The Life of Mohammad and Early Islam

It is by no means uncommon for Eastern and other Christians in their more zealously apologetic works to portray themselves up against a hard-nosed enemy in Islam that brooked no tolerance of perceived ambiguity and ambivalence in certain Christian teachings, especially around the incarnation and Trinity. Even more common today, especially in America over the last two decades, one finds all sorts of reactionary commentators willing to portray Islam as an intolerant and incorrigibly violent "fundamentalist" tradition that brooks no uncertainty or ambiguity at all. To be sure, some Muslims figures, not least those associated with ISIS, themselves put forward this same version of Islam. Whether by ISIS or its opponents, such a portrait of Islam is seriously at odds with the developed tradition and invariably tendentious.

Two recent books will help us appreciate that both the life of Mohammad and the development of Islam, were, of course, far messier and more complex than extreme apologists for it, or extreme "Orientalist" opponents of it, like to admit. 

The first of these is simply a new translation of a major biography that has been around for some time in French: Muhammad, by Maxime Rodinson, trans. Anne Carter (NYRB Classics, 2021), 432pp. 

Tariq Ali has a very appreciative and helpfully contextualizing review of this biography in a recent issue of the London Review of Books. About this book we are told this by the publisher:

A classic secular history of the prophet Muhammad that vividly recreates the fascinating time in which Islam was born.

Maxime Rodinson, both a maverick Marxist and a distinguished professor at the Sorbonne, first published his biography of Muhammad in 1960. The book, a classic in its field, has been widely read ever since. Rodinson, though deeply versed in scholarly studies of the Prophet, does not seek to add to it here but to introduce Muhammad, first of all, as “a man of flesh and blood” who led a life of extraordinary drama and shaped history as few others have. Equally, he seeks to lay out an understanding of Muhammad’s legacy and Islam as what he called an ideological movement, similar to the universalist religions of Christianity and Buddhism as well as the secular movement of Marxism, but possessing a singular commitment to “the deeply ingrained idea that Islam offers not only a path to salvation but (for many, above all) the ideal of a just society to be realized on earth.” 

Rodinson’s book begins by introducing the specific land and the larger world into which Muhammad was born and the development of his prophetic calling. It then follows the steps of his career and the way his leadership gave birth to a religion and a state. A final chapter considers the world as Islam has transformed it.

The second book looks to be equally important: A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam by Thomas Bauer. Translated by Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Tricia Tunstall (Columbia University Press 336pp. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy?

In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture, which stands in striking contrast to both present-day fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how Islam’s encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies that in their own ways rejected ambiguity—and therefore also their own cultural traditions.

Awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize, A Culture of Ambiguity not only reframes a vast range of Islamic history but also offers an interdisciplinary model for investigating the tolerance of ambiguity across cultures and eras.

Women of the Soviet Catacombs

Early next year, will see the publication in English translation of Women of the Catacombs: Memoirs of the Underground Orthodox Church in Stalin's Russia, trans. W.L. Daniel, with an introduction by the late Aleksandr Men (Northern Illinois University Press, March 2021), 252pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The memoirs presented in Women of the Catacombs offer a rare close-up account of the underground Orthodox community and its priests during some of the most difficult years in Russian history. The catacomb church in the Soviet Union came into existence in the 1920s and played a significant part in Russian national life for nearly fifty years. Adherents to the Orthodox faith often referred to the catacomb church as the "light shining in the dark." Women of the Catacombs provides a first-hand portrait of lived religion in its social, familial, and cultural setting during this tragic period.

Until now, scholars have had only brief, scattered fragments of information about Russia's illegal church organization that claimed to protect the purity of the Orthodox tradition. Vera Iakovlevna Vasilevskaia and Elena Semenovna Men, who joined the church as young women, offer evidence on how Russian Orthodoxy remained a viable, alternative presence in Soviet society, when all political, educational, and cultural institutions attempted to indoctrinate Soviet citizens with an atheistic perspective. Wallace L. Daniel's translation not only sheds light on Russia's religious and political history, but also shows how two educated women maintained their personal integrity in times when prevailing political and social headwinds moved in an opposite direction.

A New Biography of Stalin

The influence of Stalin on the destruction of Eastern Christian churches--Catholic and Orthodox--is notorious. I have read a couple biographies about him over the years, and now Princeton University Press has another one coming out this month: Ronald Grigor Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution (PUP, 2020, 896pp.

About this hefty new study, the publisher tells us this:

This is the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin from his birth to the October Revolution of 1917, a panoramic and often chilling account of how an impoverished, idealistic youth from the provinces of tsarist Russia was transformed into a cunning and fearsome outlaw who would one day become one of the twentieth century's most ruthless dictators.

In this monumental book, Ronald Grigor Suny sheds light on the least understood years of Stalin's career, bringing to life the turbulent world in which he lived and the extraordinary historical events that shaped him. Suny draws on a wealth of new archival evidence from Stalin's early years in the Caucasus to chart the psychological metamorphosis of the young Stalin, taking readers from his boyhood as a Georgian nationalist and romantic poet, through his harsh years of schooling, to his commitment to violent engagement in the underground movement to topple the tsarist autocracy. Stalin emerges as an ambitious climber within the Bolshevik ranks, a resourceful leader of a small terrorist band, and a writer and thinker who was deeply engaged with some of the most incendiary debates of his time.

A landmark achievement, Stalin paints an unforgettable portrait of a driven young man who abandoned his religious faith to become a skilled political operative and a single-minded and ruthless rebel.

Things Spotted While Reading the London Review of Books

I'm a bit behind here, but last week on a plane greatly enjoyed the 2 January 2020 edition of the London Review of Books. In there I found notices for, and long review essays about, various books, including the following.

David Runciman reviewed the third and final volume of Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher: the Authorized Biography vol. III: Herself Alone (Allen Lane, 2019), 1072pp.

I've read the first volume, but not this one yet, though it sounds fascinating. I've also read several other biographies of her over the years, and some of her own works, including The Downing Street Years.

Thatcher, of course, is routinely credited for working with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in helping to dismantle the Soviet Union which destroyed so much of Eastern Christianity and so many Eastern Christians.

Also not to be missed are the uproariously funny and farouche diaries of her junior defense minister Alan Clark. I've read them probably three times over the last twenty years, and having read rather a lot of British political memoirs and diaries, can safely say nothing comes close to these.

Clark was also something of an historian manqué, and his scathing book of British military leadership during the Great War, The Donkeys, is a quick, devastating, but not entirely fair critique.


The highlight of this issue for me was a long essay by Jean McNicol discussing three new books, the first of which is Maggie Craig's When The Clyde Ran Red: A Social History of Red Clydeside.

Socialism here in this time was not just a program of political revolution, though it was that, and awakened close and ongoing interest on the part of Lenin and others in Russia. Socialism here, according to Craig's book (quoting an article in the Times from 1922) included

‘Socialist study circles, socialist economics classes, socialist music festivals, socialist athletics competitions, socialist choirs, socialist dramatic societies, socialist plays – these are only a few of the devious ways in which they attempted to reach the unconverted.’ 

This essay and the books awaken a feeling of personal albeit distant connection insofar as my maternal great-grandfather was a ship-builder along the River Clyde in the late 19th and early 20th century. McNicol's essay, "The Atmosphere of the Clyde," does a splendid job of capturing the sense of social and economic tumult, suffering, but also real progress especially during and right after the Great War.

The Clyde was then, and for some time afterwards remained, one of the largest shipbuilding sites in the whole of the British Empire, employing tens of thousands at its height, including the long-suffering John Maclean: Hero of Red Clydeside, the second book reviewed here and written by Henry Bell. MacLean and others fought for just wages, rent reforms, adequate housing, and a 40-hour work week among other things we now take for granted.

The third book is Glasgow 1919: the Rise of Red Clydeside by Kenny MacAskill, who is a sitting MP for the Scottish National Party.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

On the 31st January 1919 Glasgow was in the midst of a strike for a 40-hour week. A demonstration in George Square saw the Red Flag hoisted and panicked police baton charge the milling crowd.

The War Cabinet in London monitoring the developing situation had declined pre-emptive arrests of strike leaders, but now unleashed the military. That evening 10,000 British soldiers started to arrive in the city, supported by tanks and guns. Howitzers protruded from the City Chambers and barbed wire surrounded it. Armed soldiers guarded critical sites and tanks were based at the cattle market. Images of these events have entered collective memory of the city's inhabitants.

In context this was a time when fears of Bolshevism were spread amongst western ruling elites. The first month of January saw western allied troops fighting in Russia, Trotsky leading the Red Army in Poland, the Spartacist Rebellion suppressed in Germany and the Irish Republic declared by victorious Sinn Fein MPs. Glasgow, crucial to Britain's war effort was conversely, one of the most deprived cities in Europe, and ripe for change. It was a world in turmoil.

Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and the Nazis

It has been said for years that one of the factors holding up the canonization of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky is some concern around what he may have said with regard to the German invaders of 1941. This new study, by a young historian Andriy Mykhaleyko, is therefore going to be invaluable in airing and analyzing these claims once and for all: Metropolit Andrey Graf Sheptytskyj und das NS-Regime: Zwischen christlichem Ideal und politischer Realität (Brill, 2020).

Mykhaleyko's book is published by Brill as the first volume in their new series, Eastern Church Identities. About that series Brill tells us this:

This new series focuses on the interplay between theological thinking and cultural self-understanding of the Oriental-Orthodox, the Byzantine and the Uniate branches of the Eastern Churches worldwide. The series studies the Eastern Churches' various roles within their mainfold contexts, i.e. either as actors within the transformation-processes in Eastern Europe or as minorities both in the Middle East and in the north American diaspora. By fully acknowledging the role of ritual and hagiography for the ecclesial community-building and the theology of the Eastern Churches the series opens up new approaches to an often-neglected dimension of global Christianity. The series accepts contributions in English, German and French. Each incoming manuscript is evaluated in a peer-reviewing-process conducted by renowned specialists from the editorial and the advisory boards.

And about the book itself the publisher tells us this:

Metropolit Andrey Sheptytskyj war der einflussreichste Repräsentant der Ukrainischen Griechisch-Katholischen Kirche im 20. Jahrhundert. Sein letzter Lebensabschnitt unter dem NS-Regime wird bis heute sehr gegensätzlich bewertet und kontrovers diskutiert.

Während die sowjetische Geschichtsschreibung Sheptytskyj als Kollaborateur des NS-Regimes, Feind des Kommunismus und Agenten des Vatikans verurteilte, verehrt die griechisch-katholische Kirche ihn als nationale Symbolfigur, als »neuen Moses«, dessen Heiligsprechung sie betreibt. Mykhaleyko legt einen Beitrag zur Neubewertung Sheptytskyjs vor: Durch die Kontextualisierung seiner Biographie im Zeitalter der Totalitarismen während der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts korrigiert die Studie die historischen Narrative, dekonstruiert die ideologischen Porträts Sheptytskyjs und entmythologisiert das ambivalente Verhältnis Sheptytskyjs zum NS-Regime.

King Charlie the Big?

The University of California Press just sent me their catalogue of forthcoming publications, and in it I spy a new study of one of those figures who often loom large, for good and ill, in the minds of certain Christians, especially those trying to find bogeymen for divisions, so-called heresies, the rise of those horrid "Franks" who apparently drove East and West apart, etc. Charlemagne rather majestically fits that bill for some.

King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne by Janet L. Nelson (University of California Press, 2019), 704pp.

About this biography we are told this by the publisher:

Charles I, often known as Charlemagne, is one of the most extraordinary figures ever to rule an empire. Driven by unremitting physical energy and intellectual curiosity, he was a man of many parts, a warlord and conqueror, a judge who promised "for each their law and justice," a defender of the Latin Church, a man of flesh and blood. In the twelve centuries since his death, warfare, accident, vermin, and the elements have destroyed much of the writing on his rule, but a remarkable amount has survived. Janet Nelson's wonderful new book brings together everything we know about Charles I, sifting through the available evidence, literary and material, to paint a vivid portrait of the man and his motives.

Building on Nelson’s own extraordinary knowledge, this biography is a sort of detective story, prying into and interpreting fascinating and often obdurate scraps of evidence, from prayer books to skeletons, gossip to artwork. Charles’s legacy lies in his deeds and their continuing resonance, as he shaped counties, countries, and continents; founded and rebuilt towns and monasteries; and consciously set himself up not just as King of the Franks, but as the head of the renewed Roman Empire. His successors—even to the present day—have struggled to interpret, misinterpret, copy, or subvert his legacy. Janet Nelson gets us as close as we can hope to come to the real figure of Charles the man as he was understood in his own time.

Rebels and Their Biographers

The always-readable Terry Eagleton (whose recent book on sacrifice I discussed here) has a rather savage review in the current London Review of Books of a biography by Claire Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard. Eagleton's major complaint is that the biographer indulges too much in what Melanie Klein might call projective identification with her subject, turning him into an emotionally overwrought nice guy when, Eagleton says, he was anything but.

Elsewhere in the same issue the well-known historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has a critical review of Roy Flechner's St. Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland's Patron Saint, published earlier this year by Princeton University Press. MacCulloch notes that there are numerous strengths to the book, but that it sometimes gets tripped up with the same historiographical problems that tend to bedevil treatments of Patrick and others from that era, some of which will probably never be resolved no matter how many times this ground is retrod and the story retold.

Colin Grant offers a fascinating review of David Blight's recent book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon and Schuster, 2018), 892pp. The book has already won a number of awards since publication last October. About it the publisher tells us this:

As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.

Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, using his own story to condemn slavery. By the Civil War, Douglass had become the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. After the war he sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights.

In this “cinematic and deeply engaging” (The New York Times Book Review) biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. “Absorbing and even moving…a brilliant book that speaks to our own time as well as Douglass’s” (The Wall Street Journal), Blight’s biography tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. “David Blight has written the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass…a powerful portrait of one of the most important American voices of the nineteenth century” (The Boston Globe).

On the Life of Catherine Doherty

Last week, when I was at the Orientale Lumen conference in Washington, DC, I was approached by a lovely woman, Echo Lewis, whom I did not know, but who introduced herself as being from Madonna House, which I visited in 2004 and of which I remain a big fan. She very graciously gave me a copy of her biography of Madonna House founder: Victorious Exile by Echo Lewis (Madonna House Publications, 2013), 205pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Katya Kolyschkine, who came to be known in the West as Catherine de Hueck Doherty, lived a life of adventure, peril, persecution and exile from her native Russia. The darkness of poverty and near despair closed in on Katya; but propelled by a love so great nothing could overpower it, she proved victorious in her quest to show the face of that love to thousands of others. In doing so, Katya set a spark of pre-Revolutionary Holy Russia aflame in the Western world.

Vasily Grossman

One of the real surprises in MacIntyre's 2016 book Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, which I discussed at length here, is his series of potted biographies in the latter part of the book of a very diverse cast of characters, only half of whom I had any familiarity with. Among those who were new to me was Vasily Grossman, whom MacIntyre "displays" as a moral exemplar of a very particular type in a very singular context when one's capacity for acting as a free and virtuous agent was (to put it mildly) severely under duress.

It is with great interest, then, that I greet the publication of a new biography about Grossman, of whom I am keen to learn more. Just published six weeks ago is Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (Yale University Press, 2019), 424pp.

Modestly introduced by the publisher as "The definitive biography of Soviet Jewish dissident writer Vasily Grossman," Yale UP goes on to tell us this about the book:

If Vasily Grossman’s 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905–1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article “The Hell of Treblinka” became evidence at Nuremberg. Grossman’s powerful anti‑totalitarian works liken the Nazis’ crimes against humanity with those of Stalin. His compassionate prose has the everlasting quality of great art. Because Grossman’s major works appeared after much delay we are only now able to examine them properly. Alexandra Popoff’s authoritative biography illuminates Grossman’s life and legacy.

Notes on the London Review of Books 41/8 (18 April 2019)

I began last month a new series on here: annotations from my reading of the London Review of Books, which comes every two weeks and is savoured for many hours afterwards. Herewith a few notes on books discussed in the above-referenced issue.

I have had a growing interest in interwar and postwar politics of the British left, and previously noted on here, e.g., biographies of Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan. But that interest has been expanding to the nineteenth century, and lately I've been reading about the celebrated Gladstone-Disraeli rivalry. So I read with keen interest Jonathan Parry's long review of The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History 1800-2000, eds. D. Brown et al (OUP, 2018), 626pp. Parry notes that there are a few areas the collection short-changes, but overall it sounds like a worthwhile endeavor.

British historians are often themselves fascinating characters--from what I've read of the lives of, e.g., Toynbee, Hugh Trevor Roper, Martin Gilbert, and a few others. So I paid special attention to Susan Pedersen's very conflicted review (titled "I want to love it") of Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (Little, Brown, 2019), 800pp. I've only read smatterings of and about Hobsbawm, and Pedersen brings out some fascinating details of his rather charmed life. So I'll look forward to reading this biography at some point. About it the publisher tells us this:

Eric Hobsbawm's works have had a nearly incalculable effect across generations of readers and students, influencing more than the practice of history but also the perception of it. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, of second-generation British parents, Hobsbawm was orphaned at age fourteen in 1931. Living with an uncle in Berlin, he experienced the full force of world economic depression, and in the charged reaction to it in Germany was forced to choose between Nazism and Communism, which was no choice at all. Hobsbawm's lifelong allegiance to Communism inspired his pioneering work in social history, particularly the trilogy for which he is most famous--The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Empire--covering what he termed "the long nineteenth century" in Europe. Selling in the millions of copies, these held sway among generations of readers, some of whom went on to have prominent careers in politics and business. 

In this comprehensive biography of Hobsbawm, acclaimed historian Richard Evans (author of The Third Reich Trilogy, among other works) offers both a living portrait and vital insight into one of the most influential intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Using exclusive and unrestricted access to the unpublished material, Evans places Hobsbawm's writings within their historical and political context. Hobsbawm's Marxism made him a controversial figure but also, uniquely and universally, someone who commanded respect even among those who did not share-or who even outright rejected-his political beliefs. Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History gives us one of the 20th century's most colorful and intellectually compelling figures. It is an intellectual life of the century itself.

The review of this biography was followed by Christina Riggs reviewing Jonathan Conlin's biography, Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the World's Richest Man (Profile, 2019), 402.

Gulbenkian seems to have been one of those characters who probably could only have lived, and prospered, in the era he did using the methods he did. Among other things he shows the power of money to insulate an Armenian in the last days of the Ottoman Empire from its many attacks on his compatriots. As the publisher tells us:

When Calouste Gulbenkian died in 1955 at the age of 86, he was the richest man in the world, known as 'Mr Five Per Cent' for his personal share of Middle East oil. The son of a wealthy Armenian merchant in Istanbul, for half a century he brokered top-level oil deals, concealing his mysterious web of business interests and contacts within a labyrinth of Asian and European cartels, and convincing governments and oil barons alike of his impartiality as an 'honest broker'. Today his name is known principally through the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, to which his spectacular art collection and most of his vast wealth were bequeathed. Gulbenkian's private life was as labyrinthine as his business dealings. He insisted on the highest 'moral values', yet ruthlessly used his wife's charm as a hostess to further his career, and demanded complete obedience from his family, whom he monitored obsessively. As a young man he lived a champagne lifestyle, escorting actresses and showgirls, and in later life - on doctor's orders - he slept with a succession of discreetly provided young women. Meanwhile he built up a superb art collection which included Rembrandts and other treasures sold to him by Stalin from the Hermitage Museum.Published to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, Mr Five Per Cent reveals Gulbenkian's complex and many-sided existence. Written with full access to the Gulbenkian Foundation's archives, this is the fascinating story of the man who more than anyone else helped shape the modern oil industry.

When it first came out at the start of our decade, I read Eric Kaufman's Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century with great interest, though without being entirely persuaded by his thesis. So when I saw he has a new book out, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities I read Daniel Trilling's review of it with particular interest. Trilling notes that Kaufman has some interesting arguments in places and data, but overlooks a number of factors, too. Here is the publisher's blurb about the book:

This is the century of whiteshift. As Western societies are becoming increasingly mixed-race, demographic change is transforming politics. Over half of American babies are non-white, and by the end of the century, minorities and those of mixed race are projected to form the majority in the UK and other countries. The early stages of this transformation have led to a populist disruption, tearing a path through the usual politics of left and right. Ethnic transformation will continue, but conservative whites are unlikely to exit quietly; their feelings of alienation are already redrawing political lines and convulsing societies across the West. One of the most crucial challenges of our time is to enable conservatives as well as cosmopolitans to view whiteshift as a positive development.

In this groundbreaking book, political scientist Eric Kaufmann examines the evidence to explore ethnic change in North American and Western Europe. Tracing four ways of dealing with this transformation—fight, repress, flight, and join—he charts different scenarios and calls for us to move beyond empty talk about national identity. If we want to avoid more radical political divisions, he argues, we have to open up debate about the future of white majorities.

Deeply thought provoking, enriched with illustrative stories, and drawing on detailed and extraordinary survey, demographic, and electoral data, Whiteshift will redefine the way we discuss race in the twenty-first century.

My ignorance of modern poetry is lamentably vast, but one of the very few poets I have long read and admired is the subject of the next review by Robert Crawford of the seemingly endless volumes to be published of The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume VIII: 1936-38, eds. V. Eliot and J. Haffenden (Faber, 2019), 1100pp. For such a brief period, this is a massive volume, indicating just how loquacious a correspondent Eliot was, perhaps all the more astonishing in view of his vast literary output. 

Jean Vanier: In Gratitude

I noted a few weeks ago the move by Jean Vanier into palliative care. Now he has died. Here is a moving interview he gave almost twenty years ago reflecting, inter alia, on death.

I first discovered him in the 1990s, probably around the time he gave the celebrated Massey Lectures in 1998. Those were published as Becoming Human. Before that, and often afterwards, he was interviewed on my favourite CBC Radio show, Ideas. You can find many of those interviews starting here.

When I was both listening to him on the radio--he has an absolutely unique and unforgettably enchanting voice--and reading some of his many books, I was at at that time a psychology student and an analysand of Dr. Louise Carignan, thinking of clinical training as a pastoral counsellor and/or psychoanalyst. At the same time, I was living in an ecumenical intentional community--Somerset House--which we set up in part with the hope of working with street-people in downtown Ottawa, some of whom lived very literally on our doorstep (which was at a major intersection a few blocks south of Parliament Hill). During this period I was doing volunteer pastoral work at a large nursing home while also volunteering with the Ottawa Crisis Centre, working overnight shifts on the suicide hotline.

These latter two experiences gave me my first, and ever-memorable, taste of the fact that the very frail and elderly residents I was accompanying, and many of the deeply broken people who called into the suicide line, gave me back far, far more than anything I may have thought I was giving to them. Vanier was the one who helped me understand this. He wrote about this many times, and in this very moving article an unnamed Catholic bishop also realizes this paradox so richly illustrated by Vanier's life:  “Up until now, we have spoken about doing good to the poor. But at L’Arche, you say that it is the poor who do us good."

That lesson, along with his constant emphasis on how much the gospel is lived by, and revealed in, those the world considers "defective," are the two things that have remained with me for more than twenty years now, informing my work on Dorothy Day and also my fascination with "holy fools" who blur the boundaries between what we want to call "sanity" and "sanctity" and who are often regarded as losers, freaks, misfits.

There are many other books written by Vanier which you can see here. And there are a number of books written about him, including Michael Higgins 2016 work Jean Vanier: Logician of the Heart. 

Forthcoming later this summer is what seems to be a major biographer of Vanier: Anne-Sophie Constant, Jean Vanier: Portrait of a Free Man (Plough, August 2019), 250pp. About this book the publisher tells us this:

The life of Jean Vanier, founder of l’Arche, who changed the way the world views disability

It’s a crazy story. In August 1964 a thirty-six-year-old Canadian from a famous family – one who has already joined the navy during war at age thirteen, become an officer, earned a PhD, and taught ethics at the University of Toronto -- takes up residence in a little house he just bought in the village of Trosly, France, with two mentally disabled men he has removed from a care home. The house, which he calls l’Arche (the Ark), has neither water nor electricity. His plan? None. He is just convinced he has to do it, touched by the silent cry of these men shut up in the gloomy, violent institution where he found them. His example is contagious; within months the community has grown to over fifty.

Jean Vanier is known and loved around the world for having created L'Arche, those unique communities of people with disabilities and their volunteer caregivers in more than one hundred and fifty sites on five continents. But Vanier is also a philosopher, a spiritual master who touches believers and nonbelievers alike, a tireless messenger of peace and ecumenism, and an adventurer with life full of twists and turns. Anne-Sophie Constant's literary biography paints a rare portrait of this extraordinary man and the events and influences that shaped his destiny.

“The story of Jean Vanier is the story of a free man – a man who knew how to become himself, who knew how to free himself from restraints, opinions, and prejudices; from intellectual, religious or moral habits; from his epoch; from popular opinion. . . . Jean Vanier has transformed the lives of thousands and thousands of mentally disabled people. And he has transformed the understanding of thousands of people regarding the disabilities of their own children and of people with disabilities. Where we see only failure, disgrace, impossibility, limit, weakness, ugliness, and suffering, Jean Vanier sees beauty. And he knows how to open the eyes of others to see it.”

And now, his earthly life over, I have to imagine that Vanier has made God's job very easy, allowing Him quickly to say, even this very day, "Well done, good and faithful servant! Enter into the joy of your master!" May Vanier's memory be eternal, and may his intercession inspire all of us to deeper lives of vulnerable service.

Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard (I)

During very long flights to Romania earlier this month, with long times in between and thus a lot of sitting around, I very happily whiled away the hours by starting Cynthia Haven's lovely new biography,  Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard (Michigan State UP, 2018), 346pp.

I will say more about it after I finish it, but for now wanted to commend it to those of you who are interested not just in his extraordinary life and work, but also in the history of southern France (especially Avignon) and in the history of academic changes and conflicts in the United States. A cast of well-known characters crosses the page, including not least Lacan and Derrida.  

Politicians Who Aren't Loathsome: A Long-Lost Species

I have been reading biographies of, books by, books about, and books written by people somehow connected to, Winston Churchill for two decades now. Even before that, when I was quite young, my Glaswegian grandmother got me interested in him and in the war by telling me harrowing tales of her surviving the Blitz and Battle of Britain: her father worked in the shipyards on the River Clyde around Port Glasgow, and these were of course the subject of special attention from the Luftwaffe. She also mentioned the unity felt by the country as a result of his Churchill's famously stirring speeches, a unity she claimed was lost after the 1945 election. (Andrew Sullivan also indulges more recently in some Churchill nostalgia here, asking if we will have another today. I think the better question, after the turmoil of Trump, is whether we can have an Attlee instead.)

She put me off Churchill's successor, Clement Attlee, and the post-war Labour government, through for reasons that were never clear until recently reflecting on it more than a decade after her death. I think hers was the unreflecting prejudice of the family she married into in 1942: my grandfather's family were small-business owners who fell for Tory propaganda about Labour somehow being against them. As a result of all this, I never bestirred myself to look closely into these questions until early in 2017 I went back and read Alasdair MacIntyre's many "lost" essays from the postwar period in which he was actively involved in the politics of the British left. Those essays are found in an indispensable collection. I will soon read that collection alongside John Gregson's forthcoming study, which looks most fascinating: Marxism, Ethics and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 224pp.

So as a child and then adult who adored his grandmother and her often fiercely expressed opinions, I never realized what an utterly compelling life Clement Attlee led until I just finished reading John Bew's new and splendid biography of him, Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain (Oxford UP, 2017), 688pp. To my mind, it is a mark of a good biography that one is a little sad at coming to the end of it, and immediately files it away to be read again down the road, as I shall do with this one. For those with any interest in biography, wartime Britain, and the politics of the British left, this is a must-read.

Attlee, of course, was compulsively reticent and an almost sadistically taciturn man. I knew that much of him (and have often quoted his apparent response to Harold Laski's endless and prolix agitations: "a period of silence from you would be most welcome"), but not how far he carried that until reading Bew's biography. Once, a BBC interviewer had prepared 28 questions for what was to be a half-hour broadcast with Attlee, who answered all her questions in 5 minutes flat and then stared at her with his pipe as both wondered what to do next.

Attlee emerges as a thoroughly admirable character who seems never to have sought office, honours, or glory for himself. But he was certainly no pushover, no pious pacifist afraid of a fight. (Even though initially turned down as too old at the age of 31, he was eventually enlisted and fought in the Great War, including at Gallipoli, and was twice invalided out but kept wanting to get back into action as soon as possible.) He could be withering when needed, and saw off many attempts on his job as Labour leader (1935-55), which he usually managed to rebuff without scruple.

He didn't have much truck with explicit forms of Christian faith, but he had many virtues nonetheless, perhaps none so clear as his genuine desire to help the poor of the slums of London (and the Welsh coal-miners from whom key Labour ministers like Aneurin Bevan came), among whom he began to work as a social worker at the end of the Victorian era. Unlike some with such motivations, he seems never to have been condescending about it, and never to have thought himself above such people, or the working classes and trade unionists on whom he and his party depended so much. Almost until the end of his parliamentary career in the mid-1950s, he took the tube by himself to Westminster quietly reading the paper, and would often be asked by people "Has anyone ever told you you bear a striking resemblance to Clement Attlee?" to which he would reply "Yes, often" and leave it at that.

Having some time back read David McCullough's fascinating biography Truman, there are, I think, certain parallels between him and his contemporary, Attlee: both thrust most unexpectedly into office within weeks of each other in 1945 (almost everyone thought the Churchill Tories would be returned with a modest majority: nobody, least of all Attlee himself, thought Labour would win the largest landslide in its history), and both replacing wartime leaders who were then, and have remained since, giants on the global stage partly for their compelling ability to communicate with their followers--whether in FDR's fireside chats, or Churchill's speeches on the BBC and in Parliament. Both Truman and Attlee were moderately of the left, and both came after larger-than-life leaders and presented a welcome contrast of much more contained, direct, business-like and modest leadership without flashy rhetoric or fiery oratory. Both did not appear over-much to enjoy the perks of power or especially the limelight, and both gratefully retired to very modest surroundings in the 1950s.

When his memoirs, As It Happened, were published, the New York Times review said that Attlee had the maddening habit in every chapter of leading readers up to a cliff's edge and having them sit there, so drained was the text of all drama and so heavily downplayed the many major events and personages he was involved with. Bew retails many amusing instances of this, and it drove some people like Aneurin Bevan to distraction. Bevan, of course, was the fiery Welshman who brought in the National Health Service in 1948, and was always pushing Attlee from the left to do more and faster. But Bevan could not always restrain himself and often overshot.

Attlee, no violent firebrand or revolutionary he, much preferred the slow and incremental approach. In doing so, he strikes me as a quintessential character of his generation of the type well-understood by his contemporaries the Scottish psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn (whose rather interesting biography by John Sutherland I also recently read) and his English counter-part D.W. Winnicott: the "good enough" leader not overly concerned with ideological orthodoxy whose schizoid aloofness allowed him to survive much political turmoil and intra-Labour intrigue, and in doing so managed to accomplish a very great deal of good without going too far. In the end, he outlived almost all of the 1945 government, including those who would have gladly replaced him--Nye Bevan, Stafford Cripps, Ernie Bevin and others--and died full of honours: ennobled as an earl, and made Knight of the Garter, Companion of Honour, and Order of Merit. In typical fashion, he mocked this gently in a bit of doggrel he composed looking back on his improbable life:

Few thought he was even a starter.

There were many in life who were smarter.

But he finished PM,

A CH, an OM,

An earl and a Knight of the Garter. 

Ukrainian-American Bishop Constantine Bohachevsky

For more than five years now, since working with a grad student who was doing field research in Sugarloaf, PA, home of the Byzantine Carmelite sisters, I have thought that Eastern Catholics are exceptionally bad at telling our own history, and such defects must be remedied wherever possible. I am therefore delighted to see this biography forthcoming in November of this year: Ukrainian Bishop, American Church: Constantine Bohachevsky and the Ukrainian Catholic Church Hardcover by Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak (Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 544pp.

I greatly look forward to reading this, and I hope to be able to arrange an interview on here with the author.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Constantine Bohachevsky was not a typical bishop. On the eve of his unexpected nomination as bishop to the Ukrainian Catholics in America, in March 1924, the Vatican secretly whisked him from Warsaw to Rome to be ordained. He arrived in America that August to a bankrupt church and a hostile clergy. He stood his ground, and chose to live simple missionary life. He eschewed public pomp, as did his immigrant congregations. He regularly visited his scattered churches. He fought a bitter fight for the independence of the church from outside interference – a kind of struggle between the Church and the state, absent both. He refashioned a failing immigrant church in America into a self-sustaining institution that half a century after his death could help resurrect the underground Catholic Church in Ukraine, which became the largest Eastern Catholic church today.

This trailblazing biography, based on recently opened sources from the Vatican, Ukraine and the United States, brings the reader from the placid life of the married Catholic Ukrainian clergy in the Habsburg Empire to industrial America.

The Ukrainian Catholic Church, formalized in 1595, melds Eastern religious practices with Western hierarchic structure, thus healing the 1054 Christian divide. While there is doctrinal unity, Eastern Catholic practice differs so markedly from that of the Latin Rite that Ukrainian immigrants in the US created their own churches. The death of the first bishop in 1916 and the long hiatus in naming a replacement led to widespread unrest. Yet, under Bohachevsky's forceful leadership, within a decade, the church developed a network of parishes, schools, colleges, and eventually a seminary, cultivating its clergy and its understanding of Eastern Catholicism. In 1958, the Pope erected the Ukrainian Catholic Archbishopric of Philadelphia and appointed Bohachevsky its Metropolitan/Archbishop.

Darwin's Worms and Freud's Death Drive

I have often commented on here over the past few years about the many books of the English literary scholar and psycho-analyst Adam Phillips. Having finished another, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories, herewith a few thoughts.

This is a short book, and is in essence two separate essays, the first on Darwin, the second on Freud, and they are only loosely stitched together. Phillips suggests that what interests both men is a fascination with natural history and an archaeological approach to the past. Moreover, both were skeptical of the idea of the redemption of humankind, and believed that any major changes were going to be very limited, both individually and politically.

The essay on Freud is useful in reminding us of several things Phillips has addressed in some of his other books, including his excellent "biography" of Freud I discussed here: the tendency of Freudian thought to "undo" itself by turning its awareness of our propensity for self-deception on itself; the treachery, therefore, and unreliability of all biographers; and the important place of the death drive, discussed most fully, of course, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

That drive, or instinct as some translators put it, came to Freud relatively late (1920) when other attempts to understand human beings proved limited if not futile. The theory of the death drive, often regarded as Freud's most speculative and controversial claim, arouse out of a need, Phillips says, "to tell more persuasive, more convincing life stories: stories about how people actively, if unwittingly, undo their lives; and how this is a source of satisfaction to them" (78). This theory does not posit that people are straightforwardly suicidal or anything like that; if often does not involve literal death, but rather many other ways of undermining, sometimes fatally, relationships, jobs, fortunes and prospects in ways that make no sense at least consciously or rationally. But such self-destruction does make sense in other ways which the death drive helps to explicate, not least that we seek relief from our desiring, making the death drive "the object of desire that finally releases us from desire," as Phillips concludes.

The death drive thus showed Freud something he had struggled with for a long time: why desires are not always for what seem to be self-evident goods--family, health, prosperity--but are often based on deception and destruction. For Freud, says Phillips, human beings are "not truth-seeking animals in any simple sense." Thus, while Christians and others may believe that "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free," it is by no means straightforward that people always want that truth, much less freedom--a point Erich Fromm powerfully illustrated in his landmark best-seller, Escape from Freedom.

On the Problems of Biography: Freud Reconsidered

I am at work on two recent books that are both, in part, biographical studies but also studies that grapple with the problems of biography and how to interpret an author's life in light of his works. The first is--it will not surprise you--by the incomparably compelling Adam Phillips (about whom see here): Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Yale UP, 2016), 192pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Becoming Freud is the story of the young Freud—Freud up until the age of fifty—that incorporates all of Freud’s many misgivings about the art of biography. Freud invented a psychological treatment that involved the telling and revising of life stories, but he was himself skeptical of the writing of such stories. In this biography, Adam Phillips, whom the New Yorker calls “Britain’s foremost psychoanalytical writer,” emphasizes the largely and inevitably undocumented story of Freud’s earliest years as the oldest—and favored—son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and suggests that the psychoanalysis Freud invented was, among many other things, a psychology of the immigrant—increasingly, of course, everybody’s status in the modern world.

Psychoanalysis was also Freud’s way of coming to terms with the fate of the Jews in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So as well as incorporating the writings of Freud and his contemporaries, Becoming Freud also uses the work of historians of the Jews in Europe in this significant period in their lives, a period of unprecedented political freedom and mounting persecution. Phillips concludes by speculating what psychoanalysis might have become if Freud had died in 1906, before the emergence of a psychoanalytic movement over which he had to preside.

Biographies of Freud are not wanting, beginning with the three-volume and largely apologetic endeavor of one of Freud's close early associates, Ernest Jones (about whom see here).

A more recent attempt, by the widely respected historian Peter Gay, was published to great acclaim in 1988 as Freud: A Life for Our Time. I read it shortly after it came out when I was an undergraduate student in psychology, and it is a fine study, though not (as Paul Roazen showed) without some residual tendencies towards an apologetic treatment of Freud that he didn't need.

Phillips' study is a unique one, now joined by another one from Todd Dufresne (who studied under Roazen): The Late Sigmund Freud: Or, The Last Word on Psychoanalysis, Society, and All the Riddles of Life (Cambridge UP, 2017), 322pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Freud is best remembered for two applied works on society, The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents. Yet the works of the final period are routinely denigrated as merely supplemental to the earlier, more fundamental 'discoveries' of the unconscious and dream interpretation. In fact, the 'cultural Freud' is sometimes considered an embarrassment to psychoanalysis. Dufresne argues that the late Freud, as brilliant as ever, was actually revealing the true meaning of his life's work. And so while The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and his final work Moses and Monotheism may be embarrassing to some, they validate beliefs that Freud always held - including the psychobiology that provides the missing link between the individual psychology of the early period and the psychoanalysis of culture of the final period. The result is a lively, balanced, and scholarly defense of the late Freud that doubles as a major reassessment of psychoanalysis of interest to all readers of Freud.

This latter study, I must confess, has challenged my own approach to Freud's late works, which I have heavily discounted. I'm still rethinking this issue as I make my way through this book.

But, having finished Phillips first, let me turn to it. It is a slender volume and the writing is much more taut than one finds in a lot of his other books, whose characteristically discursive style I noted here. It is interesting to read Phillips alongside Dufresne because Phillips gives pride of place to the early works, where as Dufresne weights the very last works the same as the earliest.

Phillips repeatedly makes the argument in  Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst that if Freud had died in 1906 then psychoanalysis would have developed very differently, and far less ideologically, without a prescribed history and an apparently inviolable canon of sacred texts, rituals, and rules.

The early Freud, that is up to his turning 50 in 1906, wrote books that evidence a much freer spirit: "Freud in his forties was a younger man than he had ever been: less cautious and more boldly and brashly speculative. And the writings of this period have a corresponding sense of exhilaration and possibility" (145). Of those writings, Phillips singles out five, starting with the landmark The Interpretation of Dreams (1899/1900).

The book on dreams was quickly followed by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).

These books, Phillips says, show more openness to engaging with others--artists, feminists, socialists, among them--though he notes several times Freud's total lack of interest in engaging politics, which he preferred to ignore almost at the cost of his life. Even as late as 1938 he thought that the Nazis were still not a serious threat, and that the Catholic Church was more of an enemy to him as both a Jew and an analyst.

That view is one that is quite understandable in the world Freud grew up in, born in Freiberg in Moravia, then part of the Habsburg Empire, before moving to the imperial capital of Vienna, where he would remain until the last 18 months of his life before being forced to flee to England to "die in freedom."

But with Phillips I tend to see in the early Freud not the hardened hostility to Christianity that would emerge in 1927's Future of an Illusion but, as he says in his concluding line to Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, a man working with ideas and methods "for those eccentrics and dreamers who don't know what to make of themselves."

Evelyn Waugh: A Brief Note About Another Biography

I have previously paid fulsome tribute to Evelyn Waugh on here and elsewhere. At the time I noted the forthcoming publication of another biography, which has since appeared and I have since read: Philip Eade, Evelyn Waugh: a Life Revisited.

I have read it, and after doing so found my judgment unaltered: Douglas Lane Patey's 1998 The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography is far, far and away the superior--indeed superlative--biography of Waugh. Patey's book is not only a scholarly analysis of Waugh's life and work, but it is the most theologically informed and intelligent biography every written of Waugh. Indeed, I would say that it's very high and elegant theological literacy sets the standard for other biographies of Christian writers.

Eade's book, by contrast, pays scant attention to theology, and overall breaks very little new ground. His groundbreaking is extremely workmanlike, without great flourish or insight. So there is nothing wrong, per se, with the book--only that it is superfluous. What few new letters he has purportedly seen he manages, strangely, to render in a very flat and bloodless way, leaving the book teetering on the one social sin Waugh himself regarded as unforgivable: to be a bore.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

When I was still in Ottawa more than a decade ago, I had a friend who was beginning his doctoral dissertation on Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, about whom, until that time, little scholarly work had been written in a systematic style--which should not surprise us given that the popular archbishop was far from being a systematic thinker himself. That did not, however, prevent such books of his as Beginning to Pray and Living Prayer from becoming hugely popular, and remaining in print decades after they were first published.

In the last decade, we have seen a number of works emerge about him, including the collection edited by Gillian Crow, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh: Essential Writings.

Crow is herself the author of a biographical study, This Holy Man: Impressions of Metropolitan Anthony.

At the end of this year, it seems we shall finally have a serious scholarly biography: Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh: A Life by Avril Pyman (Lutterworth, 2016), 288pp.

Pyman is a well known scholar of Russian realities, and author of previous studies including A History of Russian Symbolism and the author, moreover, of what is perhaps the definitive biography of Pavel Florensky: Pavel Florensky: a Quiet Genius. 

Amazon describes this forthcoming book as

A biography of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, based on published and unpublished materials, interviews with surviving contemporaries and the author’s own experience as a pupil of Russian émigrés, of life in the Soviet Union and of the Russian Patriarchal Church in London.

The publisher, Lutterworth, gives us further details:

Andrei Bloom (1914–2003) better known as Anthony Bloom, or Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, led an extraordinary life. He was an individual who sought to be in touch with his God yet in solidarity with and responsibility for a tragically disconnected society; a man of God who "knew the world". From the difficulties of Russian émigré life that conditioned him as "a monk without a monastery", through the trials and suffering of war and revolution, to his calling as Priest and Bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain, he moved between many changing landscapes, striving always to take his bearings in prayer and contemplation.

In spite of the collapse of their whole way of life, his parents brought him up to be a generous and courteous friend to those around him. As a surgeon and doctor in German-occupied France, he would provide treatment to those in need irrespective of ethnic or ideological affiliation. In his character, joy in the good and the beautiful was compounded with ardor and tragic depths. This biography explores how Metropolitan Anthony sought the mind of Christ to cultivate and control his own loving heart and occasionally harsh exigence. 

Avril Pyman draws on a mosaic of available evidence to offer deeper insight into the life and times of a remarkable spiritual teacher, charismatic speaker and priest whose cosmopolitan background, character and experience of science and medicine made a unique and significant contribution to Orthodox Christian thought and practice throughout the world.

We are also given the table of contents:

List of Illustrations
Foreword
Acknowledgements
1. From Prince to Pauper: Origins and Childhood, 1914–1922
2. Alienation and Revelation: Growing up in Exile, 1922–1929
3. Conflicting Vocations: The Formation of a Monk "in the World", 1928–1937
4. Surgeon in the French Army and Monk in the Surgery, 1937–1949
5. Priesthood, Move to London, Ministry in the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain, 1949–1957
6. Fame in a Divided World, 1957–1963
7. The International Arena, 1963–1974
8. The Consolidation of the Second Diocese of Sourozh, 1974–1989
9. Mission to Russia and New Problems in England, 1983–2003
10. Agony
Endnotes
Glossary of Proper Names
Index of Proper Names

At this link you can read excerpts from two chapters.

The Adventure of Marriage

I have previously noted the fascinating figure of Julia Kristeva, the French philosopher and psychoanalyst of Bulgarian Orthodox background. I have also mentioned my longstanding reading of biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and memoirs. So this forthcoming book looks like it will satisfy on both fronts, and thus I look forward to the December release of Kristeva's latest book, co-authored with her husband: Marriage as a Fine Art.

The publisher gives us excerpts from the co-authors, and then the blurb:

"We found so much to say, to share, to learn.... For it wasn't just the Marquis de Sade profile and the sporty thighs-and-calves that seduced me. It was even more, perhaps, or certainly just as much, the speed at which you used to read, and still do."—Julia Kristeva

"We're married, Julia and I, that's a fact, but we each have our own personalities, our own name, activities, and freedom. Love is the full recognition of the other in their otherness. If this other is very close to you, as in this case, it seems to me that what's at stake is harmony within difference. The difference between men and women is irreducible; there's no possibility of fusion."—Philippe Sollers

Marriage as a Fine Art is an enchanting series of exchanges in which Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, married for fifty years, speak candidly about their love. Though they live separately, Kristeva and Sollers are fully committed to each other. Their bond is intellectual and psychological, passionate and mundane. They share everything when together, and lose themselves in their interests when apart. Their marriage is art, rich with history and meaning, idiosyncratic, and dynamic in its expression.

Yet it is also as common as they come. Kristeva and Sollers have lived through the same challenges, peaks, and lulls as all married couples do. With humor and honesty, they elaborate on these moments, turning marriage's familiar aspects into exceptional examples of relating, struggling, transcending, and being. Marriage as a Fine Art is a rare chance to know these intellectuals—and marriage—more intimately.

A Word from Adrian Fortescue

I was invited to be keynote lecturer at the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary's annual conference this past weekend at the lovely Catholic college in Newburgh, NY.

I chose as my topic a question that has long perturbed me: why did Pope Pius IX feel he had the right to proceed with a unilateral dogmatic declaration in 1854 concerning the conception of the Theotokos when:

a) no pope before had dared to dream of doing such a thing; and
b) no dogmatic crisis--whether in Mariology or theology proper in the strict sense--was at hand, and thus the old rule of "nothing is defined until it is denied" was not applicable.

Various traditions and scholars agree that there was no crisis to hand, and thus no obvious dogmatic or theological reason to proceed with a definition. The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, in several places between 1981 and 2004 (helpfully studied in Studying Mary: The Virgin Mary in Anglican and Catholic Theology and Devotion) agreed that the Immaculate Conception arose when there was no crisis to hand.

The great Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov says the same thing, rather wearily and acerbically, in his book The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God. And even conservative Catholic scholars such as Sr. Sara Butler agree that there was no crisis to hand, and thus the justification for a definition must be sought on quite other than theological grounds.

The short answer I proffered, drawing on an article I published last year (“Sovereignty, Politics, and the Church: Joseph de Maistre’s Legacy for Catholic and Orthodox Ecclesiology,” Pro Ecclesia 24 [2015]: 366-389), was that the French Revolution, combined with widespread revolutionary turmoil in 1848, led the pope to realize that there was a crisis to hand, a crisis centred precisely on papal power in the temporal realm, which was rapidly coming to a disastrous end, and therefore some new modus operandi in the world and Church must be sought. Thus we see 1854 as the beginning of the popes as global teachers, a notion well described by the irreplaceable studies of Eamon Duffy and Owen Chadwick.

It would, of course, be too much of a stretch, especially in a short lecture, to suggest there is a direct route between 1854 and 2016, but I did sketch out enough evidence, I thought, to indicate some highly probable links between the 1854 definition, the 1950 definition of the Assumption by another pope named Pius, and also the burgeoning papacy commenting on everything under the sun and inserting itself into all manner of thing well and truly beyond its brief. This problem began with Pius IX in 1854, increased under Leo XIII, and then became more and more acute with every pope from him to the current incumbent of the Roman bishopric who seems to have missed all the warnings in the Apophthegmata Patrum about the importance of bridling one's tongue lest that organ become a σκάνδαλον to the brethren.

Then, for effect on a hot summer evening after three days of a conference, I threw in some spicy bits at the end calling for an overhaul of the papacy to prevent any future popes not only from proceeding with unilateral dogmatic definitions, but also from hosting flying press conferences, having Twitter accounts, giving interviews to anyone for any reason about any topic, and much else besides. I concluded with an especially bon mot from Adrian Fortescue, the English priest-scholar and Orientalist whose views on the papacy were much more acerbic, and much more polemically conveyed, than anything I have ever done in, e.g., my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy. (It seems a great pity that many of his choicest phrases are to be found in his correspondence, very little of which seems to have been published except in excerpts here and there--as in Aidan Nichols intellectual biography, The Latin Clerk: The Life, Work and Travels of Adrian Fortescue.)

Writing--note well--in 1920, Fortescue, a stout defender of the papacy and Church in other contexts, was forced to admit, “I wish to goodness that the pope would never speak at all except when he means to define ex cathedra. Then we should know where we are.”

To which let all the weary brethren say: Amen, Amen!