for yourself? Ivan grinned crookedly.

With your guidance, sir.

So now you've come to believe in God, since you're giving back the money?

The Brothers Karamazov,
Part IV, Book 11, Chapter 8
"The Third and Last Meeting with Smerdyakov"
(emphasis added)

What's more, Dostoevsky has put these words on the lips of those who claim to be enlightened or rational people, who are too intelligent to be fooled by something as naïve as the superstitious belief in a god. Neither Smerdyakov nor Ivan disputes the idea. Ivan, I think, is starting to be troubled by it, as he sees how Smerdyakov—whose intelligence he only recently has begun to perceive—has applied that logic in a manner he finds repugnant.

I have by now lost count of how often this phrase, or something like it, appears in the novel. It becomes difficult to believe that anyone who's read and engaged the novel could assert with a straight face that Dostoevsky never wrote those words. Ironically, everyone I've seen to assert it forcefully happens not to believe that God exists… but we won't draw any false conclusions about their motives from Dostoevsky's theme.

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Dmitry Karamazov's not-so-clean underwear

I was thinking today about the chapter in The Brothers Karamazov where the prosecutors arrest Dmitry Karamazov. Dostoevsky remarks that Dmitry feels deeply humiliated that he must remove all his clothes, including his underwear, which was not very clean:

[Mitya] felt unbearably awkward: everyone else was dressed, and he was undressed, and—strangely—undressed, he himself seemed to feel guilty before them, and, above all, he was almost ready to agree that he had indeed suddenly become lower than all of them, and that they now had every right to despise him. "If everyone is undressed, it's not shameful, but when only one is undressed and the others are all looking—it's a disgrace!" flashed again and again through his mind. "It's like a dream, I've dreamed of being disgraced like this." But to take his socks off was even painful for him: they were not very clean, nor were his underclothes, and now everyone could see it. …

I wonder if Dostoevsky was consciously using this as a metaphor to describe the shame one feels when caught doing something wrong.

While wearing clean outer garments, one can perhaps imagine oneself to be clean all over, but when forced to strip down to one's underwear, and remove even them, and reveal that one is in fact soiled and dirty… Only an individual who considers filthiness to be normative and superior to cleanliness would not feel at least some disgrace, and a desire to present oneself as completely clean, all the way down.

Likewise, we like to wear a kind of "spiritual clothing" that makes us look clean and even fashionable to our peers. When instead these outer garments are stripped, revealing the less-than-clean undergarments that reveal our true spirituality—the deeds we perform when we think no one is looking; the disparaging words we utter about others in conversations that we fancy to be among like-thinking, right-thinking folk; the haughtiness and self-righteousness that we nurture within our hearts—when those are revealed for the filth they are, only an individual who values shameful deeds would not feel disgrace and the call to repentance. We all become Dmitry Karamazov in such moments.

I'm probably reading too much into this. One of the characters of the novel, "Stinking Lizaveta", seems to fit just this bill: she is completely oblivious to her filth, and if someone should clean her and give her new clothes, well—

Both Ilya's employers and Ilya himself, and even many compassionate townspeople, mainly merchants and their wives, tried more than once to clothe Lizaveta more decently than in her one shift, and towards winter always put a sheepskin coat and a pair of boots on her; but she, though she let them put everything on her without protesting, usually went away somewhere, most often to the porch of the cathedral church, and took off all they had given her—whether a kerchief, a skirt, or a sheepskin coat and boots—left it there, and went away barefoot, dressed as before only in her shift.

So Lizaveta seems to fit the bill of what I'm talking about—but for the fact that everyone considers here a "holy fool". (Very important in Tsarist Russian culture.)

Then again, she is Smerdyakov's mother…

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Yes, Dostoevsky said it! Again!

A while back—a long while back—I tried to explain, contra the received wisdom on many internet sites, that it is correct to quote Dostoevsky as having written in The Brothers Karamazov,

IF GOD DOES NOT EXIST, THEN EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.

You can follow that link back to the entry and judge for yourself whether my attempt succeeds.

I mentioned that I've been reading the novel again, for the first time in twenty years. I find that this idea arises elsewhere in the novel on fairly regular occasions, usually in association with Ivan, the "intellectual" brother. For example,

"You mean 'everything is permitted'? Everything is permitted, is that right, is it?" Ivan frowned, and suddenly turned somehow strangely pale. …"Yes, perhaps 'everything is permitted,' since the word has already been spoken. I do not renounce it."

The context is noteworthy: Alyosha and Ivan spend three chapters conversing about a number of "heavy concepts". (Ivan calls them "eternal questions" which obsess the "Russian boys" of their time.) The above quote occurs in the most famous chapter of the book, "The Grand Inquisitor", pg. 263 of the edition I have.

Ivan admits some sort of belief in God, so he isn't exactly convinced that everything is permitted, but it is also clear that he struggles with the same corrupt lifestyle that the father indulges. Ivan refers to projective geometry to explain his difficulty.

[I]f God exists and if he indeed created the earth, then, as we know perfectly well, he created it in accordance with Euclidean geometry, and he created human reason with a conception of only three dimensions of space. At the same time there were and are even now geometers and philosophers, even some of the most outstanding among them, who doubt that the whole universe, or, even more broadly, the whole of being, was created purely in accordance with Euclidean geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid cannot meet on earth, may perhaps meet somewhere in infinity. I, my dear, have come to the conclusion that if I cannot understand even that, then it is not for me to understand about God.

The argument appears to imply that God cannot logically exist, but Ivan does not in fact mean that, and seems to resign himself to an agnosticism. Although he has begun with a rather abstract and questionably argument, it later becomes clear that his struggle understanding projective geometry parallels (pun intended) his struggles understanding how a just God can create a world some of whose inhabitants, especially children, endure horrifyingly unjust suffering.

"It's not that I don't accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket."

"That is rebellion," Alyosha said softly, dropping his eyes.

Ivan's reference to the word's having been spoken already is to a conversation earlier in the novel where their brother Dmitry was present. The conversation appears on pg. 69 of the edition I have, in the chapter titled, Why Is Such a Man Alive? Quoting selectively (it's too long to reproduce),

(Miusov) "[Ivan says that,] were mankind's belief in its immortality to be destroyed, not only love but also any living power to continue the life of the world would at once dry up in it. Not only that, but then nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted, even anthropophagy. And even that is not all: he ended with the assertion that for every separate person, like ourselves for instance, who believes neither in God nor in his own immortality, the moral law of nature ought to change immediately into the exact opposite of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to the point of evildoing, should not only be permitted to man but should be acknowledged as necessary, the most reasonable, and all but the noblest result of his situation. …"

(Dmitry) "Allow me to be sure I've heard correctly: 'Evildoing should not only be permitted but even should be acknowledged as the most necessary and most intelligent solution for the situation of the godless person'!"

…

(the elder) "Can it be that you really hold this conviction about the consequences of the exhaustion of men's faith in the immortality of their souls?"

(Ivan) "Yes, it was my contention. There is no virtue if there is no immortality."

[emphasis added]

Thus in "The Grand Inquisitor" Ivan acknowledges as correct the statement that If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. (Miusov and Dmitry may use different words, but the essence is the same.) Ivan states explicitly that Mitenka's version is not so bad.

Now that I am halfway through reading it again, it occurs to me for the first time (I'm not as smart as I fancy) that perhaps this idea is the very theme of the novel. I am not alone in thinking this. Pevear and Volokhonsky write that the scholar Victor Terras is justified to think that the following passage holds the "master key" to interpreting the novel:

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it.

Again, once could summarize this argument as, If God does not exist, everything is permitted.

Thus the assertions that Dostoevsky did not write, let alone mean to write, such a statement, strike one as truly bizarre. Whether he agrees with the statement is immaterial (although it appears to this reader that at the very least Dostoevsky wants to believe it). He does make statements equivalent to it, and even makes that statement, as I documented in the previous post.

In case you doubt me, perhaps the Elder Zosima's words will convince you:

[I]f you have no God, what crime is there to speak of?

(pg. 315, "From Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima")

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The House of the Seven Gables

I wanted to listen to a book on CD-ROM on my drive from Virginia back to Mississippi. I obtained The House of the Seven Gables and listened to about half of it. I subsequently read the rest of it from a real, live book. (I've started taking the bus to work, and I need something to do.)

The biggest discovery I made from this novel is that good novels don't require much in the way of a plot. On the other hand, a good novel requires some sort of plot at least, and personally I found the novel a tad wanting in this regard. I can sum up the entire plot as follows: (I marked the spoilers. Don't read them if you want to read the novel & be, well, not surprised, but something.)

• Old, rich man connives to steal land from an old, poor man, only it ain't stealin' because he did it legally by framing the guy for a hangable offense.
• Old, poor man curses old, rich man from the gallows: God will give him blood to drink!
• Old, rich man builds enormous mansion on said land, but on opening day (so to speak) he is found dead, with blood in his mouth. Creepy insinuations are made, but dismissed by the narrator.
• Deed to giant tracts of land that were supposedly promised by British King to dead rich man disappeared. If they even existed, which maybe they didn't.
• Fast forward 6 or 7 generations. Old, poor woman is the sole descendant of dead rich man to occupy the house. Her brother is in jail for murdering his father. Her cousin is a rich judge, respected by society, but for some inexplicable reason the old, poor woman hates him passionately.
• Also occupying the house is a young, poor, adventurous man who dabbles in ideas that society frowns on.
• Young, pretty relative of old, rich woman comes to visit the mansion.
• At about the same time, imprisoned brother of old, poor woman returns home from jail.
• A lot of talking about the fragile, broken mental state of the imprisoned brother, the saccharine sweetness of the young, pretty relative, and how she makes everyone instantly happy just by… by being her young, pretty self!
• Young, poor tenant of house reveals to young, pretty relative of landlady that he has written a story based on one of her earlier relatives, one of the dead, poor man's descendants, and how her relative's father, in an attempt to reclaim the deed, more or less sold his daughter to the poor man's descendant's witchery. Also called hypnotism.
• Amazingly, the young, poor tenant nearly hypnotizes the young, pretty relative merely by relating his story! So the reader isn't the only one falling asleep. (I'm not being facetious; Hawthorne himself remarks at one point that the reader must be falling asleep.)
• Poor, young relative leaves town to visit her family a short while.
• (Cue the Wolf's theme from Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.) The rich judge comes calling for his formerly imprisoned relative while the poor, young tenant is also out. He wishes to extract from him a secret which will enrich his descendants for generations more to come. As if he isn't rich enough! (Again, I am not being facetious; Hawthorne himself makes some remark to this effect.)
• Rich judge quarrels with old, poor woman. She loses the quarrel and leaves to call her poor, half-crazy brother. He is not in his room! He finds her instead, and shows her that the judge is dead, with blood in his mouth! He then takes her out of the city on a cold, blustery day. He is mysteriously joyful and energetic!
• The judge is eventually found. Murder is suspected.
• The old pair take a train (a new invention of the time) out of town. The old man praises much technology, such as the train, but curses other technology, such as the telegraph. Why does he curse the telegraph? For making it easier to catch murderers. That robs the murderer of his due chance to make his getaway. (I really am not being facetious! He says this!) He and his sister debark the train early, at a stop where the only shelter from the elements is an abandoned church. He was not, it must be noted, previously a church-goer.
• SPOILER SPOILER SPOILEREveryone returns to the mansion. It is discovered that the judge died a natural death; that his physique, so common to his family, has this weakness that I didn't quite understand but it runs in the family and all the doctors swear to it. In fact, the poor old man's father died the same way, and people come to understand that the dead rich judge had misled everyone to believe that the poor old man had murdered his own father, when the man had merely died after quarreling with the rich judge (who at the time was a dissipated young man, not an old, rich judge).
• SPOILER SPOILER SPOILERIt is further discovered that the poor young tenant with the mysterious skill at hypnotism is a descendant of the poor old man whose property had been robbed by the rich old man. How fortunate that the pretty young relative and he had recently declared their love for each other! They can marry and make peace between the families.
• SPOILER SPOILER SPOILEROh, and it turns out that the missing deed was hidden behind a portrait of the rich, old man.

If you haven't fallen asleep yet: That's it. That's the story. Maybe in Hawthorne's time this was original, but with our modern attention spans the movie version will last all of ten minutes. No explosions, no wars, no revealing outfits. I am being facetious here.

I would be surprised if anyone failed to guess the entire outcome of the story pretty early on. Not only did I guess everything except the part about the deed, I had likewise guessed while reading The Scarlet Letter that SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Dimmesdale was the father of Hester Prynne's child.END SPOILER I guessed that back when I had to read it in high school, that is, when I was dumber than I am now. I also guessed it within the first few pages. Hawthorne's record at impressing me with plot devices is, so far, 0 wins, 2 losses.

As I pointed out, however, the strength of this book is not in its plot. Besides, in Hawthorne's time these plot devices might not have become so hackneyed as they are today. In any case I enjoyed the book, and I haven't told you the most interesting parts of the story. Hawthorne explores the characters thoroughly, and once I passed through my annoyance at the excess sweetness, I found myself enjoying the characters. Especially the little devourer of gingerbread elephants, soldiers, and the rest.

Hawthorne also has a wonderful way with words. I enjoyed listening to or reading his descriptions of the mansion, of the weather, of how the characters looked, and so on. Hawthorne invests a lot of effort into scenery, and the reader feels placed into the very location. I like Dostoevsky a great deal, but I'm rereading The Brothers Karamazov at the moment and, to be honest, the same level of detail isn't there.

The point of the story, in case you haven't guessed it already, is made glaringly obvious by Hawthorne by the end:

It is a truth (and it would be a very sad one, but for the higher hopes which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought his irreparable ruin behind him.

Hawthorne doesn't score high on the subtlety meter. It's still a good novel, even if Hawthorne insists it's not a novel, but a "romance".

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A modern Mr. Wisley, sans the dough

My wife and I watched Becoming Jane this evening. It's a highly dramatized description of Jane Austen's life. My wife's a fan of her novels—it's on account of her that I know what little I know of Austen and her works*—and she enjoyed the film.

One of the characters is "Mr. Wisley". On the surface he is rather conventional, slow to speak, and clumsy when he does speak. Or dance.

Watching him agonize through an early conversation with Jane, my wife laughed, "That is you!" She made this observation only moments after Jane's father said of Mr. Wisley—and I quote—"He's a booby."

Had I a quicker wit, I would offer a worthy rejoinder. Unfortunately, she seems to be correct. I am a lot like Mr. Wisley, only shorter, poorer, and not so blonde.

Boy does that explain a lot.

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*After they forced me to read Wuthering Heights in high school, I was for a long time completely disinclined to read any classic novels that smacked of romance. This ruled out more or less all the female authors of that period, especially those whose last name was Brontë. Thankfully George Elliot was likewise disinclined when she wrote Silas Marner, as was Mary Shelley when she wrote Frankenstein, or I would have zero experience of women authors in classical literature.

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Lucinie and Mother Teresa

The Hattiesburg library recently held a used book sale. One of the discards I acquired is a translation of a 1958 French novel titled Lucinie, by Marie-Louise Pascal Dasque. Mme. Dasque was the wife of a French farmer in Algeria back when Algeria was still a French colony. She sets her tale in Algeria, and the story suggests strongly that the French who lived there dwelled in blissful ignorance that they would not be masters of the land much longer.*

This is all strange enough, but stranger still is how the book itself sparkles with pre-conciliar Catholic spirituality, in the best sense of the word. (All in my humble opinion, of course.) Lucinie serves as a member of an order of religious who nurse the sick and dying. She shows tendencies of contemplation and loves Jesus deeply. She appears not to struggle much with the order's rule. She is simple and innocent, yet intelligent. (Simplicity, innocence, and intelligence are not mutually exclusive, notwithstanding the demons' howls.)

Yet Lucinie is not a cardboard cutout. What I enjoy about the novel are passages such as the following:

[Lucinie] preferred to take her stand on the life of Christ, reliving it in her imagination. She discussed it mentally, going over the details again and again, describing to herself the physical characteristics of appearance and of scene, until at times, though very infrequently, a brief fleeting vision called forth her full concentration and made her ready to recapture with all the concentrated force of her emotions the image that had forever disappeared.

This practice she loved dearly, yet it did not achieve contact with God. Rather did He flee, the moment she tried to reach Him... How did she know that [He was present]? Who gave her such an assurance? In fact, she had no such assurance, but its absence did not change her belief. And now for some considerable time this sense of union had left her or at least had suffered a qualitative change, becoming less certain and lacking sweetness.

Sister Lucinie again addressed her companion. "I don't know whether or not I believe in God. ..."

Ordinarily I would find such a statement unremarkable, and move on. Not in this case.

Here, a devout Catholic grandmother, a farmer's wife raised on Catholic religious education before the Second Vatican Council, exhibits a profound awareness that deeply religious people often experience prolonged periods of anguish, uncertainty, and a sense of abandonment by God. Yet when Mother Teresa's letters are published more than half a century after Mme. Dasque's book, well-educated people express shock and amazement at the notion that a deeply religious Christian could feel abandoned by God—despite the fact that a casual perusal of Catholic spiritual literature makes it plain that Mother Teresa was not the first to experience emptiness, and will not be the last. Unless I have read too much into Catholic writers like St. John of the Cross, we should all hope to experience this at some point; it is a sign of spiritual maturation.

The book must have been quite popular in France, considering the fact that I am reading an English translation that came out shortly after. The jacket cover quotes positive reviews by Le Monde, La Croix, La Cité, and Etude. The quote from La Cité remarks,

[This novel] opens the door to a series of works of real value.

A half-hearted Google search reveals no further information on Mme. Dasque, no later novels. Only this one book appears, in antique bookstores. Given the subsequent turmoil in Algeria, there may indeed have been nothing further.

I'll write further on the novel itself once I finish it.

---

*Throughout the first half of the book, not a single Algerian of non-French descent has appeared—not one. The only sign of unrest is a vague mention to some communists. The uninformed reader could easily conclude that Algeria is a province of southern France.

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The Children of Men

I don't think God bargains."

Oh yes He does. I may not be religious but I do know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But he's supposed to be just. If He wants belief He'd better provide some evidence.

That He exists?

That He cares.

Imagine that humanity has been infertile for 25 years, and the hope of our species' propagation has evaporated like so much fog. Scientists have no idea why this is, although the fault appears to lie with men, who can no longer make women pregnant. Governments have spent enormous sums trying to solve this problem, to no avail. The youngest generation, called the Omegas, has been pampered and coddled, but they also turn out to be infertile. As a bonus, they turn out to be aloof, indolent, and wicked.

If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

The oldest generation, meanwhile, manifests its loss of hope by committing suicides. The British government helps them along by organizing the Quietus, a ritual where people are rowed out to sea and collectively drowned. On his fiftieth birthday, the divorced, despairing Oxford historian Theo Faron sits down to write a journal. He begins by noting news reports that world's youngest person has just died in a barroom brawl.

This is the world of P. D. James' The Children of Men. Not the most pleasant of places. News of universal infertility—from which the animals were, maddeningly enough, exempt—at first prompted riots, but in Britain at least a sense of calm was restored by the ascension of the Warden, a certain Xan Lypiatt who promised peace, comfort, and security. He delivered on that promise, and Britons, for the most part, accepted the humiliations that went along with it. Humanity isn't perishing in a bang, but in a whimper.

Shortly after Theo begins his novel, he is approached by a small group of malcontents who eventually call themselves the Five Fishes. A more pathetic, laughable bunch of would-be rebels you could not assemble:

• Rolf, the would-be leader and, perhaps, would-be replacement to the Warden;
• Julian, his physically deformed, Christian wife, whose masculine name is attributed to a mixup at the hospital;
• Gascoigne, a former Grenadier offended at the Warden's appropriation of the Grenadiers as part of his personal army,
• Miriam, a former midwife of African descent; and
• Luke, a priest.

(It is a sign of the times that people who read this book assume that Luke is a Catholic priest, James a Catholic author, and the novel has a Catholic theme. In reality, James is an Anglican and a Lady of Parliament to boot, Luke is an Anglican priest who reads from the Book of Common Prayer, and as for the novel... well, I would call it "catholic" in the sense of having universal themes, but not "Catholic" in the sense of being associated with the Church of that name.)

The Fishes want Faron to approach the Warden and ask for some changes: mostly democracy, but they also want the penal colony on the Isle of Man closed and the Quietus stopped. On this last part, they encourage Faron to attend an actual Quietus, so that he can see what it is really like. They hint that it is not so voluntary as the media suggest.

Faron visits a Quietus, and notices that most of the old people appear to be drugged. What sets off his alarm, however, is that one of the old women tries to escape. He runs out to help her, and is beaten by the police. Later, he find a bed and breakfast and asks the landlady if she saw the Quietus. The woman corrects him emphatically; there have been no Quietus in that town.

This convinces Faron to visit the council. He is actually cousin to the Warden, and spent a lot of time with him as a child, and later spent some time as his advisor, although none of his advice was taken. He has no trouble seeing the Warden and his advisors, but, as he expects, has no success and convincing them even to hold an election—which, he points out, the Warden would win anyway. The Warden and his advisors ask Theo who has put these ideas into his head, conceding only that the Quietus he saw was "mismanaged", and steps have been taken to ensure it won't happen again. They dismiss him with a veiled threat to keep out of trouble.

Theo, for his part, has no interest in becoming a revolutionary, but finds himself drawn to Julian. He tells her that if she needs anything, to let him know. He then leaves for an extended vacation in Europe, trying to escape thoughts of Julian, of the Fishes, of his former wife, and of the daughter he killed nearly twenty years prior.

From here on, the novel offers us the usual share of twists and turns. Some of them are not unexpected; others are. Julian gets knocked up by a man who is not her husband. This is, of course, a major event in human history, one that would interest the governments of the world, and she wants none of it. At her insistence, the Fishes urge Theo to help them get her to a place far from the Warden's propagandistic clutches. Omegas being Omegas, this effort is doomed. Rolf learns of the child's true parentage, goes bananas, and disappears, giving everyone cause for concern.

The story does not offer any new insights explaining the human condition, unless you think it particularly profound that people like having babies, even need to have babies so much that they will baptize kittens in their stead.

What the story does offer is a repeat of an old insight. Although the book never cites it, I was repeatedly reminded of this passage from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians,

Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God.

As I mentioned, the Five Fishes are a laughable bunch of incompetents. Theo himself laughs at them, yet he finds himself drawn ever closer to them. He even starts to consider the possiblity that God may exist.

It's a fun little novel. It's interesting how the characters. One can have fun with their names: the protagonist is Theo, from the Greek word for God; the midwife is Miriam, from the Hebrew name for Jesus' mother; the mother is named Julian, perhaps for Julius Cæsar, in whose adopted son's empire Christ was born; the priest is named Luke, like the author of the Gospel written for Christians who were not originally Jews; and so forth. That's probably all coincidence, but it's interesting at least that James was clearly not trying to come up with her own take on the Christmas story. I don't see why she would have made the names so misleading if so.

This isn't to say that the story isn't informed by traditional Christian ideas. I found it refreshing that James chose to use Christian themes to illuminate this story:

• Humanity is flawed, and deeply so.
• God has, apparently, chosen to start over, but he still loves his creation, and so uses it, flawed as it is, to create what is new.
• Salvation does not come from those who hold power in this world. They are unable to admit their own impotence, seek to control and create anew, and fail.
• The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (also from 1 Corinthians)
• Every human life has both dignity and potential, even the lives of the ailing elderly, the deformed, and the unborn.
• Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. (Psalm 90·1, as prayed at one point by Theo)

This brings me to a note on the film based on the novel. Don't expect any exploration of these messages. People have referred to the film as changing the politics of the book. If only! The film dissects the book, turns it inside out, genetically modifies it, and spiritually empties it. A few of the changes are clever, but most are merely artistic self-gratification. If you rent the DVD, you get a few bonus materials, including a discussion of the film by a philosopher who apparently watched a different film. I say this based on his claim that the oppressive social realities are not thrust into the viewer's face, but kept in the background, and this demonstrates the director's mastery of his art. I shut off the interview at that point, since I recall repeated scenes of immigrants crowded into cages on street corners, abused by police and passers by, a bomb exploding in a café accompanied by insinuations that the government planted it, police brutality, the stark contrast between the dreary lives of ordinary folks and the opulence of the privileged classes, and so forth. In short, you lose all of the novel's development of oppressive social realities—and in the novel, they really are kept in the background—and instead you get a lot of modern left-wing dogmatism. Most telling, perhaps, is the director's statement that after he rewrote the initial script, he didn't want to "start second guessing things" by reading the novel. On top of that, he reveals in an online interview an impression that the film is close to the book. Only in the same way that A Wizard of Earthsea and Starship Troopers resemble the book: superficially, at best. If you're into that sort of thing, go ahead and rent the movie. I'm not saying that the novel is a work of great literature and this film is some sort of artistic crime, but the novel does deserve better treatment than this.

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Bede's review of the God Delusion

Dr. James Hannam, whose website I discovered many years ago and to my great benefit, recently received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. I believe his field is the History of Religion and Science. His weblog will quite sadly enter hibernation, but he's going out in style with a thoughtful review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. It's worth a read.

Edit: Added a link to the review. Duh.

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Book quiz

I don't usually take up these internet meme challenges, and when I do, I don't post them here. But this one might redeem me after my recent admission that I don't recall reading any books last year. (I presume that math textbooks don't count.) You can thank Brandon at Siris and Elliot at Claw of the Conciliator for this.

Directions: Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole, put a cross infront of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk* the ones you’ve never heard of.

The ones without any markings or formatting are books to which I feel perfectly indifferent. The thought of reading them neither fills me with horror or happiness.

(You'll notice that I've stricken out all of the Harry Potter books. I refuse to read those as a matter of principle. Don't ask me what the principle is, because it's not to read Harry Potter books. If I had a deeper reason than that, it wouldn't be a matter of principle, now, would it? And why are all those books in this list anyway, while only one—count 'em, one—Dostoevsky novel is here?)

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) (A tall, rugged, silent, dark-haired haired English nobleman with a dark past striding across a field in the light of dawn in his bedrobe and the flush of emotional self-realization, crying out to Keira Knightley how he loves her? None of that for me, thank you very much.)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. †The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. †The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. †The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. *Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. *A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. *Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King) (Misery was misery enough.)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) (although I'm told it's overrated and terrible)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. *The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. †The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) (Positively one of the worst experiences of my life. It's shame enough that they kill trees to publish this trash. That they then call it "literature" is baffling.)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom) (I'm told this is a great book. I simply have zero interest in it.)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. *The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) (I'm not sure why I want to read it, but I do.)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. *The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. *I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. *The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) (Another candidate for the "I can't believe they kill trees to publish this garbage" category.)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. *The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. *Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. †Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) (Anyone who has the time to read novels by Tolstoy desperately needs to get out more.)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) (This was really good.)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb) (The title interested me, until I read the summary on the back cover.)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) (Great book.)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens) (I need to read more Dickens.)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. *The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood) (Overrated ad hominem theocrat phobia from twenty years ago. I'm exaggerating, but I've heard of nothing in modern anti-religious fiction that wasn't in this novel, and Atwood had the merit of being a talented author.)
60. *The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy) (See comment above on Anna Karenina).
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice) (I've heard it praised by too many people whom I wouldn't want dating my daughter.)
65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)
66. *One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. †Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) (One of the best surprises of my life.)
69. †Les Miserables (Hugo) (One of the worst surprises of my life.)
70. †The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. *Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell) (Same as Interview with the Vampire.)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett) (The movie was bad enough.)
76. *The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. *A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. *The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White) (What American schoolchild hasn't had some teacher read it to the class?—that counts, btw, doesn't it?)
81. *Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. *Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. *Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. †Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. *The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. *Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. *In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding) (What a great book!)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. *The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) (The only thing this has in common with the film is the first scene.)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. *White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. *A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Strange but true: a high-school English substitute teacher told our class that the first few chapters of Ulysses are about a booger on a rock on the beach. I was gullible enough to believe him at the time. Does anyone know if it's true?

As you see, I haven't heard of a lot of those books. More than 25%, in fact. Hmm, so much for "redeeming" myself. Okay, I'll try again. Here are some books that I've read, can recommend, and either own a copy or plan to. They're better than most of the books I've read on the list above.

Classic literature:
1. The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)
2. Demons (Dostoevsky)
3. Silas Marner (George Eliot, who despite the name was a woman)
4. The Odyssey (Homer) (much much better than The Illiad)
Italian literature:
5. The Late Mattia Pascal (Luigi Pirandello)
6. Pinocchio (Carlo Collodi) (The book is significantly different from the Disney film, and much better. This story is bright, fun, and splendid. Children should read this instead of the dim, depressing, and pointless Bridge to Terabithia.)
7. Few Returned (Eugenio Corti)
8. Trial and Death of Stalin (Corti) (described in a series of earlier posts on this weblog: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
9. Letter to a Child Never Born (Oriana Fallaci) (very beautiful, very sad story of an unmarried woman's unexpected pregnancy, which developed serious complications)
10. Insciallah (Fallaci, described in an earlier post on this weblog)
Modern literature:
11. The Last Temptation of Christ (Nikos Kazantzakis) (I wrote about it earlier)
Philosophy and Religion
12. The Apology of Socrates, Crito, Phaedo (Plato)
13. The Mind's Road to God (St. Bonaventure)
14. Purgatory (Dante Alighieri) (I haven't finished it but this is much better than Inferno, as evidenced by beautiful passages like this one)
Science Fiction:
15. Who? (Algys Budris, or however you spell his name)
16. Time and Again (Jack Finney)
17. Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein) This is essentially a militarist-libertarian screed. But if Ayn Rand's books can be in the list above, I can put Starship Troopers in my list. Combining militarism and libertarianism took more imagination, I think, than most everything else Heinlein wrote, and he did a good job of it if you ask me, not that anyone did. Too bad the film made it look like mindless pulp fiction.)
18. A Canticle for Liebowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.)
Poetry
19. The Collected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (truly unique poetry)
Math (well, I am a mathematician after all, and this is actually quite good)
20. How to Solve It (George Polya)

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...as if confused by an excess of virtue

I want to present the beginning of Canto VIII from Dante's Purgatorio.

This passage contains some beautiful allusions, many of which are difficult to recognize today, even for devout Catholics. I find the last verse translated below especially intriguing. Dante apparently expected his readers to be familiar with them. See how many you can catch!

I'll go ahead and note that Te Lucis Ante is a chant that monks (and sometimes I) sing before going to bed. I wonder how well-known it was in Dante's day. It is a rather sweet hymn, so perhaps I will add it to the list of translations on this weblog. Translations are available elsewhere.

Era già l'ora che volge il disio ai navicanti e 'ntenerisce il core lo dì c'han detto ai dolci amici addio;	It was now the hour that changes sailors' desires, and softens the hearts of those who have bid farewell to friends,
e che lo novo peregrin d'amore punge, se ode squilla di lontano che paia il giorno pianger che si more;	and that pricks the new pilgrim of love, if he hears a far-off ringing that sounds like the tears of a dying day;
quand'io incominciai a render vano l'udire e a mirare una de l'alme surta, che l'ascoltar chiedea con mano.	when I began to pay no heed to the chatter, but to behold one of the risen souls, who beckoned by her* hands that we listen.
Ella giunse e levò ambo le palme, ficcando li occhi verso l'oriente, come dicesse a Dio: "D'altro non calme."	She joined and raised both her palms, fixing her eyes to the east, as if she were saying to God, "Nothing else will calm me."
Te lucis ante sì devotamente le uscio di bocca e con sì dolci note, che fece me a me uscir di mente;	So devotedly did the Te Lucis Ante float from her lips, and with such sweet notes, that it lifted me out from my very mind,
e l'altre poi dolcemente e devote seguitar lei per tutto l'inno intero, avendo li occhi a le superne rote.	and the other [souls] sweetly and devotedly followed her through the entire hymn, setting their eyes on the celestial orb.
Aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero, ché 'l velo è ora ben tanto sottile, certo che 'l trapassar dentro è leggero.	Dear reader, here sharpen your eyes to see the truth, for the veil is now quite subtle, and passing within it is certainly easy.
Io vidi quello essercito gentile tacito poscia riguardare in sue quasi aspettando, palido e umile;	I saw that noble assembly then look quietly upwards pale and humble, as if they awaited something;
e vidi uscir de l'alto e scender giue due angeli con due spade affocate, tronche e private de le punte sue.	and I saw emerge from on high and come down two angels with two fiery swords blunted and deprived of their blades.
Verdi come fogliette pur mo nate erano in veste, che da verdi penne percosse traean dietro e ventilate.	As green as newly budded leaves was their vesture, rustled by the beating of green wings and trailing behind them in the wind.
L'un poco sovra a noi a star si venne, e l'altro scese in l'opposita sponda, sì che la gente in mezzo si contenne.	One of them came to stand a little above us, and the other descended onto the opposite bank, placing the crowd between them.
Ben discernea in lor la testa bionda; ma ne la faccia l'occhio si smarria, come virtù ch'a troppo si confonda.	We saw clearly their blonde heads; but in gazing on their faces the eye lost its way, as if confused by an excess of virtue.

*Although I transliterate faithfully Dante's use of the feminine, the Italian word alma is feminine, and can apply to men or women. So, the soul could have been a man. But, it doesn't matter, so who cares!

By the way, you can find Purgatorio both in English and in the original Florentine (not quite the same as modern Italian) at Project Gutenberg.

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Top books I read in 2006

Elliot at Claw of the Conciliator has a list of the best books he read in 2006. He suggests that readers supply their own list, so here's mine:

• uhm...

Pretty sad, isn't it? I can't remember a single book. Maybe I haven't had the time to read?

Or have I? I certainly have some time outside work, but some of it I spent on the weblog, and a lot of it I spend with my family. That's pretty demanding. Is that reason enough to have read nothing that I can recall? It's pretty embarassing, given the fact that I started this weblog with a series of posts comparing and contrasting Dostoevsky and Hugo, and that I have a rather long section of posts in the "Literature" section of the archive. I'm not the most prolific reader, but I do read, after all. Or rather, I did once.

So, having failed miserably in 2006, I present the following list of books I resolve to work on in 2007:

• I Promessi Sposi, by Alessandro Manzoni. People who have read it tell me it's among the greatest works of Italian literature, and one of the greatest novels of all time. We'll see about that.
• Purgatorio, by Dante Alighieri. I read Inferno some years back. I actually started to read Purgatorio a couple of months ago, and lost track. That reminds me of something (see the next post).
• Uhm... to be determined.

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A Bone to pick

One of my favorite comic boo—er, graphic novels is Jeff Smith's Bone. I only managed to collect one of the original comics, but I did get my hand on a few of the hardback editions of the collected series. The first two or three are the best, when the Bone cousins are exploring a world into which they accidentally wandered. It's lighthearted, innocent, and optimistic. Then a "serious" story emerges, and it's all downhill from there. I don't mean that in a bad way: simply put, things become dark, and an epic story emerges and unfolds. I think I would have liked it more if Smith hadn't attempted to make an epic out of it, but the plot remains interesting, the art remains gorgeous, and the stupid, stupid rat creatures remain entertaining, so I did finish the whole thing.

My son also likes Bone. I don't have all the hardcover editions, so he hasn't read some of them. I recently bought volumes 3 and 4 (I already had volumes 1, 2, 5, and 9) and I saw to my dismay that the new publisher, Scholastic, has colorized them.

At first, I thought it was awful. Black and white comics don't often take well to colorizing; there's a certain warmth to a well-done comic that turns ugly when you colorize it. By the end of the second comic, I decided the problem was really my attachment to the older versions, and the colorization is excellent.

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Kazantzakis, Discussion, Judas and DaVinci

Kazantzakis

Does anyone remember The Last Temptation of Christ? The book, written by Nikos Kazantzakis (of Zorba the Greek fame) came out a long time ago. The film came out when I was in high school. It attracted attention and viewers, including me — although I couldn't watch it at the time, since it was rated R, I was 17, and my parents refused to accompany me.

(An explanation for non-Americans: cinemas here aren't supposed to admit viewers younger than 18 to movies that are rated R, unless they are accompanied by a parent. In reality, they did it quite often back then, but not when public outrage is stoked by a particular film.)

What was I to do? Being the bookish type, I checked Kazantzakis' book out from the public library and read it instead. It contains a number of intriguing ideas. It contains heretical ideas, as well, but this is a work of fiction, after all. I was impressed that Kazantzakis was willing to take seriously the notion that Christ was so fully human that he would endure such extremes of temptation.

The book posed no danger to my faith; I could appreciate Kazantzakis' imagination without taking his flights of fancy too seriously. The example that sticks out in my mind is the protagonist's fantasy of a menage-a-trois. Episodes like that reveal a great deal more about Kazantzakis than they do about Jesus.

Of course, I wasn't aware of that when I set out to read the book; I was only aware that its theme was Jesus' last temptation on the cross, which involved abandoning the cross, and taking up a sensual life with Mary Magdalene. This appealed to me strongly. I would point out to people that it's not far from the Gospel's depiction of the Garden of Gethsemane:

Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done.

Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.

My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet, not as I will, but as you will.

There is certainly room for development here, in a fictional sense.

As I said, there were jewels to be found in the book. Kazantzakis described the tension between Jesus' human and divine natures using the Curse. The details escape me — I read it more than 15 years ago, remember — but we first meet the Curse as the sound of footsteps following following Jesus. Jesus turns, but sees no one there. The image is effective at communicating a fundamental Christian idea, that Jesus in his divinity knew beforehand that he must die, although in his humanity he surely struggled with the notion.

Both the novel and the film caused a ruckus. Many theaters refused to show the film, and a number of those that did suddenly began enforcing the R rating. They attracted protests all the same. A number of unhappy people made dramatic remarks about Christians being persecuted, and about this being a sign that Christ would return any day now. A number of other unhappy people made drastic remarks about the first group posing a threat to free speech. All of this was nonsense, but people say some pretty dumb things when they let the fire in their hearts rule the machinery in their brains.

My U.S. Government teacher, a liberal and lapsed Catholic, went to see it. He shook his head in class the next day and remarked that It's a badly made film. I watched it on video some years later, and I had to agree. It's terribly edited. Yet it attracted viewers, such as my government teacher, who ordinarily wouldn't have watched it. Why? because well-meaning clergy and laity lambasted it.

There's nothing some people don't enjoy so much as watching controversial films, even those that are badly made.

From Kazantzakis to Judas

I said the film posed no danger to my faith. What did pose a danger to my faith was the absolute refusal of people at my church to talk about it, or even to discuss the issues involved. I was hyper-responsible, and struggled with fantasies of abandoning my responsibilities. I also struggled with sexual fantasies all the time (again, I was 17). Why should it be so outrageous to imagine that Jesus might have struggled with similar fantasies, especially if he triumphs over them?

I couldn't get an answer. Any attempt at conversation with the adult Christians whom I respected was shut down pretty quickly. I sensed strong discomfort even with the idea that Jesus might not have been too thrilled about dying. I asked questions because I wanted to understand; their reaction implied that my questions were a disingenuous guise for dissent.

I educated myself. Over the years, this has led to me to quite unorthodox areas. In my youth, I had read about apocryphal gospels. Search hard enough in a good university or on the internet, and you will find a few. I found and read the Gospel of Thomas. I recognized it from its very first sentence as a Gnostic scripture (These are the hidden sayings...). Studying the issue, I concluded that Gnosticism wasn't Christianity, but a parody of it, and a bad one at that. Gnostic Gospels claimed to reveal "secret" knowledge that Christ kept hidden from those fools who founded the canonical faith, sharing them with the wiser apostles instead (typically Thomas, Mary Magdalene, Judas). A number of such gospels are known, and fragments of have been found. I acquainted myself with a few other apocryphal gospels, but nothing impressed me.

I wasn't impressed by the recent claims of the rediscovery of a "lost" gospel. The Gospel of Judas is certainly not a "forgotten" Gospel in the strictest sense of the word. St. Irenaeus mentioned it in the second century:

They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.

Even less did it surprise me that the Gospel of Judas begins with the same promise that begins the Gospel of Thomas, to reveal "secret" teachings.

An interesting question I've had since hearing of the Gospel of Judas is, Did Irenaeus give a faithful summary of its text? It's an obvious question to ask; I haven't seen it answered anywhere.

Typically, Americans Christians are ignorant of their faith. Most Christians wouldn't know Gnosticism from a hole in the ground, and many of them would embrace some tenets of Gnosticism (our true selves are immaterial beings of light, not the matter in which we've been trapped) over the tenets of the ancient Apostles' Creed (I believe in the resurrection of the body...) Of course, it's impossible to educate oneself on things that aren't discussed, due either to lack of resources or to discomfort or to... whatever.

From Judas to DaVinci

At Mass the other day, our priest asked, How many of you have read, or plan to watch, The DaVinci Code? A lot of hands went up. Mine didn't; I have no interest in conspiracy theories, and (being bookish, again) I was aware of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Get your hands up high, the priest encouraged with a smile, I really want to know... He raised his own hand, confessing, With all the controversy, I wanted to educate myself, so I read it. It's a great read, a real page-turner.

Then he asked, How many of you have watched Mel Gibson's Passion? This time, my hand went up. Other hands went up or down, or stayed up or down. My son surprised me by raising his hand. I looked down at him. Ты смотрел? I asked. Да, дома, he affirmed, somewhat defensively. Wow. The things that go on in my house that I don't know about. To think he's only 9.

(My wife tells me that I did in fact know, and even watched a little with them, but I've simply forgotten. Go figure.)

Now, the priest continued, How many of you have forbidden your children from watching The Passion, because you think it's too violent? My hand remained raised. I don't think I ever forbade him explicitly, but I had consciously not invited him when my wife and I watched it. I am a little put off by Mel Gibson's obsession with the grotesque. By this I mean not the scourging at the pillar, but the demons who torment Judas, the crow that plucks out the wicked thief's eye, and other such fictions. Such gratuitous spiritual violence presents an inaccurate vision of God.

Isn't that interesting? the priest remarked. We'll forbid our children from watching a film because we think it's violent, but not forbid them from reading a story that does violence to our faith.

The homily did not dwell on this; he used it as a plug for a seminar the parish will have on the book and the film. He cited the DaVinci Code and the Gospel of Judas as evidence of a three-pronged attack on our faith, bulding on what I remembered as an excellent Easter homily on that topic.

You may have guessed that I disagree profoundly with the tone, if not with the substance.

If nothing else, it is a self-defeating strategy. Nothing riles people up and encourages them to watch a film so much as denouncing it from the pulpit. It turned them out to watch the Last Temptation of Christ, after all. It also turned them out to watch the Passion of the Christ, although the pulpits condemning the latter film were those of theologians of a completely different stripe.

As for the Gospel of Judas, I see it as an opportunity to faith, not an obstacle. It illustrates that pastors should be familiar with the ancient heresies. They must study a little Gnosticism — from a Christian perspective, rather than that of scholars who rank anything as superior to orthodox Christianity — then instruct their flocks on this idea that recurs with surprising frequency. Every pastor ought to explain simply the ideas that distinguish Gnosticism from genuine Christianity:

• an evil, lesser god created and controls this world;
• this god (or others) trapped our spiritual selves and imprisoned them in flesh;
• salvation consists of liberation from the flesh and its weaknesses;
• liberation comes through knowledge of the secret mysteries and not through God's grace given through faith;
• the secret mysteries prepare one for the passage through the afterlife;
• the secret mysteries can only be revealed in stages, and then only to those who are properly prepared for that stage;

...and many others besides. Gnosticism had quite a lot of variety.

With such an education, the faithful can understand the proper place of this so-called Gospel of Judas. They can also see how the Christian Gospel loves this world because it reflects the glory of the God who created it, while the Gnostic Gospel is one that despises it as a shadow created by a false god. Knowing this can lead to virtue, since many Christians suffer under the mistaken understanding that this world is worthless, as only the next life matters.

I'm optimistic that my parish's education session will be a genuine education session in the Christian faith, making use of this opportunity to illumine the hearts of the faithful with God's love. The potential remains that it will exhibit more an attitude of fear and angry opposition to others' ideas, than one of faith and joyful proclamation of the truth. I hoped to attend, because I like to learn things, but I think I've missed it; the date wasn't in the bulletin, and I don't remember it.

My main point, however, is that if Christianity is true, Christians have nothing to fear from the truth. Opposition is not an opportunity for a fight; it's an opportunity to distinguish what we really believe, and what makes it special.

Christianity historically proclaimed that God's glory is reflected in his creation. People won't find that glory in ancient Gnostic texts whose main themes are that the world was not created by the true God, that we have been trapped within it, and that one's task is to free the real self within to achieve personal glory. Neither will people hear it if they only see Christians on the nightly news, condemning the latest spiritual fashion as as failure of modernity. The reality is that Gnosticism is a failure of antiquity.

The reality is that Christians should seek not their own glory, but a share in Christ's infinite glory, the triumph of eternity.

Begun 27 Apr 2006.

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Father Zosima on self-deception

A nice quote from The Brothers Karamazov, Book 2, Chapter 2 (Zosima):

Do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasure, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.

I was reading the book again late last year, came across this passage, and smiled at it. I never realized before how this theme appears in so many of Dostoevsky's works: people lie to themselves all the time about what's going on around them. The protagonists who think that they are honest and enlightened — Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, pretty much everyone in The Idiot, Stavrogin in Demons, and pretty much everyone in The Brothers Karamazov — are the most self-deceived of all.

Despite their ignorance, it is the simple, pious folk who are the least self-deceived about their own selves. Often enough, they are the catalysts on which the story hangs — Sophia, the Prince, Shatov, and Alyosha Karamazov, for example.

I have no idea if Dostoevsky intended it that way. Who knows? it could simply be my memory and my seeing what I want to see (more self-deception :-)).

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The Idiot on the essence of Christianity

It's so nice to be married to someone who enjoys Dostoevsky as much as I do! My wife wanted to watch a Russian adaptation for television of Dostoevsky's Идіоть (The Idiot). Fortunately, Netflix stocks it; we were watching it today and the title character narrates this wonderful story:

"That same evening I stopped at a small provincial hotel, and it so happened that a dreadful murder had been committed there the night before, and everybody was talking about it. Two peasants — elderly men and old friends — had had tea together there the night before, and were to occupy the same bedroom. They were not drunk but one of them had noticed for the first time that his friend possessed a silver watch which he was wearing on a chain. He was by no means a thief, and was, as peasants go, a rich man; but this watch so fascinated him that he could not restrain himself. He took a knife, and when his friend turned his back, he came up softly behind, raised his eyes to heaven, crossed himself, and saying earnestly — 'God forgive me, for Christ's sake!' he cut his friend's throat like a sheep, and took the watch."

Rogojin roared with laughter. He laughed as though he were in a sort of fit. It was strange to see him laughing so after the sombre mood he had been in just before.

"Oh, I like that! That beats anything!" he cried convulsively, panting for breath. "One is an absolute unbeliever; the other is such a thorough-going believer that he murders his friend to the tune of a prayer! Oh, prince, prince, that's too good for anything! You can't have invented it. It's the best thing I've heard!"

"Next morning I went out for a stroll through the town," continued the prince, so soon as Rogojin was a little quieter, though his laughter still burst out at intervals, "and soon observed a drunken-looking soldier staggering about the pavement. He came up to me and said, 'Buy my silver cross, sir! You shall have it for fourpence — it's real silver.' I looked, and there he held a cross, just taken off his own neck, evidently, a large tin one, made after the Byzantine pattern. I fished out fourpence, and put his cross on my own neck, and I could see by his face that he was as pleased as he could be at the thought that he had succeeded in cheating a foolish gentleman, and away he went to drink the value of his cross. At that time everything that I saw made a tremendous impression upon me. I had understood nothing about Russia before, and had only vague and fantastic memories of it. So I thought, 'I will wait awhile before I condemn this Judas. Only God knows what may be hidden in the hearts of drunkards.'

"Well, I went homewards, and near the hotel I came across a poor woman, carrying a child — a baby of some six weeks old. The mother was quite a girl herself. The baby was smiling up at her, for the first time in its life, just at that moment; and while I watched the woman she suddenly crossed herself, oh, so devoutly! 'What is it, my good woman,' I asked her. (I was never but asking questions then!) 'Exactly as is a mother's joy when her baby smiles for the first time into her eyes, so is God's joy when one of His children turns and prays to Him for the first time, with all his heart!' This is what that poor woman said to me, almost word for word; and such a deep, refined, truly religious thought it was — a thought in which the whole essence of Christianity was expressed in one flash — that is, the recognition of God as our Father, and of God's joy in men as His own children, which is the chief idea of Christ. She was a simple country-woman — a mother, it's true — and perhaps, who knows, she may have been the wife of the drunken soldier!

"Listen, Parfen; you put a question to me just now. This is my reply. The essence of religious feeling has nothing to do with reason, or atheism, or crime, or acts of any kind — it has nothing to do with these things — and never had. There is something besides all this, something which the arguments of the atheists can never touch. ..."

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Pascal's Christian apologetic

It has probably never occurred to anyone to be distressed at not having three eyes, but those who have none are inconsolable. — Pensée 117 (409)

I had been reading Peter Kreeft's Christianity for Modern Pagans until today. Since I'm leaving the country, I thought it best to leave it at the library, since I don't actually own it. I'll take along Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and the Book on Adler as well as L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

I've read about half of Christianity for Modern Pagans. I want to start by saying that I generally like Peter Kreeft's work; I read his Summa of the Summa some years ago, and I found him thought-provoking. I am not however impressed with this book.

My beef with the title
The first problem is the title. Kreeft calls it, Christianity for Modern Pagans, which suggests that it's addressed to the modern pagans themselves. This is not the case; nor does the book resemble what Kreeft suggests: a way to get his class on Pascal's Pensées out to the world. The book consists by and large of Kreeft preaching to the choir, and with a rather condescending tone to boot.

Pascal's desired strategy in argument was along the following lines (paraphrased, since I cannot find the appropriate pensée in my notes): Start by telling someone how he is correct from his point of view, then proceed to show him how from a different point of view one might arrive at a different conclusion. The result is that one's opponent will be quite pleased. (I forget the reasoning, but it struck me as quite sound.)

If only Kreeft had employed this method! When Kreeft is not dripping with scorn for "modern pagans", he is simply dismissing them. This might be forgivable if Kreeft were consistently on solid ground; the problem is that he's not. Changing one word would produce a more accurate title: Christianity Critiques Modern Pagans.

My beef with the commentary
So, the highlight of this book is, at least in the first half, Pascal and not Kreeft. Kreeft himself encourages the reader to ignore him and read Pascal straight through at first, and I have been doing that, but afterwards one is curious to see what Kreeft has to say. One is rewarded with curiosities such as,

Who would fear and obey policeman without uniforms? (pg. 103)

Now, I'm fairly certain that "secret" police forces don't wear uniforms, and I'd say that most people consider secret police more fearsome than ordinary police. Indeed, I don't generally fear the police at all, not in the United States anyway; the fact that they wear uniforms helps a great deal, because I can identify them. I respect them and the authority they represent, and for that reason I obey them on the occasions that they stop me and give instructions, but I don't fear them.

Some comments are based on questionable, undocumented pseudo-scholarship. For example,

The word "boredom" does not exist in any ancient language. It first appears in the seventeenth century. No one knows its origin. (pg. 187)

Perhaps the English word "boredom" first appears in the seventeenth century (perhaps later), but the Latin word taedium appears quite a while before it. Maybe I misunderstand the argument, but Kreeft isn't exactly helping — and I want desperately to be on the man's side! Note that the context of this remark is to provide evidence for Kreeft's highly questionable assertion that people never felt boredom before the seventeenth century. (He says, people invent words for what they need, so the natural conclusion is that they didn't need the word until then — whereas they did need to say that they were tired of chopping wood for ten hours a day.) I must be misunderstanding something here, because Kreeft (a professor of philosophy at Boston College) can't possibly be ignorant of ancient Roman patrician society, and their use of the vomitorium.

Moreover, Kreeft is unduly flippant about the serious concerns that many genuine Catholic thinkers have regarding Pascal's Jansenist sympathies.

I know that Kreeft is a much better thinker than this, so I can't for the life of me imagine what was going through his head when he wrote the commentary to this book. Admittedly, Kreeft provides enlightening remarks as well; for example,

Christ did not come to give us an aspirin but an operation.

In an age of saccharine spirituality, those are refreshing words. However, there is an awful lot of mire that one has to wade through before arriving at the islands of sanity.

My beef with the Pensées proper
Jansenist or no, Pascal is wonderful to read. His writing is full of insights that are thought-provoking (see the quote that begins this insight, which is pointing out that surely people ought to be happy, since they are aware of and inconsolable in their unhappiness), though not nearly as conclusive as Kreeft implies. Pascal answers Cartesian rationalism rather effectively, and mocks Descartes without ever mentioning his name:

Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness. We desire truth and find in ourselves uncertainty. We desire happiness and find only wrtechedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness. — Pensées 412, 401 (414, 437)

Of course, he is given to some rather ill-considered (if attractive) hyperbole:

The soul cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. — Pensée 136 (139)

One some of these occasions (like the one above) Kreeft's commentary manages to explain the nugget of truth that I, a rather slow-witted modern Catholic, was not able to grasp on my own.

One of the greatest deficiencies of philosophical discussions, to my mind, is that people don't begin with the simple question that began many of Socrates' inquiries (at least, as Plato portrays him): "What is...?" So:

• we debate God's existence, without ever asking just what we mean by the word;
• we talk about how to find happiness, without ever thinking about what happiness is;
• we try to say what it means to live a full life, without first considering what makes for a genuine life. &c.

It seems to me that Pascal is somewhat aware of this, and he considers these questions insofar as he can use them to deflate the prevailing philosophies of his time (and later times as well):

All very well to cry out to a man who does not know himself that he should make his own way to God! — Pensée 141 (509)

I am not sure however that Pascal does a very good job of defining the terms himself. For example, in Pensée 688 (323), he begins by asking, "What is the Ego?", and concludes:

[I]t is impossible and would be unjust to love the soul of a person in the abstract and whatever qualities might be therein. We never, then, love a person, but only qualities.

For all the merits this insight may have, it simply does not answer the question that began the pensée.

I don't want the reader to misunderstand: the Pensées are great, and Kreeft's commentary is somewhat helpful. Pascal's philosophy is a little like Nietzsche's in that it abounds in memorable soundbites that one does not typically hear in our consumerist, materialist society. It's hard to pick a favorite; besides the one that leads this entry, I might suggest Pensée 113 (348):

Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it.

I have copied down three pages of pensées and commentary (questionable and otherwise), and I would point to Pensées 869, 166, 44, 821, 21, 699, 114, 131 (508, 183, 82, 252, 381, 382, 397, 434). You can find them by going to this wepage and looking up the numbers I've listed in parentheses. (There are apparently two standards for numbering the Pensées.)

However, the marketing for Kreeft's book represents it as something it's not — or else I am in worse philosophical shape than I thought. If anyone else has read it, and has some thoughts that would correct my point of view, I would be very interested in your insights.

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Trial and death of Stalin, Pt. 4

Obviously the exclusion of God from Jacobin, Communist, and Nazi society did not bring about their extinction. Rather, it brought about the extinction of an endless number of human beings.

The final part of Eugenio Corti's book Trial and Death of Stalin is titled, "Western Culture's Responsibility for the Great Massacres of the Twentieth Century." (Previous discussion here, here, and here.) The point should be obvious: after examining the conditions surrounding the appalling massacres in Eastern, communist-led nations throughout the twentieth century, Corti turns his eye on the influence of Western society's laicized and increasingly anti-religious atmosphere.

Corti begins with France, and dwells on it a while. (He also takes swipes at his own nation, and at the United States.) He draws a parallel between the Communist massacres and the Jacobin terror, highlighting an episode of the French Revolution that has been largely overlooked by history: the war against Vendée. A brief summary: the citizens of Vendée were not terribly pro-Royalist, but they were pro-Church. They drew the line at the Republic's attempt to replace churchmen with those of their liking, and took up arms. A brief revolt against the Revolutionaries enjoyed only temporary success; in response, the Republican government dispatched twelve columns of troops with the mission of raping, torching, and murdering everyone and everything in sight. Corti cites casualty rates at over 30% of the population in some areas.

Corti reminds the reader that many of the 20th century's communist revolutionaries, and all of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, were educated in French universities. He recalls the Cambodian leaders' rationalization that their nation only required one million citizens to operate effectively, and compares it to a remark of Rousseau's that there were too many people in France at the time.

In conclusion we can thus affirm that the West furnished the Eastern populations, which had few cultural defenses, not only with the tragic utopias that generated these massacres, but by covering them up, has also favored their actualization.

Besides the ideas Western culture instilled in their minds, Corti also discusses the Western media's determination to ignore their crimes. Again, during the late 1970s Corti reports how Italian papers ran thousands of articles detailing Pinochet's oppression, while ignoring (or very nearly) the contemporary extermination in Cambodia. Corti argues for a pattern: Italian media also discounted, ignored, or even mis-reported long periods of massacre and forced starvation in China and the Soviet Union.

While not mentioned in Corti's book, to my knowledge the most infamous example of this in the United States would have to be the New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who reported from Moscow in the early 1930s that there was no famine in the Ukraine, even while millions of Ukrainian peasants were in fact starving to death, prohibited from eating food they had grown themselves. Duranty won a Pulitzer prize for this exercise in "truth-telling", a prize which has not been revoked despite the subsequent revelations that he did no investigation whatsoever, reporting only what his friends in the Communist Party told him. I mention this because Corti has recorded in two other works (I più non ritornano and Il cavallo rosso) his memory that many Ukrainians welcomed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union precisely because they viewed the Nazis as liberators. As they soon learned, however, the Nazis were the worse of two evils: Hitler's racist ideology viewed Ukrainians, like all Slavs, as an inferior race whose purpose was to serve the Aryans.

As I have mentioned before, Corti sees in these tragedies empirical evidence for the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin: that all people are born selfish, and we cannot be made good without the intervention of God. Communism, to the contrary, declares that men can remake human nature into that of a "new good man"; that a "new society", an earthly paradise, is within our grasp, and can be brought about through the workers' revolution.

Moreover, argues Corti, what occurred during the centuries of the Middle Ages, and what has occured during the centuries of the Enlightenment, especially the 20th century, validates St. Augustine's notion of the two cities. Augustine's idea is that history consists of the alternation between the City of Man (which excludes God) and the City of God (which seeks to build itself according to God's teachings).

Augustine warns: the builders of the "earthly city" — regardless of their intentions — always end up behaving in the manner of the "prince of this world" as described by the Gospel. That means, like it or not, that they behave in the manner of the demon. We now know from the Gospel that the specific attributes of the demon are those of being a murderer, a liar, and an ape of God.

What did we witness in many settings during the 20th century? a building of the "city of man": the left-wing settings of communism, and the right-wing setting of Nazism.

An objection from the reader: how, then, does Corti explain some of the massacres of the High and Late Middle Ages? I am speaking neither of the Inquisition nor of the witch trials, which despite their infamy do not even approach the demoniacal butchery that we have found in communist regimes. I am speaking instead of events like

• Magdeburg, where a brutal massacre killed all but 400 of the inhabitants, giving rise to an ironic German expression: the mercy of Magdeburg;
• Bèziers, during the Albigensian crusade, at which the legate of the pope himself remarked, Kill them all; God will know his own. In the massacre that followed, tens of thousands died so that the legate could be certain that 500 Cathars were eliminated.

My argument is not whether the massacres of the 20th century were really so bad; they do in fact dwarf anything accomplished by medieval Europeans. Rather, Corti seems to have romanticized the Middle Ages a bit much, placing the blame exclusively on an atheistic Enlightenment that took its cue from a "Rennaissance" overly enamored with paganism. He specifically fingers Macchiavelli as an example culprit: for Machiavelli teaches that the ends justify the means, and all is lawful to the man who would be a "good" prince. Of course, Corti also remarks that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are inseparable from the thirteenth and fourteenth, so I could be overestimating his nostalgia for the Middle Ages.

I do find Corti's argument on the Augustinian vision of history very convincing, though; even during the Middle Ages, after all, people desired to build God's kingdom on earth, excluding God in practice if not in theory. My objection is simply that Corti gives the Middle Ages a pass. After all, the number of medieval reform orders, and the consistency of their message, is dizzying: Cistercians, Trappists, Carthusians, Norbertines, Dominicans, Franciscans... should I go on? As the Second Vatican Council itself said, the scandal of Christians who fail to follow the Gospel provides some explanation for the existence of atheism — and, if I may be permitted to extend it, provides some explanation as well for the massacres of the twentieth century. I add as a caution, though, what a wise seminary professor of mine once told our class: an explanation is not an excuse.

Let us return to Corti's argument. As a conclusion, Corti asks whether we are witnessing this anew in Western culture. To this day, Western culture has refused to abandon its philosophical materialism. It does not often look critically at its post-Rennaissance history; it sneers at the Middle Ages and glorifies an Enlightenment that, in Corti's words, have actually brought a darkness upon us. As examples of this darkness, Corti points to the poverty of our so-called arts in comparison to the glories of the sacred art from the Middle Ages; he points to Western culture's obsession with entertainment and consumerism. We are headed, he warns, towards a new imbestiamento dell'uomo: a making of man into a beast.

Is he wrong? Look around yourself in Western culture: look at the exclusion of God from ordinary life, the exclusion of God from personal life even by most people who call themselves "religious". Religion itself has been infected by materialist philosophy that values social justice more than conversion; as an example, Corti reports on the infection of Italian Catholicism by Marxism and materialism, and laments the immense number of "Cathocommunists" who cheered on the Maoist, Vietnamese, and Cambodian revolutions, and refused to open their eyes to the demon that was making beasts out of men.

Look at the way our culture insists on escaping the consequences of our actions; look how we demand an unrealistically low price for many, many goods and services, so that we can accumulate more and more worthless things that decorate us and our larger, emptier homes - as if we, with eternal souls created by God and destined to resemble him, need any further decoration!

Look at the glorification of pleasure and of income, and the disdain for a real education that completes a human being rather than manufacturing a worker; look at the approaching factories of human clones that will be used as meat for human vanity; look at the abundance of sex and the famine of love; look at all these things and ask yourself whether Corti's description of these revolutionary societies of mass murder may be an apt description of our own not-so-revolutionary society in the not-too-distant future. I don't know; it's just a thought that wanders into my mind.

Of course, these things have all existed in the past; "there is nothing new under the sun." In some cases these symptoms have been worse. The Enlightenment, however, has left us with two gifts that, as we saw in the twentieth century, bring a greater danger: thanks to technology, we possess immense power; with atheistic (or at least secular) societies, God is excluded from common life. As Dostevsky wrote, If God does not exist, all things are lawful. God must exist not only on our lips, but in our hearts as well. With power comes responsibility, but again: people demand more ways to avoid responsibility as ever.

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