Food

The metaphor is usually one of speed: fast food has ruined our culture, slow food will save it (and is the rallying manifesto for the movement of the same name, based in Bra, in northern Italy.) You see the metaphor’s appeal. But it obscures a fundamental problem, which has little to do with speed and everything to do with size. Fast food did not ruin our culture. The problem was already in place, systemic in fact, and began the moment food was treated like an inanimate object – like any other commodity – that could be manufactured in increasing numbers to satisfy a market. In effect, the two essential players in the food chain (those who make the food and those who buy it) swapped roles. One moment the producer (the guy who knew his cows or the woman who prepared culatello only in January of the old young man who picks his olives in September) determined what was available and how it was made. The next moment it was the consumer. The Maestro blames the supermarkets, but the supermarkets are just a symptom. (Or, to invoke a familiar piece of retail philosophy: the world changed when the food business agreed that the customer was right, when, as we all know, the customer is actually – well, not always right.) What happened in the food business has occurred in every aspect of modern life, and the change has produced many benefits. I like island holidays and flat-screen televisions and have no argument with global market economics, except in this respect – in what it has done to food.

When I started, I hadn’t wanted a restaurant. What I wanted was the know-how of people who ran restaurants. I didn’t want to be a chef: just a cook. And my experiences in Italy taught my why. For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer’s knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don’t have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and, it’s true, those who do have it tend to be professionals – like chefs. But I don’t want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human.

From Heat (An amateur’s adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany) by Bill Buford.

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Happiness

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so, I suppose, we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman. We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace.

The End of the Affair (1951) by Graham Greene

Plan for Alexandria, Wind up in Constantinople?

Deus Vult! Jonathan Phillips’ The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (2004) (I’ve previously reviewed Madden’s Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice and a book Phillips edited about the First Crusade.)

Here is a (very) brief chronology of the Fourth Crusade, with parts for the major players:

June 1198
Pope Innocent III: Go to the Holy Land, avenge the injury to Christ!

1199-1201
Crusaders: Mea culpa, we have sinned! We will repent by recapturing the Holy Land! We will pay our own way there!

April 1201
Crusade leaders: We need a way to get 33,500 men there.
Venetians: We will suspend all other operations for a year to help you get there; we’ll only charge per man and horse for all the men.
Crusade leaders: Yeah! (sotto voce) Don’t tell anyone we are really going to first sack Alexandria and use Egypt as a launching point for recapturing the Holy Land.
Venetians: Yeah! (sotto voce) The riches of Alexandria will also help pay our expenses and give us access to that market!
Pope Innocent III: Get moving!

Summer 1202
Venetians: Where is everyone?
Crusade leaders: Oh no! We are idiots! Some of the crusaders found passage to the Holy Land another way! We only have 12,000 men with us!
Venetians: WHERE ARE THE MEN WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO PAY? HOW WILL WE GET THE MONEY YOU OWE US??
Crusade leaders: (sotto voce) Don’t forget, we are going to Alexandria.

Autumn 1202 – the Sack of Zara
Venetians: Why not help us recover our debts now – let’s sack the Christian city of Zara!
Crusaders: Yeah! They have been fighting you guys for years anyway!
Innocent III: You’re all excommunicated!

December 1202
Young Prince Alexius: Help me depose the usurper Alexius III and recover the Byzantine throne for myself and my father! I will pay LOTS! And give you even more men and ships to conquer Alexandria.
Venetians: We can get our money back?!
Crusaders: Yeah, let’s go to Constantinople!
Pope Innocent III: You’re all excommunicated!

June 1203
Crusaders: Yeah, we’re outside of Constantinople!
Venetians: Parade Alexius around so that the people will welcome him and we can get our money and get out of here!
Young Prince Alexius: OOPS! (sotto voce) I might have left a few things out…I don’t know…the situation is more delicate than that….
Byzantines: Who is this fool Alexius? We will not negotiate!

July 1203 – SIEGE! FIGHT!
The Byzantines roll over, Alexius and his increasingly insane father Isaac II share power, Alexius III flees.

August 1203
Venetians: Where is our money?
Now Emperor Alexius: Ah, oh, hmm, um…
Isaac II: We owe you nothing!

FIRE!

Fall 1203
Crusaders: Let’s leave!
Emperor Alexius (Alexius IV): If you leave, I can’t keep the throne and I won’t be able to repay you! But here, let me burn down some religious art and relics to pay you!
Venetians: Money, money, money!
Pope Innocent III: You’re all excommunicated!
The Byzantine throne changes hands a few more times, all the emperors (6 in about a year) refuse to negotiate with the Crusaders and get them away from the city.

Winter 1204
Byzantines: We’re going to kill you!
Crusaders: Huh?!

Lent 1204
Byzantines: Prepare for war!
Crusaders: Umm, okay!

April 1204 – SIEGE, take two
Crusaders: GRRR!
Byzantines: AAAH!!! Run for your lives!

13 April 1204
Byzantines: We surrender!
Crusaders: We’re going to take EVERYTHING!
Byzantines: AAAH!!! Run for your lives!

SACK!!!
Venetians: We have our money!
Crusaders: We have money too!
Both in unison: Divide the spoils of the city!

Innocent III: You’re all excommunicated! How many times do I have to declare it? 'How, indeed, will the church of the Greeks, no matter how severely she is beset with afflictions and persecutions, return into ecclesiastical union and to a devotion for the Apostolic See, when she has seen in the Latins only an example of perdition and the works of darkness, so that she now, and with reason, detests the Latins more than dogs? As for those who were supposed to be seeking the ends of Jesus Christ, not their own ends, who made their swords, which they were supposed to use against the pagans, drip with Christian blood,­ they have spared neither religion, nor age, nor sex.' Oh, wait (November 7, 1204), the capture of Constantinople is a ‘magnificent miracle…done by the Lord and is wondrous in His eyes.’

In Phillips' analysis, the fundamental error of the Fourth Crusade, the one that placed the whole expedition on the railings towards a train wreck, was the failure to ensure that all Crusaders would take the Venetian vessels to the Holy Land, as had been contracted by the Crusade leaders. For thirteen months Venice suspended all other commercial activity to prepare a fleet for the Crusade: enough room for 4,500 knights, 9,000 squires, and 20,000 foot soldiers. Also included was room for 4500 horses and the 30,000 Venetians (half the population of the city) who would be required to sail this fleet of 200 to 250 ships. When less than half the proposed number of Crusaders showed up in Venice, the leaders were left holding a contract that owed a tremendous amount of money to the Venetians to avoid the economic collapse of that state. Almost everything that played out over the next two years were maneuvers to allow the Crusade leaders to recover the money that was owed to the Venetians.

Once we reach Constantinople, there are a few very important lessons: 1) Do not antagonize a standing army outside one’s city, particularly an army composed of battle-experienced soldiers who have been away from home and family and living on rations for over three years. Do not rattle this cage. 2) Byzantine politics have never looked so byzantine. When an army is outside the gates and all they really want is money and then to get out of there, never-ending political upheaval, refusing them money, and attacking them is NOT a good idea, especially if on the way to your city they already sacked one of their own. 3) Was there not a single skilled military leader for the Byzantines in all of Constantinople?! Talk about a military in disarray…

Phillips' book follows the work of Queller and Madden to re-examine the Fourth Crusade, and revise the rather hostile to the West interpretations of Runciman and JJ Norwich. About 30 years ago, Queller published works that focused attention on the devout piety of Western crusaders, and as is clear from contemporary accounts (Robert of Clari, Geoffrey of Villehardouin), Westerners really were profoundly moved by requests to reconquer the Holy Land for the sake of Christ. They were also battle-experienced: military skills were a regular part of life. Both Queller and Madden have carefully searched for support for the commonly held view that the Venetians wanted to divert the Crusade to Constantinople in order to eliminate a shipping rival, and have found the evidence sorely lacking. Madden's works on Venetian history carefully demonstrate the degree to which stability was prized by the Venetians, and how they would have had no interest in diverting resources to maintain control or govern additional lands, as their own actions after the establishment of the Latin Empire indicate. It was mere chance that the future Emperor Alexius IV, also a brother-in-law to one of the Crusade leaders, would show up asking for assistance in recapturing the Byzantine throne of his deposed father, Isaac II.

But these facts do not address the most striking element of the sack of Constantinople: not the fact that it happened, but the sheer violence of it. The Crusaders, in fact, had made a vow not to engage in killing of women or children, or pillage of sacred sites, and they were also supposed to turn in all of their spoils to be divided according to previously agreed upon percentages. Neither Phillips, Queller, or Madden have proferred explanations of why the sack of the city played out the way it did. We are only left to surmise that perhaps the average knight in Crusade, having committed himself to the conquest of the Holy Land, and then forced to languish on a sandy island outside of Venice for nearly 9 months, suffered through disease outbreaks and plague conditions on the Adriatic coast, diverted to conquer another Christian city and been excommunicated for it, only to end up outside of Constantinople for nearly a year and at times be terrorized by a hostile populace was perhaps not, in modern day terms, in the healthiest frame of mind.

Now to the book: Phillips writes in an engaging style that is meant to entertain the casual reader. He intersperses his thoughts with letters and documents from the time period and successfully creates an “if you were there” feel. This book is not as detailed or exhaustive as Queller & Madden’s definitive The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople (2^nd ed 1997), which revised the entire view of the Fourth Crusade by analyzing the goals of the Venetians and finding the evidence to support a planned attack on Alexandria, not Constantinople, on the way to the Holy Land. But it is a fun read.

Kundera's Compassion

All languages that derive from Latin form the word "compassion" by combining the prefix meaning "with" (-com) and the root meaning "suffering" (Late Latin, passio). In other languages - Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance - this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means "feeling" (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, współ–czucie; German, Mit-gefühl; Swedish, med-känsla).

In languages that derive from Latin, "compassion" means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, "pity" (French, pitié; Italian, pietà, etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. "To take pity on a woman" means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.

That is why the word "compassion" generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

In languages that form the word "compassion" not from the root "suffering" but from the root "feeling," the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune, but also to feel with him any emotion - joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.

From Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Painting is Baglione's St. Sebastien Healed by an Angel (1603)

Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Published 1984.

Beloved - Part IV

From Toni Morrison's "Beloved" (1987)

In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.

She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glorybound pure.

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

“Here,” she said, “in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unloosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them…More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.”

For the previous "Beloved" posts, go here, here, and here.

Catholicism in non-Western cultures

Continued from here and here, a discussion of Shusaku Endo's "Silence"

‘Father, have you never thought of the difference in the soil, the difference in the water?’

‘We have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp.’

The fictional missionary, Rodrigues, is told by a fictionalized Ferreira, the Portuguese Provincial who apostatized in 1632, that the Japanese do not actually believe in the Christian God; they would not recognize Him. Rodrigues, who is never tortured in the pit himself but instead is tortured by listening to the moans of people in the pit, hung there until he, a foreign priest, will apostatize, begans to wonder if these Japanese are suffering, dying, for a God he does not believe in. (This part was very controversial among the Japanese Christian community when Silence was published.) The ending of Silence is ambiguous - it seems as if Rodrigues has lost his faith, though perhaps the internal struggle remains.

Is Christianity a 'Western' religion? Do other cultures that encounter it, if they seem to accept it, really only incorporate what is native to their culture with a shallow veneer of the Christian one?

The Christian God, of course, is one Whom everyone has access to simply by their share in humanity. The Almighty is not like the gods or guides in other religions, where specialized knowledge is needed to experience the infinite. No, the Christian God is the Incarnate God, united to humanity. He places Himself on the Cross, spreading His arms horizontally across the earth and vertically uniting heaven and earth. But is the language of the Christian God, God as lover, both father and mother, only understood in Western culture? Can that understanding of God and of human person only be understood by those shaped in Western civilization (and by 'understood,' I mean internal understanding, the kind that seeps into bone, sinews, and blood, not merely intellectual agreement.)

Endo's experience as a Japanese Catholic and his decision to write Silence (from the preface):

I received baptism when I was a child….in other words, my Catholicism was a kind of ready-made suit….I had to decide whether to make this ready-made suit fit my body or get rid of it and find another suit that fit.…There were many times when I felt I wanted to get rid of my Catholicism, but I was finally unable to do so. It is not just that I did not throw it off, but that I was unable to throw it of. The reason for this must be that it had become a part of me after all….Still, there was always that feeling in my heart that it was something borrowed, and I began to wonder what my real self was like. This I think is the ‘mud swamp’ Japanese in me. From the time I first began to write novels even to the present day, this confrontation of my Catholic self with the self that lies underneath has, like an idiot’s constant refrain, echoed and reechoed in my work. I felt that I had to find some way to reconcile the two.

Endo's words continue here (bolding is mine, of course):

For a long time I was attracted to a meaningless nihilism and when I finally came to realize the fearfulness of such a void I was struck once again with the grandeur of the Catholic Faith. This problem of the reconciliation of my Catholicism with my Japanese blood…has taught me one thing: that is, that the Japanese must absorb Christianity without the support of a Christian tradition or history or legacy or sensibility. Even this attempt is the occasion of much resistance and anguish and pain, still it is impossible to counter by closing one’s eyes to the difficulties. No doubt this is the peculiar cross that God has given to the Japanese.

We could always invoke the superiority of Western civilization here, though I don't think that adequately addresses the issues of belief that Endo raises. On Catholicism (I also note here that Endo's comments are his own, and should not be taken as representative of all Japanese Catholics):

But after all it seems to me that Catholicism is not a solo, but a symphony….If I have trust in Catholicism, it is because I find in it much more possibility than in any other religion for presenting the full symphony of humanity. The other religions have almost no fullness; they have but solo parts. Only Catholicism can present the full symphony. And unless there is in that symphony a part that corresponds to Japan’s mud swamp, it cannot be a true religion. What exactly that part is – that is what I want to find out.

This, as Johnston correctly points out, is also the dilemma of modern Catholicism. Western civilization has lost its moorings. It seeks to deny the inheritance of the Western tradition. Does a way exist for Christianity (Catholicism in particular) to be loosed from the Western heritage and survive in the brave new world? Part of what the changes in the liturgy accomplished was a sort of planting of the tree of Catholicism in the swamp of multiculturalism (read my thoughts on that here), among many other 'isms.' But that is not where its roots are. Can it grow there? Is it less 'true' if it cannot grow there? Should it, as Endo would perhaps argue, be able to grow there?

Beloved - Part III

Continued from here and here

Beloved is not only Sethe's daughter come back to life and wanting vengeance, she is also the spirit of slavery, a spirit of only wants and needs. When Beloved is asked where she came from, she describes the horrors of a slave ship. (Morrison dedicates the book to those who died in the slave trade: 60 million and more). She wants Sethe, needs her, needs to devour her. She is mine, she says again and again.

Throughout, we are faced with the moral implications of what Sethe chose (based on the real case of a Margaret Garner who killed her child rather than send that child into slavery). Faced with it, Sethe is proud, proud to have the freedom to have made a decision about the welfare of her children, even if it meant an early trip to the grave for one of them. She refuses to be ashamed. Her very defiance fuels the spirit. Paul D expresses his disbelief:

This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw. This here new Sethe didn’t know where the world stopped and she began. Suddenly he saw what Stamp Paid wanted him to see: more important than what Sethe had done was what she claimed. It scared him.

“Your love is too thick.”

“Too thick?” she said…"Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”

“Yeah, it didn’t work, did it? Did it work?” he asked.

“It worked,” she said.

“How? Your boys gone you don’t know where. One girl dead, the other won’t leave the yard. How did it work?”

“They ain’t at Sweet Home. Schoolteacher ain’t got em.”

“Maybe there’s worse.”

“It ain’t my job to know what’s worse. It’s my job to know what is and to keep them away from what I know is terrible.”

Slavery is worse than death. To live stripped of who you are is worse than death. When Paul D says in response, "You got two feet, Sethe, not four," we also know that the daily struggle as a slave was to remind one's self that one HAD two feet, not four.

I like to think of some whites I encounter as The Others (like in Lost). The Others live in a world where history doesn't matter (or at least the history of this country doesn't matter). The Others blindly believe that hard work will pay-off. The Others look at blacks and are baffled as to why so many of us live in poverty, while never questioning what systems were operative when their grandparents went to college and their parents owned their own businesses. The Others aren't responsible for anything, aren't accountable for anything, and insist that they alone are in charge of their life, ignoring that they may deny that for Those Who Are Not Others. The Others don't see that there have been only forty years of attempted racial repair in this country, compared to the four hundred years of white supremacy. And The Others do not ever think about what it might be like to NOT be an Other. They assume the experiences of Those Who Are Not Others are identical to their own. The Others do not know what it's like to live in shadow, to live life strictly on the terms of someone else because you happen to have the wrong ancestry.

This is in some ways also the story of Sethe - forced into an action that The Other would never understand. But she is free, so free that she is losing grip on herself. It's hard to describe how enraged I became reading this novel. I deliberately haven't actually written about the novel much, because I think it needs to confront you where you are, on its terms.

There is beautiful, evocative language in this novel. There are moments that remind me of the way MaMa talks, supernatural events that I think would be likely to happen out in the country. Dialogue that reminds me of my grandparents: in response to MaMa questioning PaPa if he knew how to fix a broken washing machine that he had taken apart, "what I know is that another man put it together."

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”

But there is also hard, graphic language here. The horror of what is chronicled (and for those who are squeamish, I won't mention any more details). And the frightening thought that some crimes are so horrible, some events so evil, they remain in a place between life and death, waiting to strike out at the living.

The title, Beloved, is of course ironic. The book is about the journey of a people who are anything but beloved: treated as animals until they start to behave like animals, where the only freedom is to act on nothing but pure instinct, and they must fight for their dignity. It's about 400 years of being anything but beloved and the consequences of that. But it's also about being beloved to yourself. That in the darkness, it begins with you. As Paul D tells a woman who believes she has lost everything and who is in danger of losing herself: “You your best thing, Sethe."

There will be one last post on Beloved: an excerpt from the novel.

Silence and the Holy Face

Continued from this post
Thursday's Lenten Reflection, a prayerful one

Father Rodrigues is not physically tortured. His torture is psychological - the ruler will let the people go if Rodrigues apostatizes. To do this, he must stamp his foot on the face of Christ, a minimal act, and it's whispered in his ear by the Japanese interpreter, "you don't have to mean it...." Five people die, then more, because Rodrigues refuses to put his foot on the face of Christ. They know the apostacy of a foreign priest means more than of one of their own. To break him will be to break the will of the community he has guided.

Lord, that which I do, I do only to find You. May I find You after I have completed it! - Blessed Angela of Foligno

Rodrigues complains about the snoring in the cell next to him - no, it is not snoring, but the moaning of those being hung upside down in the pit, those who will be released if only he places his foot on the fumie. But he cannot bear to do so.

'Lord, since long, long ago, innumerable times I have thought of your face....Whenever I prayed at night your face appeared before me; when I was alone I thought of your face imparting a blessing; when I was captured your face as it appeared when you carried your cross gave me life. This face is deeply ingrained in my soul - the most beautiful, the most precious thing in the world has been living in my soul.'

My beloved is all radiant and ruddy,
outstanding among ten thousand.
His head is the finest gold;
His locks are wavy, black as a raven.
His eyes are like doves beside springs of water,
Bathed in milk, reposed in their setting.
His cheeks are like a beds of balsam, yielding fragrance.
His lips are lilies, dripping liquid myrrh - Song of Songs 5: 10-13

He cannot hear the voice of God, and only knows that the greatest act of love he can perform is to trample on this face he loves to save the lives of others.

Before him is the ugly face of Christ, crowned with thorns and the thin, outstretched arms....he stares down intently at the man in the center of the fumie, worn down and hollow with the constant trampling.

Jesus, Who in Thy bitter Passion did become "the reproach of men and the Man of Sorrows," I venerate Thy Holy Face on which shone the beauty and gentleness of Divinity. In those disfigured features I recognize Thine infinite love, and I long to love Thee and to make Thee loved. The tears which well up abundantly in Thy sacred eyes appear to me as so many precious pearls that I love to gather up, in order to purchase the souls of poor sinners by means of their infinite value. O Jesus, Whose adorable Face ravishes my heart, I implore Thee to fix deep within me Thy divine image and to set me on fire with Thy Love, that I may be found worthy to behold Thy glorious Face in Heaven! - St. Therese of Lisieux

This, of course, is the face of Christ. His suffering Face, worn down by the sins of others, the turning away from Him, the bruising of His body. This is the God Who speaks.

'Trample, trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross.'

Wisdom of the Sacred Head guide me in all ways. O Love of the Sacred Heart, consume me with Thy fire. O seat of Divine Wisdom and guiding Power, which governs all the motions and love of the Sacred Heart, may all minds know Thee, all hearts love Thee, and all tongues praise Thee, now and for evermore.

Sacred Head of Jesus, Bowed to the Earth which was redeemed at the moment of death on Calvary, Guide us in all our ways.

Adorable Face of Jesus, my only love, my light, and my life, grant that I may know Thee, love Thee and serve Thee alone, that I may live with Thee, of Thee, by Thee and for Thee.

And for those who know the beautiful Face of Christ is His suffering Face, and those who know that the beauty of Catholicism is its longing for the suffering Christ:

Be it known that the number of armed soldiers were 150; those who trailed me while I was bound were 23. The executioners of justice were 83; the blows received on my head were 150; those on my stomach, 108; kicks on my shoulders, 80. I was led, bound with cords by the hair 24 times; spits in the face were 180; I was beaten on the body 6666 times; beaten on the head, 110 times. I was roughly pushed, and at 12 o'clock was lifted up by the hair; pricked with thorns and pulled by the beard 23 times; received 20 wounds on the head; thorns of marine junks, 72; pricks of thorns in the head, 110; mortal thorns in the forehead, 3. I was afterwards flogged and dressed as a mocked king; wounds in the body, 1000. The soldeers who led me to the Calvary were 608; those who watched me were 3, and those who mocked me were 1008; the drops of blood which I lost were 28,430.

Beloved - Part II

Continued from this previous post

When I tell people I'm black - the fact that I sometimes have to tell them indicates something about both how I look and how many whites don't realize that "black" was legally enforced at the state level as the racial classification for anyone with a known drop of Negro blood - they sometimes look at me quizzically and ask, "so, you really consider yourself black?" Nah, because I go to the opera and ballet I no longer consider myself black. Nah, because my hair is straight and I'm so fair my skin burns within 30 minutes of sun exposure, I don't consider myself black. The funniest remark was from a friend whom I told I was filling out a questionnaire about 'passing,' "What, are you answering questions about how you try to pass for black?" ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND???? Why would I, or anyone, choose to be black?

[Note: the subject of white fascination with blackness is, well, another subject that I will cover at some point. Then, I will discuss black popular entertainment and how it's often a version of minstrelsy - for instance, over 70% of hip-hop records are sold to young white males. Let this statement of bell hooks' suffice for now: "It is a sign of white privilege to be able to 'see' blackness and black culture from a standpoint where only the rich culture of opposition black people have created in resistance marks and defines us."]

Anyone on the other side of the color line knows that they'd have a better life as a white person in this country. I doubt my family would have ever chosen to be black, but through pre-Civil War white man + black woman, that's how it ended up. MaMa's materal grandmother was brought over as a slave from Africa, and ended up having a child by a white man. On both sides of my family, when we reach back into the past, that's the story we find again and again: our named white male ancestor, owning x number of acres and y number of slaves, had a child with a slave woman known only as slave. (Except for a somewhat famous case in history that one can read about here. Joseph Gregorie Guillory is my great-times-six grandfather; his slave mistress Marguerite is my great-times-six grandmother.)

[Note: The slave trade was not only an exchange for manual labor but also for sexual goods. In fact, in places it was de rigueur for a young white man to have a black woman as mistress (consensual or not) before marriage to a white woman. An attractive, lighter-skinned, young female slave could auction off for as much if not more money than a young male laborer. There are even records of plantation owners selling their own daughters, conceived with a female slave, to other plantation owners as sex slaves. But that’s another post.

Pictures of mixed race children were spread by abolitionists in the North, especially in the late 1850s, to alarm the largely white supremacist population: ‘Soon, the n-----s will look like us! We won't be able to tell them and us apart!’ Abolitionists also published pamphlets arguing that the good Christian white men of the South needed to be ‘saved’ from the witchery that these soul-less black women must be using to seduce them. The extent to which abolitionism was motivated by white supremacy and segregationist goals is also a topic for another discussion.]

It did not matter how white the progeny of these unions (consensual or not) looked. As in the picture above, all of black slaves, Negro blood made you a Negro. And it made you inferior. It meant that you had to be segregated, had to get the hand-me-downs of whites in schools, weren't allowed to go certain places. When my father went to college when he was 18, he interacted with whites for the first time. He went there sure of his own inferiority, expecting to not perform as well as they did. To his surprise, as he will modestly admit, he was better than 90% of white people. What he had been taught his whole life, what had been encoded into the American black experience by whites, was wrong.

[Note: Only get me started on the Civil War if you want to be made to go sit in the corner. It was fought over slavery. Stop. The rest is historical revisionism. Stop. Anyone who doesn't think it was fought over slavery is either misinformed or deluding themselves for psychological reasons. Full stop. Now if you want to see me debunk the states' rights argument, just ask.]

I've written all this as an introduction to my experience of reading Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). In that book, it's all there - the passing down by oral tradition, houses that move, spirits that come back to walk the earth, and most terribly, the personal cost of slavery: its loss of freedom and dignity.

Beloved, in a basic way, is about a slave woman named Sethe, sexually assaulted and beaten by her owners, who escapes her plantation in Kentucky and crosses over the Ohio River to Ohio where she is reunited with her three oldest children ( who had already escaped with others). When her master comes to retrieve her (thanks to those Fugitive Slave Laws), she kills one of her children and is on her way to killing the rest before she is stopped. Convinced that she is out of her mind, her master leaves her there. Eighteen years pass, and the house she and her surviving daughter live in communicates with them, haunted by the spirit of the murdered child. When Paul D, another slave on the old plantation called (ironically) Sweet Home, enters into her life again and demands the spirit leave the house, the spirit that has been haunting it takes on corporeal form; they call this 18-year-old girl Beloved.

To be continued.

Endo's Silence

Silence (1969), a novel by Japanese author Shusaku Endo (1923-1996), confronts several issues: the desperation of man's call to God, the goals of a missionary (noble or self-glorifying), and the ability of Christianity to take root in another culture (in this book, Japan).

It is the story of a Portuguese missionary, Sebastien Rodrigues, idealistic and glory-searching, who goes to Japan in 1640, a time when Christianity has gone underground and Christians are being persecuted. He has the typical visions of glory when administering to the Japanese Christians who are eager to receive the sacraments again, though this begins to fade with the reality of life, and running for his life.

[Note: I'm not well-read on Japanese history but in the preface William Johnston, the translator of Endo's novel, provides a brief history of Christianity's introduction and growth in Japan. St Francis Xavier arrived there in 1549 and would call the Japanese 'the joy of my heart.' By 1614, there were 300,000 Japanese Christians including local clergy. The lack of a strong centralized government had been operative in the spread of Christianity in Japan, and as strong leadership from the shoguns again exerted itself, the Christians began to be persecuted. Initially immediately executing Christians who had been rounded-up, the shoguns realized that making martyrs only strengthened the convictions of the remainder. Thus, they began to precede execution with torture to make the martyrs apostatize, typically by stamping their foot on a picture of Christ. The most famous of these tortures was to hang them down upside in a filthy pit. In 1632, after six hours in the pit, the first missionary apostatized (Christovao Ferreira) and began collaborating with local rulers. The Shimabara Rebellion, originally against policies of local government, became a pro-Christian insurgency that led rulers to suspect aid from outside governments (like Portugal) was involved, and Japan was shut off from Christian missionaries. Nevertheless, as Johnston writes:

"The faith was handed down; baptism was administered; catechism was taught. They gave their names, of course, to the Buddhist temple; they complied with the order to trample on the sacred image; and today at Ueno Museum in Tokyo one can still see those fumie rubbed flat and shining by the hundreds of feet that ached with pain (if I may borrow Mr. Endo’s phrase) while they trampled on someone whom their hearts loved. Handed down, too, was that tradition that the fathers would return; and in 1865, [these crypto-Christians] came out of their hiding, asking for the statue of the Santa Maria, speaking about Christmas and Lent, recalling the celibacy of the priests….In their prayers remain smatterings of old Portuguese and Latin; they preserve pieces of the soutanes and rosaries and disciplines that belong to the fathers whom they loved."

Johnston's comments on history are themselves taken from CR Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan (1951). Whew, long note. It's like writing a book report.]

Rodrigues is eventually captured, and thus begins his spiritual journey to be able to see the face of Christ and hear His voice. His love for the face of Christ: “from childhood I have clasped that face to my breast just like the person who romantically idealizes the countenance of one he loves” sustains him early on, but when he calls out to God, he hears no response:

"‘Exaudi nos, Pater omnipotens, et mittere digneris Sanctum qui custodiat, foveat, protegat, visitet, atque defendat omnes habitantes…’ Repeating the prayer again and again he tried wildly to distract his attention; but the prayer could not tranquilize his agonized heart. ‘Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent…?’"...

The village had been burnt to the ground; and its inhabitants had been completely dispersed. The sea and the land were silent as death; only the dull sound of the waves lapping against the boat broke the silence of the night. Why have you abandoned us completely?, he prayed in a weak voice. Even the village was constructed for you; and have you abandoned it in its ashes? Even when the people are cast out of their homes have you not given them courage? Have you just remained silent like the darkness that surrounds me? Why?...So he prayed. But the sea remained cold, and the darkness maintained its stubborn silence. All that could be heard was the monotonous dull sound of the oars again and again...

‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani!’ It is three o’clock on that Friday; and from the cross this voice rings out to a sky covered with darkness. The priest had always thought that these words were that man’s prayer, not that they issued from terror at the silence of God.

In truth, it is not that God is not speaking to him, but that he does not have the ears to listen. The silence is an internal one, and only by seeing the face of Christ, not the face of the Sermon on the Mount or of the Child Jesus, but of the suffering Christ, the Christ Who is dying for humanity, can he hear the voice of God.

"Anyone can be attracted by the beautiful and the charming. But could such attraction be called love? True love was to accept humanity when wasted like rags and tatters."

To be continued....

Black holes, anyone?

Empire of the Stars: Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes by Arthur I. Miller (2005)

This largely boringly written book – the best parts are the footnotes that discuss the findings dully presented in the text – chronicles the career of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who first proposed and calculated that there was an upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf: any white dwarf with a mass of over 1.4 times the solar mass would began a process of collapse that would lead to a singularity, a point of infinite density and zero volume. Chandra presented his findings in 1935, only to be met with harsh resistance, particularly from Arthur Stanley Eddington, then the pre-eminent astrophysicist in the world.

Miller tries to make a case that racism played a part in the professional response to Chandra’s calculation; certainly the professional goals of other prominent scientists led to the ignoring of Chandra’s findings, as did presuppositions from well-regarded scientists, like Eddington and Einstein, that the universe would not yield an infinite result. But to me, the story sounds all too typical of academia – the group in power wants results and conclusions that match up to their own way of thinking and are resistant to novelty. What else is new?

Although Chandra undoubtedly felt the condemnation from Eddington and the slighting of his work by his peers for the rest of his life (he was angry that he didn’t win the Nobel Prize twenty years earlier than he did), he went on to make significant findings in other fields away from astronomy, and did not seem to be professionally crippled by the experience, no matter how it wounded him personally.

Of greater interest in the book is the intellectual evolution towards the acceptance of black holes: from the 1935 negative reaction to the 1960s theorizing that indeed, black holes must exist, although evidence of their existence had not been found to date. There’s some cool stuff in this book about the nuclear arms race, hydrogen bombs, and the death of stars, but I really would never have finished this book if I hadn’t been stuck in an airport for 4 hours and wanted to avoid digging through my luggage for another book. It’s not the content, which could be fascinating. It’s the writing, dull as dishwater.

One fine example (pg 178): “Chandra had a keen eye for lurking stability problems; his forte was identifying the exact point at which a star is likely to collapse. He spotted a flaw in Gamow’s argument. The challenge was irresistible, and he decided to turn his attention to white dwarfs one last time.” Absorbing mystery yarn? Action-adventure for the teen-boy crowd? Cliched phrases, Alex, for $600!

Anytime reading the footnotes becomes more engrossing than the actual text, something is wrong. (One of the gems of the footnotes is that there may be white dwarfs that are diamonds, composed entirely of compressed carbon. Another is the story of Fuchs’ espionage.)

So unless anyone wants to know more from me about this book, I’ll put a black hole tutorial in this space.

(Abbreviated in parts from Stuart J. Robbins' site)

Classifications of black holes: mass, spin, and magnetic field

Stellar black holes: have a mass of 10-100 times the solar mass.

Supermassive black holes: have a mass of millions to even billions of solar masses.

Schwarzschild black holes: no spin and no magnetic field. It has two main components - a singularity and an event horizon. The singularity is what is left of the collapsed star, and is theoretically a point of 0 dimension with infinite density but finite mass. The event horizon is a region of space that is the "boundary" of the black hole. Within it, the escape velocity is faster than light, so it is past this point that nothing can escape.

Reissner-Nordstrøm Black Holes: no spin and a magnetic field. It has a singularity and two event horizons. The outer event horizon is a boundary where time and space flip. This means that the singularity is no longer a point in space, but one in time. The inner event horizon flips space-time back to normal.

Kerr Black Holes: spin and magnetic field. A Kerr black hole adds another feature to the anatomy - an ergosphere. The ergosphere resides in an ellipsoidal region outside the outer event horizon. The ergosphere represents the last stable orbit, and the outer boundary is called the static limit. Outside of it, a hypothetical spaceship could maneuver freely. Inside, space-time is warped in such a way that a spaceship would be drawn along by its rotation.

An interesting point that comes up in the case of a spinning black hole is that of the naked singularity. The faster the black hole rotates, the larger the inner event horizon becomes, while the outer event horizon remains the same size. They become the same size when the rotational energy equals the mass energy of the black hole. If the rotational energy were to become more than the mass energy, the event horizons would vanish and what would be left is a "naked singularity" - a black hole whose only part is the singularity.

Yet another distinguishing feature of the Kerr black hole is that, since it rotates, the 0-D point that is the singularity in the Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstrøm black hole is spun into a ring of 0 thickness. Interesting theoretical physics can take place around this ring singularity. One consequence is that nothing can actually fall into it unless it approaches along a trajectory along the ring's side. Any other angle and the ring actually produces an antigravity field that repels matter.

NOTE: The only physical part of a black hole is the singularity. The other parts mentioned are mathematical boundaries. There is no physical barrier called an event horizon, but it marks the boundaries between types of space under the influences of the singularity.

Two other features can characterize a black hole: accretion disk and jets.

An accretion disk is matter that is drawn to the black hole. In rotating black holes and/or ones with a magnetic field, the matter forms a disk due to the mechanical forces present. In a Schwarzschild black hole, the matter would be drawn in equally from all directions, and thus would form an omni-directional accretion cloud rather than disk.

The matter in accretion disks is gradually pulled into the black hole. As it gets closer, its speed increases, and it also gains energy. Accretion disks can be heated due to internal friction to temperatures as high as 3 billion K, and emit energetic radiation such as gamma rays. This radiation can be used to "weigh" the black hole. By using the doppler effect astronomers can determine how fast the material is revolving around the black hole, and thus can infer its mass.

Jets form in Kerr black holes that have an accretion disk. The matter is funneled into a disk-shaped torus by the hole's spin and magnetic fields, but in the very narrow regions over the black hole's poles, matter can be energized to extremely high temperatures and speeds, escaping the black hole in the form of high-speed jet.

Where do black holes come from?

Current theory holds that black holes form in three main ways. The first is that if a star has more than nine solar masses when it goes supernova, then it will collapse into a black hole. The reason that a neutron star stops collapsing is the strong nuclear force, the fundamental force that keeps the center of an atom from collapsing. However, once a star is this big, the gravitational force is so strong that it overwhelms the strong nuclear and collapses the atom completely. Now there is nothing to hold back collapse of the star, and it collapses into a point (or, in theory, a ring) of infinite density.

A second way for black holes to form is that, in some rare instances, two neutron stars will be locked in a binary relationship. Because of energy lost through gravitational radiation, they will slowly spiral in towards each other, and merge. When they merge, they will almost always form a black hole.

Finally, a third way was proposed by quantum cosmologist Stephen Hawking. He theorized that trillions of black holes were produced in the Big Bang, with some still existing today. This theory is not as widely accepted as the other two.

AG again, providing cool facts about black holes (see Hawking's Brief History of Time or Greene's The Elegant Universe for more):

Black holes aren’t really black. As proposed by Stephen Hawking, black holes emit a type of radiation due to escaping particles. The intense gravitational field near the event horizon of a black hole can briefly split a pair of photons apart. If one falls through the event horizon, the other particle, which would have been annihilated by its partner when they came into contact, is now left outside the black hole; indeed the energy from the fall of the one partner of the pair over the event horizon will give the other partner energy to move further away from the event horizon. The particles emitted from a black hole in this way are called Hawking radiation. Which leads to…

Black holes may evaporate. Although not yet observed, if blacks holes leak energy (through the Hawking radiation) we know from Einstein’s famous E = mc² that the black hole will also lose mass. However, for a typical black hole, the evaporation time would amount to more than 10⁶⁷ years (the age of the universe is around 10⁹ years). But lightweight black holes formed in the first few moments of the Big Bang (according to Hawking’s calculations, less mass means higher temperature and hence more radiation) may exist and may be on the verge of evaporation, emitting Hawking radiation and gamma rays that could be picked up by observatories. Even more fascinating: as a black hole emits radiation, its mass shrinks and the distance between its center and the even horizon diminishes. As this happens, does the space that was previously in the black hole still contain its old information? Hawking has bet that black holes destroy the information.

Black holes have entropy. This was actually one of the starting problems that lead to the two solutions described above, formulated in 1974 by Hawking. Starting from these theoretical observations/calculations: the area of the event horizon increases in physical interactions (calculated by Hawking), and black holes must have entropy (Jacob Beckenstein), and with a whole lotta intuition and math, Hawking arrived at the above conclusions.

There may be massless black holes. Formed from a black hole that has lost its mass; these black holes would lack an event horizon. In string theory, the loss of mass is attributable to the shrinking of a piece of the Calabi-Yau portion of space to a point. (Calabi-Yau spaces are where the extra dimensions required by string theory can be curled up.)

And of course, this sci-fi question remains: at the singularity, where space-time is infinitely curved and time ends, could it be possible for another universe to be attached? String theory provides possible solutions, but that’s another discussion.

Books on Balanchine

Only God creates; I assemble. - George Balanchine

I was recently asked to suggest a good book on Balanchine. The first book I'd recommend is Garis' Following Balanchine (for reasons I explain below). Unfortunately, there are no exceptional biographies of him that combine thoroughness with insights; so far, all the biographies written about him have been no more than serviceable. Of those, Robert Gottlieb's George Balanchine: The Ballet Master (2004), part of Harper's Eminent Lives series, gives perhaps the best brief overview. Gottlieb knew Balanchine for several years and was on the board of directors for NYCB, and he's respectful, sensitive, and engaging about his subject. A more thorough book, though not more insightful, is Bernard Taper's Balanchine: A Biography (reprinted 1996), some parts of which were written and published while Balanchine was still alive and able to confer with Taper. (One can read a "brief" 4 part biography of Balanchine here.)

IMO, the best book on Balanchine, the man, is I Remember Balanchine: Recollections of the Ballet Master by Those Who Knew Him (1991), edited by Francis Mason, a collection of 85 interviews from people who knew him. If one wants to know how Balanchine impacted the lives of those he came into contact with and how he was frequently several different personas to many different people, this is the must-read.

Balanchine's own opinion, told to Taper after reading a copy of Taper's biography: "You've written too much about me, and not enough about my dancers."

And so, there are the autobiographies of dancers associated with him: wives Tamara Geva, Alexandra Danilova, Vera Zorina, and Maria Tallchief have all written autobiographies. (Tanaquil Le Clercq, Balanchine's fourth or fifth wife, depending on whether his common law marriage to Danilova is counted, never wrote an autobiography and largely refused to speak about her life with Balanchine. A prominent ballerina at NYCB in its infancy, they married in 1952, but in 1956 she contracted polio and remained paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life. After setting aside his work and diligently caring for her for almost two years, he returned to NYCB and in fast succesion choreographed Agon, Stars and Stripes, Gounod Symphony, and Square Dance. They separated after he fell in love with Suzanne Farrell - and made it known to the whole world - and they divorced in 1969.) Dancers Barbara Milberg Fisher, Jacques d'Amboise, Edward Villela, Allegra Kent, Suzanne Farrell, Peter Martins, Merrill Ashley, Toni Bentley, and Gelsey Kirkland have also written autobiographies in which he plays a prominent role.

Of these (so you have no doubts that I have indeed read every single book about Balanchine that I'm referring to here and plenty more than I'm not including), Milberg Fisher presents a fascinating account of life as a corps member and soloist in the first decade of NYCB; Kent's is the wittiest and most "out-there." Gelsey Kirkland's is probably the most famous and the harshest - her Dancing on My Grave (1986) practially (and completely unfairly) lays at the foot of Balanchine her eating disorders, obsession with plastic surgery, and drug addiction, and she was undoubtedly still very unstable when this book was written; however, she and Villela provide the few dissenting voices among the many, including his wives, who describe him as a near deity. And Suzanne Farrell's is, of course, my favorite.


If one is interested in the music angle, Charles Joseph wrote Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention (2002), about the artistic collaboration of these two geniuses (warning: a good knowledge of music is recommended for reading this book), and Balanchine's own opinions on Tchaikovsky and other Russian composers, the St. Petersburg of his childhood and the Revolution, Russian writers, Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes, and other topics are contained in Balanchine's Tchaikovsky: Interviews with George Balanchine (1985) by Solomon Volkov. This book is invaluable if one wants to hear Balanchine's "voice" and ideas on the arts near the end of his life. If one wants to hear Balanchine's actual voice, watch Balanchine.

If one is interested in Balanchine's choreographic output and wants to learn the impact of his work and his dancers on the life of a member of the audience (who was also a music critic and professor of English), Following Balanchine (new ed 2006) by Robert Garis is required. I'd probably read this book and Gottlieb's brief biography in tandem, to gain a hold of Balanchine's background and his creative output at NYCB through the eyes of an audience member. This book is also the must-read for anyone who believes that one's life can be profoundly affected through art and wants to understand why Balanchine's work mattered so much to people; as one NYCB audience member of the 1960s and 70s wrote, "Balanchine was our God and the State Theater was where we worshipped." (Balanchine himself would not have wanted to be called God, though he did once say, in response to why he only had the title "Ballet Master" at NYCB, as opposed to artistic director or head choreographer, etc., "God doesn't have to call Himself God.")


Unfortunately, no biographer has been able to crack the enigma of Balanchine, the man and the work. Ballet fans have been waiting over a decade for eminent dance critic Arlene Croce's promised study on Balanchine and his work. Part of the problem is certainly that Balanchine himself was not interested in introspective self-analysis and even to those close to him he was impenetrable. Whether because he was a life-long adherent of the Russian Orthodox Church or he had a massive ego and was utterly secure in his own choreographic genius - though he would be the first to point out that God gave him his gift for choreography and God told him, "This is the only thing you're going to be good at" - or he followed his judgment alone: "I like what I like and I disagree with everyone and I don't care to argue." A slightly more self-deferential quote in response to a question about the hows and whys of his many marriages and affairs and how it tied into his artistic output: "I am a dancer; I lead a dancer's life. It's like a horse. No one asks a horse what he does - he just leads a horse's life. That's what I do."

Mary and the Church, Book Review

Since Cyril of Alexandria proclaimed at the Council of Ephesus (431) that Mary was the Mother of God (Theotokos), Mariology has been used a way of ensuring orthodox Christology. In Mary is a microcosm of the Christian journey. Through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, Mary brought, quite literally, the God-Man into the world, and she lived, very literally, the life of Christ: from His birth to His suffering and death. She was the first Christian and remains the exemplar. But as the Church Fathers remind us, there is more to Mary than that: what the Church teaches about her teaches all of us about the reality of salvation and salvation history, and her unique and continuing role in the economy of salvation.

Joseph Ratzinger’s Daughter Zion: Meditations on the Church’s Marian Belief is taken from a series of lectures and was first published in English in 1983. In some ways, it is an elaboration of particular points presented in Hugo Rahner’s Our Lady and the Church (originally published in 1961), a work that rediscovers the beliefs of the Church Fathers through their writings: Mary is a type of the Church; what is true of Mary and fulfilled in her is also true and fulfilled in the Church. (See also John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Mater, 1987). Ratzinger takes up this point and proposes that the theological neglect of Mary in this century is attributable to poor typological exegesis (established in Romans 5) of the Old and New Testaments.

After making the first parallel to Mary as the New Eve (as did Irenaeus), Ratzinger makes a parallel I have never read before: between Mary and the pairs of Sarah-Hagar, Rachel-Leah, and Hannah-Peninna. In the way that the Old Testament and covenant are a shadow of the New, Ratzinger points out that those pairs of women in the Old Testament, contrasted as infertile and fertile, can only be understood through the reality of Mary and her virginity:
“infertile ultimately turns out to be the truly blessed….Barrenness as the condition for fruitfulness – the mystery of the Old Testament mothers becomes transparent in Mary….In this “new birth” [the birth of the Messiah], which simultaneously included the abandonment of earthly fertility, of self-disposal, and of the autonomous planning of one’s life…to bear the Son includes the surrender of oneself into barrenness.” Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2 foreshadows Mary’s own Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55). Suddenly, the teaching of the Church of Mary’s perpetual virginity can be seen as foreshadowed in the Old Testament.

Ratzinger also points out another reality related to Christ - that of the younger son usurping the older one and seizing the inheritance: Isaac-Ishmael and Jacob-Esau are shadows of Christ-Adam.

Ratzinger elaborates on the type of the woman-savior (Esther and Judith) and on Mary as daughter Zion, the true holy remnant, who brings forth the savior, God (compare Zephaniah 3:14-17 to Gabriel’s greeting of Mary in Luke 1:28-32). Ratzinger ties Mary as daughter Zion, the new Israel, a type of the Church, to the teaching of the Immaculate Conception (Ephesians 5:27), expressing the Church’s certitude of salvation. On the Immaculate Conception, he writes: “Preservation from original sin, therefore, signifies no exception proficiency, no exceptional achievement; on the contrary, it signifies that Mary reserves no area of being, life, and will for herself as a private possession: instead, precisely in the total dispossession of self, in giving herself to God, she comes to the true possession of self.”

The final issue Ratzinger tackles is the Assumption of Mary, standing for the definitive state of salvation of the Church. Death and decay occur because of sin, out of self-determination. To be in Christ is only life (Ephesians 2:6).

Almost all the truths of the Church involve paradoxes: Christ is God and man, Mary is virgin and mother, God is Three in One, death brings forth eternal life. Here, Ratzinger adds that virginity is fruitfulness, dispossession is belonging, and renunciation is fulfillment. In Truth and Tolerance Ratzinger writes that what separates Christianity from Eastern religions is that in the former, God is present and available, not through special knowledge or pursuit but through nothing grander than one’s consent to Him.

God confronts us as Other, but Marian teaching reaffirms that (paraphrased) God really does act in the world, and because of it, the earth produces fruit. And he acts on persons, not on ideas or concepts. The Church, the new Israel, is not just an idea but an actual person in Mary. The cooperation between humanity’s free will and God’s grace is not just an abstract, but is personified: thus Mary as exemplar is called the All-Holy (Panagia).

Ratzinger ends his meditation on Mary by reminding us of Mary as the Ark of the Covenant (the parallel between 2 Samuel 6:11-16 and Luke 1:39-56).

But I’d like to reproduce here something else from the text, dealing with the virgin-birth:

The world-view which would force us psychologically to declare the virginal birth an impossibility clearly does not result from knowledge, but from an evaluation. Today, just as much as yesterday, a virgin birth is improbable, but in no way purely impossible. There is no proof for its impossibility, and no serious natural scientist would ever assert that there was. What ‘compels’ us here to declare the maximum inner-worldly improbability an impossibility, not only for the world but also for God, is not knowledge but a structure of evaluations with two principal components: one consists in our tacit cartesianism – in that philosophy of emancipation hostile to creation which would repress both body and birth from the human reality by declaring them merely biological; the other consists in a concept of God and the world that considers it inappropriate that God should be involved with bios and matter. In reality, precisely when we talk abut corporeality and raise suspicions about the soul, we are dualists.

The subject of presuppositions, especially involving faith and reason, is elaborated on at length in other works by Ratzinger, and is reflected in his famous Regensburg address: the false dichotomy between faith and reason and the West’s inability to recognize the presuppositions that are the basis of post-modern thought.

Fourth Crusade book view

Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice by Thomas F. Madden (2003)

After a post on the First Crusade, I have to address one of the most infamous ones: the Fourth Crusade. (An aside: the numbering of the Crusades post-dates the events themselves, and there are several crusades between the main numbered ones.) Madden wrote, with D.F. Queller, The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople, a book that challenged the previous scholarship by Runciman and Norwich, among other less prominent historians, that the Venetians were motivated by greed to take out their maritime rivals, the Byzantines.

This book focuses on the Venetians, beginning in the 9^th century with the establishment and changes in the political structure of early medieval Venice and the rise of the Dandolo family to the positions of Patriarch of Grado (also named Enrico) and doge. Related to the Fourth Crusade, Madden makes a strong case for an “accidental” conquest of Constantinople through the following points:

1. The Venetians believed, above all, in stability. They strictly limited the power of both the doge and of the people (after the assassination of Doge Vitale II Michiel after he failed to follow the popular arregno and attack Constantinople in response to the imprisonment of all Venetians in Byzantine land and seizure of their property by Emperor Manuel Comnenus). They would have been unlikely to destabilize the region.
2. Enrico Dandolo himself had been involved in diplomatic efforts with Byzantium since 1171, and had secured a chrysobull with Emperor Alexius III in 1198 granting Venetians exemption from taxing and tolls in Byzantine ports and Venetian jurisdiction over most matters involving Venetians in Constantinople.
3. The original deal between the Venetians and the Frankish leaders (to secure from Venice transport to the Holy Land) failed to account for the fact that the number of crusaders would not be as high as the Franks thought, and it didn’t guarantee that those crusaders would have to leave from the Venetian port. The siege and eventual destruction of Zara was the Frank “repayment” of the debt owed to Venice.
4. Venice more-or-less shut down their regular trade for a year to build and prepare transport vessels for the crusaders, indicating a high level of popular piety for the crusade mission.
5. The transport galleys were designed and built for the planned (but secret) invasion of Egypt at Alexandria, not assault on Constantinople.
6. The Venetian crusaders sent an envoy to Constantinople sometime in March 1203, following the decision of the Frankish leaders to try to seat the young Prince Alexius (son of deposed emperor Isaac II), brother-in-law of the leader of the Crusade, Boniface of Montferrat, as Emperor. The envoys were captured unfortunately by Genoese corsairs.
7. Enrico Dandolo took the cross, and in doing so, had to relinquish his title as Doge (to his son, in his stead).

Other issues are dealt with more fully in the Queller & Madden and Phillips books I am currently reading, and hope to review later.

First Crusade book review

The First Crusade: Origins and Impact by Jonathan Phillips, ed. (1997)

There are only a few historical events initiated with Christian fervor that, on the face of it, are as hard to defend as the Crusades; the Catholic-Protestant wars and the policies for dealing with heretics are probably the others. And yet the First Crusade was initiated by the appeal of Pope Urban II, partly in response to the increasing encroachment of Muslim armies on previously Christian lands, including an appeal by the Byzantine emperor.

This collection of essays on the First Crusade, written by professors and lecturers of history at UK colleges and universities, revises and corrects myths about the First Crusade. Jonathan Riley-Smith, Marcus Bull, and Carole Hillenbrand each point out that two sources of information for the First Crusade have been neglected: monastic charters and Arabic texts that have not yet been translated into English, including Arabic poetry and geography.

In the first essay, “Patronage and the appeal of the First Crusade,” John France dismantles the myth of the younger son and briefly states the amount of supplies a typical crusader would have needed and the issues of patronage that would have arisen. Crusading was an undertaking that required a large amount of resources and any possible plunder would have been property that the crusader seized during forays or captures of a city – there was no organized division of property among crusaders in the First Crusade (William G. Zajac’s “Captured property”).

Most interestingly, France points out that many of our views of medieval people and society are formed by our modern conception of “separation of the poor…from political structures” – a class society that uses the Marxist dialectic. France writes: “The analysis of the motives of the first crusaders based on the notion of a simple stratified society has been particularly unhelpful, because in most of the countries of the West vertical ties of patronage were at least as important and probably had more bearing on individual decisions about Urban [II’s] appeal” (pg 7). It’s a subject dear to me: one must understand the presuppositions of the people in any given era and how those presuppositions shaped their actions and behaviors, so to read that a class struggle dialectic may have been read (and written) back into the Middle Ages by major historians of the 19^th and 20^th century is not surprising but it is cautionary.

A prime example of this error also relates to the First Crusade: in our cynical age, we do not understand how a group of people, motivated mostly by piety, could agree to take up the Cross and recapture the Holy Land. And yet generations of Western Europeans did exactly that, hoping to recapture the land on which Christ was born, suffered, and died (they also turned against other Europeans in an attempt to “cleanse” their own land in later Crusades).

Other essays address the historiography of the crusades over time (Susan Edgington’s “Reviewing the Evidence,” Alan V. Murray’s “The Chronicle of Zimmern as a source for the First Crusade”), a few major players including Peter the Hermit (Colin Morris) and Alexius Comnenus (Jonathan Shepard), and how the principality of Antioch came into being (Thomas Asbridge).

This is not a book I would recommend for anyone with less than a sure footing of the known facts of the First Crusade and the essays are certainly less than comprehensive, but they do provide many jumping-off points for a person interested in issues related to the study of the event (or series of events) in history that came to be known as the First Crusade.