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Theological Amnesia: dreaming a book to write in my dotage

Using Clive James’s book as a springboard for imagining a similar volume dedicated to theological themes and writers from the twentieth century.

I remain enamored with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia.

By way of reminder, it’s an 850-page encyclopedia of twentieth century European letters, life, politics, and war, with diversions into Asia and the Americas as the occasion demands. It’s organized as a series of short essays on 112 writers, artists, musicians, dancers, comedians, actors, directors, generals, and politicians, ordered alphabetically by surname. There are maybe one or two dozen figures who antedate the twentieth century, mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tacitus is premodern; I can’t recall if there is another). James selects the names entirely by personal preference, affection, and the importance he deems their role in the times—whether or not that importance is recognized by others. Most of the chapters are love letters: he wants his readers to love what he loves. But not all of them; Mao, Hitler, and Goebbels have entries, as do Sartre, Benjamin, Brasillach, and Kollantai. He despises them all. Another goal, then, is for readers to learn to hate what he hates, and why.

The themes of the work cluster around the twin disasters of Nazism and Stalinism, which is to say, the prelude to World War II, the nightmare of the Final Solution, and their contested half-lives in the Cold War. James celebrates the fragility and triumph of liberalism over communism and fascism. For “liberalism” read “humanism.” He wants his readers, whom he imagines as students, not to succumb to the forgetfulness so common to liberal cultures. Amnesia, in his view, is the precondition for political tragedy, because it makes the poison of ideology go down less noticeably. Memory is the antidote, necessary if not sufficient.

I noted in a previous post that, if all you had was James’s book, you would think religion was a failed experiment, universally accepted and proclaimed as such by World War I at the latest. He includes no explicitly religious writers and only a handful of Christians, whose faith, as he sees it, is utterly incidental to the value of their thought or the quality of their writing.

Although not all his subjects are writers, it is writing in which he is principally interested. This is a book about style: James admires no one whose prose lacks grace or verve; a unique voice on the page covers a multitude of sins. Each entry begins with a brief autobiographical introduction, then an epigraph from the artist, then an essay to match it. The essay is free to go in any direction it pleases, which sometimes means it isn’t about the name at the head of the chapter at all. But it is never off topic and never not a pleasure to read. That’s how he gets away with it. The book is a monument to his own vanity, and yet he pulls it off anyway.

Given how deeply personal such an endeavor must have been for James, I find myself imagining, as I come to the book’s close (I have around twenty chapters to go), what another version would look like. Scratch that: I wonder what my version would look like. It goes without saying that I could never write a book one tenth as good as this one. And for erudition and scope, only someone like David Bentley Hart could manage writing the book as it exists in my imagination.

That said, I can’t stop thinking about it.

Suppose the parameters were the same: An alphabetized encyclopedia of the century just past, centered on and after World War II, featuring mini-essays on more than a hundred authors, artists, and public figures, selected by whimsy and pleasure but centered around a determinate set of themes that would emerge organically as readers moved from name to name in a kind of spiral or web. But suppose, in addition, that the goal was to highlight religion, in particular Christian life and thought, in a supposedly secular century. Suppose, too, that the center of gravity moved across the Atlantic to North America, and instead of comedy, ballet, and journalism, attention was paid to film, sports, and philosophy. James’s interest in the lost world of prewar Vienna would be transmuted into contemplating the legacy of the American West and the subsequent export of American culture to the world. Further themes would announce themselves: the problem of atheism; the boredom of secularism; the rise of Islam; the irrelevance of public theology; the return of the convert; the renewal of monasticism; and the modern martyr, in all its varieties.

The secret of James’s selectivity is that, in considering only some, he sneaks in all the rest. He has no entries on Kant, Pound, Joyce, Auden, Berlin, Eliot, Heidegger, Solzhenitsyn, Costa-Gravas, Kissinger, Einstein, Shakespeare, Dickens, Stalin, Lenin, or Orwell, but look in the Index, and you’ll see plenty of page numbers for each of them. He makes no apologies for whom he does and does not include, since a potted history is the only possibility for a personal literary breviary such as this one. He’s certainly not choosing for race, gender, nationality, or ideological bona fides. Remember: this is a catalogues of his loves, together with a few of his hatreds, presented (with a straight face and tongue in cheek, neither somehow canceling out the other) as what’s worth remembering from the most violent century in human history.

If you don’t share my reaction—that the world needs more books like this one—I don’t know what to tell you. If you do share my reaction, read on.

*

The title of my imaginary book, naturally enough, is Theological Amnesia. It’s an antidote to an antidote. James has forgotten faith: not his own, but others’. It didn’t go underground. It was never relegated to the private sphere. He and his ilk just chose to ignore it, and given the genuine changes in Western societies since the Enlightenment, they could afford to do so. They did so, however, at their peril.

Two subtitles are competing in my mind: Authors and Artists from a Long Secular Century vs. Authors and Artists from the Long American Century. The former is clearer, in its irony, about the book’s subtheme, whereas the latter foregrounds the cultural focus. (Now I’m wondering whether I should add mention of martyrs, saints, and others besides. Hm.)

Either way, that’s the pitch. Below are the names.

A few words of explanation. First, the number ballooned from 112 to 150. That was only after nixing an additional 150. I do not know how James did it. It’s an impossible choice.

Second, I justified the larger number—for, I remind myself and you, dear reader, my completely imaginary book—by recourse to James’s word count. While some essays are 4-6 pages, many are 8-12 pages, and some are much more than that. All in all, his book totals around 350,000 words. If I wrote an average 2,200 words per entry, even with 150 names that would make for a smaller book than James’s. In the alternate universe where a more learned variant of myself attempts to write this book in my 70s … a publisher definitely goes for it. Right? (Let me have this.)

Third and finally, I did my best to keep to James’s temporal center of gravity. No one on my list is born after the mid-1950s, and any of them who are still alive today (a) are approaching their ninth or tenth decade of life and (b) became famous, having done their most important and influential work, in the closing decades of the last century. Everyone else on the list lived and wrote between the Great War and the fall of the Soviet Union—except, that is, for the handful of premodern authors (five or six) and figures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (maybe a dozen) whom I felt compelled to include.

Without further adieu, then, here is the fake table of contents for my imaginary book. If I live long enough to be an emeritus professor, full of leisure time and surrounded by scores of grandchildren, don’t be surprised when I self-publish a thousand-page version of this idea, with copies distributed to friends and family only. I’ll leave it to history to decide whether it’s an unheralded classic or a painful exercise in imitation gone awry.

Theological Amnesia: Writers and Thinkers, Saints and Martyrs from a Long Secular Century

  1. Thomas J. J. Altizer

  2. G. E. M. Anscombe

  3. Hannah Arendt

  4. W. H. Auden

  5. Augustine of Hippo

  6. Jane Austen

  7. James Baldwin

  8. J. G. Ballard

  9. Hans Urs von Balthasar

  10. Karl Barth

  11. Saul Bellow

  12. Isaiah Berlin

  13. Georges Bernanos

  14. Wendell Berry

  15. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  16. Jorge Luis Borges

  17. Peter Brown

  18. Sergei Bulgakov

  19. Roberto Calasso

  20. John Calvin

  21. Albert Camus

  22. John le Carré

  23. G. K. Chesterton

  24. J. M. Coetzee

  25. James Cone

  26. Christopher Dawson

  27. Dorothy Day

  28. Simone de Beauvoir

  29. Henri de Lubac

  30. Augusto del Noce

  31. Charles Dickens

  32. Annie Dillard

  33. Walt Disney

  34. Fyodor Dostoevsky

  35. Frederick Douglass

  36. Clint Eastwood

  37. T. S. Eliot

  38. Frantz Fanon

  39. Patrick Leigh Fermor

  40. Ludwig Feuerbach

  41. John Ford

  42. Michel Foucault

  43. Sigmund Freud

  44. Mahātmā Gandhi

  45. Billy Graham

  46. Graham Greene

  47. Ursula K. le Guin

  48. Adolf von Harnack

  49. Martin Heidegger

  50. George Herbert

  51. Abraham Joshua Heschel

  52. Alfred Hitchcock

  53. Gerard Manley Hopkins

  54. Michel Houellebecq

  55. Aldous Huxley

  56. Ivan Illich

  57. P. D. James

  58. William James

  59. Robert Jenson

  60. Tony Judt

  61. Franz Kafka

  62. Søren Kierkegaard

  63. Martin Luther King Jr.

  64. Stephen King

  65. Ronald Knox

  66. Leszek Kołakowski

  67. Stanley Kubrick

  68. Akira Kurosawa

  69. Christopher Lasch

  70. Stan Lee

  71. Denise Levertov

  72. C. S. Lewis

  73. George Lucas

  74. John Lukacs

  75. Martin Luther

  76. Dwight Macdonald

  77. Alasdair MacIntyre

  78. Malcolm X

  79. Terrence Malick

  80. Jacques Maritain

  81. François Mauriac

  82. Cormac McCarthy

  83. Larry McMurtry

  84. Herman Melville

  85. H. L. Mencken

  86. Thomas Merton

  87. Mary Midgley

  88. Czesław Miłosz

  89. Hayao Miyazaki

  90. Malcolm Muggeridge

  91. Albert Murray

  92. Les Murray

  93. John Henry Newman

  94. H. Richard Niebuhr

  95. Reinhold Niebuhr

  96. Friedrich Nietzsche

  97. Flannery O’Connor

  98. Robert Oppenheimer

  99. George Orwell

  100. Yasujirō Ozu

  101. Blaise Pascal

  102. Paul of Tarsus

  103. Walker Percy

  104. Karl Popper

  105. Neil Postman

  106. Thomas Pynchon

  107. Sayyid Qutb

  108. Joseph Ratzinger

  109. Marilynne Robinson

  110. Fred Rogers

  111. Franz Rosenzweig

  112. Salman Rushdie

  113. John Ruskin

  114. Bill Russell

  115. Edward Said

  116. Margaret Sanger

  117. Dorothy Sayers

  118. Paul Schrader

  119. George Scialabba

  120. Martin Scorsese

  121. Roger Scruton

  122. Peter Singer

  123. Maria Skobtsova

  124. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  125. Sophrony the Athonite

  126. Wole Soyinka

  127. Steven Spielberg

  128. Wallace Stegner

  129. Edith Stein

  130. Leo Strauss

  131. Preston Sturges

  132. Andrei Tartovsky

  133. Charles Taylor

  134. Mother Teresa

  135. Thérèse of Lisieux

  136. Thomas Aquinas

  137. R. S. Thomas

  138. J. R. R. Tolkien

  139. John Kennedy Toole

  140. Desmond Tutu

  141. John Updike

  142. Sigrid Undset

  143. Evelyn Waugh

  144. Simone Weil

  145. H. G. Wells

  146. Rebecca West

  147. Oprah Winfrey

  148. Ludwig Wittgenstein

  149. Karol Wojtyła

  150. Franz Wright

*

Update (8/2): I should have thought to include a list of James’s entries, so that those unfamiliar with the book could see the names he chose, as well as compare them with mine. Apparently his list comes only to 106, not 112; perhaps I came to that number by counting the introductory and concluding essays. In any case, here you go:

  1. Anna Akhmatova

  2. Peter Altenberg

  3. Louis Armstrong

  4. Raymond Aron

  5. Walter Benjamin

  6. Marc Bloch

  7. Jorge Luis Borges

  8. Robert Brasillach

  9. Sir Thomas Browne

  10. Albert Camus

  11. Dick Cavett

  12. Paul Celan

  13. Chamfort

  14. Coco Chanel

  15. Charles Chaplin

  16. Nirad C. Chaudhuri

  17. G. K. Chesterton

  18. Jean Cocteau

  19. Gianfranco Contini

  20. Benedetto Croce

  21. Tony Curtis

  22. Ernst Robert Curtius

  23. Miles Davis

  24. Sergei Diaghilev

  25. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

  26. Alfred Einstein

  27. Duke Ellington

  28. Federico Fellini

  29. W. C. Fields

  30. F. Scott Fitzgerald

  31. Gustave Flaubert

  32. Sigmund Freud

  33. Egon Friedell

  34. François Furet

  35. Charles de Gaulle

  36. Edward Gibbon

  37. Terry Gilliam

  38. Joseph Goebbels

  39. Witold Gombrowicz

  40. William Hazlitt

  41. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  42. Heinrich Heine

  43. Adolf Hitler

  44. Ricarda Huch

  45. Ernst Jünger

  46. Franz Kafka

  47. John Keats

  48. Leszek Kołakowski

  49. Alexandra Kollontai

  50. Heda Margolius Kovály

  51. Karl Kraus

  52. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  53. Norman Mailer

  54. Nadezhda Mandelstam

  55. Golo Mann

  56. Heinrich Mann

  57. Michael Mann

  58. Thomas Mann

  59. Mao Zedong

  60. Chris Marker

  61. John McCloy

  62. Zinka Milanov

  63. Czesław Miłosz

  64. Eugenio Montale

  65. Montesquieu

  66. Alan Moorehead

  67. Paul Muratov

  68. Lewis Namier

  69. Grigory Ordzhonokidze

  70. Octavio Paz

  71. Alfred Polgar

  72. Beatrix Potter

  73. Jean Prévost

  74. Marcel Proust

  75. Edgar Quinet

  76. Marcel Reich-Ranicki

  77. Jean-François Revel

  78. Richard Rhodes

  79. Rainer Maria Rilke

  80. Virginio Rognoni

  81. Ernesto Sabato

  82. Edward Said

  83. Sainte-Beuve

  84. José Saramago

  85. Jean-Paul Sartre

  86. Erik Satie

  87. Arthur Schnitzler

  88. Sophie Scholl

  89. Wolf Jobst Siedler

  90. Manès Sperber

  91. Tacitus

  92. Margaret Thatcher

  93. Henning von Tresckow

  94. Leon Trotsky

  95. Karl Tschuppik

  96. Dubravka Ugrešić

  97. Miguel de Unamuno

  98. Pedro Henríquez Ureña

  99. Paul Valéry

  100. Mario Vargas Llosa

  101. Evelyn Waugh

  102. Ludwig Wittgenstein

  103. Isoroku Yamamoto

  104. Aleksandr Zinoviev

  105. Carl Zuckmayer

  106. Stefan Zweig

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Brad East Brad East

Malick and Scorsese on confession and martyrdom

The two people to read on Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019) are Jon Baskin (in NYRB) and Alan Jacobs (in The Point as well as his blog). One thing I assume others have noted but that struck me in my viewing is the likeness to and contrast with Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016).

The two people to read on Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019) are Jon Baskin (in NYRB) and Alan Jacobs (in The Point as well as his blog). One thing I assume others have noted but that struck me in my viewing is the likeness to and contrast with Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016).

Both directors are 1970s auteurs. Both are Americans born during World War II. Both are Roman Catholic in one sense or another. Both have made multiple films featuring explicitly Christian themes. In fact, within the next year or two, both will have directed films about Jesus of Nazareth himself.

Moreover, both A Hidden Life and Silence are rooted in historical events, though the latter is an adaptation of a novel fictionalizing something that happened centuries prior, while the former is an imaginative evocation of a real man’s life and martyrdom, based on his personal correspondence. As it happens, the execution of Franz Jägerstätter occurred less than four months before Malick’s birth.

Finally, both films are about faith under conditions of persecution, the meaning (or meaninglessness) of suffering, the command of Christ under duress, and martyrdom. Scorsese and Malick come to very different conclusions, however.

To be sure, neither film imposes a particular interpretation on the viewer. Personally, I read Silence against what are Scorsese’s evident intentions: namely, to vindicate Rodrigues’s ultimate decision to step on the fumie, i.e., to repudiate and blaspheme the image and name of Christ. He does so, under impossible pressure, not only from Japanese authorities, who are torturing Japanese Christians before his very eyes, but also from Ferreira, a fellow priest who preceded Rodrigues’s time in Japan. Ferreira wants Rodrigues to see that nothing is gained by not giving in. He is the voice of “reason” absolving Rodrigues in advance of his betrayal. At last Rodrigues does the deed. In a long epilogue, we see him going about his life aiding the Japanese in keeping Christianity out of the country. But when he dies and is given a customary burial, his wife slips a crucifix into his hands—on which Scorsese zooms in the final image of the film.

Again, Scorsese is clear: he wants us to approve of Rodrigues, who saved the lives of believers under his care, relieving their suffering, while keeping the faith quietly, privately, silently. Here Scorsese is wrong both in his theological instincts and in his artistic instincts—he need not try to stack the deck so obviously—yet the film remains patient of other readings, including readings wholly contrary to Scorsese’s own intentions.

Now consider A Hidden Life. Over and over, Franz is asked a variety of the same question: “What are you wanting to accomplish? Your death will do nothing. It will make no difference. No one will even know of it. The only result will be the suffering and shame brought upon your widow, your orphaned daughters, your mother, and your village.” Franz’s calculus, however, is not consequentialist. It’s a matter of principle. He cannot do what he believes to be wrong, even if it will make no difference whatsoever. (And it’s worth noting that basically no one knew his story for decades after his death.)

In a pivotal scene late in the film, Franz’s wife Fani visits him in prison. As they face each other across a table, his lawyer gives him one last chance: if he signs a piece of paper, the execution will be stayed, and he will be permitted to work in a hospital—he won’t even have to fight as a soldier. The only price is the oath of loyalty to Hitler.

With the paper before him, Franz’s parish priest joins Fani at the table and makes the following appeal (this is a quote, not a paraphrase):

God doesn’t care what you say, only what’s in your heart. Say the oaths and think what you like.

This is precisely Ferreira’s advice to Rodrigues. And here it is likewise a Catholic priest meaning well. It doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter if you repudiate Christ; it doesn’t matter if you deny his lordship and pledge yourself instead to Der Führer. What matters is your heart. Think, feel, believe what you like—quietly, privately, silently—so long as you step on the image; so long as you swear the oath.

Franz refuses. And he never sees his wife again. Soon thereafter he is taken to the guillotine. He is killed “for no reason,” “senselessly,” by his own stubborn refusal to do the “sensible” thing, for the sake of others—his own beloved family. The Nazis kill him in a windowless room away from witnesses or crowds. He dies alone. For what?

The film as a whole is the answer. The rationale underlying it, though, highlights the contrast with Scorsese. Who you are is not separate from what you say and do. “You” are not “within.” “You” are your words and actions—full stop. The distinction between the inner self and external behavior is not a division, much less a chasm separating the real from the ephemeral. As Christ promises: “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven.”

Confession manifests the self. There is no you except the you who acts in the world. The life and death of Franz Jägerstätter—beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007—reveals this truth, and Malick understands it. Based on the evidence of Silence, Scorsese does not.

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