Byzantium is an adventure story set on an epic scale. Bridging the ninth and tenth centuries, it concerns a group of Irish monks who are charged with the task of taking a beautifully illustrated and bejewelled Bible as a gift to the emperor of Byzantium in Constantinople. The story revolves around one particular monk, Aidan, who is separated for long periods from his brother monks, and whose journey turns out to be full of not only outward but also inward and spiritual peril. The action ranges from Ireland to Constantinople across present-day France, Scandinavia, and several Mideastern countries.
Stephen Lawhead is the author of a much-read trilogy dealing with the Arthurian legends, the Pendragon series. He has clearly mastered his craft. Like the best historical novels, Byzantium opens a window to remote times and places–worlds as diverse as the Irish monastery, the Viking drinking hall, the Muslim palace, and the cosmopolitan culture of Constantinople in its heyday. Several well-drawn characters enable us to see Byzantium through the eyes of a Viking pagan and Muslim prince as well as a Christian monk, and the shifting perspectives often make what would otherwise be taken for granted appear strange and new.
A particular strength of the novel is that it manages to treat all of these diverse cultures with respect yet unflinching honesty. A previous age might have chauvinistically caricatured pagans and Muslims. In these politically correct times such cultures are more likely to be romantically absolved of any evil. (I like to call this the Kevin Costner effect, as illustrated by the treatment of Native Americans in Dances with Wolves and Muslims in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.) The brutality of the Vikings is honestly portrayed in Byzantium, but so is the generosity and sense of honor of the Viking chieftain; we experience the horrors of the Khalif’s slave-mines but also the elegance and refinement of Muslim culture. The same honest lens is turned on Byzantium itself, and even on the seemingly idyllic life of the Irish monastery. Lawhead’s characters and cultures are human, all too human.
Lawhead’s story is in the end a story of faith–not of faith triumphant, but faith militant. It is a story where providence may be present but where it is terribly difficult to discern. The struggle of faith is a struggle with doubt, grounded in a realistic portrayal of suffering. Can an honest person believe in the goodness of God in a world where it appears that God is largely absent, a world where the most saintly character dies a horrible death, and those who are most dedicated to what they see as the kingdom of God seem abandoned by the Lord they serve? The answers Aidan finds for these questions are not purchased cheaply. In some ways, Lawhead, like his Christian predecessor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, seems to give the strongest arguments to the Devil’s advocate. However, the faith that can withstand such a challenge seems to me to be worth the cost, and the depiction of such a faith in literature is no mean achievement.
–C. Stephen Evans
Wired Style: Principles
of English Usage in the
Digital Age
Edited by Constance Hale
HardWired
170 pp.; $17.95
Cyberpunks, grrls, and technopagans can celebrate: Now they have a stylebook all their own. Slipcase copy promotes the book as “an Elements of Style for the 21st century,” which “smacks of the language evolving.” All smacking aside, the spirit of E. B. White can relax: “This manual isn’t intended to replace other style and grammar guides,” writes Constance Hale, “but it does dig into questions that Chicago and AP–and for that matter Strunk & White–don’t even imagine.” Quite a trick, that, showing the briefest moment of humility before dissing one’s noble forerunners. We’re in the middle of the Digital Revolution, see, and it’s “whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon.” Language “moves in one predictable direction: forward,” and it beckons to the digerati to tag along. Come, you prodigies of Way New Journalism, and “Grow the Language.”
What better guides for such a crucial task than the hive at Wired, the Digital Revolution’s magazine of record? Wired Style is more charming than its fluorescent slipcase and bright-green pages first suggest. It’s spiral-bound, as any good style guide should be, but its hard cover also assures longevity. Wired urges writers to “Capture the Colloquial,” which means there’s never a dull page. The chapter titled “Transcend the Technical” distinguishes between “true jargon,” which “can be as elegant as it is meaningful,” and “junk jargon” (implementation, menu-driven, utilize). In “Go Global,” the editors suggest a style no longer bound by North American chauvinism, but they avoid the scolding tone of pc schoolmarms. Wired Style defines a few vivid Japanese words (anime, manga), canonizes the sacred texts of the digital age (Bladerunner, The Medium Is the Massage) and identifies “Moore’s Law”: the observation that “computers get drastically better every year –faster, cheaper, smaller–and that this will occur indefinitely.” (Hubris alert!) OTOH, the editors see usage rules as mere options. (Visit www.hardwired.com/ for regular updates on which rules evolve next.)
The editors also indulge in unabashed horn-blowing. Wired congratulates itself on using first-name references in some of its stories, as if Barbara Walters had not beaten them to the habit. These bold editors “celebrate subjectivity,” “have fun with facts,” and “call a spade a spade.” So do most reporters on college newspapers before life teaches them some humility. Constance Hale uses god in her one passing reference to the Creator of wetware (the human brain), but concedes an initial cap on playing God. TinySex earns not only an initial cap, but a midcap, too.
Wired Style differs most from “Chicago, AP and Strunk & White” in the editors’ frequent use of the editorial “we,” and in their frequent block quotes from Wired classics, usually written in the first-person singular. “Consider this Version 1.0,” Hale writes. Perhaps by Version 6.0.3, the editors will lose all the gaseous utopianism (e-mail is “the best form of communication–ever”) and the cyberpunk four-letter words. Then, maybe, they’ll produce a book truly as essential as The Chicago Manual of Style, The Associated Press Stylebook, or The Elements of Style.
— Douglas LeBlanc
A World of Their Own Making:
Myth, Ritual, and the Quest
for Family Values
By John R. Gillis
BasicBooks
310 pp.; $25
Since they help us see how fascinatingly different the past was, good historians cannot write boring history. Turning his attention to the actual family values of times and places behind us, Rutgers scholar John Gillis never bores. His survey of the rituals of birth, courtship, marriage, parenthood, and death within European and American families is enlivened by compelling synthetic insights peppered with fresh, sometimes startling, historical details. For example, Gillis observes that early modern folk “understood love as a physical phenomenon, which could be communicated . . . immediately,” then notes: “In Wales it was not unknown for a boy to urinate on a girl he was particularly fond of, and everywhere kisses were more like bites, for the drawing of blood was, like any commingling of bodily fluids, a powerful symbol of attachment.” Ahem. Point taken.
Gillis’s agenda is to strike back at today’s conservative family-values proponents, with a brief that history’s families have been quite diverse, so let’s not get too hung up on heterosexual monogamy now. Those of us who do not share that agenda can profitably poach on his historical labor to other ends. Students of gender, for instance, can find many leads toward evidence indicating that preindustrial fathers were considered as nurturing and capable of childcare as mothers. Even more intriguing, at least for this reader, are the theological implications of Gillis’s investigation of the ideology of the home. Gillis argues that premodern Catholics and Protestants associated home ultimately with heaven. Life on earth was an exile, so that home was an eschatological destination rather than a retreat or return to the place of birth. Relatedly, these earlier Christians had a much more theocentric orientation, making God the marked center of their affections. Spouses were regularly warned not to love one another too much, and the commandment to honor your parents applied to all fathers and mothers in the household of God, not just to one’s own biological parents. Gillis’s striking investigation of such topics can help contemporary Christians to see where their “pro-family” crusades verge on idolatry and may actually obstruct the embodiment of the genuinely Christian family.
–Rodney Clapp
Fascism: A History
By Roger Eatwell
Allen Lane/Penguin
404 pp.; $34.95
The Sacralization of Politics
in Fascist Italy
By Emilio Gentile
Translated by Keith Botsford
Harvard University Press
208 pp.; $49.95
It’s always something. No sooner has the dust from the collapse of the communist edifice settled than we begin hearing about the threat of neo-fascism. Ethnic cleansers and skinheads make front-page news. The previously dwindling ranks of Holocaust deniers are getting reinforcements from the likes of David Irving. Is fascism back?
Before we can answer that question, there is the little problem of definition. What exactly is fascism? Roger Eatwell considers it “a holistic-national radical Third Way.” Rejecting the arguments that fascism is primarily about style or about “Manichean demonization of the enemy,” Eatwell contends that all true fascists hold to a common ideological core, traceable to the usual eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suspects: Rousseau, Nietzsche, Pareto. Fascism seeks to regenerate the nation through a radical social revolution that would avoid the “extremes” of capitalism and communism. In short, despite its protean qualities, fascism is, according to Eatwell, a serious ideology.
Here Emilio Gentile agrees. However, Gentile argues further that fascism, in the Italian context about which he writes, “belongs to the luxuriant and alarming modern phenomenon of secular religions.” He describes in splendid detail how and why the Italian Fascists attempted to “sacralize the state”: how the fascists coopted the nineteenth-century nationalists’ goals of civic and moral renewal through the development of the new nation, turned the youth movement and the veterans organizations into a “holy militia,” converted national symbols such as the flag into elements of their “liturgy,” cooperated at times with the Catholic church in order to “smooth [the fascists’] search for power,” actively proselytized the masses through demonstrations and rallies, called in artists “to glorify the myths of the Fascist religion,” and centered all of these activities around the cult of the Duce.
Eatwell’s focus is quite different. He “hunt[s] for the roots of fascist movements,” not in the realm of ideas, but in “the more concrete realm of national histories.” So histories of nations, and not always histories of fascism, are what the reader gets. In workmanlike fashion, Eatwell demonstrates that fascism succeeded in Germany and Italy because an unstable political order provided maneuvering room for a talented leader with disciplined followers and a “syncretic” ideology to woo the masses and seduce the conservative political leadership. By contrast, no such maneuvering room existed in France or Britain.
So far, so good. But if fascist success was predicated on the luck of the political draw, then neo-fascism could easily steal its way back into power given the right conditions (for example, a charismatic politician exploiting such contentious issues as mass immigration and a stagnant economy). Thus, claims Eatwell, “fascism is on the move again” and needs to be taken seriously.
This reader is unconvinced. As Gentile argues, it was precisely the “sacralization of politics” that distinguished the Italian experiment (and the similar Bolshevik and Nazi ventures) as totalitarian, not merely tyrannical. Just as Gorbachev is not a Stalin, neither is Le Pen a Hitler. Lacking the civil-religious impulse of true fascism, neo-fascism manifests merely a family resemblance to its ominous forebear. That “neo” is vital.
–Edward E. Ericson III
Some Far and Distant Place
By Jonathan S. Addleton
University of Georgia Press
208 pp.; $29.95
Jonathan Addleton, who works for the U.S. Agency for International Development, shares bittersweet vignettes about growing up as the second son of Conservative Baptist missionaries in Pakistan. Shaped by gritty realities among people precariously close to death and yet indifferent to the gospel, Addleton neither indulges in the standard missionary cliches of evangelistic victories (apparently few) nor laments a childhood lost as a “missionary kid” sent off to the Murree Christian (boarding) School. He sprinkles his observations with frequent allusions to Scripture and familiar hymns, as if to say, “This is the old-time religion we missionaries believed.” Perhaps from a reserve learned while living among Muslims, he never quite spells out where he himself stands spiritually today.
Like so many other missionary pilgrims, the Addletons were aliens and strangers on earth, longing for a heavenly country. He writes, “It was strange to think that, even in America, the country we thought of as our own, we should be set so much apart, even as we were in Pakistan. Here too our religion and our family life were different, so different that it sometimes felt that others viewed us as followers of some strange and threatening cult.”
Yet Addleton would not trade his life’s poignant complexities for a safe existence in Georgia. “Life taken in its entirety was a serious business,” he writes, “but momentary humiliations or successes meant almost nothing; they were like the leaves of autumn, vivid for a few days and then gone forever. . . . There was a natural
tension between particular events that seemed so important on any given day and the view of them as seen through a longer lens, from the perspective of eternity. It demanded an attitude of awe mixed with ambiguity, faith combined with uncertainty and, above all, a humbler and less ambitious view of life, one that accepted the failings of others, all the time hoping that others too would reciprocate and accept the same failings in oneself.”
–Stan Guthrie
Rodney Clapp is the author of A Peculiar People: The Church As Culture in a Post-Christian Society (InterVarsity). Edward E. Ericson III is assistant professor of history at John Brown University. C. Stephen Evans is professor of philosophy at Calvin College. Stan Guthrie is managing editor of Pulse and Evangelical Missions Quarterly. Douglas L. LeBlanc is editor of United Voice.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.
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