Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, Revised Edition,

Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, Revised Edition, by Paul Johnson, Harper Perennial, 2007.

In G.K. Chesterton’s mystery “The Scandal of Father Brown,” Father Brown comments on the wasted life and potential of a prominent writer, declaring that, “You don’t need any intellect to be an intellectual.”  This quote could be the tagline for Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals.  This book is a collection of essays on various literary figures and self-described intellectuals, many of whom have been elevated to the status of demigods in the popular critical pantheon.  About two-dozen such personages are addressed in this book, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Percy Shelley, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Wilson, Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, and Lillian Hellman.  One of Johnson’s chief aims is to demythologize these figures, illuminating not just the flaws in their thinking, but also the disastrous personal lives of the intellectuals, their hypocrisies, and the ways that their work and personal lives hurt both those closest to them and the rest of the world.

It is important to be precise when understanding Johnson’s definitions.  Johnson is definitely not attacking people who are smart or traditionally educated.  Indeed, Johnson’s own intelligence and extensive literary knowledge is evident with every page he writes.  Johnson’s target is not the brainy, or academia, or even those who belong to a specific political group (although most of his subjects are hard left-wingers).  Johnson takes aim against individuals who put ideas over people.  Johnson defines “intellectuals” as a relatively recent phenomenon.  Since the rise of intellectual secularism in the eighteenth century, many men of aptitude and literary skill have argued that the use of “reason” and new philosophies of life and behavior can solve the ills of the world.  Unfortunately for the world, as Johnson never tires of noting, intellectuals have tended to leave a trail of devastation in their wake, even as they toil to promote their own glory.

This is not an angry book.  It is an indignant book, at times even righteously indignant.  Johnson could conceivably have filled this book with rants and furious denunciations, but his tone is always calm, measured, and he frequently tries to be fair.  In some instances, he even professes to be an admirer of some of these intellectuals, such as when he declares himself to be a fan of Ibsen’s plays.  A fierce, furious book could conceivably have been great fun to read, but it would have been all the easier for critics to dismiss.  As it is, by asserting that the acclaim that many intellectuals have received has been largely undeserved, Johnson has opened himself up to a flood of criticism.  The most recent edition of Intellectuals includes a selection of negative criticism regarding this book, mainly by people who believe that the figures in this book ought to be above reproach, or who believe that personal behavior should not be a factor in ranking the legacy of an intellectual figure.

The essays in this book attempt to demythologize the targeted intellectuals, exposing some as frauds and fools, others as brazen liars, still more as utterly toxic to those closest to them, and most as unworthy of veneration or even serious respect.  Johnson is holding a barbeque, and the main course is sacred cows.  Of course, these intellectuals have never been revered by everybody, and Johnson takes pains to illustrate exactly which types of people contributed to the making of the intellectuals’ reputations. 

These essays are not hatchet pieces.  Johnson’s theses are not centered around arguing that the intellectuals described here were horrible, self-absorbed jerks with no regard whatsoever for the happiness or wellbeing of other human beings, although several of the figures in this book certainly appear to fit that description.  Johnson seems to have some respect for some of subjects, even some affection for one or two, and thinly veiled disgust for many more.  The intellectuals in this book are not portrayed as evil incarnate, but as deeply flawed individuals whose theories about the world and society hurt a lot of people.  This is revisionist history, seeking to reveal disturbing facts about major figures that are too often ignored, or worse, defended.

Is Johnson being unfairly harsh towards his subjects?  It is certainly possible.  The purpose of biography is to describe what figures from the past were actually like and how they affected the world around them.  Perhaps what Johnson does here is not demonize these figures so much as humanize them.  Then again, there is much to be said about being charitable towards those one disagrees with, and never speaking ill of the dead is a sound policy.   And yet…  The characters in this book, and their ideas, have hurt a lot of people, and historians have a responsibility to speak the truth, even when expressing such opinions is unpopular.   The author’s bias aside, there is one definite aspect of the book that could have used improvement: Intellectuals does have a thorough collection of citations, but Johnson uses a lot of obscure anecdotes and references in order to make his points, and a few of them are not cited.  In order to keep the level of discourse above reproach, thorough presentation of evidence is essential.

Can you separate a major figure’s life from his work?  Johnson argues that one cannot.  If a prominent intellectual engaged in morally dubious behavior or treated towards those closest to him like dirt, how can one respect their prose?  In his essay “The Heartless Lovers of Humankind,” a summary of the main points expressed in Intellectuals, Johnson writes, 

“I believe the reflective portion of mankind is divided into two groups:  those who are interested in people and care about them; and those who are interested in ideas.  The first group forms the pragmatists and tends to make the best statesmen.  The second is the intellectuals; and if their attachment to ideas is passionate, and not only passionate but programmatic, they are almost certain to abuse whatever power they acquire.  For, instead of allowing their ideas of government to emerge from people, shaped by observation of how people actually behave and what they really desire, intellectuals reverse the process, deducing their ideas first from principle and then seeking to impose them on living men and women.”

Johnson has declared that, “people must always come before ideas and not the other way around.”  That, in his eyes, is the great crime of the intellectuals who are featured here.  He does not deny their intelligence, only the ways that they applied their intelligence.  By subjecting their lives to critical scrutiny, it appears that Johnson intends to place their ideas and writings under a more analytical light as well.  By stripping away the moral foundations of the men, he questions their ideas. 

One has to be careful when reviewing a book like this.  I personally am no fan of most of the intellectuals featured in his book, with the major exceptions of Tolstoy and Hemingway.  Having an active dislike for the writings– and philosophy– of most of the intellectuals featured here, I have to say that a certain part of me enjoyed seeing Shelley, Marx, Russell, and Sartre depicted as womanizers who refused to take responsibility in their lives, or learning that the author of The Second Sex spent her life as the manager of her paramour’s ever-expanding harem, or discovering the extent to which Sartre served to inspire and inflame genocidal regimes in Southeast Asia.  Nearly every intellectual presented here comes across as being morally bankrupt.

But is this wholly fair or wise?  I never cease to be disgusted by pundits who airily dismiss the work G.K. Chesterton or Hilaire Belloc because they claim that they were anti-Semitic or that they engaged in extramarital affairs, charges that are patently false.  I can thoroughly understand how some fans of these figures might deem Intellectuals to be mere character assassination, but as Johnson illustrates in his coverage of Lillian Hellman and other figures, the popular media, academic, and political establishment often deliberately covered up the details about several intellectual figures. As Johnson observes, from the late eighteenth century onwards, self-styled intellectuals attempted to give themselves moral authority by smearing the cultural and scholarly life of Western civilization, which for centuries had been led by the Church.  Many of the figures in Intellectuals have attacked the character of several popes and the behavior of the Church, using utterly spurious allegations.  Perhaps turnabout is fair play, especially if Johnson’s analysis of the intellectuals is more accurate than that of the intellectual’s critique of the Church. 

Johnson writes with such confidence and verve that he propels his historical narrative forward with surprising power.  Intellectuals illustrates a side of history that has often been glossed over in the textbooks.  We need to understand how ideas originate and how they affect society.  Intellectuals illustrates just how little we know about the recent past, and emphasizes the importance of being highly critical towards those who think they know better about everything than the average person.

–Chris Chan

God Has Not Changed.  By Alice Thomas Ellis, Continuum, 2004.

Alice Thomas Ellis, who also published under her birth name of Anna Haycraft, was raised by atheistic parents who were members of the Church of Humanity, a godless organization originated by Auguste Comte.  In her late teens, she rebelled and converted to Catholicism.  She initially intended to enter a convent, but her poor health prevented her from pursuing this vocation. She eventually married and had seven children, though the deaths of two of them would deeply affect her and her work.  Starting in 1977 and continuing for over two decades, she would produce a series of wonderful novels of manners that frequently addressed themes of faith, love, and family.  Due to her acerbic wit, Ellis might very justifiably be thought of as, “Jane Austen after a few fast shots of whiskey.”

Besides her novels, Ellis also wrote a popular column on the joys and trials of domestic life, as well as numerous essays on religious themes. It is this latter group of writings that has been anthologized into “God Has Not Changed.” All of these essays were originally published in a newspaper, and therefore most of them are quite short, being only about two pages long.  Despite their brevity, each essay contains Ellis’s piercing insights into the state of the Faith in England.

Ellis was a staunch Catholic for her entire adult life, but she was an outspoken critic of the secularization of society, particularly what she viewed as the watering down of theology and traditional religious practices in the wake of Vatican II, which she frequently alleged led to the breakdown of a sense of wonder and beauty in favor of modern fads and political correctness.  Her outspoken disgust at contemporary trends in worship was very controversial, sparking a wide variety of reactions from all people of all backgrounds.  In one of her essays, Ellis wrote that:

“I get lots of letters.  In one of them a Reverend writes: ‘You may be a fine novelist but I really do wonder why your theological opinions should be of the slightest interest to anybody, let alone worthy of inclusion in The Guardian.  Since you are not a professional theologian they are your private opinions…’  I had written a few words on the liberal approach to God, or as the Reverend would put it ‘God,’ for on the reverse side of the letter is an ad for a work by the Reverend himself entitled On Doing Without ‘God.’… Part of the ad reads: ‘In a global village, the God of religion should not be modeled in the metaphysical terms of a more parochial age. New ways of doing this must be developed.’ New ways of doing what? However, the gratifying part of it is that I had written, in the article to which the Reverend takes such exception, about the intolerance of the liberal stance, the baffled outrage of the liberal whose views are questioned, the refusal to consider any other point of view. It is sweetly ironic that the modernists, the reformers, the liberals, say things like ‘we are church,’ meaning presumably, the people the laity.  They wish to democratize the faith and give everyone a say except, of course, for the orthodox.  The only voices the bien pensant can tolerate are those that sing in agreement with the current vogue, and the most noted ‘professional theologians’ of our time seem to be either feminists or atheists or both. The simple believer cannot get a word in.” (11).

Ellis was not in the habit of mincing words, and her acerbic style turned off a lot of people.  Ellis was singularly disinclined to be charitable towards people who disagreed with her, though it would be unfair to regard her as mean-spirited.  A more just evaluation of her character would be to describe her as saying that she was always “snapping to keep from crying.”  At the heart of all of Ellis’s work is a deep sadness, often revolving around something that no longer exists, but that was once very deeply loved.  In God Has Not Changed, the loss in question often revolves around what Ellis saw as a much wiser and purer past.  Anger is commonly regarded as a stage of grief, and behind the disgusted complaining lies some very real mourning.  In another essay, Ellis mourns the generational gap in religious knowledge, writing:

“I have given up trying to explain to the younger generation that we are not mere passive spectators at the Tridentine Mass but deeply involved in the mystery, the holiness, the sense of awe, the awareness of a Presence which you sure as hell don’t feel in the kindergarten atmosphere that too often prevails now.  With all the endless talk of ‘empowering the laity,’ of giving us a ‘role in church affairs,’ we have ended up being treated like witless kiddies, too stupid, too immature to grasp anything smacking of theological complexity: everything must be sweetened, diluted, simplified and made as bland as infants’ pap.  No guilt and certainly no humility and nothing that might appear to tax our intelligence.  The attitude of the ‘reformers’ is profoundly insulting, patronizing in the worst possible way, and if we complain they take offence, protesting crossly that it’s all for our own good and how can we be so ungrateful?  The changes in the Church increasingly look less like alteration than total destruction, an act of iconoclasm, vandalism previously unsurpassed.” (20).

Many people might disagree with Ellis’s assessment of the post-Vatican II Church, but any serious study of religious changes have to understand the diversity of opinions that changes provoke.  Ellis’s writings raise the point that somehow complaining has the power to lead to sanctity, if only because venting over everything that bothers you can assist in purging you of anger.  One particularly salient point that she makes is that the attempts to turn religion into a commodity for mass consumption wind up producing something that few people wish to consume at all.  Ellis comments:

“Much of the appeal of the religious life used to lie in the challenge it presented.  It took courage and determination, as well as faith, to abandon what the world perceived as desirable, and the distinctive habit was an outward sign of commitment.  Besides, if one may be permitted to strike a fashion note, the habit suited all women regardless of size, shape or form of countenance, and was a pleasure to gaze upon.  A group of nuns clad in the old style, compared with the new ones in short skirts, anoraks, lisle stockings, sandals and the unbecoming approximation of a veil, are reminiscent of swans adjacent to a bunch of tatty pigeons.  Some new nuns, of course, dress as they please, with make-up, hair-dos and earrings, and God alone knows what message they hope to put across.  I think they might claim that the inner light of the spirit shines through their outer appearance, but it doesn’t.  Many of them are concerned only with feminism, goddesses, and ‘women’s rites’– which is even more tiresome than the eldritch squawking about ‘rights,’ and flesh-creepingly silly.  Not just spirituality, but all common sense disappears in a welter of secular trendiness, hung about with the tawdry baubles of paganism which are intended, I suppose, to add a flavour of other-worldliness, but are in direct contradiction to Christianity.  One of the troubles with the devil is that he has lousy taste he is not the suave gentleman that some would like to think of him as, but a poseur avid to keep up to date with the latest fad.  I sometimes think that perhaps he lives in Islington and reads The Tablet, but I may be doing him an injustice…  (As I wrote those rude words about Satan, the adversary, my pen dried up.  Typical petty spite.)” (27-28).

–Chris Chan

Europe and the Faith

Europe and the Faith.  By Hilaire Belloc, 1920.

Hilaire Belloc loved controversy.  He took pride in his intractable opinions and almost never backed down.  Belloc’s irascible temper led to the loss of friendships and career setbacks, but Belloc never adopted the ability to separate personal disagreements from personal relationships that his friend G.K. Chesterton perfected.  Belloc’s interests included history, religion, culture, and economics, and all of these subjects are present in Europe and the Faith.  

In Europe and the Faith, Belloc presents his history of European society over the centuries, and argues that Catholicism was at the heart of the continent’s cultural and regional identity.  This perspective has an added level of controversy in the present day, when the bureaucrats of the European Union have recently attempted to draw up a history of the continent in their constitution without the slightest mention of Christianity.  In contrast, Belloc posits that Catholicism formed the core of national identity and shaped the mentality of each individual European.  When explaining the centrality of faith to European life and intellectual culture, Belloc writes:

“The Catholic brings to history (when I say "history" in these pages I mean the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true and what other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united European civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and for acts which are his own. He himself could have done those things in person. He is not relatively right in his blame, he is absolutely right. As a man can testify to his own motive so can the Catholic testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European story; for he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic, look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. They have to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone: he sees it all from its centre in its essence, and together. 

I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is The Church.”

This famous syllogism
has provoked much ire from Belloc’s critics, especially those who stress that contemporary Europe’s secularism and multiculturalism have utterly and permanently divorced it from its religious past.  These opinions were present a century ago, more towards secularism than multiculturalism, the latter of which has grown more prominent in the post-colonial period.  Belloc was convinced that the Catholic Church traditionally filled the soul and intellect of Europe, and when society was divorced from the faith, innumerable societal and personal problems would follow.  He writes:

“I have now nothing left to set down but the conclusion of this disaster: its spiritual result--an isolation of the soul; its political result--a consequence of the spiritual--the prodigious release of energy, the consequent advance of special knowledge, the domination of the few under a competition left unrestrained, the subjection of the many, the ruin of happiness, the final threat of chaos.”

Belloc’s history of Europe starts with the early days of Christianity in the Roman Empire, moving through the Dark and Middle Ages, through the rise of Protestantism up to contemporary times.  Special attention is paid to the English religious experience.  Belloc does not argue that the past was better than the present because Catholicism was more ubiquitous and better protected by the establishment, but he does suggest that a culture that is thoroughly infused with the morals and societal justice preached by the Church made for a better treated and more united civilization.  A society permeated with the ideologies that Belloc termed the “modernist heresies,” in his view, isolate the soul from the protective truths and codes of conduct that are necessary to keep people balanced, safe, and sane.  Belloc further explains what he means by “the isolation of the soul” when he writes:

“The isolation of the soul means a loss of corporate sustenance; of the sane balance produced by general experience, the weight of security, and the general will. The isolation of the soul is the very definition of its unhappiness. But this solvent applied to society does very much more than merely complete and confirm human misery.”

Belloc wrote this book long before the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, before Communism fell over Eastern Europe, before the looming demographic collapse of Europe, before the rise of terrorism, and before economic turmoil caused widespread societal unrest.  Yet though the modern age saw many technological and medicinal advances, Belloc insisted that with the soul of the continent rotting, no amount of comfort and affluence could protect Europe from slouching toward certain doom.  Indeed, over ninety years have passed since this tome was written, and many of the predictions Belloc made have come true.

“So things have gone. We have reached at last, as the final result of that catastrophe three hundred years ago, a state of society which cannot endure and a dissolution of standards, a melting of the spiritual framework, such that the body politic fails. Men everywhere feel that an attempt to continue down this endless and ever darkening road is like the piling up of debt. We go further and further from a settlement. Our various forms of knowledge diverge more and more. Authority, the very principle of life, loses its meaning, and this awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited, and which is still our trust, trembles and threatens to crash down. It is clearly insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who still live may see the ruin. But ruin when it comes is not only a sudden, it is also a final, thing. 

In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church. 

Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. 

The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.”

No overview of European history is complete without a detailed and thorough understanding of how the Catholic Church shaped every faced of it, but unfortunately all too many history of the region do exactly that.  Will Europe return to its Christian roots, or will it follow one of multiple pathways to destruction?  It is impossible to divine the future, but it must be remembered that with God all things are possible.

Europe and the Faith is in the public domain, and can be downloaded for free for the Amazon Kindle, or from Project Gutenberg as a free e-book in various formats.  It is also published in book form.

–Chris Chan

Spies in the Vatican: The Soviet Union’s Cold War Against the Catholic Church.

Spies in the Vatican: The Soviet Union’s Cold War Against the Catholic Church.  By John O. Koehler, Pegasus Books, 2009.

The USSR liked to talk as if it had an iron grasp on the minds and spirits of the people under communist control, but in truth the Soviet leadership was petrified of the continuing presence and power of religion in their subjects’ lives, especially the influence of the Catholic Church.  Throughout the twentieth century, the Soviets strove to eradicate the influence of the Vatican, and crafted an immense espionage network to learn about the Church’s actions and plans to counteract communist authority.

Koehler dedicates Spies in the Vatican “to those who paid with their lives or suffered imprisonment for defending their religious beliefs against communist tyrants.” (v).  The book opens with a disturbing recounting of Soviet Russia’s first persecutions against religion:

“Before dawn on Easter Sunday 1923, Monsignor Konstantin Budkiewicz kneeled on the steps leading to a row of cells at Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka Prison.  A single bullet fired from a communist executioner’s Nagant revolver shattered the back of the 65-year-old Monsignor’s head.  The Catholic Church in Russia had its first 20^th-century martyr.  His crime?  Resisting religious persecution by the Bolsheviks, thus “committing a counterrevolutionary act.”  The Monsignor was a defendant in the first major show trial in the Bolsheviks’ quest to destroy the Catholic Church in Russia.  The chief target, Polish-born Archbishop Jan Cieplak, and more than a dozen priests were also convicted.  The archbishop was sentenced to death as well, but was quietly exiled after intervention by the Holy See and a number of Western governments, winding up in Latvia and eventually in Rome… The others were given long sentences they served in Gulags, the communist concentration camps where many died.  Four years earlier, after the Bolsheviks pledged to “liberate the toiling masses from religious prejudices and organize the broadest scientific, education, and anti-religious propaganda.”  Archbishop Baron Edward von der Ropp of the Mogilev diocese was arrested on trumped-up charges of engaging in “illegal economic speculations.”  He undoubtedly escaped a bullet in the head when the Bolshevik leadership decided to exchange him for Karl Radek, the Ukrainian-born Bolshevik confidant of Vladimir I. Lenin.” (1-2).  

There are many other anecdotes of brutality and diplomacy in this book, although the vast majority of the narrative revolves around the cold war between the Church and the Soviets, including incidents such as one communist official giving his relative (who was a high-ranking churchman) a religious statuette containing a wireless transmitter listening device.  The bug provided the communists with information for years until increased scrutiny in the wake of the failed assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II led to its discovery.

This book was made possible because many Soviet records have finally been made available to researchers.  It is fortunate that so many files survived.  This preservation is due in part to the fact that in the chaos after the abrupt and unexpected demise of the Soviet Union, large quantities of documents that might have been destroyed by the Soviets due to their embarrassing and incriminating content.  Despite the massive amounts of time and effort the communists placed into crafting a spy network, the Soviets did not want their espionage efforts made known, due in part to the public relations back that would inevitably follow.  With the breakdown of the communist government, there was no force to compel the destruction of the remaining documents.  It is impossible to tell how many other revelations might be found in the remaining documents sprinkled throughout various former communist locales.  

What is clear from an overview of the existing materials is the Soviet Union’s continuous fear of the Church’s power to subvert communist authority.  For all of the oft-repeated usage of Marx’s “opiate of the massage” dictum, the Soviet authorities did not believe that religion would just fade away with the imposition of communism. Indeed, after studying the available evidence, the Soviets appear to have been deathly afraid that the Church would destroy them, and as later events would prove, this anxiety was justified.  The communists sought to corrupt or recruit members of the clergy in order to gain more information about the Church’s actions. The Soviet spy network thrived by having contacts within the Church.  In Poland, between ten and fifteen percent of the nation’s clergy were thought to have collaborated with the Soviets at some point, tempted by threats, bribes, or blackmail. (272).  Even some high-level Church officials proved to be Soviet spies, but their traitorous activities were only revealed after the USSR fell and the long-hidden documents were released.  Koehler writes:

“The efforts of East European communist governments and the Soviet regime to burrow their way into the inner workings of the highest level of the Church certainly were to be expected, as they viewed people’s loyalty to the Church certainly were to be expected, as they viewed people’s loyalty to the Church a direct betrayal of their loyalty to the Party and, therefore, “subversive activity” that had to be stopped.  How well they succeeded, however, would not have been believed had the collapse of the regimes not occurred so rapidly that their intelligence services did not have sufficient time to destroy all of their explosive documents.  Unfortunately, the documents obtained by me only date back to the late 1960’s and cover merely a bit over a decade.  Nevertheless, had the East European communist bloc managed to hang tough and overcome its domestic difficulties, the opponents of democratic nations would have had valuable tools for managing their foreign policy.” (31)

Koehler believes that the USSR was so afraid of organized Catholicism that they may have considered assassination as a means of protecting their own position.  On November 13, 1979, several high-ranking Soviet officials passed a decree on how the USSR ought to deal with the election of Pope John Paul II and the moral and spiritual authority he inspired in Catholics and even non-Catholics, especially in Soviet-controlled Poland.  The decree read, “Use all possibilities available to the Soviet Union to prevent the new course of policies initiated by the Polish pope; if necessary with additional measures beyond disinformation and discreditation.” (88).  Nine members of the Soviet Secretariat signed this KGB order, including Mikhail Gorbachev.  Koehler theorizes that this order may have contributed to an assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, but he asserts that the truth of the matter cannot be determined for certain based on the available archival materials. 

The penultimate chapter of the book ends with a quote from Pope John Paul II, where the pontiff declared, “The claim to build a world without God has been shown to be an illusion.” (264).  For all the Soviet Union’s posturing about its own strength and indestructibility, faith and dedication to moral principles proved fatal to the regime.  Koehler’s book is fascinating, althougth one is left with the distinct impression that there are many more stories left to be told about communist espionage and the Catholic Church’s role in the Cold War.  This tale of espionage focuses on character, psychology, and politics, making it far more in the vein of John le Carré than Ian Fleming.  The next time you hear someone doubt that religion is still relevant in the modern world, tell that person just how much the Soviet Union worried about the influence of the Church.

–Chris Chan

My Peace I Give You

My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints.  By Dawn Eden, Ave Maria Press, 2012.

FULL DISCLOSURE ALERT: Dawn Eden is a friend of mine, but nepotism has not affected this review in any way, shape, or form.

What do you do when you have a wound that you feel will never heal?  One of the deepest and hardest to alleviate wounds is an intangible one: the pain caused by sexual abuse.  In My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints, Dawn Eden explains how the examples of some saints can help rape victims to deal with the aftermath of these traumatizing events.

My Peace I Give You is Eden’s second book.  Her first book, The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On, was written after her conversion to Christianity but before her conversion to Catholicism.  The Thrill of the Chaste is a stirring defense of Christian sexual morality, drawn upon Eden’s own poignant life experiences with relationships and dating.  A brief autobiography is included in My Peace I Give You, expanding upon some incidents mentioned in her previous book.  Having read her previous book, we already know that Eden’s parents’ divorced when she was quite young, but a further, even more harmful scene is revealed.  Eden was sexually abused as a child.  Eden describes her personal experiences clearly, strongly, and beautifully.  The subject matter is very disturbing, but Eden writes with quiet grace and dignity.  There is no trace of anger in her words, but her prose reads as if it has been touched by grace:

“The tears came because, even at that young age [seven], I had suffered sexual abuse.  What’s more, for the previous two years, since my parents had split up and my mother gained custody, I had been living in an environment I would now consider to be sexually porous.  I don’t recall any clear boundaries; I was not well shielded from adults’ nudity, substance abuse, dirty jokes, sex talk, and swearing.

Like many victims of sexual abuse, I identify with the words of the messenger in Job 1:15: “I alone have escaped to tell you.”  As far as I know, there is no other living person who admits to witnessing the evils that were done to me.  Certainly, my mother recalls things very differently than I do.  When I told her of the incidents I planned to relate in this book, she denied several of them, including that her home was a “sexually porous environment during my childhood.”

Eden’s main point is that even though being molested as a child leaves lasting intangible scars, that healing, happiness, and peace can come eventually through the grace of God.  Eden has a rare gift for talking about her own life experiences in a way that it does not sound so much like she is talking about herself as she is speaking of the entire human condition.  There is no smug sanctimony in her words, she is only stating facts about divine grace.

“Learning about the ongoing aid that grace provides in the moral life was encouraging, helping me be patient with myself as I began to “walk the walk” of a faithful Christian.  As time went by, however, my initial confidence began to erode.  My greatest desire was to have the blessing Jesus promises to the “pure in heart,… for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8).  Yet, even when I was doing everything I could to live in purity, I was unable to feel pure.  I felt stained– because of what adults had done to me, or had bid me do, when I was a helpless child.

On an intellectual level, I knew there was nothing for me to be ashamed of.  No child is responsible for what an adult does to her, or induces her to do.  The sin of abuse belongs to the abusers, not their victims.  Children depend on adults and have to trust them in order to survive.  It is adults’ responsibility to show children what is good, and it is in children’s very nature to accept what adults call “good” as being truly good.  One cannot speak of “consent” in such an unequal relationship.”

Despite the darkness of the subject matter, this book’s tone is consistently warm, friendly, and reassuring.  References to fairy tales and Peanuts comics give the book a gentle innocence.  Readers should not be afraid of reading this book, because it will be sure to leave them more spiritually renewed than emotionally drained This is not just a book for victims of abuse, the lessons in it can be applied towards any traumatic experience.

“Over time, as that image of the loving and merciful light streaming from Jesus’ wounds deepened its hold on my consciousness, I began to re-examine the times in my past when I had doubted God’s mercy.  That in turn led to a conversation with God that I had been putting off for a long time– asking how I could embody his mercy toward those I found hardest to forgive.”

It is too easy to think of saints as paragons of virtue to which mere mortals can never compare.  Unfortunately, many people believe themselves to be incapable of living up to the high standard of piety exemplified by the saints so they never even try, rather than set themselves up for failure at the slightest sign of bad temper. Eden points out that the saints were not perfect all of the time: 

“Another surprise was discovering how human the saints were in their reactions to abuse.  They weren’t all sweetness and light.  It was a guilty pleasure to read how the young Bernardine of Siena reacted when a rich man propositioned him while he was playing in a field with schoolmates.  According to an early biographer, the little saint to be promptly whopped the man upside the head.  (While he may very well have been justified, perhaps this is an apt moment to recall the old saying– often quoted by Dorothy Day– that one could go to hell imitating the imperfections of the saints.)…

Here is where the saints have something to show us.  We tend to think of the saints in heaven as being perfect, which they are, but it would be more descriptive to say they have been perfected.  Likewise, we think of the saints as being pure, which they also are, but it would be truer to say they have been purified.  The prophet Malachi spoke of this purification when he described the Messiah as “like a refiner’s fire,” adding that “he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver till they present right offerings to the Lord” (3: 2-3).”

My Peace I Give You should be recommended reading for everybody who needs help or healing.  The lives of the saints demonstrate that there is no wound so great that God cannot heal it, and Dawn Eden has created a stirring and genuine reminder that no matter what problems one might have, there is always cause for hope.

–Chris Chan

The Hound of Distributism

The Hound of Distributism.  Edited by Richard Aleman, ACS Books, 2012.

FULL DISCLOSURE ALERT: Some of the contributors to The Hound of Distributismare colleagues of mine at the American Chesterton Society. 

Distributism is one of the most misunderstood and controversial forms of economic theory. It has often been dismissed as religious fanaticism applied to the economy, and criticized by capitalists, socialists, and Marxists alike.  Distributism is not capitalism, nor is it socialism, and even less is it Marxism. It is an entirely different form of economics built upon philosophy, namely Catholic social and moral teachings. It is easy to mislabel or misunderstand Distributism or reduce it to nothing more than a variant of any of the aforementioned economic systems.  The numerous articles in the anthology The Hound of Distributismare an excellent means of informing people about the true nature of Distributism and how it ought to be implemented, and a fine way to easily dispel misconceptions about all of these economic philosophies.

Contributors to The Hound of Distributisminclude Dale Ahlquist, Phillip Blond, Peter Chojnowski, David W. Cooney, William Fahey, Donald P. Goodman III, the Hon. Race Mathews, Philippe Maxence, John Médaille, Joseph Pearce, Bill Powell, Russell Sparkes, Thomas Storck, and Mark and Louise Zwick.  A handful of essays by G.K. Chesterton on Distributist theory are also sprinkled throughout the book.  Since Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are the major twentieth-century innovators of Distributist thought and philosophy, they are frequently referenced and explained throughout this work.

The title of this volume is not a reference to the famous Sherlock Holmes story. As the book’s introduction states:

“Domini canes or “The Hounds of the Lord” is a name given to The Order of Preachers, commonly known as the Dominican Order. According to tradition, while pregnant with the great saint, St. Dominic’s mother had a vision of a black dog with torch in mouth setting fire to the world with the Gospel. In art, St. Dominic is typically depicted with a white or black canine by his side. As the symbol of the historic Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, the Distributist fraternity of craftworkers in Ditchling, England, the hound has also grown to

be with the great saint, St. Dominic’s mother had a vision of a black dog with torch in mouth setting fire to the world with the Gospel. In art, St. Dominic is typically depicted with a white or black canine by his side. As the symbol of the historic Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, the Distributist fraternity of craftworkers in Ditchling, England, the hound has also grown to
be associated with Distributism.”  

In his introductory essay, “What’s Wrong with the World (and How to Fix It),” Dale Ahlquist explains the reason for compiling this book and why it is so vital to implement Distributist philosophy in today’s world, writing that:

“Most normal, carefree people would rather avoid arguing about politics and religion. They fall in love and get married and, in the normal course of events, have children. Then they begin thinking about two things: the world in which they are raising their child, and the soul of their child. In other words, they start thinking about politics and religion. Unfortunately, most people with families don’t have the time and money to become political activists. Most of the people who do have the time and the money to be political activists don’t have families; the laws these people lobby for with great success represent special interest groups, but they do not represent the interests of that general interest group,
the family. As a result, most laws are very much anti-family.”

Distributism, after all, is meant to protect the building block of society, the family.  As many of these commentators observe, in today’s world the average family is plunged into debt by a very young age, and many people never escape from the problems of debt.  The point of Distributism is not to make people rich, but rather to make them free and happy in a way that other systems cannot.

“Towards a Description of Distributism,” by Dr. Wiliam E. Fahey, describes what Distributism really is, and, equally importantly, explains what Distributism isn’tas well.  This article is crafted in the form of a dialogue between a “Lector” and a “Scriptor,” the Lector initially being largely ignorant of what Distributism really is, aside from some very negative misconceptions, which are quickly corrected by the Scriptor. “Towards a Description of Distributism” provides a thorough overview of the definition and development of Distributism over time, as well as the reasons why Distributism ought to be considered the most moral economic system.  Towards the end, Fahey writes the following exchange:

“Lector: So, Distributism is about freedom? 

Scriptor: Some distributists have said that is the central tenet. Chesterton reminds us, however, that “the aim of human polity is human happiness.””

Throughout this volume, the authors attempt to show how Distributism can make someone’s life better, easier, more economical, and more just. One of the most interesting essays describing how to implement Distributist principles into one’s own life is Bill Powell’s “Make Your Backyard a Forest Garden,” a description of how to turn one’s backyard into an abundant and economical food source. Powell’s essay explains the principles of permaculture, a blend of the words “permanent” and “agriculture.” Many farmers today require high overhead costs, all kinds of chemicals, and large quantities of equipment in order to produce substantial amounts of food.  Traditional forms of backyard gardens require large amounts of time and effort.  Constant weeding, watering and fertilizing come with the territory, as do the high start-up costs of seedlings, which often do not generate enough produce to offset the original price of purchase.  A forest garden uses a natural woodland habitat to grow the kinds of plants that can thrive naturally in the wilderness. With only a tenth of an acre, a forest garden can be used to grow all sorts of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and fungi; enough to take care of a major portion of one’s produce bills.

The essays in this anthology deserve further analysis, but to give all of the works the space they deserve would make this review run for dozens of pages. In any event, this book is a superb introduction to Distributism, and a simple and accessible way to help people understand this oft-maligned set of ideas.  This anthology also serves to clearly and effectively present the ideas of Distributists such as G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Dorothy Day, and E.F. Schumacher.  In his essay, “Small is Beautiful Versus Big is Best,” Joseph Pearce explains how Distributism possesses a moral force that all other economic systems lack, writing that:

“Ultimately, conventional economists are making the perennially fatal mistake of ignoring the metaphysical truths that underpin physical facts. They forget that greed is a metaphysical reality and is, therefore, in a physical sense, unlimited. Greed is larger than the world and may, if unchecked, outstrip the world’s ability to meet its demands. As Gandhi said, “Earth provides enough for every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.” Or, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, “Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the process loses his soul.” And Solzhenitsyn’s words are, of course, a variation on the words of Jesus Christ: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Such is the folly of economic man that he is not even leaving himself a choice. He is set to lose his soul and the world, poisoning the one with greed and the other with the pillage and pollution it causes.”

–Chris Chan

Flannery O’Connor: Spiritual Writings

Flannery O’Connor: Spiritual Writings, by Flannery O’Connor, edited by Robert Ellsburg, introduction by Richard Giannone, Orbis Books, 2003.

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) is a writer who is both beloved and baffling.  Kurt Vonnegut once referred to her as “the greatest short story writer of my generation,” who managed to create brilliant work while breaking all of the conventional wisdom about crafting fiction.  Her tales are full of violence, foolishness, churlishness, and comically flawed characters that display all of the seven deadly sins in shockingly vivid detail.  Her fiction is also filled with love, grace, faith, intelligence, and a bushel of other understated virtues.  

O’Connor’s Catholicism permeates her work, but unlike many overtly Christian writers, her integration of her faith into her prose is often easy to miss at first glance.  Her religious morals are often subtly and cleverly disguised by her focus on Southern Protestantism or the dark nihilistic void that is left in the absence of a religious moral compass.  Readers might not expect to find lessons on grace and redemption in tales of family annihilation, open blasphemy, and self-righteous preening, which is why this anthology is a useful guide to understanding the spiritual lessons of her work.

O’Connor suffered from crippling lupus for most of her life, leading to her early death at age thirty-nine. Her published writings consist of two novels, Wise Blood(1952) and The Violent Bear it Away(1960); thirty-one short stories (published in two short collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find(1955) and Everything that Rises Must Converge(1965), and the National Book Award-winning The Complete Stories(1971) containing the two aforementioned collections and several other pieces); numerous lectures, book reviews, and articles (many of which were compiled into the anthologies Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose(1969) and The Presence of Grace: and Other Book Reviews(1983)); and mountains of personal correspondence, some of the best of which was printed in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor(1979).

All of the aforementioned works are full of O’Connor’s thoughts on faith and religion’s role in culture and society, but as stated earlier, sometimes the “presence of grace” is hard to detect in her work amongst the muck and muddle of human folly, much as it is in real life.  Flannery O’Connor: Spiritual Writingsis meant to help highlight the role of religion and spirituality in her work. Even if one already owns all of O’Connor’s books, this book is valuable to readers because of a lengthy critical essay and numerous editorial and contextual comments.

The book opens with Richard Giannone’s introductory essay “Flannery O’Connor’s Dialogue With the Age.” The book is divided into five sections, reflecting O’Connor’s religious views, thoughts on the role of the Christian in society, critical assertions regarding religion in fiction, and ponderings on spiritual mysteries.  There is some topical overlap amongst the sections, with the exception of the third, which consists solely of the short story “Revelation.”  Ellsburg notes that all of O’Connor’s books have been used for this anthology.  Snippets from both of her novels, scenes from many of her short stories, passages from her lectures, and scores of her letters and reviews are included here, all arranged in order to emphasize her points about spirituality.

Like all essays that address the work of a really great writer, Giannone’s introduction doesn’t come close to capturing all of the depth and beauty of O’Connor’s work, but it’s still a very helpful introduction to her work and its themes.  Giannone provides a useful overview of the scholarship on O’Connor and a good summary of her life, as well as many salient arguments against the oft-stated assertion of secularists that religious themes have no place in serious fiction.  Another Catholic novelist, Alice Thomas Ellis, put it best when she said that, “Once you take away the religious element, you can’t write fiction. Well, you can, but it’s boring.”  Many adjectives can be used to describe O’Connor, but ‘boring’ is not one of them.

Most of the excerpts are short.  Some of her letters are only half a page in length, and some book passages only fill a couple of pages.  Each selection is carefully chosen in order to make a point either about O’Connor’s religious and artistic opinions, or how she managed to use unexpected and unconventional ways to insert her beliefs into her fiction.  A few choice scenes from Wise Blood, where the central character, Hazel Motes, proponent of the “Church Without Christ,” illustrate the folly of trying to run away from a God who is always present everywhere.

When many people think of religious fiction, they think of preachy moralizing, saccharine protagonists who are always rewarded for their virtue, and one-dimensional atheistic villains. None of that applies to O’Connor, who was never one for sugar-coating the truth.  Sometimes the innocent suffer.  Monsters walk the earth in human form.  Humans blame God for their own destructiveness.  In Spiritual Writings, O’Connor expressed her annoyance at people who labeled her a “Catholic writer,” preferring instead to call herself a “Christian realist.”  A substantial percentage of this book is devoted to O’Connor’s literary theories, and her thoughts about what constitutes the perfect balance of religious themes in fiction ought to be required reading for all aspiring writers who want to write about Christian themes.

The one short story reproduced in its entirety, “Revelation,” is an interesting choice. It’s a very good story, but there are so many others that directly address the relationship between God and man that it’s not quite clear why “Revelation” was selected for inclusion and not others.  “Revelation” is the story of Ruby Turpin, a woman who is securely convinced of her own moral superiority and increasingly exasperated by the people she views as her moral and social inferiors.  Turpin spends a rather disconcerting day in a doctor’s waiting room, and gradually the reader learns just how disgusted she is by the “white trash” that surrounds her and her patronizing attitudes towards black people.  The climax of the story, where Turpin receives a world-rocking vision about the state of her own soul and others’ souls, ought to give readers pause over their own lives and evaluate their souls in a different light. The questions O’Connor raises over what truly makes one morally superior and closer to God are not directly answered in the text, which is just as well– readers really need to come up with conclusions on their own.  O’Connor is full of opinions, but didacticism has no place in her prose.

One of the most insightful portions of Spiritual Writingsconsists of O’Connor’s letters from The Habit of Being.  In them, we see glimpses of O’Connor’s personal life, especially her friendship with an anonymous correspondent.  We see O’Connor’s wonder and joy at being a Catholic, as well as her distress when her friend decides to leave the Catholic Church, and O’Connor’s cheerful but disconcerted acknowledgement of her own impeding mortality.

Since Flannery O’Connor: Spiritual Writingsprovides some spoilers for some of O’Connor’s fiction, this book may not be the best introduction to her work.  Personally, I would recommend this anthology to readers who are already fans of O’Connor and who want to gain a better appreciation for the religious dimension of her work.  If one is not already familiar with her, I suggest that those who have not yet discovered the joys of her work begin by reading some of her short stories and one of her novels, or possibly The Habit of Beingbefore reading Spiritual Writings.  

Spiritual Writingswill probably be of most use to those readers who are familiar with O’Connor’s fiction but would like a guide to understanding her religious themes better.  The juxtaposition of excerpts from her fiction, her personal musings on literature, and her thoughts on religion will help the reader see the hidden hand of God in each of her works, and quite possibly help readers better understand religious themes in all kinds of fiction.  Indeed, after perusing Spiritual Writings, many people may gain a better understanding of how fiction that does nottake religion seriously may sometimes be thematically and intellectually lacking.

–Chris Chan