Angels and the Modern City

Wings of Desire
* A Film by Wim Wenders
* Produced by Anatole Dauman, Screenplay by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke
* Bruno Ganz as Damiel, Solveig Dommartin as Marion, Otto Sandler as Cassiel, Curt Bois as Homer, Peter Falk as Himself

Eternity is in love with the productions of time. --Blake

I’d like to get something straight from the start. I’m no great fan of moving pictures. The cinema, for me, has always been suspect. I think of it as a form of diversion that waits round every corner, an escapism we’ll never escape.

The 20th century’s great art form, a totalizing art that’s taken over so much of our lives--to assess its influence is almost impossible for us. We’ve grown up inside it, we live our lives under its spell. Unlike the great art forms of the past, cinema seems mostly a means of avoiding life, or snuffing life out. Its flickering images are too compelling; we’re too easily taken in by such devastating visual powers. And the powers that cinema lends us are nearly always a sham. What are we left with after the credits run? We’ve been “entertained,” and wait for the next fix.

Although the cinema certainly matters to me (my point here, after all, is that it’s impossible for it not to matter) and although I’m often compelled by a particular movie for the two hours I watch it, it’s rare that a film will answer the demands that I bring, say, to reading. It’s rare a film forces me to widen my thoughts the way certain novels do. There are few movies, in other words, that actually thrill me beyond the experience of watching, that make me see something new in relation to spiritual life or think something new in relation to the problem of being human.

Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire is the only film of these few that’s made me want to write about it. It’s the only film I return to, and muse over.

For me Wings of Desire is not just Wenders’ masterpiece, but one of the peaks of cinema. If the art of cinema has a Divine Comedy, it must be this single film by Wenders.

Never has a film given such compelling answers to such pressing questions. Not clearcut answers, but paradoxical, ambiguous ones. That a filmmaker can bring such existential problems to such immediate, tangible presence is a thing to wonder over. Wenders makes these questions drive every scene in his film.

Is there a spiritual realm behind the material existence we experience every day? If so, what are the relations between spiritual and material? Is human history a parade of disasters finally leading nowhere (or leading, perhaps, to some terminal disaster)? Does anyone hear our voices? Do our voices resonate with some divine Word or words? Our triumphs and perils--are they connected to some ultimate purpose, part of some cosmic conflict, or are they meaningless? And finally: If a spiritual realm does exist, why would it concern itself with us? Is it in any meaningful way intermingled with us?

Wenders’ film stands apart. It manages to convey the immediacy of such questions to modern life. Wings of Desire is bizarre, in a wry, humorous way, but at the same time utterly serious. Wenders’ genius was to make a film both compellingly realistic, as a documentary of life in modern Berlin, and convincingly metaphysical, as a tale of the angels in charge of watching over the great city.

Wenders collaborated on the film with Austrian novelist Peter Handke, and it’s clear that Handke’s particular genius is behind much of the lyricism. One of Handke’s books I treasure is a collection of his notebook jottings, titled The Weight of the World in English translation. One can hear in his aphorisms the same writerly genius that wrought some of the film’s finest dialogues.

Wings of Desire develops the tension that holds between angels and humans, examining the distance between their separate realms and the yearning that would bridge that distance. The angelic realm is particularly fascinating here because it is one we haven't ever glimpsed in such a tactile way. Wenders’ angelic realm doesn't exactly conform to traditional ideas of angels.

Though his angels hover over Berlin and can move in and around it at will, though they can enter any room or office and observe the people there, they also overhear the thoughts that run through individuals’ heads. The viewer too hears these thoughts as voiceovers.

We learn that the angels have been preparing for this job of overseeing since the beginning of time. The two we meet as characters have in fact been present over this same plot of ground since well before the city arose, even since before human history. At first they merely awaited the arrival of “the one created in our image,” i.e. man. Then, after the earliest humans arrived on the scene, their waiting took on a different character.

Human beings in this film come forth as a result of evolution, but they come forth destined to fulfill a spiritual potential. Wenders’ myth of men and angels thus strays from the orthodox religious accounts, but has, to be sure, its parallel with orthodoxy as well.

Having watched human beings from the beginning, the angels in some ways understand us better than we understand ourselves. In particular they understand how we reach for what is spiritual, how we sense but can’t quite enter into the spiritual realm just beyond us. This understanding, however, doesn’t necessarily imply an intellectual superiority. Although their realm overlaps with ours, and although they can read our thoughts, there remains the barrier, a barrier experienced as such by both sides.

We humans cannot see the angels and cannot normally converse with them. We may even doubt their existence. For their part, they cannot know what life really is for us, what it feels like. Wenders gives us their world in black and white and makes it clear that they can never really touch things in a human way. The coldness or warmth, color, taste, texture of things--these remain beyond them. Being that they transcend time, they cannot really know time either. They cannot know its human meaning. Intellectually, they may know that man lives in the present, that man’s present is ever running out, ever dragging him toward death. They know this, as a matter of fact, but they don't know what it feels like to actually live within it.

The angels’ curiosity about the true lives of men leads to desire. Their lack of real life, of the tragic feel of life, eventually leads some of them to want to shake off their eternity and join man in his time-bound state. The desire of the angels to fall is Wenders' most brilliant twist. Not to fall like Lucifer, by a denial of God, but to fall through a need for human warmth, through a curiosity or empathy for human life. The angels, in their perfection, fall in love with man, with his compelling imperfection. One may say the film is a gloss on Blake’s maxim: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Wenders makes of this love a beautiful meditation on the worldly and the divine.

It's through the dialogues of the two angels Damiel and Cassiel (played by Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander) that we learn of their long waiting for man’s gestation. We learn also of their current task, their calling: to witness the development in man of “spirit.” Thus Damiel and Cassiel watch over the lives of Berliners and keep note of what they see and hear. Having to testify to man’s spiritual reach, they must gather evidence of it.

One of the most telling dialogues as regards Damiel and Cassiel’s work takes place when they meet to share notes. It’s evident that the two occasionally make reports to each other of their individual observations, things they’ve seen and heard as they each wandered around Berlin. They are seated in a car on display in a car dealer’s showroom, invisible to the mortals around them. Cassiel first takes out a small notebook and begins giving the standard readings:

CASSIEL: Sunrise and 7:22 a.m. Sunset at 4:28 p.m. Moonrise at [. . . .] Twenty years ago today a Soviet jet fighter crashed into the lake at Spandau. Fifty years ago there were the Olympic Games. Two-hundred years ago Blanchard flew over the city in a balloon.

DAMIEL: Like the fugitives the other day.

CASSIEL: And today, on the Lilienthaler Chaussee, a man, walking, slowed down, and looked over his shoulder into space. At post office 44, a man who wants to end it all today pasted rare stamps on his farewell letters, a different one on each. He spoke English with an American soldier--the first time since his schooldays--and fluently. A prisoner at Plotzenzee, just before ramming his head against the wall, said: 'Now!' At the Zoo U-Bahn station, instead of the station's name, the conductor suddenly shouted: 'Tierra del Fuego!'

DAMIEL: Nice.

CASSIEL: In the hills, an old man read the Odyssey to a child. And the young listener stopped blinking his eyes. . . . And what do you have to tell?

DAMIEL: A woman on the street folded her umbrella while it rained and let herself get drenched. A schoolboy who described to his teacher how a fern grows out of the earth, and the astonished teacher. A blind woman who groped for her watch, feeling my presence. . . . It's great to live only by the spirit, to testify day by day, for eternity, to the spiritual side of people. But sometimes I get fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel there's some weight to me. To end my eternity, and bind me to earth. At each step, at each gust of wind, I'd like to be able to say: 'Now! Now! and Now!' And no longer say: 'Since always' and 'Forever.' To sit in the empty seat at a card table, and be greeted, if only by a nod. . . . Whenever we did participate, it was only a pretense. Wrestling with one of them, we allowed a hip to be dislocated, in pretense only. We pretended to catch a fish. We pretended to be seated at the tables. And to drink and eat. . . . Not that I want to plant a tree or give birth to a child right away. But it would be quite something to come home after a long day, like Philip Marlowe, and feed the cat. To have a fever. To have blackened fingers from the newspaper. . . . To feel your skeleton moving along as you walk. Finally to suspect, instead of forever knowing all. To be able to say 'Ah!' and 'Oh!' and 'Hey!' instead of 'Yes' and 'Amen'.

This dialogue begins as a lyrical testimony to the ways in which man's spirit seeks to break through the pragmatic weight of everyday life. The train conductor who shouts “Tierra del Fuego!” and the man who sends his farewell letters each with a rare stamp from his collection are both kicking against the limits of the mundane. But by the dialogue’s end the focus has shifted in the other direction. Damiel’s yearning for the weight of the world brings him to make almost equally lyrical evocations of what he imagines human life to be like: “To have a fever. . . . Finally to suspect, instead of forever knowing all.”

It is in this dialogue, in its contrast between the two kinds of yearning, human and angelic, that the film affirms its theme. It is a heterodox theology of sorts, or at least angelology, that suggests a necessary and permanent tension between beings of pure spirit, on the one hand, and we humans who commingle spirit and matter, on the other. It regards the lack one suffers without the other.

This is not orthodox Christianity, certainly, but it is close. The film offers a far-reaching heuristic that points to certain of the fundamental Christian mysteries.

Wenders further develops the integration of these two sides through the motif of falling. We humans have long imagined that transcending the limits of our earthbound lives meant rising up: if we could only take flight, all that is banal or merely mortal would be left behind. First, we would fly like the birds, escaping the clutches of family and the law, crossing over walls and borders. Who could pursue us? Then, taking this imagined flight further, we might literally succeed in ascending to Heaven, crossing over from time into eternity, leaving death behind on the surface of a fallen, corrupted earth.

The dream of flight and its concomitant fear of falling is incarnated in the figure of Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a once-aspiring trapeze artist about to give her very last performance. The small-time circus Marion works in is going to close down for lack of money. She knows very well she’ll have to return to waitressing: her dream of rising up through her art was a delusion. But there is more that nags her before her last night. Trapeze is a dangerous art, and what if, her very last time above the crowd, she should lose her composure and fall and break her neck? Along with her coming fall from the ideal life as a circus artist, there is also the grim possibility of a literal fall, one that is frighteningly material.

The angel Damiel, in his growing desire to fall into humanity, grows increasingly fascinated with Marion. We see her through his eyes and hear her thoughts through his ears. Eventually Damiel will truly fall from his angelic state and come together with her.

What does it mean that the film’s last scene shows Marion again practicing trapeze while Damiel, erstwhile angel, holds the rope that anchors her to earth? She didn’t need to renounce her art after all. A new balance between heaven and earth is established, a balance this time effected through the love between man and woman.

Wenders charges theological speculation with romance, with Eros, and vice versa. He gives us a love story with a subtle cosmic significance. There’s no love story like it, in film or modern literature, that I know of.

Falling. Scenes of falling are everywhere in this movie, but it is only Damiel’s falling for Marion that is simultaneously a kind of transcendence. The other cases of falling include auto accident, film stunt (a fake sort of falling), suicide (a young man leaps from a building) and the angel Cassiel’s pathetic attempt to experience what that suicide must have felt like. Having been unable to prevent it, he’s led to a confused empathy: he will repeat the young man’s suicide by himself falling from Golden Else’s shoulder atop the Victory Column. But since Cassiel is both immortal and weightless, his fall can be nothing like true suicide.

Cassiel, in fact, offers the all-around professional angel: the angel as mid-level management. In each instance he lacks Damiel’s grace and sympathy. He’s closer to abstract intelligence and further from creative, living being. In the same meeting with Damiel quoted above, we learn that what most attracts Cassiel to the idea of falling is the possibility of experiencing evil. Cassiel, as angels go, is in a more Luciferian mode, more in the mode of the angel classically understood. Is Damiel, then, in a mode closer to Christ?

Wenders doesn’t stress the notion that Damiel might be somehow Christlike, unless it is in his interactions with children. One way we may think of him as Christlike is in the sense rendered by a rewritten, pared down John 3:16: “For Damiel so loved the world that he gave his eternity in order to be with man.” Which is quite pared down indeed, though the parallel is strong enough that one cannot neglect it. Damiel, in any case, is more Christlike than Cassiel, if only because he is more human; he is animated more by love than by whatever it is that animates Cassiel.

Love, transcendence, human history, mortality: these themes taken up by Wenders give his film a potentially epic character. Not epic in the Hollywood sense, but epic in the traditional sense of a story of foundations: the story of the heroic struggles that defined us.

The theme of epic story is made explicit through the character of the despairing old storyteller (Curt Bois), the old Berliner who is at the same time a kind of would-be Homer. His criticism of the world around him is familiar. According to him, the possibilities of wonder, of storytelling, are finished: men have become both too sophisticated and too impoverished through their scientific knowledge; they’ve lost the world through their destructive know-how. Many of us will sympathize with this Homer.

Where are my heroes? Where are you, my children? Where are my own, the dull-witted, the first, the original ones? . . . Name me, Muse, the immortal singer. Who, abandoned by his mortal listeners, lost his voice. How, from being an angel of storytelling, he became an organ-grinder, ignored or mocked. Outside, on the threshold of no-man's land.

The no-man’s land he wanders are the dead zones and nearly dead zones bordering the (still standing) Berlin Wall. He is looking for the location of Potsdammer Platz, which has been effaced by the changes brought about by the war and then the division of the city between East and West.

Wenders’ lamenting Homer is a figure for those among us who see our advancements as only alienating us further from the authentically human. Our lament is implicitly criticized by Wenders. For in the very same city where the old storyteller wanders distraught there is occurring “a story of new ancestors”--namely the story of the fall of Damiel and his love for Marion. And if I love this film so much it’s because Wenders, in his magnificent artistry, is nearly convincing. One is nearly brought round to believing that, yes, it is possible to tell stories about our world that might matter to us as much as the ancient stories mattered: those, say, of Adam and Eve, or Odysseus.

Marion had dreamed of a man in her sleep, a man who came to her. In fact it was Damiel who, in his angelic form, was lying in her bed by her side. When Damiel finally falls, a day or two later, he comes to the pub where Marion goes to dance. He comes to find her, only her. But it is she who approaches the bar where he's waiting. The two turn to each other and Marion, recognizing the face from the dream, begins her monologue about how, finally, things are getting “serious.” Following the drama of Damiel and Cassiel, Marion’s monologue is the lyrical high point of the film. She speaks it just inches from Damiel, a man she’d never before seen in the flesh; she speaks it with halting confidence, a frankness and softness that mean he is only to listen, to hear from her mouth the meaning of their new love. I’ll finish by quoting her monologue in full:

It's time to get serious. . . . I was often alone, but I never lived alone. When I was with someone I was often happy. But I also felt it's all a matter of chance. These people are my parents, but it could have been others. Why was that brown-eyed boy my brother, and not the green-eyed boy on the opposite platform? The taxi driver's daughter was my friend, but I could just as well have embraced a horse's head. I was with a man. I was in love. But I could just as well have left him there, and continued on with the stranger who came toward us. . . . Look at me, or don't. Give me your hand, or don't. No, don't give me your hand, and look the other way. . . . I think there's a new moon tonight. No night is more peaceful. No blood will be shed in the whole city. . . . I never toyed with anyone. And yet, I never opened my eyes and thought: 'This is it.' . . . It's finally getting serious. So I've grown older. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Is it our times that are not serious? I was never lonely. Neither when I was alone, nor with others. I would have liked to be alone at last. Loneliness means at last I am whole. Now I can say it because today I am finally lonely. No more coincidence. . . . The new moon of decision. I don't know if destiny exists, but decision does exist. Decide. Now we are the times. Not only the whole city, but the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are more than just two. We personify something. We are sitting in the People's Plaza, and the whole plaza is filled with people, who all wish for what we wish for. We are deciding everyone's game. I am ready. Now it's your turn. You're holding the game in your hand. Now or never. You need me. You will need me. There's no greater story than ours. That of man and woman. It will be a story of giants. Invisible, transposable. A story of new ancestors. Look. My eyes. They are the picture of necessity, of the future of everyone on the plaza. Last night I dreamt of a stranger. Of my man. Only with him could I be lonely. Open up to him. Completely open, completely for him. Welcome him completely into myself. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know it is you.

[esssay: January 2002; revised]

RICHARD DAWKINS SMART, NEW BOOK SHOW AGAIN

Review of Richard Dawkins: Outgrowing God
Random House, 284 pp.

Dawkins very smart. Have new book. For teens. Teens read then they smart too. 

Dawkins book have neat Idea: “Let Teens Decide For Themselves”. Teens decide. Then join Dawkins defeat dumb Christians. 

Because Christians DUMB.

So I read the Dawkins new book. It come out last Fall. But I finally read now. 

I see book give classic arguments EVER. They same arguments in GOD DELUSION book. Oh classic!

Here my keen summarize of CLASSIC ARGUMENTS:

     If God real, why many other gods?
     If God real, why bad thing happen?
     If God real, why atheist good?
     If God real, why universe so big?
     If God real, why Jesus not teach science?
     If God real, why monkey?
     If God real, why He no have own God?
     If God real, why bad thing feel good?
     If God real, why I do bad thing go to Hell?

You see now. The Dawkins very smart. And he NOT EVEN READ philosophers he refute. It AMAZING. 

So YOU. Get copy Dawkins Book and be REALLY SMART and SCIENTIFIC. DO this NOW, then you be BRIGHT.

Eric Mader

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest humor in the west.

With special thanks to Another Aquinas Avi.

The Brilliance and Theological Oddity of Shusaku Endo’s Silence

The first Christian missionaries arrived in Japan in 1549. By 1583, an estimated 200,000 Japanese, from both the upper classes and the peasantry, had converted to the new faith, convincing the Jesuits who started the mission that Japan was their great hope in the Far East. This period of success, however, was followed by a sharp reversal. Japan's rulers, many of whom had themselves been baptized, decided that Catholicism was not suited to Japan, and suddenly, in a complete about-face, banned the religion completely.

There followed a persecution of extreme brutality. Through burning, crucifixion and a wide variety of other tortures, the new Japanese Christians were forced to renounce Christ. To the astonishment of the rulers, many brave souls refused even under such duress. These ended up martyrs.

Churches were destroyed, possession of Christian objects (icons, crosses, rosaries) was strictly forbidden, and ultimately the number of those who gave their lives in refusal of the ban reached over 5,000.

In Christian tradition to be a martyr is preeminently to refuse to obey an order that offends against the faith, and to hold to this refusal even unto death. Dying as they did, the Japanese were in perfect harmony with the ancient martyrs of the Western Church. The phrase still heard on the lips of Christians today, “Jesus is Lord”, had an additional meaning in the ancient West. For Christians living under the Roman Empire of the first centuries, to say “Jesus is Lord” was also to say “Caesar is not Lord!” Many Japanese faithful recognized the same primacy, and refused to renounce their Lord before their rulers.

Though ancient Western Christians were often model citizens, obeying the law and paying taxes, there were customs of life under the Empire in which they could not take part. One of these was the worship of the emperor as divine. In cities across the Mediterranean, when people came together to bow down to some image of the current Roman emperor as a living god, Christians stood out for their refusal. This refusal led to their persecution, and, for many, finally to death.

For ancient Western Christians, to bow to an image of Augustus or Tiberius was to renounce one’s faith. The theological term for such renouncing is apostasy. The officials of ancient Rome, precisely like the rulers of 17th century Japan, resorted to torture and other devious forms of psychological manipulation to compel the faithful to apostatize--to make a statement of renunciation against their faith.

In Japan the rulers tested people suspected of being Christian by forcing them to step on the fumie, an image of Christ affixed to a wooden plank. Of course those who refused the gesture were immediately subject to brutal punishment. But those who complied, depending on their demeanor during the process (their facial expression as they performed the gesture, the degree of hesitancy in their step) might also be judged Christian. In the secret Japanese Christian communities that survived under the ban, there was naturally much handwringing over whether it was not simply better to step on the fumie, as an outward gesture, while remaining faithful to Christ in one’s heart. Under pagan Rome, the early Western Church also saw many debates about whether one might in good faith perform outward gestures of obeisance to paganism while remaining a good Christian in spirit. The early Church’s conclusion was that one could not. One’s outward demeanor must correspond to one’s faith as a Christian. Many Japanese understood things this way as well.

Shusaku Endo’s extraordinary novel Silence is set in this 17th century Japanese milieu of strict secrecy and religious persecution. Its success in capturing the dynamics of persecution and resistance, along with the sheer beauties of its structure and evocations of place, led Graham Greene to hail Endo as “one of the finest living novelists.” (As readers of both will recognize, Greene’s own masterpiece The Power and the Glory had a clear impact on Endo’s novel.)

Endo, a Catholic who had himself struggled with the oddness of Catholicism in a Japanese context, was perfectly suited to writing this tale. He focuses his narrative on the fate of two Portuguese Jesuits, Sebastian Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe, who in 1637 made the long journey to Japan in order to tend the persecuted flock and discover whether it could possibly be true, as they had heard, that their former beloved teacher Christovao Ferreira apostatized under torture. Their superiors in the Jesuit order try to dissuade them from going, as the situation in Japan is dire and they would almost surely die martyr’s deaths. In the end, however, the zeal of the young men wins out. They are given permission to undertake the journey.

Making it from Portugal to Japan in the 1630s was hard enough, as Endo’s narrative reveals, but the difficulties only begin in earnest once the young priests set foot on Japanese soil.

Under cover of darkness, their ship anchors near a coastal peasant village of clandestine Japanese Catholics. The people’s joy upon learning that two priests have come is palpable. For years they have had no one to administer the sacraments. The two learn that the Japanese faithful, in the absence of priests, have developed their own indigenous hierarchy to keep the faith alive. And that the villagers are in a life-and-death struggle to ensure that their adherence to Christ is absolutely invisible to the authorities, who periodically conduct surprise visits and offer payment in silver to anyone who will betray a Christian.

The fathers are set up in hiding in an abandoned shed on the mountainside above the village. And here they wrestle with the first of many moral dilemmas to come. As priests, as Christians, they are called to proclaim the faith to all, regardless of consequences. Jesus himself taught: “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from housetops.” (Matthew 10:27) Yet here in Japan they live in hiding, like criminals, not daring to show their foreign faces openly. As this life drags on for months, Garrpe and Rodrigues try to justify it by reminding themselves that they are the only priests in the whole of Japan; that their deaths would be useless; that someone must continue to teach and administer the sacraments to the villagers who have become their congregation. But what, they ask themselves, of all the other terrorized villages, who now likely believe that the Church over the seas has abandoned them to their fate?

Events catch up to the fathers before they can resolve their dilemma. Their flock’s adherence to the outlawed foreign creed is unmasked by authorities. Two of the peasants who refuse to apostatize are martyred in a grueling ordeal that the priests must witness from their hideout on the mountain, and soon after the fathers are forced to flee from the now utterly broken community they’d served. None of this alleviates the feeling that they are getting off lightly: that their status as priests, making them precious to the Japanese faithful who’ve lacked priests for so long, is protecting them from the brutality suffered by their flock.

One of the great triumphs of Endo’s novel is the character Kichijiro, a Japanese Catholic drunkard whose perverse meld of comradely warmth and devious cowardice is worthy of Dostoyevsky. A man of impossible paradox, Kichijiro ends up being the moral fulcrum around which the plot twists and tilts. Endo’s conception and use of this character show a master at work. The various Japanese officials depicted, from the interpreter up to Lord Inoue himself, who plays an elaborate game of cat and mouse with Rodrigues and Garrpe, are also brilliantly conceived.

The only element in the novel that rang false for this reader was Endo’s thematization of his title as the silence of God. Here one feels the writer is missing something in the Christian tradition; that the theology he gives his 17th-century Jesuit Rodrigues has been too affected by 19th and 20th century existentialism. Repeatedly Rodrigues complains of God’s silence and supposed lack of action in the face of the suffering of his Japanese followers. Facing the overall situation of the mission the Jesuit is led to ponder:

Why has Our Lord imposed this torture and this persecution on poor Japanese peasants? [It is] sickening. The silence of God. Already twenty years have passed since the persecution broke out; the black soil of Japan has been filled with the lament of so many Christians; the red blood of priests has flowed profusely; the walls of the churches have fallen down; and in the face of this terrible and merciless sacrifice offered up to Him, God has remained silent.

Later, overhearing Christian peasants praying in their prison cell, Rodrigues is led to remark bitterly to God: “Yet you never break the silence. You should not be silent forever.” (55; 104)

This kind of discourse, though put in the mouth of a 17th century priest, is more Camus (Endo was a devoted student of French literature) than it is Christianity. The writer would have done better to engage more seriously with the biblical book of Job, but that isn’t half the problem. By allowing Rodrigues to conceive of God this way, as a kind of failed Deus ex machina, Endo neglects a core New Testament teaching--that Christ is always already present in his suffering faithful. As St. Paul put it:

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts make up one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized in one Spirit so as to form one body--whether Jews or Gentiles, slaves or free . . . Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. (I Corinthians 12: 14-15; 27)

For Paul, God is not somewhere else, watching and considering whether to take action. Rather, he is present already in his Church. Writing of his own suffering, Paul put it this way: “I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.” (Colossians 1:24; emphasis mine) The relevant point here is clear: Christians who suffer persecution are not asking what Jesus would be saying if he were present; they are asking what he is saying because he is present.

A Jesuit of the early modern period would have been thoroughly grounded in this deeper theology of Paul; it would have informed his spirituality of suffering through and through. The real Rodrigues would have known from the start that God’s love was already there in the grace granted to those who suffered in His name. Indeed, he would have known that their suffering, however grievous, was the suffering of Christ himself. Endo, a master novelist, seems to have missed this crucial Christian truth, with the result that Silence is more 20th century and secular in conceptual terms than it need have been.

And yet the theological failures of Endo’s missionaries, though they seem anachronistic to me, do serve one worthy novelistic purpose: they level the playing field between his Japanese and European characters. How so? Taken as a group, the Jesuit fathers, though they’ve benefited from their formation in a Catholic order, are no better than the Japanese when push comes to shove. Like the Japanese, some of the Portuguese face death heroically and refuse to apostatize even under the most extreme torture; but also like the Japanese, some of the missionaries begin to make excuses for themselves and finally do apostatize. In short, the Europeans here, though they’ve been raised in the heart of a thoroughly Christian culture, have no monopoly on Christian zeal.

This evened playing field serves to make Silence especially thought-provoking for the modern reader. Any devout Christian reading Endo’s book, given the harrowing subtlety of the sufferings he depicts, is finally forced to ask him- or herself the salutary question: Under such torture, would I be one of the brave and hold out to the end or would I give up and betray my deepest beliefs? Clearly one of Endo’s central points is that no one can predict for sure how he or she would fare in such straits.

Another, secondary thematization of the title is the question of the believer who remains silent or invisible. Above I mentioned Garrpe and Rodrigues’ doubts as to the rightness of their policy of remaining in hiding. They justified doing so as a means of protecting the mission. Their dilemma, the question of whether keeping one’s faith secret is an act of wise prudence, or whether it is rather mere cowardice in disguise, is not unique to the ancient world or 17th century Japan. Christians struggled with the same dilemma during decades of official atheist rule in the Soviet bloc, and many continue to struggle with this dilemma in the countries where the faith is still persecuted.

According to both the Pew Research Center and The Economist, Christians are now the world’s most widely persecuted religious group. Though followers of Christ in the modern West are largely unfamiliar with persecution to the point of imprisonment, many have, in recent years, had to face serious dilemmas when the tenets of their faith come into conflict with newly minted secular teachings on marriage, “reproductive rights”, or the number of "genders" that exist. In particular, how many orthodox Christians in our liberal West must now squelch their true beliefs on marriage or risk losing their careers? The answer seems to be: Millions. Which only underlines the fact that, even in our supposedly “inclusive” and liberal societies, many of the Christian faithful are being put to dilemmas of silence in everyday life.

If I’m writing this belated review of Endo’s novel, it is partly because of the great Italian-American director Martin Scorsese’s recent film based on it. Scorsese’s Silence stars Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano, and Ciaran Hinds. The director had wanted to adapt Endo’s novel to the big screen for decades, describing the project as an obsession of his. Filmed mainly here in Taiwan, where I live and work, the film doesn’t disappoint. I would say, in fact, that Scorsese manages to negotiate the theological subtleties with more realism than Endo had in his novel--though admittedly that’s a hard call to make, given that the media of prose and film are so different. Still, in Scorsese’s interpretation, there is not nearly the same thematic stress on silence as “the silence of God” that one finds in the Japanese novelist.

I was lucky to attend an early Taipei screening of the film with Scorsese present. He gave a gracious introductory talk thanking the people here, also in attendance, who’d helped on the project. I only wish I’d had time to talk with him on a bit on the novel and its theological oddities.

Eric Mader

A version of this article was recently published in BookishAsia.

A new edition of my novel A Taipei Mutt is now in print. The Asian capital unmuzzled.

Different Ways of Touching (with Steve Johnson)

This is the fifth installment in an ongoing debate/dialogue on same-sex marriage in America. All installments in this debate are indexed in order and can be linked from here. The opening letter below, by Steve Johnson, is in reply to my closing letter posted in the fourth installment. Steve argues below in support of same-sex marriage.

Eric Mader

Steve's Letter of 01/19/14
Dear Eric:

Let me start by saying that I wasn't offended one iota by your reply. As a matter of fact, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think we are doing important work here, and that our debate, as long as it remains civil, will echo throughout history and could be the basis for university courses in the future. Honestly, I loved your reply. Okay, so let me begin with some of the basics of your argument.

It is often argued in these kinds of debates that a "slippery slope" of change could lead to all kinds of abhorrent behavior or notions that would seem utterly repugnant to us in our time. Indeed, yes, that is a definite possibility. Change is scary, and every time our species makes a course correction in terms of human rights, there is the distinct possibility of the change being warped directly, or being used as a basis for other warped changes that are undesirable to our current culture exist.

So, let us not create possible "what if" scenarios that give us cause to not focus on the actual matter at hand. As of this moment, I am hard pressed to imagine a scenario where I, or those of us who support gay marriage, would find it okay to eat dead human beings on the notion that it is merely protein. I would even go so far as to state that just like pork was considered a meat not to be eaten at one time due to the lack of refrigeration, there may come a time where eating human beings may make sense, though for me, and for other gay marriage supporters, it would be an abomination.

That particular scenario is nothing but a straw man, and you know it. Let us pick up with your point that does have value in my eyes, which is the one about the baby that is not provided with a birth certificate.

It offers a very valuable and highly instructive example of my thinking, and can prove of tremendous use in making the point that I "feel" you are very close to arriving at.

When a child is born, it exists, it is alive and it has value. It is a human being. This value of life itself is a not a matter of debate in our culture. It is, in fact, irrelevant for our valuation of human life that a birth certificate be issued for the newborn human life. Its value is intrinsic to us as adult human beings, because if the baby has no value, how can a human adult have value? And you have no debate with me on that point.

However, this is where we need to focus specifically on the notion of "third-party verification". Third-party verification is the sole aspect of our legal framework that is essential to the legal framework working in any way.

I am sure you get what I mean, but just in case, I will take a moment to describe what I mean. Third-party verification is the idea that you are who you say you are. When a human being claims "a right" or a "privilege," or access, or a capability, third-party verification is required. It is required simply because it asserts by a secondary source that the claim one makes is indeed valid. If you claim to have a right to drive, you need to prove it. If you claim you are a citizen, an adult, a parent, a male, an electrician, a doctor, an expert in the field of comparative literature . . . our culture, and indeed, our legal frameworks all require third-party verification.

I can explain why this is true, but you already know the answer. There is nothing that can stop a person from coming forward and claiming they have spent thousands upon thousands of hours comparing literary works and have come to understand the values and differences of such things, and that they are therefore qualified to speak and hold opinions about them. However, our culture would not hold this person's claim with in same esteem as the individual who can show a Phd. in the subject. Why? Third-party verification. The same goes for the fishing license, the drivers license, etc.

If you have a fishing license, you are authorized to pull fish out of a specified body of water.

A birth certificate is no different. It provides third-party verification that a new birth was in fact registered to have occurred, and that birth itself provides to the owner of that certificate all sorts of legal rights and privileges under our legal framework.

So, when I think about the issue of a marriage, I think that sometimes people confuse the value of the marriage ceremony with the value of the legal framework. According to the long line of data we have at our finger tips, there were many reasons people took on the construct of marriage, reasons that, as you say, predate our modern governments and legal frameworks. And you have no argument from me on what their reasons were, or why they found it appropriate for their time, their circumstances, and their cultures.

I take no issue with any of those notions. But we no longer live in those times. And our ways of making legal frameworks may come from the ground of those cultures, but particular reasons, particular social realities, that led to the earlier legal frameworks no longer get to define our current realities or the implications of our current realities.

I will make as ridiculous a point as I think the "cannibal" argument was to drive my point home. One could argue that the medicine was practiced long before there was modern medicine. And one could also argue that it was the ground for the creation of modern medicine. Additionally, one could continue to argue that many of the principles of modern medicine, many of the modern day cures, and many of the modalities of treatment all stem from ancient practices that are still held in esteem today. However, although those arguments are all verifiable and true, they are not helpful or even instructive when it comes to what we have learned in the last X number of years as it pertains to a specific treatment. Take the use of leeches or maggots. We have learned today that maggots if properly applied to specific kinds of rotting skin (gangrene) can effectively treat the problem.

However, we no longer use these particular treatments because they come with other kinds of risks that we have determined medically are more dangerous than the already known benefits that maggots can provide.

In short, we are grateful that our ancestors saw fit to practice medicine. We are grateful that they gave us frameworks, guidance, and notions that have guided and instructed our medical practices, for without them, we would not have reached the place we have reached in the practice of medicine. However, that does not mean that we must continue to honor many of their particular notions. Science itself, technology itself, knowledge itself has increased and expanded, and some if not many of the medical practices of old are now understood to be ineffective or simply incorrect.

So lets take quick look at Alan Liu's argument. It was a delight to read.

Here is the essence of his argument: whether God actually exists or not doesn't matter because "the majority of world cultures have come into existence, grown and developed along with their religious beliefs and practices. They have imbued nearly every aspect of their material and productive lives with religious meaning, to the point that their social organization, their laws, their ideas of birth and death and love--indeed, nearly everything that holds them together and defines them as a human culture--are tied in with their religion. So religious beliefs are factual things."

Let us first take a moment to understand how Christianity itself came to predominance in the world, to create his so called "factual" things.

In Western Europe, it is my full understanding, that history records that Christianity (the basis of our legal framework which is a factual thing) essentially murdered anyone that did not agree with their teachings. If you were a pagan, if you held a differing view, they tortured you, or killed you. They continued with this practice until what was declared to be "true" was accepted in all but the darkest of corners, hidden away from any actual debate.

It was not the merits of Christianity that stood in the marketplace of ideas and fought for and earned a deserved respect. It did not happen in the marketplace of thought, where all ideas could be fought and argued. It was rather that Christians, through power and might, murdered anyone that did not agree.

We could argue that by having the pure might to enforce their ideas, their ideas were stronger and of greater value, but we both know that intellectually speaking, any religious construct that informed our societies, that resorted to death to the non-adherents, simply is not sufficient today to hold sway or stand equal in a meritocracy of intellectual debate. Not in the marketplace of our ideas.

However, how or why our societies formed the notions they formed does tell us a lot about the notions themselves. It also tells us that the so-called factual realities, that Mr. Liu sees as real, are not actually a matter of making the unseen into the provable or factual. And cultural history does not in fact regularly make false beliefs into so-called "fact". As an example of this, we might consider the simple notion of human "touch".

When you use your keyboard to type a reply to me, you "feel" the touch of the keys on your fingers. So you know that you are touching the keys. This is undebatable, right? However, science has proven, without any doubt whatsoever, that you cannot actually touch anything. It is physically impossible. I will explain. We know for a fact that atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. We also know for a fact they have huge amounts of space between them (on their scale). We also know for a fact that no two atoms ever touch. If they did, enormous explosions would occur, and great amounts of energy would be released.

We also know that as such, in the "material" world that we are able to observe around us, there is as much space between each atom as is necessary to prevent that world from collapsing and exploding.

Therefore, it is also a fact, that when your fingers "touch" the keyboard, you are in fact not actually touching the keyboard. It is not possible. However, your brain is informing you otherwise. So what is the actual fact? The actual fact is you are not touching the keyboard, but you are experiencing it as "touching".

So let me bring this full circle now. If you are willing to assent that from a legal framework that same-sex folks should have full protections under the law, and that there should be no differences legally between that and a marriage contract, you are 90% of the way to seeing it my way.

The 10% of you that viscerally reacts against same-sex marriage comes from culture, history, and a deeper sense of what is true or right. And these things deserve greater recognition than my offhand brushing them aside. And I hear you, brother Mader. But, I think that if you carefully walk through how our culture was informed, and how history show these notions came to be, you will eventually realize that the basis for this difference comes from a "feeling". A feeling, no different than the absolutely clear feeling you have when you touch the keyboard, that cannot be denied. However, that feeling is insufficient to me, it is insufficient as reason to maintain a "separate but equal" status in the legal framework for the concept of marriage.

Every marriage has two components that need to be separated and kept distinct. The first is the idea of a legal framework that provides contractual benefits and rights is one of the two components. That component is all the state and our governing bodies can deal with. The second component comes from the ceremony of the marriage ritual, the marriage's deeper notions, which are derived from things that may or may not have merit in any one person's eyes, and which in any case are not the purview of the state. That component, as Mr. Liu would argue, is as real as the first component. And although I may not see it his way, I do understand how he gets there. And I am not without empathy for his view. But I do feel that view is no longer sufficient to have the legal framework remain restricted simply because of the meaning of a word.

Keep in mind, I do believe that regardless of your arguments which are anti-statist, such as the notion that a government might declare things like "freedom is slavery" or the like, or "war is peace," as a long-term result of giving a minority its fair due in the legal framework--I do believe it is still worth the risk. And I simply do not think that using our culture as a guidepost for determining what is right or good is, on balance, the best method for informing our species how to proceed in the future.

It was a pleasure writing this, Eric. Maybe we can get through this and find a third path for the world.

Steve


Different Ways of Touching: 01/21/14
Again, Steve, I'm grateful you're still willing to pursue this dialogue. This time, however, I must admit that your reply has disappointed me. I don't think you're yet really engaging the points I raise--the problem of the depth level of human culture regardless of current technological or social development.

I really shouldn't complain I suppose. Mostly I should be grateful for your thoughtful formulations and your engagement in this debate. These days most people will just text their thinking, and this time, after so much back and forth already, you could have written me something like:

Still dont agree w you here dude. Really your getting too religious for me. Finally who r we to judge?

But you don't do things this way. You're a thinking person, willing to address issues at length. What's more: I know very well I'm not the only one who gets to set the terms of the debate here. Your points are valid, I've gotten much from them, and intend to address some of them directly. Your analogy built on the question of whether I actually "touch" my keyboard, for instance--I think it does pertain to our debate. I'm just convinced that it's more useful in support of my position than yours!

But before going into atoms and keyboards, Steve, I will have to voice my complaints. I'll do it because, simply put, it's more interesting to go after you, old friend. Besides, it may prove useful in the end, who knows? We may come to common ground; doing so, we may glimpse a way out of this cultural impasse. That our remarks will eventually become classroom material--well, I kind of doubt it.

And so . . . First, I must say that your remarks on how Christianity was spread around the world are totally inadequate. Why don't you look into these things before you begin to expatiate? Really, you should have suspected I'd smirk, if not laugh outright, at your "Rise of Christianity" spiel. Think about it, Steve, for you to lecture me on Christian history is kind of like me presuming to lecture you on futures trading or sales. How about this? "You really could be making more sales, Steve. I think the problem is that you're forgetting fundamentals. Try to remember: The successful salesman must convey an impression of messiness. In the customer's eyes, you want to seem unprepared, kind of strung out. It especially helps to have a mustard stain on your tie. This way, the customer, especially if it's a woman, will begin to feel sympathy for you. She'll want to help you in your career. This will help you you cinch the deal. Remember: Sloppy, unprepared."

Now go forth and make a killing, old friend! You can trust me on this. I'm an English teacher after all!

I've read a few good stacks of scholarly books on Christian history and how the faith spread globally. Believe me: The "history" you think you know is based on specific historical periods that have been blown up into little more than a trite caricature.

This is not to deny that violence and oppression occurred in different times and places. And sometimes the violence continued over centuries. But how is it that you've forgotten that for the entire first three centuries of Christian history the faith was often vigorously persecuted by pagan rulers from the Emperor on down to local potentates? Starting in Palestine, through its own vigor alone, the faith spread north into Syria, west through Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and up into Gaul, reaching the British Isles in the 4th century; it spread southward and westward across the north of Africa; eastward to the Arabian Peninsula and Persia as well as north into Armenia. None of this growth was a matter of conquest--quite the contrary: Christians were often viciously persecuted, often had to meet in secret, often were denied by family and neighbor. For centuries the faith was spread largely by itinerant preachers and small tradespeople ("free marketplace of ideas" anyone?) and women played a major role in its early growth. Before any swords were raised in its name, Christianity already had a strong following all across the Empire and in many other places besides. The Christians were not persecutors but victims. Have you forgotten--or perhaps you never learned?--the majority of saints from those early centuries died as martyrs. Christian men and women were tortured and executed by the pagan powers of the day, often as mere entertainment, those same pagans you're rooting for.

It wasn't until the conversion of the emperor Constantine to the faith in 312 that the dynamic began to change. Once Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, the ranks of the faithful were swelled by all sorts of powerful folk who wouldn't normally have been attracted to the Gospel message. The consolidation of the faith in the Empire is a very complex story, but yes, following it there began to occur the persecution of pagans. And the persecution, besides, of fellow Christians whose beliefs differed from what the bishops allied to the Emperor deemed to be orthodoxy.

Starting in this period, Christian history, as a matter of political and religious oppression, is mixed. In some places, the orthodoxy sanctioned by the emperors oppressed pagan cultures; in others, especially in the East, Christians continued to be martyred at the hands of non-Christian rulers (by Zoroastrian rulers in Persia for instance). This mixed character of the Christian record (Christians either committing or being victims of injustice and violence) continued over subsequent centuries, through the medieval period, the early modern period and up until the present. Christian culture has undergirded monarchs and dictators, but it has also been a force of liberation and revolution. The ethical universalism of the Enlightenment (our "unalienable rights") would have been unthinkable without Christianity. Slavery would never have ended.

Your caricature, preferred by contemporary PC Americans of recent decades, is totally inadequate to the actual history. It has a tendentious shallowness equal to that of, say, Fox News reporting on Barack Obama's youth. Really it is that one-sided. I expected better of a guy like you, especially given where you were educated. But I'm not mainly disappointed by this. By now I'm used to hearing this so-called "history of Christianity": half-educated young liberals and Hollywood movies have been promulgating it for decades. And what is America if not Hollywood movies and half-educated, opinionated shills?

What really disappoints me, Steve, is the following: NONE OF THIS DISCUSSION OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY IS EVEN REMOTELY RELEVANT TO OUR DEBATE. Because, as you apparently haven't yet noticed, my argument against same-sex marriage is not based on Christianity. Rather--AND PLEASE GET THIS--my argument is based on the strictures against same-sex marriage found in Christianity AND Judaism, Islam, all Buddhist cultures, Hinduism, Sikhism, all cultures of the Indian subcontinent, all known Asian and Austronesian cultures, all African cultures (except for one exception: the Dahomey, which allowed a specific kind of marriage between women), most Amerindian cultures (with exceptions, in North American tribes, of "Two-Spirit Marriages", in which a male couple marry and adopt the gender roles of husband and wife), ancient Greek and Roman cultures (except for some notable, actually notorious, Roman exceptions: the emperors Nero, Elagabalus), the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian and Assyrian cultures, the Phoenicians, secular Soviet bloc and Chinese-allied communist cultures, all known nomadic cultures, whether in the Eurasian steppe or Africa--and of course the list isn't complete. When you and other Americans, understandably sick of the hypocritical antics of the Christian right, argue in favor of gay marriage, you're not arguing against Christianity so much as against the collective wisdom of humanity; you are rejecting, based on a twenty-year-old liberal social movement, one of the few universal human insights. The local cultural instances where gay marriage was practiced historically are minuscule compared to the counter-evidence. What's more, in none of those instances were the couples understood to be composed of "husband and husband" or "wife and wife". Rather, the married individuals took up distinct gender roles: "husband and wife".

I have to say, Steve, it's almost maddening how you refuse to address this point. Refuse to address it except via banalities like "Times change", or "People get married for many reasons nowadays". It's as if you believed there was something unique about modern capitalist culture that allowed it to become, shall we say, post-human. That because of our iPhones and medical technology and the Discovery Channel we are okay as a civilization ignoring what all major civilizations before us have discovered and maintained--often independently of each another.

Finally, regarding my "cannibalism" story, that you find it ridiculous and irrelevant suggests, again, that I'm not really getting my point across. I'm not at all suggesting a connection between same-sex marriage and cannibalism! Or that same-sex marriage might lead to that future city-state. I'm only and very specifically making a point about the force of taboos and how you are also, very likely, recognisant of that binding force, if only in this instance of cannibalism. Believe me, it was hard to come up with a good example to make my point. But I'll rephrase things, and we'll see if I'm successful this time.

From a certain rational and materialist point of view, Steve, there really is nothing wrong with eating human flesh. If I offered you a piece of one of your relatives to chew, and you refused it in disgust--first, because it's human meat, and, second, because it used to be part of your aunt--you would be basing your refusal upon what is a mere "feeling" stemming from a primal taboo. I mean it very sincerely, Steve, when I say that in this case you have no rational argument for your refusal. Meat is meat. Remember that we are not hunting and killing people, only making best use of the flesh they leave behind. Now please think about this clearly. If you can accept the value of your ultimately irrational prohibition against eating deceased relatives, and I believe you do, then you've just legitimized what you and many secular Americans now like to describe as "magical thinking". And if you admit that this taboo about eating the dead is morally right, suddenly your whole argument against me in terms of "it's just a feeling" becomes fatally weak. Your argument collapses because, in fact, you yourself recognize the value of a purely "feeling-based" universal taboo. The gist: If you are right to refuse human flesh on such grounds, you should be willing to admit that opponents of same-sex marriage may be right, on such grounds, to refuse to recognize a husband-husband pair as actually married. This is important for the viability of the whole gay marriage movement, because, as I've argued before, marriage is not simply a status or agreement between two individuals: it is a status of two individuals that is recognized by society as a whole. In America we are now recognizing marriages that half the society doesn't recognize. And they have every right to refuse this recognition.

I hope now the point of my "cannibalism" story is clear. It was, as I said, very hard to come up with a suitable thought experiment that might compel someone like yourself to acknowledge the kind of primal and irrational weight a taboo can have. And to acknowledge that you too are under the sway of such taboos. In fact you acknowledged as much in your reply, but didn't see how my thought experiment applied to our debate. I hope you now do.

Personally I believe such taboos, especially to the extent they are universal, have something deeply right about them. And this is why, regardless of practical or "progressive" concerns, the widespread taboo against same-sex marriage must not be ignored. Not even in our postmodern, fragmented social order.

In conclusion, I want to repeat that I've much appreciated our debate. In this round, as I said, I was disgruntled by the fact that your arguments didn't actually relate to my own arguments, disgruntled besides by your bogus Christian history, which was in any case hardly relevant to the issue; but still, wrangling with you is always a great pleasure. If you have the time, I hope you will finally deign to tell me why you think modern capitalist cultures can safely ignore strong taboos rooted in our human, rather than simply Christian, past. Why is it that in terms of marriage our times are somehow different from all the past human times we have studied? I hope you really try to get to the bottom of this, and let me know. "Times change" is not an adequate response in my view, neither is the argument that past "reasons" no longer hold sway for us. What's more, I don't need to hear any more shallow Christian-bashing! So take off the PC bifocals. I'm doing you the decency of carefully not arguing from a Christian point of view, you should maybe do me the decency of addressing my actual arguments. How about you pretend, for the time being, that we're both committed secularists? My arguments, after all, could just as viably be offered by someone who doesn't believe in God. This is the deeper point of my quoting Alan Liu, a notional ball I think you had your hands on, but quickly dropped.

Eric

P.S.-- Having eating lunch, I'll now add at least a few words on the application of Alan Liu's thinking here. Just to get it over with. I want you to pretend as you're reading these sentences that it is not a religious person writing them, alright? That will help you get the point. As follows: The strictures upheld by religions across the globe against same-sex marriage were not imposed from above by a corrupt and hypocritical priestly caste. These rules were rather formed over generations of the culture's experience of being together--through good times and bad. They were formed collectively. Thus such rules were deeply informed by generations of practical observation as to how different kinds of relationships functioned in and affected communities. That these insights were finally given authority by being put in the mouth of the God or gods is secondary. The insights themselves were probably prior to this "religious step". Given that that is the case, the universality of such strictures against gay marriage is nothing short of stunning. And it should be deeply respected if only as a weighty anthropological fact about human communities as such. That we are technologically or scientifically advanced beyond these earlier communities is not really relevant. Being human, we are still within the purview of anthropological insights. We still live within communities that must function over generations.

Please take the trouble to understand why, in my view, the strictures of previous human communities, on such a primal matter as marriage, are still binding on us.

P.P.S-- It is now a couple hours later and I've just come back from a walk round my Taipei neighborhood. I love this city, although presently, being January, there is a cold front come down from Mainland China, and as usual when the cold arrives, it has brought with it some of that now world-famous Chinese air pollution. The pollution is a compound of Inner Mongolian dust, coal from factories, other noxious things, and without a doubt Taipei's air will only continue to get worse and worse each winter, until . . . when? In short, signs of the times.

I've returned to my computer because before actually posting this rebuttal to you, I might as well address your "touching the keyboard" analogy. In fact I do not really agree that your atomic physics explanation means that I'm not now "touching" my keyboard. Let me explain. What I think you've done in essence is merely added another layer to the definition of what we mean by "touch". You've shown a second, theoretical level on which the phenomenon can be explained. Knowing the structure of atoms doesn't, however, make any difference to the phenomenon of touch itself, or even to the semantic sense of the word, because, of course, the atomic structure you evoke is well below the threshold of the visual or tactile. Knowing some of the facts of atomic physics does not change daily realities. It will not help you improve your operation of a keyboard. If I were to push the analogy a bit, I might say, somewhat archly, that knowing these facts neither gives you the ability nor the "right" to change the realities of touch as we live them.

Now how does all this apply to our debate? As follows: Just as we exist within a set boundary of physicality, exist on a certain scale, so, I would say, we exist within human societies. These are complex structures of interrelation that we are bounded by. If in medieval Florence everyone believed that same-sex marriage was an impossibility because God had forbidden it, then that stricture stood as part of the bounded structure Florentine society lived within. That many scholars of medieval society no longer believe God exists does not prove that the medieval model was fundamentally incorrect as a practical matter. The medieval Florentines merely expressed in religious terms a practical reality that was part of how their culture held together. And it did hold together. Again, even if their stricture about marriage didn't come from God but came rather from their ancestors' experience, this didn't matter as regards the viability of their being together. Just as our knowing some of the facts of atomic physics doesn't matter as regards the viability of keyboards or the use of our hands. It would be wrong, then, and immature besides, for a modern scholar to believe that if he could only go back to those Florentines in a time machine, and demonstrate to them that it was likely their God didn't exist--then they would "wake up" from their illusions and would subsequently remove their strictures as to what constituted a marriage. Do you see this point? The naive time traveler might believe he was teaching the Florentines about human rights and bringing "progress" to their backward and oppressive culture. But almost certainly, if they followed his instructions, their culture would be undermined, it would begin to unravel, just as in recent centuries many tribal cultures have been fatally undermined by contact with our "more advanced" Western societies. Anthropologists are in agreement on this: the Florentines would likely be left worse off than they were before that modern do-gooder appeared. Their unique culture, after all, functioned as a very complex mesh of many factors, so complex that even we, with all our modern knowledge, cannot really account for all these factors.

Just like the material universe we live in and touch every day, so our cultural universe is bounded. For very many cultures, the great majority of them, the term God or gods has held an important place in the economy of their functioning as a people--it has played a crucial role in demarcating and maintaining the "boundaries". Modern secularists may argue that God is a myth and we needn't believe in Him, but nonetheless our own cultural economies still retain this concept God in much its same place, since our culture and its ideas of human freedom, justice and right were developed under its aegis. In other words, in large measure we are talking about structures in which we still live--even if we think we are largely secular-minded. Alan Liu made this same point in relation to Scandinavian cultures, which are more "secularized" than ours.

Understanding the facts of atoms doesn't alter how we need to deal with material things. Likewise, a scientist's ideas about the likely non-existence of God doesn't alter the facts of our being together. An important part of these facts has been the institution of marriage. As I've clearly shown, this stricture against gay marriage hasn't just been handed down to us by European Christians, but by all our ancestors. In this it is similar to the taboo on consumption of human flesh. And I would insist: Regardless of the specific features of our modern society--satellite transmissions, Sex and the City, nuclear weapons, the insufferably idiotic Sean Hannity--regardless of all these, we still exist as pretty much the same beings we have been for millennia. We have the same genetic makeup, emit the same pheromones, communicate through the same array of facial expressions, and reproduce in the same way. We have similar hopes for the continuation of our individual tribes into the future. It stands to reason that strictures that have been universal previously would remain so, because we are largely the same beings.

Your "facts" about touch, then, seem to offer a better analogy for my way of thinking than for yours. After all, while typing these last paragraphs, I've managed to forget about atomic physics at least a hundred times. Just like I regularly manage to forget what tone-deaf thinkers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have to say about God. These thinkers don't even bother to study the theologians who actually represent modern Christian thought. It's easier to attack straw men. There are in fact many ways of approaching the concept God that do not involve the kind of simplistic belief Harris and Co. take for granted as the default religious position. You may want to look into the theologian Paul Tillich, for instance, as regards his theory of God as the "ground of Being Itself". Or what he calls "the God above God". Or look into process theology, which frames the problems in strikingly subtle ways.

I hesitate to add these remarks because I don't want to distract you from my main points in the body of my letter. I hope, if you want to answer me in any way, you try to wrestle with these issues more and better understand where I'm coming from.

But all this is just the way I think about the relative value of our different ways of knowing. I'd much rather learn to use my hands to play the saxophone than learn that my hands are made of atoms composed of particles and wide empty space. But you, Steve, what about you? How has your knowledge of atomic physics impacted your way of being in the world? Does it change your way of typing or your way of moving about? Or when you are together with a beautiful woman, and you have your hand between her thighs, are you thinking about the necessary space maintained between atomic particles and that you are thus not actually "touching" her? For your sake, friend, I hope not. Really I hope not.

Eric

William Blake's Heretical Forebears

Book reviewed: Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law by E.P. Thompson, Cambridge UP

British historian E.P. Thompson is best known for his 1963 masterpiece The Making of the English Working Class, a groundbreaking study of English artistans during the industrial revolution and the most significant early work of what would come to be known as "history from the bottom up." In that work Thompson focuses on the losers of the industrial revolution and depends more on documentary evidence than on the statistical methodology employed by other historians. The new approach allowed him to bring to life generations previously silenced by the very hopelessness of their resistance to the New World Order taking shape in spite of them.

Thompson always stressed the value of literary works as a source for historians, as also, naturally for a Marxist, he insisted on the importance of history in the study of literature. His book on William Blake is a gem in this tradition of historical criticism. Thompson's documentary approach sheds a multifaceted light on this poet so resistant to interpretation.

Witness Against the Beast, the product of decades of grappling with the origins of the poet's thought, was published posthumously (Thompson died in 1993). In it the historian mainly seeks to unearth Blake's "tradition": to address the question of where Blake's complex, often arcane symbolic system could have found its genesis. Many traditions had been proposed over the years, including neo-Platonism, Hermeticism, and Behmenism, but none had really accounted for Blake's difference. How explain the persistence across Blake's career of concerns and themes that were lacking in the supposed sources? For one, could a neo-Platonist have scoffed at Greek rationalism as Blake did, in lines such as:

The Gods of Greece & Egypt were Mathematical Diagrams--See Plato's Works.

Rather than approach the poet in an academic way, by trying to fit him into one of the major intellectual traditions, Thompson chose to narrow his sights somewhat by researching Blake's milieu: by looking into the intellectual and religious culture of the self-educated London artisan. In this way, Thompson was able to identify many of Blake's characteristic symbols as part of a common currency of underground English theological discourse. The methodological point was clear: Why search parallels in late antique philosophy when much of Blake's language echoed that of fellow Londoners?

Thompson places Blake in the line of religious dissent that exploded during the English Civil War of the previous century. His arguments for the identification are compelling. Blake's work, according to Thompson, is in the tradition of Christian antinomianism, an antinomian in its Greek etymology being literally one who stands "against the law." Among the dissenting sects that rose at the time of the Civil War, many reinterpreted and extended the belief that Christ's coming and sacrifice had annulled Mosaic Law. Those who had been saved by Christ's blood, it was insisted, could no longer be called to account by any moral or religious law; in fact any who stress law in religion are not true Christians but enemies of Christ. Considered heretical in its extreme forms, such antinomianism is of course grounded in no less than St. Paul himself:

The law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. (Galatians 3:24-5)

In the generations before Blake, the English antinomian sects pushed this Pauline idea to a degree the religious authorities could not tolerate. Thompson convincingly argues that Blake was of their ranks:

What must . . . be insisted upon is the ubiquity and centrality of antinomian tenets to Blake's thinking, to his writing and to his painting. Throughout his work there will be found this radical disassociation and opposition between the Moral Law and that gospel of Christ which is known--as often in the antinomian tradition--as "the Everlasting Gospel." . . . The signatures of this antinomian sensibility will be found, not at two or three points only in Blake's work, but along the whole length of his work, at least from 1790 until his death. (18-9)

Thompson shows in detail how Blake adopted language and images from the antinomian tradition, while not however strictly following any sect's teachings. Rather the poet reinterpreted fellow radicals' ideas to his own brilliant ends, putting a Blakean twist on their theology and ending with a body of work and doctrine that arguably made him "the greatest of the antinomians." Thompson writes:

[I do not] suppose that very much has been settled if we hang up his work on a hook marked "antinomian" and think that then we have put it in place. Antinomianism, indeed, is not a place at all, but a way of breaking out from received wisdom and moralism, and entering upon new possibilities. The particular attack of Blake's through and feeling is unique . . . . Even so, I am not saying nothing [by placing Blake in the antinomian tradition]. I am arguing that these ideas are intrinsic and central to the structure of Blake's thought, and that they remain so. . . And I am arguing also that even those critics who have noted the antinomian influence have rarely noted its structural centrality; and that, in general, extensive critical attention has been paid to quite secondary, or even trivial, influences upon Blake, while this major and continuing influence has remained little examined. (19-20)

Of the different sects Thompson considers likely to have influenced Blake, he settles on the Muggletonians as the most important. The sect got its start from chapter 11 of Revelations, where an angel tells St. John:

I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth.

In 1652 a London tailor named John Reeve experienced visions and received "a commission from God" to be "His appointed Prophet." The sect takes its name from Reeve's cousin, Ludowick Muggleton, who had similar visions. Members believed Reeve and Muggleton were the "two witnesses" mentioned in Revelations.

Unlike the Quakers and other contemporary sects, Muggletonians did not evangelize, so the number of believers always remained small. Their typical religious service took the form of a meeting in a pub, where beer would be shared and the sect's songs would be sung. Much stress was put on the composing, recording and singing of songs, and over the decades members would be called upon to subscribe to the printing of new editions of the song book.

Muggletonian doctrine is fascinating and, to a great degree, internally coherent. In some respects their teachings remind one of the Gnostics; in others they couldn't be further from Gnostic thought.

According to the Muggletonian doctrine of the Two Seeds, the mixture of good and evil in humanity is to be ascribed to humanity's twin paternity. Abel and Seth were true children of Adam and Eve; Cain, however, was sired on Eve by the Serpent. Thompson quotes a Muggletonian text and explains:

The Tree of which Eve eat, called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, was her being overcome by the glorious Appearance of the Devil made in the form of an Angel of Light.

This Devil (or Angel of Light) appeared in the form of a glorious Serpent, who copulated with Eve. Entering within Eve's womb the Serpent transmuted himself "into Flesh, Blood and Bone" and the offspring of the intercourse was Cain, whereas Abel and his young brother Seth (in whose generation the Devil had no part) were the offspring of the divine principle in which God had created Adam. But from the moment of the Fall, Satan disappears from the rest of the cosmos, having dissolved himself in Eve's womb and perpetuated himself in Cain and Cain's seed and only there. (73)

As was also taught by certain of the Gnostic sects, the Muggletonians insisted there were two seeds in humanity: a good and an evil. Also like the Gnostics, the evil in humanity was not the result simply of man's temptation and disobedience, but of the evil principle actually tampering with (in this case impregnating) the first human generation.

The sect's doctrine of Christ is of the greatest interest and is parallel to their doctrine of the Fall. The Muggletonians rejected the Trinity, insisting instead, in a quite striking departure, that when God was incarnated as Jesus Christ he was no longer present in Heaven but only in Jesus. Entering Mary's womb, God dissolved there so as to be born in the human form of Jesus. Thus not only was Jesus wholly God, as other Christians insisted, but when he walked the earth God was present nowhere else in the universe. This teaching implied a further striking idea: that God died entirely on the cross, that God himself was dead for a time, coming back to life on the third day. As a Muggletonian text put it:

When Christ died the whole Godhead was absolutely Void of all Life heat or Motion. Father son & Holy Ghost became Extinct in Death. The whole Life of the Infinet power was Dead.

Thompson comments:

This accentuated the dramatic sacrificial symbolism of the Cross: God literally took on mortality and paid its penalty in order to redeem the faithful. How he got out of this situation at the Resurrection was a fruitful source of dispute and dissention among subsequent believers. (78)

From a Jewish or Muslim perspective, the Christian doctrine that Jesus was both God and man is already quite radical. The One God, it is asserted, would not lower Himself to become human. But the Muggletonians, rejecting the Trinity as these other Western monotheists do, push the humanism in Christianity even further: not only was Christ God incarnate, he was all of God.

One quickly notices an interesting parallel structure in Muggletonian thought. Just as the Fall was effected when the Serpent entered Eve's womb and transmuted himself into Cain, so redemption is effected when God enters Mary's womb and transmutes himself into Jesus. And just as it is asserted that God was entirely present in Jesus and present nowhere else in the universe while Jesus walked the earth, so it is said that Satan disappeared from the rest of the cosmos after dissolving himself in Eve's womb: Satan, thenceforth, was present only in fallen man. The extremism of such views, taken literally, is hard to credit; yet there is a remarkable humanism of a kind, as well as a strong narrative logic. Thompson's own assessment of the Muggletonian faith is sympathetic:

From a certain rational standpoint--the single vision of literalism--all religious symbolism may appear as absurd. The rational mind can do little more than stand outside it and comment on its consistency or inconsistency. From this standpoint I can see nothing more absurd in Muggletonian doctrine than in great and supposedly intellectually reputable faiths. . . . The Muggletonian doctrines of the Fall, the Two Seeds and the conception of Christ, combine literalism with a robust symbolic power. The dual impregnations of Eve and Mary give to the doctrine a certain symmetry, like a figure-of-eight, as well as intellectual consistency. . . . I will suggest that--a few peripheral doctrines apart--Muggletonian beliefs were logical, powerful in their symbolic operation and have only been held to be "ridiculous" because the Muggletonians were losers and because their faith was professed by "poor enthusiasts" and not by scholars, bishops or successful evangelists. (78-9)

This is well put and in large measure correct. Yet one would be curious to see how the sectarians defended some of their doctrines--for example their notion of Jesus being an incarnation of all of the Godhead--in relation to the text of the Gospels. The Gospels frequently quote Jesus referring to his "Father in Heaven" or to "our Father," and there is no implication in the texts that this father is somehow temporarily not there.

Although Blake was not a member of the sect--the poet, as Thompson says, "does not follow doctrine but turns it to his own account"--parallels between Muggletonian teachings and Blake's thought are clear. Across his long poetic and polemic career, Blake stressed many of the same themes the sectarians did. There is enough overlap in these themes to make Thompson's argument compelling.

The historian identifies four major thematic parallels between Blake and the sect, as follows: the repudiation of the Moral Law; the theme of Reason; the symbolism of the Fall; the prominent role given the Serpent. According to Thompson, it is the cumulative weight of the four that suggests not just a general Dissenting influence, but a specifically Muggletonian one.

Discussing the Moral Law and Reason, Thompson quotes the sectarian leaders at length, then shows passages where Blake is working with the same terms in much the same register. Thus Muggleton:

The law is not written in the seed of faith's nature at all, but in the seed of reason's nature only. Therefore the seed of faith is not under the law, but is above the law.

The law is imagined as a "flaming sword," and Muggleton writes in reference to the Fall: "Those cherubims which had the flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the Tree of Life . . . had the same law of reason written in their seed." And: "[This] flaming sword . . . was that very law of reason which . . . is called the moral law, or the law of Moses."

There are passages in Blake that seem rooted in the same theology:

When Satan first the black bow bent
And the Moral Law from the Gospel rent
He forgd the Law into a Sword
And spilld the blood of mercys Lord. (93)

The Muggletonian condemnation of reason is very similar to that found in Blake. The rejection of temporal human reason as being "unclean" and "corrupted" goes all the way back to the founders of the sect, but, according to Thompson, becomes even stronger in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the sect felt its doctrines more threatened by Enlightenment thought. Thompson quotes a passage from Muggleton in which the founder identifies the corrupted force of human reason with Pilate: "his reason . . . delivered up the Just One to be crucified by reasonable Men." Thompson points to various parallel passages in Blake: "Christ & his Apostles were Illiterate Men. Caiaphas Pilate & Herod were Learned." "Rational Truth is not the Truth of Christ, but of Pilate. It is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil."

According to Thompson, Muggletonian discourse repeatedly returns to the theme of reason as Satanic principle, as a product of the Fall. And likewise:

Few themes recur with more consistency in the whole trajectory of Blake's work than Reason (often in association with the moral law) binding, constraining or corrupting life. (95)

The historian similarly treats the serpent symbolism in the Muggletonians and Blake, noting a striking echo in Blake's Book of Urizen. The sectarians had insisted on Eve literally being impregnated by Satan, the Serpent, who entered her womb and dissolved there, engendering Cain. In the Book of Urizen Blake writes of Enitharmon conceiving Orc:

When Enitharmon, sick, Felt a Worm within her womb
All day the worm lay on her bosom
All night within her womb
The worm lay till it grew to a serpent
With dolorous hissings & poisons
Round Enitharmon's loins folding. . .

Thompson writes:

[The serpent symbolism] continues in the convoluted couplings of serpents and females in the prophetic books; and it takes a new and powerful form (both visually and in verse) in the image of the 'mortal coil'--a literal serpent coil--which Christ sheds on the cross, shedding thus one of his two natures. (97)

Once again, with the serpent symbolism in the Muggletonians and Blake, one may be reminded of the ancient Gnostics. Here, however, the image of Christ shedding or defeating a serpent coil on the cross suggests a meaning directly contrary to that given the serpent in Gnostic thought. For the ancient Gnostics, the serpent in the Garden came to liberate man from an evil Demiurge. The knowledge given man by the Gnostic serpent is liberating; therefore thus knowledge may be associated with Jesus. It is quite the opposite for Blake and the Muggletonians.

Thompson's book ends with perceptive readings of three major poems: "The Divine Image," "London," and "The Human Abstract." Particularly in the case of "London," Thompson demonstrates the importance of historical understanding to the appreciation of Blake's poetry. His careful attention to the poem's movement and to the particular charge of Blake's choice of terms brings new clarity to the poem.

By a noteworthy historical coincidence, Thompson was working on his thesis of a Muggletonian influence on Blake during the same decades that saw the sect's last surviving member pass away. Thompson was trying to track down the Muggletonian archive, which he knew had been held in the church's reading room as recently as the early part of the century. As of 1939, however, there was no longer a church reading room and no way of knowing what had happened to the church itself or the archive. Making inquiries through the Times Literary Supplement, Thompson was eventually led to a Mr. Philip Noakes, who, it turned out, was most likely the church's last living member. In his home Noakes held an important part of the archive, including papers and correspondence going back to the 17th century.

It was a strange situation. Mr Noakes himself was the last repository of a 300-year-old tradition. He conversed with me freely about Muggletonian practices and doctrine, which had been carried down to him with a clarity (and, indeed, coherence) which reproduced their seventeenth-century origin. Mr Noakes frequently said: "We believe"--and yet one could not point to another believer. There was absolutely nothing of the fanatic or crank in his manner. He was always quiet and concise in his explanations, and I quickly formed a respect for him. (116)

It was through Mr. Noakes that the main body of the archive had been saved after the London building in which it was kept was firebombed during the war. A fruit farmer, Noakes packed the archive into eighty-some apple crates and stored it in a furniture depository, where Thompson and Noakes went together to collect it. The archive is now in the British Library, thanks to Thompson's scholarly persistence and Philip Noakes' faith. The last Muggletonian passed away in 1979.

One wonders, reading this brilliant and wide-ranging study, what the Muggletonian faithful would have made of Blake. Doubtless they'd have appreciated many of his poems, as they'd have found others opaque or aberrant. In any case, there seems to be no evidence of a Muggletonian response to Blake, even if, as Thompson would have it, Blake is in some measure a brilliant and eccentric response to them. To what degree Thompson's thesis is correct is hard to say; that it hits the mark in some fundamental way, however, seems obvious. Blake and the sectarians thought in much the same theological idiom.

Check E.P. Thompson's Witness Against the Beast at Amazon.com

Gnosticism: Rethinking the "Mother of all Heresies"

Review of: Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category by Michael Allen Williams, Princeton UP, 335 pages

If one seeks out a quick definition of ancient gnosticism, one is liable to get something like the following:

Gnosticism:

A religious movement that flourished in the Roman Empire between the second and fourth centuries C.E. Identified as heretical by both Christians and Jews, the gnostics taught that the world was created not by the true God but by a lesser, deficient being called the Demiurge, who ruled over his creation, our world, with the help of administrative powers called Archons. The realm of the true God (the Pleroma, or "Fullness") lay beyond this faulty creation, and it was the goal of the gnostics to escape the trap of this world and return there.

According to the gnostics, human beings contained a spark of true divinity that did not belong in this lesser creation, but would continually be reincarnated here unless redeemed by gnosis (the liberating knowledge of our true origins). Human beings were divided into three types: the spirituals (those predestined for salvation), the psychicals (those who could attain a kind of salvation through gnosis and various purifying practices) and the materials (those who by their nature were permanently tied to the material realm). Gnostic religion was thus characterized by a radical contempt both for the world (understood as a prison) and for the body (each individual's prison cell). Ancient sources show that this contempt led in some groups to a rigorous asceticism, in others to an equally rigorous licentiousness (since the laws of morality were merely part of the trap created by the Demiurge, some gnostics taught that the spiritually liberated must demonstrate their liberation by breaking as many of these laws as they could).

Christian gnostics understood Jesus to be a messenger of the true God, sent from the Pleroma to bring the liberating teachings of gnosis. They rejected the orthodox doctrine that Jesus died to atone for the sins of men. According to the gnostics, the evil in the world did not result from human sin, but rather from the Demiurge's faulty creation: i.e., the world was evil because its creator was evil. Whereas orthodox Christians accepted the Old Testament as part of their sacred scriptures, the gnostics saw in the Old Testament God a depiction of the Demiurge. Only Jesus was sent from the "Father," i.e. the true God.

Given its rigorous contempt for the world and its concomitant rejection of social norms, most scholars understand gnosticism to have been a religion of radical revolt. The Bogomils in eastern Europe and the medieval Cathars in the south of France are considered to be later incarnations of gnostic religion. A buried collection of ancient gnostic scriptures was discovered near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.

Here in a few paragraphs is an example of how gnosticism is typically defined in university classes and encyclopedias. It is a presentation buttressed by such classic modern studies of gnosticism as Hans Jonas' book The Gnostic Religion. Through force of repetition it has become more or less standard. But is this definition really apt to the beliefs and practices of the ancient gnostics? How appropriate is it to what we find in the Nag Hammadi texts? After all, most of the elements of this definition were forged before the discovery of these writings. With actual gnostic writings now available, scholars should be able to come to a more nuanced understanding of gnosticism than was previously possible. Has their reading of the Nag Hammadi texts changed our understanding of this ancient religious movement?

In his book Rethinking "Gnosticism" Michael Allen Williams assesses the validity of such usual definitions and finds them seriously lacking. To read his study is to realize to what extent this thing called "gnosticism" is an amalgam of modern scholarly caricature and uncritical reliance on ancient heresiologists like Irenaeus and Epiphanius. Such reliance was maybe inevitable given the previous lack of original sources. But now with the wealth of gnostic gospels and treatises uncovered in Egypt, things have changed. Williams' work sets out to reveal the extent of the needed change.

Williams' overall methodology is simple: take the current scholarly presentations of gnostic religion and compare them point by point with what we actually find in the gnostics' writings. But also: take the ancient heresiologists' presentation of the gnostics and undertake a similar comparison. Do the gnostics' presentations of themselves in their writings correspond to the doctrines attributed to them by Irenaeus? Do they correspond to what we hear from the community of modern scholars? If not, why not?

If Williams is right, our idea of gnosticism as an ancient religion would not, in important respects, have been shared by the ancient gnostics themselves. Our understanding of gnostic doctrines and attitudes (to the body, to society, to ethics) has often put the stress in the wrong place. And our presentation of gnostic practices still relies on the heresiologists, even though their portrayals have been given the lie by the Nag Hammadi writings.

For one, gnosticism is usually presented as a world-denying religion of revolt: a religion adopted by outsiders in a state of rebellion against social norms. The gnostics were believed to have erected a barrier between themselves and the surrounding world by mechanically reversing dominant social values. This notion of the gnostics undertaking a kind of systematic denial of everything society held sacred grew mainly from select observations of gnostic readings of Hebrew scripture (for example, they frequently understood the serpent in the Garden of Eden in a positive way, while Yahweh, understood as the Demiurge, was seen negatively). But, as Williams points out, such instances of gnostic scriptural interpretation do not necessarily indicate a rebellious attitude to society at large. Using models developed from the sociological study of religious movements, Williams argues that in many cases the opposite was more likely true: that the gnostics were actually interpreting Judeo-Christian ideas of the divine in ways more in harmony with the dominant pagan society in which they lived. Williams' argument here is convincing. Our interpretation of the gnostic attitude as one of revolt against society has been foisted on us by the heresiologists, who themselves, for obvious reasons, sought to portray the gnostics as rebels against orthodoxy. To claim the gnostics were radical social deviants is thus anachronistic.

Williams likewise takes up the question of "gnostic determinism": the oft-repeated modern assertion that the gnostics believed mankind to be strictly divided into different types (the spirituals, the psychics, the materials) or different races (the race of Seth, the race of Cain), and that the doctrinal upshot of such divisions was that each individual's potential for salvation was understood to be already determined at birth. Williams shows that this modern notion of gnostic determinism is not supported by the original texts. A careful reading of the sources shows that one is not "born into" the race of Seth: rather it is a status one may attain or earn. The race of Seth is more a spiritual community than a biological "race" in our modern sense. Likewise with the division into three types: one's status as a spiritual is seen to be linked to one's behavior: one may lose this status through abandoning the truth, and thus to be born as a spiritual is no guarantee of salvation. The assertion that the ancient gnostics were elitists in the sense of believing themselves predestined to salvation (saved in essence) is misguided. Williams demonstrates that there was at least as much flexibility in these gnostic notions as there is in more recent Protestant doctrines of the elect.

With these remarks I've only scratched the surface of this subtle and wide-ranging study. Williams offers an important discussion of gnostic hermeneutics (their practice of Biblical interpretation) and reassesses gnostic notions of the body and how these might relate to the different doctrines of salvation. One abiding concern of Williams' book--and I've maybe been irresponsible in skirting it until now--is the appropriateness of the term "gnosticism" itself. On the basis of the many disadvantages Williams sees in the term--its vagueness as a category, the baggage it brings with it--he suggests scholars refer instead to "biblical demiurgical traditions" when discussing much of what is typically called "gnosticism." He seeks to demonstrate that 1) the ancient people we refer to as "gnostics" did not themselves use this term, and 2) modern scholars have long had difficulty establishing a stable set of characteristics for gnosticism: i.e., we still cannot define clearly what gnosticism is. The argument Williams finally puts forward is that the term has impeded our understanding of the ancient religious movements in question. It has led generations of scholars to grapple with false problems and construct arguments on the basis of unexamined preconceptions. This is a pretty serious charge to make. Whether or not Williams is right in these assertions--something I'm in no position to judge--it seems obvious that his book has brought forth much that is new in the field of "gnostic" studies. And it seems clear that many of his new perspectives on the "gnostics" grew directly from his attempts to think beyond the (academic or heresiological) category "gnosticism."

Williams' book is not for scholars only, however. Even a reader only slightly familiar with the Nag Hammadi texts can gain much from it. He helpfully begins the book with a chapter summarizing the myths or doctrines of four important "gnostic" traditions: the myth from The Apocryphon of John; the doctrine of the Valentinian teacher Ptolemy; the myth taught by Justin the Gnostic; and the teachings of Marcion. These four different examples are then referred to repeatedly in the remainder of the study in order to clarify this or that point. Williams has structured Rethinking Gnosticism in a way that allows him to write both for fellow scholars and the general reader. It is a successful strategy all around, one that makes the book fascinating reading for anyone interested in "gnosticism," the Nag Hammadi texts, or the history of Christianity.

Check the book at Amazon.com: Rethinking "Gnosticism"