Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy is almost certainly Chesterton’s most famous book. The only other serious contenders may be fiction like The Man Who was Thursday or—just maybe, and mostly thanks to TV now—the Father Brown stories. But for many who come to know Chesterton as more than a source of pithy quotations, Orthodoxy serves as their introduction and guide. That is certainly true of me.

Chesterton wrote Orthodoxy as a follow-up to Heretics, which I covered here last week. Heretics offers a strong dose of Chesterton’s emerging worldview, albeit in diffuse form and somewhat less accessible a hundred and twenty years on. Orthodoxy, though a sequel, is better remembered thanks to offering a positively stated vision rather than responding to a string of false doctrines and—I think this is key—because of the form in which Chesterton wrote it.

Because Orthodoxy is highly personal. Those familiar with Chesterton’s discursive, topsy-turvy style and his use of metaphor, simile, and paradox will find that here, but—in a phrase from his later book The Everlasting Man—viewed from “the inside.” Rather than simply opining on a subject in his signature style, Orthodoxy more than any of Chesterton’s other books takes the reader directly into his mind. Though he wrote an Autobiography just before he died, Orthodoxy remains the definitive testament to his growth, conversion, and imagination. All it lacks to make it a memoir is names and dates.

Briefly, Orthodoxy tells the story of Chesterton’s growth away from a comfortable “paganism.” His journey is marked at every step by self-examination, examination of what others have told him, and a turn in another direction. His attitude is a cheerful version of Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse,” refusing to comply with fashionable ideas or accept fashionable attitudes and rebelling against the complacent. Guided both by intuition and rigorous, complex questioning (“My own case for Christianity is rational;” he writes near the end, “but it is not simple”), he works his way into philosophical positions that he always finds preempted by Christianity: having tried “to found a heresy of my own,” he found, “when I had put the last touches to it, . . . that it was orthodoxy.”

Like all of Chesterton’s non-fiction, Orthodoxy reads smoothly but proves hard to summarize, the curlicues of Chesterton’s thinking always feeling right and leading to the right place but also surprising. Having slaved over this review more than any other Chestertober post, I can’t claim to do the book justice here. I’ll have to content myself with a illuminating a few connected points and suggesting the larger shape of the book.

Having begun as an uncatechized pagan or agnostic, he moves, through the process mentioned above, toward religious faith and finally to Christianity itself. Along the way Chesterton integrates the critiques of progressivism, materialism, scientism, sentimental humanism, racialism, rationalism, pessimism, cynicism, and other persistent -isms from Heretics into a coherent argument and makes his case for Christianity as the answer to all of them, the only complete picture of the world.

The rational part of Chesterton’s approach is strongly historical. Told that Christianity was responsible for the misery of the Dark Ages, Chesterton “read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.” He noticed contradictions, criticisms that Christianity was both unmanly and too warlike, denigrating to women but only of interest to women, forcing people into families and tearing families apart to put people in monasteries, emphasizing poverty and humility too much but also too full of “pomp” and “ritualism,” of being too sexually repressed and too reproductively fruitful, and on and on. Tempted to conclude that Christianity was more monstrous than he had at first assumed, he realized instead that “[i]t looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with.” There is a dimension of apologetic work in which reason, fact, and study are appropriate, and this is it.

The other aspect of his approach, on the other hand, is observational, intuitive, and even aesthetic. In reviewing Heretics I noted Chesterton’s artistic background and sensibilities, and the gut feeling that something in the world is out of true, out of proportion, both begins his investigations and guides them. The truth of Christianity is encoded in the real world, perceptible to the senses and internalized both through doctrine and the prevailing Christian culture of his day—the starkest difference between his original audience and ourselves, to which we’ll return—as well as through impressions gained from fairy tales, observation, and inference and analogy. This is where Chesterton most often invokes common sense and tradition, “the democracy of the dead.” These are arguments, too, but not the kind amenable to the spreadsheet.

Taken together, these two “truth-detectors,” as Peter Kreeft has called them, give the honest seeker complementary pictures of the truth. The task is rightly perceiving, followed by synthesis. As Chesterton himself points out, the opportunities for mistakes are infinite. Only Christianity has avoided them all.

As I mentioned, Orthodoxy is an intensely personal and interior book, taking the reader through years of intellectual workings to reach Chesterton’s destination. The memoir-like format, the warm confessional tone—unlike the polemics of Heretics, which are jovial but still polemics—and especially the imaginative appeal of his reasoning unify the many threads of thought before they are brought together in the final chapters. These must also account for much of the book’s success, then and since.

Chesterton’s book is a personal story, so here’s mine, parts of which I have related previously. Like many others, I came to Chesterton by swimming upstream from CS Lewis’s work. I had heard Chesterton was an influence on Lewis, and when I stumbled upon a copy of Orthodoxy in Barnes & Noble one day, I bought it.

Orthodoxy surprised, challenged, and encouraged me. I was intensely interested in apologetics and debate at the time and was used to an icy logical approach. Chesterton’s combination of reasoning with art and instinct was surprising but spoke powerfully to me. Like Lewis, he didn’t just focus on splitting hairs and debating points of fact, but targeted the heart, the imagination, and all of existence. It spoke powerfully to me, and of course it was loaded from front to back with quotable lines. And this was at a time before you could encounter all the Chesterton quotations you could stand online.

As simple as parts of it are, it also suggested the need for frequent rereading—and that I would want to read more from Chesterton. I did. Scarcely a year has gone by over the last twenty when I haven’t read something by him, and this book in particular has grown with me. As a college student I appreciated the reinforcement as well as testing my assumptions about what faith and apologetics were. Rereads over the years have impressed me with his insight into human nature and his fierce arguments for joy and humor against melancholy and despair—a theme I’ve written on recently. During my most recent reading I noticed and appreciated Chesterton’s tireless refusal to accept fashionable consensus. Told about the Dark Ages, “I read a little history.” Told a lot of tall tales about Jesus, Jesus’s character, and what Jesus would do about this or that issue (remember that the man who first asked “What would Jesus do?” was a contemporary of Chesterton, and a socialist), “[i]nstead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament.”

Chesterton is always suspicious of accepted polite opinion, always ready to look into a thing, and always ready to be surprised. His openness and intellectual honesty—agree with him or not—are winsome and have kept him appealing.

To return from the personal to more of a review, however, (“clos[ing],” as Chesterton says in the book’s final paragraph, “this chaotic volume”), I have to wonder about the strengths of Orthodoxy’s arguments in our own age. As people as diverse as David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions, Richard Dawkins in various interviews, and especially Tom Holland in Dominion have pointed out, Christianity has invisibly undergirded our civilization for centuries. Our assumptions have been Christian assumptions. Chesterton could bank on that and argue from it.

But in the more than century since, those assumptions have been shaken—partly by complacency and Christian self-sabotage, partly by deliberate philosophical warfare by the descendants of Chesterton’s heretics, partly by the unintended consequences of the kind of amoral sentimental do-gooders Chesterton sought to expose. Just this year Carl Trueman ably outlined the changed assumptions in anthropology and their consequences. Could Orthodoxy, which assumes much of the worldview Chesterton shared even with his opponents, still make Chesterton’s case?

I think so. The cultural foundation of his Edwardian world has been fatally compromised but, just as with the worldviews attacked in Heretics, many of the problems are the same. Christianity is mocked, derided, and libeled in just the ways Chesterton outlines. Fashionable opinion still hews to notions of steady progress, materialist evolution, and, in ethics, an airy, inconsistent humanitarian impulse apparently rooted in nothing. Further, and more positively, apologists like Alister McGrath have argued that the strict logic-chopping arguments of the previous century will be inadequate for rising generations. An unintended consequence of postmodernism and other such schools of thought has been openness to the intuitive and imaginative as avenues of argument—just Chesterton’s specialty.

That leaves only superficial hurdles to encountering and arguing—but not quarreling—with Chesterton. As much as it pains me to say it, in the words of Matthew Lee Anderson, quoted in the foreword to a recent edition of Orthodoxy, “it is a dated work.” The language and structure may pose problems for readers who, we are constantly reminded now, have been so badly served by the educational system and a culture that militates against reading, attention, and thought. I don’t personally find Chesterton forbidding, but for those who do, Simon Vance’s audiobook recording is an easy entry point thanks to Chesterton’s conversational tone, and Broadman & Holman’s 2022 hardback of Orthodoxy edited by Trevin Wax has had the long paragraphs broken up, topical headers inserted to better illuminate the structure of the book, and unfamiliar names and terms annotated.

I’m not usually a fan of this kind of formatting, but the goal is to ease modern readers into Chesterton’s thought and the words remain unchanged. If that means more people can meet Chesterton through Orthodoxy and be challenged and changed by his work, I can embrace that.

To return to that line from Anderson quoted above, though dated in some ways, Orthodoxy “comes nearer to timelessness than anything we have today.” A Chesterton-worthy paradox. Orthodoxy is still the best place to encounter Chesterton, the purest dose of his personality, and a challenging introduction to discovering the world as it has already been revealed.

Heretics

Critics and even some fans of Chesterton have tried to fault him with many defects in the ninety years since he died, but I’ve never seen anyone call him a coward. The early nonfiction work with which this abbreviated Chestertober continues today, Heretics, published when he was only thirty-one, offers an excellent sample of his willingness to disagree, to argue, and to name names.

Heretics is a bold title. The Edwardian world, Chesterton thought, was beset with harmful doctrines embraced by the powerful and influential. These are not merely differences of opinion but heresies, partial apprehensions of the truth that prove more damaging than indifference to it. Chesterton attacks many of these by focusing on the work and views of their most prominent spokesmen or on their manifestations in popular culture like painting and novels.

There are twenty essays, and they range widely. Among the heretics are names that remain famous like Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells, James McNeill Whistler, and George Bernard Shaw, and many more that have been forgotten to most of us: George Moore, Joseph McCabe, Olive Schreiner, Lowes Dickinson. Among their heresies: a deracinating globalism, a Nietzschean worship of power and will, journalism that substitutes cheap sensationalism for the real sensationalism of telling the truth, praising the metaphorical “youth” of “young nations” that already show signs of decay, the prideful assumptions of anthropology, novelists toadying to the rich, novelists presuming to represent the poor, scientific reductivism, pragmatism, militarism, nationalism, neopaganism, atheism, lack of a sense of humor, pride.

Heretics is much too complex and diffuse to summarize easily. A chapter-by-chapter breakdown, especially if including asides and subordinate arguments, would run to thousands of words. But what all of Chesterton’s critiques have in common regardless of target is an objection to the simplifying tendency of ideologies. Each view, whether the scientism of Wells or the art-for-art’s-sake amorality of Whistler, offers to make sense of the world according to some easy-to-use heuristic, and each fails either because it is founded on a misapprehension of the truth that warps one’s entire perception, or because it forces fragments of the truth to stand in for the whole.

And so those trying, in Chesterton’s day, to revive a pagan ethic do so out of a belief that ancient pagans were unencumbered with the guilt imposed by Christianity and “were continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state.” Actual paganism was diffuse, devoted to inscrutable gods, and sad, the pagans ironically being “praised as disobedient when they had only one great virtue—civic obedience” and “envied and admired as shamelessly happy when they had only one great sin—despair.” Remove religion and ethics from the question and focus on genetics and race, and one has the jingoist ethno-nationalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “that silly Teutonism which knows as little about England as it does about anthropology, but which is always talking about Vikings.”

Sometimes the heresies seem to be opposites—a point Chesterton does not draw attention to, but which would go on to be an important part of his argument in the sequel to Heretics, Orthodoxy. In two interesting chapters on the fiction of his day, Chesterton criticizes novelists who flatter the pretentions of millionaires and aristocrats by making them sharp, witty, and urbane and their seeming opposites, novelists who explore the plight of the lower classes and depict them as degraded, helpless, even monstrous. Chesterton will abide neither obsequiousness to the rich nor condescension to the poor, neither of which is democratic in the sense of men conceiving of themselves as equals or brothers. Even “hereditary despotism” is to be preferred to managerialism under such types, “because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all.”

In addition to being untrue, these heresies also—as the above examples demonstrate—tend to make their adherents pretentious. This comes across clearly in perhaps the most entertaining and purely Chestertonian essay, “On Mr McCabe and the Divine Frivolity.” Former Catholic priest turned freethinking gadabout Joseph McCabe had, in an aside in one book, reproached Chesterton for writing about serious subjects lightheartedly. Chesterton’s opening salvo is still laugh-out-loud funny:

It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all. . . . It is not I; it is not even a particular class of journalists or jesters who make jokes about the matters which are of most awful import; it is the whole human race. If there is one thing more than another which any one will admit who has the smallest knowledge of the world, it is that men are always speaking gravely and earnestly and with the utmost possible care about the things that are not important, but always talking frivolously about the things that are. Men talk for hours with the faces of a college of cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party politics.

Tellingly, it is humorlessness and pride that provoke Chesterton’s sharpest jabs. He respects all the other heretics in this book—and names them because he respects them as sincere men—but the puffed up, he implies, lack the honesty and humility to argue with him, or be saved.

First published in the summer of 1905, Heretics was assembled from some of Chesterton’s columns for the London Daily News. They vary greatly in length and detail and the subject changes sometimes dramatically from chapter to chapter. What keeps them from becoming a hodgepodge, a mere collection of essays, is Chesterton’s inimitable cheery tone, consistent conceptual overlap and recurring themes between chapters, and his already coherent worldview.

Chesterton’s highest formal schooling before becoming a journalist was the Slade School of Art, which is worth remembering because his sensibilities are above all artistic. He knew the marriage of hard work and pure enjoyment that sets the artist apart from the dabbler (“[t]he artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs”) and hates the squandering of natural talent on self-serious intellectual projects—as when he praises the “violent vision” of Wells’s early science fiction novels before tracing his descent into drab works of “scientific” history and social theory—and the blinkered imagination of the ideologue. Where Chesterton critiques the abstractly rational, the scientific, and the calculated, he favors the humble and common sense and argues for the organic, traditional, and intuitive, all of which are neighbors to the mystical.

Again, these points prefigure key elements of Orthodoxy.

The joy of his personality is key in a book like this, which in other hands would be twenty chapters of invective. Chesterton is charitable toward his “heretics” throughout, even to the humorless, and does not attribute base motives to them or suggest they are part of a conspiracy to bring down Western Civilization. A true happy warrior, he weighs them case-by-case, praises them where they deserve it and criticizes in a spirit of friendly correction. Their errors have helped him see the truth, and he wants to share.

Heretics is a lively critique and a perceptive survey of informed, fashionable opinion in Chesterton’s time. Though not straightforwardly an apologetic work, its arguments against the heretics and their heresies suggest the outline of an alternative, which he names in the introductory and concluding chapters: orthodoxy.

Heretics was well-received in its time even if, 120 years later, we agree with Chesterton biographer Ian Ker that it is a “major, if not great work.” What keeps it from being among the shortlist of Chesterton’s greatest hits and what poses the book’s biggest obstacle for the latter-day reader is precisely his strength as a journalist and a critic of his peers—his topicality. Kipling, Shaw, and Wells may still be familiar names to modern readers, but their social and philosophical ideas are likely to be less well-known. Lesser lights like McCabe or Moore or Dickinson, the politicians Chesterton namedrops (of whom probably only Arthur Balfour may now ring a bell, and likely not for good reasons), or those, like Whistler, known purely for images, are mostly forgotten.

I last read Heretics during grad school at Clemson sixteen or seventeen years ago. Many of the names were unfamiliar then but I got the gist. Rereading it now I know much more about Chesterton’s world, but there were still many names that sent me to Google for more detail. To get the most out of Heretics, one needs an annotated edition—with the disruption to the flow of Chesterton’s argument that that potentially entails—or preexisting knowledge of the period.

And yet—no matter what, Chesterton’s wit and fundamental arguments shine through. A modern reader may not know or remember much about Teutonism or Celticism now, but they’ll recognize the simplifying impulse of racial or class or gender essentialism of all kinds and all political stripes. A modern reader may not recognize the trend of novels about witty aristocrats, but they’ll know movies and books that flatter a certain kind of knowing irony or cynical, unsmiling flippancy, especially among our present elites—office drones, politicians, techbros. Try to read the following without thinking of Aaron Sorkin’s characters:

This new frivolity is inadequate because there is in it no strong sense of an unuttered joy. The men and women who exchange the repartees may not only be hating each other, but hating even themselves. Any one of them might be bankrupt that day, or sentenced to be shot the next. They are joking, not because they are merry, but because they are not; out of the emptiness of the heart the mouth speaketh.

The heretics have changed but the heresies haven’t. As Michael Ffinch argues in his biography of Chesterton, the book is “at its best . . . not so much when he was attacking the ideas of men like Shaw,” whom readers may or may not know much about, “but more when he was attacking some of the fads of the time, and in as much as some of these have remained fads until our time, Chesterton’s comments are still relevant.”

Heretics seems an unlikely book to remain relevant, but it’s true. It is also, like all of Chesterton’s books, immensely quotable. I’ve tried to avoid quoting the most famous passages here, but one in particular suggests itself for the end of this review:

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. . . . For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

A paradox worth remembering both in Chesterton’s age of heretics and ours.

Chesterton and the Pout-Pout Fish

In case you aren’t familiar with it, The Pout-Pout Fish is a rhyming kids’ picture book about a glum fish who is so downbeat and pessimistic he makes everyone around him miserable. Mr Fish fatalistically assigns his attitude to his frowny appearance: “It’s just the way I am.”

Over the course of the book, Mr Fish encounters four friends—a clam, a jellyfish, a squid, and an octopus—who show decreasing amounts of patience with his sad sack ways. Finally, having rebuffed even the friend who is willing to tell it to him straight, Mr Fish is approached by a newcomer. A “bright and brilliant swimmer,” she doesn’t even say hello, just kisses him on the cheek and swims away. Mr Fish is transformed, and dedicates himself to spreading love and cheer to everyone around him.

Our twins have picked The Pout-Pout Fish for their bedtime story almost every night for what feels like months. I don’t actually mind, because it’s fun to do Mr Fish’s voice and the boys enjoy his repeated refrain of “Blub, bluuub, bluuuuuub.”

But it has also brought Chesterton to mind every time I’ve read it. In Chapter IV of Orthodoxy, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Chesterton meditates on the truth we learn from fairytales. As a child, he writes, he was “fed on fairy tales” and derived an “ethic and philosophy” from them. He mentions several examples, but one in particular has always stuck with me:

There is the great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast”; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable.

As silly and fun as The Pout-Pout Fish is, this is the drama at the center of it. Mr Fish’s friends try sweet-talking, cajoling, playing on his sympathies as a friend, and bluntly telling him he’s a drag to be around, and all fail to reform him. Rational appeal, social convention, and force don’t work. But the newcomer’s wordless act of love converts him.

Chesterton notes that the “certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, . . . has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.” There are plenty of ideas vying for attention and space in our children’s imaginations. Only a few will be “ratified” by real life experience. Love as the ultimate tool of redemption, making lovable what was once intolerable, is an important one.

The Desecration of Man

Midway through his documentary “Why Beauty Matters,” the late Sir Roger Scruton surveys the brutalist wrecks in the hollowed out town center of Reading, a formerly quaint Victorian town updated in mid-century and now derelict, and asks us to look past the broken windows and spray paint. “[W]e shouldn’t blame the vandals,” he says. “This place was built by vandals, and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job.”

We clearly live in an age of vandals, with vandalism lauded as both high art and meaningful political protest, and that is before we even consider darker acts of defacement: the surgical mutilation of human bodies in pursuit of phantom identities, the buying and selling of sex through pornography, the devaluing and destruction of unborn, disabled, and elderly life. But like Scruton looking at Reading, Carl Trueman, in his new book The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades our Humanity, presents us the obvious acts of profanation while asking us to consider the subtler, invisible acts that first made them possible—the graffiti artists as well as the architects who provided the already crumbling concrete walls.

Trueman’s project for some years now has been the basic historical task of explaining how we got here. Where his best-known book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and his more recent study of critical theory, To Change All Worlds, are big, sweeping books tracing multiple interrelated threads of philosophical and cultural development, The Desecration of Man is a short, brisk book concerned specifically with anthropology—the question What is man? If asking How did we get here? is the fundamental question of the historian, this is the fundamental question of the philosopher and theologian.

Everything else, Trueman demonstrates, is downstream of one’s answer to this question. Invoking Nietzsche’s Madman, Trueman argues that a shift in how both intellectuals and ordinary people answered that question began a long, slow rot that has only recently become obvious. The culture coasted for a long time on shared mores even as the anthropological assumptions that shaped them disintegrated. But the assumptions that man is not transcendent, that he is an atomized individual with no connection to others, that his interior life is his true self, that flesh is just flesh and sex is just stimulation, and that all of these are malleable have in the last century born fruit. A spirit of negation—a phrase borrowed from Goethe’s Mephistopheles—has led to a culture of desecration, the vandalization of mankind.

The surgeries, the “exuberant nastiness” of present day political rhetoric and online Holocaust denial, the public celebrations of aberrant sex, the industrial output and consumption of pornography, the epidemic of abortion or, in a seemingly opposite extreme, IVF, the push for infanticide and the rise of euthanasia regimes, the aims of Silicon Valley transhumanists, and even our consumerist obsession with youth and fitness—all of these treat man as a commodity to be bought, sold, upgraded, or disposed of as if man is just another product. These are desecrations, Trueman argues, and as often as not intentional. The frenzy with which, to choose one example, people are encouraged to take vocal public pride in having killed an unborn child betrays this spirit.

Some of this will be familiar, at least if you’ve read Trueman’s essays or have simply been paying attention. Rousseau, Marx, Freud, and others appear, tearing down the old anthropology and replacing it with their functional, brutalist edifices—the individual unsullied by society, the economic man, the Id. This is succinct and pointed, and should prove enlightening to anyone who hasn’t considered the longer history of how we think about ourselves before. But what Trueman does best is illuminate the logical connection between a debased understanding of what we are and how these outcomes—the spraypaint on the office block and bus stop—naturally result.

At this point it is worth noting, in case this sounds like a straightforwardly conservative polemic, that Trueman is bipartisan in his criticisms. He credits neither side in our current political environment or culture wars with a correct anthropology; both of them embrace the commodification of man in only superficially different ways. The end result is the same.

If a diagnosis were all The Desecration of Man had to offer it would be a good book, but Trueman ends with his most surprising and challenging material: a pair of cautions and a vision of the only true solution to the desecration. He roots both in three inextricably interlocked Cs: creed, cult, and code. Creed he defines as a given set of beliefs; cult, in the technical sense of a body of ritual, as the trappings and practices of those adhering to a creed; and code as the ethics, mores, and courtesies of those believing the creed and practicing the cult.

Trueman offers two examples as cautions. The first, Richard Dawkins, enhanced his already exalted reputation as a biologist by becoming the voice of an aggressive, hostile new form of atheism in the early 2000s. Recently, with the best years of the New Atheists behind him, he began to describe himself as a “cultural Christian,” someone who wants the customs and ethical priorities of the West, which he treats as having emerged apparently ex nihilo and as still viable without the pesky need to believe in God. This, Trueman argues, is a dead end, because it wants only the code but not the cult that sustains it or the creed in which it originates.

It is hard to feel sorry for Dawkins, who has shown himself so clearly to be a man sawing off the limb he has spent his life sitting on. More difficult for me was Trueman’s second test case, the aforementioned Sir Roger Scruton himself.

Even after reading more than a dozen of his many books, Scruton’s precise views of Christianity remain opaque, or at least unclear. There are some signs in interviews and reminiscences that he became more traditionally religious toward the end of his life and his arguments in favor of it clearly come from a deep, sincere place, but the usual tenor of his work is merely to treat Christianity as useful. This was not solely for the way it propped up modern niceties about equality and self-congratulatory do-gooder ethics, like Dawkins, but because it made manifest the transcendent, which is aesthetically and spiritually good for people. Scruton, then, in lauding the faith as a way to bring beauty and a sense of wonder into the world, embraced the code and participated eagerly in the cult, but it seemed not to matter to him one way or the other whether the creed was true.

Other examples could be supplied. Trueman mentions Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson. But this also, Trueman argues, is a dead end. It matters whether the creed is true or not because, if not, the anthropology derived from the creed will be a sham. Once this is discovered, as so many thinkers over the last centuries have so eagerly asserted they have, why maintain it? And so we end up right back where we are.

If the problem is desecration, Trueman writes in his conclusion, having “imagined ourselves as gods” only to “have ironically reduced ourselves to dust,” the solution is the long, slow task of consecration, of taking the thing we have vandalized and treating it as it deserves again. The only way forward is Christianity in accord with those three Cs: belief in God and his vision of what man is and what he is for, teleologically; acted out in community rather than as individuals, in embodied, physical liturgy; and lived out in real-life acts toward flesh-and-blood people: giving, hospitality, neighborliness, even acknowledging our shared mortal limits by attending funerals. These three things are inseparable, and only if taken together may restore our anthropology and begin to undo the vandalism, both the obvious and invisible kinds.

The Desecration of Man is a helpful intellectual history, cultural critique, and religious appeal in one short book, briefly and clearly explained for the widest possible readership. And far from affirming a reader inclined to agree with Trueman, he graciously but clearly points out the weaknesses in much modern rediscovery of the utility of faith. Picking up some of the themes CS Lewis presciently explored in The Abolition of Man eighty years ago, this is a worthy successor to that book, and one that I hope many will find challenging and helpful, not to mention hopeful.

Another justice

Julia Jentsch as Sophie Scholl in Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage (2005)

The past two weeks in my Western Civ II class I’ve been teaching the interwar period and the Second World War. By coincidence, I have two things fresh on my mind:

First, I recently finished reading Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans. This collection of profiles and capsule biographies of people from every level of the Reich—from Hitler himself to ordinary citizens—concludes with a look at some commonalities: bourgeois backgrounds, decent education, a humiliating loss of status at some early point in life. Evans does not mention them specifically in his conclusion, but broken homes and religious apostasy feature in a nontrivial number of these lives.

Second, I recently listened to a Rest is History Club bonus episode with Jonathan Freedland, whose latest book tells the story of a German anti-Nazi resistance group. Freedland, in the course of the interview, notes that a significant factor in both motivating and sustaining the actions of many members of the ring was a deep Christian faith that allowed them to see beyond the Nazis and the Reich, to prioritize God above state and live sub specie aeternitatis.

In class Monday I mentioned to my students the story of the White Rose and recommended Sophie Scholl: The Final Days to them. Few movies tell a true story better or better demonstrate the truths to be inferred from the two items above.

Briefly, the film dramatizes the last several days of Sophie Scholl’s life in 1943. Scholl, her brother Hans, and a group of friends—Lutheran, Catholic, and Orthodox—had begun the White Rose as an anonymous protest against the Nazis’ conduct of the war. They drafted, printed, and secretly distributed leaflets denouncing Hitler’s leadership, the mass murder on the Eastern Front, where Hans had served, and the Reich’s top-to-bottom disregard for human life. Hans and Sophie were caught leaving stacks of their final leaflet outside the lecture halls at the University of Munich, and within days had been interrogated by the Gestapo, tried by hanging judge Roland Freisler in a specially convened Volksgerichthof (People’s Court), and guillotined.

The Scholl siblings had some steel in them, standing up to both the Gestapo, the Reich’s most brutal kangaroo court, and the threat and promise of death, and the film—which is very closely based on fact, including verbatim recreations of interrogations and the trial proceedings—shows us why.

There is their faith, invoked again and again and the source of their perspective. Hitler and the Reich hold no terror for them—these can only kill the body. Revealingly, the Scholls’ appeal to eternity and the City of God (he is never mentioned, but St Augustine heavily influenced the White Rose) are not so much disregarded by Gestapo investigator Robert Mohr or Judge Freisler as they are simply unintelligible. These two, the nose-to-the-grindstone cop and the ideologue, are alike so wedded to the State, the Party, and the Spirit of the Age that anything deviating from their devotion is worthy only of mockery and destruction. Evil cannot understand good.

Second, and inextricably linked with the Scholls’ faith, are their parents. Robert and Magdalena Scholl show up in the middle of the Volksgerichthof’s proceedings and demand a chance to testify. Freisler shouts them down and has them removed from the courtroom. Later, given a chance to see their daughter a final time, they praise her—“You did the right thing”—and tell her to remember Jesus. Like them, Sophie invokes the transcendent: “We’ll meet in eternity.”

Where do children get such faith and strength? Their parents. The film shows most clearly where the Scholls got their courage in their father’s one line as he is hustled out of Freisler’s courtroom, the line that still strikes me most powerfully: “Es gibt noch eine andere Gerechtingkeit!”

There is another justice. A promise to the faithful, no matter how terrible the suffering; a threat to the wicked, not matter how temporarily successful.

When introducing Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler in class a few weeks ago, I noted as an aside specifically for my male students that if they planned to have children they should take care to be good dads. All four of these dictators, and many others besides, not to mention many of their underlings, had terrible relationships with their fathers. The regularity with which the tyrannical, unfaithful, or absent father crops up in Evans’s book is telling. Hans and Sophie Scholl—not to mention the Stauffenbergs and Bonhoeffers—offer a positive counterexample and a challenge. We need more Robert Scholls than ever.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is well worth your time. I own the recent Blu-ray of the movie, but the entire thing is available on YouTube (with English subtitles available in the closed captioning button). I strongly recommend it.

Something special and small

I mentioned last month that I’ve been doing a leisurely reread of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I finished it last night which, being Maundy Thursday, the evening before Good Friday, turned out to be perfect timing.

I did a blog event I called Chestertober a couple years ago but wasn’t able to follow it up last fall. I’m considering reviving it this year. If I can manage it, Orthodoxy will be one of the major books I mean to review. It was my introduction to Chesterton twenty years ago—I recall reading it during the summer of what must have been 2006—and proved genuinely revelatory. It’s frequently quoted for a reason. I could pull out a dozen passages per chapter, minimum, and comment on them at length and still find more to consider and work through on another reading.

For now, as part of observing and thinking about Good Friday, here are two that leapt out at me in the final chapter last night.

First, near the end, as Chesterton ties together the book’s arguments, he narrows his focus briefly from broad philosophical and cultural conflicts to the mischaracterization of Christianity as “something weak and diseased” and the character of Christ himself, who has often been portrayed as “a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly”:

“The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque”

Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god—and always like a god. . . . The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence.

A brilliantly concise summary of the moralistic “be nice” Jesus manufactured out of a variety of ulterior motives and the man we actually encounter in the Gospels. The contrast is perhaps most striking if one returns to the Gospels after several years, or reads them straight through in a reader’s Bible—a topic I intend to write about one of these days—rather than parceling them out in discrete episodes or tidied up storybook versions. And the “extraordinary” quality of Christ is nowhere more apparent than in the events of Holy Week.

Second, and most personally moving to me, was the book’s penultimate paragraph. Having considered the way paganism, for all its strengths and admirable qualities, still left men in despair, the state to which Christianity’s critics threaten to return the world, Chesterton closes Orthodoxy with his most important point:

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. . . . Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.

I did not recall this passage from previous readings; it had not stuck out to me or stuck with me. That changed this time.

“Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.”

I’ve mentioned before the struggle that this winter and spring have been, of the insomnia and depression and paranoia and exhaustion. The melancholy of January grew so deep during our back-to-back weekends of ice and snow that I picked up Orthodoxy precisely because of its early passages on madness. Chesterton has a reputation for rescuing diseased minds from the brink and, though whatever I was going through wasn’t that severe, I reckoned I needed it. And it worked.

But to begin with madness—reaching for an old favorite as a comfort at a time when I felt like I was losing my mind—and to end with the above passage… that felt truly providential. Reading last night, I recognized myself from two months ago. Grief, melancholy, pessimism—these are my natural bent anyway but had somehow become “the fundamental thing.” Something had gone badly wrong. But far from mere description, this passage is also prescriptive. It can feel like this state lasts forever, but thanks to Christ these will only be temporary.

Already they have been lifting. Good Friday is a chance to remember that they will, if not now, be lifted forever. They’ve already been conquered, reduced to “something special and small.”

I hope this is an encouragement to y’all as it has been to me. If you haven’t read Orthodoxy, do so. I first picked it up because I had learned, somewhere, somehow, of Chesterton’s influence on CS Lewis. But I’ve read and reread it over the years on its own merits. Every time I enjoy my favorite parts again, and every time some part I had never noticed before touches something in me that I never knew needed help.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby as Reed Richards and Sue Storm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps

I recently watched The Fantastic Four: First Steps with the kids. It was okay—enjoyable without thrills, funny without big laughs, suspenseful without surprises. But it was also inoffensive, had a creative retro-futuristic look that took me back to The Incredibles, and had one compelling subplot that held the entire movie together and made it just a bit more than the sum of its parts. This won’t be a proper review of the entire movie, but a recommendation on the basis of its straight-down-the-middle quality and this one surprising aspect of the story.

The movie begins with husband and wife Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic and Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman discovering that, after two years of trying without success, they are finally expecting a baby. This might seem an odd place for a superhero movie to start, but the pregnancy and baby subplot—which I heard a lot about when the movie came out—turns out to be central to the story. The film’s villain, Galactus, who means to devour the Earth, offers to spare the planet in exchange for the Richards’s unborn child. They refuse. The public turns on the Fantastic Four.

This was a refreshing surprise for two reasons:

First, the baby, even before birth, is presented unquestioningly as living and important. The most moving scene in the film comes when Reed wants to scan the baby in utero and Sue, in an attempt to show that his science is distracting him from the truth of the situation, uses her powers of invisibility to reveal their son in her stomach. He squirms, kicks, and responds to them—all stuff I’ve seen on ultrasound monitors many times, that my wife has felt many more. In a culture that persists in dehumanizing the unborn—for pernicious, devouring reasons of its own—this lingering meditation on their life and value stunned me.

Second, the film explicitly positions the Richards’s refusal to give up their baby against a utilitarian, consequentialist ethic. Saying no to Galactus means he will eat the Earth. The fickle public, who adore the Four one moment and revile them the next, want to know why the fate of one baby should doom the entire planet. This is the Caiaphas argument: it is more expedient for one to die than the whole nation.

Reed and Sue steadfastly refuse to give in. It is wrong for parents to sacrifice the life of the child gifted to them. They won’t give up on saving the world, but that route—the path of least resistance, of giving in to the pressure of numbers and a short-term vision of salvation—is closed to them. I can’t think of the last time a film made such a deontological move, presenting something as morally wrong under any circumstances. Their refusal in the face of public pressure and the threat of Galactus makes them more heroic.

The latter aspect of the film not only drives the events of the climax, it reinforces the message of the former. If Sue and Reed, in their joy at the news, their preparation for the baby’s arrival, and their refusal to give him up show that life is too precious to bargain, the climactic action, in which all four demonstrate their willingness to die for the innocent, shows us that they mean it. Life is valuable. How valuable? This valuable!

Again, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is not an earth-shattering movie. It’s enjoyable entertainment with a unique aesthetic and more thought put into it than the last several Marvel movies combined—a low bar. What sets it apart is its wholehearted commitment to a vision of the value of human life—even in the womb—and its courage in allowing the characters to live that out without compromise. This was a great surprise, and I hope we can see more like this.

On “not sucking”

Two things I saw early last week that I thought a lot about even at the time, but that not long afterward took on much greater weight:

First, after a social media algorithm served up an amusing comedy routine about Christian rock, I explored the comedian’s other work. His brand is explicitly “exvangelical,” and in addition to the usual contemptible rants, complaints, and progressive exhibitionism of that demographic, he has an ongoing series of videos called “Christians Who Don’t Suck.” The most recent video at the time profiled Nat Turner.

Turner was a slave preacher in Southampton County, Virginia. Inspired by visions he claimed to have received from God, in the late summer of 1831 he led a slave revolt that killed around sixty people. In his master’s house, where he began the uprising during the night, his men killed a baby sleeping in a crib. At another house they killed a bedridden old woman. At another a three-year old boy recognized the slaves riding into the yard and ran to greet them; they decapitated him. At a farm where a schoolhouse had been built for local children, his men arrived just as the children were being told to flee. Turner’s men—by this time riotously drunk on hard cider—rode them down and dismembered ten of them with axes.

This, apparently, is “not sucking.”

Second, a history account that I follow on Instagram shared something related to abolitionist terrorist John Brown. In the comments, when someone mentioned Brown’s Pottawatomie massacre, in which Brown, his sons, and some accomplices hacked five men to death with custom-made broadswords, someone who thought himself very clever indeed replied: “Thus always to slaveholders.”

Here’s the thing: none of Brown’s victims owned slaves. They were family farmers who had a mere difference of opinion with Brown, who settled on them as suitable targets for retaliation following what he perceived to be recent pro-slavery victories in the news. For this, they were roused from bed in the middle of the night, led away from their farms over the wailing and pleading of wives and mothers, and hacked to pieces, with Brown personally administering coups de grâce with his revolver. He would go on to plot a rebellion that, had it been successful, would have killed tens of thousands. It failed, but not before sixteen had been killed.

This is, presumably, also “not sucking.” Indeed, to go by that commenter’s words, it’s apparently a standard to be striven for.

I don’t remember the order in which I saw these two posts, but I ran across them on Monday and Tuesday of last week. I found the gloating tone, the posturing and virtue signaling, and especially the moral blindness of both annoying but not especially surprising. The self-congratulatory upright can talk a lot of smack about the long dead, especially when they’re ignorant of the details.

Then Wednesday happened.

I don’t have anything new to say about last week’s public political murder, but the gloating, posturing, and moral blindness of the responses following the event brought these posts about Brown and Turner back to mind, albeit more sharply and painfully defined.

One of my favorite history professors in college mentioned, as an offhand comment during class one day, that one should always beware of those willing to murder on principle. (He may even have been talking specifically about John Brown.) It took me a long time to grasp fully what he meant. One should also beware of those willing to excuse murder on principle.

This is why one’s perception and interpretation of history matter. One’s understanding of the past inevitably informs the present, and excusing the violence of a Turner or a Brown because they had the correct opinions creates the same incentive structure in the present. The person who can celebrate the long-ago slaughter of ordinary people in the name of high-minded political principle can also—it is abundantly clear—celebrate and excuse murder today. They even get the added joy of revisiting the moment over and over on video.

If only there were a way to describe these people.

I teach both of these events—Nat Turner’s revolt and John Brown’s career of bloodshed in both Kansas and Virginia—in detail as part of US History I. Both stories are well enough documented and complicated enough to rubbish easy celebration. Students will all agree that slavery was bad, but they almost always recoil from what Turner and Brown did about it—a salutary moral challenge offering a moment of genuine openness. I’ve linked to decent online articles about both above, but the books I routinely recommend to students on these topics are The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates, which is sympathetic to Turner’s plight as a slave but doesn’t soften or excuse the violence at all, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz. I’ve written about both here.

Crucially, while both books are about the evil men at the center of these stories, they also offer small points of hope, of people who actually “don’t suck.” During Turner’s revolt, a slave named Nelson saved the life of Lavinia Francis and her unborn child by hiding her from Turner’s men, and on the night of Brown’s Pottawatomie Creek massacre, Mahala Doyle’s stalwart defense of her sixteen-year old son John spared him from Brown and his men’s swords.

May we have more Nelsons and Mahala Doyles, people saving lives amidst slaughter, and fewer self-righteous, self-proclaimed heroes embracing it.

The damned and the blessed

Dante’s Comedy has three parts, but people commonly read only Inferno. I can somewhat understand why—Inferno is dramatic, fast-paced, and gossipy, with passages of seemingly straightforward horror. I think modern readers can also mistake Dante’s meditation on sin for salacious wallowing. But even if they read it in good faith, those who read only Inferno shortchange themselves.

I had already read the Comedy several times by the time I took Classical and Medieval Lit as an elective in college. (The chance to read my favorite book for credit was one reason I took it.) I’ve always been interested in structure as a part of storytelling, but it was in this class that my professor first drew my attention specifically to Dante’s use of parallelism across the three parts of the Comedy.

Case in point: I’ve been reading Michael Palma’s new complete translation of the Comedy and began Purgatorio last night. In canto II, Dante kneels to wash the smut of hell from his face—a requirement before he can enter Purgatory—and encounters a shipload of saved souls arriving to begin their purgation. They’re singing Psalm 114 as a hymn of deliverance and, before Dante can speak, greet him:

. . . with every face
turned toward us, the new people raised the cry:
“You there, do you know this mountain? If you do,
then show us the right road to climb it by.”

These souls are joyful and eager.

The contrast with the vestibule of hell, which parallels it in Inferno III, could not be more striking. There, instead of singing, there is pure, unrelenting, cacophonous noise. (“We will make the whole universe a noise in the end,” Lewis’s Screwtape asserts.) Instead of greeting Dante, the damned are too consumed with their tortures to do anything but flee the wasps that sting them. And where the souls arriving in Purgatory have a goal and direction, the damned run in circles—the central image of Inferno—forever.

The contrast extends through both books. In Purgatorio, souls repeatedly speak to Dante before they are spoken to. In canto IV, where I left off last night, the soul of Belacqua actually calls out to Dante and Virgil to get their attention; they wouldn’t have noticed him otherwise. The redeemed are as eager to share how God has saved them as they are to begin their sanctifying journey up the mountain. Here’s Manfred, a secular ruler who was excommunicated by multiple popes and only repented as he lay dying on the battlefield, in canto III:

After two mortal wounds had done for me,
weeping, I placed myself into the care
of Him who gives forgiveness willingly.
My sins were horrible beyond compare,
but the arms of Infinite Goodness open wide,
and all who return to It are gathered there.

The shades of the damned in Inferno, by contrast, are famously reluctant to give their names and are often identified by other souls out of pure spite. Grace gives direction and continues to unify and open, even after death; sin, aimless, turns in on itself and closes, especially after death.

Dante is one of the rare writers who can make goodness desirable, not least through contrast. After the thirty-odd cantos of ever deepening evil in Inferno, the opening of Purgatorio is the same splash of cool dew that cleanses Dante’s face. That tiny moment—a single tercet of dialogue—in which the new arrivals ask Dante where they must go to find the path upward filled me with an inexpressible yearning for grace.

Again, if you only read Inferno, you miss more than you might guess.

The King of Kings

We were too late for Easter, but last weekend my three older kids and I finally saw The King of Kings, a new animated movie about the life of Christ from Angel Studios.

I admit I was skeptical of the project when I first learned about it. The King of Kings is based on The Life of Our Lord, a posthumously published retelling of selected stories from the Gospels by Charles Dickens, of all people, and Dickens appears in and narrates the movie. I also have to admit that I’m a bit wary of Angel Studios, not only because I’m reflexively and mulishly suspicious of popularity but because much of their work, based what I’ve read about their prestige projects like Cabrini and Bonhoeffer and what I’ve seen of “The Chosen,” strikes me as slick but hollow. I’d be glad to be wrong. I’m certainly glad I took the kids to see The King of Kings.

The movie begins, startlingly, with Ebenezer Scrooge in the cemetery, insisting to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come that he has repented and changed. When noisy children interrupt him, we discover that we’re watching Dickens give a live one-man performance of A Christmas Carol in London sometime in the mid-1840s. The noisy children are Charles Jr, Mary, and the youngest (at the time), Walter. The King Arthur-obsessed Walter proves particularly troublesome, disrupting Dickens’s reading until his father shouts at him and confiscates his toy sword.

At home, Dickens and his wife Catherine put the older children to bed and Dickens takes Walter into the family library to talk things over. He gives Walter’s sword back and begins to tell him about the true story of the king who inspired Arthur. What follows is a quick, thematically-oriented tour of the life of Christ from his birth in Bethlehem, through some of his ministry, and finally his death and resurrection.

Any movie revisiting such familiar stories must have an unusual angle to make them fresh again. Many of the rote, stagey Biblical epics era of the 1950s and 60s are forgotten today because they never improved upon what The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur did. The King of Kings, to my surprise, brilliantly used Dickens to narrow the focus of the film and tease important but easily overlooked themes out of it.

By starting off with a Victorian boy’s love of King Arthur, The King of Kings takes Christ’s rule as its central theme, and every part of the story portrayed onscreen supports and expands on this. Christ’s birth was the birth of a king, resisted by a rival king. Each miracle shown in the film demonstrates his authority over some part of creation—his kingdom. Beginning with his healing of a blind man and following with the feeding of the five thousand, walking on the water, casting out Legion from the demoniac of Gadara, healing the paralytic on the Sabbath, raising Lazarus from the dead and, finally, rising from the dead himself, they also show an unmistakable escalation in his claims to rule.

A parallel theme is the irony of Christ’s lordship. Walter, like those anticipating the Messiah’s rule two millennia ago, expects something else in a king. Born in a stable, followed by a council of fishermen, scorned, humiliated, and killed—at every step, Christ’s life upends those expectations. You have heard it said, but I tell you…

Even the film’s odd starting point—the end of Dickens’s Christmas Carol—proves aptly chosen. The King of Kings begins with repentance among snowy tombs and ends with Jesus leaving a tomb having conquered death and made redemption possible. The writing, by director Seong-ha Jang, is simple but brilliantly effective.

Something else that pleased me: The King of Kings was made with children in mind and is kid-appropriate, but it does not sand all of the rough edges off the Gospel accounts. Christ clearly suffers on the cross and endures relentless mockery from the crowd. The film also includes things I’ve seen in very few kids’ books and no other animated version of the story. Not only are the demoniac and Legion here, so are the pigs into which Christ casts the demons. And following the feeding of the five thousand, when some of the crowd talk about making him king on the spot, the film includes Christ’s sobering note that many of the people following him are doing so for material reasons, not because they recognize in him the Son of God. This is not merely a feel-good Sunday School story, but a challenge.

Technically, the film is fine, better than a lot of similar independent animated features. Limitations in the animation show occasionally, but the characters and environments are nicely designed—some of the disciples have a nice Rankin-Bass claymation look to them—and the directing inventively supports the story. A series of flashbacks to the earlier miracles during the crucifixion works especially well, with Walter imagining himself as Peter sinking into the Sea of Galilee and Jesus saving him only to sink himself. The King of Kings may not be on the same level as Pixar or Disney, but the director and animators did a wonderful job making sure the visuals were part of the story and not merely the necessary visual means of telling it.

The voicework is also good, with Kenneth Branagh’s narration as Dickens being the backbone of the film, Oscar Isaac as a subtle, understated Jesus, and many smaller parts filled by big names for a scene or two—Mark Hamill as Herod, Pierce Brosnan as Pilate, and Forest Whitaker as Peter, for example. But the chief strength of the movie is its story and the manner in which the filmmakers, a South Korean animation team led by Seong-ho Jang, have chosen to tell it.

The King of Kings is not an exhaustive cartoon version of the life of Christ, but through the thoughtful selection of stories that resonate with each other, it offers a surprisingly and wonderfully deep meditation on how Christ transformed what kingship means while clearly demonstrating who the true king is.