McClay on history as narrative

A Reading From Homer, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Last week I started reading Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, a new one-volume narrative history of the United States. I’m up to the post-Revolution period of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutional Convention, and so far it’s been measured, nuanced, and carefully balanced, with McClay falling into neither of the traps laid on either side of the historian’s path, traps that have caught (often quite willingly) a lot of other recent histories of the US—pathological suspicion and denunciation to the left, mindless jingoism and nationalism to the right. It’s excellent so far.

I started reading the introduction just for kicks and immediately knew I was going to dive into the book. Here’s McClay on the very first page, explaining the purpose of the book:

Its principle objective is very simple. It means to offer to American readers, young and old alike, an accurate, responsible, coherent, persuasive, and inspiring narrative account of their own country—an account that will inform and deepen their sense of the land they inhabit and equip them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship. “Citizenship” here encompasses something larger than the civics-class meaning. It means a vivid and enduring sense of one’s full membership in one of the greatest enterprises in human history: the astonishing, perilous, and immensely consequential story of one’s own country.

McClay takes this as the jumping off point for explaining why he wrote Land of Hope as a narrative. Every semester I begin each of my classes with a short presentation on how I approach the past and how I plan to teach it, emphasizing—using quotations from Marc Bloch, LP Hartley, and Cicero—the past as the study of humanity (as opposed to endless eons of geological and biological forces) as it changes over time, with the ultimate purpose of expanding our own limited store of memories.

With that in mind, I read McClay’s introduction with greater and greater excitement. I quote at length so you can get the full import of his argument, and to enjoy his prose, which is elegant and economical throughout:

Let me emphasize the term story. Professional historical writing has, for a great many years now, been resistant to the idea of history as narrative. Some historians have even hoped that history could be made into a science. But this approach seems unlikely ever to succeed, if for no other reason than that it fails to take into account the ways we need stories to speak to the fullness of our humanity and help us orient ourselves to the world. The impulse to write history and organize our world around stories is intrinsic to us as human beings. We are, at our core, remembering and story-making creatures, and stories are one of the chief ways we find meaning in the flow of events. What we call “history” and “literature” are merely the refinement and intensification of that basic human impulse, that need.

The word need is not an exaggeration. For the human animal, meaning is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Without it, we perish. Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Without memory, and without the stories by which our memories are carried forward, we cannot say who, or what, we are. Without them, our life and thought dissolve into a meaningless, unrelated rush of events. Without them, we cannot do the most human of things: we cannot learn, use language, pass on knowledge, raise children, establish rules of conduct, engage in science, or dwell harmoniously in society. Without them, we cannot govern ourselves.

Nor can we have a sense of the future as a time we know will come, because we remember that other tomorrows also have come and gone. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous and easily tyrannized, even if it is technologically advanced. The incessant waves of daily events will occupy all our attention and defeat all our efforts to connect past, present, and future, thereby diverting us from an understanding of the human things that unfold in time, including the paths of our own lives.

McClay says here what I've been saying at the start of all of my classes for years, and says it far better than I ever have. No one, I tell my students, really hates or is uninterested in history, because if I asked one student about her favorite TV show or another about how his favorite college football team is doing, both would immediately give me a narrative history—with cause and effect, careful attention to context, discrimination between important and unimportant events, probably a few heroes and certainly some villains. That often seems to click, and for those for whom it doesn’t, I can always ask How did you get here this morning? The answer, again, will be a narrative.

That said, I only add two short glosses or comments, because I can’t really improve on McClay.

We need history because we need a story with which to frame our lives, otherwise we are stuck in those “incessant waves,” that “unrelated rush of events.” We become stuck in the present—not just the present era but the present year, even, thanks to the brain-eroding forces of social media, the present day and hour and minute. That’s how animals live and perceive the world, which is why animals don’t meaningfully change. History is a critical part of what makes us human and is, I think, part of the mysterious imago Dei.

But I’m not going to draw any facile conclusions about how “relevant” this is, because worrying about relevance is another symptom of being enslaved in the present. Narrative history is “relevant” the same way bedrock, or the ocean, or our own skeletons are relevant, as things that support and give shape—and will outlast us.

McClay has much more to say in his introduction, and the history itself, as I said, is great so far. I definitely recommend it if you are at all interested in the past in general or the American story in particular.

That Hideous Strength, Part II, on City of Man Podcast

The City of Man Podcast’s final episode on CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy, the second half of our discussion of That Hideous Strength, arrived earlier this week. In Part I, Coyle, David, and I introduced the novel, summarized the plot, and started talking about some of the subplots and themes in this rich and complicated book. We also talked about Mr. Bultitude—how could we not?

In this episode, we pick up with David’s examination of NICE’s system of programmatic degradation and alienation and continue to talk about the novel’s parallel dramatic structure, its themes of rightly ordered love and marriage, NICE’s Babel-like project and the eventual confusion of speech that wrecks it, violent animal attacks, and the final surreal cataclysm that swallows up NICE and the village of Edgestow (much to my delight). We also discuss a little more of the novel’s historical context—wondering what That Hideous Strength might have looked like if Lewis had written it just a few months later, after the debut of the atomic bomb—as well as the novel’s Arthurian content and whether it works with the rest of the story, and what exactly “that hideous strength” is. We also have a lot of reading to recommend, and one great YouTube channel.

You can catch up by listening to Part I of this episode here, or go even further back to listen to our chats about the first two books in the trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.

You can listen to City of Man Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or to this particular episode of the show via the embedded Stitcher player in this post.

Thanks as always for listening! I had a great time revisiting this trilogy and talking it over with some sharp and insightful friends, and I hope y’all enjoy it as much as I did.

Sappho and the gods on Core Curriculum

Sappho and Alcaeus, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912)

The Core Curriculum returns! After a first series on the Iliad, in several episodes of which I took part, and a second on Plato’s Republic, which, to my regret, I sat out, the show’s third series will take a close look at the fragmentary body of work of Sappho.

Sappho was a native of the island of Lesbos and lived the late 7th and early 6th centuries BC. Though widely respected in the ancient world for the quality of her lyrics, most of her poetry has come down to us in fragments or quotations in other writers. Only one of her poems survives in full. She is also the only known named female poet of the Greco-Roman world.

In this first episode, host Nathan Gilmour, fellow guest Michial Farmer, and I look at a selection of Sappho’s poems about the gods. We read through the poems individually, including that single, priceless complete lyric—and discuss their often highly allusive contents, the god or gods invoked by each, and what these poems can tell us about how the Greeks—and, more specifically, Sappho—conceived of the relationship between gods and mortals.

I really enjoyed this discussion and have to say I emerged from this episode—and the series as a whole—with a deepened appreciation for Sappho’s verse.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting services, or via the embedded player in this post. You can find this episode’s excellent shownotes, including a full listing of this episode’s poems, the translations we used for reading, comparison, and discussion, and links to some of things we incidentally talk about, at the Christian Humanist Radio Network homepage here.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy.

That Hideous Strength on City of Man Podcast

The last installment of our City of Man series on CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy has arrived! Well, sort of—after discussing Out of the Silent Planet and its sequel, Perelandra, longish but single-part episodes, host Coyle Neal, fellow guest David Grubbs, and I found that That Hideous Strength proved so long and so rich that our discussion had to be split into two parts. Join us as we talk about the strange final chapter of Lewis’s already unusual science fiction trilogy.

How strange is it? In a series that so far has mostly involved interplanetary journeys, alien life, and a dash of the supernatural, That Hideous Strength features an evil government laboratory and think-tank trying to establish communication with demons, an amiable house-trained bear, a hyper-rational Ulsterman, a literal talking head, an unusual number of college faculty meetings for a sci-fi novel, a lot of sex stuff, and way, way more than one fatal animal mauling.

Also, Merlin is in it.

Tune in to Part I to hear us discuss all this and more, including the novel’s context in Lewis’s life and body of work, some of the themes and concerns Lewis develops from the previous books, the elements new to this third volume of the trilogy, and just what Coyle thinks pets are good for.

We had a great time talking about That Hideous Strength, and I hope you enjoy this first chunk of our discussion of this strange but rewarding novel. I listened to it while cooking dinner this evening and enjoyed every minute. You can look forward to Part II soon.

If you’re just now tuning in, you can catch up on our discussion by listening to our previous episodes on Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. In the meantime, you can listen to City of Man Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or to this particular episode of the show via the embedded Stitcher player in this post. Thanks for listening! Hope y’all enjoy.

Willy Wonka’s hidden Nazi joke

Anyone who watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a kid remembers the movie’s immense weirdness, the streaks of darkness that run through it like a layer of fudge in cake, and the crushing disappointment of Charlie Bucket when the last golden ticket has been found. According to the news report in the film, “a gambler in Paraguay” found the ticket, ending the contest. The news anchor holds up a picture of the lucky winner, an old-fashioned studio portrait of a doughy but well-dressed man.

Only later, after Charlie’s spirits have begun to rebound and he has bought Grandpa Joe a Wonka bar, do we learn that the last ticket was a forgery and the contest is still on.

“Can you imagine the nerve of that guy?” a man looking at the headline reporting the fraud says. “Trying to fool the whole world?”

There’s a joke lost in the shuffle here, one that was certainly lost on me as a kid wondering why the first four winners were children whom we met and learned a little about while the fifth was a middle-aged man in a photo: our shady South American gambler is Martin Bormann.

The 1934 portrait of Martin Bormann used by Willy Wonka’s filmmakers. The Reichsleiter rank insignia on his collar was airbrushed out for the film.

As Adolf Hitler’s personal secretary and Chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann was not only one of Hitler’s closest staff members and advisers but the second most powerful man in the Nazi Party. He was a longtime Party member and—following an act of political violence as an accomplice of Rudolf Höss, the man who would go on to command Auschwitz—a convicted murderer, and he ruthlessly used his positions to accrue and hang onto immense power. By the end of the war, because of his amoral hunger for power, his utter lack of scruples, and his tight control over access to Hitler himself, he had become one of the most feared and hated men in Germany. Party insiders called him “der braune Schatten”—The Brown Shadow or Brown Eminence because of his closeness to the Führer.

After Hitler killed himself on April 30, 1945, the survivors of the Führerbunker banded into small groups to try to break out of Berlin, which had been surrounded and overrun by the Soviet Red Army in the previous weeks. Bormann joined one of these groups and, after leaving the bunker and the ruins of Hitler’s headquarters, took cover behind a Tiger tank that was fighting its way up a rubble-jammed street. The Tiger took Russian fire and Bormann was thrown from his feet, but others ran into him again later on. The last person confirmed to have seen Bormann in Berlin was Artur Axmann, head of the Hitler Youth, who spotted Borman and Ludwig Stumpfegger—a Nazi doctor who had helped Joseph and Magda Goebbels poison their six children—lying on their backs near a railroad station.

After that, as far as Allied investigators were concerned, Bormann disappeared.

As one of the leading Nazis in the Third Reich, Bormann was at the top of the Allies’ most wanted lists. The Allies viewed him as so important to the functioning and the crimes of the Reich that he was tried in absentia at Nuremberg alongside Nazi leaders like Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, Rudolf Hess, Wilhelm Keitel, and Joachim von Ribbentrop—men who had actually been caught. The Nuremberg court convicted Bormann of war crimes and sentenced him to hang.

But they never caught him. As historian Luke Daly-Groves documents in Hitler’s Death, American and British intelligence services received a flood of tips and reported sightings for years—Brazil, Switzerland, Denmark, Egypt, England, the United States, Spain. He was reported to be living disguised as a monk in Rome (or maybe Spain) or to have fled via U-boat (or maybe helicopter) to Argentina (or maybe a Tibetan monastery) with Hitler. British intelligence received so many contradictory leads that Bormann’s supposed travel itinerary became the subject of jokes. And because of the conflicted but not mutually exclusive eyewitness accounts of survivors and the total lack of legitimate leads following the war, these agencies were confident that Bormann was dead. But the rumors continued, aided by a sensationalist media, and eventually, probably because so many Nazis who had escaped had fled to South America, the rumored location of Bormann’s refuge settled there.

And that’s the joke. The elusive man in South America faking the golden ticket is a wanted Nazi war criminal.

In his making-of book Pure Imagination, Mel Stuart, Willy Wonka’s director, acknowledges the joke, and that it didn’t land. “The scene was never as successful as I had hoped.” He also thinks he knows why: “twenty-five years after World War II, very few people knew or cared who Bormann was.”

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory came out in 1971. In December of 1972, Martin Bormann was found. Construction workers near the Berlin railway station where Axmann had last seen Bormann uncovered two sets of human remains. One was the loathsome Dr. Stumpfegger. Dental analysis and, in the 1990s, DNA comparison with an elderly cousin, confirmed the other body’s identity—it was Martin Bormann. Glass fragments in the skull’s teeth showed that Bormann, like his Führer, had killed himself, but with cyanide rather than a bullet.

That fifth golden ticket proved even phonier than we thought.

Hitler's death, 75 years later

Hitler decorates a member of the HitlerjuGend in his last public appearance, April 1945

75 years ago today, Adolf Hitler killed himself in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The city lay in ruins and hundreds of thousands of soldiers of the Soviet Red Army were at that moment only hours from grinding the last Nazi resistance to powder, and Hitler, after final farewells to the small coterie of staff members, secretaries, and toadies who had remained with him, retired to his personal chambers with the new Frau Hitler, where she took poison and he shot himself. The staff burned their bodies immediately.

A fitting end, and it would be tempting to gloat over the circumstances of his death were it not for the 80+ million people he dragged into the abyss with him. So I think such a date calls for commemoration—not necessarily celebration, though it will always be true that the people rejoice when the wicked perish, but rather a remembering in order to understand. It is good to look to the past, to look it as fully in the face as we are able, and to try to reckon with what we see there. This should be no exception.

So in that spirit of remembering and learning I wanted to recommend two films and three books that could help you learn about what took place today in 1945. I’ll start with the movies first:

Downfall (Der Untergang)

Downfall is the great film treatment of the final days of Hitler and the Third Reich. Based on a book by historian Joachim Fest (see below) and the memoirs of a number of survivors of the Führerbunker, Downfall opens on Hitler’s 56th birthday and follows a wide number of characters through his final ten days of life and beyond, concluding with the attempt of the bunker’s survivors to break through the Russian encirclement.

Bruno gANZ AS aDOLF hITLER IN dER uNTERGANG (2004)

The filmmakers, led by director Oliver Hirschbiegel, include the perspectives of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s young, naive secretary, and her friends; the ordinary staff members of the bunker like switchboard operator Rochus Misch and Hitler’s personal adjutant Otto Günsche; the generals on Hitler’s staff and high-ranking members of his government like Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer; soldiers and officers cobbling together Berlin’s defenses; the doctors trying to save the wounded; and ordinary citizens of all ages now struggling to support the collapsing Nazi military against the power of the Red Army. Its scope is impressive, and Downfall offers as comprehensive a picture of the fall of Berlin as is possible in a single film.

The filmmakers did a solid job of presenting the known facts, and opted to depict only those things they could confirm from actual historical sources. So, since no one who was in the room with Hitler when he killed himself survived, the viewer experiences that moment as the survivors outside did—a muffled gunshot followed by the disposal of the bodies. While the film takes some artistic liberties with the story (perhaps most notably, softening the fate of Frau Junge), it mostly adheres to the documented historical record and does so with a minimum of fictionalization.

But while that’s a reason to watch Downfall, it’s not the reason. The main reason should be Swiss actor Bruno Ganz’s performance as Hitler—a dark, subtle, scary portrayal of an evil man now sickly and beaten down, rolling back and forth between self-pity and rage, charm and brutality, his old magnetism and something utterly repellent. Ganz presents us with a man who believes his own lies and, faced with defeat, has determined to take everyone down with him. This decision testifies to his evil; that many of his followers stick with him is a testament to that indescribable other side of his personality that Ganz, better than anyone else, brings to life. It’s the best onscreen realization of this complicated, inscrutable man that I’ve seen, and the much-memed scene in which he rants against his generals for their supposed betrayal is only one of the film’s many overwhelmingly powerful moments.

Downfall is a grim film, and appropriately so. Most of the historical figures we meet die before the end, many by their own hands, and some choose coldbloodedly to take their children with them. Perhaps the most disturbing scene in the film is that in which Frau Goebbels first drugs and then, one by one, crushes cyanide capsules in the mouths of her six children.

But I think it’s a necessary film in the same way that a film about the Third Reich’s victims is, and with perhaps an even more important lesson. For where we all imagine what we might do if we were to face victimization by people like the Nazis, very few of us have the moral courage to imagine ourselves as the perpetrators. Until we can do that, and look beyond our easy image of the Nazis as monsters, we can’t fully recognize our own potential for evil. Downfall is at its best when it makes us most uncomfortable.

The Bunker

If you are curious about the subject but want to see something less graphic than Downfall or are genuinely intimidated by “the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles,” let me recommend The Bunker, a film based on the book of the same name by journalist James P. O’Donnell, the first non-Russian to gain access to the ruins of the bunker following the fall of Berlin.

Anthony Hopkins as Adolf Hitler in The Bunker (1981)

The Bunker begins with Hitler’s move from above ground to the Führerbunker in January of 1945 and focuses primarily on the last two weeks or so of Hitler’s life there. The Bunker played on CBS in 1981 and has many of the limitations of a TV movie of that time—it’s decidedly cheap looking in many respects, owing mostly to TV-style lighting though the sets and especially the costumes look good. But the film’s big draw is the cast, which features solid work by a number of recognizable faces including Richard Jordan, Michel Lonsdale, Michael Kitchen, and a very young Julian Fellowes, most famous now as the creator of Downton Abbey. But most important of all is Anthony Hopkins in an Emmy-winning performance as Hitler.

Hopkins’s Hitler is closed off and detached, almost catatonic in some scenes and flying into rages in others. (The film makes much of the many drugs administered to Hitler by his personal physician, Dr. Morell, one of history’s great quacks.) Hopkins clearly studied Hitler’s flamboyant oratorical gestures closely and incorporates them whenever Hitler loses his temper. The impression one gets is of an enfeebled man who almost ceases to exist when he is not performing. It’s alienating and terrifying, and were it not for Ganz’s more fully rounded Hitler in Downfall—a Hitler that integrates all of these seemingly disparate parts as well as his much noted charm and magnetism—I’d rate this as perhaps the best imagined Hitler on film.

But caveat lector. Be aware that the cheapness of the cinematography is not the only issue with The Bunker. Its scope is narrower and unless you already know a little bit of who’s who, the film may get confusing. This is especially the case near the end, as the major cast members either kill themselves or join groups hoping to break out of Berlin. Some characters simply disappear from the narrative. But the source material’s reliance on Albert Speer is perhaps the biggest issue. The film spends a lot of time following Speer through a half-baked plot to flood the bunker with tabun (a nerve agent developed in Germany by some of the same chemists who created sarin), an interesting story but one that Speer almost certainly made up after the war, when he spent decades carefully crafting an image as an apolitical artist and technocrat hoodwinked by the regime.

Nevertheless, if you’re aware of some of these historical problems, The Bunker can be both instructive and, more important, gripping. The final hour—with Hitler’s suicide and the deaths of the entire Goebbels family and many, many others—is genuinely chilling, a testament both to the actors and to the power of the true story they’re trying to reenact.

While The Bunker is available on a rather expensive DVD, you can find it free in its entirety—albeit in VHS quality—on YouTube.

Having noted these two films, let me recommend a few books if you want more detailed and rigorous non-fiction presentations of these events:

Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, by Joachim Fest

The book that provided the basis for the film Downfall, Hitler biographer Joachim Fest’s Inside Hitler’s Bunker is a short, brisk read and a good guide to the sequence of events that played out in the days leading up to and following Hitler’s suicide. Fest capably interweaves the stories of the many people who both lived with Hitler in the bunker and those who passed through. (One of the striking things about the bunker, once you begin studying it, is how many people dropped in, especially in the final days. The films elide some of this out of necessity, though Downfall does an excellent job creating an impression of how busy the place was.) If you’re looking for a quick, straightforward narrative of Hitler’s final days and the fall of Berlin, this is the one I’d recommend.

As two bonus recommendations, if you’d like to read the perspective of just one of the people who visited the bunker in the final days, the opening chapters of Siegfried Knappe’s memoir Soldat relate his repeated trips to the bunker to brief Hitler as the defenses of Berlin crumbled; and if you’re interested in something that treats the last several months of the Reich in greater depth and gives a lot more context but shorter treatment to Hitler’s death, check out The Fall of Berlin 1945, by Antony Beevor.

Hitler: The Survival Myth, by Donald M. McKale

Up to this point I haven’t mentioned the many, many conspiracy theories surrounding Hitler’s death. This is not because I am unaware of them. Indeed, I have at least one student per semester who either is curious about or fervently believes one of these theories. Unfortunately for these students, the theories are all bogus—and I can tell them that one of my professors at Clemson literally wrote the book on it. Hitler: The Survival Myth, tracks the origins, spread, and evolution of these myths and theories from the immediate aftermath of his death and the capture of the bunker by the Russians through the decades following. Most of the many, many competing theories stem from the uncertainty surrounding Hitler’s fate—an uncertainty deliberately created by the Russians as disinformation for the western Allies and unwittingly abetted by the sensationalist western press ever since. McKale follows the growth and elaboration of these myths through meticulous research into decades of news coverage, public opinion polls, and more, and carefully debunks them.

Though the book is almost forty years old (it was originally published in 1981, the same year that The Bunker premiered on CBS), it is available in an updated edition and its premises and conclusions still hold up, as the conspiracy theories have only become more and more tenuously connected to reality in the years since.

As another bonus recommendation, Dr. McKale’s most recent book is Nazis After Hitler: How Perpetrators of the Holocaust Cheated Justice and Truth, which deals in detail with some Nazis who did manage to escape and, in many cases, live to a ripe old age.

Hitler’s Death: The Case Against Conspiracy, by Luke Daly-Groves

Despite the prevalence and apparent popular appeal of Hitler survival theories, books like Dr. McKale’s are scarce, especially considering the vast literature on the Third Reich that has appeared in the last eighty years. Some of this scarcity surely stems from the association of these conspiracy theories with fringe pseudoscience (what begins as a question about Hitler’s suicide often quickly expands to encompass cloning and Nazi UFOs), Neo-Nazism (if Hitler didn’t kill himself, the Third Reich wasn’t really defeated, or so they think), and general kookery.

Luke Daly-Groves’s book Hitler’s Death: The Case Against Conspiracy comes as a relief then. He does not dismiss the conspiracy theories but directly investigates and engages them and drives out false knowledge with good, relying on the proper use of the historical method and the mountains of available evidence. His book is one of the most recent and comprehensive looks at the subject and is designed specifically to counter the still-widespread conspiracy theories. Daly-Groves argues that argument and persuasion are more powerful in the long run than dismissal, and I think that makes his approach through this book worthwhile. You can listen to a good short interview with him on the History Hit podcast here, or via the embedded Stitcher player in this post.

Conclusion

This is a big anniversary and I hope you’ll take some time to understand what happened, what it can teach us about both the Third Reich and ourselves, and what ghostly remnants of these events we’re still living with today. These films and books offer a good introduction and lots of food for thought. Thanks for reading!

Perelandra on City of Man Podcast

Eve of Perelandra, by James Lewicki

A few weeks ago, my friend Coyle Neal of the City of Man Podcast hosted David Grubbs and I for a discussion of the first book of CS Lewis’s “Space Trilogy,” Out of the Silent Planet. That was a great conversation, and I finished it looking forward to talking about the second book with them. I’m happy to say our discussion of Perelandra has arrived.

Perelandra continues the story of philologist Elwin Ransom with a journey to Venus—Perelandra in the celestial tongue—where he is destined to play a role in the temptation of another Eve in another Eden. As part of our discussion, Coyle, David, and I talk about the book’s historical context, what had happened both in Lewis’s life and and the world since Out of the Silent Planet and how that shaped this book; the plot and characters; the literary influences Lewis masterfully drew upon to fashion the world of Venus and the thematic resonances and harmonies of the story, everything from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival to Dante and Milton and the anonymous poet of The Battle of Maldon; the book’s relation to others Lewis was working at the same time, like A Preface to Paradise Lost and The Screwtape Letters; the fallen Oyarsa of Thulcandra—Satan—and his pettiness, brutality, and continuous evolution from Hegel to Nietzsche to Lovecraft; the role of violence and righteous wrath in the story; and what, if anything, Lewis’s story has to teach us about the fall, temptation, sin, and redemption.

You can also learn what it is about Perelandra that reminds us of “Tiger King.”

I had a great time recording this episode—it may be the most fun I’ve had doing a podcast—and I hope y’all enjoy listening. We will finish our read-through of the Space Trilogy with That Hideous Strength soon. I’m looking forward to it.

In the meantime, you can listen to City of Man Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or to this particular episode of the show via the embedded Stitcher player in this post. Thanks for listening! Hope y’all enjoy.

How to Grow Old

I originally wrote and posted this review of De Senectute on Goodreads after I read it in March of 2017. I have fond memories of carrying this little book in my pocket on a trip to the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia for my daughter’s birthday. Now, three years later, with two more children, a lot more grey on my chin, and the Riverbanks Zoo closed to prevent the spread of coronavirus, I revisited Cicero’s wonderful meditation and found it just as uplifting, enlightening, and challenging as before. I share my slightly emended original review with y’all in hopes that it will be beneficial and that some of y’all will check the book out.

“Those who lack within themselves the means for living a blessed and happy life will find any age painful.”

Late last year I found grey in the stubble on my chin. This year I’ve started sprouting grey hairs at my temples. Time and age catch up to us all, and for modern people—to judge by a perennially fruitful field of advertising—the discovery of grey hair, or crow’s feet, or a newly creaky joint, marks the beginning of a crisis. The same was apparently true in the ancient world, judging by the forceful arguments against bemoaning old age in Cicero’s De Senectute, loosely rendered here as How to Grow Old.

Cicero wrote On Old Age in early 44 BC, as he entered his 60s. One would imagine Cicero had more to worry about than growing old—in the twenty years since saving the Republic from the Catiline conspiracy, he had found himself marginalized and finally ousted from the Roman political scene. His friends or allies in the Civil War fell one by one as Caesar, whom he steadfastly opposed, carried all before him in the Civil War. Finally, his beloved daughter Tullia had died the year before. Cicero devoted this time to philosophical reflection, completing this book—one in a rapidly appearing series of works—just before Caesar’s assassination, which began a fresh round of strife that resulted in Cicero's murder.

Cicero set his dialogue in the illustrious past, before present troubles, which still intruded most notably in his choice of speaker: Cato the Elder, the revered great-grandfather of Cicero's sometime political ally Cato, who had disemboweled himself in Utica in 46 BC rather than be captured, forgiven, and used as a human prop for Caesar's propaganda purposes. The elder Cato had fought in the Second Punic War alongside Scipio Africanus—whose adopted grandson is one of Cato's young conversation mates in the dialogue—and lived well into his eighties. He lived on as a Roman ideal to more than just his great-grandson, and Cicero here makes him a spokesman for wise and dignified old age.

Much of Cato's advice rotates around the Stoic poles of Nature and Reason (already giving this book a significant edge over most current self-help advice on growing older). The right use of Reason, Nature’s great gift to man, brings man into alignment with Nature, and enables a life of virtue. This seemingly abstract idea helps make sense of much of the misery that the aging experience, and points to the real truth about the challenge of growing older: it all comes back to character.

Cato tackles four major objections to aging: the denial of an active life (both physical and mental), the weakening of the body, the deprivation of sensual pleasure (especially sex), and—the big one—the ever nearing threat of death.

The answers to these objections stem from a deeply wise observation—aging well begins in youth. A once athletic man who mourns himself as dead when he loses the spryness of youth has had his priorities wrong from the beginning. A person mourning the inability to fulfill all their appetites never really knew what those appetites were for, and allowed them to master him. And people who fear death will never really be happy in any age, because death can come at any time—it is simply harder to ignore in old age. “Since death threatens us at every hour,” Cato asks, “how can anyone who is afraid of it have a steadfast soul?”

Cicero sprinkles imagery from nature (by way of Nature) liberally, particularly of the seasons. Granted that a person has lived virtuously as a youth and can approach aging properly, he will see that old age is simply another season, a season with pleasures, duties, and honors of its own. Cicero may not use these words, but a lifestyle appropriate to or befitting old age—Reason corresponding to Nature—is key. If weakness of the body is appropriate to old age, so is the wisdom of accumulated years. The fretful elderly who keep Viagra in business are, in Cicero’s mind, still mastered by an appetite appropriate to an earlier season, and create their own misery by their unwillingness to appreciate old age on its own terms.

Old age’s honors include respect and wisdom, time for simply pleasurable work (for Cato, farming and learning Greek), study, thought, and conversation, and some much-appreciated stability after the stormy passions of youth. Of course, respect is not guaranteed—one thinks of the way the elderly are shunted to the side as quickly and efficiently as possible in our world—but a life well lived is its own reward, and will result in a person calm and content in the face of death. The approach of death—which is one of the things appropriate to old age, like the fall of ripe fruit from a tree—does not rob old age of its value, but rather gives it value by focusing one’s priorities. Lust and greed should fall away (“What could be more ridiculous than for a traveler to add to his baggage at the end of a journey?”) in favor of reflection on past blessings. (I was reminded of his assertion in an old legal case that gratitude “is not only the greatest, but is also the parent of all the other virtues.”) Cato concludes his arguments with a really interesting and moving discourse on his belief in eternal life.

I wasn’t really bothered to find grey hair on my head—on the contrary, I think it’s really interesting to watch it spread—but a lot of people are, and as our culture values youth and vitality to an idolatrous extent, On Old Age is a refreshing celebration of age.

Philip Freeman’s translation of De Senectute is free and brisk and a delight to read, as I’m sure Cicero’s original (which is presented on the facing page for one to pick through and compare) is in the Latin. His short introduction offers a simple breakdown of the main benefits of aging that Cato extols in the body of the dialogue. A few pages of succinct, helpful endnotes identify people or explain allusions within the dialogue.

* * *

If you enjoyed this review, please give Philip Freeman’s wonderful translation a read, or check out the other volumes in the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series from Princeton UP, including another of my favorites, Cicero’s De Amicitia or How to Be a Friend. And please check out my novella about Cicero’s death, The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Thanks for reading!

Chesterton on fools

In honor of April Fools’ Day, here’s a quick batch of thoughts on fools and foolishness from GK Chesterton, a man who knew a thing or two about the topic—and also how to enjoy what he often called the “topsy turvy,” which is the essence of the holiday.

Alas, not everyone is a fan of April Fools’ Day. I’ve already seen warnings on social media regarding the precisely proper ways to celebrate it this year, admonitions so stern and moralistic I started checking the posters’ profile pictures for ruffs and broadcloth. I’ve also seen some deeply wise people suggesting we not fool around at all, reminding us that we have apparently evolved beyond the examples of those who survived the plague and religious persecution and the death camps and the gulag and can—and should—now hang up our humor and adopt a properly modern attitude of lugubrious, sorrowful navel-gazing. Which brings me to this line, from “The Neglect of Christmas,” 1906:

“There are those who dislike playing the fool, preferring to act the same part in a more serious spirit.”

Let the reader understand. And there’s this, from “A Defence of Heraldry,” collected in The Defendant, 1901:

“We shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of ourselves. For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite certain that the effort is superfluous.”

Being foolish is not a choice. There is, indeed, no other option.

Chesterton will begin to make a lot more sense to you once you’ve reckoned with his thoughts on two categories of people: madmen and fools. Madmen, those afflicted with any number of the insanities that have created the modern world, are the tragic endpoint, and much of his writing was concerned with outlining, arguing against, and rescuing people from madness. We are susceptible to madness because we do not begin as a tabula rasa of sanity and then fall away into madness, but begin predisposed to it because we are all, in fact, fools.

This is not the kind of everyone-is-an-idiot cynicism of some modern thinkers and most middle school malcontents. It is not even necessarily a bad thing. That’s because it stems from Chesterton’s beliefs about mankind as informed by Christian doctrine. From Heretics, 1905:

The weak point in the whole of Carlyle’s case for aristocracy lies, indeed, in his most celebrated phrase. Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of the equality of men. But the essential point of it is merely this, that whatever primary and far-reaching moral dangers affect any man, affect all men.

Chesterton saw the Socratic truth that wisdom must begin from a recognition of one’s own foolishness, a foolishness shared with all of mankind and therefore not just the basis of any real equality but also of any real wisdom. From his 1910 book What’s Wrong With the World, in a passage on the ever-relevant topic of modern education:

“We shall certainly make fools of ourselves; that is what is meant by philosophy.”

This fundamental fact—that we are all fools, disguise it as we may—is also the basis of our one true hope, since only Christianity can acknowledge this universal human defect and not just offer a solution to it but make it one of the instruments of our redemption. From his great 1908 book Orthodoxy:

Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the grey ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard. When one came to think of one’s self, there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let himself go—as long as he let himself go at himself. There was an open playground for the happy pessimist. Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not say that a man, quâ man, can be valueless. Here again, in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious. The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.

No one is too big a fool to be saved. As Chesterton knew, it is the engine of redemption and the acknowledgement that we are fools is a step toward sainthood. Indeed, the foolishness of holiday and ritual are part of the making of saints. Again from Heretics:

“A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions when he is not even ready to wear a wreath round his head for them.”

A good reminder in this self-serious age. Don’t listen to the scolds. Be foolish, and even more importantly, be willing to be fooled. The more that we can do this, the more that we can take ourselves lightly—which, according to Chesterton, is why angels can fly—the more of us that can take that one small step called humility, the closer we fools will draw each other toward salvation.

Out of the Silent Planet on City of Man Podcast

Among the many, many books CS Lewis wrote during his lifetime, the most rewarding and underappreciated may be the Space Trilogy (aka the Ransom Trilogy), three science-fiction novels that together make up some of his earliest and most inventive fiction. Last week I sat down to talk with my friend Coyle Neal of the City of Man Podcast and fellow guest David Grubbs about the first of the three, Out of the Silent Planet. David proved to be a fellow fan; Coyle not so much.

Tune in to hear our discussion, which covers the origins of the novel and its context both in Lewis’s career and in the world at large, the plot and the interesting creatures with which Lewis peopled his martian landscape, and the ideas Lewis grappled with in the persons of his three human characters and their conflicting approaches to understanding Mars. Along the way we talk about the inspirations for the story and its world including Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom series and HG Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, and how Lewis’s early fiction stacks up against that of GK Chesterton and JRR Tolkien.

We had a great time recording this episode and I hope y’all both enjoy the listen and find the discussion fruitful. We aim to continue Lewis’s trilogy with a discussion of Perelandra soon. In the meantime, You can listen to City of Man Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting apps, or to this particular episode via the embedded Stitcher player in this post. You can look at the shownotes at the Christian Humanist Radio Network website here.

Scruton on risk aversion

From How to Think Seriously About the Planet, in a chapter entitled “Radical Precaution.” Scruton is critiquing the precautionary principle, a principle as vague, irrational, and inevitably absolutist, favoring stifling schemes (summarized as “Don’t!”) to reduce already remote risks to zero, shrouding real crises in fogs of non-negotiable regulation that often prevent decisive action, “confiscating” problems from those directly affected by them and tasking detached and unaccountable international agencies with finding universally applicable solutions. Scruton provides several discouraging examples.

Worse are the precautionary principle’s effects when it trickles down from being the guiding idea of governments and activists to being the way ordinary people approach the decisions they make in their lives. Scruton, arguing from experience, describes the breakdown of real communities and relationships wrought by the absolute Don’ts created by precautionary regulatory programs.

Building on those examples and elaborating upon those worries, Scruton writes, in response to arguments in favor of the precautionary principle based on the prioritization of needs over wants or desires, a prioritization that favors “a ‘heuristics of fear’, always focusing on worst-case scenarios and the costs that we might endure, rather than the benefits, however great, that might otherwise cast them in shadow,” that:

Distinguishing needs from desires is simply one part of the process of weighing reasons. And we should be clear that we do, in our ordinary reasoning, bargain with both life and need, and that the attempt to prevent this is rarely successful. Human beings risk their lives in skiing, hunting, driving and competitive sport; they happily exchange health for whisky and safety for love; they leap to the defence of their family and their country and throw caution to the winds. And sometimes they are prepared to risk the end of everything, in defence of a way of life that they refuse to jettison. The prefect of a Roman city besieged by Vandals or Huns would often choose to resist rather than surrender, even though the cost of failure would be total destruction, and the cost of surrender a negotiable servitude. We do not regard the choice as irrational, or as an immoral imposition on the citizens for whom the prefect stood as guardian. Indeed, we look with suspicion on those who are unwilling to risk death in defence of a shared way of life, and we recognize sacrifice as a fundamental component in the resilience of human communities. The Roman Empire lasted because it schooled its citizens in sacrifice; and the principle that governed the beleaguered cities was not ‘to save everything, risk nothing’, but ‘to save the best things, risk everything’. We should not, therefore, ring-fence our needs and our lives from the business of risk-taking. Whatever we do, the risk of death—our own death, but also the death of those who depend on us and whom we are duty-bound to protect—is real, however small. And to forbid us to bargain with this risk, as we bargain with all others, is to deprive us of our most important weapon in confronting it. Indeed, rational beings, it seems to me, can flourish only when they have risks to confront and responsibilities to assume. The risk-free life is not a life in which we are or can be fulfilled. Any pattern of thought that seeks to extinguish risk and to lift our responsibilities in the face of it is, therefore, one that threatens a primary human need.

I can’t remember where, but several times I’ve heard people say something like: “Sociology has spent the last fifty years proving that everything your grandmother said was true.” I see two grandma sayings in the passage above: “Need ain’t the same as want” (or one of a thousand variations on that theme), which is indisputably true, but when elevated to an absolute, universal guiding principle “throws the baby out with the bathwater.”

We live in an increasingly risk-averse culture (sometimes, as now, for good reasons), and Scruton’s counterpoint, coming back as he so often does to the nature of persons and their lives in community, is welcome food for thought.

Five good St Patrick’s Day books

St Patrick visits Purgatory, from a 15th century English manuscript

Updated! With the addition of Freeman’s biography of St Patrick below, this post now has six good books to choose from. I hope y’all find something here to enjoy. Happy St Patrick’s Day!

“Although I am imperfect in many ways, I want my brothers and relations to know what I’m really like, so that they can see what it is that inspires my life.”

— St Patrick, Confessio VI

St Patrick’s Day has been one of my favorite holidays since I was a kid, when my mom would make sure my brother, sister, and I wore something green so that we wouldn’t get pinched at school. As I grew up I gradually learned more and more about the man behind the holiday and my appreciation only deepened. The childhood celebration, the fun of the holiday, led me eventually to what it all meant. It shaped me—both my imaginations and desires—like all holidays should, and are meant to.

I’m writing this at a time of heightened anxiety, as a lot of us are home under quarantine. Even those of us who are not particularly afraid of the disease making its way through the world right now probably have doubts about what the future will look like. With that in mind, I wanted to recommend a few books about St Patrick, books that will be accessible to a variety of readers, both to encourage y’all to learn more about a remarkable and righteous man, and to offer some comfort. Patrick was born into a world of even deeper uncertainties than our own, and confronted possibly more threatening enemies than mere disease, and yet he brought good out of those evils.

So I hope you’ll check out at least a few of these books. We need St Patrick and his example more than ever now.

The Confessio and Epistola, by St Patrick

I’ll start with the two surviving writings of St Patrick himself. The Confessio is our source for virtually all that we know about Patrick and his life. All other information comes to us second- or thirdhand and leans heavily toward the legendary. Patrick wrote the Confessio in response to accusations of corruption, and in it he gives a lengthy explanation of his own life: his kidnapping and enslavement by the Irish, his escape, how God compelled him to return to his former masters, and the work he undertook there among the Irish pagans. He makes vivid the many dangers faced by missionaries at this time, and forcefully responds to his critics. It’s a fascinating and bracing read, and Patrick makes it plain that his sole concern since returning to Ireland has been the Gospel. You won’t find it more clearly laid out than here. Indeed, Patrick’s powers of explanation, as displayed in this letter, at least partly explain his success as a missionary.

The Epistola or Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus is another forceful piece by Patrick, this time in response to nominally Christian British raiders who had struck westward into Ireland and butchered or enslaved Patrick’s converts, some of them on the day of their baptism. Patrick violently condemns them and calls on other British Christians both to publicize Coroticus’s sins and treat him and his men as excommunicates until they repent and return their captives to their homeland. The Epistola offers us a vivid picture of what life was like in post-Roman Britain, and what a commitment it was to live a life according to the teachings of Christ—a commitment grown no less arduous despite fifteen-hundred years of change in time, place, and culture.

Both of these documents are short—even the longer Confessio you can read in twenty or thirty minutes—and both are freely available online. You can read the entire Confessio online here, and the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus here.

St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, by Philip Freeman

This is not only the best book on Patrick that I’ve read so far, but it’s one of the best books on the post-Roman British Isles and early medieval Christianity in general. These latter two constitute, of course, almost the whole world in which Patrick lived and moved, and it’s Freeman’s attention to the context of Patrick’s life that makes this such a powerful and enlightening work. Freeman, a classicist, is able to mine ancient Greek and Roman sources and the scant offerings of archaeology and Patrick’s own writings to offer a carefully researched, well-grounded picture of the challenges facing Patrick—from the problems afflicting Britain following its abandonment by Rome to the conditions of slavery in Ireland, a remote place dominated by numerous rival warlords and the worship of gods demanding human sacrifice.

Freeman includes his own complete translations of Patrick’s Confessio and Epistola, which are very good. (I have reviewed another of Freeman’s translations here before.)

Freeman is as gifted a writer as he is a scholar, and his St Patrick of Ireland reads briskly, wearing its research lightly and indulging in a minimum of speculation to fill gaps or round out our understanding of unclear events. The result is a striking portrait of a great man—a man who was only great because of his humble acknowledgement of his flaws—bringing light to a bleak world, a model as important today as it was to the medievals.

Patrick: Patron Saint of Ireland, by Tomie dePaola

This is a relative newcomer to me and my family. My kids have enjoyed a number of Tomie dePaola’s books, and when I discovered he had a book on the life of St Patrick I made sure to get it in time for the holiday. We read it last night. My kids loved it—they picked it up to look back through it this morning while we were getting ready.

DePaola briefly sketches Patrick’s life—as outlined in his Confessio—from his noble background in Britain to his kidnapping, escape, return, and lifetime of missionary work. The pictures, as is the case with all of dePaola’s books that I’ve seen, are beautiful, influenced by but not mere imitations of the style of medieval manuscript illuminations, and the story includes a striking amount of detail for a short picturebook. The book also includes a little section on the legends associated with St Patrick, including his driving of snakes out of Ireland and the famously problematic shamrock story.

Tomie dePaola’s Patrick is an ideal way to relate his life story to kids while also making clear the counter-intuitive grace of what he did in returning to the people who had enslaved him. My daughter couldn’t believe it, providing a moment ripe for discussion.

Saint Patrick, by Jonathan Rogers

An entry in the Christian Encounters series, Jonathan Rogers’s Saint Patrick is a brisk, readable, well-researched, and short biography.

Rogers’s brevity is one of the book’s main strengths. There are longer and more scholarly biographies of Patrick (see Freeman’s above, which is not much longer but certainly more scrupulously scholarly), but this is a book I’ve recommended to friends and students for years precisely because it is so easy to read and makes the history so accessible. Rogers does a good job of expanding upon and contextualizing what Patrick reveals of himself in his two surviving letters, and commendably avoids a lot of speculation and conjecture, which are constant temptations when dealing with a subject so remote and with so little primary source material to work from—not to mention the involvement of the druids, a guarantee that you’ll get some really crazy stuff muddying the waters. The result is a good biography that you can read in an hour or so.

As a bonus, this book includes the complete texts of the Confessio and the Epistola, making this book an excellent starting place for grownups looking to learn more about Patrick, his world, and his work.

Brendan, by Frederick Buechner

This book is a bit of an outlier for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a novel, and everything else I’ve recommended so far is either one of St Patrick’s own writings or a biography of one kind or another. Second, St Patrick barely figures into the story, which mostly concerns the life and work of St Brendan the Navigator.

But Buechner’s novel so powerfully evokes the strange, dangerous world of Patrick and Brendan’s day—with violent warlords ruling diffuse petty kingdoms and druids still carrying on the demonic fertility rites of the old Irish gods in many places—that it offers an excellent way for us to understand anew what these men did and the risks they ran in doing it. And though Patrick is mostly a memory in the novel, his presence looms over Brendan because Brendan and his fellow Christians are the first generation of native Irish Christians. (We tend to forget that Patrick wasn’t himself Irish, but “Romano-British,” of mixed Roman and native Brythonic stock.) Brendan is a Christian because of Patrick, and he struggles to continue Patrick’s work of conversion, which, for him and his fellow believers living in this uncertain world, is not a foregone conclusion. The events of the novel test Brendan, and by the end, after decades in Ireland and many a God-directed voyage out to sea, he learns a lesson Patrick could have taught him—about strength being made perfect in weakness.

In conclusion

A “traditional Irish blessing” of the kind you see in memes would probably seem strange coming from an Anglo-German hillbilly like me, so let me wish you all a happy holiday and good health, and hope that you’ll find something on this list that entertains, informs, and uplifts you. Happy St Patrick’s Day!