Three books

  • I’ve had three books sit­ting on my desk for days, wait­ing patiently till I had time to do a quick review. They are: “The Jour­nals of Father Alexan­der Schme­mann 1973–1983″*, “The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov”** and a totally absur­dist romp called “The Areas of My Exper­tise”*** by John Hodg­man. The pri­vate thoughts and wor­ries of an Ortho­dox lumi­nary, a clas­sic of Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture and a bit of inge­nious silli­ness. Where to begin?

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    Father Schmemann’s “Journals”

    frsjournals.jpgWell, you really have to begin here, I think. And it’s fit­ting — I believe that today is the 25th anniver­sary of his repose. In that time, there has been ample time for those who loved him to love him even more, and those who were offended by him to become so offended they can hardly stand it. But there has also been time, it seems to me, for some of the sen­ti­ments of his pri­vate jour­nals to have proved pre­scient. Fr. Alexan­der was incred­i­bly active on behalf of the Ortho­dox Church, and going to the ends of the earth as he did, tak­ing in all fla­vors of Ortho­dox and non-Orthodox churches, he had a van­tage of both the tremen­dous ben­e­fits and the tremen­dous problems.

    Con­sider this pas­sage, the first entry in the jour­nal he started in Jan­u­ary, 1973.

    Yes­ter­day, on the train com­ing back from Wilm­ing­ton, Delaware, I thought, “Here I am, fifty-two years old, a priest and a the­olo­gian for more than a quar­ter of a cen­tury — what does it all mean? How can I put together, how can I explain to myself what it all implies, clearly and dis­tinctly; and is such a clar­i­fi­ca­tion needed?” …

    What is there to ‘explain’? The sur­pris­ing com­bi­na­tion in me of a deep and ever-growing revul­sion at end­less dis­cus­sions and debates about reli­gion, at super­fi­cial affir­ma­tion, pious emo­tion­al­ism and cer­tainly against pseudo-church inter­est, petty and tri­fling, and at the same time an every-growing sense of real­ity. Just yes­ter­day, I felt this real­ity while walk­ing to church for the liturgy, in the early morn­ing, through the empti­ness of win­ter trees; and then this pre­cious hour in the empty church, before the liturgy. Always the same feel­ing of time filled with eter­nity, with full and sacred joy. I have the feel­ing that church is needed so that this expe­ri­ence of real­ity would exist. Where the church ceases to be a sym­bol, a sacra­ment, it becomes a hor­ri­ble car­i­ca­ture of itself.

    These aren’t pretty thoughts, lit­tle Hall­mark moments reflect­ing a bright but shal­low level of thought. These are very deep and very hon­est reflec­tions, anx­i­eties, con­fes­sions of an active, intel­li­gent mind, some­one who had seen things inside and out­side the church that chal­lenged and occa­sion­ally dis­turbed him.

    Father Schme­mann is incred­i­bly forth­right in his jour­nals about the things in the Ortho­dox Church that he thinks are wrong, and for that rea­son, I wouldn’t rec­om­mend the book to new con­verts or any­one who is still in that beau­ti­ful ‘hon­ey­moon’ phase where they think that admit­ting that the bride has freck­les is the same as say­ing that she’s ugly. Per­son­ally, I didn’t find his hon­esty offen­sive; I found it lib­er­at­ing. It didn’t seem overly crit­i­cal to me — Fr. Schmemann’s great love for the Church is much too obvi­ous for that. But he was ever and always con­scious of the need for all Chris­tians always to live ‘escha­to­log­i­cally’ — to live for the age to come — and to the degree that any­thing, even the Ortho­dox Church as an orga­nized reli­gion, got in the way of that, he couldn’t hide his displeasure.

    And in any case, as you see from this excerpt, the final sound­ing note of such entries isn’t anger or sad­ness — it’s joy. Joy for Fr. Schme­mann was not just a mood, it was a state of being with a life of its own, a life that could only really be expe­ri­enced in the Church. For all of the ups and downs of this book, it was a joy to read and I’m going to miss these daily walks with Fr. Schme­mann as if I had lost a friend.

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    He ain’t heavy read­ing, he’s my “Broth­ers”

    I remem­ber read­ing the opin­ion of an Ortho­dox priest that the only prob­lem with this book is that Ortho­dox peo­ple seemed some­times to regard it as a sort of addi­tion tobroskaramazov.jpg Scrip­tures writ­ten just for them. So maybe I was going into it with my expec­ta­tions too high. Or maybe it’s just the usual grim feel­ing I get when I know I’m about to read a book that first appeared in seri­al­ized form by an author that (a) was being paid by the word, and (b) really needed money. Those always seem like ingre­di­ents for uneven pac­ing and a LOT of words (see also, the works of Charles Dickens).

    But in any case, I may have to turn in my Ortho­dox read­ing card, because I didn’t really like the good “Broth­ers.” Now, to be sure, I can cer­tainly see why Ortho­dox clasp it to their heart. Where in West­ern lit­er­a­ture would you encounter a young man with a monas­tic bent and not expect to read lov­ing detail of his fall into apos­tasy? And if that young man — the youngest brother Alexey — was under the tute­lage of an elder who was a holy man, wouldn’t you expect the entire action to hinge on Alexey find­ing out that the elder was a fake, an idiot or a per­vert? But no. Dos­to­evsky man­ages to talk about some­thing that Ortho­dox know exists — the occa­sional glim­mers of purity and holi­ness we encounter in this sin­ful world — in ways that don’t seem to fall into excess on one side or the other. The prob­lem for me was that Alexey and his rela­tion­ship to the elder Fr. Zos­sima aren’t the cen­tral theme of the book. It is mostly a slow unveil­ing of cir­cum­stances lead­ing up to a mur­der, and then the reper­cus­sions of that. For a book run­ning over 700 pages, that just wasn’t doing it for me.

    All the same, there are gems. Con­sider this bit, a lit­tle pure wis­dom given by a priest to Alexey:

    “Remem­ber, young man, unceas­ingly,” Father Paissy began, with­out pref­ace, “that the sci­ence of this world, which has become a great power has, espe­cially in the last cen­tury, analysed every­thing divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analy­sis, the learned of this world have noth­ing left of all that was sacred of old. But they have only analysed the parts and over­looked the whole, and indeed their blind­ness is mar­velous. Yet the whole still stands stead­fast before their eyes, and the gates of hell shall not pre­vail against it. Has it not lasted nine­teen cen­turies, [make that 20], is it not still a liv­ing, a mov­ing power in the indi­vid­ual soul and in the masses of peo­ple? It is still as strong and liv­ing even in the souls of athe­ists, who have destroyed every­thing! For even those who have renounced Chris­tian­ity and attack it, in their inmost being still fol­low the Chris­t­ian ideal, for hith­erto nei­ther their sub­tlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to cre­ate a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the result has only been grotesque. Remem­ber this espe­cially, young man, since you are being sent into the world by your depart­ing elder…”

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    Invent­ing your own “Expertise”

    areasexpertise.jpgI really don’t know how to describe this book. It’s writ­ten by John Hodg­man, the bor­ing PC guy in those “I’m a Mac” com­mer­cial. Who knew that the guy who was picked to per­son­ify drab, col­or­less un-hipness even had an area of exper­tise. But then, does he? It’s hard to say, exactly, because so much of the book is com­posed of wildly inven­tive ref­er­ence mate­r­ial that exists only in his imag­i­na­tion. For exam­ple, con­sider this intro­duc­tion to a sec­tion about states and state mottoes:

    As many have for­got­ten, our nation is divided into states, num­ber­ing 51 (of which only 50 are com­monly known). They are a remark­able nat­ural occur­rence of mys­te­ri­ous ori­gin which when you fit them all together, per­fectly cover the con­ti­nen­tal mass we call the U.S.A., leav­ing only the small hole or “dis­trict” of Colum­bia, where com­passes spin wildly and mag­nets fail to func­tion. In addi­tion, the U.S. owns sev­eral ter­ri­to­ries and island pro­tec­torates, and twenty-five secret space colonies. That is all I can tell you about the space colonies.

    And here is where I can point to the book itself as the best lit­mus test. If that para­graph is mak­ing you say things like “Fifty-one states? Space colonies? But that’s just wrong!” then you don’t want this book. Peo­ple with a lit­eral mind who expect the author­i­ta­tive voice of a ref­er­ence work to be seri­ous and non-inventive will be really both­ered, I think. They def­i­nitely wouldn’t want to go on and read this about the state of Alabama:

    Alabama

    Nick­name: State of the Golden Heads

    Motto: “We Dare to Sculpt Our Own Heads”

    Notes: In this state, the gov­er­nor is paid in gold ingots. It is cus­tom­ary at the end of his/her term to melt some num­ber of them and return them to the state as a bust of his/her head. Tra­di­tion­ally, the gold sculpt­ing was done by the gov­er­nor him­self. Anti-child labor Gov. William D. Jelks was a par­tic­u­larly nim­ble sculp­tor, while George Wal­lace, for rea­sons unknown, gave him­self a third eye in the mid­dle of his fore­head dur­ing his last term of office. Now the task is largely given over to pro­fes­sional sculp­tors and paid con­sul­tants, many from out of state, mak­ing this, for most Alaba­mans, a hol­low exer­cise in pro­fes­sional politicking.

    So let that tid­bit be either your fair warn­ing NOT to get this book, or your tipoff that it might just be your cup of tea. The world prob­a­bly needs both kinds of people.


    Related posts:

    1. Fr. A: ‘Why is civ­i­liza­tion so meta­phys­i­cally foolish?’
    2. “Keeper of the Light”
    3. Saint Fyo­dor
    4. Harry Pot­ter thoughts — w/o spoilers
    5. Becom­ing Ortho­dox by Peter E. Gillquist

    December 13th, 2008 | Grace | 6 Comments |

6 Responses and Counting...

  • DebD 12.13.2008

    Great reviews.

    I really liked the quote ou gave from Fr. Alexan­der… both the “ever-growing revul­sion at end­less dis­cus­sions and debates about reli­gion,” and .. “Always the same feel­ing of time filled with eter­nity, with full and sacred joy.” res­onated with me, oddly enough.

    I didn’t like BK either. I just didn’t get it and felt like a EO drop-out. Oh well.

  • DebD

    ooops, I for­got to say… that last book looks like one my hus­band would love. Thanks!

  • Fr. Luke Hartung

    Thank you for the post. I whole­heart­edly agree with your review of The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov. Have you heard of Alexan­der Papa­dia­man­dis? Many call him the “Greek Dos­to­evsky” but, I per­son­ally would put him in a class of his own. You can read about his most recently pub­lished book here http://ishmaelite.blogspot.com/2008/04/boundless-garden-now-available.html and pur­chase it here: http://www.uncutmountainsupply.com . If you really are inter­ested, email me and let me know and I’ll see to it that you receive a com­ple­men­tary copy.

  • Mimi

    I think that as a cohe­sive story, Broth­ers K is lack­ing (and way beyond me) but as snip­pets of stories,it speaks to my heart. The Grand Inquisi­tor and the woman with the onion are two snip­pets that I often find myself think­ing about.

  • Grace

    What a relief to find out I’m not all alone in not lik­ing BK that much. And, Mimi, your met­ric makes a lot of sense to me. It’s true — that story of the woman with the onion is some­thing that a priest worked into a homily once and it made me want to read the book. Some of the other para­bles and visions are really mem­o­rable. But the dia­logue drove me crazy:

    Fyo­dor or Ivan or Dmitri: Blah blah blah … (97 pages)
    Alexey (star­tled): Why do you say that?
    Fyo­dor or Ivan or Dmitri: BLAH BLAH BLAH .… (angry rant, 63 pages)
    Alexey (sti­fling a sneeze): I see what you mean.

    It all seemed wordy beyond belief and the emo­tional responses didn’t make any sense. I won­dered if maybe it was a Russ­ian thing.

  • Grace

    Fr. Luke:
    VERY intrigu­ing info! I went off to the Web­site, and I’ll def­i­nitely look into it.

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