Page 3364 – Christianity Today (2024)

Around the turn of the 20th century, when the American university was in its most creative period of growth, geography was an important discipline in the new studies of man. It combined natural science, the generalizing propensities of the social sciences, and history. Offering a synthetic account of human development that located cultures in the physical order, geography had some notable practitioners and institutional strongholds. But by World War II it was in decline, and has now virtually disappeared as an autonomous area of study in the United States. Its nearest equivalent is sociology. If this is so, we are all the poorer for it, as Donald Meinig’s enormous history shows.

Meinig is emeritus professor of geography at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University (a geographical holdout). These volumes are not really Meinig’s life project, for he did not take them up until well into middle-age, and he has several other outstanding publications. Nonetheless, the book is surely his magnum opus. In the twenty years since reviewers started to shower the first installment with praise, the author has kept at it, and the four parts announced in 1986 are now completed. There are few encomia to add, and in this review I intend, not so much to criticize The Shaping of America as to introduce interested readers to what they will find in this very impressive effort.

Meinig first tips his hat to the some of the great textbooks in U.S. history that students are asked to read in introductory courses. These texts are extraordinary productions, synthesizing all the professional literature in an easily available format, and Meinig has rightly used them to outline his own version of the American story. The first volume treats the age of exploration and of Revolution; the second scouts the context of the Civil War; the third deals with continental expansion and the first chapter of empire in the Caribbean and the Far East; the last volume is about capitalist industrial life and global responsibility.

“Responsibility” is not a good word here. As Meinig sees the purview of geography, it is a genre of history that puts a narrative of human striving into its physical surroundings. At the center of geography as a discipline is the dilemma of freedom versus determinism in human affairs. It is not surprising, nor to his discredit, that Meinig waffles on this issue. He often talks in terms of how nature molds the conditions of experience, of how geographic variables are necessary to understanding, but there is not much that is more concrete on this subject. Yet the sleight of hand in assessing the relative causal importance of ideas and decision-making as against natural necessity or constraint is no more or less than in other large historical theories, or in the monographs that engage professional attention every day. Moreover, when applied to the United States the message is simple. Geographical variables—a largely temperate climate, arable lands, weak and dispersed neighbors—have propelled into existence a civilization that is expansive at its core; often democratic, but always imperial in its triumphal movement.

“Responsibility” is a word from the textbooks that communicates the lingering sentimental patriotism conveyed to underclassmen. Meinig is a more hard-headed patriot. For him the study of geography has made excruciatingly clear the way in which the land has promoted American assertion if not aggression.

In his presentation there is a difference in historical tempo from that of the textbooks. I did a rough check of the weight given to various issues in the textbooks that Meinig cites and in some other prominent ones. Take the period from 1500 to 1800, which is roughly from “contact” to the establishment of the Republic. In the standard texts this period occupies roughly 19 percent of the whole; for Meinig, 25 percent of the whole. A geographical approach demands more attention to a survey of the initial conditions. Within this early period, in the texts, the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras (which make up 13 percent of the span to be covered) take up 21 percent of the writing; for Meinig these periods take up only 14 percent of the space. Political developments are less fundamental to him than for writers of the textbooks. Meinig expends more effort on epochs that other authors ignore, comparatively speaking, and within these epochs expends his effort on different subjects, comparatively speaking.

Take an example with a somewhat different resonance. In volume 2, which covers 1800 to 1867, less than one-fifth of the writing concerns the sectional crisis and the Civil War itself. This must be one of the few overviews about the war that does not even refer to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin; there is no commentary on the role of abolitionists and anti-slavery propaganda. Lincoln gets mentioned several times, but his leadership is not a variable for consideration, nor are his political ideas. As Meinig says in his courtly style, “We shall pay little attention to … the larger human dimensions of this conflict … in order to help us see more clearly certain basic features rather more clearly than when these things are enmeshed in richer panoramic narratives.”

About the war itself there is a skilled if expected analysis of the comparative economic strength of the North and South, of their manufacturing capabilities, railroad connections, and highway development. More interesting are maps of the core and periphery of both the North and South, and the way geography determined the shape and nature of the alliances among the two contesting groups of states.

What is absolutely stunning about the explorations connected to the war is Meinig’s elaboration of the territorial question in American history—a recurring theme. The issue is not so striking in the age of exploration leading up to the victory of the English colonists on the seaboard, because close attention to Euro-American imperialism in the New World has become conventional in writing about the period from 1500 to 1700. Meinig gets his running start in working over these conventions, but hits his stride when he gets to the 18th century and a treatment that is oriented around the Northwest Ordinances. The author carries on with the transformation of territories into states through the 19th century, and then into the period of expansion into Central America and the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. He finishes up with discussions of various areas under American sovereignty during the Cold War.

This extended narrative seems to me to be the spine of Meinig’s volumes and, thus, as I read him, the author’s central contribution to what he believes is a more fruitful way to look at the evolution of the American state. I agree with him.

The history of the United States is one of a continuous drive for either territory or control—and sometimes both. Americans had a blind self-righteous streak about their bulging republic, which they believed embodied transcendent goodness, and were oblivious to the unfortunate consequences to others of their forceful expansionism. They hardly noticed that they applied their ideals sporadically, if at all, to those who were weaker or alien. Meinig is not much concerned with the ideology, but he is exceptionally perceptive about the way in which politicians over time altered their notions of incorporation to suit various constituencies or political exigencies. The one constant was the ability to absorb new turf, one way or another.

The best aspect of this thematic unity governing the book is the author’s use of what I would call “counterfactual” charts or maps. More conventional historians regularly debate the merits or lack thereof of what-if history. Meinig instead offers graphic depictions of alternative structures of sovereignty in what is now the continental United States, or in the South Atlantic or the Pacific. My favorites are the maps in volume 2 (p. 215) of two “might have been” constellations of republics in North America that would have existed had the United States in fact enlarged itself differently than it did. These illustrations, taken as a whole, vivify the sort of relentless extension that has taken place.1

Geography as a discipline in the United States was to an extent allied with the social sciences. I would say more critically that there is more than a hint in Meinig’s prose of generalizations about human affairs meant to lift us from the particularity of historical understanding. As often as not, I found these as obfuscating as illuminating. “Federalism is a geopolitical device for dealing with basic differences among a set of states associated under a common government.” When we look at technologies, we are to look at “the formation of this elaborating national infrastructure.” “A large national society requires a multitude of … élites to coordinate the activities of its many national systems.”

Meinig himself is not perfect, although as an utter amateur in these matters I serve up examples only to show that I have done my homework. There is no discussion of the Mason-Dixon Line, or of its English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, their adventures of the 1760s, and the role of the Line in the Missouri Compromise. The Line comes into the text when the author talks about the formal boundary between free and slave states, but we learn nothing about its genesis, which I had long wanted to understand (and which I learned about from a website).

The line of reasoning Meinig takes about the Cold War is less interesting than it might have been. The geopolitical dimension of the conflict strikes me as overwhelming, but the author—uncharacteristically, it seems to me—emphasizes more than he needs to the ideological struggle. But my appraisal may be due to the fact that this is a historical problem I know something about, concerning which I am less willing to take instruction.

In volume 4, Meinig discusses the moves of major league baseball franchises in the 1950s to suggest how important was the geographical core of the United States. He points to the earliest moves of 1954 as indicative of the strength of the core, since they took place within it. But he omits from the discussion the move of the Philadelphia Athletics to Kansas City. Because this move was outside the core, it contradicts his thesis.

Such quibbles aside, Meinig leaves the reader with a fresh angle on American history and a sense of what has been lost with the decline of geography as a discipline.

Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author most recently of A History of Philosophy in America: 1720–2000 (Oxford Univ. Press).

1. Yale University Press has spent a pretty penny on the many maps and charts (not to mention photographs) that enrich this text. But should the press do further printings, it would be well advised to re-do the indices. They are only just passable, comprised of some moderately useful analytic references but mainly proper names of one sort or another followed by long lists of page numbers—a real let-down in a book like this.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

There has always been an element of special pleading mixed into the historical reputation of Jonathan Edwards. He was a controversial figure in his own lifetime, and people have continued to take sides over him ever since, and the question that begins to occur is whether the controversies have done more to create the historical figure of Edwards than Edwards’ own words and deeds.

In a number of respects, Edwards’ life was anything but historically exciting. While the 18th century’s great wars of empire were being fought out, and while wit and music danced from the pens of Voltaire, Mozart, Kant, and Haydn, Jonathan Edwards occupied for 21 years the pastorate of the middling-size town of Northampton in western New England, where the guiding intellectual impulses were still being shaped by readings in Protestant scholastic theology. (That, at least, was the kind of education the young Edwards received when he entered Yale College, an institution consciously dedicated in 1701 to maintaining the “old logic.”) He was never a particularly scintillating preacher, or, for that matter, a particularly graceful writer. His most public achievements came in the context of two revivals which swept through Northampton, a small-scale one in 1734–35 and a much larger one which occurred as part of the Great Awakening of 1739–42.

But that publicity owed more to Edwards’ widely reprinted account of the 1734–35 revival, and then to a series of spirited defenses he wrote of the Great Awakening, than to his prowess as a husbandman of conversions. He might have qualified as the concertmaster in the Awakening’s pit orchestra, but he was never the featured soloist that George Whitefield was. Once the climax of the Great Awakening passed, Edwards’ pastoral ineptness triggered so much fury in Northampton that the exasperated townsfolk fired him in 1750. The philosophical works to which he devoted the remaining eight years of his life (while filling the post of missionary and pastor to the Indian mission in Stockbridge, Massachusetts) went largely unread, and the president of Yale predicted that “in another generation” Edwards would pass into a “transient Notice perhaps scarce above Oblivion.”1

So much for the predictive powers of the presidency of Yale. Biographies of Edwards have won the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize; a five-decades-long project to publish the Works of Jonathan Edwards is now approaching thirty volumes; five major scholarly conferences since 1984 have produced as many volumes of learned essays on Edwards. He has managed to wedge his way into anthologies of American literature, into samplers of American intellectual history, and into the reading lists of high school ap history courses. Edwards has become “America’s Theologian” (the title of Robert Jenson’s paean of praise) and “America’s Evangelical” (in this new book by Philip Gura); his name sits alongside that of Abraham Lincoln in Mark Noll’s account of “America’s God.” Yet, in all the published editions of the pillars of 18th-century America—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton—the name of Jonathan Edwards does not appear once. This problem, as the gentleman from Baker Street might have said, has features of unusual interest.

And this is the very thing that drew Philip Gura to Edwards. “The fascination in writing his biography,” says Gura in the preface, “lies precisely in this disjunction between his ebbing reputation in the 1750s and his subsequent canonization, half a century later, into the chief exponent of American revivalism.”

There are a number of ways to deal with this “disjunction.” One way would be to ignore the “subsequent canonization” and treat Edwards strictly as an 18th-century American figure, in a strictly historical manner. The results of this are likely to be limited. Biographies of Congregational pastors may have local or professional interest, or they may be cast (in the manner of Carlo Ginzberg or Robert Darnton) as cultural microhistory, but such ventures rarely result in canonization, and in Edwards’ case, that retrospective reassessment cannot be easily ignored as a factor in why a biography is being written at all. Gura has opted to leap directly at the issue of canonization and “present Edwards as someone whose conceptions of man and the universe continue to challenge and enlighten us because of their universality.” If Edwards seems to have made only a very modest impact on his own contemporaries, that is because he was speaking over their heads to ours.

To bring this off, however, Gura has to deal with the uncomfortable reality that “Edwards couched his vision in language that many today would find offensive, or at least unpalatable.” Indeed he did, and not just by “many today.” As the favorite son of a pastor’s family, Edwards grew up never knowing what it was to duck an argument. He chided himself to behave with more “modesty” and to try “not only to silence but to gain readers.” But there was an element of the prig in Edwards, a self-confidence in his own intellectual rectitude and virtuosity, which was the seedbed for most of the woes he endured in life. He was, said another Yale president, “of a strong brain and thoughtful,” but “Narrow and odd in his sentiments.” He painted a bull’s-eye on himself early in his pastorate by entering a regional controversy over the appointment of an “Arminian,” Robert Breck, to the church in Springfield, Massachusetts. From that point on, he swung away at the critics of the Great Awakening, at his own congregation over the terms of church membership, at the most prominent of Northampton’s families over the behavior of their adolescents, at the sponsors of the Stockbridge Indian mission, and finally, in his last published works, at Isaac Watts, Thomas Chubb, Daniel Whitby, John Taylor, and Samuel Clarke

In almost every case, what Edwards was arguing for was the past, and especially the Puritan past of Massachusetts’ first generation (restoring the strict membership criteria of the churches of the 1630s was the principal issue that caused his disastrous break with the Northampton church). “He was not a man of the moderate, rational, English Enlightenment of his day,” Henry May once remarked, “Indeed, he was the most powerful enemy of that way of thought.”2

This means that Gura’s Edwards must not only speak over the heads of his own era. His “unpalatable” words must become a code that modern hearers can decipher and discover to be a relevant and friendly message for modern sensibilities. This is what goes into a great deal of modern scholarship on Edwards, whose authors hope devoutly that their recalcitrant subject can be made to yield neo-orthodoxy, postmodernism, semiotics, and other modern intellectual dividends. In Gura’s case, the dividend he believes the modern reading of Edwards will yield is “a generous acknowledgment of our common humanity,” a vision of “all souls as irreducibly equal” and capable of transformation “into benevolent beings.” This means reading Edwards’ relentless insistence on human depravity in The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (1758) as a device for demonstrating “an equality that made no one any better than another, man or women, master or slave, European or Native American.” It also means that the “new simple idea” of grace which Edwards borrowed from John Locke to explain the core of the conversion experience becomes a model of generic “personal transformation,” which can occur “as one reads a book, is in the midst of a battle, volunteers in the Peace Corps, or climbs Mount Ranier.”

To do this, Gura has to commit an act of extraordinary historical violence, because it is safe to say that Edwards never had any notion of depravity or conversion like the ones Gura wants to ease him into. And this is a pity, because Gura’s comparatively brief survey of Edwards’ life packs a tremendous amount of personal detail, astutely and readably organized, into its 238 pages of text. Gura’s capacity to thumbnail the world of the Connecticut River valley, the Yale “apostacie” of 1722, the ecstasies of the awakened, the “bad books” debacle, and the village politics of Stockbridge is a running delight. This is, after all, territory with which Gura has more than a little acquaintance: a number of his essays in the 1980s were focused on the Connecticut River valley in the 18th century, and his earliest books, The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance (1981) and A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England (1984), showed a sure grasp of the complexities of Puritan theological language.

Still, there is a very real sense in which Edwards, if he cannot be stretched so thin as to provide a theologian for the age of therapy, still has reason to be considered “America’s Evangelical.” But even this is because the Edwards who survived the apparent death of his reputation in 1758 acquired his outsized standing over the following century at the expense of the very things the historical Edwards thought were the most important. Joseph Conforti made the unsettling point in 1985 that Edwards’ posthumous fame was built, not on the great theological treatises of the 1750s (Freedom of the Will, Original Sin, the treatise on True Virtue) but on his popular writings, and principally Edwards’ edition of the journal of the missionary David Brainerd.3

Even more curiously, the Brainerd journal was not confected by Edwards for the purposes for which its 19th-century readers were most like to employ it—as a devotional incitement to missions recruitment—but rather as a rebuke to the opponents of the Great Awakening. Brainerd had come to Edwards’ notice after being bounced out of Yale for slandering one of the Yale faculty as having no more grace than a chair. Edwards pleaded, as a Yale alumnus, for Brainerd’s reinstatement, but in vain. The edition of the journal that Edwards published after Brainerd’s death was a starkly polemical effort to embarrass the anti-revivalists, and show what a better man Brainerd had been.

Gura is astute enough to see how American evangelicalism has re-made Edwards into something it can admire and “trumpeted him as the progenitor of a remarkable American spirituality”; but apparently that only gives Gura permission to do likewise for those today who are “unaffiliated with any explicitly religious tradition” and who simply want to “reconceive the tenor of the spiritual life.” And there is nothing which Jonathan Edwards would have found more bleakly abhorrent.

Gura pays tribute in his notes to a trio of latter-day Edwards biographers: Ola Elizabeth Winslow, George Marsden, and Iain Murray. Of the three, Murray’s Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (1987) is probably the least-well-known, and certainly the least-well-spoken-of within the circle of Edwards’ scholars. There are reasons for this—Murray did next to nothing in the way of primary research, frankly painted Edwards as a martyr to Calvinist truth, and published his book under what amounted to his own imprint, the Banner of Truth Trust—yet Murray (who was, by the way, quite a good writer and quite well-read in Edwards’ published works and the secondary literature on Edwards) may have caught far more accurately than his fellow biographers the Edwards whom Edwards himself would be most likely to recognize: an utter partisan of Calvinist orthodoxy with the brains and inclination to confront the most abstruse intellectual challenges to that orthodoxy, a man of the most solemn integrity who would rather be broken by the storm than bend to the self-serving wishes of his own times and his own congregation, a man of ideas for whom personalities come in a distant second.

It is precisely this which makes Gura fear that Edwards will turn out to be “unpalatable” to modern sensibilities, as he surely will. I suspect that turning Edwards loose like that on modern evangelicals would grate on their modern sensibilities, too. But Americans, fearful and resentful of being thought provincial, have always been hungry for intellectual champions to put on a par with Europe. The same spirit that moved Benjamin Franklin to appropriate Bishop Berkeley’s promise that “the Arts delight to travel Westward,” and drove Thomas Jefferson to denounce the Comte de Buffon’s snigg*ring mockery of America, drives us today to locate a legitimate 18th-century philosophical virtuoso in America, and Edwards has long seemed the most obvious candidate. But to place Edwards on that pedestal requires that we seal his contentious Calvinistic mouth. We need his genius, but we cannot accept it. And he would not be in the slightest degree surprised.

Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.

1. The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed. F.B. Dexter (Yale Univ. Press, 1916), volume 3, p. 275.

2. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), p. 49.

3. Joseph A. Conforti, “Jonathan Edwards’ Most Popular Work: The ‘Life of David Brainerd’ and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Culture,” Church History (June 1985), pp. 188-201.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

As modern convention has it, we draw a sharp distinction between “theology” and “history.” According to this distinction, James O’Donnell is a historian of the first order. His three-volume commentary on Augustine’s Confessions will remain the unsurpassed reference for generations. His skills as a classicist make for easy familiarity with the Latin primary sources. His keen critical eye allows him to pose probing new questions and uncover potential embarrassments in our hagiographies that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. In Augustine: A New Biography, he works hard to blaze a trail in Augustinian biography by asking more deeply critical questions of the church father’s life, in hopes that he can “wring a real confession or two from him against his will.”

As a theologian, alas, O’Donnell’s skills are less patently on display. Because he mistrusts Augustine’s own accounting of his life—which mistrust marks his skill as a critical historian—he pays either very little or very poor attention to the intellectual content of Augustine’s work. A reader of this book will be left wondering how Augustine could have had such wide readership for so many centuries when his ideas are so flimsy. That Augustine comes in for intellectual criticism here is no surprise—scholars for decades now have complained about his inability quite to leave off the dualism of his Manichaean past, his ruthless use of imperial power against his Donatist enemies, and his late-life grumpy and inadequate responses to the intellectually spry Pelagian, Julian of Eclanum. But at every turn in O’Donnell’s critique, Augustine is portrayed as dreadfully anxious, intellectually inferior to his enemies, and so inclined to deal with them duplicitously and brutally, and to tell the story subsequently in such a way as to exonerate himself and excoriate their memory.

O’Donnell begins with Confessions, a “triumph of self-absorption” in which Augustine so deftly managed to “dramatically mislead his readers” that few before O’Donnell have had the gumption to challenge Augustine’s narration of his life. Certainly this ur-memoir whitewashes history. Augustine’s “one truly impassioned religious experience,” for example, was with the very Manichees whom he here disavows, and the deepest allegiance of his mother Monnica (O’Donnell uses an old Punic spelling of her name) was to the Donatists, mention of whom Augustine surgically omits to avoid this embarrassment. At the time he was writing his life story, Augustine was a bishop of a nowhere town in North Africa (ordination to that ecclesiastical jurisdiction was the only genuine conversion in his life, O’Donnell says, in a characteristically withering jibe), and nowhere does he mention that he only retreated to Africa from Italy with his tail between his legs when his social ambitions proved a failure.

Confessions, then, in O’Donnell’s reading, is really a book about failure. It ends with Augustine’s supposed conversion in order to hide the disillusionment that had already set in before he set to writing and that would steadily creep over his entire life, chasing away his friends, clouding his philosophical judgment, and sweeping him up in anxiety about God’s indifference and his own frailty—an anxiety so consuming that it bordered on paralyzing dread. For O’Donnell, “the real power of this text [comes] to the surface just as the hegemony of its author’s ideas and his church’s ideas begins to fade from memory.” Luckily for Augustine, his work helped birth modern psychological introspection and even the literary form of the novel—for without this unintended success we would not so readily believe the false version of events he craftily constructed and would think no more of him than of any number of unimportant late antique Latin clerics.

O’Donnell is consistent in his mistrust of Augustine’s telling of events. The Donatists, he tell us, were actually a more locally rooted African version of Christianity, whose popular support Augustine envied and which he could only dispel by arranging for its brutal suppression at the hands of the imperial authorities. O’Donnell calls Augustine’s favored brand of Christianity the “Caecilianists,” after an earlier bishop who opposed Donatus—even though no one else in Augustine’s day or since has called the Catholics that. O’Donnell is out to puncture stereotypes, to show us that one can slap a name on a group one dislikes and dismiss it as evil—and that he can do it no less effectively than Augustine. The supposed “theology” in this controversy is a mere pretext; this is a political quarrel, plain and simple, in which Augustine effectively “invents” a notion of “Catholicism” to “help him win a local war of punishing intensity.” Because O’Donnell’s book is meant to have popular appeal he often turns to contemporary parallels, and the one used here is telling: “Augustine resembles nothing so much as one of those pious churchmen of Francoist times, leader of a state-promoted church, followed prudently by many, despised quietly by some, and opposed fiercely by a remnant quite sure of its own fidelity to a truer church.”

O’Donnell’s historical account continues in this vein: show Augustine in the worst light possible, his enemies in the best, and dispatch him with a final zinger in the form of an ad hominem slur or what’s taken to be a devastating analogy. In truth, Augustine was simply “jealous” of Pelagius and Pelagius’ skilled protégé Julian. He was not only a social climber but also connivingly acquisitive—despite his pious claims that he wanted people’s wealth for his church and not for himself. Every one of his famous polemical disputes is described as a fight Augustine needlessly picked, with disastrous consequences. His fight with the Donatists needlessly weakened the African church and prepared the way for the later Islamic conquest. His unnecessary pouring of vitriol on the Roman Empire in City of God anticipates later church divisions between insiders and outsiders, paving the way for the Crusades, endless heresy hunts, and modern fundamentalism. Augustine is “Don Quixote in a world that really takes him and his obsessions seriously,” that is, a world too gullible to know this figure deserves mirthful pity.

And that’s not even Augustine’s theology—merely his political machinations. “Augustine’s god was off the charts,” O’Donnell tells us, giving us a glimpse of a professor trying to appeal to undergraduates with hip language. That is to say, Augustine’s god was “powerful, knowing, arbitrary yet ultimately just and fair” (the lowercase “g” alerts us that Augustine knew, deep down, there were many gods to choose from but tried to pretend there was only one). His god was “high, unapproachable, ineffable” and finally the “unsayable Other,” before whom the individual stands alone in dread of a capricious judgment that produces “anxious, depressive, lonely, and distraught” believers. This arbitrary god naturally produced an arbitrary vision of the church. As O’Donnell puts it,

The notion that what one sees today on an evangelist’s television program, in the cave monasteries of the Pechersk Lavra in Kiev, and in an African cathedral welcoming a papal visit, to say nothing of an upper Manhattan Episcopalian Sunday service regularly attended by house pets and their owners, are all of a piece with what happened in Augustine’s lifetime in the Syrian desert, in farming villages in Africa, and among perfumed socialites in Rome is to make a quite extraordinary theological assertion in the guise of history.

This wonderful passage shows that despite O’Donnell’s strident effort to be critical at every turn, occasionally he sees clearly what Augustine is saying and simply dislikes it. Of course it’s an extraordinary thing to claim that believers are united in Christ’s body across space and time: that is why belief in the church is something we hold to by faith. For O’Donnell, such faith is tantamount to the cessation of thought—as when he mocks Augustine’s inability fully to explain notions of God as a non-bodily Spirit, or the promised resurrection of all flesh. But for Augustine—and for all Christians—a “mystery” is something we can talk about with insight from Scripture and tradition even as we cannot explain it fully. All O’Donnell can see in such moments is theological tyranny and an arbitrary divinity. After a long quotation from a sermon about evil as a privation of the good—a classic Christian position—O’Donnell paraphrases, “you can’t make sense of sin: the god’s book says so.”

These moments in which O’Donnell comes clean by laying out Augustine’s position and his own antagonism to it are refreshing. There is hardly a heresy Augustine confronted that O’Donnell does not praise. The Manichees’ Cologne Mani Codex is a “magically beautiful” book. The Sabellians’ description of the Trinity as one God wearing three masks “might be a fresh approach to a difficult subject.” The Arians’ description of Jesus as a creature of God is a “rather more nuanced philosophical position” than the view of Jesus’ divinity that won out. The Pelagians’ religion was “serene, optimistic, cultivated”—too bad Augustine’s view won the day. Yet O’Donnell also advises us moderns who are troubled by Augustine’s views to “look closely to see what text or scripture he has in mind and how it more or less forces him to say what he says.” At least O’Donnell doesn’t subscribe to the common (and mistaken) claim that Augustine is not a biblical theologian. Augustine is faithful to Scripture; O’Donnell just wishes he weren’t.

Unfortunately these moments of honest antagonism are overwhelmed by others in which O’Donnell simply misunderstands his subject. His description of Augustine’s view of God as distant and arbitrary, creating dread, is sadly misinformed. However much one dislikes the “Platonism” that informed Augustine’s theology, one has to attend to those places where Augustine himself shows how the incarnation thoroughly reshapes that philosophical legacy, as a new wave of Augustine scholarship has made clear, despite O’Donnell’s ignoring it here. O’Donnell also seems unable to imagine any view of religion other than of an individual before God. This is obviously a thoroughly modern view, but O’Donnell maintains that it is present in both Paul and Augustine and only has come to be questioned recently in late modernity! O’Donnell’s chronology on this point is simply backward.

On other matters too, for all his justly deserved reputation as a historian, O’Donnell offers brand-new historical theses with startlingly little evidence in support. Manichaeism as Augustine’s only religious passion? Ordination as his only conversion? His praise of Augustine’s opponents and his opprobrium heaped on Augustine are simply hagiography in reverse: we mistrust everything from the saint’s mouth and believe everything from his enemies. Startlingly, Augustine himself was more kind to his interlocutors, believing that even communities he disavows in Confessions have things to offer insofar as any goodness in them attests to the goodness of the Creator. Augustine frequently thanks God for heretics—without them, how can we know or clarify the truth? Modern critical inquiry shows itself here to be far more intolerant than the Bishop of Hippo and father of the church.

So we see that the convention of separating theology and history finally fails. For O’Donnell here subjects Augustine to a ferocious inquisition and judges him worthy of condemnation at every turn. O’Donnell’s own theological commitments clearly guide him in this endeavor. Unfortunately, they keep him from offering a helpful work of history. While critics of great thinkers often clarify matters, here they are badly muddled. We are frequently left wondering why exactly Augustine opposed the Donatists, or Pelagians, or whomever; when O’Donnell explains, we get more about the arbitrary god or the anxious self, rather than anything informed by Augustine’s actual thought. This incessant suspicion collapses as O’Donnell pays Augustine so little respect that he hardly ever bothers to give us Augustine’s ideas in terms that he himself would recognize.

The problem may be that O’Donnell avoids attention to the community that is the successor to Augustine’s: the Christian Church. For the billion and a half or so Western Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, who are his intellectual heirs, the ideas matter. Our ministers are trained in Augustine’s ideas about the goodness of marriage and creation against the Manichees, the universality of the church and the power of the sacraments against the Donatists, the grace of God against the Pelagians. That O’Donnell finds these ideas unintelligible may have something to do with his evident distaste for the community that still tries, by fits and starts, to live them out. “It is impossible for Augustine’s Christianity … to exist any longer,” O’Donnell maintains. (In his day job, by the way, he is provost of Georgetown University.) Those of us who demur could help him understand why he is wrong—if he bothered to ask.

Jason Byassee is an assistant editor at the Christian Century.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

It is rumored that, due to the cumulative effect of small atmospheric variations, downdraft from a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world may cause a typhoon on the other. Similarly, Ray Bradbury told how a tourist traveled in time to the Jurassic Era and stepped on a butterfly. He returned to the 20th century to find tyranny had replaced democracy. The Butterfly Effect, as it is called, thus refers to “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” in particular the spell cast by small causes on large events at a distance.

What good is a fairy? In an era when fantasy was under suspicion, Bruno Bettelheim wrote an ingenious and fruitful book with a title, Uses of Enchantment, that justified Tinkerbell in just such utilitarian terms. Bettelheim argued that fairy tales not only entertain, but “enlighten (a child) about himself” and help him “find meaning in life.” J. R. R. Tolkien had already pointed out that fairy tales teach children the wonder of simple things. If we lend credence to the Butterfly Effect, we may add a further use of enchantment: Grimm fairy tales helped win the Cold War.

What did Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have in mind when they gathered, edited, and rewrote their collection of Central European folk tales? Bettelheim hinted at spiritual dynamics beneath his own gently Freudian reading of the Grimms. In The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimm’s Magic Fairy Tales, Jesuit scholar Ronald Murphy explored those depths.1 Within the gingerbread of beloved tales—”Hansel and Gretel,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood”—he detected strangely familiar dogmatic latticework. Most obviously, perhaps, in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves”:

Once it was the middle of winter, and the snowflakes fell from the sky like feathers. At a window with a frame of ebony a queen sat and sewed. And as she sewed and looked out at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell in the snow. And in the white snow the red looked so beautiful that she thought to herself: “If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood in the window frame!” … When the child was born, the queen died.

Snow symbolizes purity, and Snow White the young, innocent but vulnerable soul. The drops of blood from the queen’s finger are Trinitarian: her death hints at divine purpose in suffering.

Like a traveler admiring a mountain stream, one can attend to the surface flow of the story or focus on the spiritual bedrock over which it pours. Snow White finds refuge among seven dwarves with seven candles (the church, which exists to warn and protect lost travelers). She undergoes a series of temptations, the first two—”Pretty things for sale!” “Now, for once, I’ll comb your hair properly”—appealing to the vanity that ensnared her stepmother. Giving in, she falls down “as if dead,” only to be revived by the dwarves. The third temptation involves an apple. Like Eve, Snow White falls, not “as if dead,” this time, but “dead, and she remained dead.” The dwarves anoint her with water and wine, but cannot revive her. They place her in a glass coffin on a hill, where owl, raven, and dove watch over her still form.

Scanning the Greek New Testament that Wilhelm Grimm read in morning devotions, Murphy found themes from the Grimm fairyland in the passages Wilhelm underlined: “The Spirit of God, divine providence, love of God and of neighbor, faithful confidence, ecumenical acceptance of other faiths, the Resurrection to eternal life.”

One passage Wilhelm highlighted was the “Mars Hill” narrative in which Paul quoted Greek poets about a God who transcended culture: “As even some of your poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.'”

At first glance the owl, raven, and dove by Snow White’s grave may seem as ornamental—and even more incidental to the story—as Flower the skunk to Bambi or the English sheep dog to Disney’s Little Mermaid. But in fact their presence carries deep theological meaning. By them, the Grimms symbolically address the great question that confronted Paul in Athens, and confronts us today: How do the religions of the world fit together? Should we simply reject other beliefs and (with Karl Marx) “abolish all eternal truths?” Should we welcome all beliefs to an undifferentiated and indifferent parliament of sectarian fowls?

The Grimm birds bring three spiritual civilizations to the grave of Snow White: Greek (owl), German (raven), and Hebrew (dove), the traditions on which the brothers drew for their stories. The cultures of the world, this scene implies, are beautiful, and can lead (like the white duck that carried Hansel and Gretel home) toward truth.

Yet in the end, salvation itself comes from another source: “A king’s son happened to come into the forest and went to the dwarves’ house to spend the night.” The Prince, Lord of the seven churches, brings Snow White to life. (Wilhelm also marked the Johannian phrase, “en auto zoe en … phos ton anthropon“: “in him was life, and the life was the light of men.”) Confessing his love, the Prince took Snow White to his “father’s palace” as wife. The evil stepmother put on “red hot slippers” and danced till she dropped dead.

The Brothers Grimm thus hint at what Paul Tillich called a “universalism” that “did not mix” but subjected other beliefs to “an ultimate criterion.” That criterion is Christ, the King’s Son (who appears in various guises in many of their most popular tales). Not only Jewish Scripture and Greco-Roman philosophy and poetry but also German folk tales could serve as “tutors to Christ,” in Justin’s famous formulation. And the stories do not fail to note the fate of wicked stepmothers, because Christian tradition is a free, therefore perilous, universalism: the cross stretches in all directions, yet still crucifies.

Adults who keep a foot in Never-Neverland continue to enjoy the simple narrative flow of these childhood stories. We may also sense their psychological depths. But before Murphy’s detective work, few I think recognized the spiritual bedrock over which the stories flowed. Yet this quietly redemptive Grimm subtext set in motion a chain of events, like dwarfish dominos, or an avalanche released by the tread of leprechauns across powder snow, that ultimately toppled the castle of one of the most wicked philosophical “stepmothers” of our day.

Domino one. In Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton explained how fairy tales brought him to Christian faith. “The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now,” he confessed in a chapter called “Ethics of Elfland,” “are the things called fairy tales.” Chesterton tipped his hat to “the fine collection of Andrew Lang,” senior romantic at the Illustrated London News.2 But his examples were mainly drawn from the Brothers Grimm: “That giants should be killed because they are gigantic.” “The terrible allegory of Sleeping Beauty … how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death, and how death also may perhaps be softened to sleep.” Beyond specific lessons, the air of Fairy awoke in Chesterton a childlike wonder at the elementary phenomena of nature. “These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”

Fairy tales led Chesterton to five theological conclusions: “This world does not explain itself”; “There was something personal in the world”; “This purpose is beautiful in its old design, in spite of defects, such as dragons”; “The proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint”; and “All good was a remnant.”

Just as owl, raven, and dove perched by the coffin of Snow White but could not save her, so Chesterton argued, in Everlasting Man, that mythology, while beautiful, had by the birth of Christ been “drained to the dregs.” “Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep.” Christ himself gathered enchantment into the fold of redemptive history.

Domino two. J. R. R. Tolkien’s understanding of fairy tales and their relation to faith owed much to Chesterton. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” he mentioned Chesterton several times, and (in a passage that could almost serve to list the material assets of Hobbiton) echoed “Ethics of Elfland”: “It was in fairy stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; trees and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”

“Snow White”‘s happy denouement suggested a conclusion even beyond the magic of nature. This Tolkien christened the “eucatastrophe,” the good disaster. Fairy tales not only breathe the magic of renewed sight into earthly beauty, but hint that God will breathe life into mankind again:

It has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt-making creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories … But this story has entered History and the primary world … The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.

Domino three. Reprieved from trench warfare in France, C. S. Lewis read Everlasting Man and “for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history” in a form that made sense. Echoing New Testament passages that Wilhelm Grimm underlined, Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy:

The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, “Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?”

When Lewis returned to postwar Oxford, he fell in with “Tollers,” and it was Tolkien who helped him see Christ as the answer to that question. (Phantastes, a “Fairie Romance” by another Grimm disciple, George Macdonald, also played a role.)

Domino four. Charles Colson is the first person in the lineage I am tracing to hold political power. He read Lewis’ Mere Christianity just as he lost that power—the very moment students of Fairyland know to anticipate great things. In Born Again, Colson described the transforming impact of his conversion to Christ at that moment when he had hit bottom.

Domino five. A few years later, an imprisoned Filipino senator, Benigno Aquino, read Born Again and experienced spiritual renewal. Exiled to the United States, Aquino heard sociologist Tony Campolo speak on “Authority and Power in Social Change.” Campolo argued that God redeems society through love, not force. (Without, however, specifically mentioning the prince’s kiss in “Sleeping Beauty.”) After the lecture, Aquino told Campolo he was “willing to die” for truth: “You have given me hope,” Aquino said. “I know that when I return to my homeland I will be powerless: but you have helped me to see that I will have authority.” Recounting their conversation in his book The Power Delusion, Campolo reflected, “I will be anxiously waiting to see how this once powerful leader affects the people in his native country.”

Neither anxiety nor hope were misplaced. Aquino was shot to death at Manila International Airport. (Now named in his honor.) When the dictatorial President Ferdinand Marcos attempted to steal the subsequent election from Aquino’s widow, millions of citizens poured into the streets and gave birth to what was called “People Power.” Like the huntsman in “Snow White,” Marcos’ soldiers refused to fire on the demonstrators, and their king and queen (known, by the way, for her collection of slippers) danced off the archipelago to political doom.

Copy-cat revolutions erupted soon afterward in Burma and China and were suppressed. Then, on the turn of an autumn tide, the masses of Eastern Europe, inspired by People Power revolts, toppled statues of Lenin and smashed the Berlin Wall, fragments of which were sold in Western department stores to stuff stockings on Christmas 1989.

Redemptive history moves in mysterious ways. Events set in flow by the Incarnation touch individual lives, but the full causal pattern is (as Paul hinted) greater than those lives, and ultimately beyond human comprehension. Now and then, some small part of that great pattern comes to light.

“The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road,” Chesterton whimsically informed us. The line of causation I have traced may appear (as his poem put it) to “ramble round the Shire.” But in the company of such as Tolkien and Grimm, what better place to wander? As that great Shire rambler, Bilbo Baggins himself, remarked, “Step into the Road, and … there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” If you follow my hobbit logic, it may be that a spell cast on the world by the Greek Prometheus (to whom Marx and Engels were in thrall) was broken by the angelic wings of German fairies, beating in tune to the canonical, and still useful, multiculturalism of St. Paul.

David Marshall is director of Kuai Mu Institute for Christianity and World Cultures. His newest book is entitled Why the Jesus Seminar Can’t Find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could: A Populist Defense of the Gospels (Kuai Mu Press).

1. Ronald Murphy, The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).

2. Aside from his famous “color” collections of fairy tales, which remain popular with children, it was also Andrew Lang who cast doubts on two standard anti-Christian arguments of his day: Edward Tyler’s theory of the evolution of religions, and James Frazer’s theory that the gospels belonged to a common mythological pattern of “dying and rising gods.”

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Barely visible under the overgrown pink dianthus and purple violas in my backyard is a bronze sundial with the inscription, Time Began in a Garden. Pretty sentimental. But the Good Book tells me that time as we know it got off to a flying start with a woman, a slinky critter, and a nice chunk of garden real estate. I’m convinced this way of beginning the world wasn’t accidental, and it’s not all about the flowers.

Native American writer N. Scott Momaday understood the importance of creation when he wrote persuasively in Way to Rainy Mountain that, “Once in his life man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it.”

I took this to heart when I relocated to the suburban sprawl west of Chicago. Amid the strip malls, the tollways, and the power lines, I found the Morton Arboretum, a 1700- acre park dedicated to the preservation of trees and a glorious tallgrass prairie. Since then I have spent countless hours in that particular landscape in all four seasons, looking at it from as many angles as I can find and wearing out several pairs of hiking boots and sneakers in the process. It’s a sanctuary, a place for reflection, meditation, and prayer, for puzzling through difficult midlife questions. As the Calvinists might say, I found a place to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”

Although I doubt Beth Kephart would put it quite that way, in Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self she writes about her similar attraction to landscape and its ability to help her make sense of her life. For Kephart, the magnet was a 30-acre tract of pleasure gardens on the grounds of an estate known as Chanticleer, in southeastern Pennsylvania, which she visited weekly.

Just turned 41, Kephart is living the frazzled life of a writer on deadline, simmering with questions about middle age, her 20 years of marriage, and parenting her son Jeremy, diagnosed as autistic (about whom she wrote so eloquently and poignantly in A Slant of Sun and Seeing Past Z). How have I spent my life? Where am I going? What does it mean to let go of some things, and preserve others?

In 36 quiet meditations (some only a paragraph, most only a page or two long), Kephart offers deceptively simple thoughts on time spent on the grounds of Chanticleer. For years, she drove by the ruins of the estate but paid no attention: “I was crowded into the space of my life, writing and mothering and mothering and writing and holding on hard to the depleting idea that time is an enemy and that things had to get done.” Kephart’s time spent at Chanticleer signals a shift in her interior landscape—a pause in activity, a purposeful disconnection. The garden serves as both sanctuary and incubator.

“Chanticleer,” she writes, “is a pleasure garden, so beautiful that it suggests the alchemy of danger, and the flowers there are tangled up inside each other, except where they’ve been disciplined in rows.” Here, as throughout the book, the reader immediately sees Kephart’s account of her interior life reflected in her perceptions of the garden, the inner and outer landscapes locked in an often-melancholy tango.

To understand Chanticleer, she finds, is to understand its history, and how the landscape has changed over time. As she walks, she conjures “the click of whelk in a wampum belt,” the “echoes of the Lenni-Lenapes and Quakers.” Chanticleer also harbors a legacy of violence, as when its last owner, Adolph Rosengarten, Jr., was murdered. “My thoughts, as I walked, were of ghosts,” she writes, and later: “I already understood that we were ghosts just passing through … right now will be a memory soon.” The poignant fleetingness of life, so vividly expressed in the cycle of the seasons, reverberates throughout the book, more in tone than in specifics. At Chanticleer, Kephart confronts aging, and strikes an uneasy truce with the knowledge of her own mortality.

The biggest drawing card for Kephart, she says, was the calm she felt walking the byways of the old estate. Her worries subsided. The frantic demands of deadlines receded. “I grew more concerned with gains and gratitude than with losses. In the garden, my age felt like a blessing. In the garden questions that had haunted me for years found quiet resolution.”

As she mulls over her future, she realizes the value of memory in midlife: “sometimes it’s the going back that takes us forward.” She tunes in to the weather, to birdsong, to the seasons. After a lifetime spent immersing herself in the production of words, she finds comfort in her inability to identify the myriad flowers, trees, and birds. In winter, when the garden is closed, the memory of the garden becomes enough. She sifts through seeds, dreaming of spring.

Landscapes need people, and those she meets on her walks become as important as the trees and the stream in understanding herself. An elderly woman, worried that she is missing the best places in the garden, asks Kephart, “How do you see everything?” And Kephart replies, “Leave the path. Leave it. Absolutely.” The gardeners who tend Chanticleer are exemplary in the generosity with which they share their knowledge: “No hoarding of secrets here, no claiming beauty as one’s own … a gardener will broaden your perspective, if you allow a gardener to.”

When writing about gardens and about midlife, the temptation is to resort to overblown prose and flowery metaphors. While Kephart loves metaphors, seeing them as a “sideways step that shortens the distance between the unknown and the familiar,” her small book is delightfully spare. The garden is by turns a painter’s canvas, a sacrament, a sacrifice. It is music: “the sonata is the garden by the serpentine stream, where ferns uncoil early and camas blues the mood.” If one wished for anything more, Kephart might have been a bit more vulnerable about her interior life, and offered observations about the darker side of nature. Instead, this is a restful book, often tinged with pensiveness. The beauty of the gardens never dims; the only ugliness or violence is the brief mention of Rosengarten’s murder.

Superb black-and-white photos, taken by Kephart’s husband William Sulit, further illuminate her descriptions. Sulit is a Yale-trained architect, and his background comes through in the composition of his photos, be they of flora, landscape, or objects. (An appendix with titles for the photos, especially those of plants, would have been helpful.)

Of her time at Chanticleer, “some would say I accomplished nothing,” writes Kephart, adding, “the opposite is true. I would say that I was learning to trust what I could not set in language, keep, control, or hold. I would say that I was learning to surrender. To stop warring with myself, to stop needing to be right, to come to terms with shifts and change, to sit on a hill and count my blessings.”

Gretel Ehrlich wrote in The Solace of Open Spaces, “Keenly observed, the world is transformed.” This transformation, as Kephart so compellingly illustrates, goes both ways. When we observe creation, our lives are transformed in our understanding of who we are and where we are going—and in knowing more deeply the Maker of the world around us, in whose image we ourselves are made. “What happened to me at Chanticleer can happen to anyone anywhere—to anyone who takes a detour from routine and stops, at last, to search for answers to old questions,” Kephart writes. We do well to heed her advice: “Don’t wait too long to see.”

Cindy Crosby writes about nature and the spiritual life in By Willoway Brook: Exploring the Landscape of Prayer (Paraclete). She also writes the Bookmarks review column for Christianity Today magazine.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Edith Grossman’s new translation of Don Quixote is a pleasure to read, not a chore. Easy, vernacular, high-conversational in tone, written in the long sentences of an expansive spirit, this English version let me truly enter the greatest of all dialogues, literary or otherwise.

What kind of proprietary relationship exists between the writer and his character? Hamlet, Falstaff, Lear, and company are always Shakespeare’s. They are giants of the stage, along with their mysterious creator. Deeply as they speak to the human heart, they don’t leave the boards, walk out through the audience, and exit to the street. What writer could name a character “Hamlet” and think even for a moment that it would not conjure Shakespeare’s?

Doctor Johnson, a historical personage, may live by dint of James Boswell’s journalizing, but the author of The Dictionary had a larger-than-life existence of his own. Thanks to the heap of minute particulars amassed by Boswell, there is little chance of anyone “being” or invoking “another” Samuel Johnson. The obverse of a character imagined so vividly that he seems real, like the mural painted by Appelles that birds tried to light on, Boswell’s subject is an actuality meticulously documented by an imagination in love with another man’s life.

Don Quixote presents itself as a personal history, framed in the conventions of a courtly romance. Miguel de Cervantes, the author of record, was perhaps descended from Spanish Jews on his mother’s side. As a young man, he fought with the Spanish navy alongside the vessels of Venice and the Papal States in the Battle of Lepanto and was wounded in that victory over the Ottoman fleet. Sailing home four years later, Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates, and endured five years of slavery in Algiers before his family finally ransomed him. Back in Spain and dirt-poor, he worked for a time as a collector of taxes beginning around the defeat of the Spanish Armada, only to be imprisoned for peculation, or incompetence, or some other haplessness. One tradition holds that Cervantes began writing his Ingenious Gentleman: Don Quixote of La Mancha while still in prison, in 1598. Part 1 of the novel was published in 1605. It was an instant success, for its publisher if not for the author.

Part 2 of Don Quixote appeared in 1615, about one year before Cervantes’ death on April 23, 1616. As the Second Part of The Ingenious Gentleman … by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Author of the First Part makes abundantly clear, Cervantes was galvanized by the popularity of a false sequel, The Second Part of the Exploits of Don Quixote of La Mancha, by Fernandez de Avellaneda, which made a mockery of his character. So again Cervantes picked up his pen, to defend the honor and dignity of the Knight of the Sad Countenance (or the Sorrowful Face, in this translation), and the integrity of his imagination.

The true adventures of the real Don Quixote are only found in Cervantes’ novel. But his knight has ridden off the page and into the minds of all, whether they’ve read his adventures or no. The novel has fostered such multifarious inventions as an English song cycle by William Purcell, a 19th-century Russian ballet, an 18th-century French ditto, and a German romantic ballet set by Felix Mendelssohn. Also numbered among its progeny are a 17th-century French stage comedy and operas by Jules Massenet and Georg Philip Telemann. Tobias Smollett did a complete English translation, Mikhail Bulgakov made the Don into Russian. There are a Hebrew Don Quixote, the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha and, most recently a film, Lost in La Mancha.

Translations aside, none of these hommages and spinoffs of Don Quixote has a life independent of the novel. Perhaps truest to the quixotic spirit is Lost in La Mancha, which documents celluloid medievalist and former Monty Python trouper Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to film his favorite novel. Watching, it’s hard to tell where inspiration edges into madness, where history leaves off and embroidery takes over, what action is scripted and when real misfortune begins. The documentary stars Gilliam as himself, the scriptwriter and director; the actor who is unable to play Don Quixote for medical reasons is Jean Rochefort; Johnny Depp plays Johnny Depp signed to play Sancho Panza. One Fred Millstein plays himself in the role of “production guarantor.” Jeff Bridges narrates. Orson Welles appears courtesy of the archives. The rains, the banks, and conflicting schedules conspire to curse Gilliam’s production as absolutely as any evil enchanter could. Not even the windmill scene is completed. The documentary ends with a plea for a new backer to finance Don Quixote.

What is the original of the true history of Don Quixote?Part 1, comprising the first eight chapters, sets the Don upon the path of chivalry and returns him dubbed and drubbed to his home village. This opening sally parodies those popular romances in Don Quixote’s library, which the priest and the barber consider each by each before consigning them to the flames. After the auto-da-fe, the tale cuts free of received folly. Don Quixote’s second venture into the Spanish countryside, this time accompanied by his squire and conversational complement Sancho Panza, is one as yet untold.

Cervantes refers to himself as “the second author” of his book. He claims that he suspended chapter 8 in mid-gesture because he could not discover what came next. Yet this second author refused “to believe that so curious a history would be subjected to the laws of oblivion, … and so, … he did not despair of finding the conclusion to this gentle history.” One day in the market of Toledo, Cervantes happened upon a boy selling a bundle of old books and papers. Answering his curiosity, Cervantes plucked a volume from the pile. It was written in Arabic. No problem. The Spaniard easily found a Morisco who spoke both Castilian and Arabic (indeed, it would have been even easier to find a Hebrew-speaking Christian there, had one been called for). Cervantes handed the volume to the Moor and asked him to interpret. The Morisco opened the book, and began to laugh. So was discovered the History of Don Quixote of La Mancha. Written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab Historian.

To claim that a book is actually the translation of an older manuscript from another language was a common device, as our translator explains in one of her illuminating footnotes. But I take this poke from Cervantes as something more than conventional. Don Quixote is the work of an old, wounded soldier, not a literary pastiche. The writer had lived and fought among Arabs; Spain had a long and glorious Moorish history only officially expunged in 1492. And the first real chivalric romance, as distinct from the ruck of 16th-century pulp taken from the Quixote’s personal library and fed to the flames, was written in Arabic.

Antar: A Bedoueen Romance, as translated by Terrick Hamilton in 1819, would fill over 4,000 pages were the entire original ever to make it into English. It celebrates the exploits of an historical figure, Antara Ibn Shaddad, from the time known as the Ignorance, before the calling of Mohammed. Warrior, lover, author of one of the “Seven Odes” written on banners in gold ink and hung in the Ka’aba in Mecca, Antar was the black son of a sheik of the tribe of Abs by an Ethiopian concubine. His Romance, attributed to Al-Asmai—a renowned Basran scholar at the court of Harun ar-Rashid—was as popular in the Arabic-speaking world as the 1001 Nights. Dating from the time of Charlemagne, the work was composed before the Poem of the Cid and the Song of Roland, not to mention all those epics celebrating the Jerusalem Crusades.

The French artists Robert and Sonia DeLaunay practiced what they called “simultaneity.” Their aesthetic theory stated that no color exists alone, but only appears when in the company of at least one other color. There is no such thing as “red.” There is only red next to blue, or green, or yellow, or black. And red next to blue is different—a different red—from the very same pigment beside yellow. Don Quixote, the knight errant, starts out as a reader but only lives as an actor and speaker. His actions alone, before he rides with Sancho, are slapstick, cruel, and even grotesque. Paired with the earthy Sancho, his discourses become part of an ongoing conversation. And his chivalric imaginings reshape the landscape, just as Jacob dreaming in a empty place with a rock for a pillow could awake and see that empty place was none other but the house of God, the gateway to heaven.

For Cervantes, that most serious reader, it was not enough to open discourse via Don Quixote with the world as it might be, and with Sancho as it hath ever been. Through his Arab historian, and the secret Jews in the Toledo market, he also enters into a conversation with what once really was, and how it still is behind the screen of orthodoxy. By constantly poking at the edges of his own conventions, Cervantes manages to have it both ways, to make a fiction that insists upon the existence of a higher fact.

The narrative deadpan self-consciousness liberates Don Quixote from the constraints of literature, of unreality, of the Inquisition. The Knight of the Sorrowful Face might even have escaped from the confines of his own life story, except that the author(s) return(s) Quixote to his senses—a return to what may be sanity, or maybe a transfiguration, ending with an novelistic death so unwelcome to this reader that it makes a real grief.

The hero began his story as a 50-year-old gentleman named Quixada, or Quexada, or Quexana. Bedeviled by his reading and perhaps by an intimation that the life he’d lived was not one he believed, or perhaps because he was no longer of an age to love a woman, all that remained for him was to declare his love for the world. Whatever the impulse, he entered the lists as Don Quixote of La Mancha.

Defeated at last in combat by another knight, the disguised bachelor Sanson Carrasco, the melancholy knight undergoes one final transformation. To the assembled friends called to his bedside to hear his last will and testament, he’ll tell no more tales. Instead, he declares that “Those [tales] that until now … have been real, to my detriment, will, with the help of heaven, be turned to my benefit by my death.” And more: “Let us go slowly, for there are no birds today in yesterday’s nests. I was mad, and now I am sane; I was Don Quixote of La Mancha, and now I am, as I have said, Alonso Quixano the Good.” Then Don Quixote collapses on his bed; three days later, he dies.

The scribe (no name given) draws up one more document, attesting to the natural death of Don Quixote, so that no author other than Cide Hamete Benengeli himself can resurrect him.

Cide Hamete, who may or may not be Miguel de Cervantes but is surely not the contemptible Avellaneda, then offers a valediction to his pen that equals Prospero’s adjuration of his books. Cautioning “presumptuous and unscrupulous historians” against profaning his enterprise, the Arab declares: “For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; he knew how to act, and I to write. … ” At which point someone very like the second author takes one last swing at that false history which, had the inspired Cervantes not taken arms against it, would surely be lost in oblivion.

Laurance Wieder is the author most recently of Words to God’s Music: A New Book of Psalms (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Although most periods in history have no doubt served as home to an unacknowledged genius or two, few are likely to have housed as many as the culture of the West did in the 19th century. So many of that era’s most vital writers remained virtually unknown in their own lifetimes that in retrospect the period seems filled with prophets who received neither honor in their own countries nor recognition in their own day. Between 1850 and 1900, for example, a diminutive Massachusetts woman toiled on a body of unpublished verse that would earn her a posthumous place in the top rank of lyric poets in English; in Denmark, a melancholy man labored at a series of ironic studies that drew scant attention during his lifetime but won worldwide acclaim only decades after his death; and in Lutheran Germany, a brilliant philologist thundered away at the Christian tradition in provocative books that were largely unread when published but canonized in the century to come.

The anonymity of Emily Dickinson, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche was due in good measure to their vigorous responses to powerful changes that were unfolding in the religious and intellectual culture of their day. The shifts in thought with which these authors wrestled, like Jacob with the angel, involved sometimes radical reinterpretations of God and nature, history and the self. In the 19th century, these changes rumbled in the depths of the culture but did little to disturb the becalmed waters on its surface. Only bold souls plunged deep enough into the sea of thought to gauge the enormity of the disruptions to come. It would take the events of the 20th century, in the form of two world wars and unprecedented genocidal destruction, to roil the waters of Western culture and flood its solid ground at last.

Although the anonymous lives of artists may provide compelling storylines about creative genius and visionary power, their obscurity also places substantial obstacles in the path of any would-be biographer. It is one thing to admire a writer for having prophetic insights that escaped others at the time, another matter entirely to make sense of the details of an unnoted life lived at or beyond the margins of major events. A biographer can readily make connections between Elizabeth I and the religious, political, and cultural landscape of modernity, and one does not need to strain to link Abraham Lincoln’s private beliefs with that public drama of slavery and civil war in which he played the leading role. It is more difficult to take the measure of a life played out in the recesses of the mind and on the unread page.

Recently named “America’s Greatest Social Critic” by Time magazine, Andrew Delbanco is one of our most astute students of 19th-century culture, so it is not surprising that he was already alert to this biographical challenge when he set out to write about Herman Melville, one of that century’s most brilliant “thought-divers” (the phrase is Melville’s). In his unfailingly engaging and elegantly written study, Delbanco begins by admitting that “any conventional biography of Melville is bound to fail.” The murky details of that life “have slipped beyond the reach of even informed conjecture,” and most accounts of it have been “notable for the discrepancy between the vividness of what he wrote and the vagueness of the figure who appears in writings about him.” For anyone dealing with Herman Melville, the shadowy figure who lurks in the biographical background “will always be incommensurate with the genius whom we meet in the works.”

In the face of such constraints, Delbanco has chosen to offer not so much a biography of Melville the man as a life study of the language he used in his efforts to seize what Moby Dick calls “the ungraspable phantom of life.” Throughout the book, Delbanco judiciously balances a fascination with Melville’s “spontaneous and self-surprising” language with a deep concern for the “complex connections” between his writing and the “intellectual and political context in which he lived and worked.”

In Melville’s case, personal life was to have an uncanny fit with political context for much of his career. As a young adult in 1841, he set out from New Bedford, Massachusetts in a whaling vessel bound for the killing fields of the Pacific. Already weary of the “soul-killing business” of office work, he was itching to see the world, and in his inquisitive restlessness, he mirrored the larger culture of the 1840s. For America this was an age of swagger and expansion, as settlers relentlessly drove across its vast prairies, mountains, and deserts to its western shores.

Midway on their whaling voyage, Melville and a fellow sailor jumped ship in the South Pacific. Out of their escapades he fashioned his first novel, Typee, which proved to be a modest but genuine success. Three similar works quickly followed at the rate of one a year, and in the midst of these heady and productive days, Melville found enough time to court and wed Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, to begin raising a family with her, and to settle into life in New York City.

Though he had yet to write the works for which he is remembered, Melville’s reputation in 1850 was as high as it would ever be in his lifetime. In the following decade, his professional and personal decline proved to be as precipitous as his nation’s parallel descent into political stalemate and civil war. In the body politic, the decade opened with the passage of the calamitous Fugitive Slaw Law, and over the course of the next ten years, writes Delbanco, “the American political system went to pieces before Melville’s eyes.” As the author grappled with spiritual depression, literary failure, and the prospect of financial ruin, he at the same time found America’s political leadership behaving like “a ship of political fools sailing headlong for disaster.”

With nuanced and astute readings of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Benito Cereno, and the incomparable Moby Dick, Delbanco draws out the political significance of the brilliant short stories and novels Melville produced amid this national turmoil and personal stress. He details how the author brooded upon a world in which the abominable reality of chattel slavery drove opposing factions on a course that was as fated in its inevitable outcome as it seemed reckless in its unpredictable course. With his own eye cast on the politics of our post-9/11 world, Delbanco notes that in the years leading up to the Civil War, Melville repeatedly assailed his nation’s political culture for a “kind of moral opacity that seems still to afflict America as it lumbers through the world creating enemies whose enmity it does not begin to understand.”

Melville: His World and Work deftly balances its assessment of the author’s life among the weary Whigs and self-destructive Democrats of the 1850s with a vigorous account of the writer’s blazing transformation from a middling teller of tales to a genius of world literature. Many factors figured in Melville’s astonishing development in the early and mid-1850s. They included his bracing, revelatory encounter with the printed text of Shakespeare’s plays (“if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakespeare’s person,” Melville wrote at the time), his remarkably intense and lamentably brief friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his full-scale immersion in the life of his adopted city of New York.

We may reflexively associate Melville with New England, but Delbanco makes a forceful case for him as the quintessential New York writer. He settled in the city just as it entered a period of explosive growth that saw it almost double in size, from 400,000 to 700,000 inhabitants, in a decade. Stimulated by the vigor of the city’s life, Melville experienced “a breakout into freedom,” as the languid prose of the early sea tales gave way to a brisk, rhythmic exploration of human experience by way of daring analogies and audacious associations. Delbanco claims the city equipped Melville with a new vocabulary and a fresh understanding of the possibilities of language. It was not so much on Melville’s plots, characters, or settings that New York made its mark as “in the nerve and sinew of his prose.”

New York made that mark by breaking open Melville’s style and opening “his mind to the cosmopolitan idea of a nation” that had been fashioned not in the darkness of the ethnic past but in the light cast by a yet unrealized democratic future. The city and all it symbolized impressed itself upon Melville’s imagination, as the brazen daring of its daily life liberated him to experiment with different fictional forms, even with formlessness itself. “There never has been,” Delbanco says, “an American writer more deeply affected, indeed infected, by the tone and rhythm of the city.”

The days of exhilaration and expansion, however, proved to be brief. Moby Dick was a critical and financial failure, and the novels Melville wrote in its wake only deepened the public’s rapidly growing antipathy to his work. By late 1852, one of his acquaintances wrote to a friend, “the Harpers [publishers] think Melville is a little crazy.” At the same time, his marriage entered what was to be a lifelong state of uncertainty, as his wife struggled to come to terms with Herman’s recurrent bouts of depression and the chronic financial problems that beset the household of a failed writer.

Melville was to write some exceptional fiction and impressive poetry over his four decades of decline, including Benito Cereno and the majestic, valedictory Billy Budd. Yet these subdued works possessed little of the manic brio of Moby Dick, and as brilliant as they were, they did nothing to slow his involuntary retreat into obscurity. Within days of his death, the New York Times commented that “in its kind this speedy oblivion by which a once famous man so long survived his fame is almost unique, and is not easily explicable.”

One possible explanation for this “speedy oblivion” has to do with the manner in which Melville’s religious thought made him, like Kierkegaard, Dickinson, and Nietzsche, a prophet without honor in his own time. In the wake of his fictional failures in the 1850s, he grew more doubtful about his own capacities and possibilities, more critical of his culture’s essential optimism, and more skeptical of any possible sources of religious comfort or belief. Although Delbanco’s treatment of Melville’s religious struggles seems at times cursory, especially in contrast to his splendidly extensive discussions of politics and sexuality in the fiction, he accurately strikes the painful balance of the writer’s religious confusion, when he says that the novelist both believed “that the Bible was a collection of improbable fictions and . . . cursed the secular scholars who had exposed it” as such.

Those I have called the “prophets” of the late 19th century were among the first to sense the crisis of spiritual and moral authority dawning in their midst. Although they fashioned distinct and sometimes strikingly different responses to that crisis, Melville and his fellow writers knew they could not avoid it. Here at the beginning of the 21st century, we might refer to this problem as that of the “death of God,” but in the 19th century many approached it by way of the more intimate metaphor of the orphan. In Moby Dick, for example, Ahab offers an extended, heartbreaking meditation on the melancholy cycles of human life. He concludes that “there is no steady unretracing progress in this life”; rather, we constantly move from belief to doubt to unbelief and back again. “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?” he asks. “Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.”

In two of his earlier works, The Death of Satan and The Real American Dream, Delbanco skillfully anatomized late 19th-century America’s sorrowful search for this secret. Here he concludes that by the end of Melville’s life, the weary author had given up the quest, because he had come to believe that the world had neither a divine origin nor a divinely appointed end. Up to the point of his death, Melville continued to work on the manuscript of Billy Budd, but Delbanco notes that although it makes extensive reference to Christian Scriptures and symbols, there is in the “heart-rending tale … no intervention by a merciful God. There is no God at all.” Others who came after him—Karl Barth, C. S. Lewis, and Flannery O’Connor, among them—would reach a dramatically different conclusion, but for Herman Melville at the close of the 19th century, the foundling’s father was nowhere to be found, and the final harbor itself remained unmoored.

Roger Lundin is Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Why “Chapter 11” on the cover? Is this intended as a subtle reminder that, like virtually all publications of its kind, Books & Culture—if not exactly ready to file for bankruptcy—is in urgent need of your financial support? No, though if you renew your subscription for another three years and send in a handful of gift subs while you’re at it, you will be contributing mightily to the health of the magazine. “Chapter 11” is on the cover because with this issue, we are embarking on our 11th year. Our first issue, September/October 1995, featured (among others) Mark Noll on Abraham Lincoln, Philip Yancey on Annie Dillard, and Frederica Mathewes-Green on icons. All three appear in this celebratory 10th anniversary issue, along with many other regulars and some newer voices as well.

Too many people have contributed in manifold ways to the first ten years of the magazine to single out a few of them here (may they receive this issue as a collective thank-you note), but the support of several institutions must be acknowledged. Without the significant help provided by the Pew Charitable Trusts from 1994 to 2000, Books & Culture would not exist. A grant from the Lilly Foundation in 1998 provided a strategic boost. Beginning three years ago and concluding this summer—a period during which the magazine industry reeled from the economic downturn—Baylor University offered crucial assistance. Finally, Christianity Today International has invested enormous resources to publish a magazine in which you can read Amy Laura Hall on “Holy Housekeeping,” George Marsden on fundamentalism, Harry Stout reviewing Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s magnum opus, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview, Alan Jacobs on Harry Potter, Philip Jenkins on religion and the media, and Lauren Winner on Jan Karon’s Mitford saga, to name a few of the pieces coming in our November/December issue. Thanks to these institutions, to the advertisers (with deep gratitude to those faithful ones who have been with us from the start), and, especially, to all our readers.

Two of the pieces in this issue make mention of the Butterfly Effect, identified by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s. Lorenz was simulating weather patterns on his computer (a clumsy ancestor of our fleet pcs, but a marvel in its own time) when he discovered—by accident—that miniscule differences between two starting-points produced huge divergences in the patterns that resulted. “He might as well have chosen two random weathers out of a hat,” as James Gleick puts it in his account of Lorenz’s discovery in Chaos: Making a New Science. What emerged from Lorenz’s work was a new appreciation for “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” not only in the weather but in the world more generally, best known as the Butterfly Effect: “the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.”

A lot of foolishness has been spun out of notions of “chaos” and “complexity,” as Eugene McCarraher observed in his dissection of Mark C. Taylor’s Nietzschean boosterism [“The Confidence Man,” July/August], and some of it has been wrapped around the Butterfly Effect. But there’s an eminently practical lesson from Lorenz’s findings. Our everyday world—the world in which we make countless choices, large and small, in the course of a week, a year, a lifetime—is marked by sensitive dependence on initial conditions. We need to keep two salient truths in mind. What we do (or don’t do) will make a difference, far exceeding what we could imagine. (Somewhere in Brazil, a butterfly is fluttering near the table where a young woman sits in the sun, drinking coffee and turning the pages of this issue of Books & Culture.) Yet often the ramifying consequences of our actions, their place in the infinitely intricate unfolding of “cause” and “effect,” will not be readily apparent to us—or to anyone else, except God. The result, a nice balance between awe and absurdity, is the nature of our condition this side of glory.

As I’m writing, the news is full of reports from London following the (unsuccessful) second wave of terrorist bombings (on July 21) and the fatal shooting of a man wrongly suspected of involvement. The response in many quarters has been appalling. You may recall Don Yerxa’s interview with the military historian Max Hastings [“The Moral Complexity of War,” March/April], whose book Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 was one of my favorites from 2004. Here is what Hastings wrote, after the first round of bombings, in the Daily Mail (as quoted in the New York Times):

The price for being America’s ally, for joining President Bush’s Iraq adventure, was always likely to be paid in innocent blood. We must acknowledge that by supporting President Bush’s extravagances in his ill-named war on terror and ill-justified invasion of Iraq, Blair has ensured that we are in the front line beside the U.S., whether we like it or not.

Whatever one’s views of the invasion of Iraq, it’s clear, I think, that if a man with Hastings’ knowledge of 20th-century history is capable of expressing such sentiments—widely repeated by others in the wake of the attacks—the rot has penetrated very deeply indeed. When the first issue of Books & Culture was published ten years ago, the war in which these bombings are the latest offensive had already been well launched by radical Islam, though only a few in the West were aware of its scope. Like the war against the Nazis—a very different kind of war against an equally formidable but very different kind of enemy—it will be a war to the death. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain: all are on the front lines. Whenever the Europeans show weakness, the Islamists will merely be emboldened. Already they believe that self-doubt and internal divisions render the West defeatable.

A cluster of articles and op-ed pieces have been pointing to the discrepancy between the experience of U.S. troops in Iraq and people back home, where little in the way of sacrifice or commitment is being demanded. “All Quiet on the Home Front, and Some Soldiers Are Asking Why,” as Thom Shanker put it in a New York Times report (July 24, 2005). Shanker quotes Maj. General Robert H. Scales, Jr., retired, who formerly commanded the Army War College: “Despite the enormous impact of Sept. 11, it hasn’t really translated into a national movement towards fighting the war on terrorism. It’s almost as if the politicians want to be able to declare war and, at the same time, maintain a sense of normalcy.”

How true. But wait a while. Alas, 9/11 won’t be the last major attack on American soil. And ultimately our government will be forced to acknowledge in a more forthright manner the ideological nature of the conflict. It won’t be enough to say over and over that the terrorists “hate our freedom.” For this war, like the Cold War with the Soviet Union—yet again, a very different kind of war against a very different kind of enemy, but with powerful analogies nonetheless—is fundamentally an ideological conflict, and it won’t be possible to sustain the well-meaning fiction that it isn’t a conflict with Islam.

Of course it is a conflict with one version of Islam, not with Islam across the board. That distinction is absolutely vital—and it will be most persuasively enforced by believing Muslims who reject the radical Islamist agenda. But is it too much to hope that even now there are figures close to the White House who realize that it’s past time to speak frankly to the American people about this ill-defined war we find ourselves in?

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

For evangelicals and fundamentalists, faith in God is a communicable condition rather than genetic. It’s passed through close oral contact, occasionally through the airwaves or a shared tract, but never via chromosomes (or baptismal water, for that matter).

The first time I met anyone who thought differently, I was a young teenager on a missions trip at Appalachian State University. My partner was a long-legged, long-faced man who carried a Bible the size of Moses’ actual stone tablets. He had no college degree of his own, nor could he count on me for intellectual backup, but he wasn’t a bit intimidated. “I’ll do the talking,” he said, “and you just watch and pray.”

We cruised the campus and witnessed, ineffectually, to a sweet-natured hippie and then to a devotee of Transcendental Meditation. After an hour or so we came across a young man on the steps of the student center and asked him if he knew Jesus.

The young man smiled like we were long-lost friends. “I sure do! Known Jesus all my life. I was born a Christian.”

“Son,” replied my witnessing partner in a firm but patient voice, “weren’t nobody ever born a Christian!” As arrogant as he sounded, he didn’t mean to offend. He was merely echoing the teaching so dear to all fundo-evangelicals: that Jesus saves through his own blood, and not through the blood running in your veins, or your mother’s veins, or even the veins of your grandparents who founded a mission in Argentina. Various groups may add nuances to this doctrine (covenantalists emphasize God’s promises to children of believing parents), but the basic teaching stands: belief is a choice of the individual, offered anew to each generation.

Only now do I really see the poignancy of that theological stance. Consider the interconnectedness of fundamentalist/ evangelical culture. After so many years of shared church and missionary life, not to mention a mind-boggling amount of intermarriage, American fundo-evangelicals have become a quasi-ethnic group, much like American Jews. A child raised in that culture may not be able to claim he was “born a Christian,” but he can make a pretty good case for having been born a fundamentalist. Thus the very people who cherish the idea of decisional faith, who cling to it theologically, actually live as if faith is hereditary, a matter of family and kinship.

I thought a lot about this contradiction after reading Jon Sweeney’s new memoir, Born Again and Again: Surprising Gifts of a Fundamentalist Childhood. Sweeney’s story will sound familiar to many. He came from a devout fundamentalist family: his grandfathers were both Independent Baptist preachers; his father worked at Moody Bible Institute. He grew up physically in the backyards of his small town (Wheaton, Illinois) but spiritually in the halls of his church—rededicating his life to God multiple times, dreaming of becoming a missionary. As a zealous teenager, he led school chapels and argued theology with friends. He seemed destined to be a preacher or evangelist, fulfilling his family’s dreams of a third generation of full-time Christian workers.

Then, on a college missions trip to the Philippines, Sweeney’s fundamentalism began to unravel. His group was assigned to evangelize Catholics, even though that meant asking them to turn their backs on long-held beliefs. Perhaps empathizing with others from a strong religious heritage, he felt guilty about the mission itself:

By the time that my summer was over, I was convinced that what we were doing was wrong in its disregard for the life, community, culture, and the faith of the people that we had come to help. I came face to face with a series of real, human examples of how the faith of my childhood might hurt others.

Sweeney no longer felt at ease in the old fundamentalist paradigm, but it didn’t occur to him to leave his faith altogether. At first he only wanted a simpler, quieter way of being a Christian. He considered becoming a Trappist monk (to the horror of his mother) but couldn’t “make the leap.” After transferring from Moody Bible Institute to Wheaton, he discovered a more tolerant conservatism (evangelicalism, really) and a handful of mentors who encouraged his questions. Eventually, though, his questions overtook his confidence in basic Christian doctrines. As an adult he drifted outside the boundaries of orthodox Christianity, retaining the shape and color of his childhood faith, but just a remnant of its theological content.

To his credit, Sweeney examines his story and its meaning with unusual humility. He doesn’t claim superiority to the people he came from, only an inability to accept all that they taught him. He intends his memoir to be in no small part an exploration of the good in fundamentalism: its appreciation of the power of words and learning, its surprising mysticism and zeal for God, its ideals for human relationships and recognition of the human need to start over—to be born again and again. His tone is thankful and affirming, meant to shore up bridges rather than burn them down.

For all Sweeney’s optimism and kindness, though, there’s a sad subtext in this memoir: the tragedy of a family divided by faith. Like so many others, he was born to parents who lived within a particular theological framework, asked to accept that framework for his own life, and then pressed into it by the weight of family tradition. He resisted in a generous rather than vindictive way, following his own beliefs and yet doing his best to live peaceably with the past.

Still, I know what his decision must mean to his family, having seen the same drama played out in my own and others over time. It’s the tragedy Sweeney worried about for Catholic Filipinos: the pain of separation. Fundamentalists love their children as much as anyone else, and the threat of being torn apart (in this life and the next) can make that love an especially terrifying thing.

“These slow separations of changing faith were agonizing,” Sweeney says. “I would imagine a slide toward separation and divorce, after years of loving marriage, would seem somewhat similar.”

Ironically, it was Sweeney’s family that had taught him to seek truth for himself. “If you look clearly and honestly at yourself in the presence of God,” his preacher grandfathers had told him, “you have all the spiritual direction you need.” Following their advice, he found himself wandering far from home. But the backward pull remains. In occasional moments of doubt, or nostalgia for the habits of childhood, he wonders if he made the wrong choice. Not a writer to ask for the reader’s sympathy, Sweeney still gets mine when he speaks wistfully of his parents:

I wished to be of the same light as that of my mother and father. I wanted to be another link in the constant and continuous chain of faith. … The light of their faith shone brightly and glowed beautifully. I was never more proud than when I was spiritually what they wanted me to be. In the end, though, it was impossible to bridge the gap between their light and my own.

It’s a mystery why some cling to childhood faith and others stray. Fearing separation, we’d probably all like to direct our children’s hearts, but faith in God doesn’t allow room for fear or condemnation, or especially the bullying of those we love. It only allows trust in God’s goodness, which is the very thing we’ve always preached to our children. And if we struggle to accept that, then we may have to face up to a humbling truth: it wasn’t God we wanted them to love in the first place—it was really just us.

Betty Smartt Carter is a novelist living in Alabama.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Soul: Look on that fire, salvation walks within.Heart: What theme had Homer but original sin? —William Butler Yeats

And three begot the ten thousand things.—Lao Tzu

I am another vine in the great democracy of vines part of the complexity that defies explanation part of the tree you put your back to alert, but never suspecting. I am the cold coil around the warm trunk, I expand as your lungs, poor rabbits, twitch and swell. I am a long story with lovely yellows and dapples and shades a beginning, middle, and end that you can get lost in a sunny patch followed by a shadow a green dapple and twist, the turn, the unexpected reversal. When you come to the denouement and the tail narrows to nothing you wish to go back to the beginning and start over where the red lie flickers in the leaves beneath eyes like mica moons.

It is the old story, the beginning of everything but really a long divigation and excursus in which the woman naked and trembling complains to the man, weeping over and over, and his voice rises in sharp jabs while all their unborn children listen. It is something that interrupts the afternoon, the first day and history begins and wanders off for millennia, missing the whole point.

It is these subtle shades on my scales this maze of intricate lines that lead back upon themselves in endless recursions that fascinate you, that lead you endlessly from my tail into my mouth. In the moving light of the jungle I am a simple body-stocking of shadows and weave under a fritillary of bird cries to a sensuous music a harmony to all your doings promising you the ultimate knowledge in my belly down the dark tube of years: Light and shadow, light and shadow, the days and nights pass with increasing speed like stations and their intervals and you sway holding the strap the car-lights flickering wondering whatever was your original destination.

When fiction held out its red lie among the roses you followed it down my dark throat. It seemed utterly reasonable. Then you were Methuselah carrying each of his 900 years like a brick on his back Abraham’s wild surmise with knife Joseph starving in a hole and Moses singeing his feet in the wilderness. Next they hung you from two sticks and slowly everything grew more dramatic: Augustine heard the children in the garden Aquinas fled from the naked peasant and Columbus woke in a sweat, the voices still singing of a lost world of amber waves and alabaster until Lord Amherst gave his blankets to the Indians Franklin saw the flashing key and Washington sold his horse for pasturage until the utterly reasonable Robespierre offered up his head Lenin popped from a boxcar and Einstein gave you a terrible secret which I had promised, a man of violins and God.

Now the story has gotten out of hand as you swarm upon yourselves like maggots on a diminishing dung-pile and frenzied, move toward the catastrophe history a string of boxcars each a century stuffed to overflowing until the last leaps the track.

Meanwhile I who am the truth move scintillatingly, with grace in my own shadow telling the story: There was a man, and a woman … and the sun rose and they went on a long journey and night fell and they did not know where they were.

Such is knowledge, such is the fruit I offered without the encumbrances of love, without listening without the tree of fire that burns below all movement, all shining, the tree below the bones whose flames reach through the skeleton and hover just over the fingers and burn away the forest where the ego goes crying, alone—one eye balancing the other bilaterally symmetrical— of what it has and what it hasn’t until all shapes are shining and fear falls way shriveling like a black net and the wisdom of God dances freely before you and the glowing fruit blushes for the mouth.

I see all clear and can tell you the end of things, knowing you will not listen, for my knowledge is cold here in the forest and you will follow the shifting arabesque of moonlight on my mica-glint, my scales moving like the sequins of days, events, the rise of stocks and the next presidential election and the price of wheat futures in a drought.

So I go on, flowing into my own shape into the darkness I have made, subservient (and this is the bitterness beyond all blankness) at the last to another purpose which you cannot guess, which rings in these leaves like the harps and fiddles of insects too high for your range of hearing—a music which drives me into the narrowing circle I have made tail in mouth, swallowing untilI vanishand everything in this circle vanishes with me.

Robert Siegel’s latest books of poetry, The Waters Under the Earth and A Pentecost of Finches, will be out this year and next year.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.