The Great Heresies

Were you to bother researching this extremely learned and extremely opinionated man, you would often find him accused of being a bit too, well, orthodox. Unlike his genial contemporary, Belloc was not someone who made much room in heaven, or, for that matter, on earth, for people who did not share his views on life, God, right, wrong, and a few other important things. He has been charged with antagonizing non–Catholics with his effusive and bull-like prose, as well as relegating non-Christians (a term I use ironically since he insists there is no such thing as a “Christian”; there are “Catholics” and everyone else) to levels of salvation, etcetera, quite below what he expects of himself and others who properly impale heresies right through the sternum. Since I don’t doubt that he would have considered my beliefs to err too greatly on the side of ecumenicalism, it is with a chastened but unscarified eye that I read and enjoyed this book for what it is worth and what it can bring us in terms of historical perspective. That it is one-sided, consistent, and unforgiving, you may rest assured; that it sparkles with radiant insight into many a human topos, you may find more than a little fascinating.

The scope, indeed the sweep of a small work like The Great Heresies cannot possibly detail these alleged crimes with sufficient accuracy, which, I suspect, is one of Belloc’s methods of downplaying their historical vigor. He has other works – especially on his unending nightmare, the Reformation, which he blames for everything and anything – that treat the topics with more academic precision. Apart from a definition of heresy, the current book has a list of the five main offenders: the Arian heresy, Islam, the Albigensians, the Reformation, and what he terms “the Modern Phase,” which is nothing more than the post-Darwinian reliance on empiricism and so-called hard science. But we should begin in any case with that all-important definition. According to Belloc, a heresy is “the proposal of novelties in religion by picking out from what has been the accepted religion some point or other, denying the same or replacing it by another doctrine hitherto unfamiliar" (these days we might say “customization”). If you find something faulty in his reasoning, some gaping hole in his logic, you will be surprised to learn how assailable Belloc’s arguments are throughout his text. He abides by that most commendable of principles that only people who believe in something fully and completely cannot defend themselves with any margin of success. Should you disagree with Belloc’s initial premises, you will shake your head at every single observation that follows; but if you like what you hear, you will be enthralled by the cold logic of his math and smooth pavings of his causeways. Since Islam and Protestantism are attacked unfairly and far too succinctly to justify a rebuttal by me or anyone else, and the Modern Phase has devolved into such flummery that I will let Belloc alone crush it into gunpowder, a brief look at the two lesser known heresies, the Arian heresy and the Albigensians, will give us an idea of Belloc’s style and substance.

The Albigensians, now in retrospect the minimus on heresy’s fist, were a mass movement in the mid–twelfth century, the likes of which the Church had not seen in quite a while. There is ample information available on their objections to the Church, as well as the vicious campaign that dammed their rebellious flood. Belloc draws attention, however, to the events at Muret on September 13, 1213:

Muret is a name that should always be remembered as one of the decisive battles of the world. Had it failed, the campaign would have failed. Bouvines would probably never have been fought and the chances are that the French monarchy itself would have collapsed, splitting up into feudal classes, independent of any central lord ... With it our culture of the West would have sunk, hamstrung to the ground.

This assessment, made about seventy years ago, seems overblown even at the time of its publication. But it is indicative of Belloc’s coercive spirit that wants us to know the hardships his faith has sustained to reach through the centuries down at long last to him, its herald. He supports, for example, the First Inquisition, which “arose from the necessity of extirpating the remnants of the disease” of the Albigensian heresy, but acknowledges “the sporadic cruelty of earlier Christian times.” When discussing the Manichean dualism of the fourth century Arian revolt, which appears almost as distant now as Christ’s time itself, he attributes to this movement

The factor which is called today in European politics “Particularism,” that is, the tendency of a part of the state to separate itself from the rest and to live its own life. When this feeling becomes so strong that men are willing to suffer and die for it, it takes the form of a Nationalist revolution.

Catholic, he points out like any good etymologist, is from the Greek word for “general” or “universal,” and it should know no boundaries, be they national or economic. There should be one general and universal culture, as there should be one religion from which “cultures spring,” because “the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude towards the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it.” And the vital force which maintains Catholic culture? A “certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness,” which is a nice way of co-opting the Ancient Greeks into our ways and means.

About decay, as about many other things in this book, Belloc is right; he is perhaps wrong in his refusal to broaden his etymology to include other cultures who may not immediately identify with the straits through which his faith has sailed. Belloc is now seen as prescient for his warnings about the modern re-emergence of Islam, to which he claims Catholics have fallen inferior in their faith. Despite that nothing would ever bring him to reconsider the manifestoes of that faith, should one plod on with no corollaries and theorems that might aid in making sense of modernity as reflected through the prism of thousand-year-old truths?  Absorption by acceptance not subjugation; confederacy by trust not loyalty; compassion for differences, not similarities. But I do not want to rewrite Belloc’s book, just encourage its deliberation.

Der Vorleser

Denial is an inconspicuous form of betrayal.

                                                                                                         Michael Berg, The Reader

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, in prescient view of what was to come by century's end, a new form of art was created that wasn't new at all. The English term for it, which I loathe, is "bourgeois tragedy," a direct calque of the German Bürgerliches Trauerspiel. Although the words quite obviously share a root, bürgerlich ("citizen's," "civil," although also "bourgeois") and Bourgeoisie in German are normally two different things with appropriately divergent associations. For that reason was the new form of art not really about the bourgeoisie per se, it was simply not about the nobility. Gone were the kings, queens, and princes who had dozens of myrmidons and helpers to do their bidding; in their stead came a merchant, a welder, a tailor, characters who hitherto had only been part of the stage props. The result was that the throngs, whose previous portrayals had been exclusively in comedy, were now allowed to suffer. 

And suffer they did. Since that time and the French Revolution we have never stopped championing the underdog, never ceased to praise the simple values of the less privileged strata of society, and currently are more inclined to listen or read or watch a story of humble beginnings (and often ends) than sit through another tedious melodrama about a king and his crown (count me among those completely antipathetic to such drivel). Despite the futile efforts of some frustrated theorists to make the bourgeoisie evil in every language, their middle class habits and middling opinions are the center of commercialized existence and will stay that way for as long as you and I roam this earth (and probably much longer). Our bourgeoisie may be proverbially average, unimaginative, inflexible, and dull, but they are also for the most part quite harmless provided that their view of the world never usurps a more enlightened examination of human affairs. Before I am accused of snobbery, I will say this: the best thing we can do in life is treat everyone the same way. We will love only a few, and we will accord them a special status; but any other soul has as much right to our respect, admiration, and friendship until proven that these are things they do not deserve. Few are they so irredeemably unpleasant or evil as to merit our indifference, indeed, our contempt, and it is much easier to despise those who put their power and money to selfish and destructive use. But let us not overlook those aforementioned myrmidons, the small petty cowards whose actions or inactions led to death just as much as that of their vilified leaders. That question, among many others, is raised in this fine book.

Our hero and narrator is Michael Berg, a native of this German state now in his mid-fifties and, just as importantly, an attorney. But as the book opens in 1958, Berg is fifteen and stricken with jaundice. One day, a wretchedly ill Michael inadvertently becomes the guest of a woman only known as Ms. Schmitz, an almost anonymous name for a citizen without anything better to do than take care of someone else's sick teenager. After making sure he is well enough to leave and sending him on the road homeward, Ms. Schmitz becomes the center of Michael's life in a way he could never have imagined. He returns to thank her and intimacy abetted by loneliness takes its course. Yet theirs is no ordinary relationship, and not only because Michael is fifteen and his lover, whose name is eventually revealed as Hanna, is thirty-six. He loves her not because he knows what that means, but because she has made him into an adult. In other words, his love is really a discovery of his own sexuality. He writes her a poem in the style of this German poet, but the exercise is solely meant for Michael – a studious, almost nerdy lad who worships books and has little to offer the opposite sex except the promise of a great mind (at fifteen, such a promise falls on the deafest of ears) – to experience what lies behind his favorite literary works. Perhaps for that reason, he thinks, is Hanna so keen on listening to him read. 

He reads her book after book as their liaison which begins in the spring as so many do, lasts into the later part of the summer, and they follow a methodical routine of reading, bathing, lovemaking, and eating. Hanna works as a tram conductor, collecting and punching tickets, and says that she has worked dozens of other jobs in her itinerant life. To Michael, who doesn't know any better, this description of her world just makes her seem all the more vulnerable and, eventually, less attractive than some of his coevals whom he now has the sexual confidence to conquer. As the end of summer comes, so fades his connection to Hanna, which he justifies by foisting the responsibility for what happened on her:

I never learned what Hanna did when she wasn't working or when we weren't together. Whenever I would ask, she refused to answer my question. Our lives had no world in common; instead, she made the room for me in her life that she wanted to make.

Their separation is sudden, as are so many details in a book that takes its time to tell what, in the hands of someone other than Schlink, might have been a pithy cautionary tale. And as suddenly as the first part of Michael's life ends – that is, his childhood and innocence – there begins a second existence as a law student at this university where he aids a professor in documenting the trial of a group of middle-aged German women who served as sentries to some unwholesome forces in the 1940s. Among them, of course, is Hanna, and that is where the real story begins.

Numerous motifs intertwine and separate throughout the rest of the novel, but the main non-historical one is the reason why Hanna asked Michael to read aloud for her (which Vorleser means, a significance lost in the English "The Reader") – Hanna cannot read or write herself. A functional illiterate as a metaphor for wartime collaborators? Precisely this point has been made by many critics, as it would appear that only the dumb and uneducated were responsible for the atrocities of the war; yet such an interpretation could not be further from the truth. In the near-endless courtroom scene which in pages lasts almost as long as Michael's childhood, it becomes clear that Hanna's scapegoating is not intended as a font for pity; if anything, it is Michael who has had his memories destroyed by "ugly facts." A more accurate portrayal of the events presented in The Reader would suggest that the political reality of a nation or period can overshadow the smallest and most unimportant of personal details, and that historical tragedies are often reflected on every level of existence, including, most sadly, in the artistic. That said, Schlink, himself an attorney, proffers his readers a wealth of observations on the world and his characters: from the association of Hanna's mole on her shoulder with the mole of the rather unscrupulous driver who loses his temper with Michael, to the detached philosophy of Michael's father (who gives his children office hour appointments like he gives his students), a man devoted to learning and wisdom and somewhat incapable of having a normal conversation unfettered by profound concerns. That the driver's mole, like the mark of Cain, is actually on his temple, should tell you enough about the crimes on his conscience.

As can be expected from such a sensitive subject, there are also a few missteps. For example, chapter thirteen of part two is too self-conscious, too plagued (as it readily admits) by popular culture and its Philistine sensibilities. Yet this is rectified in the following chapter, a brief and harrowing account of indifference, which is indeed the worst thing that has ever happened to the human heart and intellect. And so do we contemplate indifference in its two guises: as the absence of caring or as the human body and mind's ability to heal itself, to overcome, to make do with the present and press on for survival in the future. In general, Schlink also errs when he turns his attention to the broader spectrum: terms like "collective guilt," "fate of the Germans," and a "generation of those who committed crimes, those who looked on, those who looked away, those who tolerated what was happening, and those who accepted it" are revolting clichés that ultimately disparage his book. But when he keeps it personal, when he adheres to the framework of the bourgeois tragedy of Michael and Hanna (to underscore this parallel, Hanna's first theater visit is to see this play), then he succeeds mightily. Some readers will never see past the thick, political implications of the novel, but true artistry is occasionally cloaked in topicality. What Michael recalls is love, love for being a young man in a beautiful country that affords him a myriad of opportunities to explore the world, and love for a woman who shows him the most basic pleasures of human interaction: companionship, laughter, understanding, and physical intimacy. Both ends of this spectrum meet in one lonely shade whom we should not pity, nor really seek to understand. After all, she is far more powerful a force in Michael's heart and mind than in any history book.

The Lair of the White Worm

We cannot realistically expect trifles in a work with such a name. There should be a gigantic worm and a commensurate lair (and here I find myself already echoing a famous review of the novel's loose and dreadful movie adaptation); there should also be victims for that worm – ideally, lured to the lair and left to scream themselves into agonizing death – a simple formula that could easily be botched by too much meddling and melodrama. There is, wonderful to say, only a moderate portion of the latter among pages of sparkling prose in this author's final novel. 

Our protagonist is Adam Salton, a young, roughly hewn Australian of proper upbringing who stands to inherit substantial wealth and territory from his British forebears. His plans for this turn of fortune are no different than those of any callow Victorian hero: survey the lay of the land, see what benefits might exist to abandoning the volatile adventure of youth for a sedentary life as a member of the provincial gentry, gain the trust and succor of the commonalty, and, of course, keep his eyes peeled for a nubile lass with whom his house can be made into a home. Two lovely possibilities immediately appear. Lilla Watford, "as good as she is pretty," and, a less obvious choice, her first cousin Mimi, half-Burmese with "black eyes [that] can glow .... as do the eyes of a bird when her young are threatened." As bright as the prospects for Adam and one of these women remain – being a man of inexperience, he is instinctively more attracted to the blonde Lilla – a long aquiline shadow is cast by the form of Edgar Caswall. I struggle now to recall a literary Edgar who was both gentle and sane, but no matter. The "history of the Caswall family is coeval with that of England," and our Edgar has been generated from like-minded snobs unaccustomed to challenges or laughter. In fact, their only custom seems to have been one of acquist:

Now, it will be well for you to bear in mind the prevailing characteristics of this race. These were well preserved and unchanging; one and all they are the same: cold, selfish, dominant, reckless of consequences in pursuit of their own will. It was not that they did not keep faith, though that was a matter which gave them little concern, but that they took care to think beforehand of what they should do in order to gain their ends. If they should make a mistake someone else should bear the burthen of it. This was so perpetually recurrent that it seemed to be a part of a fixed policy. It was no wonder indeed that whatever changes took place they were always ensured in their own possessions. They were absolutely of cold, hard nature. Not one of them – so far as we have any knowledge – was ever known to be touched by the softer sentiments, to swerve from his purpose, or hold his hand in obedience to the dictates of his heart. Part of this was due to their dominant, masterful nature. The aquiline features which marked them seemed to justify every personal harshness. The pictures and effigies of them all show their adherence to the early Roman type. Their eyes were full; their hair, of raven blackness, grew thick and close and curly. Their figures were massive and typical of strength.

It takes no great effort of our imagination to ponder the "idea that in the race there is some demoniac possession"; indeed, the experienced Gothicist would anticipate nothing less. Caswall will pin his cruel eyes on several characters, and they will squirm in various degrees of mesmerism until a filthy secret of his family's legacy is partially revealed, at which point Caswall assumes in our tale a very different role. But it is the appearance of an even more cunning and wicked character that unbalances our equation, and that being is Lady Arabella March.

Even if the contours of her thoughts are allotted relatively few paragraphs, Lady Arabella is one of literature's vilest creations. No one is surprised that her looks have the baleful sleekness and refinement of nature's most devilish predators, nor that her history with these lands – the ancient pagan Kingdom of Mercia, we are duly informed – seems to stretch as far back as that of dear old Edgar. Lady Arabella develops two mortal foes in the course of her attempts to get the very wealthy Edgar to marry her and forgive the mounting debts of her freshly deceased ex-husband: Oolanga, Caswall's ferocious and calculating African man-at-arms, and Sir Nathaniel de Salis, diplomatist, scholar, and President of the Mercian Archaeological Society. Sir Nathaniel is also necessarily somewhat of an expert on the local occult, making him a dramatic counterpart to this famed doctor. The diplomatist will consult regularly with Adam and smartly keep his distance from Lady Arabella, about whom he weaves theory and odd fact into terrible conclusions, but Oolanga cannot seem to let the woman out of his sight. Perhaps it is owing to her excitement at the portage to and fro of an old family chest said to contain "the secrets of Mesmer" himself; perhaps to the simple intuition that once Lady Arabella has Edgar and his rapidly declining mental health in her power, neither Caswall nor his new wife will have any use for an erstwhile witch doctor. Luck will be pressed, as well as a few triggers (rarely outside of modern noir novels does one find so many references to concealed revolvers), and unfortunately for some, most of the village is quite out of earshot.     

Modern readers will surely be repulsed at some of the characterizations of women, and, especially, of dark-skinned Africans, but the novel does not make our man-at-arms into anything more than a vulgar mercenary, which, if he's supposed to be friendly with Edgar Caswall, is well in keeping with the personalities of both villains. What is more, almost all the deprecations directed at him come from an even more abhorrent source. Lair of the White Worm may never be counted among Stoker's masterpieces, but it contains a fullness and ease that eluded many of his earlier works. Sumptuous lines, sometimes on the most banal of topics, are strewn on every page ("He found Sir Nathaniel in the study having an early cup of tea, amplified to the dimensions of possible breakfast"; "He was on the high road to mental disturbance"; "The rest and sleep in ignorance would help her and make a gap between the horrors"; "I don't believe in a partial liar. This art does not deal in veneer"). The storytelling vacillates at the natural unevenness of oral narrative, and confusion over some of the details forces the careful reader to retreat and verify just as a rapt listener would have asked a speaker to revisit a certain scene. Praise should likewise be accorded for the restraint through which our eponymous reptile crawls, literally and figuratively, to the surface towards all the other players. There is also an almost understated deduction that begins with, "if we followed it out" and ends with "is a snake." Even in books of this subject matter, logic has no true peer. And some islands, we remember, don't have snakes for a reason.

Those Who Walk Away

Peggy was very romantic – in a dangerous way. She thought marriage was another world – something like paradise or poetry – instead of a continuation of this world. But where we lived, it couldn't have been more like a paradise. The climate, the fruit on the trees right outside the door. We had servants, we had time, we had sunshine. It wasn't as if we were saddled with children right away and up to the elbows in dishwater.

This novel's title is ultimately explained in a casual aside from our third-person narrator who, we suspect, could have probably devised something saltier. It is only very late in our tale, when the narrator relinquishes her hard-won objectivity to excoriate one of her characters, that we realize the title's appropriateness. The accusation is cowardice, and the accused is a young, rich, intelligent, and decent-looking widower by the name of Rayburn "Ray" Garrett.

Ray has everything a young man could wish for materially, as well as something of infinitely greater importance: a taste and a love for art. He has little to say about literature (he quotes this poem in a fit of passion) or cinema, but this being the 1960s, there may not have been as much access to the plenitude of films now literally at our fingertips. No, Ray's love has always been and always will be painting. It is then a sad discovery, and one that occurs early on in our novel and Ray's fictional existence, that his taste and passion for painting do not extend into any creative talent. That is to say, while Ray Garrett may know a dazzling genius's landscapes and portraitures when he sees them, he cannot possibly mimic their accomplishments. So he is relegated, as are so many professors of English with vast and exquisite libraries, to collecting them. His family's fortune allows him an insouciant existence, one that takes a very unplanned turn when he meets Peggy Coleman. Peggy is even younger and richer than Ray; unlike Ray, however, she has not been afforded the bliss of an unbroken home. Her mother would die young and Peggy grew up with her foul-tempered and hack painter of a father, Edward, who will come to play a far more prominent role in Ray's life than either would ever care to imagine. Especially after almost a year of newlywed bliss, residence on Mallorca with "all the ingredients that were supposed to make a marriage go [–] time, money, a pretty place to live, [and] objectives," Peggy, not yet twenty-two years of age, decides that "the world is not enough," and that getting on in this world is not worth the trouble.

The rest of the novel could easily have comprised Ray's inner thoughts on why this all occurred, a diary, in other words, of his eternal guilt. For very laudable artistic reasons, Highsmith grants us only snippets, distant arias from a world Ray shall never know again. Instead of speculate desperation about someone who remained very much a stranger until her death, Ray digs into his own past, his own shortcomings, with the faint hope of excavating a golden key to his puzzle:

From his father, an oilwell worker in his youth, a self-made man, now a millionaire with an oil company of his own, Ray had inherited wide cheekbones. It was an American face, slightly on the handsome side, hopelessly marred by vagueness, discretion, the second thought, if not downright indecision, Ray thought. He disliked his appearance, and always saw himself leaning slightly forward as if to hear someone who was speaking softly, or as if incipiently bowing, kowtowing, about to retreat backwards. And he felt that because of his parents' money, he had had life too easy.

At first glance this passage may seem rashly composed (witness the echo of "thought" in the second sentence or the pleonastic "retreat backwards"), but this is in all likelihood intentional, the purling brook of worries and images that flow through every mind. A later comment will buttress the notion that Ray's greatest fear involves his own mediocrity, the newness of his family's affluence, and his inability to capitalize on what every artist dreams of having: namely the time and resources to realize his artistic potential. His compromise to himself was to marry a budding painter and establish a gallery of European painters in New York, both of which, of course, substitute a proximity to genius for a share in its creative acts. That Ray ends up in Venice with his former father-in-law, whom he rightly understands as someone of limited artistic ability who has long since forsaken any development in that field so as to cash in on faddish garbage, we must attribute to the conceits of fiction. How and why they will engage in one of the nastiest cat-and-mouse games undertaken by two otherwise well-adjusted citizens, however, we must leave to the curious reader.     

Critics have been predictably dismissive of Those Who Walk Away, perhaps because there are no compelling characters like Tom Ripley to loathe and envy. Yet in one respect, the novel remains one of Highsmith's defining works. You may consider Ripley's harpsichord lessons, leisurely readings in German, French, and Italian literature, and his beautiful French mansion and even more beautiful French wife all indications of high culture and great intelligence, and you may forget that all these niceties swathe a murderous psychopath. Ripley is a marvelously memorable literary creation, one that has been likened to Highsmith herself in her venomous disdain of her birthplace and its social Darwinism, but there is only so much to make of such a comparison. What really drove Highsmith we can only hope to uncover through the medium of her more introspective works, such as the terrible tragedy of Rayburn and Edward. It is in their tale that we find Americans of true artistic sensitivity living in Europe, understated but clear alcoholism, and a certain inability to express oneself fully that is the mark of self-imposed literary exile. The most eloquent words, some of which are quoted at the beginning of this review, are exchanged when the two Americans – one a failed painter, the other a sellout – are not impeded in their locutions by Italians or Edward's French girlfriend Inez. The city of Venice itself assumes the role of hero, an antagonist to both men, whose sins (Ray's being cowardice and, in a way, betrayal, Coleman's being wrath and its explosive consequences) will confound them in the end. So when Ray, who survives more than one brush with death, actually believes he may be dead and that the surrounding realm holds but phantasms and erstwhile joys, he is reminded that Venice's "dark canals were very real." And what could be realer to the weary than time's blackest shroud?

St. Francis of Assisi

The merely modern mind has justified every detail of its facile existence by the simplest means: we are selfish survivalists whose only real wishes are hedonistic and bestial. Not only is such an approach fatally misconstrued, it also really applies to that subsection of humans who believe that whatever they do is good because they want it, and have the ridiculous idea of calling such desire the power of the will. Modern philosophy, in its efforts to reinvent the wheel, the chariot, and the horseman, has smiled upon the silliness of gratitude, of beneficence, of unwarranted and unreturned kindness as some childish desire to blunt a jagged conscience. Somewhere, in our depths, we are compensating for the evil we have inflicted upon others (the common explanation for those who left a life of debauchery behind in favor of a good and pure existence, such as this Russian actor). But these are modern views to age-old questions. They are necessarily as ignorant of what has occurred over the course of human history as today’s agnostic who claims – in the same timid and wishy-washy way he does everything else – that religion, organized or in riot, has always been the refuge of the poor and downtrodden. A refuge, mind you, designed by the reigning elite to palliate the inequities that reality maintains between the privileged and the very underprivileged. Apart from a story about some birds, that same agnostic may or may not have heard of this Saint; but he surely will know little about the man described in this book.

The argument in such an endeavor does not devolve into what St. Francis set out to do, nor what we should think of St. Francis as a human being; this is not, as it were, the tale of a Nordic explorer. The appearance of the man we now call St. Francis of Assisi cannot and should not be explained away by divine intervention, because there has only been one such intervention in the history of Christianity. No, St. Francis must be explained as a man, and as a man he is remarkable in ways that have rarely been ascribed to anyone else among the ranks of mankind. His way was perhaps the Way of the Cross, but it had not the same ends – nor could it have presumed to have – as what Jesus Christ brought to the world. This oddness, an ascetic strain so restrictive as to seem incredible to the modern hedonist, is appropriately addressed in unusual terms:

The truth is that people who worship health cannot be healthy. When Man goes straight he goes crooked. When he follows his nose he manages somehow to put his nose out of joint, or even to cut off his nose to spite his face; and that in accordance with something much deeper in human nature than nature-worshipers could ever understand. It was the discovery of that deeper thing, humanly speaking, that constituted the conversion to Christianity. There is a bias in man like the bias in a bowl; and Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias and therefore hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the saying; but it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.

On this basis Francis Bernardone, a young Italian who grew up at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century, became the most austere admirer of Christian mores the world had ever learned of, and not because he was the most austere of all persons to have ever walked in the massive shadow of Calvary. History is replete with tales of self-flagellating monks, believers burning and starving themselves, in a futile attempt to make up for the sin they feel has made them mortal and wicked. What history lacked before the advent of Francis Bernardone, however, was a soul who committed himself to the trinity that is the vow of the monk – poverty, obedience, and chastity – and did so with such unadulterated and genuine cheerfulness. In a way, Francis was the first among us to divine the teachings of Christianity as the paradoxical amalgam of utter destitution and utter rapture; the first to make happiness and poverty synonymous; the first, in other words, to show us that the meek truly will inherit the earth.

The Brothers Minor, an order that still numbers in the tens of thousands, have persisted through our faithless days as a sort of sideshow attraction. Witness the innumerable popular references to the hooded friar in brown garb with a rope as his belt and the soil as his shoes. Many of us think such an existence to denote enslavement – if not enslavement, then a sad and meaningless resort for the desperate – although no one to my knowledge has ever been forced to become a Franciscan monk. Yet the key to asceticism can be elegantly resolved: if you believe the world to be made by laws that do not change, you cannot believe in anything that violates those laws. As such, if you believe that we were meant to live and survive, you can hardly believe in any culture or mores that shorten your life so that you may repent for our collective moral turpitude. For St. Francis, this is precisely what makes the most sense:

It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be for ever paying it. He will be for ever giving back what he cannot give back, and cannot be expected to give back. He will be always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks. Men who think they are too modern to understand this are in fact too mean to understand it; we are most of us too mean to practice it. We are not generous enough to be ascetics; one might almost say not genial enough to be ascetics. A man must have magnanimity of surrender, of which he commonly only catches a glimpse in first love, like a glimpse of our lost Eden. But whether he sees it or not, the truth is in that riddle; that the whole world has, or is, only one good thing; and it is a bad debt.

The use of the term “debt” will certainly appeal to those modern industrial souls who measure every gesture and nuance of speech in light of their financial solvency; but there is more at stake here than pure self-immolation which can easily be interpreted as guilt. One thing that did not plague St. Francis was guilt. He did not feel the burden of the Cross upon his shoulder blades or the Weltschmerz that has made many a philosopher sob in the corner of his private study. His only burden was his clothes, which in a much-belabored scene he quickly shed. He then encountered a peasant in brown habit, begged politely for the most measly and holed garment that peasant owned, found some hemp with which to bind the habit to himself, and the rest as they say is history.

The point of Chesterton’s book, of course, is not history or anything resembling historical fact. That is not because St. Francis is fictive or because what he did and said was attributed to him posthumously in a sort of deifying Festschrift; he did not do or say that much to begin with. If what we know of St. Francis of Assisi is that he loved animals, especially birds, and that novels such as this one continue to depict him as a nature boy with a heart for heaven, our perpetuation of these trusted captions is as much our fault as the fault of those who cannot be bothered to learn about anything outside the lifetime of their grandparents. So why does Francis matter at all? Perhaps because he reminds us in a very distant way of what we have always believed:

St. Francis is the mirror of Christ as the moon is the mirror of the sun. The moon is much smaller than the sun, but it is also much nearer to us; and being less vivid it is also more visible. Exactly in the same sense St. Francis is nearer to us, and being a mere man like ourselves is in that sense more imaginable. Being necessarily less of a mystery, he does not, for us, so much open his mouth in mysteries.

Mysteries cannot come from someone who is ordinary and plain, in the complimentary meaning of both words, and in our world of never-ending doubts, conspiracies and mystifications, we should be thankful for such clarity. But whatever we do in life, we will never be as gracious or as thankful as that young Italian in brown habit.