The Free Thinker

Book Review: The Rise of Christianity

I just read Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity.  Stark tries to shed light on the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire by combining the rather fragmentary evidence from ancient times with contemporary sociological research on the way religious communities develop and spread.  In some ways, the book is sufficiently pro-Christianity that it should satisfy Christian readers.  For example, the last chapter of the book argues that "the [Christian] religion's particular doctrines... permitted Christianity to be among the most successful and sweeping revitalization movements in history."  Then, after discussing the grotesque spectacle of the Roman games-- where gladiators killed each other and prisoners were fed to wild beasts; much of the book discusses the cruelties of ancient Roman society-- Stark concludes: "Finally, what Christianity gave to its converts was nothing less than their humanity. In this sense virtue was its own reward." (p. 215)

What would make Christians most uneasy, I think, is Stark's insistence that religious conversion spreads exclusively through social networks, a lesson that he draws from observing the experiences of new, rapidly-spreading religions such as the Mormons and the Moonies.  It turns out that, based on the best statistical reconstructions, the rate of growth of Christian membership in its first three to four centuries was about the same--40 percent per decade-- as that of the Mormons has been.  I think a lot of Christians, including myself, would be uneasy seeing early Christianity-- the truth, in our view-- classified alongside lots of false contemporary sects, and treated as subject to rules which can be observed and then applied elsewhere like physical laws.  One would hope that truth would play a role in the conversion process, and that conversion to the One True Faith is a wholly different kind of process than falling away into some heresy.

Maybe that's just partisanship.  Still, in the absence of a definition of "religion"-- Stark offers none-- some skepticism about making and extrapolating from generalizations about "religions" seems warranted.  In his book The Everlasting Man, which covers some of the same historical territory as The Rise of Christianity, G.K. Chesterton argues that the Christian Church is an entirely unique entity, and that "comparative religion" is an illusion.  Chesterton's book is an apologia for the faith, not a work of social science, so social scientists may regard it as outside their discipline.  Still, I would like to see some social scientist try to cope with Chesterton's argument, by, for example, offering a definition of religion which would include all those things, and none others, that we usually call religions.  I suspect it could not be done; and the failure to do so could even be a useful input into the American legal process, and particularly, in helping to phase out the discrimination for-and-against religion which has become a feature of American curriculum design.  (I say "for-and-against" because, while "religious" teachings, of even the most generic kind, are excluded, there is also a sort of kid-gloves policy where philosophers and scientists who regard atheism as axiomatic have to keep that opinion out of the classroom, more or less.)

One thread in Stark's story seems dramatically presentist: opposition to abortion and infanticide appears to have been a principal driver of the growth of Christianity, because it led to higher birthrates and a lack of gender imbalance.  But Stark is not pandering to the religious right: it is, it seems, a historic fact that abortion and infanticide-- in particular, exposure of girls-- were widely practiced in the ancient Roman Empire, but completely forbidden by Christians.

Reading Stark, I am constantly struck by the parallels between the rise of Christianity in ancient Rome and the rise of Christianity in contemporary China.  For example, one parallel is the new religion's overrecruitment of women in a society which had a surplus of men due to sex-selection infanticide (in Rome's case) or abortion (in China's case).  Another parallel is in the way that lackadaisical persecution helped growth in the church by creating opportunities for heroic demonstrations of faith, without being severe enough to totally wipe out the church.

My own conversion experience might not count in Stark's terms, because I converted, not to a totally new faith, but from one form of Christianity-- Mormonism-- to another-- Orthodoxy-- even if Mormonism differs from Christianity in enough ways that most (traditional) Christians would be ambivalent at best about recognizing Mormons as Christians.  In one way, my story contradicts Stark's insistence that religions spread almost solely through social networks: I knew about Orthodoxy and was drawn to it long before I met any actual Orthodox.  On the other hand, I didn't join until I found a church with welcoming people to meet, and that meeting was somewhat happenstance, not really a result of deliberately seeking them out.  But then, I went to lots of churches with welcoming people in them, which I didn't join on doctrinal grounds.  In my case, social networks and convincing doctrines were both necessary conditions.

Tolkien's Presentism

I saw the fifth Harry Potter movie on Thursday (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). Quite fun. By now, the Harry Potter series has, I suppose, surpassed the fantasy classics that I read as a kid-- C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings-- in terms of both length and readership.  Having read very little of Harry Potter-- I read the first chapter and a half of Order of the Phoenix-- I suppose I can't really compare.  Certainly Rowling is a very talented writer.  But I don't sense in her the same greatness as in Tolkien or Lewis.

Lewis, whose greatness is specifically Christian, is a topic for another essay.  Tolkien seems to me the inventor of modern fantasy; the inventor because, unlike, say, The Wizard of Oz, he serves as a bridge between the ancient fantasist tradition-- paganism-- and a myth-starved modernity which hungers for a literature that inculcates the belief, proscribed in our times by scientific-materialist dogma, that there are mysterious worlds other than our own, a belief that man needs to have at some level even he is no longer permitted to openly confess it, or else, as William Blake said, "the same dull round, even of the universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels."  One must give special credit to a founder.  Rowling steps into a tradition of fantasy literature which is already thriving; her originality lies in the extraordinary humor and creativity with which she appropriates a huge amount of magical folklore, and at the same time in her evocation of the experience of growing up.

What impresses me about Tolkien is the strange presentism of Lord of the Rings.  I've heard that Tolkien denied that his books were representing contemporary events.  (He was writing between 1937 and 1949, and was published in 1954-5.)  And an attempt to map the characters, places, and events of his novels onto the geopolitics of the 1930s and 1940s doesn't quite work.  And yet there are nonetheless so many parallels and echoes.  The Ring evokes the atom bomb: it means destruction if the Enemy gets it; yet the good guys, who have it, must not use it or it will irrevocably corrupt them.  The rising power of Sauron evokes the rising power of Hitler: a force of perfect malevolence, of terrific strength, but capable also of subtlety, cunning, deceit.  Saruman and King Theoden, under the influence of Grima Wormtongue, evoke the appeasers, seduced by lies and fear into collaboration or non-resistance.  The opposition of East and West is also evocative: the East (read: Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany), a source of vast menace and darkness; the West-beyond-the-seas (read: America), a place of bliss and peace, to which the people of Middle-Earth could once sail (the open borders of the 19th century) but to which access was now debarred (the rising immigration restrictions of the 1920s, a national disgrace for which we have never felt anything like adequate shame: they make us, in effect, complicit in the genocide of the Jews).  Tolkien's Middle-Earth is a world in an immediate crisis but also in long-term decline, a world full of the echoes of old glories, full of ruined cities and depopulated countries, a world where the best things are ancient.  In this respect it makes a weird contrast with our world, where we taken for granted the superiority of the present over the past.  But it fits the 1930s and 1940s: Europe's glorious past standing in grim contrast to the darkness and menace and horror of its present.  And again, victory over Sauron brings a reprieve but not a restoration: the decline of Middle-Earth is inexorable, just as Europe could never again be restored to its 19th-century glory.

Too mechanical a presentism can be a fault: it may prevent a story from following its own logic, its telos.  Tolkien's presentism is incomplete.  The Ring is destroyed and the good side wins; the atomic parallel breaks down.  America came to Europe's rescue; Tolkien's blessed West-beyond-the-seas remains aloof from the affairs of fallen Middle-Earth.  Presentism is not Tolkien's purpose: he is not trying to describe contemporary affairs in metaphoric garb.  Yet the moods, the fears, the lessons of those times infuse The Lord of the Rings, and they can help a contemporary reader to imaginatively penetrate the consciousness of the world-saving Britons of the 1940s.  That is what myths for.  William Blake wrote that "eternity is in love with the productions of time."  Myths capture that intersection of time and eternity, weaving into stories that will reverberate forever the deepest heart of man-as-he-lives-now.  Tolkien's presentism is his strength.

Is there a similar presentism in Rowling?  Of course, whereas Tolkien created his world apparently out of whole cloth (although one never quite understands what the relationship of "Middle-Earth" to our own world is), Rowling's books are set in our own world and our own times, with the fascinatingly implausible revision that there is an entire magical world parallel to and secretly embedded in it.  A certain trivial presentism is inherent in the fact that Rowling's stories are, in fact, set in the present.  But does Rowling's mythology bear any meaningful relationship to the great issues of our times?  Is there a high presentism in it similar to that of Tolkien?  If so, I don't see it.  Rowling's fiction seems to me merely escapist.

Book Review: The Crusades

The danger of reading a history of the Crusades, such as The Crusades, by Zoe Oldenburg, is that it tends to make you root for the bad guys.  In a history that treats the Franks as the protagonists, you naturally start to sympathize with them.  But the Crusaders' cause, to capture and hold Jerusalem for Christendom, was always a dubious one, and the century (almost) of Frankish rule in that city was initiated by a massacre and punctuated by various acts of perfidy, war crimes, and wanton aggression.  It is a terrible irony that all this violence was done in the name of the Prince of Peace.

But what a story!  Knights in armor, and castles, have fired the imagination for centuries after their military obsolescence, and the journeys and adventures and battles and sieges that fill the history of the Crusades are romantic in themselves.  To that, add that the Crusaders are a minority in their own kingdom and severely outnumbered by their Muslim neighbors.  They can survive only by shrewd strategy and by regularly beating numerically superior Muslim armies.  To that, add the element of religion, the fervor of Catholic Christians for the cause of Jerusalem, raising the stakes, and also the dissensions and enmities among the (mutually heretical) Eastern Christians, and, later, the spirit of jihad that grew among the Muslims.  Surprisingly-- and for enhancing the narrative, this is almost too good to be true-- not only war and religion but love (of men and women, that is) plays a central part in the story, because of the dynastic element inherent in Frankish feudal society.  In 1147, the brilliant and passionate Eleanor of Acquitaine, queen of France, comes to the Holy Land with her husband King Louis VII and the Second Crusade, and meets her uncle Raymond of Poitiers, prince of Antioch, is rumored to have had an affair with him, and is persuaded by him to ask her husband for a divorce.  This contributes to the failure of the Second Crusade.  Soon after this, Raymond dies in battle, and his young widow, Constance, despite pressure from her uncle, the king of Jerusalem, to marry a suitable candidate for price, is determined to marry for love.  The man she falls in love with, Raynald of Chatillon, is a scandalously low-born husband for such a lofty personage, a younger son of a minor family in France, an energetic knight, but disastrously rash, who thereby becomes prince of Antioch.  Repeatedly, the passionate women of the leading families of Frankish Syria play a fascinating, sometimes treacherous part in events.  And then there is the Leper King, Baldwin IV, who reigns from 1174 to 1185 as the kingdom is encircled by the rising power of Saladin (it will fall in 1187), whose hideous disease seems like a metaphor for the doomed Kingdom of Jerusalem.  Yet Baldwin IV displays an amazing will to live, leading his knights in battle on horseback as a boy, and later from a litter as his body begins to fall apart.  He wins a spectacular victory against the numerically superior armies of Saladin in the Battle of Montgisard in 1177.  Yet Baldwin IV is unable to fix the throne, which he will soon inescapably vacate, on anyone capable of saving the kingdom.

Book Review: Prague

Arthur Phillips, author of Prague, is a talented prose stylist.  His sentences are full of weird metaphors and unexpected twists that bring scenes to life.  People vary in their ability to use words to convey (in this, fictional) experience.  Phillips is able to convey scenes, facial expressions, the implicit meanings of conversations, and subjective feelings which a lesser prose stylist would be unable to convey.  A lesser prose stylist would have to fall back on simpler and more formulaic descriptions.  That said, it's a matter of taste: I sometimes found the book too noisy, too rich in detail that is lively and original but not obviously relevant.

Phillips also comes up with a smorgasbord of very different characters, with interesting interactions and contrasts.  The main characters are:

Mark Payton, a Canadian scholar who is writing a history of nostalgia, an expansion of his doctoral dissertation.  His erudite obsession with the theme of nostalgia is simultaneously funny and profound.  Nostalgia is not just his doctoral dissertation; its his philosophy of life; or rather, Mark Payton is a philosophy who is really a philosophy personified.  Payton loves for the past, yearns for the past, thinks all the good things are in the past-- a pessimistic philosophy, which does not, of course, wholly make sense.  Payton wants to escape the trap of nostalgia, of always living out patterns; he wants to live in the present, but he can't.  His monologues tend to bewilder and bemuse the other characters, yet most of them experience his influence a bit.

Charles Gabor, a Hungarian-American M.B.A. working for a venture capital firm.  Gabor turns out to be rather the villain in the end, but he's likable.  He's the most self-confident, active, worldly-successful of the characters.  He is to some extent a symbol of capitalism.

Emily Oliver, the Nebraska farm girl who works for the embassy, incapable of lying, who never swears, loyally admiring her unappealing military father.  John Price falls in love with her, and as a result there are two Emily Olivers in the novel: the real Emily Oliver, and the Emily Oliver John is always fantasizing about.  John is an obvious case of "love is blind," and it's clear that readers are meant to discount the apotheosis of Emily Oliver that is constantly taking shape in John's lovesick imagination.  The interplay between these two Emily Olivers is very interesting.  Every time Emily Oliver appears in the action, the reader jumps to attention, thinking: Did John Price see something I didn't?  He's obviously not seeing quite clearly here, but is there some justification for his lyrical thoughts? 

Nikki M.  A bald girl and a photographer/painter of contemporary art.  She becomes John Price's lover, though she also has lesbian leanings.  Nikki is one of the most original characters in the book.  Not wholly likable, but she is frank and candid, rebelliously so.  A bit rough and cynical about both art and sex, but that is part of her candor.  Her relationship with John always strikes me as a bit grotesque.

Imre Horvat.  The latest in a long line of owners of the Horvat Press, a historic Budapest institution, Imre Horvat ran his family business briefly in the immediate post-war years, before being dispossessed and put into a prison camp by the Communists.  He is released and returns to his press as an ordinary worker, but then, in the brief anti-Soviet revolution of 1956, he takes the helm again for 13 days to proclaim the revolution, before being driven into exile when the Soviets re-invade Hungary.  He spends the next 33 years in Austria, seeking to keep alive "the memory of the Hungarian people," a leader of resistance to the Communists.  He enters the story because when the Communist regime falls in 1989, he wants to acquire his own Horvat Press-- run by the Communists for 33 years-- and he turned to Charles Gabor's venture firm for capital.  Charles Gabor then intrigues with the help of John Price to make a lucrative deal by positioning himself to be Imre Horvat's heir.  Horvat is the grandest character of the book, who cuts a heroic figure as against the "Lost Generation" young people.

John Price.  Overall, Prague is an omniscient-narrator novel: we see the action through the eyes of many different characters, even including a 19th-century aristocrat, former proprietor of one of the buildings where some of the action takes place.  However, John Price is Phillips' preferred main character.  John Price comes to Budapest to see his brother, whom he has looked up to for years even though Scott never treats him well; he finds a job with the new English-language Budapest newspaper as a sort of op-ed columnist (some of his writing is quoted: he is a lively stylist and his writing is rich with irony; much like Arthur Phillips himself) and his one-year stay defines the beginning and end of the novel's action.  He is 24/25 years old.  Price is sympathetic but not admirable.  You tend to feel "his heart is in the right place," so to speak, but he doesn't have any fixed moral principles and is drawn, for example, into a sleazy scheme by Charles Gabor just for the fun of it, so to speak, without apparently ever thinking through its moral implications.  John Price is a learning character: he loves observing, he is interested in many things, he is always drawing a sort of odd, fragile lessons from life, trying to understand it as best he can.  I never feel he gets things quite right, and I tend to think-- though Phillips doesn't want me to-- that Price is too much of a spoiled California kid uncritically accepting the menu of liberal values.  Perhaps he is a cameo of Arthur Phillips himself?

Prague represents a certain time and place in history vividly, and a time and place of considerable significance.  That is a creditable service, a contribution to historical knowledge, because while the characters are fictional, facts and moods and the way history felt are woven into the account. And a novelist who can invent a cast of such original and distinctive characters deserves some credit.  But what's missing is some loftier theme that communicates itself, or even merely intimates itself, through the novel's pages. Disparate insights are scattered through the text but they never cohere into anything.  In the end, if I were going to sum up the takeaway from Prague-- what is the message, behind all the prose stylism and humorous ironic conversations-- that the author is sending to the reader?-- I feel like it would be "What the heck do I know?"