Page 3502 – Christianity Today (2024)

A few days after I got engaged, my mother presented me with a Barnes & Noble gift card, which a colleague had given to her. “You can have this gift card,” she said, “but you must promise to buy that book that was just on Oprah, the one with the list of questions engaged couples should discuss.” I knew just what book she meant—The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say “I Do” had become a minor sensation. So I took the gift card. Mom said I could use the change for a mystery or a magazine or a cappuccino, whatever I wanted, so long as I didn’t leave the bookstore without The Hard Questions.

The Hard Questions—ranging from “Who prepares the meals?” to “What if one of us is attracted to someone else? Superficially? Deeply?”—is just one of a truckload of books designed to help couples get married well, be married well, and stay married well. Many of these marriage books, like other staples of the self-help genre, codify their wisdom into a simple program comprising seven (or nine, or 100) easily digestible (and often alliterative) rules. To wit, The Good Marriage, by Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee. Wallerstein, who is best known for her studies on the impact of divorce on kids, optimistically asserts that good marriages are possible, and suggests nine steps couples should take to protect their nuptials. “The first task in any marriage … is to separate psychologically from the family of origin” (don’t give your mom a key to your new marital home). Step two is “building togetherness and autonomy, … [that is,] putting together a shared vision of how you want to spend your lives together.” Good marriages have a strong sense of “we,” but, following Kahil Gibran, good marriages also have space in their togetherness. Then comes having children, coping with crises, and “build[ing] a relationship that is safe for the expression of difference, conflict, and anger.” Tasks six and seven are to “create a loving sexual relationship and to guard it so that it will endure,” and to laugh and ward off boredom and ennui. Finally, in good marriages, partners nurture each other emotionally, and they “hold onto … idealized images of courtship and early history along with a realistic view of the present.”

In a similar vein, psychotherapists Linda and Charlie Bloom sketch out 101 Things I Wish I Knew When I Got Married: Simple Lessons to Make Love Last. Their lessons are indeed a little simpler than Wallerstein’s. The Blooms urge couples to remember that “there’s a difference between judging and being judgmental.” They call for good communication (this sounds like presidential candidates saying they’re pro-education—is there a marriage counselor anywhere who celebrates bad communication?), and suggest that spouses refrain from issuing ultimatums.

All those singletons who successfully followed Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider’s The Rules—a blockbuster that coached women in “how to captur[e] the heart of Mr. Right”—can now avail themselves of The Rules for Marriage. Here Fein and Schneider lay out precisely 43 rules, including the seemingly contradictory “Don’t Use the D Word (Divorce),” but then “Divorce with Dignity.” (Fein is herself divorced. As she explained in one interview, “I was very happily married for many, many years before the book came out. The sudden rise to fame and overnight celebrity was just too much for me and I filed for divorce when I just felt like it was all too much. I had stopped going out on date night and was too tired to do all the things I used to do, and it was so overnight! Rather than filing for divorce, a few weekends away alone would have been better!”)

In the main, The Rules for Marriage (and “Rules,” by the way, is trademarked) is consistent with the original dating rules, which are all about manipulating the guy and appearing not to need or desire anything on your own terms. Dating women are instructed, for example, to let their hair grow, because men prefer long tresses. Husband-hunters are told “don’t call him and rarely return his calls,” and advised not to accept invitations issued at the last minute—you wouldn’t want to appear to have anything other than the fullest dance card. Once you are married, you should practice a machiavellian submissiveness: Do not, for example, return the gifts hubby gives you “unless you absolutely can’t look at them and are positive that you will never wear them.” Calling him at the office is forbidden (but since you didn’t call him while you were dating, you probably won’t even be tempted). Oh, and also you’re to “keep … to yourself … how not in the mood you are to make love,” and you’re to have sex whenever he wants: “When it comes to sex in a marriage, husbands rule the roost. Whether you like it or not or think it’s right or fair, your husband determines your sex life.”

Animating all these tips, suggestions, rules, and questions is a vision of what the good marriage is. So one might expect Christian marriage guides to differ markedly from their secular counterparts. And in some respects they do. Consider my three favorites.

Les and Leslie Parrott’s helpful Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts rehearses many solid and standard marriage basics—learn to fight well, learn to communicate, cultivate intimacy and commitment. But the Parrotts also insist that men and women can’t make marriages work by themselves. “On our own,” write the Parrotts, ” … We can’t … look all the uncertainty of life full in the face and say, ‘I will make one thing certain: my faithfulness to my partner.’ ” That proclamation relies on God’s faithfulness, without which “marriage would have no hope of enduring.” Walter Wangerin’s wonderful As For Me and My House insists that sin has distorted God’s ideals for marriage, and hence Wangerin puts the practice of forgiveness at the center of married life. And Mike Mason’s The Mystery of Marriage, which has a cult following in some corners of the kingdom, is shot through with the understanding that marriage is not “in any sense separate from or subordinate to the life of faith.” Marriage is a “practicing … for Heaven,” an institution in which God disciples us, “helping men and women to humble themselves, to surrender their errant wills.”

And yet, alongside these distinctives, there are some underlying assumptions about marriage that are common to almost every marriage self-help book I’ve read, secular or Christian, and these assumptions are, I think, questionable.

The first has to do with eros—or, more plainly, sex and romance. It’s no surprise that many of the current marriage guides focus on sex: According to The Sex-Starved Marriage (and according to a lot of shopworn jokes), married couples are in an outright crisis of libido. Twenty percent of married couples have sex less than once a month. Couples are harried, busy, stressed, exhausted. They’re clinically depressed, or their hormones are out of whack, or they’re dealing with childhood sexual abuse. Whatever the cause, married folks don’t seem to be having much sex.

So don’t worry if your sex life has gotten a little humdrum—you’re not alone. What’s more, these guides suggest, a solution is staring you in the face. You need only “work hard” at creating a romantic atmosphere and cultivating sexual desire.

As Marg Stark puts it in What No One Tells the Bride, “brides and grooms are working, cleverly and secretly, at their sex lives. … Couples have to work at it, especially today . … with the average couple marrying in their mid-twenties, when the demands of burgeoning careers can overtake even the raging hormones of youth.” So if your libido is low, consider escaping for a romantic weekend; going to a sex therapist; hiring a babysitter and checking into a Motel 6 for the afternoon. To prevent sex from becoming routine, alternate the time of day in which you make love. What No One Tells the Bride suggests that couples “Buy some ‘dirty dice.’ Roll them on the sheets of your bed and then do what they say to do” and tells women to “Wear the thong even though it’s lace and really scratches.” The Rules for Marriage warns that wives who “do not take date night … seriously” are likely to end up in marriages where “the couple starts to act like roommates, not lovers.” A host of Christian sex guides (think Alex Comfort meets the Song of Songs) echo the theme. Linda Dillow and Lorraine Pintus’ Intimate Issues, for example, lays out three different types of sex—hors d’oeuvre sex (“it satisfies and whets the appetite for a good, regular meal”), home-cooked sex (“fifteen minutes to a half-hour of warmth, foreplay, and intercourse”), and gourmet sex (“long, lazy, luxurious romance with no responsibility except loving”); husbands and wives are encouraged to plan at least one round of gourmet sex a month.

It is, of course, a salutary thing to suggest, as Stark does, that our frantic jobs are less important than the fabric of our marriages. But is the “solution” to America’s married sex “crisis” really simply to work harder at sex—an idiom that befits a society in thrall to advanced capitalism? Maybe roommate-like status is not what we ought to be aspiring to in marriage—but neither is the thrill and romance that one associates with one’s fondly remembered dating days. (Why bother with marriage if the romance of dating is all you’re after?) Surely what married people should aspire to is, well, living as husband and wife.

Enjoy the occasional weekend getaway at a B&B, sure, but create an eros situated squarely in the household. That means not just sex and candlelight, but much more often sex and domesticity, sex and routine, sex that is part of, rather than abstracted from, the day-to-day life that is marriage. Our task, then, may not be to “work harder” at romance and desire, but rather to reconceptualize eros. Our task may be to move away from the logic that tells us that erotic love is the thing that married couples try to approximate at the end of their date nights, and to adopt instead a robustly domestic and household sexuality. Our task may not be to cultivate moments when eros can whisk us away from our ordinary routines, but rather to love each other as eros becomes imbedded in, and transformed by, the daily warp and woof of married life.

Lurking underneath the romanticized eros is a certain individualism, and, indeed, almost all of today’s marriage guides frame marriage strictly as an individual project. The marriages that emerge from the pages of these books are marriages of two people who rarely engage their communities. Marriage is figured as something that is undertaken by, and that serves, only the husband and wife. None of the books’ rules, guidelines, or suggestions urge couples to understand marriage in the context of the communities to which they are committed.

Consider, for example, the Blooms’ endorsem*nt of fidelity: Having enjoined married couples, “If you chose monogamy, keep your agreement,” the Blooms go on to suggest that “Ultimately the question of monogamy … [is] a matter of enlightened self-interest. Keeping the agreement to monogamy provides a container within which we are able to experience greater depth and fulfillment in our marriage and greater levels of self-awareness and self-development.” Fidelity, then, is not a social good; it is not a discipline that fosters goodness; it neither draws on nor offers anything to neighbors. It is merely good for the folks practicing it; it helps them attain self-fulfillment.

Even Judith Wallerstein, who aims to shore up good marriages and prevent divorce, seems to assume that marriage begins and ends with the couple. None of the nine tasks she lays out for married couples put husbands and wives in relation to a larger community. Her married people don’t even seem to have friends. They have each other, and some kids; that’s where their community begins and ends.

And, yet, marriage is meant to be communal as well as couple-centered both in its means and its meanings. At the most practical level, it is our friends, our brothers and sisters in the church, our aunts and uncles and colleagues, who can remind us why we got married in the first place. It is this community that, when we lay our marriages bare before them, are able to hold us accountable, and also celebrate with us. This is what the Book of Common Prayer’s Order of Marriage is getting at when it prompts the celebrant to ask the congregation if “all of you witnessing these promises [will] do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage?” The congregation’s response is a hearty “We will.” If we Christians want to get our divorce rates down below the national average, rendering our marriages visible to our communities—opening ourselves up to our friends’ support, prayers, questions, and rebuke—would be a good place to start.

But recalling the communal dimension of marriage is not merely a strategy for sticking it out and navigating the rough patches. It is rather an assertion of God’s purposes for marriage. Our surrounding society tells us that marriage is a private endeavor, that what happens between husband and wife behind closed doors is no one else’s concern. But in the Christian grammar, marriage is not only for the married couple. Insofar as marriage tells the Christian community a particular story, marriage is for the community. It reminds us of the communion and community that is possible between and among people who have been made new creatures in Christ. And it hints at the eschatological union between Christ and the Church. As Catholic ethicist Julie Hanlon Rubio has put it, “marriage consists not simply or even primarily of a personal relationship. Rather, it crystallizes the love of the larger church community. The couple is not just two-in-one, but two together within the whole, with specific responsibility for the whole. … They must persevere in love, because the community needs to see God’s love actualized among God’s people.”

The inflections of community are important because they get at the very meanings of marriage. Marriage is a gift God gives the church. He does not simply give it to the married people of the church, but to the whole church, just as marriage is designed not only for the benefit of the married couple. It is designed to tell a story to the entire church, a story about God’s own love and fidelity to us.

Lauren F. Winner is the author of Girl Meets God (Random House).

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Oh the mails: every bore in two continents seems to think I like getting letters. One’s real friends are precisely the people one never gets time to write to.” Thus Lewis sounds off to one of those real friends, Dorothy L. Sayers, in the letter closing the second volume of this collected correspondence. Editor Walter Hooper has chosen an interesting note on which to pause for breath before he brings out the third and final volume next year. Lewis’ complaint reminds us that a writer’s correspondence may reflect duty much more than joy, and in that regard these two volumes show him as the very slave of duty. (His fantastically tireless thank-you letters to Warfield Firor ought to be compulsory reading for all children on Boxing Day.) The complaint also has a delicious proleptic irony for we know that, within a year, Lewis will publish The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and henceforth his mails will be even heavier. He really has only himself to blame.

Once complete, this three-volume edition of Lewis’ correspondence will replace all previous collections, gathering up into its comprehensive embrace Letters (1988), Letters to Children (1985), Letters to an American Lady (1967), Letters to Arthur Greeves (1979), and the Latin Letters (1989). 1 However, that is not to say that every single extant letter by Lewis will then have been published. Some, of course, have still not come to light. (Incidentally, those letters which materialized too late to get into volumes 1 and 2 will be given their own appendix in volume 3.) And some letters have been omitted from the first volume to prevent it from being too long. The omissions mostly consist of the weekly “regulation” letters from the schoolboy Lewis to his father and the abstruse letters to Owen Barfield in the 1920s when Lewis was debating—as his brother mockingly put it—”the utterness of the nothingness.” They constitute about five per cent of the total correspondence from the period covered by volume 1, and it is to be regretted that the publisher should not have found a way to squeeze them in. So near and yet so far. (Perhaps Hooper will at least be given space to list all omitted letters in a second appendix to volume 3.)

Another mark against the publisher is incurred by the subtitles of these two volumes, which are, respectively, inaccurate and jejune. The first volume is made up of letters to friends as much as family: it would have been better called something like “The Road to Faith,” concluding, as it does, with a letter detailing that seminal moment in which Lewis first thought of Christianity as “a true myth.” And to say that the second deals with “books, broadcasts and war” serves to distinguish it from volume 1 only in respect of “broadcasts,” but Lewis’ radio talks are not a major subject of this second volume. An apter subtitle would have been “The Road to Narnia” or some such, since it finishes with Lewis on the brink of his greatest achievement and having just penned his first letter to Narnia’s illustrator, Pauline Baynes.

Although most of these letters have been published before, there are many which are new to print, especially in volume 2. These include 11 to his bête noire, T.S. Eliot, which are fascinating as much for their tone as their content. When Eliot failed, despite repeated undertakings, to supply an essay for the festschrift dedicated to the memory of Charles Williams, Lewis, who was editing the book, wrote to tell him that his time was up, adding, “Perhaps you will find your own way of honoring our friend later and no less effectively.” In the light of Lewis’ inveterate hostility toward Eliot on literary matters and given that the festschrift was designed to bring a little financial relief to Williams’ widow, one can detect all sorts of undercurrents in that single sentence: doubt, disappointment, confirmation of worst suspicions, mild chastisem*nt, and all within a perfectly polite and encouraging suggestion. Peachy.

Also new are 26 letters to Ruth Pitter, the poet, whom Lewis once said he would have liked to have married. “I should love to come and lunch,” he writes: “Will September do for you?—when the world begins to stir again and one puts back the eiderdown and there are cobwebs of a morning? I long for it.” This correspondence gives a glimpse into a rarely seen gentleness and sensitivity in the letter-writing Lewis and into a deeply felt, deeply restrained relationship, like something out of a Barbara Pym novel; a contrast to the hefty, hearty rallies with Dorothy Sayers.

Third, in this survey of the newcomers, we must include mention of the numerous letters to E.R. Eddison, author of one of Lewis’ favorite books, The Worm Ouroboros. These are written in a mock-Tudor style, full of duncicall, saucie, and malapert periods, very witty and light. Much of the correspondence was composed before the two men had ever met; when they eventually did, it was at a lively Inklings session at Magdalen, where Eddison found himself “one martyr-lion fallne vnawares ammiddes an whole covine of Xtianes.” Once we have learned that Eddison was an unbeliever we can see the yeast in Lewis’ habitual signoff: “euer yo~ hono~’s humble bedesman.” He is effectively saying, “I’m praying for you, dear pagan; you’re in my prayers.” But he makes it palatable; it coheres with the whole epistolary relationship.

The Eddison letters, like the Latin letters to Don Giovanni Calabria (presented by Hooper above English translations), typify Lewis’ extraordinary ability to adjust his language and modulate his tone to suit the correspondent. There is never a pro forma response. Lewis’ pen is like a magical stream which can run now fresh, now salt, now cream, now wine. His complete mastery of voice is an object lesson in the art of becoming “all things to all men.” Occasionally (in volume 1 especially) this capsizes into hypocrisy. In his late teens and early twenties, Lewis’ letters to his father were pitch-perfect pretences of filial piety; they alternate with letters to Greeves which show a very different, but equally presentable, persona. Lewis’ two-facedness in these years is the evil twin of his later ability sincerely to accommodate himself and his style to interlocutor, occasion and subject matter.

As we witness Lewis develop we find that these volumes are working as a kind of unconscious autobiography. Lewis is unwittingly portraying his own maturation, a portrait which is, in its own way, as instructive an insight into the shape of his early life as Surprised by Joy. The alteration in manner which occurs between, say, 1927 and 1933, is striking to observe, clear empirical evidence of the objective efficacy of spiritual conversion. The crisis which Lewis was brought to by his encounter with Christ really was the hinge on which his whole life turned. The man demonstrably became more integrated, more purposeful, more relaxed, more self-effacing as a consequence of that life-changing talk with Tolkien in Addison’s Walk. Faults and flaws and foibles remain, of course, and privately intended correspondence can be expected to reveal such characteristics; it opens a window onto a man’s weaknesses more revealingly than any public confessional. Lewis sometimes writes irritably, eristically, posingly, de haut en bas; he can still, on occasion, denigrate people behind their backs. But he never writes dully, is never less than imaginative.

Not only do these volumes track the development of an individual; in the background we can make out (in soft focus) larger historical movements and moments: the rise of modernism, socialism, feminism, the debate over Irish Home Rule, the flaring of the General Strike, the election of Adolf Hitler (“as contemptible for his stupidity as he is detestable for his cruelty,” Lewis wrote in 1933). We enjoy, indirectly, a history of Lewis’ lifetime, alongside that of his life.

In all this we are enriched and enlightened by Hooper’s superbly researched footnotes: every quotation sourced, every person dated and placed, every enigma clarified. What is more, each of Lewis’ correspondents is given a brief biographical treatment so that the reader may better understand the personal context into which Lewis was writing. These hard facts, which so usefully underpin every page, will not leave either the scholar or the Lewis enthusiast feeling short-changed; indeed, if anything, the level of detail may occasionally appear supererogatory. But this explains why Hooper is the world’s leading expert on Lewis’ life and work. He knows and cares more about the subject than anyone else in the field.

Lewis wrote to his father in 1926 that “a heavy responsibility rests on those who forage through a dead man’s correspondence and publish it indiscriminately.” HarperCollins may want to try a little harder to live up to that responsibility with volume 3, but Hooper need only do a third time what he has already done twice so well. Encore!

Michael Ward has just taken the post of chaplain at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.

1. The first volume of this edition of Lewis’ letters was published by HarperCollins in the United Kingdom in 2000 but is only now appearing in the United States, along with the newly published second volume.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The Byzantine Museum, Athens, August 2001

Christ of Sinai is directly in front of me, and I can’t breathe. I didn’t think He would be here. I rounded a corner, absorbed in my own thoughts, certainly not expecting to see Him on this quiet morning, in the hundred-degree heat and dust of a city that has not yet fully wakened; but here He is, and I am suddenly confronted with His image, the image, the oldest icon in existence, the epitome of what an icon is and should be. My hands shake, and I approach Him slowly, in disbelief. The rest of the room evaporates, and all I can see is Him.

He is part of the exhibition titled “A Mystery Great and Wondrous,” a title I thought was fitting in many ways: it is drawn from the Megalynarion of Advent, a “magnifying” hymn to the Virgin Mary in the weeks before we celebrate her Son’s birth. She is Virgin, yet she gave birth to a son: “In the confines of the manger is laid the infinite Christ our God.” He is fully God by nature, fully man by choice. He died in the flesh and conquered Death; he went to Hell, only to take Hell captive. How can we ever hope to understand these truths? They are indeed pure mystery, great and wondrous and dizzying and terrible. And icons, the attempts of man to communicate these astounding and beautiful events, are themselves a mystery. How can the physical materials of wood and pigment and egg yolk and animal skin convey such ethereal truths, and how can the passage of many centuries only intensify the power of these images to captivate Christian eyes and hearts?

Christ of Sinai looks at me with a steady gaze. His eyes-the famed twins, Justice and Mercy-see straight through me, piercing the whitewashed tomb of my exterior, and it hurts. I turn to the guard and ask her, in broken Greek, whether this is the true Christ of Sinai, or one of the copies that the ancients were so fond of. No, she says. This is the only one, and it is the first time it has left its home in Egypt. I look again into His eyes, where there are no highlights, emphasizing Christ’s spirituality over human individuality. One eye is dark, foreboding, the shadows between the brow and lid deepening and on the verge of righteous anger; the other eye embraces all, even my own unworthy soul. I stand and pray. My eyes swell with tears, and I cannot look anymore.

Christ’s eyes are painted in the encaustic technique, using beeswax mixed with pigment, applied in pure form while hot or emulsified with oil while cool. This is the same technique used for many of the Fayum burial portraits of the same period, several centuries after the birth of Christ. These portraits can be found in the British Museum in great numbers, shown alongside the sarcophagi and weaponry of the Egyptians, and they are similar to this icon in one important aspect: amid the meticulously rendered details of the portraits, it is the eyes, dark and arresting and sometimes frightening, that call out to the viewer. The eyes are the door into something greater than the image’s substance. It was the eyes of the icons that Turkish warriors scratched out when pillaging the monasteries of Greece: the presence of the saints did not stop them from looting churches, but even the robbers could not bear to look in the eyes of those saints while desecrating all that was holy to them.

Christ of Sinai is not large-maybe 20 inches by 30-and he is behind a layer of glass, with an extra guard keeping watch a few feet from His face. I am reminded, suddenly, amid my tears and prayers, that I am in a museum, not a church, and that I am looking at a piece of art that is very old and very valuable, like the Attic black-figure amphorae which are so plentiful here, excavated anew each time the Athenians try to build a subway station. But this is not just an ancient object: it is a holy one, an icon, a window into heaven: a screen through which we are allowed to see, as much as we can abide it, the true world that is invisibly present with us. We forget where we are, and even who we are, in the power of the presence of the Almighty God. The thought of worshipping the physical object of an icon itself is ridiculous for anyone who has truly regarded one: in prayer, the substance melts away completely. This is at the heart of what every iconographer is trying to do when he fasts and prays while painting, saturating every brushstroke with intercessions-hoping that, through God’s mercy, he may be made worthy of creating an icon so true and beautiful that we forget it is there at all.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 2004

The critics are calling this exhibition “The Byzantine Empire Strikes Back,” as it is the second in the last ten years that has focused on the wealth and artistry of Constantinople’s empire. “The Glory of Byzantium,” in 1997, focused on the period 843-1261; this show surveys the period 1261-1557, covering the reclaiming of the empire by Crusaders and its eventual demise as it was absorbed into the growing Islamic nation. The exhibition is rich with icons from St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, the monastery that houses the Christ of Sinai icon I saw in Athens. For those who are not fortunate enough to see the exhibition in person, there is a splendid volume from Yale University Press accompanying it.

In the first room, there are several large icons of the Virgin and Child in a pose commonly called “Sweet Kissing” or “Tenderness,” Christ on his mother’s lap with their cheeks together, and faces turned toward the viewer. One thing that strikes me right away is the parity between the icons of this exhibition, produced centuries ago under vastly different circ*mstances, and the icons being produced today in Greece, Jerusalem, and even the United States. Iconography, or the “writing” of icons-as any iconographer will be sure to tell you, they are not considered paintings but rather tools for religious instruction-is gaining popularity in the United States among converts to the Orthodox faith, and although there will always be those who alarm the establishment with ridiculously modern techniques and ideas (a female iconographer who paints Byzantine-style portraits of house pets with halos and calls them icons, for example), the trend is toward following the ancient rules. There are many such rules, and despite disagreements and differing schools of thought within the body of iconographers, the results of this stringent discipline are self-evident: a Sweet Kissing icon from 12th-century Byzantium, 18th-century Russia, or 21st-century North America will contain the same narrative elements, the same layout and positioning of figures, and probably even the same colors.

Color, especially, is vital to an icon; it is also the subject of much debate among iconographers. The earliest icons were found in the catacombs, sketches of a faith in hiding and under persecution. Since the images were created to represent the holiest truths of Christianity, the faithful tried to use the purest pigments available; the less man interfered, the more God was allowed to shine through. They used dried earth, pulverized stone, and the juices of plants; they never mixed colors, either, and so for centuries there were as few as five pure essences to choose from. The colors signify various theological ideas, and again, what they signify varies according to the interpreter. Gold is closest to God; it is used for the heavens, often the background of an icon. Blue is the next highest color, representing divinity, made from crushed lapis; red is humanity. Thus the Theotokos wears a red inner garment and a blue mantle: she was human, but took on the divine by giving birth to Christ. Christ is clothed in the opposite manner: with his blue inner garment, he is shown to be purely divine, but his red outer garment tells of his adopted humanity. Both are also shown at times in caput mortum, the purplish-brown dye that signifies royalty.

Yet, though perhaps an iconographer would not want to admit it, there is an artistry beyond symbolism in choosing the color scheme as a whole. A huge icon of St. Cyril of Belozersk, the founder of a monastery in Russia who kept even Ivan the Terrible at bay, contains a central portrait surrounded by many scenes from his life. The scenes are vibrant in rich russet tones, velvety reds, and lush greens; against the darkness of the colors, points of white are luminous in contrast. The saint is clothed in a green-gold stole and brown cloak, and as he heals the sick and casts out demons and oversees the work of his brothers, he is accompanied by white-clad assistants. They are those whom the darkness of our own lives prevents us from seeing, except in rare moments; then we realize, if only for a moment, how far we are from grasping the true reality of things.

The Dormition of St. Ephraim the Syrian is another epic work. St. Ephraim is known to me only as the author of the famous prayer, said with prostrations, during Great Lent; I said it just last night. “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, faint-heartedness, lust of power, and idle talk; but give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to Thy servant. Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own sins and not to judge my brother; for Thou art holy now and ever, and unto ages of ages.” It is a wonderful, all-encompassing prayer, indicative of so much in Orthodox spirituality: the goal of humility is at the core of all that we do.

Here St. Ephraim is shown being mourned by a crowd of monks who kiss his feet and grasp his hands. In a larger circle around him are monks with candles and incense and a prayer book. Farther still, at the outskirts of the funeral gathering, scenes of monastic life are juxtaposed seamlessly. Monks till the soil, draw water, copy Scripture, and discourse with one another. Several carry an aged monk in a litter, and a young man carries an old man on his back. Another brings food to an ascetic who has positioned himself on a tower, one of the stylite monks who went days and weeks without nourishment, chaining themselves to the rocks and to God’s love. Death is posited as just another event in monastic life; the monks mourn, they return earth to earth, and they continue in their daily work of eradicating the passions and uniting themselves to Christ. Yet the center of the icon is not the monastery, nor even St. Ephraim himself, but another icon: the Virgin Hodegetria, a common icon in the East for centuries. The Virgin holds Christ, who blesses us.

Stylistically, these icons vary a great deal, reflecting the influence of many cultures and periods. There are Serbian icons, with carefully inked line drawings in the style of illuminated Islamic manuscripts-small, active figures. Those geographically closer to Italy have a distinctively Italian flavor-carefully rendered drapery, with deep shadows and a sophisticated touch. Some are more painterly, very close to El Greco in style: long strokes and sunken, detailed faces. (El Greco himself actually rejected his native Eastern Orthodoxy because he believed he could not be an artist and remain within it.)

But the most traditional Byzantine icons, those which are still copied today, have a style all their own. Even the mosaics, some of them with glass tesserae less than a millimeter in diameter, mimic the defined outlines and angularity that is so central to icon-writing technique. It is truly otherworldly; the perspective is warped, frozen in pre-Renaissance times before the development of the camera obscura. The objects are tilted so that the viewer can tell for certain what they are: a table, where St. Luke sharpens his pen; a Russian church, shown in birds-eye view so as to display the row of onion domes. The faces are too angular, the hands too round to be true. It is easy to disregard such technique as obsolete, but it seems to me intentionally different, as if to bridge the gap between the seen and unseen. Icons are neither art nor prayer, but somewhere between the two.

A copy of the icon called King of Glory, a portrait of Christ’s face as he suffers on the Cross, forces me to stop for a long moment. It is so dark the details are hard to make out up close; it is best viewed from a distance of a few feet, and then the blackness seems to coalesce into more understandable forms. Points on Jesus’ face-his nose, an earlobe-define the sea of black into a face; the pale highlights mimic its muscular structure, almost like external tendons. His beard blends into his neck and the sides of his face, creating a vortex of shadow. He exudes sorrow and burden, the cares of the whole race of man. I look and look, and I think: how can something so obviously unreal look so real? Then I am looking through the icon again, through the window of humanity’s imperfection into the truth of the Passion.

Emily Jorjorian Lowe, a music teacher who has studied architecture and classics, is a member of Holy Cross Orthodox Church in Linthicum, Maryland.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

What’s With Mandy?

I’m a big fan of Mandy Moore’s music and A Walk to Remember. I always thought she was a Christian, but now I wonder. What’s the deal with Mandy?

It’s rarely a good idea to hold strong hopes that famous people will act the way we think they should. The problem? We don’t know them or their faith. All we know is the “public image” of the real person.

So what do we know about Mandy? She has talked openly about her Catholic faith, and she’s made public commitments not to appear nude in movies or be photographed in revealing clothing. But, Mandy also says she really enjoys cussing—especially saying the “F” word (which she said over and over on a TV episode of The Osbournes).

Several of her movies, like her music, have been wholesome and positive. She’s played Christians in films, but also played teens who drink heavily and have premarital sex. In Saved!, she plays a very un-Christlike, hypocritical Christian girl. This is far different from A Walk to Remember where she played Jamie, the devout daughter of a pastor.

But Mandy is not Jamie. She’s a real person. And we really don’t know what her relationship with God is like. Should we be disappointed by Mandy’s choices? Sure. Based on what she’s said about her faith, it’s OK to question some of the choices she’s made.

Even when we do have to point out what someone is doing wrong, we don’t have to have a judgmental attitude toward them—we all mess up (Romans 14:4). My advice: If she’s involved in stuff that bothers you, stay away from it. But say an occasional prayer for her. Ask God to help her to understand his truth and make wise choices in her personal life and career.

To Burn Or Not to Burn?

My friends and I like to share music. Is it wrong to burn CDs or download music for free online? And if burning whole CDs is stealing, what about making mix CDs (with a bunch of favorite songs) for friends?

I’m no lawyer or expert in copyright law, but here’s my understanding of what’s against the law when it comes to burning CDs and sharing music files:

It is only legal to make copies of music files you own for your own personal use. For instance, I can make a copy of a song from a CD to play on my iPod—if I paid for that song to start with. However, it’s against the law for me to make a copy for you—even if it’s a mix tape. Doing this might not feel the same as tucking a CD inside your coat and walking out of a music store, but the law says it’s exactly the same.

I’ve heard Christian students say, “I know it’s wrong, but I do it anyway.” That’s a dangerous attitude. As believers, God tells us to obey those in authority over us (Romans 13:1) and not to steal (Exodus 20:15). Downloading music we don’t own or burning CDs for others goes against both of those commands.

You also have to remember this stealing does hurt people. When you steal your favorite artists’ music, or make a copy for a friend, you’re hurting them financially. For every song or CD copied, that’s money they don’t get.

Should I junk Punk’d?

I think the MTV show Punk’d is awesome! I love watching Ashton Kutcher do all those practical jokes. Anything wrong with watching this show?

I’ll admit it: Some of Kutcher’s gags are funny. Punk’d uses hidden cameras to catch the reactions of people caught in elaborate practical jokes. But they’re not just any people—they’re celebrities. (Except for when Kutcher punk’d us all by saying the show was cancelled!)

Unfortunately, Punk’d comes with the same values of MTV and Kutcher’s other hit, That ’70s Show—lots of harsh language, crude humor and barely dressed people. Kutcher’s whole personality and reputation are a celebration of worldly attitudes about sex, fame and money.

Should you watch it? That’s up to you and your parents, based on your own decisions about what’s healthy for your mind and relationship with God.

What about playing such jokes on your friends? That depends on how your friends will react, and your attitude as well. I believe you can play a practical joke in a loving way. But you can also do it cruelly with the intent of causing pain, or carelessly with the motive of getting laughs at the victim’s expense.

Way back in Sunday school, you probably learned The Golden Rule: Treat others how you want to be treated (Matthew 7:12). Let that determine how you’ll treat your friends—and whether or not you watch Punk’d.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Campus Life magazine.Click here for reprint information on Campus Life.

Two innocents in the holy wild, the pair stood gaping at the hairy heap of body on the trail. What terrified them most, the boy told us, was the silence of the pursuit. In the bright afternoon, when she first saw him digging roots across a flowered field and they set off to intersect his course, he was dumb. In the dimming light of dusk, when he turned upon their looming curiosity, he made no sound. And through the long dark, as they wove among the trees not even an exhalation of his breath reached their ears. A grunt or a low growl, they said, would have buoyed their spirits, rallied them, and made him, somehow, less than what he was, more human— comprehensible. They knew him only as the other, as something that did not value them as they valued themselves. We cannot know if what he did, he did by choice, or if he simply stalked them like a simple beast scenting simple prey. Nor can we know, if choosing, he governed what he did by some blunt morality of kinship that reduced the pair to meat, or if in anger or desire he trespassed bounds and rose to sin. The hikers can tell us nothing except how it seemed. Some consciousness, they said, some grim intelligence, seemed to herd them forward, then stand off to watch and wait, to observe before hounding them again.

He had no weapon. His body, a mossy boulder with arms and legs rolling through the trees, was weapon enough. Death, they knew, if it were to come from him, would come as a brutal embrace or a ripping of bone from bone. His presence, overbearing, turned the holy wild to wilderness, changed the innocents from pilgrims to refugees.

Through the night, they said, their only life was language. No hurled stone or branch, no threatening gesture slowed the beast. Words, however, whether shouted at his shape or spoken softly to each other, kept him off. They babbled in the dark, found their camp, their cell phone, and their GPS. While the dumb cold circled, they called and called. At dawn the troopers arrived, the bullet, and the human wild.

—John Leax is professor of English and poet-in-residence at Houghton College. His book Grace Is Where I Live: The Landscape of Faith & Writing has just been reissued in an expanded edition by Wordfarm.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Who or what is a Catholic? Is it the entire church or only the Western part of it? Must a Catholic be loyal to the pope, or could she defend the faith against the pope? Can a Protestant be Catholic? And does the meaning of the word “Catholic” even matter?

Diarmaid MacCulloch replies that in early modern Europe, the meaning of the word was central to the Reformation—and, he maintains, Reformation history is essential to European and world history. He goes so far as to claim that it’s impossible to comprehend the modern world without knowing the 16th-century roots of divisions between Protestants and Catholics. In particular, he provocatively contends, the Reformation background is essential to grasp the distinctive character of the United States. He identifies Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism as the dominant influence on American culture, explaining American religiosity as the fruit of Reformed Christian faith that was transplanted from the edges of the British Isles to North America.

MacCulloch covers the familiar ground of survey texts with ease and grace, offering the reader a well-paced and broad introduction. But he also follows the story well beyond the bounds of the Reformation narrowly construed, extending the narrative into Eastern Europe, Catholic renewal, and the 17th century. He offers lively sketches of the major characters en route, describing Martin Luther as the guarantor of a good night out on the town but declining to say the same of “buttoned-up” John Calvin. He also does a fine job untangling complicated theology, particularly regarding the Eucharist. It takes an exceptionally talented historian to clarify why Protestant church unity floundered on whether the host is broken (Reformed) or elevated (Lutheran) without getting bogged down in pages of explanation. (A useful touch for the novice Reformation student is an appendix with the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Hail Mary.)

To demonstrate the church’s ubiquity in 1500, MacCulloch notes that of the three most mechanically complex machines that most people would see in their lives—the pipe organ, the clock, and the windmill—two were only found in churches. MacCulloch often emphasizes the centrality of hymnody, especially the Genevan Psalter, for giving words to the laity’s faith. Such was the power and appeal of the sung word, that French Catholics cut out the tongues of Reformed Protestants before they were burnt at the stake so that the words of the Psalter would not ring out from the flames.

Many stalwart Catholic countries in Eastern Europe became Protestant or harbored substantial Protestant movements in the 16th century, only to be re-Catholicized in the 17th. MacCulloch describes this energetic renewal in detail, rightly emphasizing that not only Protestants but also Catholics defined doctrine, sent missionaries, and built schools in the 16th and 17th centuries. An equally significant expansion of the standard Reformation text is MacCulloch’s decision to include the 17th century. He incorporates not only the horrific Thirty Years’ War but also the expansion of the Portuguese, Spanish, and English empires into the Americas.

Ultimately, religious change came to every country in Europe. In order to cover the necessary ground, MacCulloch has to switch rapidly from one area to the next. Although the transitions often work well, at times the book has the feel of a whirlwind European bus tour: if you blink, you might miss the border and suddenly find yourself in a different country. This is a small price to pay, however, for a tour that includes all of Europe west of Russia and not just Protestant nations.

MacCulloch also includes a section on social history that could be called “the difference the Reformation made in everyday life.” He covers the emergence of new funeral rites for Protestants, the importance of the book in Protestant Europe, the survival of folk beliefs in all parts of Europe, and a study of sexual ethics. MacCulloch sees high ages at first marriage and low rates of bastardy as an argument for lots of non-procreative sexual activity. He concedes that some could have followed church teaching and been chaste, but thinks it more likely that other activities, including “the discreet practice of hom*osexuality,” substituted for procreative sex. He argues that attitudes on hom*osexuality (mostly condemnations of it) are a “useful litmus test of the nature of attitudes towards sexuality generally.” With prohibitions on hom*osexuality foremost in mind, he finds 16th- and 17th-century Christian teachings on sexuality wanting modern appreciations of sexual need. For all of MacCulloch’s nuanced treatment of theological debates and other questions unfamiliar to the modern world, he seems keen to elide differences in sexual ethics between the modern world and the Reformation era.

Overall MacCulloch seems convinced that the Reformation is still quite close to us. Remarks designed to demonstrate the nearness of the Reformation, however, sometimes obstruct the flow of the narrative. Offhand comments that compare medieval friars to contemporary professors or religious riots in Paris to violence in Mostar, Belfast, or Rwanda do little to show that the subjects are related. The real danger in drawing contemporary analogies, however, is not that they distract but that they can create dangerous reductions. Luther’s later publications on Jews hardly model Christian charity, but stating that his “writing of 1543 is a blueprint for the Nazis’ Kristallnacht of 1938″ ignores the almost 400 years of change between Luther and Hitler.

MacCulloch’s attempts to tie the story of the Reformation to the present do bring us to the end of the road: the importance of the Reformation for understanding American religious practice. He credits the high rate of religious observance in America to the influence of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. Ulster Presbyterians were descended from Scottish Protestants, who had been settled in northern Ireland by the English crown in an attempt to Protestantize Ireland. When their offspring came to North America in the 18th century, they brought with them a Reformed theology that was indebted to Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. MacCulloch traces American revivalism to holy fairs that Presbyterians held in Scotland and Ireland whenever they celebrated the Eucharist, noting that “American life is fired by a continuing energy of Protestant religious practice derived from the sixteenth century.” While declining religious adherence in Europe may have dampened the importance of the Reformation there, MacCulloch sees the continued impact of European reforms in Wittenberg (Wisconsin), Geneva (Nebraska), Belfast (Maine), and Amsterdam (New York).

MacCulloch’s willingness to assign a preeminent role in American religious and cultural history to Ulster Presbyterians has its own dangers of reductionism; it ignores the vitality of American Catholicism and the endurance of African American Christianity, as well as the distinctives of American church-state relations. In the midst of the 16th and 17th centuries, however, MacCulloch has a surer touch. His masterful outline of the subject demonstrates a fine ear for the debates and characters of the time. The elegance of the book, its lively and clear prose, suggest that what we mean when we say “Catholic” continues to matter a great deal.

Mary Noll Venables recently received her Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from Yale University and is now living in Ireland.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The history of contemporary film began in a bathtub. Not with the grainy short films of D.W. Griffith, the stark black-and-white epics of Sergei Eisenstein, or the choppy comedies of Chaplin, though there is historical merit to prizing these technological achievements as the worn celluloid heralds of a new art form. But from the perspective of a different sort of history, one which traces the history of film as the emergence of a new way of creating and participating in culture, we need look no further than the visionary hobbies of the first film buffs. Here is where film as we know it today really began—in the Parisian bathtub of Henri Langlois.

In 1936, Langlois established the Cinémateque, a theater designed simply to be a place where people could experience important moments in the history of film. The introduction of sound on film in 1929 had posed a major setback for the acceptance of film as an art. While the mass audience quickly welcomed the “talkies,” most of the intellectuals and aesthetes who had begun to rally around this new visual art regarded the advent of sound film as a commercial corruption that fundamentally perverted the medium.

And what happened to all those reels from the golden age of silent film? Theaters had no use for them. Many were recycled for their silver content. But Langlois managed to lovingly salvage a goodly number. They ended up in his bathtub, the only space he had to store them. Out of this storehouse of treasures was born the Cinémateque and a new generation of film appreciation that influences us to this very day.

One of the ways in which this generation influences us is in the importance Langlois placed on the preservation and screening of classic film. (Preservation is not merely an issue for the early days of film history—it applies to the work of filmmakers like Antonioni and Tarkovsky.) Another, fortuitously related, is in the wave of directors and theorists it inspired to make and talk about films, electrified by the scratched and dusty images from the pop culture of a passing age. This sort of film history is the subject of Colin MacCabe’s new look at the director Jean-Luc Godard. It is a history that is as much about biography as it is about technology. In Godard’s life we see the convergence of film as a technology with the intense suspicion that marked post-World World II European philosophy, exploding in social movements leaping from the screen to real life and back again in a new sort of cultural dialogue.

MacCabe often eschews the theoretical and critical for the anecdotal. It is hard to understand Godard without establishing the cultural climate that informed his thinking, beginning with Langlois and extending through a myriad of journals and theaters that persist to this day. This is not just because the culture of film appreciation began to produce a new sort of artist and thinker, but because Godard himself has probably done more than anyone else to draw attention to this culture, to explore the confines of its rules, and to champion it as a higher order of artistic reflection. While he is the godfather of all video-store clerks turned directors, he is also the patron saint of theorists who explore film as the medium of the modern age, the herald of a new democracy in social criticism. “The way to criticize a film,” Godard famously announced, “is to make another film.”

In legend, everyone from James Joyce to André Breton attended screenings at Langlois’ cinema clubs. One of these who would become famous much later was the young Jean-Luc Godard. And around this resurgence in appreciation of the cinema arose a number of journals that began to revive interest in film. The first of these, La Gazette du cinema, was the brainchild of schoolteacher turned filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who would go on to become a great director in his own right. Throw in a little of the disillusionment of Sartre, the increasing influence of the revolutionary anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, and the profoundly innovative film theory of André Bazin and you have Rohmer’s next editorial venture, Cahiers du cinema.

While many still turn monthly to the pages of Cahiers du cinema, few are familiar with its patriarch, André Bazin. He found in works like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane an ontology of film that would inspire the film writing of Cahiers du cinema and the work of a legion of young filmmakers. Through deep-focus shots, non-traditional camera angles, and innovative storytelling, Welles was able to produce a new sort of film. Citizen Kane forces us to make our own way through the visual and psychological details of each scene. For Bazin, this is one of the first films that really seem to understand the nature of film as an art—films freed from the conventions of painting or literature.1

In films like these, Bazin caught a vision for the cinema, one which existed in a primordial form in Langlois’ collection. He caught a fleeting glimpse of what his protégé Francois Truffaut called “the privileged moment” and Rohmer called “flashes of beauty”—or, as given currency by a delicate scene in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), what Bazin himself, steeped in Christian thought, came to call “holy moments.” These are instances in which the viewer enters so fully into what is transpiring on the screen that a moment of meaning occurs which is entirely distinctive to cinema. It is this presence of a transcendent version of the “real” in film, Bazin believed, that is the ultimate justification of its existence as an art form. In this strange new medium, Bazin further argued, such moments take their shape through the distinctive personal vision of the director, who should “author” his film independent of the clichéd corporate expectations of studio executives. (Hence the “auteur theory” that generated fierce debate in film criticism of the Fifties and Sixties.)

From this passionate new conception of the nature of film the movement that became known as the French New Wave was born. Young men like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, hitting the streets with little more than cheap cameras, wheelchairs for tracking shots, and half-written scripts fleshed out by unprofessional actors, began producing films that found instant critical acclaim. Bazin died in 1958 before he was able to see Truffaut’s first film, The 400 Blows, but the New Wave was already well launched, gaining steam with Godard’s astounding debut, Breathless, in 1959.

Godard quickly became famous for the personality he stamped upon his films. They swaggered with the nightclub nihilism of cool jazz and winked along with the audience in rollicking send-ups of the Parisian bourgeoisie. Much like the other pioneers of the New Wave, he was unschooled in the finished professionalism of the Hollywood studios. “All you need for a movie,” he explained, “is a girl and a gun.” His films leapt in ungainly edits and makeshift transitions that discomforted and dazzled audiences in equal measure.

Through his radical criticism in Cahiers du cinema and his early films with their homages to B-grade Hollywood flicks, Godard became one of the first to brilliantly unpack Bazin’s reconfiguration of the cinema. Rejecting the Christian profundity of Bazin’s thought, Godard appeared to be replacing the experience of Bazin’s “holy moments” with acutely secular ones. His innovative storytelling reproduced the restlessness of the twentysomething culture that would explode in the Sixties and probed at the moorings of modern European society with an alert eye for ironies and injustices. Godard had begun to turn Bazin’s lens upon the very culture that film itself was shaping and reforming.

In Breathless, Jean-Paul Belmondo channels Humphrey Bogart so effectively that he creates a film within a film, even to the point of being gunned down by cops right on cue. This gleeful deconstruction of Hollywood pervaded Godard’s work for the next few years, hopping from genre to genre and finding his profane versions of Bazin’s “holy moments” in the strangest of places. A Woman is a Woman (1961) flirts with

musical comedy, subverting the genre through the savvy cinematography of longtime collaborator Raoul Coutard. In My Life to Live (1962), Godard catches his first wife, Anna Karina, weeping along with Dreyer’s Joan of Arc and weaving her way through a tapestry of other cinematic allusions. In Contempt (1963), he dismantles Brigitte Bardot, literally laying bare the illusion, the intriguing fantasy that is contemporary cinema.

But Godard was always a moving target. In 1960, he had made a darkly enigmatic film about the Algerian War, Le Petit Soldat. Initially banned in France because it showed the use of torture by both sides in the conflict, the film wasn’t released until 1963. Films such as Masculin-Feminin (1966) and Weekend (1967) continued in this vein, becoming more self-consciously political. In 1964, Godard had credited himself as Jean-Luc “Cinema” Godard in Band of Outsiders. In 1967, in the postscript to Weekend, he was ready to declare the “End of Cinema.” For Godard, the cinema was no longer the arena for privileged encounters with the real, as Bazin saw it, but rather a place to re-imagine the world through the lens of its social and political alignments. Though he insisted he wasn’t making “political films” but rather “making films politically,” Godard’s work became too distracted by political activism to generate the lighthearted humanity of his earlier ventures. He spent the next decade producing a pile of largely unwatched titles that variously chronicle the Maoist student movements of the Sixties and Seventies, explore the ideas of obscure Russian theorists, and outrageously deconstruct gender codes with Jane Fonda.

In this string of poorly received projects, Godard’s passion was strictly in the present tense. In the 1980s, however, he returned to the history of film and the filmmaking process for inspiration. This return to his origins culminated in the decade-long project he cheekily titled

Histoire(s) du cinema, a massive series of videos in which Langlois’ bathtub treasure-trove achieves its apotheosis. In the title Godard puns on the French word “histoire,” which can mean both history and story, as a starting point for a reflection on the history of film. Through a visual dialogue about classic and contemporary film, he uncovers a metaphysic that is specific to film. For while film is an art, it is also a history.

And just as Histoire(s) du cinema is impossible to describe in print, this new sort of historiography is impossible to describe in any medium but film. Using the material of 20th-century cultural and political history, Godard is able to uncover the storied nature of this secular histoire. Throughout the series, scenes from movies are spliced together under a rich network of music, spoken commentary, and written words. What is his and what is others’ blends together into the biography of a cultural institution. And what could be unpacked as an advanced reading of the history of film plays as a symphony of images, seemingly the montage that Godard had been trying to create his whole life. Film as a history is by now so wired into the history of cultural self-reflection that to improve our understanding of one is to guarantee our role in the other.

Godard’s presence looms insurmountably over contemporary film. Quentin Tarantino’s genre ode, Kill Bill, was produced by Band of Outsiders, Tarantino’s production company named after Godard’s film, and Tarantino’s entire career is inconceivable without Godard’s example. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is Godard democratized—or dumbed down, depending on your perspective. (“Moore doesn’t distingush between text and image,” Godard commented when the film was screened at Cannes. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”)

The 1963 classic Contempt opens with a shot of Godard’s cinematographer tracking with the camera down a stretch of road. As he gets closer, he begins to tilt the camera toward the audience. It is a startling experience, lens facing lens, and this awareness follows us through the rest of the film. Through this provocative self-awareness Godard still holds sway over the way many have come to see what film really is. Only he could get away with saying both “Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world,” and “The cinema is something between art and life.” Somehow his life and films harness this tension as if it were the most important one in the history of art.

Michael Leary is studying for a Ph.D. in New Testament at New College, Edinburgh.

1. In December, the University of California Press will reissue What Is Cinema?, the essential two-volume collection of Bazin’s essays, with new forewords by film scholar Dudley Andrew.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

These muddy waters measuring the light of that same moon, still round and rolling cold as once it rolled in autumns dark and bright when you upon this bank grew up and old-

these waters whisper to the swans that go and glide across the current to my side; they whisper you are living even though the steeple yonder says that you have died.

I know it so. This river overflows as surely as your Cleopatra’s Nile buoys up her fecund death, as surely grows Hermione to life all this long while.

When her still statue stirred and stepped in grace,you after time came swimming to this place.

Paul J. Willis is a professor of English at Westmont College. With David Starkey, he is co-editor of In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in spring 2005.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Years ago, when I ministered on a college campus, a student came to me one day and announced, “I don’t think I can believe in God anymore.” I don’t remember clearly, but perhaps I had just come from teaching a class in systematic theology. In any case, I was in systematic theology mode that day, and I began to list off the classic arguments for God’s existence: the teleological argument, the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and so forth. I was about wrap my tongue around St. Anselm’s famous phrase, “That than which none greater can be conceived,” when the student caught my eye, and I stopped talking.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “I meant that since Jenny died, I feel like God isn’t there when I pray. I don’t know how he could let her die in that car crash. She was so young. She had so much to live for. God could have prevented it.”

It was an “aha” moment, a few crystalline seconds in which the abstract question addressed by Anselm and Aquinas became personal, painful, and existential.

Armand Nicholi’s 2002 book The Question of God took the question of God’s existence away from the abstract arguments and placed it squarely within the personal lives of two of the greatest arguers of the 20th century: Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis and wellspring of modern atheism, and C. S. Lewis, literary critic and popular defender of the faith. Now that book has been translated into visual form for television. “The Question of God” airs on PBS, September 15 and 22 (as they say, check your local listings).

Historical narratives are put to many uses, from sending troops into battle (Remember the Alamo! Remember the Maine!) to inspiring sacrifice and missionary fervor. The story of Jim Elliott and his fellow martyrs, for example, steeled the missionary nerve of several generations of evangelicals.

Stories from history can also be a resource for spiritual growth. In my own youth, reading about Augustine’s struggles with sin gave me both perspective and realism.

Nicholi’s use of historical persons is like that: By reflecting on the people who shaped the way moderns argue about God, rather than focusing on their arguments, Nicholi forces viewers to personalize the question. Nicholi is a psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard Medical School, and as a psychiatrist, he is interested in the intrapsychic dynamics that accompany the Big Question. “It may be that Freud and Lewis represent conflicting parts of ourselves,” he says. “Part of us yearns for a relationship with the source of all joy, hope and happiness, as described by Lewis, and yet, there is another part that raises its fist in defiance and says with Freud, ‘I will not surrender.’ Whatever part we choose to express will determine our purpose, our identity, and our whole philosophy of life.”

Nicholi may be a psychiatrist, but “The Question of God” does not “shrink” its subjects. It does not give us a reductionist psychologizing of these histories. The program and Nicholi’s 2002 book do not try to explain Freud’s rejection of religion in terms of his childhood traumas—the sudden loss of his devoutly Catholic nanny or his discovery of his father’s cowardice in the face of anti-Semitism. Nor does it tell us how Lewis’s grief over his mother’s death, his feelings of alienation from his father, and his misery at boarding school eventually moved him to belief. These biographical facts and many others are presented, but they are not squeezed of their juice.

The visual medium serves the biographical material well. Brief segments from Freud’s and Lewis’s lives are presented through reenactments, still photographs, and near the end of Freud’s life, home movies. One particularly enchanting scene portrays the moment when elder brother Warnie brings young Jack Lewis a box covered with moss and containing a miniature landscape. Here is the experience Lewis called “the first beauty I ever knew”—the piercing sense of desire he later called joy.

Nicholi believes in God, but he does not load the dice. In 2002 he told the Harvard Gazette, “Students always ask me, which side are you on? . . . What I do is try to present an objective, dispassionate, critical assessment of both worldviews.”

Thus Freud is shown as a loving husband and father, and as a caring physician who sought to heal hysterics rather than warehouse them. In the home movies, we see a sick and aging Freud playfully welcoming a little girl to his home and chatting amiably with friends. We also hear Lewis’s despairing questioning of God after the death of his wife Joy. “The Question of God” deals fairly with its subjects, presenting them in moments of pain and loss as well as their joys and passionate pursuits. Neither is painted as a bounder or a hero.

“The Question of God” further personalizes the Big Question by sandwiching segments of a roundtable discussion between the historical scenes. Nicholi chose seven intelligent, attractive, and well-spoken people to discuss the issues: miracles, transcendent experiences, wish fulfillment and the Exalted Father, the nature of morality, and so forth. Once again, the dice are not loaded. Various flavors of religion and irreligion are represented, and one of the most warmly sympathetic characters is the professional atheist, Michael Shermer, publisher of The Skeptic magazine. Yet Christians (a former ambassador and a medical researcher), spiritual-but-not-religious people (a Jungian analyst and a spiritual writer) and an agnostic (a lawyer) all have their say on God, morality, and afterlife.

Historically, formal atheism was framed by skeptical arguments. Show me. Prove it. Give me the evidence. Believers have sometimes responded in kind, matching logic for logic. Remember that evangelical bestseller, Evidence that Demands a Verdict? The title said it all.

But in this video, those with the spiritual worldview echo Pascal’s famous Pensée 277: “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.” (“The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.”) They rightly refuse to let empiricism frame the discussion and insist that there are many ways of knowing. Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck is particularly passionate at this point, but writer Winifred Gallagher (Working on God and Spiritual Genius) and the self-identified Christians are equally firm. Defining the question empirically would render the dialogue flat and devoid of rich human dynamics. Why gut the question just to make it manageable?

“The Question of God” is “think TV.” It is also an excellent opportunity for church groups to watch and then discuss. (A discussion guide can be downloaded from the program’s website.) Better yet, it is an opportunity for Christians to gather and talk (rather than argue) with the polymorphously spiritual, the agnostic, and the atheistic.

David Neff is editor of Christianity Today, executive editor of Christian History and Biography, and editorial vice-president of Christianity Today International. More Christian history, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church’s past, is available at ChristianHistory.net. Subscriptions to the quarterly print magazine are also available.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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In 2002 David Neff reviewed Armand Nicholi’s book in Christianity Today “The Dour Analyst and the Joyful Christian” and interviewed the author “Two Cultural Giants“.

Christian History Corner, a weekly column from the editors and writers of , appears every Friday on Christianity Today‘s website. Previous editions include:

The Friends of The Christ of The Passion | Popular interest in the person of Jesus is widening to include his closest friends. But who were these people, really? (Sept. 03, 2004)

A God’s-Eye View of Gutenberg | The rise, fall, and redemption of the Father of the Information Age. (Aug. 27, 2004)

Revisiting the Pagan Olympic Games | New scholarship on the ancient Olympics reminds Christians why Emperor Theodosius outlawed the event so many centuries ago. (Aug. 20, 2004)

The ‘Assumed’ Fate of Jesus’ Mother | Roman Catholics celebrate the Feast of the Assumption on Sunday. What’s “up” with that? (Aug. 13, 2004)

Is Speaking Truth a Hate Crime? | Hate laws making their way through U.S. and British governments highlight the need for peaceful yet critical Christian witness. A 12th-century abbot leads the way. (Aug. 06, 2004)

The Amish Come Knocking | UPN’s Amish In the City shows us our modern selves in a mirror that is positively medieval (July 30, 2004)

All of Christian History in 6 Hours | This audio tour de force is strong meat for a mature Christian audience. (July 23, 2004)

The Prohibition of Gay Marriage | We can learn from the defeat of American Christian activism’s greatest legislative victory. (July 16, 2004)

Hey, John Kerry, WWFFD? | “What Would the Founding Fathers Do” about the application of Christian principles to American politics? A few cautionary words. (July 09, 2004)

Testify! | A glimpse inside the world of “holiness testimony,” through the story of an ex-slave woman evangelist. (July 02, 2004)

Sounds like … the alt country and modern Americana of Bob Dylan, Derek Webb, Emmylou Harris, Blind Boys of Alabama, and Lost Dogs

At a glance … the musicianship on this alt country effort is very well done as Miller attempts to reconcile wartime fears with his Christian beliefs

Though he’s only released a handful of solo albums since 1995, 51-year-old Buddy Miller is something of a legend in underground Christian and alt country circles, playing guitar for many highly regarded artists. That still holds true on Universal United House of Prayer, which features the talents of his wife Julie, Regina and Ann McCrary, Steve Hindalong, Phil Madeira, and even a duet with longtime friend Emmylou Harris on “Wide River to Cross.” The music is deeply rooted in Americana—country, blues, folk, and gospel—but given a modern-day sheen.

Highlights include the explosive country rock of “Don’t Wait,” the bluesy “Fall on the Rock,” and a fusion country-gospel cover of the Louvin Brothers’ “There’s a Higher Power.” Most of the album is original, featuring four co-written with Julie. The charming country of “This Old World” reminds us to serve and pray to our Creator, and “Is That You” reverently questions the presence of the Almighty and marvels over his amazing benevolence.

Like Miller’s previous albums, this is a socially conscious gospel record, similar to what we’ve heard from Bob Dylan, Mark Heard, Rich Mullins, and Derek Webb over time. There are in fact covers of Heard’s characteristically bold “Worry Too Much” and Dylan’s “With God on Our Side,” which with nine minutes of stanzas gives plenty to reflect on. But the difference in a modern context is that the songs seem more timely and relevant than ever.

Though this album is seemingly a reaction to America’s war on terrorism, it’s handled as a thoughtful and meaningful reproach, not the typically angry cheap shot. It also challenges us to focus on faith and prayer, things that run deeper than our patriotism, and that’s something that all Christians can agree upon.