A Catholic Reader

More Mysteries of Ancient Rome: Ruth Downie's Medicus Ruso

2011-03-19T23:36:00.002-05:00

Looking back over some of my earlier posts, I realized that there is a new series I can add to my reviews of murder mystery series set in the ancient Roman world. These are British novelist Ruth Downie's stories of Gaius Petreius Ruso, a Roman army physician serving in Britain around the time Hadrian became Emperor. I first learned of this series when I snagged a copy of the third book in the series, Persona Non Grata, through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, in which publishers provide free copies for a few lucky readers, who promise to publish an online review of the book after they've read it. (Quite a good gig, by the way. I've gotten several good books this way.) I've since read the first two in the series (as Kindle ebooks), and have grown to like bumbling Ruso who, despite being a terrible investigator, nonetheless always gets his man. (You can read my LibraryThing review of Persona Non Grata here.) The fourth in the series has just appeared in print this month (Caveat Emptor in the U.S. and Ruso and the River of Darkness in the U.K.)

Before I give my analysis of the series, I'd like to mention something that author Downie acknowledges on her website, namely the fact that the novels go by completely different titles (also, have different cover art and even list the author's name differently) in their U.S. and U.K., as you can see in the two cover images of the first volume displayed here. All of the U.S. editions have as their titles familiar Latin words or phrases (Medicus, Terra Incognita, Persona Non Grata, Caveat Emptor), while the British versions are all titled Ruso and ... (the Disappearing Dancing Girls, the Demented Doctor, the Root of All Evils, the River of Darkness). I attribute this to the fact that the ambivalence contermporary Brits have toward the Latin language. Familiarity with Latin is actually gaining popularity and prestige in the United States these days (think of the "classical education" movement that is gaining ground in homeschooling and private education), while in self-consciously egalitarian Britain Latin is apparently an unpleasant reminder of the bad-old-days class distinction, when the privileged members of the upper (and parts of the middle) class learned Latin as a routine part of their schooling, while the working class remained semi-literate. Presumably, whatever stratum of contemporary British society buys lightweight murder mysteries would be put off by Latin titles. At any rate, I prefer the Latin titles to the rather hokey and contrived Ruso and ... versions.

For the sake of easy comparison with the other Roman murder mysteries I've discussed, I'll stick to the same format for the Ruso novels:

Period: Early second century, set in the outer reaches of Roman imperial sway (for the most part, Britain), around the time that Hadrian became Roman Emperor (117 A.D.). At this time, Rome was already a well-established presence in Britain, but was still struggling to subdue the natives; in fact, this struggle is an integral feature of the novels, which play on the cultural differences between the Roman and British ways of understanding life and living it. Persona Non Grata, the second in the series, is the only installment so far to take place outside of Britain: in that story, Ruso goes home to southern Gaul to sort out some family problems. It seems highly unlikely that Roma urbs will feature as the setting of any of these novels.
Detective/Protagonist: Ostensibly, this is Gaius Petreius Ruso (although he couldn't succeed without the British Tilla, who starts as his slave and later becomes his wife). Ruso is the eldest son of a provincial Roman family, who for some unexplained reason preferred life as an army surgeon to inheriting his father's villa and farm (Ruso lets his brother take on the headaches of family obligations, as we learn in the third volume). Ruso is a competent physician, but almost completely lacking in personal ambition, which is probably a good thing, as he (like many modern surgeons) is completely lacking in "people skills" or political savvy; not that he is rude or brusque, but he seems to have an emotional IQ of zero. I doubt I've ever known of anyone, in literature or in life, who was so inept at understanding what makes people tick or what motivates human behavior. This, of course, makes him quite an unlikely sleuth, and it must be said that Ruso seems to solve crimes in spite of himself. He succeeds only with the assistance of Tilla, who lacks any interest in investigation but seems to put Ruso onto the right scent without knowing or caring that that is what she is doing.
What I like: I like the setting, the juxtaposition of the Roman and Celtic cultures, which provide a wonderful contrast. The reader gets a good sense of why the Romans were never entirely successful at Romanizing the British. Also, I suppose British readers (and Anglophile Americans) will enjoy reading stories set in ancient towns whose Roman roots may go almost unremembered today. The tone of these novels is lightly humorous, but Ruso is by no means the kind of scamp that Lindsey Davis's Falco is. In fact, much of the humor springs from the irony of Ruso's bumbling investigation, with every character other than Ruso seeming to know more than he about the mystery at hand.
What I don't like: Although I like the novels overall, I must admit that their protagonist drives me nuts. Ruso's almost complete ignorance of ordinary psychology and his obtuse inability to ask what seem obvious questions at times seem to defy belief. (Ruso is the kind of person who today would inspire engineer or Aggie jokes.) Fortunately, his feminine sidekick, the earthy Tilla, offsets his left-brained, linear-thinking way of going about things.

Like the Didius Falco series, this series aims more at telling amusing stories than presenting gripping, suspenseful mysteries. The would-be sleuth's bumpy relationship with his female partner often looms larger than the question of identifying a murderer. Nonetheless, the solution of the mystery running through the story usually manages to tie these two strands together in a satisfying way. Despite my frustration at Ruso's obtuseness, I'll keep reading the Medicus series.

Yes, I'm still reading!

2011-03-19T14:22:00.000-05:00

After a gap of several months of posting nothing to this blog, I might be thought to have given up reading, but such is far from the case. Two majors factors contributed to my recent "blog sabbatical":

"Now, here, you see,
it takes all the running
you can do, to keep in
the same place."

First, in the fall I was teaching three classes at a college campus 60 miles distant, on a grueling and exhausting schedule that left me with no energy to do anything other than run like the Red Queen, trying to keep up with myself (I lost that race). I had plenty of ideas for blog posts, many sparked by discussions in my literature classes -- my Blogger dashboard shows at least 15 drafts that never got finished and posted, some of which I may complete later. That is the problem with college teaching in the current sweat-shop environment: one is so consumed with preparation, teaching, grading, meeting with students, and various administrivia that there is no time for intellectual leisure or refreshment. And breaks in the academic year that are meant to provide such refreshment are generally consumed by a combination of total physical and mental collapse, followed hard on the heels by a desperate scramble to prepare for the next venture into the fray.

Second, just after quitting that job, which was taking more out of me than I had available to put into it, I received an Amazon Kindle for Christmas. Since that time, I have been reading almost non-stop, mostly books that are available for nothing, or next to nothing, to Kindle readers. (It's ironic that my last previous post was about ebook readers -- at that time I had no real intention of getting one, although the idea was gaining appeal for me.) I've discovered that there is a huge range of reading material available for little or no money for "catholic" tastes, from magnificent literary classics (long available in various electronic formats, thanks to organizations such as the Project Gutenberg ) to truly execrable self-published drivel; I've read some from the entire range, and I'm getting better at spotting the duds before wasting too much time on them. I've also paid for some Kindle books, something which Amazon makes ridiculously (even dangerously) easy.

Morning coffee tastes better with Kindle.

I've read essays and articles arguing that the advent of portable reading devices, and the wide availability of free, or inexpensive, electronic books will spur a new renaissance in reading among all sorts of people. Whether that shall prove to be the case remains to be seen; since I was already a reading-addict (since childhood I have been willing to read literally anything with print on it, from pickle labels and pillow tags -- "Do not remove this tag, under penalty of law" -- to the entire World Book Encyclopedia), I can only say that I find my Kindle to be an enormous convenience, which provides a much more pleasant reading experience than I had anticipated. The Kindle is my constant companion, traveling to the breakfast table with me in the morning and accompanying me in the side pocket of my purse wherever I go during the day. Now I need never be without books, magazines, even newspapers to read, because I have them all stored on my Kindle.

Currently I have exactly 300 items on my Kindle, filed in various categories to help make the list more manageable. Here is a sampling from my Current Reading category:

The Spectator (Kindle edition of British weekly magazine, this week's issue)
Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two, Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, by Pope Benedict XVI
The Red House Mystery, by A. A. Milne (a free, out-of-copyright work)
The American Frugal Housewife: Dedicated to Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy, by Mrs. Child (vintage book from 19th century)
Free sample chapters from The Alchemyst [sic], by Michael Scott, a contemporary novel for "young readers"

Now that I'm more or less recovered from my academic exhaustion (maybe it's just the effect of spring sunshine and birdsong), I hope to be posting some comments on these works and others, in the coming days and weeks. Meanwhile, I'm going to post this, so that I can get back to The Spectator.

The Reading Experience: Are Ebook Readers the Next Big Thing?

2010-10-28T20:33:00.002-05:00

You may have seen this video that's been making the rounds the last couple of years.

The joke is that, back in the middle ages, the "codex" (a flat book, with separate pages bound between two covers) was a revolutionary new technology that took the Western world by storm, pretty much putting the scroll-book industry out of business. This happened, by the way, largely because of the Christian Bible, which people wanted to be able to peruse quickly and easily, and, probably, keep it all together instead of on umpty-jillion separate scrolls. (LOTS has been written on how the spread of Christianity helped popularize the codex -- here's one example from Catholic apologist, Jimmy Akin.) Very soon, the obvious advantages of this new form of book spread, making multi-volume rolled books a thing of the past. (Jews, however, to this day scorn the "new fangled" technology of the codex in liturgical use, requiring each synagogue to have a scroll of the Torah, from which the sacred texts are read during worship.)

With the increasing proliferation of electronic gadgets designed especially for reading digital texts (ebooks), however, some people are beginning to question whether such specialty appliances will soon make "tangible books" a relic of the past, much as the codex supplanted the scroll many centuries ago. As a card-carrying "bookie," I've always pooh-poohed this idea, but I'm beginning to feel the allure of devices such as the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook. I have perhaps a thousand old-fashioned "tangible books," and I will probably continue to acquire more, but I'm already starting to collect "ebooks," which exist only in digital form, needing some kind of electronic device to translate them into "type" on a "page."

Several things have recently influenced me to begin to look more favorably on what might be called "notional books." The most immediate and pressing is the fact that most of my several hundred books are crated up in boxes, gathering dust in a rented storage unit, and look to remain that way for some time to come. As a result, I have begun buying duplicate copies of the books I need (or want) for ready reference. (Half Price Books and various online re-sellers should thank me.) However, my current living conditions offer me limited space for books, so I'm already running out of room for these duplicates. One possible solution to the problems of both expense and space might be to borrow from a local library, but the public library doesn't carry a lot of the titles I use regularly, and there's always the pesky business of remembering to return borrowed books. On the other hand, the sort of things I like to read "just for fun" are readily available from the public library, and libraries are beginning to make such titles available in electronic formats, which you don't physically have to return (thus avoiding the expense of library fines). That, however, raises a new problem.

I have always been very picky about the typeface in which a text is displayed. As a kid, I was always excited to learn that a book I was reading included a colophon (a note that told you what typeface, paper, etc. was used to produce the book), and I loved learning the names of typefaces, and sometimes thought I would like to be a book designer. (That was many years before I became a graphic artist and typographer -- lots of fun, while it lasted, but in the end unsatisfying). Anyway, even if I am willing to forgo the pleasures of the look, smell, feel of an actual, physical book, I'm not willing to look at crummy typefaces (hideous Times New Roman! awful Arial!), nor lousy layouts, meager margins, or other horrors that a badly-rendered ebook might force upon me.

For this reason, I've been a bit frustrated with the free digital versions available of many out-of-copyright books widely available for download from websites such as the Gutenberg Project and Google Books. Many of these -- those available as PDF files -- are essentially the digital equivalents of bad photocopies of old books. The new EPUB format that Adobe has popularized is a big improvement, because instead of the separate page images of old document scans, you get just digital text with minimal formatting, which an appropriate software application can render in electronic type on your computer (or other electronic) screen, which can be a little easier on the eye and give you some control over the display by letting you scale the size of the text at will. (Read a comparison of different ePub readers here.) Yet even so, you still have the inconvenience and discomfort of having to read from a computer screen (or, worse, from the tiny display of a smart phone -- eek!). That's alright for old books that you're lucky to find available in any format and may thus be grateful to read for free, but it's not a situation I'd be willing to put up with to read books I've actually had to pay money for and might wish to have frequent, ready access to. I've tried reading, for instance, Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, in Adobe Digital Editions (an ePub software application that runs on my computer), but I can't get more than about half a page before I wander off to do something else (Spider solitaire, any one?).

The fact is that reading from a computer screen is tiring to the eyes and inconvenient, which are just two more strikes against electronic books in their "ether only" format. This is where dedicated ebook reader devices are working to fill the gap between convenience and comfort, and I'm beginning to think they may make a convert even of a diehard bookie like me ("You've have to pry my tangible books from my cold, dead hands!"). This fall, several major book sellers are offering new and improved versions of "ereaders" that suggest that electronic books are the wave of the future, even if they will probably never make the codex a dead relic of the past. These new readers, such as the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Amazon Kindle, the Kobo Reader sold at Borders, and other, sport appealing features that are sure to continue to improve with time. EInk provides the matte finish, high contrast, and look (if not feel) of text on a page; built-in storage capacity allows you to store thousands of books on the device, while software allows you to read "volumes" you "own" across a variety of devices, and gives the user some control over the size and style of typeface. You can even highlight passages, embed notes (like scribbling in the margins of a "real" book), and lend your "notional books" to friends (if they have a similar device). The prices of the devices is coming down rapidly, and availability of decent professionally-prepared editions is proliferating, so a gadget like the Nook may be in my future.

I'm one of those people who are loath to go anywhere without carrying some reading material along "just in case," and I have to admit that I'm beginning to envy those who can tuck their entire library into their purses or jacket pockets. Sooner or later I'll undoubtedly find myself sliding an electronic book gadget into my purse alongside a paperback book or magazine; meanwhile I invite comments from anyone who has some experience with one of these new-fangled doodads.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Biblical (il)literacy and the modern reader

2010-09-21T15:16:00.001-05:00

I've kind of had parables on the brain the last few days. Of course, the Gospel readings that the Church's lectionary provides at this green time of the year are full of parables, and Mark Shea's recent feature article on InsideCatholic.com, "The Parable of the Dishonest Steward," is a good exploration of why Christ so often taught in parables and, also, why he had to explain them, even though on the face of it they are quite simple moral tales. As Shea points out, what's obvious to a Christian may not be obvious to others, who have not "eyes to see nor ears to hear"; these only faith can provide.

However, one of the reasons I've been thinking about parables lately really has nothing to do with the liturgical lectionary or even the Gospels per se. In the literature class I'm currently teaching (an introductory course that teaches the basics of literary interpretation), we've been studying short stories and how they work, so we've been reading selections that provide good illustrations of the various techniques we're discussing (plot, setting, point of view, character, etc.). Most recently, we've been examining Katherine Anne Porter's frequently-anthologized "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," a real literary gem. I don't know much about Porter, other than the fact that she was a native Texan (at one time writing for a Fort Worth journal) and a convert to Catholicism (although during a long period of her life she was apparently disaffected from religion in general). I haven't read a lot of her work, but "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" makes me want to read more.

The story is a deceptively complex tale, told by a narrative voice which literary types would classify as "third person, limited omniscient," which simply means that the voice telling the story does not belong to any of the characters in the story, but, standing outside the story, nonetheless
allows us to know things that an ordinary objective observer could not know -- in this case, the reader hears the rambling thoughts of elderly, dying Granny Weatherall during the last hours of her life. So the reader finds, fairly early on, that it's a bit of a job to figure out what, objectively, is happening in Granny's sick room, as the objective events come to us largely filtered through the old woman's groggy, feeble, and wandering consciousness. That is part of the complexity but, as I said, that complexity is deceptive, and not only because Granny's idea of what is happening to, and around, her is not always accurate. Porter's authorial intention goes beyond the objective level of physical reality and the subjective level of Granny's mental meanderings, to the moral level of Granny's spiritual state, something which even Granny herself seems determined to ignore, and which many readers will miss altogether.

This is really one of the things that interests me about the story, the fact that this third level of significance in the story, the moral level in which the author is explores and comments on Granny's spiritual condition, is the real focus of the story, but will be overlooked by most readers. Porter builds this level by oblique use of Biblical motifs taken from Christ's parables about death and judgment, but the effect these allusions is gradual and cumulative; nonetheless, the insistence of these parabolic images grows in intensity until their presence finally bursts into plain view in the final paragraph or two. In the end, they are hard to overlook, at least for anyone equipped to recognize them at all. And, as it happens, this moral tale of Granny's spiritual unreadiness to meet her death is the real focus of Porter's craft in this story, and it is here that the central theme is to be discovered. It's a great pity that many modern readers these days are utterly incapable of recognizing these Scriptural allusions at all.

When the story was published in 1930, Porter had a reasonable expectation that many, if not most, of her readers would be familiar with the stories of the Bible, particularly the Gospel accounts in the New Testament. For centuries, literary authors had been able to make allusion to the Bible to illuminate their own works of fiction (I wrote my doctoral dissertation on one such writer, twelfth-century Frenchman Chrétien de Troyes, who first popularized stories about the knights errant of King Arthur). But, alas, the great stories of the Bible are no longer part of the warp and woof of Western culture, and otherwise-literate Americans who read this story today may easily miss the main point Porter is trying to make. A casual cruise of the internet on the subject of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" will discover not only the predictably awful essays and summaries written by and for students, but also offerings by "professionals" which entirely ignore or overlook the ample allusions that point to the real heart of the matter. (I even found this one, an academic essay by a certain Barbara Laman of the University of Miami, which misses the point rather spectacularly, thanks to the peculiar kind of mental astigmatism created by a "feminist" perspective).

This is one of the sad effects of Biblical illiteracy in the general culture that should concern anyone with an ounce of cultural sensibility: many of our great works of literature are now largely incomprehensible even to "sophisticated" and highly-educated readers, simply because they rely on allusions to a cultural thesaurus that has been banished to the cultural outhouse.The Bible has been banned in the public sphere, and its cultural influence is ignored or denied. In the case of the Porter story, failing to recognize Biblical allusions and their significance will force an otherwise-astute reader to arrive at exactly the wrong conclusion regarding the meaning of the story. How many other, even greater, cultural treasures are, in effect, being distorted and defaced by this cultural blind spot? Loss of familiarity with the great stories of the Bible produces a great loss not only for those at least nominally Christian, but for our culture as a whole. This is an argument that has been made with greater force and eloquence by others than I have done here, but it is one that has been borne in upon me with renewed force this week as my students and I have been analyzing this widely-read work by one of America's great short story writers.

Reading and the Moral Imagination, part 1: Aristotle and C. S. Lewis

2010-08-11T00:36:00.001-05:00

If you are a reader of books (not just blogs), these days you are apparently in the minority. Some alarming statistics I've run into on various web sites claim that:

1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

Today's column by Fr. James Schall on The Catholic Thing suggests that one reason young people don't read much any more is that they are tethered to their cell phones, which constantly demand their attention, making it impossible (unlikely, at least) for them to devote themselves to reading or sustain reflection -- these days, college students hit the beach with their "smart phones," not paperback novels. Fr. Schall goes on to comment that he is not encouraged by the current fad for "electronic books" that can be read off of computer and smartphone screens, a view that I share. I'll let you read for yourself his reasoning. (What do you mean, you don't read The Catholic Thing? Why on earth not? They publish a new and thought-provoking essay each day, by an impressive variety of excellent Catholic thinkers.)

Schall mentions all this as a lead-up to his consideration of a question that I think is an important one: Does it matter if we read fiction? (Notice, he does not insist that it be "important literature" or "timeless classics," just "fiction," including poetry.) I think the answer is, "Absolutely, yes!" I know plenty of people who think of themselves as "readers," but proudly proclaim, "Oh, I only read non-fiction," as if that were a virtue. On the contrary, I can't help but think of it as a character defect, revealing an undeveloped moral imagination. Why? Well, Aristotle gave an answer that I think is as valid today as it was nearly 2,400 years ago, in his Poetics. Aristotle, of course, was a philosopher, not a poet, but he believed in the ethical value of poetry (by which he meant what we mean by "literature" -- in his day, all "fiction" was written in poetic verse). Comparing poetry ("fiction") to history ("nonfiction"), he says:

It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen -- what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims ... (Poetics IX)

So it looks like Aristotle would not have been too impressed by those people who proudly proclaim that they read only "nonfiction."

But, one might ask, was Aristotle right in claiming that "poetry" is a "high and philosophical thing"? And if so, why? I would say yes, if we recognize that, while his use of the term "poetry" would include literary fiction generally, it probably would not extend to pulp fiction (the sort of mass-produced schlock that keeps many booksellers in business, for which there was no analogue in Aristotle's day). I think that Aristotle had in mind something more like what C. S. Lewis, in his An Experiment in Criticism, classified as "good books." Lewis proposed that we define "good books" not by something inherent in the book but by what sort of reading it provokes and rewards. A "good" book is the one that allows the reader to find something new with each reading and re-reading, to which the reader returns time and again, a story that provokes reflection, and rewards reflection with discovery, which in turn causes delight. Good books provoke good reading, taking us out of ourselves while we read and returning us to ourselves, at the end of our reading, somehow enlarged:

One of the things we feel after reading a great work is "I have got out." Or from another point of view, "I have got in"; pierced the shell of some other monad and discovered what it is like inside. ... We therefore delight to enter into other men's beliefs (those, say, of Lucretius or Lawrence) even though we think them untrue. And into their passions, though we think them depraved, like those, sometimes, of Marlowe or Carlyle. And also into their imaginations, though they lack all realism of content.

This is not to say that to say, of course, that a good book cannot be read badly; rather, the important distinction is that good books "permit" a reading that enlarges the reader, whereas bad books make such reading impossible. The good book meets Aristotle's criterion of being "philosophical"because it allows us to gain new insight into some truth about the human condition, the way of the world, etc.

None of this is to say, however, that every work of fiction we read should be "good" (using Lewis's terminology) or "philosophical" (using Aristotle's), any more than every bite we eat has to be "healthy" or "nutritious." If we want to carry this food analogy a little further, however, we would have to acknowledge that, much as a complete lack of appetite for food indicates some underlying illness, and prolonged fasting will, in the end, prove deadly, in a similar way, it is not healthy for an otherwise civilized person never to read a book, or to regard reading (as too many students do!) as simply a necessary evil that must be performed to survive, a bitter medicine that must be swallowed. Avid readers are baffled by people who never read, in much the same was as people who delight in healthy, delicious, well-prepared food are baffled by anorexics, or those who never eat anything but tasteless processed junk.

The fact that even college-educated adults quit reading books as soon as they are able suggests that our schools and colleges do a very poor job of teaching the delight of reading tales well told, and that many parents set a bad example by never reading books themselves. What can or should be done about that is a separate question, and outside the scope of this blog. The delight and benefits of reading, however is a topic that I'd like to pursue further, so in my next post, I'll consider further the question of why reading fiction is good for you.

Catholic fiction on the Internet: CatholicFiction.net

2010-07-20T13:45:00.001-05:00

This morning I discovered a website called CatholicFiction.net, which offers, "news, views, and reviews" on fiction by Catholic writers. The site is sponsored and maintained by Idylls Press, a Catholic publishing concern with an interest in promoting a "new Catholic literary renaissance." The Catholic Fiction site looks like a good place for anyone interested in finding books written from a Catholic perspective (they cover "fiction in every genre, both classic and contemporary .. [as well as] literary biography and criticism) or reading reviews that give a Catholic "take" on fictional works that may or may not have been written by Catholic authors. They also have a Catholic Fiction Reading List, where you may find authors you may not have read before, or may not have realized were Catholic.

What makes a "Catholic writer" is a more complicated question than you might think. A number of years ago, I bought a book from Ignatius Press called The Catholic Writer, containing a variety of papers from an academic literary conference sponsored by the Wethersfield Institute. After I got it home, I flipped through to look for a discussion of one of my favorite Catholic writers, Flannery O'Connor -- but there was none! In the introduction to the volume, the editor explained that they only included writers who wrote on Catholic subjects -- i.e., stories about Catholics doing Catholic stuff (presumably attending Mass, praying the rosary, burying statues of St Joseph upside down in their front yards to help sell a house). I thought this was an insane definition of the term "Catholic writer,'' particularly as it necessarily excluded writers like O'Connor, whose stories are positively incandescent with the light of her Catholic faith.

Fortunately, the Catholic Fiction web site does not embrace this narrow definition -- in fact, they cite Flannery O'Connor's definition that Catholic writing is “a Catholic mind looking at anything.” (This is precisely the idea I had in mind when I called this blog "A Catholic Reader.") You can read more about their criteria for what constitutes "Catholic fiction" here. They also have a section devoted to "the conversation about Catholic fiction," with links to articles that discuss this topic -- "what it is (or isn’t), its history, its current state, its usefulness as a literary category."

It looks interesting. When I've had a chance to peruse it more thoroughly, I'll let you know. Meanwhile, cruise around, check out the Catholic Fiction site, and check back in here to let me know what you think.

If books were snow-cones: Martha Grimes & Clive Cussler

2010-07-08T12:18:00.002-05:00

I have recently gone through a spate of what, for me, constitutes the equivalent of "beach reads" -- books that you read just for the fun of it, knowing that they provide more amusement than edification or cause for reflection. Such books are the mental equivalent of buttered popcorn or snow cones, tasty but probably not good for you if taken in quantity. I find that, as with such junk food, after a couple of servings I lose my taste for such stuff and the thought of going back for another helping any time soon makes me feel a bit nauseous.

My recent "junk reads" of choice have been novels by Martha Grimes and Clive Cussler. Grimes writes British-style murder mysteries (although an American herself) that have come to occupy a prominent place in the subgenre of "cozies" (i.e., atmosphere and quirky characters predominate over plot and characterization), while Cussler's brand of story-telling almost defies description -- I suppose I would say his novels are action-adventure stories that rely heavily on maritime escapades and odd bits of ancient history. Cussler himself says:

I have never considered myself as much a writer as an entertainer. I've sincerely felt that my job was to entertain you the reader in such a manner that when you reached the end of the book you felt that you had got your money's worth. ... [I] believe you will find the novels a great summer reading escape and an everyday, anyday adventure.

I would say he has a keen understanding of both his audience and his literary product. Both Cussler and Grimes have produced long series that repeat the core cast of characters, making their books always familiar and cozy to return to, a pleasant intermezzo to a steady diet of more substantial reading fare. Too much of either at one time, however, would probably cause mental indigestion and rotting of the intellectual incisors.

Doctor Who in Denmark? David Tennant's Hamlet, part I

2010-06-19T19:27:00.003-05:00

When I was a graduate student, I always had far too much to do in the time, and with the energy, available to me. Yet, since I was a "re-constructed" graduate student (i.e., returned to graduate school after a gap of many years, and eager to put as much into, and to wring as much out of, the experience as humanly possible), I was constantly seeking ways not only to read what needed to be read for class, but also to reflect upon what I had read, so that I could learn from it. Toward the end of my coursework, I took a class on Shakespeare's history plays, which met (I believe) once a week, in the evening. (I think we covered a play a week.) Many of these plays I had never read before, nor seen performed, so I got into the habit of going to the library one afternoon each week to watch a video of the play assigned for the next class. Fortunately, the University of Dallas's library possessed the complete collection of the BBC's televised performances of all of Shakespeare's plays, so I was able to see well-staged performances with fine, professional actors, who spoke clearly enough for me to follow along in the printed text of the play; watching videos instead of live performances also allowed me to run the tape back to take a closer look at important scenes.

I mention this, first, because it is a useful practice that I can recommend -- it helps to connect the fine poetry of Shakespeare's language with the lively action of a performance and thus to cement the two permanently in the memory, in a way that just reading or just watching (or reading, then watching, or vice versa) does not. The other reason I bring it up is that I recently decided to re-read Hamlet in light of Chapter 1 of The Wreck of Western Culture (previously mentioned), and thought it would be a good idea to watch a performance of it, preferably one I had not seen before.

Given the attention to the play's textual history that appears in the Oxford World's Classics edition I'm planning to read, I briefly considered watching the Kenneth Branagh version, which is "unabridged" (not sure if that means it follows the Second Quarto edition) and was critically well-received. But, to tell the truth, I was a bit put off by the fact that Branagh himself plays Hamlet (in bleached blond hair) and by the film's the extreme length. Happily, I had recently heard that David Tennant had recently done a televised production of Hamlet with the Patrick Stewart and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and I found that it was available for download via Graboid. I've long thought (well, at least since I got to knowTennant in the role of the good Doctor) that he is a very talented actor (by far, my favorite Doctor Who), so I was interested in seeing him in a dramatic role. Well, what can be more dramatic than Hamlet, Shakespeare's most famous tragedy?

Rather than write a review of the televised production, I'd like to do something more in accord with the character of this blog, i.e., discuss to what extent, and in what way, the performance enhanced my understanding or appreciation of the text. And, let's face it, Shakespeare's plays, perhaps more than those of any other playwright (in English, at any rate) constantly run the risk of being thought of simply as texts -- that is, literature -- rather than as performed entertainment. This is one of the reasons I always jump at the chance to see a (preferably live) performance, particularly if the play is one seldom performed. A couple of years ago, for instance, I saw my first performance of Shakespeare's Cymbeline in Chicago, and it completely changed my assessment of the play. It made me see humor and life where there had seemed to be only a kind of dull obscurity.

The text of the play as literature allows for minute attention to its language and structure, but, unlike other kinds of literary works, if a play is only read and not experienced, it remains almost a dead thing, waiting to be dissected by textual and other literary critics. A good performance not only brings the text to life, but illuminates it from within, as it were, giving color, character, and dimension where there had been before a kind of grey flatness. You might think that, conversely, a bad performance could suck the life out of the text, but I don't think that's true -- although a bad performance might make evident where the text needs a sensitive and intelligent interpretation in order to "work." (I'm convince that people who are put off of Shakespeare because he's "boring" and "hard to understand" have simply not yet seen a good performance.) Yet, a bad performance really cannot harm the text, try as it may -- I remember seeing a very bad production of Macbeth a couple of years ago and was very frustrated that the actors, director, and designers showed very little understanding of the play, resulting in a maladroit presentation that was, frankly, painful to sit through. Yet I did not blame Shakespeare for writing a turgid, nonsensical play! Rather, I mourned the opportunity that the theatrical company had wasted, to make this wonderfully tense and complex tragedy come to life.

The question then remains: did the David Tennant Hamlet nourish or frustrate my appreciation for the play? So far, I've only seen about the first half of the play (through the scene of the play-within-a-play, Act III, scene ii), and I will say that so far I really like Tennant's performance, transforming the dour, grief-stricken Hamlet of the first scene (in which Tennant will be virtually unrecognizable to Doctor Who fans) into an antic/manic figure more reminiscent of Tennant's Doctor Who character (although not annoyingly or excessively similar, however). Without a doubt, this is a wonderful performance and a very fine production. I'll say more about how it shapes my understanding of the play when I have time to go back and finish viewing it (it seems this may be as long as the Branagh film).

Laughs in the Catholic Blogosphere

2010-06-19T18:55:00.004-05:00

Since this is a blog about things I'm reading, I guess it's okay from time to time to make reference to other blogs that I read occasionally. (I don't plan to make a habit of this, however.) One that I enjoy from time-to-time is Fr Dwight Longenecker's Standing on My Head blog, particularly when he is in satirical mode (which is much of the time). One of his recent entries that got me snorting was an announcement that he will henceforth be linking his blog to the website of his new parish, Our Lady of the Rosary in Greenville, SC, and including more parish-relevant posts. That much is just straight news, no funny business intended. However, to let his new parishioners get a taste of what they will have to put up with from their new pastor, he includes the following at the end of his discussion of his new parish:

... The parish has a building project, so the chance to build a new church is an exciting challenge.

I have already designed a very nice contemporary structure which is circular in form with the altar placed down among the people. The church is patterned after the native American teepee so that it reflects the 'Circle of Life'. Around the altar will be plenty of space to allow for liturgical dance and behind the altar will be the sacred drum space. I believe in proper inculturation and we will be encouraging the young people to play bongo drums of different sizes during Mass to encourage participation by all the people of God.

Already some nuns from New Mexico have expressed interest in coming to take over the parish school in order to transform it into a place of genuine earth healing and reconciliation with the maternal powers which are being raped by the military industrial male chauvinist conspiracy. They are called Sisters of the St Hildegard of Bingen who was known to be a herbalist, healer, musician and mystic.

Episcopal Bishop Mary Cesspool has agreed to be our liturgical advisor and spiritual director.

Then he rather spoils the fun by adding a postscript to his new parishioners that the last few paragraphs are just satire. Well, you can hardly blame him -- in many parishes in the American South (still officially "mission country" because of the paucity of Catholics), such things are not necessarily the stuff of Pythonesque fantasy. In fact, one commenter ("Catholic Tide") notes:

Those last 3 paragraphs were brutal! With the exception of "Bishop Mary Cesspool" I think I have seen every single one of these atrocities at one parish or another over the years. Thank you for the satire... sometimes we need to laugh to keep from crying.

Not everyone appreciates satire, of course -- especially those whom it ridicules, at least if they lack a sense of humor and the healthy habit of being self-critical. One such reader (apparently an Episcopalian who resented his oblique reference to the local Episcopal she-bishop) reprimanded him for his "insulting" and "non-sensical" references, and received this reply from another reader, who apparently has a greater appreciation of the purpose and uses of satire:

Bad Jesus, who makes nasty insults, such as,"Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?" I guess those forty days in the desert didn't do him any good.

Just for the record, Fr Longenecker is a Catholic priest of the Pastoral Provision (i.e., former Anglican/Episcopal priest) who started as an Evangelical Christian (Mennonite, I think). He's a fairly prolific writer (not just a blogger), with a number of books in print, including a recent book that updates C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, called The Gargoyle Code. I was surprised to learn that his writing career started with writing apologetics for This Rock magazine, a very fine magazine published by Catholic Answers and currently edited by a former classmate of mine from the University of Dallas, Cherie Peacock. This Rock is well worth subscribing to, as I have done when I had a job and an income (and will do again as soon as I am able); if you are cash-poor or just want to get a taste of the magazine, follow the link in the previous sentence and you can read online (or download) archived issues of This Rock (after following the link, click the This Rock pull-down menu and select the desired date of publication).

Lectio Divina: The Ancient Christian Art of Spiritual Reading

2010-06-01T22:08:00.004-05:00

Often, when teaching college undergraduates, I have found that my students are hiding a guilty secret: they don't really know how to read. Now that doesn't mean that, if I were to give them a book or newspaper and asked them to read a particular sentence they would be stymied. No, they would be able to make out all the words, and even comprehend entire sentences or paragraphs, so they are not "illiterate" in the most basic sense. But many of them don't know how to make sense of what they read: to be able to discern the most important ideas in what they read, and see how the ideas fit together; to put these ideas into context with other assigned readings (to see connections or contradictions); to assess or apply the significance of what they have read, once they understand it; to judge the value of what they have read, taking into account its merits and deficits; and other tasks that allow them to get some value out of what they have read. Once I discovered how universal this "guilty secret" was, I worked out a 4-point reading method (distilled and adapted from Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book) that I required them to apply to each assigned reading -- a method that students found very profitable, and easily adaptable to reading for other classes or purposes, as well.

I happen to know that many Christians (and perhaps Catholics in particular) have a similar "dirty secret," only this one has to do with reading the Bible: they know they should be reading the Bible, they want to, but they just don't know where to begin or how to go about it. Most feel that they should have some plan or program to follow, so they wait for a Bible study class to be announced in their parish, hoping that the right curriculum, the right teacher, the right set of videos will give them what they need, and in the meantime they just ... feel guilty. Now, I would never belittle the value of group study or a knowledgeable instructor, but it so happens that there is one quite excellent, very ancient and adaptable method of Bible reading that has been practiced profitably in the Church for millennia, which is both simple and profound, requiring no teacher, curriculum, or grand plan. Like the reading method I devised for my college students, this one has four steps, but unlike that method it requires no real intellectual effort; it is accessible to any Christian, requires very little practice to master, and can pay bountiful benefits. You don't need anyone or anything besides a Bible to use this method, either.

The ancient method to which I refer is called lectio divina, "divine reading." Most Catholics have heard of it, but may think of it as something for monks or saints, not ordinary believers. This is a mistake, for several reasons. First, it requires very little time carved out of an ordinary day to profit from this method, and uses only very short Bible passages for meditation, prayer, and contemplation. Second, the method requires only prayerful attention, not great erudition or sanctity. (If practiced regularly, however, it certainly can help the practitioner grow in holiness.) And then, this method does not require you to work your way through the whole Bible, or to read scholarly commentary or take copious notes. On the contrary, it concentrates on short passages and simply requires prayerful attention. Once one becomes familiar with the method, can become quite a natural way to respond to Scripture whenever you encounter it (in the liturgy or elsewhere). In other words, lectio divina is suitable for anyone and accessible to everyone.

I'm not the person to give detailed instruction in how to practice lectio divina -- this is done much better by others than I could do. For instance, here is a nice introduction to the method by a Benedictine monk, along with some discussion about how to adapt the practice to groups. An even simpler explanation recently was given by a Brazilian bishop who wanted to introduce lectio divina to the faithful of his diocese. I'll quote most of it here, since it's short. You can read the rest at Zenit.org. In square brackets, I put the traditional Latin term for each of the four steps.

[Lectio] First, one reads the passage. "In this first instance, one attempts to understand the text exactly as it appears, without pretending to extract from it immediately messages and conclusions," he said.

[Meditatio] Meditation on the text comes next, in response to the question "What is God saying to me, or to us, through this text? Now we really do try to listen to God who is speaking to us and we receive his voice."

[Oratio] Then comes "prayer. In this third step, we respond to the question: What does this text bring me to say to God?"

"Let us always remember that a good biblical reading is always done only in the dialogue of faith: God speaks, we listen and accept, and respond to God and speak to him," the cardinal explained. The text "might inspire several types of prayer: praise, profession of faith, thanksgiving, adoration, petition for forgiveness and help."

[Contemplatio] The fourth and final step of lectio divina is contemplation. In this step "we dwell on the Word and further our understanding of the mystery of God and his plan of love and salvation; at the same time, we dispose ourselves to accept in our concrete lives what the Word teaches us, renewing our good intentions and obedience of the faith."

By the way, Pope Benedict very frequently recommends this method to all and sundry, and frequently uses it as the basis of many of his weekly public addresses.

If anyone should still hesitate, asking, "Where do I begin?" I would like to suggest that he begin with one of the Scripture passages from the lectionary for the daily Mass, or from the propers of the Liturgy of the Hours (a.k.a. the breviary or the Daily Office). Here is the daily Mass lectionary, on the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. This link will take you to Universalis.com, a very nice website that provides the daily propers for each of the daily offices. Many non-Catholics have the mistaken notion that the Catholic Church does not place much emphasis on the authority of the Bible or promote Scripture reading, but Catholics should know that is just not true: not only is the Catholic liturgy is a densely-woven tissue of Scripture references, but each day the lectionary for the Mass presents three (and on Sundays four) substantial passages from the Bible for the faithful to meditate on. Lectio divina provides a way to use the daily liturgical readings for personal devotional meditation.

Having said all this, since this is a blog about reading (not about why you should read), I will leave it to my reader to decide whether or not to try this method of spiritual reading. I will suggest, however, that since lectio divina is a practice that turns reading into prayer, then to ask the question, "Why should I practice lectio divina?" is pretty much the same as asking, "Why should I pray?" I hope you already have a good answer to that! If praying is something you already do, and would like to do better, you should try lectio divina.

Now, off you go! Happy reading (& meditating, praying, and contemplating)!

Dynamics of World History, Christopher Dawson

2010-05-20T19:01:00.004-05:00

I've been wanting for a long time to read more of the work of historian Christopher Dawson, having read one or two of his essays on the relationship between Christianity and Western civilization. Dawkins wrote through the middle of the twentieth century, and was widely held in high esteem until about the late 1960s, when a rigidly secularist view became de rigueur in academic circles and any historian who acknowledged religion as a force in the shaping of history became persona non grata.

That, at least, is the explanation that Dermot Quinn offers for Dawson's disappearance from the canon of important historical scholars taught to history students in American universities these days. I refer to Quinn's introduction to the third edition of Dynamics of World History (ISI Books, 2002), a compendium of Dawson's essays compiled and edited by John J. Mulloy. I've had this book on hand for several months, hoping to work my way through it one essay at a time.

Mulloy has arranged the essays into five sections grouped in two parts: Part One -- Toward a Sociology of History and Part Two -- Conceptions of World History. Part One has three sections: "The Sociological Foundations of History," "The Movement of World History," and "Urbanism and the Nature of Culture"; Part Two consists of two sections: "Christianity and the Meaning of History," and "The Vision of the Historians." The book begins and ends with a preface and an afterword by John Mulloy.

Since the various sections are designed to build an understanding of Dawson's concept of history, its distinctiveness and importance -- and since I am somewhat impatient -- my plan is to read one essay from in section in turn, to gain a quick overview of Dawson's vision, then to go back and add depth by repeating the process of reading one essay from each section in order. After four "passes" I'll go back and read the remaining essays, since each section contains at least four, but some as many as ten, essays.

I've never studied historiography in an academic setting, although I have wanted to. Perhaps it is just as well -- I suspect that what is taught in historiography classes these days would not have "scratched me where I itch." (I remember a class called "Historiography" offered at my undergraduate college, which was "by invitation only" and was famed for involving a lot of wine-drinking, which in those days was legal for anyone over 18 years of age.) A number of years ago, I read an essay by political philosopher Hannah Arendt that sort of "turned me on" to the idea that history is not merely a series of historical facts (which is more or less the way it was presented in high school) but a way of understanding those facts. That is, "history" is never simply objective and factual, but always involves interpretation. This seems rather self-evident to me now, but at the time it was an important new insight. The Arendt essay in question was "The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern," which can be read on Google Books here. (I'll also put a window at the end of this post where you can read it.)

Any way, Dawson is famous for emphasizing the important role that religion plays in shaping our idea of history and, particularly, for showing that one cannot really understand Western history without adequately acknowledging the role Christianity has played in shaping Western culture.

Embedded view:

Current reading: mystery novels, history, literary criticism et cetera

2010-05-20T18:11:00.015-05:00

I've been doing a lot of reading, not much writing lately. Here are some of the things I have read, am reading, or will shortly begin, some of which I will shortly be discussing in subsequent posts.

Murder mysteries

Thanks to a new Half Price Books nearby, I've been able to entertain myself reading inexpensive murder mysteries.

Careless in Red, Elizabeth George. One of her Inspector Lynley mysteries which has not yet been turned into an episode of the television series by that name. [finished reading]
Last Act in Palmyra, Lindsey Davis. A Marcus Didius Falco mystery that takes place in the Decapolis during the reign of Roman emperor Vespasian (see earlier discussion of this Roman mystery series). [finished reading]
The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith. The first in this charming series, whose detective-protagonist is Botswanan Precious Ramotswe and which has been turned into a movie and TV series on HBO. All of the plots for the first series of TV episodes were taken from this episodic novel, and the series largely captures the charm of the novel. [finished reading]
Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish, Dorothy Gilman. The second or third in the series, which finds Mrs. Pollifax evading a pre-9/11 Muslim terrorist ring in Morroco. [finished reading]

Picture Miss Seeton, Heron Carvic. The first in the Miss Seeton series, about an elderly English art instructor with a penchant for tangling with criminals and then providing clues to crimes through her intuitively/psychically-inspired drawings. The series was begun by Heron Carvic, who wrote 5 Miss Seeton mysteries before his death. The series was later continued by other writers using pseudonyms with the initials H and C (Hampton Charles, Hamilton Crane). I read 8 or ten of the beginning of the series many years ago, and am glad to re-discover Miss Seeton. [finished reading]

Other literature

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury. I fell in love with Ray Bradbury as a kid when I read a story of his in a reader at school, about the magic of a new pair of sneakers -- a story, I found out later, that was taken from Dandelion Wine. This book really captures, for me, the beauty of Bradbury's writing and his talent at capturing the richness and beauty of life. [Currently reading]
Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith. I've not yet started this, so I'm not sure if it should go in the "murder mystery" category, along with Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. [Planning to read]
Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare. An Oxford school edition. I wanted to re-read this after reading John Carroll's analysis of it in the first chapter of The Wreck of Western Culture. [Planning to re-read]
Hamlet, William Shakespeare. Oxford edition, with extensive material and discussion of the three extant versions of the play. Another one I wanted to re-read after reading the first chapter of Carroll's The Wreck of Western Culture. [Planning to read]

Literary Criticism

An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis. While reading Michael Ward's Planet Narnia, I realized that I had never read this (although I'm pretty sure I've owned it), so I bought a new copy and got cracking. [finished reading]

History

Dynamics of World History, Christopher Dawson. A compilation of Dawson's essays, edited by John J. Mulloy. Organized to give a good overview of Dawson's work as an historian. I'm reading it one essay at a time. [Currently reading]

Other non-fiction

Things That Count: Essays Moral and Theological, Gilbert Meilaender. A collection of essays in which Meilaender, an ethicist and theologian (Lutheran, I believe) "[mines] the great works of philosophy, literature, and political theory" for "insights into the human condition." Until now, I know Meilaender only from his contributions to First Things, but I'm looking forward to reading these essays, and will probably comment on them one by one, as I read them. This is one of two books I chose as my free selections when I renewed my membership in the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's Reader's Club (huge discounts on subsequent purchases during the next twelve months). [Currently reading]
The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited, John Carroll. My other free selection from ISI. To counter the prevalent view that the humanism that came in through the Renaissance is to be credited for all the wonders of modern life -- individual liberty, modern democracy, prosperity, etc. -- Carroll presents an alternative view, namely that "the West’s five-hundred-year experiment with humanism has failed" and has destroyed culture in the western(ized) world. [Currently reading]
The Apocalypse--Letter by Letter: A Literary Analysis of the Book of Revelation, Steven Paul. This was lent me by a friend, who thought I would appreciate the linguistic precision with which the author analyzes the original Greek of the last book of the Bible (Apocalypse, a.k.a. Revelation). The author, dying of cancer, wrote this as a series of letters to his brother-in-law, who later compiled the letters into a book for publication. [Planning to read]

I have a feeling I'm leaving out one or two things, but that's the gist of it. So many books, so little time!

Moral lessons from historical figures: Plutarch's Lives

2010-04-07T18:07:00.006-05:00

While I've got Rome on my mind, I've begun dipping into some of the biographies of ancient Romans (and Greeks) written by Plutarch, who is credited with being the author of the literary genre we know as "biography." The most famous of these are Plutarch's "parallel lives," in which he pairs off a Greek and a Roman figure who share some significant biographical features (e.g., Demosthenes and Cicero were each renowned orators), describes the life of each, and then compares the points on which each should or should not be admired (Demosthenes was more mercenary than Cicero, but Cicero engaged in unseemly boasting about his own abilities and accomplishments).

I've got two different editions of Plutarch on hand to choose from: one is the Penguin Classics' Fall of the Roman Republic, a selection of Plutarch's Roman biographies that highlights figures who played a key role in the collapse of the Roman Republic (Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, Cicero). This edition presents a modern translation by Rex Warner, with an introduction by Robin Seager. The other book is Volume II of the Modern Library edition of Plutarch's Lives, some of which are paired and compared, while others are "solo." This volume contains the (17th century) Dryden translation of the Lives, along with a 19th century Preface by Arthur Hugh Clough and an editorial introduction by American biographer, James Atlas.

Before I began reading any of the biographies themselves, I read the editorial introductions and the preface by Clough, and I noticed something that struck me as rather curious, namely the fact that modern scholars, although they acknowledge the importance of Plutarch's work, seem to regard his method and purpose as quaint and even illegitimate. Plutarch himself made it plain that, in writing these biographies, his intention was to examine the character of the men whose lives he was writing rather than analyzing their historical importance ("My design is not to write Histories but Lives"):

And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their character and inclinations than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in any other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men ...

This purpose is characterized by James Atlas, with a note of indulgent condescension, as "moralizing," as if it were rather peculiar, in considering the lives of historically important figures, to be interested chiefly in the moral quality of their character. Perhaps he is willing to allow Plutarch his moralizing because Atlas himself acknowledged in an interview shortly after the publication of his biography of Saul Bellow:

We want to know how people lived, we want instruction in what critics used to call "manners and morals." Biography is our school, our church, our family, our community. It does the work the novel used to do: it educates us.

Robin Seager goes beyond questioning Plutarch's "moralizing tendencies" -- he blames Plutarch for failing to credit historical figures for their cleverness in political scheming. Take, for instance, in his editorial note on Plutarch's life of Gaius Marius; the historical record clearly shows Marius to have been a ruthless self-promoter with little regard for the rule of law and a nasty taste for bloody vengeance against his political rivals, but Seager seems to think that Plutarch takes too dim a view of these facts and fails to show "appreciation of the political skill with which Marius fostered and exploited equestrian and popular discontent in order to oust Metellus from the Numidian command."

This view, to me, smacks of a modern, Machiavellian expectation that political figures should be judged for the efficacy, rather than the morality, of their actions, which is completely at odds with the view of classical writers. The historian Livy would have had few quibbles with Plutarch's "moralizing," as he himself said, in the preface to his history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, that his purpose in writing was to provide examples of men and actions to imitate or to avoid -- that is, he intended his history to provide moral instruction, and he thought his presentation would make it plain enough which actions had been destructive and which admirable. He says:

The subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are these - the life and morals of the community; the men and the qualities by which through domestic policy and foreign war dominion was won and extended. Then as the standard of morality gradually lowers, let him follow the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into headlong ruin, until he reaches these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.

In other words, in Livy's view, a high moral standard produced social benefits, and declining morals brought about social ruin. He wrote, for the generation following the collapse of the Republic, to help people of his own day avoid repeating the disasters of the past and, in fact, his History reads like a series of moral vignettes. It has always struck me as quite inexplicable that Machiavelli, who was well-read in classical history and even wrote a famous commentary on Livy (his Discourses on Livy), seems not to have been influenced at all by the classical tendency to equate personal morality with the public good; in fact, in The Prince, he quite explicitly denies this equation, urging the prince to do what is expedient rather than what is ethical.

Perhaps, though, Robin Seager, in complaining that Plutarch fails to appreciate Marius's political savvy, is not so much reflecting a Machiavellian preference for expediency over ethics as he is revealing his own preoccupation as a biographer -- Seager has published two well-received political biographies of Roman figures whose lives were also treated by Plutarch: Pompey and Tiberius Caesar. At any rate, it certainly seems that modern biographers do not share Plutarch's interest in "moralizing." I, however, am looking forward to seeing what moral lessons Plutarch draws out in his Lives.

Mysteries of Ancient Rome, Part 3 (Marcus Didius Falco mysteries)

2010-03-30T12:56:00.003-05:00

The third series of murder mysteries set in ancient Rome with which I am most familiar are those of Lindsey Davis, the investigations of fictional detective Marcus Didius Falco, who lives and snoops during the reign of Emperor Vespasian (father of succeeding Emperors Titus and Domitian, who all together constitute the Flavian Dynasty). Unlike the Roberts and Saylor novels, this series gives insight into the popular culture of the early Imperial Rome, rather than the historical events that contributed to the collapse of the Republic. Falco's escapades are also considerably more lighthearted and deliberately comedic than those of the other two fictional detectives, which may be why they are so popular.

Period: The first in the series, The Silver Pigs, takes place in A.D. 70, at the beginning of the reign of Emperor Vespasian (also the year of the razing of Jerusalem), but the central events transpire in Roman Britain. The most recent (20th) addition to the series, Nemesis (only recently released in hard cover) takes place in A. D. 77., toward the end of Vespasian's reign. The intervening novels take the protagonist to the far corners of the Roman Empire, which in this period was at its greatest expanse.
Detective/Protagonist: Marcus Didius Falco, a plebeian with a checkered family background, is a freelance "informer" who works on commission for the emperor, reporting to the emperor's Chief Spy. Falco is also a free-wheeling scamp who is not afraid to be politically-incorrect: for instance, early in the series, he sets up housekeeping with Helena Justina, a Senator's daughter who becomes the mother of his first child. The colorful commoners in Falco's family and the more conventional and proper aristocrats in Helena's provide a good overview of the social spectrum of Roman citizenry of the period, and serve to suggest that the early Empire's pretense of preserving the social and civic mores that had given strength and resiliency to the Roman republic was just that -- pretense. Davis seems to suggest that the real vitality of Rome, at this point, lies in the huge plebeian swathe of the population, whose interests, unlike those of the stiff, old Senatorial class, are varied, earthy, and definitely not stuffy. Think of Falco as the Roman equivalent of a modern East-Ender and Helena as the equivalent of the younger generation of the British aristocracy, who want to break out of the quaint anachronism of the social class into which they've been born.
What I Like: First, these stories are just plain laugh-out-loud funny. You just can't not like that scamp, Falco, and you can't help but sympathize with the women (well-bred girlfriend Helena Justina and his common but practical mother) who try to rein him in and keep him on the straight and narrow. To my mind, Davis does a better job than Saylor of showing the contrasting values and habits of the common and the aristocratic classes. Another attractive feature of these novels is the wide range of locales covered, with at least as much time spent in the provinces as in Rome itself.
What I Don't Like: As with Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder stories, my chief quibble is the projection of modern social mores and political attitudes onto citizens of ancient Rome. It is highly unlikely, for instance, that a woman like Helena Justina would choose (or be allowed) to take up the role of common-law wife to a low-life like Falco (if he were a member of the Roman nouveau riche, this might be a bit more plausible). Davis admits on her official website that she wanted to create characters and situations that suited her own feminist sensibilities. However, I am more inclined to make allowances for the charming and irrepressible Falco than I am for the dully self-righteous Gordianus. I frankly admit my personal bias in this matter, but would defend it by pointing out that, in the case of Saylor, modern sensibilities may distort our understanding of important historical events, whereas in Davis's novels they simply provide for a lively cast of characters, none of whom is closely involved with events of historical moment.

There are many other novels, or even novel series, that use Republican or Imperial Rome as their background, but these three series are the ones I know best. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, both as mystery novels and as windows into ancient culture. I'll summarize my assessments of the three:

John Maddox Roberts' SPQR mysteries: Best overall, because it ably balances historic and cultural accuracy with entertainment. Although not as much of a scamp as Davis's Falco, Decius Caecilius Metellus manages to give us an insider's view of the ruling class without being stuffily pious about it; he has plenty of youthful adventures, including a long and spirited rivalry with Clodius Pulcher and an on-going friendship with ex-galley slave Milo, who becomes a gangleader in the Roman underworld and chief (eventually deadly) rival of Clodius.
Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa mysteries: Gives an interestingly contrasting view of many of the same events covered in the SPQR novels. While I believe Gordianus's viewpoint reflects that of some modern historical revisionists more than it does one typical of any Roman of Gordianus's day, these novels are well-crafted mysteries that can provide many hours of satisfying entertainment. They also, if read in tandem with Robert's SPQR stories, can provide a glimpse of the spectrum of modern evaluations of important milestones in Roman history.
Lindsey Davis's Marcus Didius Falco mysteries: Probably the most entertaining of the three, the Falco novels also give a glimpse of ancient popular culture that pleasingly complements the more seriously historical focus of the other two series, and also shows how the concerns of the Empire differed from those of the waning Republic.

If you have read any of these novels and would like to throw in your own two cents, please do so using the Comments function. Or if you are familiar with other novels that take place in this general period, please leave a comment and say why you would or would not recommend them.

Mysteries of Ancient Rome, Part 2 (Roma Sub Rosa)

2010-03-25T19:03:00.018-05:00

The mystery novels that got me started on this topic are those by Steven Saylor, a series called Roma Sub Rosa (a Latin term for something done secretly). Paradoxically, one of the things I like about Saylor's series is also the thing that most sets my teeth on edge: it covers the same period and the same historical events as those dealt with in Roberts' SPQR series, but from a distinct outsider's point of view, which contrasts rather strongly with that of John Maddox Roberts' aristocratic insider, Decius Caecilius Metellus. The titles chosen for the two series indicates the essential differences between them: SPQR (the motto of Republic: Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome) seeks to acquaint the reader with the values that made the Roman republic great and whose collapse led to the Republic's demise and the rise of the military dictatorship we call the Roman Empire, while Roma Sub Rosa presents the post-Machiavellian view that Rome's government was always the private club of a powerful elite who arranged things to their own satisfaction and mutual benefit through secret and often unsavory insider deals.

So it might be best for anyone interested in gaining insight into the last generation of the Roman Republic, how and why it collapsed, to read both series, taking into account the different assessments of the state of Rome at that time which are implicit in each author's treatment of the historical events. One might read, say, Roberts' The Catiline Conspiracy and Saylor's Catilina's Riddle and see one of the most notorious and significant political intrigues of the late Roman Republic from two very distinct points of view, one sympathetic to the republican point of view (which saw Catilina and his co-conspirators as dangerous monsters) and the other from a more "modern" view that sympathizes with the young Roman patricians who were willing to pitch in with Catilina and conspire to murder their own fathers in their beds.

I have to admit that I find Saylor's mysteries less congenial than Roberts', mostly because he goes out of his way to present a "minority viewpoint" which, presumably, is intended to seem more "realistic" to modern readers (whom the author seems to expect to be cynical about political figures). However, Saylor's novels are well-crafted and engaging as mysteries, regardless of what one may think about their political perspective, so I recommend them. Here is an overview of the series, using the same general categories as those I used to describe the SPQR series:

Period: This series covers roughly the same span as that of the SPQR series, with the first novel, Roman Blood, finding the detective protagonist assisting Cicero on one of his early career-enhancing legal successes, defending Sextus Roscius against a charge that he murdered his own father; the latest novel, The Triumph of Caesar, takes place during Julius Caesar's dictatorship and the events leading up to Caesar's assasination.
Detective/Protagonist: Unlike Roberts' Decius Metellus, Saylor's Gordianus the Finder is definitely not a representative of the political elite; a plebeian by birth, he takes on investigations that political bigwigs find necessary but beneath their dignity. This lead character seems to have little in with the common virtues, viewpoints, or values typical of Romans of that time, and thus strikes me as un-Roman and rather anachronistic: for example, he has a tendency to make slaves not only members of his household, but also of his family -- he marries his half-Jewish/half-Egyptian concubine, adopts two boys he had previously purchased as slaves, and manumits a handsome household slave who has impregnated his daughter so that the two can be married. Annoyingly, Gordianus the Finder is presented as the kind of anti-establishment egalitarian multi-culturalist that politically-correct modern Americans are supposed to admire but, fortunately, he is also a cracking good investigator with a knack for getting involved in fascinating political subterfuge while somehow managing to remain morally detached from it.
What I Like: Gordianus, despite his attitude of moral detachment, manages to get himself and his family of apolitical commoners entangled in some of the most fascinating and complicated high-flown historical intrigues of the late Roman republic. And even Gordianus doesn't get to keep his position on the moral high ground -- in the eighth of the series, Rubicon, it is revealed that even Gordianus is not above a dastardly deed or two to preserve his own interests.
What I Don't Like: The thing that always grates on me when I read these novels (and sometimes others with historical settings) is the anachronistic projection of modern attitudes onto characters intended to be sympathetic to modern readers, attitudes which would not have been typical of Romans of the period. For instance, even plebeians like Gordianus could be as class-conscious and snobbish as any patrician; most were contemptuous and suspicious of former slaves, who sometimes became quite rich and influential. Saylor seems to be bent on historical revisionism of a rather tendentious kind -- Gordianus always seems to find sympathy for figures whom history has shown to be socially destructive, self-aggrandizing archvillains. For instance, his beloved elder adopted son, Meto, becomes an ardent follower of Catilina and later becomes the right-hand man of Julius Caesar, but Gordianus finds no fault with either choice, other than to rue the fact that his boy has embraced military life. In fact, while sharing a hot bath with Catilina, Gordianus himself is almost seduced (sexually and philosophically) by Catilina, a spoiled aristocrat who plotted to attack the city of Rome from within and without, using an army of escaped slaves to attack the city while within Rome's walls young aristocrats won over to Catilina's self-serving cause were to murder their own fathers in their beds and set fire to the city. Leading Romans who survived Catilina's conspiracy (including the historian Sallust) regarded him as something like a cross between Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden, but Saylor manages to portray him as a kind of 1960s American radical, a charismatic and sexually magnetic figure who may have been a sociopath, but who should be admired for trying to shake up the Privileged White Man's Establishment. On the other hand, Saylor projects a much lower opinion of Cicero, who survived an attempt by Catilina to assasinate him as a political rival and who afterward, while consul, discovered and foiled Catilina's plot against the Republic; Cicero is presented as a self-serving coward and an obnoxious blowhard who had the dumb luck to stumble upon Catilina's plot, and then used it to inflate his own political ego for decades afterward. These novels would be better off without Saylor's/Gordianus's perverse moralizing.

Mysteries of Ancient Rome, Part 1 (SPQR)

2010-03-06T18:30:00.005-06:00

I just finished reading Rubicon, by Steven Saylor, and thought I would discuss one of my favorite "just for fun" genres: murder mysteries set in ancient Rome. There are three series by different authors that I am familiar with (there are also some other series I've sampled), which I can recommend for different reasons. Right now, I'll just briefly describe the three series and what distinguishes each one; perhaps another day I'll go into more depth on particular novels.

SPQR series, John Maddox Roberts

The first is the SPQR series by John Maddox Roberts, which I began reading about 15 years ago, a couple of years before I first began studying the Latin language and the culture of the late Roman Republic and early Empire. SPQR stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus ("The Senate and People of Rome"), an official motto of the Roman Republic which can still be seen on manhole covers in Rome to this day. This remains my favorite series of the three, perhaps because it first introduced me to the daily life and the cultural ideals of the Roman Republic (at that time, like most people, I didn't even know the difference between the Republic and the Empire). When I began reading, there were three novels in print; now, the novels now total a baker's dozen, and several related short stories have been published as well.

Period: The last generation of the Roman Republic (70-46 B.C.). The series opens in the year of the consulates of Crassus and Pompey, the same year that Cicero achieved one of his first major legal victories (prosecuting the corrupt provincial governor Verres), and the year that the poet Virgil was born. The most recent novel occurs in the months leading up to the assasination of Julius Caesar on the Senate floor. Thus, the series covers what is probably the most interesting and dramatic period of Roman history, when the civic virtues that had allowed Rome to become great are crumbling under the weight of greed and personal ambition, to collapse ultimately into the long period of civil war that led to the ascension of Octavian (a.k.a. Caesar Augustus) and the birth of what we now call the Roman Empire.
Detective/Protagonist: Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger, son of a obscure branch of an old Roman family of senatorial class. Decius is a bright young man with an insatiable curiosity that often gets him involved in bringing to light secrets that a more politically-astute (or ambitious) young man would avoid. In the first novel, Decius is just taking his first step on the cursus honorum, or career ladder of public service that respectable men of his social class were expected to follow. As the series goes along, Decius's career advances as the political situation in Rome declines; at some point he marries a (fictional) niece of Julius Caesar.
What I Like: There's almost nothing I don't like about this series. Here, briefly, are a few specifics: Authenticity -- Decius is a political and cultural "insider," therefore he understands, sympathetically but not uncritically, Roman republican virtues and figures; Portrayal of key historical figures is realistic without being "post-modernly" cynical of their motives; Diversity of locale: some of the novels take place in other parts of the Roman world, not just the urbs itself; all of the major historical events of the period are dealt with; also, the author provides a glossary of terms relating to Roman life that are likely to be unfamiliar to readers; indirectly, the reader learns a lot about this fascinating period of history; finally, the tone of the novels includes appropriate humor without being irritatingly "jokey."
What I Don't Like: Not much! I'm just sorry I've only read about 6 of the 13 novels so far.

Literary Neanderthals (and you thought they were stupid!)

2010-02-27T00:16:00.015-06:00

One of the online journals I read fairly regularly is MercatorNet, a site that features articles on a variety of subjects, whose common link is attention to the inherent dignity of the human person. The subjects of the articles are taken from news headlines, and one of the aims of MercatorNet's editorial policy is to take on polemically the assumptions embedded in many offerings put out by "objective" journalistic media. Or, as the MercatorNet editorial staff put it,

We're proud to have enemies and we attack them repeatedly by confronting them with evidence. Here they are: moral relativism, scientism, crass commercialism, utilitarianism, materialism -- in short, any ism which reduces persons to ciphers and treats them as soulless machines. We delight in dissecting media cliches.

They actively invite comments on their articles and encourage discussion among readers who may or may not agree with the views expressed. Since comments are moderated, the resulting discussion is always civil in tone, although not necessarily univocal. (By the way, the same publisher also has an online journal that focuses on bioethical issues: BioEdge: bioethics news from around the world.

I mention this partly to encourage others to read MercatorNet online, and partly to draw attention to a recent piece discussing a Harvard professor's proposal that we begin cloning Neanderthals. The view of the professor, genome researcher George Church, is that of most proponents of scientism: "If we can do something [e.g., clone Neanderthals], we are ethically compelled to do it if it will yield new knowledge." This is just another permutation of the old "Might makes right" argument, which most thinking people would consider suspect, if not plain wrong. For this kind of scientist, however, the only moral imperative is to seek knowledge (scientia). But while knowledge itself may be morally neutral, the means by which we seek it, and the uses to which we put it, are not. (I seem to recall a story about a couple of early humans -- even before the Neanderthals! -- who sought some knowledge for self-serving motives, which turned out not to be good for themselves or for anyone else ever since.)

It's quite an amazing thing that scientists have been able to reconstruct the genetic sequence of members of a long-extinct branch of the human race, and I can well understand the burning curiosity such a development must excite in the imaginations of many modern people. However, as Michael Cook, author of the MercatorNet article, points out, the global scientific community has already acknowledged that human cloning is unethical and should be off limits; that general rule should apply as much to ancient strains of the human race as it does to those of us living today. Read the article for Cook's analysis of why cloning Neanderthals would be unethical, and and his answer to the arguments Church uses to try to head off objections.

All of this made me think about some literary treatments of questions that Michael Cook raises, such as: what were Neanderthals like? why did they die out while we (homo sapiens) survived and throve? Is homo sapiens really superior and, if so, in what way? What would the world be like if we suddenly found cloned Neanderthals among us? Would it be good for us? Good for the Neanderthals? And, if you think about it, it would be strange indeed if we did not try to imagine what these ancient human cousins were like, and how the world might be different today if they had survived (or if they should return through the miracles of modern genetics). These questions have already been explored to some extent in modern fiction (no, I'm not talking about Clan of the Cave Bear or suchlike). Two quite different novelists came to mind as I read the MercatorNet article: William Golding and Jasper Fforde.

William Golding's The Inheritors: Were Neanderthals pre-lapsarian humans?

Golding was morally serious novelist, while Fforde's novels are light-hearted and whimsical, but they both manage to deal imaginatively with some of the moral and ethical questions about our relationship to the Neanderthals. It has been many years since I read William Golding's The Inheritors (he is better known for Lord of the Flies), but it made a big impression on me at the time and I've been intending to re-read it ever since. As I recall, the story follows a small Neanderthal family as they live their simple but happy lives, until they meet a race of more intellectually gifted men. I won't spoil the story for you by telling you what happens, except to say that the Neanderthals were very sweet and appealing, while the "superior" race they met struck me as quite demonic, almost as if Golding intended the Neanderthals to represent unfallen humanity and homo sapiens as the fallen race of Man (ironically, the more advanced humans in the novel view the Neanderthals as demons). That realization struck me rather hard at the time. I've read a few more of Golding's novels since then and have found that fallen human nature is one of the most pervasive themes found in them. While I can't entirely trust my nearly 30 year old memory of the novel, I believe that it pretty effectively turns on its head the materialist Darwinian assumption that whatever species survives is in some fundamental way "superior" to whatever has already suffered extinction -- or at least causes the reader to question what equivalence (if any) there may be between biological and moral "superiority."

Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book: Neanderthals would not thanks us for their return

Jasper Fforde's novels are pure fun, but that doesn't mean he doesn't (at least obliquely) draw his readers' attention to some of the more problematic trajectories of modern culture. He does this primarily by the means satirists have always used -- drawing ridiculously distorted pictures of the world and then daring readers to recognize themselves in the caricature. Successful satire gets the reader first to laugh at the ridiculous and then, almost simultaneously, to feel a pang of discomfort as he realizes how close to home it strikes. In Fforde's well-known Thursday Next series of novels he satirizes, among other things, contemporary culture's increasing disregard of literature, as well as its penchant for exploiting each new technological achievement quite mindlessly, without concern for the consequences -- for instance, selling home genetic reproduction kits, by which ordinary consumers can create for themselves pets from now-extinct species (Thursday herself has a pet dodo from an early model kit -- the poor critter has no wings or feathers, but Thursday keeps it warm by knitting it cozies to wear). Among the cloned species are Neanderthals -- developed in a government program, I believe, for experimental purposes, which had to be abandoned when the scientists realized that they had cloned people, not simply "medical test vessels." As our heroine, Thursday Next, tells it:

The neanderthal experiment was simultaneously the high and low point of the genetic revolution. Successful in that a long-dead cousin of Homo sapien [sic] was brought back from extinction, yet a failure in that the scientists, so happy to gaze upon their experiments from their ever lofty ivory towers, had not seen so far as to consider the social implications that a new species of man might command in a world unvisited by their like for over 30 millennia. It was little surprise that so many neanderthals felt confused and unprepared for the pressures of modern life. It was Homo sapiens at his least sapient. (Lost in a Good Book, ch. 4)

The neanderthal characters in the novel are sensitive, thoughtful (sometimes to the point of being morose), unimpressed by the complications of modern life, and melancholy over being brought into a world where they don't really belong, and where they are not legally considered to be human, although they are eventually allowed to take employment in jobs that most modern humans think beneath them. In this fictional world -- as would likely be the case in our real world, should we ever successfully clone one -- male Neanderthals are infertile, so there are no Neanderthal families, a real tragedy since they are very clannish by nature.

This last is a serious point that Michael Cook raises in his MercatorNet article when he analyzes why it would be unethical to clone Neanderthals:

The ultimate argument against cloning Neanderthals is that it violates human dignity to create a being outside of the loving circle of a family. The first right of a human being is to be loved for who he or she is, not as a product or scientific experiment. A cloned Neanderthal would be as close as possible to synthetic humanity as you can imagine. Part of her would be chimpanzee [because the proposed method would involve using a chimp ovum]; the rest would be a patchwork quilt of Neanderthal DNA sequenced from the bones of dozens of forebears who may have lived thousands of years apart, scattered across Europe. Everyone involved in her conception and birth would want to exploit her; none of them would cherish her. She would enter the world as a circus freak.

If this is true, isn’t there something really troubling about the mindset of scientists who are willing to acquiesce in cloning a Neanderthal? They ignore the humanity of the being they propose to create, viewing it merely as an instrument for their own curiosity or utility. For them, a human being is reduced to his genetic code or to anatomical novelties. Of course, it is just a thought experiment, but an unsettling one. Because what it reveals is the persistent capacity of science for dehumanisation.

This last point, I think, is what troubles me most about Church's proposal to create a Neanderthal clone -- he views as an ethical imperative a project which, ultimately, is as unethical as it could possibly be. Science reduces human beings to abstractions, and it's hard to empathize with an abstraction. Imaginative literature, however, can do what science never will -- it humanizes the abstractions by turning them back into concrete individuals (even if imaginary ones) whose thoughts we hear, through whose eyes we can see the world. We can't help but feel the desolation of Golding's Neanderthal protagonist Lok after the last of his family has been killed by the new race of homo sapiens or that of Fforde's Neanderthal, doomed to a short, lonely life among people who don't even respect him as a human being. By getting us to engage imaginatively with possible worlds and situations, literature can help us to consider the consequences of our choices without actually putting anyone at risk. We can indulge our curiosity without allowing it to take us into realms where we should not wander.

The value of conversion stories in the Christian Tradition

2010-02-24T13:11:00.008-06:00

Various things the last couple of weeks have kept me from much reading or writing. (Okay, I read a few Janet Evanovich novels about a New Jersey woman who becomes a bounty hunter after she loses her job as lingerie buyer at a local department store -- I'm all for career flexibility, but decided not to follow her example.) This being Lent, I scrounged around for some appropriate reading (not that City of God would not be appropriate!), and found a copy of the second book of St Gregory the Great's Dialogues, which is devoted entirely to the life of Saint Benedict, the father of Western monasticism, and a number of miracles worked through him. This is an edition from Macmillan's Library of Liberal Arts series, translation and introduction by Myra L. Uhlfelder, which I picked up a few months ago from Half Price Books for 98 cents.

One of the reasons I'm interested in this little book (although I doubt it occurred to me when I bought it) is my interest in the role other people's stories play in the Christian spiritual tradition. Most of the books of the Old Testament were written long after the events they describe transpired, but the Christian Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are based on eye witness accounts that had been shared orally for a generation or so before being committed to writing, and much of their authority comes from this fact. His personal encounter with Christ, risen and ascended, on the road to Damascus also lends authority to Paul's many epistles, as well as his preaching. So, one might say that from the very beginning, personal accounts of God's action and intervention in men's lives is a unique and essential feature of the Christian tradition.

St Augustine of Hippo understood this when he wrote his Confessions, a meditation on how God's providence led him to become to be a Christian. In Book X, after he has completed the account of his life up to the time of his conversion and baptism, Augustine (who has constantly addressed his narrative to God) brings up the question of why he should allow readers to eavesdrop on his confession to God:

What therefore have I to do with men that they should hear my confessions, as if it were they who would cure all that is evil in me? Men are a race curious to know of other men's lives, but slothful to correct their own. Why should they wish to hear from me what I am, when they do not wish to hear from You what they are themselves? (X. iii.3)

This, of course, was one of the most important reasons Augustine wrote the Confessions -- to get others to see in his own story something that resonated with their own experience, and perhaps learn a lesson similar to the one he has learned. He wants others to recognize what God has wrought in his life, seeing "not what I once was but what I now am," recognizing his former faults and the way God's grace has amended them:

Let the mind of my brethren love that in me which You teach to be worthy of love, and grieve for that in me which You teach to be worthy of grief [...] but whether they see good or ill still love me. To such shall I show myself: let their breath come faster for my good deeds: let them sigh for my ill. (X.iv.5)

Perhaps Augustine was inspired to such a project by the fact that he himself was encouraged to turn from his sinful ways by the conversion accounts of others. Book VIII of the Confessions relates a series of episodes showing how the example of others inched him step by step closer to the bring of conversion. By the point at which Book VIII begins, Augustine has overcome all of his intellectual scruples and has become convinced of the truth of Christianity, but he hesitates to convert because he knows that the Christian life will demand a total commitment on his part. (Sadly, few Christians today appreciate this!) Augustine doubts he will be able to overcome his lustful nature, so he finds himself caught on the horns of a dilemma: he wishes to take up the Christian life whole-heartedly, living a celibate life of devotion dedicated entirely to God, but his inability to control his sexual urges suggests that he should marry, which would mean that much of his time and attention would be consumed in providing for his family. Seeking advice on how to overcome this dilemma, he visits a wise old priest, Simplicianus.

Rather than giving him straightforward advice, Simplicianus chooses to encourage Augustine by telling him the story of the conversion of one Victorinus. He probably chose Victorinus because he had a lot in common with Augustine: both were prominent teachers of rhetoric, "deeply learned, trained in all the liberal sciences," who came to accept the truth of the Christian faith but who hesitated to enter the Church formally. In the case of Victorinus, his hesitation seems to be due to his prominence among the pagan "movers and shakers" of Milan, whom he apparently did not wish to offend by a public profession of Christian faith. Repeatedly, when Simplicianus told him, "I'll believe you are a Christian when I see you in church," Victorinus would parry by asking facetiously, "So is it walls that make a Christian?". However, Simplicianus was honest enough that when, through his careful reading and study of Scripture, he became "afraid that Christ might deny him before his angels if he were afraid to confess Christ before men," he promptly requested formal instruction in the Faith and shortly thereafter made public profession of faith and was baptised. Afterward, when under Emperor Julian (the Apostate) it became illegal for Christians to teach rhetoric and literature, Victorinus quite willingly abandoned his career.

Augustine was greatly encouraged by this testimony and "was on fire to imitate him." The fact that he did not immediately do so he attributed to the fact that what was holding him back was not simply pride (what had caused Victorinus' hesitation) but a divided will, a sinful habit of the flesh that he was not eager to break -- we might say, "The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak." As Augustine puts it:

The new will which I now began to have [to love God] was not yet strong enough to overcome that earlier will [to indulge his lust] rooted deep through the years. My two wills, one old, one new, on carnal, one spiritual, were in conflict and in their conflict wasted my soul. (VIII.v.10)

Not long after his visit to Simplicianus, however, Augustine would get further encouragement from a personal account told him by an old friend, Ponticianus, which would give him hope that God would be able to help him overcome his struggle against his lustful habits. That, however, is a story for another day.

Meanwhile, we might consider the extent to which these stories from the Confessions resonate with our own experience. How many of us have not known (or been!) someone who claimed that (s)he was a Christian but was unwilling -- because of laziness or what "other people" might think -- to make any public show of it? Shouldn't we, like Simplicianus, doubt the sincerity of such a claim? (Isn't Christianity more than merely a private opinion?) And haven't we all, from time to time, made Augustine's mistake of thinking that it is up to us, on our own, to overcome our bad habits and sinful proclivities through a force of will ("mind over matter")? The Augustine who wrote the Confessions -- many years a Christian and now a bishop -- can recognize how God was working in his life, although his younger, unregenerate self remained blind to those operations. He "now" knows that Grace can work even through an obstinate will, and that only God's grace would allow him to overcome his old, carnal will.

Planet Narnia: Tutelary Deities

2010-02-02T22:01:00.007-06:00

Last week when I was writing my previous post about Michael Ward's Planet Narnia, I visited Ward's website and left a comment on his blog, telling him how much I like his book and inviting him to take a look at what I had said about it on my own blog. A day or two ago I received this reply from him:

Dear Lisa,

Thanks for your post on the Planet Narnia blog. I'm delighted to know you enjoyed reading the book; it was certainly the greatest pleasure to write.

Thanks also for your post on your own blogsite, which I read and admired. One thing I would slightly question though is the use of the word 'red herring' with respect to Aslan as Christ. Sure, it's a red herring insofar as it has led critics to concentrate far too exclusively on Biblical-allegorical readings of the Chronicles. But Aslan certainly IS a Christ-figure, beautifully so, and the planetary scheme Lewis adopted means that the Christology he is trying to communicate is far more sophisticated than 'mere' Biblical allegory of a simple one-to-one kind.

But that's a small point. Generally, I thought what you wrote was excellent, and I found it personally very encouraging. Thank you!

With kind regards,

Michael

I can see that my use of the term "red herring" was confusing, so I've revised the original post to make my meaning a little clearer. I didn't mean to suggest that readers are mistaken to discern an identification between Aslan and Christ, or that Lewis was misleading readers to make an erroneous connection (that's the usual meaning of "red herring"). It seems quite clear to me -- as I think it will to almost any reader -- that, in the first Narnia story, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (LWW), Lewis deliberately made the parallels between Aslan's actions and the atoning sacrifice of Christ virtually unmistakable. What I had meant to convey is that this connection was so obvious that it may have distracted critics from discerning or pursuing less obvious (non-Scriptural) allusions.

For those who have not yet had an opportunity to read Planet Narnia, I'll explain a little bit about Ward's thesis. What Ward calls his "Eureka moment" occurred one night when he was struck by a phrase from Lewis's poem, "The Planets," which describes the allegorical personae of the planets as they were used poetically throughout the Middle Ages. The phrase that struck him referred to the influence of Jupiter (a.k.a. Jove, the Latin equivalent of Greek Zeus): "winter passed / And guilt forgiven." Immediately this made him think of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which Narnia is caught in an unending winter, until Aslan arrives on the scene and allows himself to be sacrificed by the White Witch, in substitution for Edmund Pevensey, who has betrayed his siblings to the Witch. Ward wondered:

Could there be a link somehow between poem and Chronicle? That thought was the stray spark connecting Jupiter to The Lion in my mind, and one by one the other planet-to-book relationships began to be lit up in its train. (Planet Narnia, 251)

That spark lit a blaze which resulted in Planet Narnia, a wonderfully illuminating study of how the medieval allegorical use of the pagan gods influenced the composition Lewis's Narnia stories (and his other novels, as well).

Why would Lewis use Roman gods as the inspiration for his wonderful Narnia tales? Well, the short answer is, "Because he was a medievalist and an ardent amateur astronomer." Here's a longer answer: Much of the poetry of the Christian Middle Ages -- and well through the period of the Renaissance -- was modeled on, and influenced by, the norms of pre-Christian Latin poetry, which was considered exemplary (think of how deeply influenced the thoroughly-Christian Dante was by the pagan Latin poet, Vergil). The Greeks and Romans, of course, believed that there were many immortal gods, who had their own distinctive personalities and attributes and who intervened in the human realm and governed the cosmos. Today we still call planets by the names of the gods who governed them: Mars, Venus, Jupiter, etc. One of the borrowings (or, better said, inheritances) from the pagan Graeco-Roman world that had the most pervasive influence on the medieval imagination, poetically and otherwise, was their concept of a cosmos in which everything beyond the orbit of the Moon (Diana's planet) was eternal and immortal, the realm of the gods.

Medieval man, of course, was not a pagan and did not believe in the pagan gods, but he was profoundly influenced by the conceptual model of the universe that he inherited from the ancient pagans. (You can read about this in C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image.) For medieval man, too, the earth was the realm of all that is mortal, material, passing, and fallen, while everything in the heavens was spiritual and immortal, charged with the Divine Presence. Thus it was natural for medieval man to find the ancient pagan gods who had given their names to the heavenly bodies to be transformed into personifications, or allegories, of the one true God who reigns over all Creation. Thus, when a medieval poet wrote about the god Jove (Jupiter), he was really writing about those aspects of God (Christ) that Jove embodies: his kingship and majesty, warmth and festivity, etc. Each of the gods represented by the planets of the night sky, in this Christianized cosmos, reflected different aspects of God's nature, so that poems about the pagan deities were always really poems about Christ.

The insight that Michael Ward hit upon was that each of the Narnia books has its own tutelary deity; i.e., each is attuned to the aspects of a particular planetary god, giving that story its own peculiar flavor or atmosphere (what Ward calls its "donegality"). Not only does the planet in question "flavor" the story to reflect its corresponding planet/god, but the way Lewis portrays Aslan in each story also reflects the those particular aspects of Christ that the god in question embodies allegorically. Medieval writers delighted in complex and many-layered allegory, so it should be no surprise that Jack Lewis, medieval scholar and Christian apologist, should choose such a complicated and obscure way to compose his Narnia tales, such that you first have to find the hidden layer of planetary influence and then penetrate beneath it to the Christological meaning, in order to fully appreciate their significance.

Comment on Gilson' s Foreward to City of God

2010-02-01T23:29:00.008-06:00

Aside from agreeing with Gilson’s general thesis -- that we wouldn't have the modern notion that we can create a universal and just society, had it not been for Augustine's City of God -- I will simply suggest that his last point is one worth considering. Although I don’t think we are anywhere near creating a just society on earth (according to the secular or the Christian model) – in fact, we often seem to be going in quite the opposite direction! – it seems that in the present day, when the secular world presents itself more and more as being necessarily antagonistic toward the Christian faith than perhaps at any time since Augustine’s own day, it is more important than ever that separated Christian bodies unite with – or at least collaborate with – the Catholic Church, to make common cause toward building a just society consonant with (not striving against) Christian principles. (In fact we see, more and more, that other religions are willing to make common cause with Christianity against the assaults of secularism.)

Now, when Augustine used that term “Catholic,” he meant not only "that Church visibly united with the See of Peter (the pope)," but also “that Christian body which is free from heresy (or doctrinal error)” – i.e., not the Donatists, Pelagians, Arians, etc. From the Catholic perspective, these two uses of the term are identical: the Catholic Church proclaims the Christian faith in its fullness, and without error through its infallible teaching authority (Magisterium). Any Christian individual or corporate body that denies any portion of the Catholic Church's teaching of the faith is at a spiritual disadvantage, because they do not know (or acknowledge) the faith in its fullness. According to this understanding, Protestants differ from Catholics not simply as one religious denomination differs from another (“different strokes for different folks”), but they necessarily suffer from the ill effects of doctrinal error, to the extent that they differ or dissent from the Catholic faith. It is an act of charity to try to heal the breach of separation, so that "separated brethren" may be restored to the full life of the Christian (i.e., Catholic) Church.

I don't say this polemically -- that is, I'm not trying to present an argument to support the Catholic view, but simply trying to articulate it, because Gilson wrote as a Catholic when he said that "If we really want one world, we must have one Church, and the only Church that is one is the Catholic Church.” Gilson does not say so, but I think he would agree that this desire for a unified society ("one world, one Church") can best be achieved if separated Christian bodies are re-unified with the Catholic Church. The Body of Christ must be whole in order to be healthy, and it must be healthy in order to be able not only to defend itself against the encroachment of secularism, but to work toward building a just society, for the good of all (Christians, secularists, and others).

Sixty years after Gilson wrote his essay, the gulf between the Christian and the secular mindsets has become only more pronounced, much deeper and wider than it was only a few decades ago, to the point that no one denies the profound differences between the two. One evidence of this is the increasing stridency of self-proclaimed atheists. In the mid-20th century, public atheists could still cheerfully make common cause with religious believers, because they could recognize that the two shared many ideas about the common good; this seems no longer to be true. Public atheists today (notably Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) argue that religious believers are not only wrong (mistaken) but downright evil, and must be eradicated (I believe it was Dawkins who recently suggested that inculcating religious faith in one's children should be considered child abuse).

At any rate, there seems to be plenty of evidence that today, more than ever, Christianity in particular, and religion more generally, is under the guns of the secularists. (Remember that even in Augustine's own day, those who wanted to blame Christianity for the world's problems did so on religious, not atheistic, grounds.) I think this explains why both Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI have labored so ceaselessly not simply to be “ecumenical” in the pallid sense often used by those who profess to embrace the “spirit of Vatican II” ("let's all make nice and pretend that all religions are equally good and true"), but in the more vital sense of trying to bring separated bodies of Christians back into the embrace of Mother Church, so that they may not only have the benefit of the sacraments of the Church and the authoritative teaching of the Roman Magisterium, but also so that the Body of Christ may be truly unified and at full strength – both lungs, all the arms & legs, fingers & toes cooperating fully with their Head, which is Christ, and his vicar on earth, the Roman pontiff. Only if the Body is whole and healthy can it most effectively build up society on earth, so that it more closely resembles the City of God, of which all Christians are citizens by virtue of their baptism, and to which all men are called.

We have seen in recent years a remarkable amount of progress toward this re-unification: not only the restitution of some of the ancient churches to the Roman Communion under Pope John Paul II but also great progress more recently with traditional-minded Anglicans (Anglicanorum Coetibus) and in ironing out remaining obstacles between Rome and the Eastern Orthodox. It should be noted that Rome has taken some pains to show that the legitimate spiritual patrimony of these other Christian traditions should be preserved and allowed to flourish in their own right, rather than trying to homogenize everyone to become cookie-cutter "Roman" Catholics; the present and former Holy Fathers have shown that this legitimate diversity, when secured by a common faith, enriches the Church, rather than weakening it.

In addition to corporate reunions, there have also been a number of public statements issued by representatives of the Catholic Church and of various Protestant bodies, affirming their common faith on many points, not only of doctrine but how that doctrine bears on Christians vis à vis the problems of modern society. If this trend of solidarity continues, there may be some real hope of the Christian Church in the future being able, as She has in the past, to make lasting and beneficial contributions to the common good of the City of Man.

Gilson's Foreward to the City of God

2010-02-01T15:37:00.004-06:00

What follows is my summary of the abbreviated version of Gilson's introductory essay that appears in the Image edition of the City of God that I'm reading. It runs on a bit, so I'll put my commentary in a separate post.

Gilson emphasizes that our modern aspiration to build a perfect, universal society had its origins in Augustine’s description of the City of God and the way this City cooperates with, and shares benefits with, the City of Man. However, the modern world neglects a fact that the ancient world would have found impossible to deny – that every society is held together (i.e., merits the name of “society”) only insofar as it is united by two things: religion and blood kinship. He goes on to say that Augustine, in writing The City of God, demonstrates that the City of God, or the Heavenly Society, also is defined by these two factors – religion, in that it consists only of those who have held God as their highest good, and kinship, in that it comprises those who recognize not only the physical brotherhood of Men (all descended from the same original parents) but, more importantly, the spiritual brotherhood of Man (adopted sons of God the Father, through His divine Son, Jesus Christ).

In Gilson’s account, Augustine demonstrates that Rome, long before his own day, had ceased to merit the name civitas (“society” or “City”) in the sense Augustine uses the term. That is, it is no longer bound together by a concern for the common good, or a shared understanding of what that good is. Going farther, Augustine demonstrates that the earthly city (not merely the city of Rome, which is its concrete exemplar) has been at odds with the heavenly society since the first generation of mankind, when Cain, who was motivated by pride and self-interest, killed his brother Abel, who worthily worshipped God; thus Augustine illustrates the difference between these two societies, which is the difference between their two primary loves (God or self). By defining things in this way, Gilson shows that, on Augustine’s terms, no earthly city can, with perfect justice, claim the name of “society,” because its primary motivation will always be self-interest (in early Rome, this meant honor or public recognition, later wealth, power, and pleasure) rather than Charity.

Thus, suggests Gilson, any later generation which is inspired by The City of God to create a just, unified, and peaceful society needs to recognize that such a society must be founded on a love of God and neighbor and depend on the grace of God for its peace and unity, and that the any efforts in this world will always, necessarily, fall short of the perfection that can be known only in the life of the world to come. This is why modern efforts to create worldwide social unity are doomed to fail, because, as Gilson puts it, “they have studied everything except the Christian faith in order to find a common bond.” He suggests, “If we really want one world, we must have one Church, and the only Church that is one is the Catholic Church.”

Michael Ward's Planet Narnia

2010-01-31T22:17:00.013-06:00

I thought I would mention another book that I read recently, which I like very much. This is Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis. I won't spend time describing the book -- go to the Planet Narnia website and see for yourself -- except to say that it is a work of literary criticism that will change Lewis scholarship forever. And about time!

I found out about this book quite by chance -- I was on Graboid (a video downloading service), and trying to find copies of the TV versions of Lewis's Narnia stories that the BBC produced back in the '80s. To simplify my search, I just used the keyword "Narnia." Not only did I find the old television shows (some of them, anyway -- I'm still looking for The Silver Chair, and one or two others), but I also hit on a BBC documentary called "The Narnia Code." This was not a title to inspire confidence; "oh, no," I thought, "another crackpot theory about what the Narnia novels 'really' mean; the BBC will do anything to attract viewers." But I downloaded it and watched it -- without great enthusiasm until Michael Ward started to explain the hermeneutic key he struck on one night that unlocked a whole level of significance in the seven Narnia novels hitherto undetected by Lewis critics.

When Ward started talking about what his find actually was, I began to get interested. This was the first theory I'd heard that (a) took seriously into account Lewis's long career as a medievalist, (b) looked at the Narnia stories as an integrated part of L's overall opus (i.e., showed that he did not, by some weird aberration, suddenly turn to writing "children's stories"), and (c) answered Tolkien's famous dismissal of them as an artless hodgpodge of mythic and legendary elements, unworthy of serious attention. Then the documentary began to show some of the major Lewis scholars giving their respectful and enthusiastic imprimaturs on Ward's theory. Next thing I knew, I was searching the internet for the best price on Ward's book (after I found that my local university library did not yet have it).

Once the book arrived from Alibris, I read it section by section at the breakfast table, over the course of several weeks. Before I got through the first chapter, I realized that it was time to re-read the Narnia novels (Lewis always called them "romances," so I guess I should, too), as well as the three Ransom novels (Lewis's "space trilogy"). I read them over a month or so, while I was also reading Planet Narnia. Ward's theory has it that each of the Narnia stories is keyed to one of the major celestial bodies (sun, moon & planets, with the pagan deities they are associated with) in medieval cosmology, so I matched my reading of each of the Narnia stories with the relevant chapter in Ward's study. I found this worked quite well, reading the Narnia romance first, and then the related chapter. I was also inspired to go back and, finally, finish reading Till We Have Faces (I had begun it once years ago and got distracted before finishing; wow, that was a mistake!).

I wound up being quite impressed with how thoroughly Ward's new theory illuminates many aspects of these stories and shows them to be not an aberration amid Lewis's other published work, but rather inspired from the very wellsprings of his deepest interests and preoccupations. Although I have not read any of Lewis's poetry (Ward's reading of his poems was what inspired this theory), I am familiar with his Christian apologetics and, to a certain extent, the more popular works touching on his scholarship (An Experiment in Criticism and The Discarded Image -- which I now want to re-read). Now I would really love to read more of his literary criticism, particularly his preface to Milton's Paradise Lost.

I can see that one of the reasons, probably, why critics have hitherto failed to see the influence of Lewis's expertise in late medieval and renaissance literature on the Narnia stories is that they have been distracted by the obvious association of Aslan with Christ in the first Narnia story (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), which although clearly intended by Lewis, has served almost as a red herring. Since the Aslan portion of LWW seems to be a kind of allegory or parable of the Salvation Story, this obvious parallel has influenced far too many critics to try to find all sorts of other connections with Biblical narratives and analogues, and to overlook other allusions that are not explicitly Christian. Of course, one other reason the connection between Narnia and the medieval cosmos has remained unnoticed is that Lewis always intended it to be so -- at least, that's what Michael Ward argues, and I think he is right.

Ho-ho, any readers out there -- yes, this is meant to be a teaser. If you're a Narnia lover and want to uncover hidden depths in those beloved stories, go to Ward's Planet Narnia web site and learn more about his theory. And if the words "literary criticism" make your eyes glaze over, fear not: this is not academic gobbledygook that ordinary mortals would choke on. In fact, although Ward came up with his theory while he was working on a doctoral dissertation, his degree is not in literary studies but theology (he is an Anglican priest; one of the Lewis scholars he quotes several times is Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury). So those of you who love Lewis's work for its Christian elements should not despair to learn that the Narnia novels are inspired by the pagan gods who inhabited the planets of the medieval cosmos -- those gods themselves were, in the Middle Ages, allegories of divine attributes of the Christian God, and Ward does a fine job of showing how the various layers of significance interplay.

I'll have more to say about Planet Narnia later. I will just add now that one of the reasons (a rather unexpected one) that I'm interested in Ward's study, is that he found himself faced with a task similar to one I had in my own doctoral dissertation. Although our subjects were quite different (I wrote on Chrétien de Troyes' twelfth century French Arthurian romance, The Story of the Grail), I saw some marked similarities in what I will call the critical and rhetorical tasks we faced. So while I was reading Planet Narnia, in addition to appreciating the content of Ward's argument, I was watching how he structured that argument, defined his terms, built his case, overcame likely objections, etc., and taking note of ideas that occurred to me regarding structural changes I might make when I get around to revising my dissertation for publication (which I definitely want to do). I'll probably have more to say about that, too, but that will be another day.

Current Reading: Arthur & Augustine

2010-01-28T18:12:00.021-06:00

I'm currently working on (re) reading a couple of things that I have loved for a while.

First is T. H. White's The Once and Future King, which I'm reading for the first time in many years, certainly since I began seriously studying the Arthurian literary tradition (in fact, wrote my doctoral dissertation on one of the earliest Arthurian romances, Chrétien de Troyes' The Story of the Grail). I loved White's story of the boy Arthur as a kid, after reading (about 40 times) the "Golden Book" story based on the Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone, which itself was based on the first part of White's novel. At age 13, I took part in a performance of the stage musical Camelot, based on the latter part of the novel, but I don't think I made the connection. As an older teenager, I finally read all of T. H. White's novel ("The Sword in the Stone" is just the first of four parts), and was rather dismayed at the tragic turn the story takes (at that point, I must have made the connection with Camelot). Well, I hadn't read Malory or Tennyson, so it kind of took me by surprise.

Now that I'm familiar with the whole length of the literary tradition and, of course, "all grown up," not only am I enjoying White's novel even more than I did as a kid, but I find all sorts of oblique commentary on the Arthurian literary tradition and its effects on the popular imagination (something Chretien was already engaged in back in the 12th century!). I'm planning to (re)read some of the other major ("literary") modern additions to the canon of Arthurian literature, too -- Tennyson, maybe Steinbeck, and definitely Charles Williams's Arthurian poems, with C. S. Lewis's commentary. This is my idea of fun!

The other book I've started recently is the Doubleday/Image edition of St. Augustine's City of God. This is an abridged version of the Fathers of the Church translation, cutting out most of Augustine's digressions, with an even more abridged version of Etienne Gilson's foreward to the original edition of that translation. I picked this copy up cheap second-hand because my Penguin edition of the complete City of God is, alas, like most of my books, in storage and inaccessible. I will definitely go back at some point and read the chapters that the Image abridgement leaves out. I'll be commenting on Gilson's foreward, as well as Augustine's tome, book by book. I've read (and taught) portions of City of God in the past, but that took some of his major ideas out of the context of his larger argument, so I'm interested in putting the familar bits back into their proper context. This will be my first go at reading the whole argument, so I'm actually glad -- for the nonce -- to be able to skip over the digressions. I'll note the "skipped" parts as I get to them.

I'm glad to be reading something Arthurian and modern alongside something theological and ancient, particularly something by Augustine of Hippo, who I think had a greater influence on the beginning of the Arthurian literary tradition than most modern critics recognize or admit. We'll see if the juxtaposition provokes any interesting, new ideas.