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Spring 2000

World Order

REFLECTIONS ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

THE CENTURY OF LIGHT?
EDITORIAL

READING, WRITING, AND REASON:
AN INTRODUCTION TO REVIEW ESSAYS
ON SIGNIFICANT TWENTIETH-CENTURY BOOKS
KEVIN A. MORRISON

CARLO GINZBURG’S
THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS
MIILAN VOYKOVIC

THE PAST AS PROLOGUE:
HUMANIIY’S FAMILY ALBUM
JIM STOKES

WORLDS IN TRANSITION:
THE DYNAMICS OF CHANGE
GARY L. MORRISON

SCIENCE AND REIIGION:
PARADIGM SHIFTS, SILENT SPRINGS,
AND EASTERN WISDOM STEPHEN R. FRIBERG

CHAIM POTOK: FINDING GOLD
IN THE CLASH OF CULTURES
GEOFFRY W. MARKS

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World Order

VOLUME 31, NUMBER 3

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE, AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN
THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY
RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:
BETTY J. FISHER
ARASH ABIZADEH
DIANNE HUFF
MONIREH KAZEMZADEH
KEVIN A MORRISON
ROBERT H. STOCKMAN
JIM STOKES

Consultant in Poetry:
HERBERT WOODWARD MARTIN

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091-1811. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher or of the Editorial Board.

Manuscripts and editorial correspondence: Manuscripts can be typewritten or computer generated. They should be double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end and not attached electronically to the text. The contributor should retain a copy. Return postage should be included. Send editorial correspondence to WORLD ORDER, 4516 Randolph Road, Apt. 99, Charlotte, NC 28211. E-mail: <worldorder@usbnc.org>.

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WORLD ORDER is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office.

Copyright © 2000, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2   The “Century of Light”?

Editorial

4   Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

7   In the Arms of My Father I Lay

poem by Nina Marin

9   Reading, Writing, and Reason: An Introduction to

Review Essays on Significant Twentieth-Century Books

by Kevin A. Morrison

19   Bristle Pine Cone

poem by Joan Imig Taylor

21   Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms

review essay by Milan Voykovic

29   The Past as Prologue: Humanity’s Family Album

review essay by Jim Stokes

37   The Eye of the Beholder

poem by Diane Huff

39   Worlds in Transition: The Dynamics of Change

review essay by Gary L. Morrison

46   The Prayer: for the parents of Ahmad (1805-1905)

poem by Peter Murphy

49   Science and Religion: Paradigm Shifts, Silent Springs,

and Eastern Wisdom

review essay by Stephen R. Friberg

53   Chaim Potok: Finding Gold in the Clash of Cultures

review essay by Geoffry W. Marks

Inside Back Cover: Authors & Artists in This Issue

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The Century of Light?

BY ANY standard, the hundred years just ending was a century of extremes ranging from unique, sometimes awe-inspiring, achievements that transformed the world for the better to atrocities on a global scale that caused the world to bleed, both physically and morally. Few would argue that among all centuries it stands unique in the range and implications of its effects.

Bahá’ís would be the first to acknowledge the monstrous failures that continue to haunt humanity—the needless suffering, the wasted potential, the festering injustices. The Bahá’í writings describe this period as “the dark heart of an age of fundamental change” beyond anything else experienced in humanity’s “tumultuous history.” Paradoxically, however, the Bahá’í writings also endlessly extol this century, calling it not the century of light and dark but the century of light. How might we reconcile these two seemingly opposing views?

Bahá’ís have a frankly mystical view of reality, believing in a loving, benevolent, systematic, but mysterious God, Who periodically mandates the appearance of uniquely radiant souls (the Bahá’ís call them Manifestations of God) Who illuminate the world of humanity with the spiritual equivalent of physical light in the form of teachings designed to protect, heal, and advance humanity. These teachings, and the restorative power they reflect, flood the world with new potencies, new ideas, new intellectual and emotional impulses, and new innovations of every kind. Against those who proclaim that history has no design or purpose, Bahá’ís assert that it is humanity’s responsibility to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization and that we are now in the throes of humanity’s coming of age. The twentieth century is endowed with “unique and unprecedented glory” because it is the dawn of “spiritual illumination” and renewal despite “the impetuosity and irrational instincts of youth,” so characteristic of a coming of age.

As a spiritual reality, the dawn of this “light” requires inner eyes (in the biblical sense) if it is to be “seen.” For those who exercise that insight, the world is literally ablaze with new possibilities. In the Bahá’í view, therefore, it is the collective and individual human we, not the world, that alternates between best and worst. To commit an act of cruelty, a prejudicial deed, a duplicitous, self-serving maneuver, or to do something even worse, is to walk between the object of such a deed and the sun that otherwise shines, as a universal gift, upon it; doing such a thing is to cast a needless shadow (that is, to create an artificial darkness). Seen in that “light,” the problem, as Hamlet says, is not [Page 3] in our stars (which never cease being a source of light) but in ourselves; the problem is not with the world but with our own alternating minds and hearts.

To proclaim the twentieth century as the century of light is not akin to Candide’s naive optimism, proclaiming this to be the best of all possible worlds and ourselves to be perfectly happy. Rather, the Bahá’í view (as promulgated in its sacred texts) is that darkness (or evil), while real in its effect, is not the presence of something but the absence of something (the quickening light of inspiration that humanizes a soul with insight, compassion, and character). The absence of that light is the self, acting willfully and perversely, at odds with the best impulses of the age. Instead of asking us to be ironists and stoics, the sacred texts of Bahá’u’lláh ask us to look unwaveringly at the light of possibilities and new potentials. They ask us to discard an inadequate view of the world, in the process replacing an almost universal intellectual pathology with what Bahá’ís take to be spiritual and intellectual health—and the real hope for humanity. To learn how to assess this century accurately—in the Bahá’í view, it is the beginning of a day of enlightenment that will not be followed by night—is to envision our collective future and to reassess our own individual place in that future

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

NORMALLY the World Order editors use Interchange to chat informally with you, the readers, about the themes uniting the articles in the issue. This column is somewhat different in that the introduction to the five review essays (p. 9) provides a philosophical context for understanding how works that probably would not end up on lists of the top hundred books of the twentieth century contain insights that direct our attention to promising trends and bright spots in what could be described as a dark period in human history. We hope that you read the introduction in tandem with the reviews.

The space left in the Interchange column has enabled one editor to become a fellow traveler, of sorts, adding her brief reviews of two books to others in this issue. The theme of the dynamics of the clash of cultures in several of the review essays adds perspective to the chance choice of two novels read while recovering from surgery.

Barbara Kingsolver, in The Poisonwood Bible (HarperCollins, 1998) uses the late 1950s and the early 1960s to explore the everyday reality of the clash of cultures. Her novel, which is well researched and well constructed, examines the interaction of cultures as the Congo prepared for independence after some one hundred years of colonial domination by Belgium. The result, on one level, is an exploration of what one missionary family (the Prices— father, mother, and four daughters, including a fifteen year old, twelve-year-old twins, and a five year old) think they need to take with them in the form of physical necessities (seeds for Georgia plants and cake mixes for each girl’s birthday, among other things) from the United States and what they find they should have brought.

The education, particularly of most of the females in the family, proceeds as each tells her story, moving from eyes that see only the differences and, to them, the strange, the “funny,” and the bizarre to informed (spiritual) eyes that discern patterns in family and village life, governance, and religion, the underlying assumptions on which the “alien” culture is based. The process of understanding is not something the missionary family undertakes alone. Their education is aided by many people and many actions: the five year old’s reaching out to the village children by teaching them the simple game of “Mother, May I?” only to find that the Congolese excel by adhering to the rules and the missionary children lose by putting more focus on executing the steps of the game than on remembering to ask the pivotal question; by a kindly school teacher who unravels the mysteries of local governance, which is, in effect, consultative, all-inclusive, and based on unity within the village; by a young house boy sent to help with food, cooking, and provisions; by the women in the village; and by a former missionary, loved by the villagers but repudiated by his sponsoring organization for getting too close to the natives.

Set against the high expectation of achieving independence from colonial rule, The Poisonwood Bible also explores the issues of who really ever “owned” the Congo— the conquering nation or the Congolese; [Page 5] the ramifications of imposing democratic voting, where 51 percent of the vote overwhelms 49 percent of the population, undermining a long tradition of consultation at several levels in village life that ensured everyone’s being heard and everyone’s getting more or less what he or she needed; the meddling of foreign governments in the government’s process of achieving its new identity without, as the missionary family had done at the microcosmic level, taking the time to understand, much less appreciate, what the country with its long traditions had to offer the international community.

Jack Finney’s Time and Again (1970; Scribner, 1995) uses a similar time period —the 1960s in New York City—for a discussion of the clash of cultures arising from a contrasting look, through photographs, artistic renderings, and prose descriptions, of the same city in 1882. Many nineteenth-century buildings still remain in New York, in places almost entire blocks, and twentieth-century maps of Central Park superimposed over 1880s maps show many of the same features down to most roads and footpaths.

Behind the historical and architectural views of New York City and spanning two centuries is a plot that manages to be both contrived and inventive. It centers on a secret scientific project (government sponsored and government funded but directed primarily by academics from a variety of disciplines from top U.S. universities—a theoretical scientist, an engineer, two history professors, a meteorologist, a biologist —plus an Army colonel, a U.S. senator, and several others). The project’s goal is proving Einstein’s view that human beings are “like people in a boat. . . . Around us we see only the present. We can’t see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it’s there.” The book moves slowly as the stage is set for stepping back into 1882 New York (and several other times and places not explored in detail). The wait is worth it, for the book is part satire on office politics, government bureaucracy, and projects that take on a life of their own; part mystery; part love story; part commentary on the present and the past with small doses of an 1880s police chase, a fire, and a magical sleigh ride.

The clash between past and present and the methods the main character chooses in dealing with the conflicting offerings and challenges of the two centuries turns out to be the most thought-provoking part of the novel. Simon Morley, who successfully navigates the river of time between the 1960s and 1882 in New York’s Central Park, at first finds a traveler’s fascination with the color, the aliveness, the animated faces in a distant time. But inevitably the city, with its warts and problems (smallpox, dirt, poverty, greed, homeless orphans) and “the seeds of everything” he hates in his own time “already planted and sprouting,” becomes real to him. “Simply being with people,” Simon observes, “is to become involved with them,” an understanding exhibited by many of the characters— Congolese and American—in The Poisonwoood Bible.

The moment of choice is forced on Simon when the bureaucrats and functionaries [Page 6] force out the moral scientist heading the project. Doing something for the sake of seeing if it can be done gives way to doing it because it can be done and because it can be turned to one’s “advantage” (“Einstein announced that E equals MC squared. And, God forgive us, two Japanese cities disappeared in the blink of an eye and proved he was right. . . .”). The project’s new direction is driven by the money already invested in the project and a determination not simply to walk around the bend to view the past but to alter the present (Cuba, in particular) and future by altering the past. The retired scientist’s plea to Simon to “Stop them!” brings an unexpected conclusion to the scientific project. But it is Simon’s choice that, to our editor, begs the issue and gives special interest to the theme of the clash of cultures.

With World War I only a quarter of a century away, and ignoring the hardships of life depicted so graphically in The 1900s House, a recent PBS special, Simon opts to stay in the 1880s and to abandon the 1960s, “a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still a good people. We hate each other. And we’re used to it.” He opts for love, for an individual’s opportunity to one-up a bureaucratic enclave, and, as it were, for one more magical sleigh ride without having to deal with, much less contribute to a solution to, the problems of his 1960s culture.

By contrast, in The Poisonwood Bible it is not the individual who is pivotal but the biblical parable of the olive branch grafted onto another tree. Who or what is the foundational tree, and who or what is the graft, Barbara Kingsolver seems to ask. How are the good points of both cultures to be used to vitalize both cultures, both of which need to be made new, or at least, to take on new characteristics to survive in a new world order? The answers are not easy; the transitions are not always smooth. But Kingsolver raises provocative questions in her long (543 pages) novel that is simultaneously a page-turner; a history, biology, and cultural lesson; and a journey into the heart of a family, a village, and a nation—a microcosm and a macrocosm of the time, the energy, the pain, the spiritual insight needed, when cultures clash, to make all things new.

Letters to the Editor

PRAISE OF FOLLY AND PULP FICTION

World Order is evolving, and it is obvious that the new Editorial Board is enthusiastic about experimenting with new forms, new writers, and new ideas. Robert Hariman’s article, “Radical Sociality and Christian Detachment in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly” [Fall 1999], best exemplifies the success the magazine has achieved in presenting material that finds relationships between contemporary life and contemporary religious teachings and philosophy. It was refreshing and stimulating to consider sixteenth-century religious thought (Praise of Folly) emerging from a twentieth-century film, Pulp Fiction. Through a clever comparison the author raised the concept of detachment above the mere to-have-and-to-have-not and shifted its emphasis to detachment as being and becoming. It was brilliant. (Now where is the author who will step up to the challenge of discussing the concept of transcendence by applying the idea to the film American Beauty? I would really like to see that!) More impressive than the thrill of a clever discussion, though, is the singular boldness that the Editorial Board showed in publishing an essay that discusses Pulp Fiction, a film that might too easily be dismissed as profane by the narrow-minded, that lets us see that evidence of the divine can be found wherever one looks.

LYNNE YANCY

Wheeling, Illinois

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In the Arms of My Father I Lay

In the arms of my Father I lay

the warm cocoon of His covenant enfolds me,

molds me,

shapes, protects me

With each passing day I grow

my wings prepare to spread themselves

to carry upon them His messages

peace

love

oneness

unity

creating a new world

recreating His world

once lost to the passions of a people

blind ears

deaf hearts

Finally putting to use the tools He’s given me

to rebuild

with no less struggle

with no less fear

but with new determination

a new urgency

and new wings.

—Nina Marin

Copyright © 2000 by Nina Marin

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[Page 9]

Reading, Writing, and Reason:
An Introduction to Review Essays on
Significant Twentieth-Century Books

BY KEVIN A. MORRISON

Copyright © 2000 by Kevin A. Morrison.

AT THE end of one century and the beginning of another, the editors of World Order magazine invited a number of writers and scholars to identify and reflect on significant works of the twentieth century. The very nature of such an undertaking raises a set of questions that are not necessarily part of the project itself but are, nevertheless, inextricably intertwined with it: What definition of significant does one use in asking the question? Or in answering it? Are significant books necessarily classic books? Are significant books those that have been the most influential? Are influential books necessarily the most significant? How might these questions be related to larger issues of social, cultural, and political concern? In an issue devoted to reflections on the twentieth century, one might begin to answer these questions by tracing some of the major theoretical and philosophical attempts in the twentieth century to do the same.

The hundred years just ending have been described as a period marked by such “slaughter, such cruel inhumanity, such mass deportations of peoples into slavery, such extermination of minorities,” an age that “raised the greatest hopes ever conceived by humanity, and destroyed all illusions and ideals.” The century was not supposed to end this way. The Enlightenment was supposed to have been humankind’s release from “‘self-incurred immaturity,’” as the philosopher Immanuel Kant proclaimed, but the very values extolled by Enlightenment thinkers—science, freedom, individuality, and, above all, reason—have come, by the end of the twentieth century, under unceasing attack. Yet it is reason that has been the subject of the most vitiating critiques.

Whereas many intellectuals of the century saw reason as a distinguishing quality of humanity’s noble nature and thus saw the Nazi concentration camps as the very antithesis of reason, a group of German researchers who fled the [Page 10] country when Adolf Hitler acceded to power asserted that reason had become, by the middle of the twentieth century, a tool of domination and oppression. French intellectuals in the late 1960s, triggered by the philosopher Michel Foucault’s investigation of the underside of reason in Folie et déraism: histoire de la folie, proclaimed that reason, which had been posited as a universal human faculty, was coercive and inherently ideological. Today many intellectuals worldwide seek to expose what they perceive to be the inherently male and Western biases that the notion of reason contains.

It is not coincidental that an increasing distrust of reason has manifested itself in an increasing distrust of writing. Writing was the visible manifestation of reason and, therefore, of history. Thinkers such as Hegel, Hume, and Kant believed that the fact that Africans, for example, had “developed no systems of writing and had not mastered the art of writing in European languages” meant that they had no history. “Without history, no humanity, as defined consistently from Vico to Hegel, could exist,” writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr., summing up the logic of those considered to be among the great minds of the age.

No wonder, then, that the acts of reading and writing make some nervous. For if reading or writing can be the visible manifestation of reason, and if reason is seen as inherently totalitarian, reading and writing are tools by which one comes to be enslaved. Yet if reading and writing, as is so often the case in oppressive regimes, come to be the vehicle by which one attains freedom, they are the greatest threats to those who seek to enslave. Indeed, reading has been linked to reason and democratization, taking on an urgent quality in the formation of the United States and in the fall of former socialist countries in Europe. There is an “insecurity of reading,” the political philosopher Claude Lefort notes, just as there is an anxiousness in writing:

Someone who practices it [writing] cannot yield entirely to the illusion that he is removed from his own time, from the society he inhabits, from the situation in which he thus finds himself, from the events that touch him, from the sense of a future that eludes his knowledge and that both excites his imagination and brings him back to the awareness of his limits.

[Page 11] The interstices between reading and writing often provoke anxiety. When the Nazis burned books they deemed unfit for a fascist state, they attacked not only the authors but also the readers. When a fatva is placed on the author of a book, however offensive the text may be, both writer and would-be reader are targeted. Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist philosopher, posited that the “dialectical correlative” to reading is writing. One cannot exist without the other, and yet each is necessarily distinct. There is circularity in reading and writing, and there is reciprocity:

If the author existed alone he would be able to write as much as he liked; the work as object would never see the light of day and he would either have to put down his pen or despair. . . . It is the joint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind.

The anxiousness that accompanies reading and writing, while heightened, is not peculiar to the twentieth century. “I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus,” writes Plato in the dialogue of the same name, “that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.” And silence, Western thinkers since Plato have often suggested, breeds ambiguity and confusion. Closer to our time, the rationalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century issued stern warnings about the dangers of reading, for it would provoke, they claimed, apparitional visions and “‘brainular irritation?’” Books were thought to have the power to seduce and in so doing to stimulate the appearance of the spectral, the supernatural.

In the twentieth century, books also conjured up phantasmagoria, though of a different sort. The Great Books came under considerable assault, haunted by the specter of the Other (female writers, most obviously, as well as those from ethnic and racial minorities), whose contributions to literature had either long been disregarded or who were seen as incapable of making any contribution [Page 12] at all. The product and output of those once considered the great minds of the ages, whose work allegedly expressed permanent, universal truths about the human condition, are now implicated in racism, misogyny, Eurocentrism, and imperialism. The Marxist Louis Althusser, too, declared that the Great Books were part of the capitalist state’s ideological apparatus, reproducing “the relations of production.” But perhaps there was no greater indictment of writing than the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ hypothesis, in his provocative Tristes Tropiques, that the “primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.”

The question of whether the Great Books, or writing itself. are oppressive belies more simple questions: What makes a book great? Who determines that a book is worthy of this accolade? At what point is a book determined to have been influential? If by influential one means having the power to exert influence over the minds or behavior of others, one could rightly argue, in a century that produced Mein Kampf, that some of the most influential books of the twentieth century were also the most horrific. At the end of the twentieth century Levi-Strauss’ concern that the perversion of our humanity stems not from illiteracy but from literacy has been amplified. Yet, while one clearly cannot question that books like Mein Kampf were strongly influential (and [Page 13] perhaps still are, as recent accounts of its republication in Europe suggest), what might be the possibilities for literature exerting more positive influences?

The task at hand in this issue of World Order is to uncover texts that might provide us with an entirely different perspective on the twentieth century. By examining such books might we not find a different narrative of modernity— one that accounts for both the disintegrative and integrative aspects of modern life? Such a different perspective would avoid the tendency to see reading and writing, and, by extension, reason, as either inherently oppressive or inherently liberating. For Bahá’ís, reason, and therefore its manifestation in reading and in writing, is an essential element of their theology: “How can man believe that which he knows to be opposed to reason? . . . Reason is the first faculty of man, and the religion of God is in harmony with it.” Yet Bahá’ís believe reason is not transcendent but rather is shaped by one’s life experiences and is, by virtue of the fact that it is human, necessarily circumscribed. To grasp reality in all its complexity, reason must be tempered both by a spiritual perspective on reality and by nonrational perspectives as well.

Thus, in striking contrast to the description of our age as one in which the sun has set on meaning, so dramatically rendered in literature from Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir to Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin and Camus’ Sisyphus, Bahá’u’lláh asserts that “this Day” is “Peerless . . . for it is as the eye to past ages and centuries, and as a light unto the darkness of the times.” While we have arrived at the end of a century that, Bahá’ís believe, sheds light both on our past (helping us to discern the spiritual processes that have driven humanity to this moment in its coming-of-age) and on our future (helping [Page 14] us to discern the destiny toward which we are moving), we are, perhaps, too close to assess properly its import or to apprectate its significance. Yet what evidence might exist for the assertion that, in the midst of a tumultuous age, in “the darkness of the times,” points of light have emerged, the source of which will, Bahá’ís believe, gradually illumine the world? Might not these points of light also be found in the literature of the twentieth century—in books that have been drowned out by the cacophony of voices declaring which books are significant and which speak to the human condition?

The editors of World Order magazine invited a number of writers and scholars to identify and reflect on important works of the twentieth century. The books selected are, perhaps, not comparable to the dense theoretical and philosophical texts that proclaim, always one last time, what the human condition is. Yet that may have been the point of the project without our even having realized it—to present books that suggest new definitions of significance, books that recognize, implicitly or explicitly, the role spiritual principles can and must play in resolving issues of social, cultural, and political concern. “There are spiritual principles . . . ,” writes the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing and legislative body of the Bahá’í Faith, in a statement addressed to the peoples of the world,

by which solutions can be found for every social problem. . . . The essential merit of spiritual principle is that it not only presents a perspective which harmonizes with that which is immanent in human nature, it also induces an attitude, a dynamic, a will, an aspiration, which facilitate the discovery and implementation of practical measures.

On one level the review essays that begin in this issue and will continue in our Summer 2000 issue can be read individually as celebrating significant works from within various disciplines: race studies, feminism, psychology, history, literature, management, and science. On another level the reviews can be read as dialogical, interdisciplinary, and polyphonic. What collectively emerges is a tapestry of interrelationships among texts, disciplines, and modes of cultural, historical, social, and spiritual inquiry.

Many of our invitees responded to World Order’s call by recognizing that a journey inward is a journey outward and chose to write on books that had a profound effect on their world view, thereby influencing the direction of their scholarly and professional pursuits. Others chose to write on books that have been marginalized but that, they argue, should be central to our understanding of the twentieth century. But classics, too, have been included, which suggests that the binarism between oppressive literature and emancipatory [Page 15] literature cannot hold. There is urgency, perhaps, not in dismissing one canon of literature for another but in broadening the categories that determine influence and signification, making room for those books that might also express truths about the human condition—thereby expanding our very understanding of what that condition might be.

What better example might there be of the struggle to understand the human condition, and to challenge the received notions of it, than Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, the miller of a small town in the Friuli region of Italy? As Milan Voykovic shows in his review of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, though Menocchio was only a peasant, he was able to read and write, thus allowing him both to understand what others had to say about the human condition and to develop his own understanding, which he could share with others. This ability resulted in Menocchio’s being tried twice on charges ranging from heresy to blasphemy. In the story of Menocchio we find the obvious counterpoint to Levi-Strauss’ hypothesis that literature enslaves. One calls to mind Frederick Douglass who, though a slave, was taught to read by Mrs. Auld. He caught the ire of Mr. Auld, who declared that, were he to learn to read, “‘there will be no keeping him;’ ‘it would forever unfit him for the duties of a slave;’ . . . ‘If you learn him now [sic] to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.’” “The effect of his words . . . ,” Douglass observed, as he realized the emancipatory potential of learning to read, “awakened within me a slumbering train of vital thought. It was a new and special revelation . . . to wit: the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.” Does not the same hold true for Menocchio who, even in his often bizarre understandings of God and the human condition, sought to find the truth for himself, to situate himself in the great chain of being?

Jim Stokes’ review considers how the concept of “the great chain of being” has evolved over time. Analyzing F. O. Lovejoy’s work of the same name, Stokes finds a key to understanding our own modern dilemma. The sociologist Max Weber once lamented that because modernity is so successful in transforming the cultural and intellectual landscape of the post-Enlightenment West, we find ourselves trapped in an “iron cage,” effecting a society of “[s]pecialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” Stokes notes that our view of life is often in just such a vein because “scientific and materialistic philosophies” tend to inculcate the habit of “elevat[ing] the [Page 16] present moment and detach[ing] it from its historical contexts.” The Great Chain of Being reminds us of our relationship, to a “transcendent higher reality” and in so doing also reminds us that the history of ideas can be the methodology by which we come to understand human history and, most imperatively, the period now coming to a close. In two other works Stokes explores how the history of ideas is traced through Western narrative art (in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis) and in a concept—romantic love (in C. S. Lewis’ Allegory of Love). In each book Stokes finds that the history of ideas “connects us with our forbears and helps us to appreciate our place in the perpetual human effort to understand a world that remains powerful and mysterious in spite of our best efforts to reduce and contain it.”

In much the same vein as Erich Auerbach, who would later write that “our philological home is earth: it can no longer be the nation.” Gary L. Morrison, in his review, finds that the rapidity with which language is changing and the increasingly universal reach of the computer is resulting in the “coming together of the peoples of the world” and a global sense “of being one.” While nothing has escaped the influence of the West, Morrison notes, this is not always something that should be celebrated. Indeed, the result has often been catastrophic, and it is this aspect of our history that is most often recognized. Morrison thus examines three texts—V. Gordon Childe’s What Happened in History?, John Cowper Powys’ Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages, and Bernard Philippe Groslier’s The Art of Indochina——that illustrate the ways humans have, over the centuries, responded creatively to tumultuous transitional periods in history and in so doing “overcome, endure, and ultimately prevail.” Yet, for many in our era, the lure of nihilism is so great, and the tendency to “elevate the present moment and to detach it from its historical contexts” so pervasive, that the coming together of peoples could only be understood either as coincidence, accident, or imperialism. Morrison reconciles this by asserting that “No other century . . . has created such a vast chasm between epochs.” Our period, he argues, is historically unique but the coming together of peoples is not. What was true in the past is still true today: “the human species has shown the need to communicate with each other, to share information, to intermarry and propagate, to confront new challenges and adapt to change, to create and beautify, to reach out beyond themselves to the cosmos.”

Stephen Friberg, in his review, looks at the cleavage between science, perhaps the greatest manifestation of reason, and religion by considering four books: Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Rachel L. Carson’s Silent Spring, Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, and Ian Barbour’s Issues [Page 17] in Science and Religion. “[T] his newly-won power over space and time,” noted Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, at a time of great scientific ferment, “this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back a thousand years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they [humankind] may expect from life and has not made them feel happier.” Not only had the Enlightenment dream of mastering nature proved futile but by the end of the twentieth century it had become exceedingly obvious that science run amok only compounded our sense of despair, for, if science were “followed blindly,” as Friberg observes in his review, it “could destroy life even when intended for beneficial nonmilitary applications.” Unlike Freud and others who relegate religion to the margins of scientific inquiry, and who see reason and faith, science and religion, as incompatible, the books Friberg has selected suggest that religion and science are not competing systems for understanding our world but inherently complementary ones. Religion, he contends, provides for a wholeness and coherence that has been lost in a purely scientific-materialist discourse. A dialogic rather than antagonistic relationship between science and religion opens up new horizons for understanding the world in which we live.

Finally, Geoffry W. Marks reviews not a book but the output of a lifetime— the oeuvre of Chaim Potok. In Potok’s work we find not only the power of a people—the Jewish people—to come together in moments of crisis and transition but the power to stay together. Potok’s work is a window onto a thriving, devout community of believers, who have endured “patterns of calamity, resurrection, renewal, and flowering” for four thousand years and, yet, through it all, have often exemplified, in many respects, what it means to be a community-of-faith. It is this model from which members of other religious faiths stand to learn a great deal. Yet Potok’s work, Marks notes, does not come without a dire warning: the need to be ever vigilant against the tendency to lapse into insularity, bigotry, and parochialism. The theme of struggle and emergence that Marks finds running through Potok’s work is perhaps emblematic of all of the review essays when read together.

The writers and scholars who participated in World Order’s project have sought to identify books that provide us with a narrative of modernity that does not deny the bleakness of our times but that recognizes such gloom only in the context of social regeneration: “We stand on the threshold of an age,” writes Shoghi Effendi in one of his many letters to the Bahá’ís of America, “whose convulsions proclaim alike the death-pangs of the old order and the birth-pangs of the new.” Looking back on the twentieth century as one in [Page 18] which either, as the Frankfurt School theorists posited, the “fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” or as the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in his celebration of the apparent triumphal reign of the liberal democratic ideal, prevents us from imagining and working toward the socially, culturally, and politically new.

Whether it is the “transmission and consumption of culture and ideas” traced by Milan Voykovic; the history of ideas considered by Jim Stokes; the dynamics of change in ages of transition explored by Gary L. Morrison; the emerging dialogue between science and religion put forth by Stephen Friberg; or the theme of struggle and emergence to which Chaim Potok has dedicated his literary life to exploring, as Geoffry W. Marks contemplates, each of our authors has risen to the challenge by writing on books that open minds, rather than close them, thereby offering a new and spiritually invigorating perspective on the twentieth century. Modernity—the values it espouses and the habits it inculcates—does not simply, in this view, and incontrovertibly, as Beckett asserted in one of his many melancholic meditations on modern life, chain “the dog to his vomit.”

Reading the twentieth century as one in which both the processes of social disintegration and integration unfolded and moved decisively toward a climax by reading the writings of those who recognized or whose work evoked the beginnings of a new civilization we can only dimly imagine serves to remind us that there is a pathway to freedom. “[F]rom that moment,” Frederick Douglass recognized, when he saw how Mr. Auld had responded to his reading lessons, “I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.” As with any pathway the obstacles are many, but the destination is assured.

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Bristle Pine Cone

It is the oldest of trees

no bark, no flower

but because of its cone

bristles with integrity.

Stripped of its grace

the wood of the tree

endures the winds.

Naked and alone

the tree protects

the treasured fruit—inviolate

within a bristly cone.

—Joan Imig Taylor

Copyright © 2000 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States

[Page 20]

[Page 21]

Carlo Ginzburg’s
The Cheese and the Worms

A REVIEW ESSAY BY MILAN VOYKOVIC

Copyright © 2000 by Milan Voykovic.

IT IS hard to believe that a book entitled The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976; New York: Dorset, 1989) could be one of the most important works of the twentieth century. At one level it would be easy to see The Cheese and the Worms as an interesting story about Menocchio, an unusual man executed for heresy in the late-sixteenth century. Or one could say that the book is a fine example of historical scholarship. Indeed, both are true, yet they overlook the magnitude of Carlo Ginzburg’s contribution to the discipline of history and to the humanities as a whole. For not only does The Cheese and the Worms substantially expand one’s understanding of early-modern Europe, it also frames and encapsulates broader questions surrounding the transmission and consumption of culture and ideas. How do people, be they sixteenth-century millers or twenty-first-century computer programmers, interact with the intellectual, religious, scientific, and artistic culture that surrounds them? What is the relationship between the “high culture” of a ruling elite and the popular or “low culture” of the masses? Are ideas and influences simply absorbed without question, or are they remodeled to fit an individual’s preexisting beliefs? Obviously Ginzburg was not the first to address these questions, and many scholars of his generation (such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, and Natalie Zemon Davis) endeavored to write non-Marxist social histories of early-modern Europe. But in Menocchio, Ginzburg has a powerful example of what he calls the “circularity of culture.”

With the concept of the “circularity of culture,” Ginzburg suggests that the relationship between dominant and subordinate classes is reciprocal. Neither class, therefore, exists in absolute autonomy or continuity, and both make compromises to accommodate the other. Thus Ginzburg explores the boundaries of intellectual and social history by examining the gaps and contradictions between an official religion firmly grounded in written texts, and popular beliefs passed down by oral tradition. In following these issues in most of his work, Ginzburg’s overriding concern has been with how the scholar establishes causal relationships using cultural evidence and how this material traces the patterns of historical change. At the turn of the century the success —or not—with which Ginzburg tackles his challenge in The Cheese and the Worms is worth revisiting.

The central character of The Cheese and The Worms is Domenico Scandella, also known as Menocchio. A miller by trade, he was born in 1532 and lived in Montereale, a small town in the Friuli region of Italy. He fathered eleven children and was once the mayor of his village. So far, nothing about Menocchio suggests he would be of any great interest to [Page 22] historians. Yet he possessed a talent that draws the attention of anyone interested in the histories of religion, ideas, and culture: Menocchio could read and write, a rare skill in sixteenth-century Italy (as it is still in many parts of the world). Moreover, it was what he read, how he read, and the ideas he drew from his books that saw him tried twice, once in 1584 and again in 1599, on the charges of heresy, atheism, blasphemy, and denying the divinity of Christ.

After his first trial Menocchio was sentenced by the Inquisition to abjure publicly his heresies, to fulfill various penances, and to spend the rest of his life in prison at the expense of his children. In 1586, however, Menocchio sent a letter to the Inquisitors in which he said that, if released, he would “live the teachings of the Holy Roman Church.” The Inquisition agreed to let Menocchio go, subject to certain conditions. He was forbidden to express his dangerous opinions to anyone, and he could not leave his village.

Menocchio resumed his place in the community and was even reappointed administrator (cameraro) for the Church of Santa Maria in Montereale. But fifteen years after he was first questioned, rumors and denunciations based on hearsay evidence made their way to the Holy Office. It was claimed that Menocchio had returned to his old habits of criticizing the Church and questioning the Gospels to the extent that the Inquisition could no longer ignore him. Thus Menocchio, now a frail man of sixty-seven and recidivist as well as a heretic, was tried and executed in 1599. That he survived for so long while being so openly censorious of the Church was due to two things: First, his fellow villagers tolerated him and his opinions, for the most part. Even the local priest defended Menocchio in court, despite the fact that he had initially denounced Menocchio to Church authorities. Second, the Roman Inquisition of early-modern Europe should not be confused with the Spanish Inquisition or the Inquisition of the Middle Ages. As a consequence, the court that Menocchio faced in both his trials was not capricious, even though it did resort to torture to obtain information. It was also principally concerned with serious threats to Catholic authority, such as Ptorcstantism, and was not necessarily interested in an individual with no links to larger organizations, such as Menocchio, until their behavior became so flagrant that it had to take notice.

Carlo Ginzburg had firsthand experience of far more arbitrary methods of persecution and repression. He was born in Turin in 1939 to Leone Ginzburg, who taught Russian literature at the University of Turin, and Natalia Ginzburg, an author of fiction. Because of the elder Ginzburg’s anti-Fascist activities, the family were “confined” to a small village in the Abruzzi region of south-central Italy before moving to Rome in 1943. In November of that year Leone was arrested by the Germans and died three months later while still in custody. Coincidentally, Marc Bloch, the French historian who has heavily influenced Carlo Ginzburg’s work, died at the hands of the Gestapo in 1944. Marc Bloch and his fellow French historian Lucien Febvre founded the Journal Annales d’Histoire Economic et Sociale in 1928 with the intention of broadening the scope of historical methods to include all branches of the humanities such as economics, geography, and culture, which would then generate a more complete picture of the human experience. Bloch and Febvre also believed that history could be a unifying social force and hoped that their aim of producing a “better kind of history” would, in turn, create an atmosphere [Page 23] that would resolve the distrust and antagonism among European historians in the aftermath of the First World War.

It is easy to see the impact of Bloch and the Annales school on Ginzburg. Like many other European historians, Ginzburg is not afraid to claim that present ideological and social commitments guide the historian’s view of their subject. The influence of Bloch can also be seen in Ginzburg’s interdisciplinary approach to history. Bloch attempted to study history’s “psychological facts,” which are at the same time the “social facts” that offer scholars a window into the collective mentalities of the past. It was this methodological and ideological background that has informed all areas of Ginzburg’s expertise, which includes the study of religious radicals, witchcraft, iconography, and historiography.

In 1962 Carlo Ginzburg was doing research on a “strange Friulian sect” that was persecuted by the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church. While examining the manuscripts relating to this sect, he came upon the case of a miller named Domenico Scandella, also known as Menocchio, who was accused of, among other things, maintaining that the world had its origins in putrefaction. Ginzburg was unable to address this topic until 1970, when, with the results of his investigation, he produced The Cheese and the Worms, a work that combines humanity and methodological brilliance with an exceptionally high level of historiographical expertise.

For Ginzburg, the story of Menocchio demonstrates many fundamentally important issues surrounding the concept of how ideas “travel.” That is, how the traffic in ideas is circular and that in any culture or class some ideas are accepted, some rejected, and others modified. Nor was Ginzburg parochial or esoteric in his approach, for he saw in Menocchio’s mundane life and tragic death evidence of what is frequently invisible to the historian—how individuals think and how what they think changes them. Ginzburg was able to reconstruct the mentality of the sixteenth-century Menocchio, using the miller’s understanding not only of early-modern Christianity but also possibly of Islam (an Italian version of the Koran appeared in 1547; Menocchio also read the description of Islam in the book called the Travels, attributed to Sir John Mandeville), Indian mythology (which is also mentioned in the Travels), and pre-Christian paganism, elements that make an appearance in the apparently unusual mental universe of Menocchio.

It is the cosmogony of this ordinary miller that Ginzburg seeks to bring to light. In a broader sense Ginzburg’s political aim is to show what “common people” believed and to demonstrate what previous generations of historians “passed over in silence, discarded or ignored.” At a methodological level Ginzburg’s work is also outstanding in that he is able to take the story of an individual and turn it into a narrative that demonstrates the potential of the past. No longer is it safe to assume that those who went before us were only capable of seeing spirituality and religion in partisan and sectarian terms.

Ginzburg was both lucky and unlucky in his search for documentation about the life and thoughts of Menocchio. He was lucky in his discovery of the manuscripts of the two trials bought against Menocchio by the Holy Office of the Inquisition because the Inquisitors were nothing if not thorough. Hence everything that was said by Menocchio and the trial judges was written down by the court’s transcribers; equally important, the Inquisitors made a list of some the books Menocchio read. But Ginzburg was unlucky because specific and detailed archival evidence of what sixteenth-century peasants actually read and how they interpreted it is hard to find. As a result Ginzburg is well aware that the limits of his argument are heavily circumscribed by the lack of any quantitative data.

Yet Ginzburg presents a remarkable story [Page 24] of how one man combined obscure popular beliefs with a clear and logical complex of ideas. Menocchio embodies the notions of a preliterate and pre-Christian peasant cosmogony as well as a conventional Christian culture based on print that eschewed and repressed the remnants of oral culture. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with movable metallic type in 1445 meant more material was being made available to those who, like Menocchio, could read. When the power of print was combined with the split within the Church that eventually led to the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Inquisition began to see that many aspects of print and peasant culture could not be tolerated. It was through the investigation of and the attempts to suppress “Lutheranism” that the Church realized the depth of a popular peasant Christianity that was at odds with institutionalized Catholicism.

Thus it was the process of Rome reestablishing its authority that brought the miller Menocchio Scandella of Friuli into contact with some of the most highly educated men of the period. At his first trial he was charged with uttering (“‘heretical and impious’ words about Christ.” To make matters worse, one witness claimed Menocchio had tried to “disseminate his opinions, bolstering them up by ‘preaching and dogmatising shamelessly.’” Hence Menocchio was to be tried for his crimes of heresy against the Church. Yet during these hearings witnesses also said he was “an honorable man.” Another said that Menocchio was ready to “die for the Faith” and added, “I like him very much.” Even during his second trial a witness said, “I think he is everybody’s friend.” Ginzburg draws several conclusions from these statements. It is clear that Menocchio was well regarded, even loved, by his fellow villagers. Many disagreed with him, while others agreed, and a third group probably saw him as something of an annoying but harmless crank. Furthermore, it was not one of the villagers of Montereale that reported him to the Inquisition. This was done by the local priest, Don Odorico Vorai, who had a long-standing (theologically based) disagreement with Menocchio. But even he could not bring himself to accuse Menocchio of heresy and, when giving evidence at the first trial said, “I don’t remember the things he said. I have a bad memory.”

Despite the positive statements of the local clergy and his fellow villagers, Menocchio managed to be his own worst enemy, and throughout his two trials, one in 1584 and the other in 1599, Menocchio surprised and confounded the judges. At the 1584 hearing he started his testimony by explaining his theory of how the universe was made, from which the book takes its title. In the beginning, Menocchio said, was chaos, but then a mass was formed, “just as cheese is made out of milk and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels,” and God was created out of the mass at the same time.

Menocchio’s “Chaos-and-God“ theory certainly perplexed his interrogators. Before concluding the first trial the Inquisitors asked Menocchio, “Was God eternal and always with the chaos?" Menocchio replied, “I believe that they were always together, that they were never separated, that is neither chaos without God nor God without chaos.” Menocchio’s notions on the creation of God continued to intrigue the court, as can be seen in the following exchange between the prosecutor and the accused:

Inquisitor: It appears that you contradicted yourself in the previous examinations speaking about God, because in one instance you said God was eternal with the chaos, and in another you said He was made from the chaos. . . .

Menocchio: My opinion is that God was eternal with the chaos, but He did not know Himself, but later became aware of Himself.

[Page 25]

Inquisitor: You said previously that God had intelligence; how can it be that originally He did not know Himself, and what was the cause that afterwards He knew Himself?

Menocchio: I believe that it was with God as with the things of this world that proceed from imperfect to perfect, as an infant who while he is in his mother’s womb neither understands nor lives, but outside the womb begins to live, and in growing begins to understand.

Indeed, it seems that the Inquisition was more fascinated by Menocchio’s creation myth than with his radical reproaches of the Church itself. At the beginning of his 1584 trial Menocchio claimed that the Church was an accomplice of the rich in exploiting the poor. He also said, “You priests and monks, you too want to know more than God, . . . and you want to become gods on earth, and know as much as God. . . . In fact the more one thinks he knows, the less he knows.” It is certainly easier to locate Menocchio’s criticism of the clergy within a common but, nevertheless, dissident desire to reform the Church hierarchy. Many in Menocchio’s village may have agreed with aspects of his condemnations, but they knew better than to express ideas that significantly diverged from the accepted order of things.

The provenance of Menocchio’s ideas on the creation of God and the universe are more difficult to pinpoint, and they certainly suggest that Menocchio was drawing ideas from sources well outside conventional Christian scripture. Even the Inquisition’s partial list of his books gathered before the first trial shows that he had read the Bible in vernacular Italian, several apocryphal Gospels, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Travels by Sir John Mandeville, and an unidentified book that a witness said was the Koran.

Yet what is perhaps more important than Menocchio’s creation allegory (which he probably inherited from an ancient oral tradition, combined with the tales he read about Indian mythology in Mandeville’s Travels) is the admixture of myths with revealed texts, which in turn produced a religious radicalism that was a blend of scientific and utopian aspirations for social reform. An example of this is Menocchio’s attitude to other peoples and religions. On more than one occasion he bravely told the Inquisitors that “the majesty of God has given the Holy Spirit to all, to Christians, to heretics, to Turks and to Jews, and he considers them all dear, and they are all saved in the same manner.”

The miller’s notions were probably taken from a basic humanity that predates Christianity. But they are also drawn from works it is clear Menocchio read. The aforementioned Travels written in the mid-fourteenth century and attributed to Sir John Mandeville is one of them. Menocchio would have read them in the Italian version entitled Il cavallier Zuanne de Mandavilla. It was based on geographical texts and medieval encyclopedias such as the Speculum by Vincent of Beauvis and was reprinted many times throughout the sixteenth century. Basically, Travels is the tale, interwoven with mythical elements, of the hero’s journeys around the world, in which he encounters a wide variety of customs and beliefs, including Islam. In fact, in the Travels Menocchio would have read that the Koran says that “among all the prophets Jesus was the most excellent and the one closest to God.” Yet one element, which Ginzburg believes had a profound impact on Menocchio, was the message of tolerance. Of his encounter with the inhabitants of the islands of Mesidarata and Genosaffa Mandeville says:

Although they do not possess the articles of faith as we do, . . . because of their good intentions . . . I am certain that God loves them. . . . [and] we must pray to God for them because we neither know whom God loves nor whom He hates, since God does not hate any creature that He has made. . . .

[Page 26] Ginzburg also points out that the case of the Travels demonstrates the complicated way in which Menocchio read and drew meaning from books. For Mandeville may have advocated tolerance toward other beliefs, but this was accompanied by “a firm declaration of the superiority of Christianity over the partial truths of other religions.” By doing this Ginzburg confronts the selective way that Menocchio read, “isolating words and phrases, sometimes distorting them . . . [and] juxtaposing different passages” with the intention of confirming his unorthodox and dissident views on religious truth.

Furthermore, while Ginzburg correctly highlights the precise meaning of the texts that Menocchio read in such a partisan way, he also points out that perhaps the world view of Menocchio, the miller, was more widespread than had hitherto been assumed. The Settennario, the unpublished sixteenth-century work of the unknown rustic “who hid behind the pseudonym Scolio,” is a primary example of Ginzburg’s argument:

Many prophets have I already sent

Diverse, because varied were those,

To whom I directed my prophets

And I also gave them different laws

Just as various were the customs I found, . . .

To the Jews, to the Turks, and to the Christians

Each one makes a copy of his law, . . .

But gives the Ten Commandments to each of them

The same, but which they comment on separately.

But God is one, and only one is his faith.

Do not adore or believe but in one God

Who has neither companion, friend nor son:

Everyone is His son, servant and friend

Who obeys His precepts and what has been said. . . .

Neither worship others nor a holy spirit

If I am indeed God, God is everywhere.

Scolio’s Settennario may well have been one of the sources from which Menocchio drew his strength to advocate the unity of religions, even though it would cost him his life.

In 1599 a new denunciation against Menocchio reached the Inquisitor. It was claimed that Menocchio “had uttered a blasphemy” and that news of his statements had reached far beyond the small village of Montereale. When an innkeeper of Aviano was questioned by the Inquisition, he said that he was told that Menocchio had denied the divinity of Christ. Even though this was basically gossip, it was enough for the innkeeper to tell the Inquisition that Menocchio “still persisted in those old opinions of his.” This was all the evidence the Holy Office needed to arraign Menocchio on charges of blasphemy. By now Menocchio was a thin and weak man of sixty-seven. His wife was dead. One of his sons (Ginzburg is not sure which one but believes it was probably Ziannuto) who had helped him after the first trial had also passed away, and the rest of his family had abandoned him, probably because they did not want to be associated with a man now found guilty of heresy. Thus Menocchio was now of frail health and low morale. As one who had been pardoned once and yet returned to his blasphemous ways, Menocchio could not expect the relative leniency he received in 1584. After interrogations that confirmed the Inquisitor’s suspicions that Menocchio was a “recidivist” and “atheist,” he was condemned to death. The local Inquisitor was reluctant to carry out the sentence, and it was only after pressure from higher authorities in Rome that in late 1599 it was.

The importance of The Cheese and the Worms is manifold. Ginzburg demonstrates his scholarly ability by bringing his knowledge to bear on difficult sources, especially in tracing from which books Menocchio took his beliefs. In many instances Menocchio, either consciously or unconsciously, failed to admit that his knowledge came from a certain book and [Page 27] preferred to claim that his ideas came “out of . . . [his own] head.” Furthermore, it was this wider understanding of the period and Menocchio’s eclectic library that enabled Ginzburg to make a broader thesis about Menochio’s confusing admixture of popular myth and oral tradition with the institutional text-based Christianity of early-modern Europe. It was his skill as a scholar that gave Ginzburg the insight to see in Menocchio’s frequently bizarre and contradictory world view a radical belief that religion should be free of what Menocchio called “pomp” and that all religions shared a common inspiration.

That Ginzburg saw so many nuances in the transcripts of the trials after they had been ignored or overlooked by historians for over three hundred years demonstrates Ginzburg’s commitment to what his historical forebears, Bloch and Lebvre of the Annales, called “a better kind of history”—one that tried to examine society as an entity in which all participants and classes influenced and accommodated each other to varying degrees and in different ways.

It is also tempting to see Menocchio as an example of a large group of peasants and village folk who shared his views on different religions and on the role of the church as a social as well as a moral authority. Ginzburg exercises a good deal of circumspection on this issue, but he also suggests that one can assume that, if there was one Menocchio, there might have been others. About them, however, the archives are silent.

It is difficult to convey the full strengths of The Cheese and the Worms. That there is information on an obscure sixteenth-century village miller is quite astounding in itself. That he was executed for his beliefs, and the beliefs themselves, increase one’s fascination. In the hands of Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms becomes a high point of scholarship in the twentieth century and an example that reaches beyond the discipline of history. In a sense, then, Ginzburg describes a beach by examining a grain of sand.

Perhaps the best way to judge The Cheese and the Worms is to use the criterion Ginzburg himself borrowed from Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish intellectual. “Nothing,” Benjamin wrote, “that has taken place should be lost to history. But only to redeemed humanity does the past belong in its entirety.” Ginzburg certainly saved Menocchio from being “lost to history.” He was also successful in redeeming history and humanity, in some ways, by telling the story of Menocchio, the miller from the village of Montereale.

[Page 28]

[Page 29]

The Past as Prologue:
Humanity’s Family Album

A REVIEW ESSAY BY JIM STOKES

Copyright © 2000 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

MANY have observed that humankind repeatedly alternates between two views of reality. One view tends to see the world mechanistically, as a kind of machine that can be reduced, deciphered, and mastered; the other sees the world as part of a much larger reality, partly invisible, that defies our best efforts to comprehend it. Since the early seventeenth century, a time when science was replacing metaphysics as the preferred method for investigating reality in the Western world, applied science has given many of us, especially in the century just ending, something approaching a material paradise, when we objectively compare our present lives and comforts with those of people living a hundred years ago. But the price has been great. Our view of life, on the one hand, has perhaps become more circumscribed because science and materialistic philosophies have also given us a habit of mind that tends to elevate the present moment and to detach it from its historical contexts. The history of ideas, on the other hand, connects us with our forbears and helps us to appreciate our place in the perpetual human effort to understand a world that remains powerful and mysterious in spite of our efforts to reduce and contain it. The history of ideas restores magnitude and meaning to the world.

F. O. Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, and C. S. Lewis’ Allegory of Love are all works in the history of ideas. Each one maps historically the development of a different core idea, all of which have had enduring significance in the development of Western civilization. Lovejoy traces the concept of the world as reflective of an invisible and transcendent higher reality. Auerbach explores the two principal recurring ways of representing reality in Western narrative art. Lewis examines the sudden appearance, in the eleventh century, of a new allegorical metaphor in Western literature and thought relating the self, as mystical lover, to the concept of a higher reality. The three books provide an intellectual and spiritual restorative in an age overwhelmingly dominated, and in some important ways reduced, by science and materialistic philosophies.

F. O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1933), written as a series of lectures in 1933, examines historically three related ideas that have collectively “produced a conception—one of the major conceptions in Occidental thought—which came to be expressed by a single term: ‘the Great Chain of Being.’” Lovejoy provides an elegant guide to this concept from its appearance in Plato through its continuing influence and endless redefinition in every succeeding age down to the present time.

It was through Plato, Lovejoy explains, that the idea of otherworldliness entered the [Page 30] Western consciousness via texts. He shows how Plato’s writings embody a “cleavage” and a tension between two fundamentally different ways of viewing the world. The one is otherworldliness, “the belief that both the genuinely ‘real’ and the truly good are radically antithetic in their essential characteristics to anything to be found in man’s natural life”; that, therefore, this world is a mere shadow of the real and the Good; and that humanity’s primary goal is the pursuit of that higher, truer reality. The second view is that the visible world is complete in and of itself and that this reality, knowable through the senses, is the true proper focus of our attention.

Plato’s “Theory of Ideas,” Lovejoy shows, reflects “a frank mysticism” and a belief that discursive language is inadequate to convey its truth, thus his resort to mythic, figurative modes of expression, irony, and dialogue in his writings. Understanding, Plato believes, “can be gained only by a sudden illumination in a soul prepared for it by austerity of life and discipline of the intellect.” It is through this mystical and poetic dimension of Plato “that the conception of an unseen eternal world, of which the visible world is but a pale copy, gains a permanent foothold in the West” (Inge, The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought [1926], quoted by Lovejoy), along with the belief that “the highest good for man lies in somehow translocating himself into such a world.”

But Lovejoy carefully notes that “the sensible world was never for Plato a mere illusion or a mere evil.” Instead, both worlds were realities made up of pluralities, and the plurality of individual souls in this earthly region remained “permanently separate from one another and distinct from the Ideas, even when translated into that higher region,” a nuance often lost when speaking of Plato.

The result of Plato’s “dialectic of the Idea of the Good” was “a strange consequence, which was to dominate the religious thought of the West for more than two thousand years,” resulting in a series of questions that has preoccupied humanity through the ages and the answers to which at any given moment have largely determined the perception of the nature of reality in that age. Is the Good (or God) a self-sufficient and remote higher reality, utterly and eternally separated from its creation, which was itself, therefore, essentially completed and fated? Or is God the intimately involved and endlessly creating Lord of a universe that is forever in a state of becoming and progressing toward perfection? Can one perceive patterns of order and degree and reason in this world, or can one see only randomness, accident, and chance? Is there an express connection between this world and Plato’s higher world of Idea and Ideal?

For Plato, the answer was that there is a necessary relationship between the endlessly various conceptual realities and their counterparts in the world of the actual, a concept that Lovejoy calls “the principle of plenitude.” When fused with the Aristotelian concept of continuity—the belief that one can see “a shading-off of the properties of one class into those of the next rather than a sharp distinction between them,” the two together gave rise to the concept known as the Great Chain of Being. That concept is the organizing of reality into an endless succession of classes and beings, and hierarchies within those classes, arranged according to their degree of perfection, and each having the innate right and need to fulfill its own potential.

From Plato’s paradigm built upon paradox flows much of Western thought, religion, and civilization. From it came the philosophy and theological foundations of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Lovejoy brilliantly traces its evolution through history: in the neo-Platonists of early Christianity; in the conflict in the Middle Ages between views of this world as perfect and good or as imperfect [Page 31] and, therefore, evil; in the new cosmology of the Renaissance with its questions about our place and our planet’s in creation—whether we live in a universe “limited and fenced about” or one “decentralized, infinite, and infinitely populous” with the attendant effects of that on human perception; in the eighteenth-century belief that the world, while vast and populous, also reflected reason and was, therefore, knowable and good because it was a place in which the potential of each thing was a reflection of the Good; in nineteenth-century romanticism where the fulfillment of individual potential became the most compelling characteristic of that age; in the twentieth century, when metaphysics seemed to be returning through the new discovery of the mysterious universe by physicists and of renewed interest in religion by many who had been left unfulfilled by science and the new philosophies. In the century just ending the concept of the Chain of Being appears in endless ways—in the urge to define and classify, whether as it relates to periodic tables of chemicals and elements, or to DNA mapping, or temporally in the concept of evolution, or in the notion of progress and perfectability that is so much a part of the American mind set, or in the endless quest, by many people, for a source of metaphysical order. The age itself has made the quest for knowledge and fulfillment a practical possibility for many, especially in the (privileged) West. That quest implicitly presumes the reality of a higher something and a set of hierarchical values that, with effort, can be attained.

But, finally, the most compelling quality of The Great Chain of Being is the way in which it describes the history of ideas as a method for arriving at a better understanding of our own human history. The most significant ideas, Lovejoy proposes, are those assumptions that “are so much a matter of course that they are rather tacitly presupposed than formally expressed and argued for” and are, therefore, not scrutinized though they often contain “the dominant intellectual tendencies of an Age.” Equally fascinating is the way, as he shows, in which one idea, as it takes dominion over an age, contains within itself the seeds of its opposite and tends to be followed by new questions and utterly unexpected results.

While Lovejoy traces the history of an idea, Erich Auerbach’s classic work, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953), studies “the various methods of interpreting human events in the literature of Europe,” especially the two narrative styles seen first in Greek and Hebrew epic literature and utterly different in their ways of picturing reality. These two styles, he argues, have both had an enduring influence on subsequent ages, endlessly recurring in modified forms and reflecting not only different styles of representation but different world views. The two styles are differing responses to the great Chain of Being.

To illustrate the two styles, Auerbach, in his opening chapter, entitled “The Seat of Odysseus,” chooses two ancient progenitors: a scene from Homer’s Odyssey and one from the Old Testament. From the Odyssey he chooses the scene in Book 19 in which the aged nurse of Odysseus, while bathing the stranger who has appeared at the beleaguered palace of Odysseus, sees a scar on his thigh that tells her the stranger is her master himself, come home at last. Startled and filled with joy, she starts to cry out, but Odysseus threatens her with death if she reveals his identity too soon.

To Auerbach the scene, as executed by Homer, epitomizes the qualities that have come to typify the Homeric style of epic. All phenomena are represented “with the utmost fullness” in an “externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations, and “this procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground.” Indeed, the very notion [Page 32] of a psychological and metaphysical background “is entirely foreign to the Homeric style,” which “knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.” The narrative provides no larger context than human feeling and experience (those of particular characters) and is completed ahistorically when the lives of those characters come to an end.

Auerbach’s contrasting example is the Sacrifice of Isaac from the Old Testament (Gen. 22:1), the episode in which Abraham, as bidden by a testing God, takes his son Isaac to a mountain, preparing to sacrifice him. Abraham stops short of carrying out that act only when an angel intervenes, directing him instead to sacrifice a ram. This episode, Auerbach argues, is an utterly different style of representation, a completely different “manner of comprehending and representing things.” Unlike its Homeric counterpart, this story is fraught with metaphysical backgrounds and complexities of character and motivation. The setting itself is indeterminate, as is the place from which God has come. Abraham’s location is “not meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but a moral position in respect to God, as compared with the treatment of literal arrivals and departures in the Odyssey. The scene has both the foreground of the present and “the undetermined, dark place” of an historical and metaphysical background. Abraham’s journey to that place “is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent”; the entire mode of representation demands “symbolic interpretation” with ethical significance rather than association with a specific place.

Auerbach catalogs innumerable differences between the two styles. The Old Testament story creates “overwhelming suspense” in a scene “fraught with background”; the characters are “multilayered and in “a problematic psychological situation,” while the destiny of the Homeric characters “is clearly defined.” For them “delight in physical existence is everything,” and they “take pleasure in their manner of enjoying their savory present, a present that sends strong roots down into social usages, landscape, and daily life.” As Auerbach says, the Homeric poems “conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and secret second meaning.” By contrast, the goal of the biblical stories “is not to bewitch the senses”; rather it is “moral, religious, and psychological phenomena which are their sole concern” and “their religious intent involves an absolute claim to historical truth.” We go to the biblical epic, Auerbach says, not to forget reality for a few hours but to “feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history.”

The Greek and Hebraic approaches to story telling reflect “different” conceptions of the “elevated style and of the sublime.” From the Greek style (as illustrated by the Odyssey) flowed varieties of realism widely differing from each other but all based on sensory description, specificity, and foreground for their aesthetic effect and meaning; from the Hebraic style (exemplified by the story of Abraham and Isaac) eventually flowed a different kind of realism based in psychological complexity, a dramatic scene placed against an historical and metaphysical background [Page 33] indeterminate in its features. As Auerbach says, “domestic realism, the representation of daily life, remains in Homer in the peaceful realm of the idyllic, whereas, from the very first, in the Old Testament stories, the sublime, tragic, and problematic take shape precisely in the domestic and commonplace,” with there being a necessary “connection between the domestic and the spiritual.” The styles in these two works provide “a starting point for an investigation into the literary representation of reality in European culture.

Auerbach’s Mimesis is endlessly suggestive. He makes it possible for one to see the influence of the two styles working in every age, providing examples from the third century C.E. through the early decades of the twentieth century. Their progress through history is too complicated to describe adequately in a short review article. But, by way of example, their continuing influence can be seen in two great American novels, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Although Auerbach himself does not refer to them, the former novel is far closer to the idea of Greek realism in its portrayal of the culture and geography of the Mississippi region of that time with the utmost specificity and “foreground.” The Starlet Letter, though set in Puritan New England, is more interested in presenting a moral drama in which nature itself takes on overt symbolic allegorical dimensions. The platform on which Hester Prynne’s agony is acted out is as much a pulpit and a timeless stage as it is a literal platform. The influence of the two essential approaches to style can just as easily be seen in many other works. They remain the two narrative techniques that Western writers bring to their imaginative explorations of reality in their prose.

The final book, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936; New York: Oxford, 1975), by C. S. Lewis, differs from the other two in that it traces not an idea or a style but a metaphor that was new to the West (romantic love as a symbol for the soul’s attraction to the Divine) and the mode of allegory (used for the expression of the quest for one’s beloved as an articulated allegory for the seeking soul’s quest). He describes the historical change that they effected (and reflected) in the thought, religion, and art of the Middle Ages. As Lewis says, “real changes in human sentiment are very rare—there are perhaps three or four on record,” but he believes that one of them occurred with the Provençal love poetry that appeared in the West “quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in Languedoc.” For the first time in the literature of Europe, romantic love became the principal subject of poetry. It was a completely novel change because “‘love,’ in our sense of the word, is as absent from the literature of the Dark Ages as from that of classical antiquity.”

Lewis offers no explanation for the dramatic change except to say that scholars have variously suggested, without much persuasive success, that the source was perhaps either Celtic, or Byzantine, or Ovidian, or that “even Arabic influences have been suspected.” But he offers no argument preferring one of them over the others. He also fails to observe that in Islamic religion and culture the metaphor of the mystic lover and his mystical quest to be united with God is present from near the inception of Islam; or that Islam had a great allegorical tradition in philosophy and literature —especially the Persian—much predating its appearance in the West; or that the Islamic-Christian cultural encounter in Spain influenced all of Europe before the literary onset in Provence; or that movements of transcendent personal mysticism paralleled each other in Islam and in the Christian West during the early Middle Ages. In fact, Lewis’ book does not treat purely religious mysticism and allegory at all. Rather, his purpose is to follow the new metaphor and allegory [Page 34] as it makes its way into secular literature and gives rise to a mode of thought and artistic expression that, although foreign to us now, became “the background of European literature for eight hundred years.”

While Lewis offers no explanation for this sudden appearance, he does seek to reconstruct “that long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of expression.” He shows how the impulse to allegorize had its roots deep in “pagan” religions and in classical Latin poetry, as well as in early Christianity. Contrasting allegory with symbolism, he says that symbolism “is a mode of thought, allegory [is a mode of] expression.” The mood, “the whole mental life of the period” of Latin antiquity and of the “dark ages” lent itself to allegory. “The twilight of the gods,” he says, “is the mid-morning of the personifications”; as the troubled and divided souls of that age began to look inward, they turned naturally to allegory and its personifications as the form most able to express the philosophical and religious conflicts that people of that period were experiencing as polytheism receded and Christian monotheism entered. There was, he says, “a profound change in the mind of antiquity,” a need “to explore the inner world.”

Lewis charts “the steady decline of mythology into allegory,” in three late Latin writers, showing that for them “allegorical conflict is the natural method of dealing with psychology.” In them he sees reflected the emergence of a third reality of meaning, the “world of myth and fancy,” which takes its place beside “the actual world and the world of his [the writer’s] own religion.” This new mode and mind set would “provide modern Europe” with a third way to explore reality, this one an artistic mode of “romantic imagining.”

In The Allegory of Love, Lewis expends little analysis on the period between the sixth and the late eleventh centuries, a time that provides few literary examples of the form, though that age “kept alive the mood” of allegory. Instead, he shows that by the end of the twelfth century the core metaphor of a new poetry was “spreading out in two directions, one south into Italy where it reached its summit in the Divine Comedy of Dante, the other north into France where it flowered in French poetry of the twelfth century, most notably in Chretien de Troyes, but eventually extending far beyond that into the allegorical romance of Spenser in the late sixteenth century.

It is the northern movement on which The Allegory of Love concentrates. Lewis’ ultimate interest is to focus on the great religiously inspired literary allegories of the High Middle Ages, but he begins by the first step that this new literary allegory took—the form that articulated a sophisticated set of practices that came to be known as Courtly Love, characterized by the extramarital, codified pursuit of an idealized woman by her lover, all governed by elaborate personal and social rules. Described as “a feudalization of love,” Courtly Love became an erotic religion of love that arose “as a rival or a parody of the real religion” and emphasized “the antagonism of the two ideals.” It became “an extension of religion, an escape from religion, a rival religion.”

The mode used by Courtly-Love poetry was the allegorical romance. Its greatest practitioner was the French poet Chretien de Troyes, who fused the new poetry with the Arthurian stories that swept Europe following the Norman invasion of England. Chrétien “was one of the first explorers of the human heart,” who found that to treat of both the inner and the outer world, he must turn to allegory, which Lewis calls “the subjectivism of an objective age.” The love dramatized in his poetry is not Platonic so much as the actual, psychological, and social equivalent of a Platonic mystical ladder by which the soul, in a purely secular form, ascends toward the ideal that it seeks. Typical of the paradigm used by Chrétien in his five Arthurian [Page 35] romances is his Lancelot. As do all of Chrétien’s knights, Lancelot undertakes a vow “to serve God, King, justice and morality, their ladies, and the cause of persons in need,” as well as developing their military skills, their moral state, and their social behavior. In Lancelot’s case, the crisis occurs when his idealized codes of chivalry (reflecting self-interest) conflict with the demands placed by his love for Arthur’s queen, Guinevere (reflecting the sacrificing of self to the object of one’s love). Lancelot’s momentary hesitation when he must rescue her from abduction (he hesitates to ride in a cart full of criminals) almost costs him her love. Though presented as an Arthurian story, Lancelot’s story clearly is an allegory of the soul’s quest for self-knowledge, maturity, and spiritual perfection.

But Courtly Love soon gave way to what Lewis calls the philosophical poets of the twelfth century who created the allegorical frame and the metaphysical context for the subsequent important religiously inspired and motivated literary allegories of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, works that reconciled the complementary meanings of the Bible and Plato. In subsequent chapters Lewis discusses masterpieces of the Middle Ages— the Roman de La Rose; selected works of Geoffrey Chaucer that use allegorical structures, such as Troilus and Cressida; and works by John Gower and Thomas Usk—and assorted other short allegorical poems from the Late Middle Ages when allegory became the dominant form. Lewis ends with Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a secular, Protestant, allegorical epic written during the Renaissance. By this time Courtly Love was dead, and allegory declined as a major form, except for religious poetry by some of the metaphysical poets such as George Herbert and by Paul Bunyan (Pilgrim’s Progress) in the eighteenth century. Allegory reemerged in the twentieth century in political allegories such as Animal Farm and 1984 and sometimes in cartoons and the Star Wars movies. But the mode has never recovered.

Except for the Roman de La Rose, all the allegorical works are English. In that sense, and because Lewis never seriously undertakes to answer why the new literary metaphor of love appeared when it did (which would have required some understanding and acknowledgment of the immense contribution by Islam), the book is not without limitations reflecting the biases of its time. But its importance in literary studies and in the history of ideas cannot be overestimated. According to David M. Zesmer, a medievalist, The Allegory of Love is “one of the most famous studies of the [twentieth] century” and is both “stimulating and suggestive.” J. A. Burrow, a medieval English scholar, notes that Lewis’ book “restored to respectability” a mode that had formed the backbone of much Western literature and drama for some eight hundred years but that had been thoroughly discredited (or at least set aside) in literary studies by scholars of the period who found allegory not congenial to their sensibilities and who wanted to discredit religion or at least set it apart from the study of medieval literature. For allegory is a mode that presumes that experience has meaning within a larger cultural, religious, and moral reality that is itself coherent, whole, and sustaining. Hence it is not generally appealing to an age defined by fragmentation and competing ideologies. But also for that reason it simultaneously has great appeal—and can have great meaning— to the part in us that yearns for wholeness and coherence on many levels.

As do Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being and [Page 36] Auerbach’s Mimesis, Lewis’ Allegory of Love enriches and expands our view of reality immeasurably far beyond the limited borders of our present moment. Together, the three books enable readers to traverse some of the most profound currents in Western thought from its earliest bcginnings in Greece and Rome to the next great intellectual and spiritual revolution, that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

[Page 37]

The Eye of the Beholder

You do not

do

minimal verse

you criticize

you with trees

in each of

your eyes

walk

into

the desert

see

one

clean bone

reach

into

your pocket

for your last

well-honed,

your

last few thin words,

all that you own

describe the

light

it is

white

all that we have,

this essence will suffice

—Diane Huff

Copyright © 2000 by Diane Huff

[Page 38]

[Page 39]

Worlds in Transition:
The Dynamics of Change

A REVIEW ESSAY BY GARY L. MORRISON

Copyright © 2000 by Gary L. Morrison.

IT HAS become a cliché to say that the twentieth century was an age of transition. Looking back on the previous one hundred years of global, regional, and civil wars, revolutions, natural disasters, famines, and social dislocations on an historically unprecedented scale, one can see both the manifestation of the darkest forces of barbarism and the brightest triumphs of the human spirit. No other century, it could be argued, has created such a vast chasm between epochs. A comfortable view of the world based on a defined social order, religious absolutism, and moral certainty permeated the largely Eurocentric opening years of the twentieth century. Europe was the “Proud Tower,” as characterized by Barbara Tuchman in her classic account of the years leading up to World War I. Europe’s beacon of optimism promised scientific, technological, social, and economic advancement, if not complete spiritual triumph as both imperialism and Christian missionaries cast their shadows around the globe. From these heady heights, England could boast that the sun never set on the British Empire. But by the end of the Great War in 1918 that worldview was completely shattered.

Throughout the following tumultuous years of the century our world was one of contradictions where the only constant was change. Political and economic ideologies competed For the hearts and minds of the masses while nationalist fervor, propelled by the democratic spirit of self-determination, brought into being new independent nations through revolutions, civil wars, and the dismantling of colonial systems. At the same time a new spirit of internationalism led to the forging of alliances, regional associations, and defense pacts as the nations of the world struggled to unite first under the League of Nations and then under the United Nations. Although refugees became a reality of the world, volunteerism and the collection and distribution of food and other basic resources helped raise the consciousness of the haves and alleviate the worst crises among the have-nots. The wholesale slaughter of peoples intensified the struggle to establish universal standards for human rights. On the one hand, religious fundamentalism led to violent conflicts within and between faiths as well as to cult followings and mass suicides while, on the other hand, religious absolutism gave way to religious relativism. Liberation movements helped to define new attitudes toward traditionally marginalized or oppressed groups. Recognition of widespread sexual and physical abuse and slavery of children and women demanded action programs on a crossnational basis. Environmental pollution and worldwide health problems necessitated global solutions. The twentieth century was, indeed, a century [Page 40] of total global breakdown of systems and values. At the same time new values and systems were emerging.

By the end of the century, language itself was changing at a phenomenal pace on a world scale. English, the first lingua franca in human history to have more nonnative than native speakers, and its driving forces— the movies, radio, television, rock music, videos, and the personal computer—fueled perhaps the first universal revolution. Through the power and pervasiveness of the media— dominated, controlled, directed, and disseminated by the West—family, moral, religious, sexual, intellectual, personal, and commercial values were undermined, challenged, and redefined not only in the West but also in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Arctic regions. No place in the world escaped the ubiquitous influence of English, the media, or the West.

The continuing universal revolution is at the heart of the twentieth-century years of transition. New terms and vocabulary were incorporated into varieties of English and interconnected disparate peoples through the universal language of the computer. Language, symbols, imagery, and visions imprinted in the minds of billions helped to raise consciousness, stimulate response, and build a sense of being one among the peoples of the world. If nationalism and self-determination characterized the opening years of the twentieth century, internationalism and mutual dependence became the fabric of the world at the close of the century woven together by technology, language, music, and the arts, sports, commerce, and all the trappings of a newly emerging world culture.

Confronted by transformation on such a global scale, many twentieth-century intellectuals failed to grasp the meaning of the changes and found expression in angst and nihilism. Others sought to comprehend their world by casting light on other peoples, cultures, and historic periods of transition, thereby suggesting some natural order out of the chaos of life. Hence the twentieth century is crowded with a myriad of creative, seminal, great, interesting, and influential as well as deplorable, discredited, and merely pedestrian works that reflect the massive transition from the world of 1900 to the new world order of 2000.

While neither great nor pedestrian, three books stand out as particularly significant contributions in understanding the dynamics of change and transition that also help to illuminate the unprecedented upheaval in human history. What Happened in History? by V. Gordon Childe is an interdisciplinary study weaving together anthropology, archaeology, and history. Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages by John Cowper Powys is a masterful novel about one week in October in the Dark Ages of Britain at the end of 499. The Art of Indochina by Bernard Philippe Groslier introduces the extraordinary art and architecture of Southeast Asia, which graphically depicts cross-cultural interchange and societal change. Each attempts to illustrate the impact of human contact and the resulting cross-fertilization of ideas, arts, and concepts that can generate change. Each reflects how civilization evolves from the diffusion of ideas through basic human interactions. Each was the product of a scholar living in the heart and experiencing the turmoil of the twentieth century who attempted to understand past periods of transition.

Long before the current debate between diffusionists and inventionists, V. Gordon Childe had fashioned an entire book in response to a simple question (which is also the title of his work): “What happened in history?” (1st ed. [New York: Penguin, 1946]; Baltimore: Penguin, 1965). Diffusionism has not been a readily accepted theory of history and human progress. Arguments among scholars still rage. The opposing positions between diffusionists and independent inventionists are clearly articulated by Marc K. Stengel in [Page 41] his article on New World settlements, “The Diffusionists Have Landed” (The Atlantic Monthly 285.1 [Jan. 2000] 35-48). Simply put, diffusionists argue that human contact was far more extensive than ever imagined and that change and progress resulted from two-way interactions among peoples, whereas independent inventionists postulate that intentional contact among peoples was minimal and only through extraordinary contact did superior technology pass on and generate change.

Childe was an early proponent of interdisciplinary approaches and introduced a diffusionist perspective on the evolution of human history. Childe postulated a prehistoric world where contact between peoples was not only natural but may have been quite extensive. He pictured stone-age peoples meeting and attempting to communicate. He imagined the possibilities of these people trading, perhaps exchanging some Iron Age tools from one group of people for perhaps grain or some other commodity from another group. He envisioned such people gathering around a campfire and accidentally discovering how to make iron. Through myriad possibilities for sharing or trading and exchanging information on a primitive level, Childe suggested the probability of the diffusion of technology, innovations, and ideas leading through human contact, two-way communication, and active interchanges to change and transformation of peoples. Not a single-man theory but the probability of subtle shifts, changes, and advances through multiple interchanges and chance encounters opened new mental avenues to understanding ages of transition and the advancement of human history.

But what is it like for the individual living in a world in transition and experiencing monumental change? John Cowper Powys in his masterpiece Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages (abridged 1st ed. [London: Macdonald, 1951]; 1st complete ed. [Hamilton, NY: Colgate UP, 1994]) provides, from the perspective of individuals in 499 Britain, the sense of a real world in transition, a seemingly blank period in which there is little documentary evidence. Historic records provide information about St. Patrick’s Confession and his evangelical mission to convert Ireland to Christianity in the mid-fifth century and about the mid-sixth century of Gildas, a fugitive monk in Gaul writing as a Roman supporter against the princes and chieftains of Britain. In the blank between these periods, however, Powys’s fertile imagination and vivid evocation of place and time create a tumultuous world in transition.

Rome was sacked many times, but historians date its fall from the invasions of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths in the latter half of the fifth century. But by the end of the century in 499, the Western Roman Empire, with its center in Rome, was still a reality and stretched from the Mediterranean northward across Europe and into Ireland, Britain, Wales, and Scotland. This is the century of its breakdown, with the migratory movements of tribal peoples pushing westward across Europe. Explaining the context of his novel, Powys wrote in his introduction to Porius, “Historic Background to the Year of Grace A.D. 499”:

Huns, Vandals, Ostro-Goths, Visi-Goths, Central Goths, along with their barbarous heroes, customs, superstitions, cults, rituals, religions, and all their weird deities, were at this strange moment of European history jostling, mingling and contending, on tribal battlefields and in individual souls, with the old classical altars and their ghostly deities, now sinking into oblivion, on the one hand; while the new Christian faith, on the other hand, commanding people to adore what they had been burning, and to burn what they had been adoring, swept forward with a reckless fanaticism that seemed to have the very spirit of the life-force behind its unconquerable desperation.

[Page 42] Britain was not immune to the stresses pushing the Roman Empire. The Picts and the Scots fought against Roman colonizers, and the legendary King Arthur fought off Saxon invaders. Roman rulers, customs, and belief systems were in conflict with local chieftains, customs, and Druid beliefs while the new Christian faith was evangelizing indigenous forest peoples in the wilds. The story of Porius takes place in a Romanized province of North Wales, Edeyrnion, over eight days in October 499. Porius is a prince, a descendant of the early Welsh tribal chieftain Cunedda and of the cousin of King Arthur. Porius is sent on a journey, and through the dark forests another world, another time opens before the reader. One meets King Arthur, a key character in the novel, and his counselor Myrddin Wyllt, or Merlin, who are battling Saxon invaders from the continent. One encounters druids and forest peoples and meets local chieftains and rulers. One experiences a complete world in transition.

With the flow of an epic prose poem, filled with mystery and philosophy and evocative and metaphorical descriptive passages of the natural world at once sensual and palpable, the language of Powys captivates and mesmerizes, holding the reader spellbound and enthralled. The book opens with Porius standing on a watchtower, looking down on the aboriginal forest and valley stretching out below him. Powys describes the scene vividly:

As far as his vision could reach wound the serpentine curves of the sacred river, the river worshipped as a goddess still by many of the natives of that region. He could follow it indeed until, dimmed by mist and obscured by distance, she was lost to sight between the descending ridges. All along the banks of this mother of rivers, Dyfrdwy, Divine Water, stretched the fertile communal clearings of his family’s domain. The furthest of these arable lands were visible to him now as dark ploughed-up patches of earth interspersed with stubble. The colour of this stubble under the afternoon’s diffused light, for between the sky and the earth hung a film of floating vapour, was a colour to which Porius, even if he had had all his wits about him, could have given no name. Compared with the dusky sepia-brown of the ploughed fields and the threatening greenish-black of the timeless forest these far-off stubble-fields showed almost white; but it was a whiteness that had nothing in it of the phantasmal or the unearthly: it was a friendly whiteness like the glint of silver at the mead-drinking he had just left. And yet there was something else, something drawn from it or bestowed on it by the strangely steel-like surface of the river; something that might have suggested to a less troubled watcher the mother-of-pearl glimmerings in the hollow curves of some vast green-veined sea-shell.

Turning southwest Porius sees the mist coming in from “the salt estuary that ran into the open sea.” Powys continues:

It was one of those peculiar afternoons that arrive in late October or early November in this district and are entirely dominated by one natural phenomenon alone—the phenomenon of mist. Wavering and fluctuating in its advances and retreats, and only tangible to the sensitive skin by a faint impact of wetness and chilliness, the mist rises, it would appear, by its own volition, or by the will of the divine water, straight out of the river, and unaffected by wind or sun assumes, weak creature as it is, the dominant and mastering control of a whole unreturning day. This rape of a day by the weakest of her children was more significant of that spot than any other of Nature’s methods.

The curious thing for our watcher above the gate about this particular October day in the last year of the fifth century was that the ambiguous colour assumed by [Page 43] those distant patches of stubble seemed to be slowly moving towards him, spreading up the slope of the sky with the persistence of a human presence.

Powys guides the reader into and through a world of wonder producing the effect of experiencing in the moment this tumultuous world of transition of the Fifth century. Through catastrophic events such as local wars or simple interchanges between widely disparate peoples, ideas, technologies, customs, and beliefs are shared, exchanged, and influence both the giver and receiver. The reader senses how ideas are disseminated first to a few and then permeate the many until change, subtle and persistent, gradually overwhelms and takes root. Again, in the long descriptive opening chapter of Porius, Powys writes:

The Brythonic Celts rarely married with either the Gwyddyl-Ffichti or the forest-people; but Porius’s paternal great-grandfather, Edeyrn, had married an aboriginal giantess and thus had broken this racial taboo. His son, Iddawc, had broken it also and was named Indeg, who was descended from an Iberian royal house that receded into remote antiquity and had once ruled all the western lands from Marakesh to Mona.

Two paragraphs later Powys continues:

Compared with the Gwyddyl-Ffichti, Porius’s Brythonic Celts were now civilized and Romanized. Most of them were nominal Christians. A few were fanatical Christians. All of them were chivalrous and proud and revengeful. It had indeed been their skill in modern warfare that had led one Roman magnate—some say none other than the great Stilicho under the Emperor Theodosius—to promise their chief, Cunedda, a new realm, the most fertile between Uriconium and Mona, if he would consent to establish himself there in perpetuity and bring with him as settlers to this favoured but Gwyddyl-infested spot a large colony of the more adventurous of his people.

The reader is drawn into a world of aboriginal tribal peoples interacting with and gradually being colonized by Roman invaders, with beliefs and customs being absorbed by and transmuted into Christian practices, intermarrying and settling with conflicting heritages challenging traditional loyalties. Language, philosophy, and ideas coming in from the Roman Empire vying with the primitive practices of forest and tribal peoples, this is a Britain in a time and place unfamiliar to the twentieth-century reader, and yet it resonates with a tone of familiarity to one experiencing life in a transitional age.

In another time and place, half a world away, the magnificent art and architecture of Southeast Asia remind us that human contact throughout our history has always been extensive. Influenced by a basically nineteenth-century Eurocentric view of history, I was overwhelmed by the sense of discovery of a different world, culture, and civilization I had never even dreamed existed when I first viewed the ruins of Angkor Wat near Siemriep in the Cambodian jungle in the 1960s. Later in The Art of Indochina: Including Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (New York: Crow, 1962) the great French archaeologist and art historian Bernard Philippe Groslier unraveled for me the intricacies and mysteries of the history, architecture, and art of the Khmers at Angkor Wat and its relationship to the art and culture of Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos.

Groslier shows in the Asian context the ebb and flow of human contacts between and among the peoples of India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand. Here was a world of commerce, trading ships plying the waters of South and Southeast Asia. Here was a world of diverse peoples passing on customs, ideas, and beliefs. Here was a world of indigenous peoples and animistic practices interwoven with Hindu gods [Page 44] and legends and mixing with new concepts and images of Buddhism. From southern Cambodia came the early influence of India. Traders brought Hindu beliefs, and their Brahmin priests and artisans left myriad examples of stone carvings in a Hindu style that moved northward over a few centuries to influence the art and architecture of the eventual capital of the Khmer Empire at Angkor. From the north came the Thai with their Theravada Buddhism, its Buddhist monks and priests and belief system gradually permeating the Khmers.

Thus the two great centerpieces of Khmer architecture, Angkor Wat and its neighboring monument, the Bayon, depict the subtleties of transition. At Angkor Wat one finds the great massive bas reliefs of tales from the Indian epic, The Ramayana, circling the central chambers of this twelfth- and thirteenth-century architectural masterwork. Nearby, and constructed toward the end of the Khmer Empire, in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth century, is the spectacular Bayon. The architecture is not only based on Hindu cosmology but incorporates Buddhist images in the four faces that depict the four cardinal directions, which are the dominating images of the central towers of the Bayon.

The Khmer Empire was the heart and soul of Southeast Asia. It was bounded on the east by the Kingdom of Champa, an Indonesian Hindu-influenced early trading colony along the eastern coast of Vietnam. The Khmer were clashing with the newly converted Buddhist Thai peoples coming in from the north and west. The Khmer Empire was supported by an agrarian economy based on rice; its capital was the center of a vast indigenous irrigation system laid out to reflect Hindu cosmology. It would seem that Theravada Buddhism, moving in from the northern and western Thais, found fertile fields in which to plant its fundamentally passive and fatalistic philosophy among these rice people. One can only imagine what it was like to be one of the rice farmers in awe of the towers of Angkor, accepting the four noble truths and eightfold path of the Buddha leading to earthly release into the realms of Nirvana.

In the great wars undertaken by Suryavarman II and Jayavarman VII against the kingdom of Champa in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one sees the beginnings of the disintegration of the medieval Khmer Empire. When the agricultural system itself failed in the early fourteenth century, the Khmers abandoned Angkor and migrated south, at the same time that the early Siamese moved into Laos and Cambodia. Through the subtle changes in art and style, Groslier illustrates the process and impact of interchange between peoples and cultures. In the history of Angkor Wat one senses another age of transition when antiquated technologies; social, political, and belief systems; and customs and traditions must transcend and change or die.

Focusing on technological transfer, language, and artistic expression, Childe, Powys, and Groslier, all writing in the mid-years of the twentieth century, reflect in their own work the realities of great periods of transition whether from simple exchanges, tumultuous upheavals, or catastrophic events. In a sense they give meaning to their own century by illustrating the processes of history they see in the past. In his concluding remarks in the “Historic Background to the Year of Grace A.D. 499” introducing Porius Powys commented:

As we contemplate this historic background to the autumn of the last year of the fifth century, it is impossible not to think of the background of human life from which today we watch the first half of the twentieth century dissolve into its second half. As the old gods were departing then, so the old gods are departing now. And as the future was dark with the terrifying possibilities of human disaster then, so, today, [Page 45] are we confronted by the possibility of catastrophic world-events. . . .

V. Gordan Childe’s What Happened in History?, John Cowper Powys’ Porius, and Bernard Philippe Groslier’s The Art of Indochina contribute to an understanding that what is most true of the human species are the natural interactions, encounters, and communications among humans at every level and in every time and place. To become a part of something larger than oneself, whether converting to a new religion with its own history and development or giving up some state rights to join a national federation, it is often difficult to let go. The old mixes with the new. The old gods linger, holding one’s mind or heart in their grasp, but are gradually replaced through generations by new gods. Times of transition are both dark and light: humans confronted with forces of disintegration, as these three books suggest, find new sources of integration to overcome, endure, and ultimately prevail through new configurations of beliefs, political systems, languages, or cultures.

Whether in the East or the West, prehistoric or medieval times, the human species has shown the need to communicate with each other, to share information, to intermarry and propagate, to confront new challenges and adapt to change, to create and beautify, to reach out beyond themselves to the cosmos. In Childe, Powys, and Groslier one finds that moments of great change are often subtle—the simple exchange of technology around a campfire in prehistoric times, the introduction of a world-changing religion such as Christianity within a predominantly tribal and primitive system, the mere alteration of a face in sculpture from the gaze of a fierce warrior to the beatific smile of a Buddha. In our own time one can see in the myriad clashes of cultures, societies, peoples, languages, arts, sciences, technology, politics, economics, and commerce that characterized the twentieth century, the emergence of a twenty-first century vastly different from the past. The old gods are passing, as Powys wrote in his introduction to Porius; and, although everyone does not agree about what the new gods will be, it seems evident, from the positive advances in all areas of twentieth-century life, that what lies ahead is the coming together of the peoples of the world in one globally connected international community.

[Page 46]

The Prayer for the parents of Ahmad (1805-1905)

Let me visit my friends the Persians in 1820

before they raged their mad missionary urging

on themselves and on us, their brothers.

Let me talk to the men in their ornately tiled baths

where the steamy water boils away their reason and their dirt.

Let me listen to the women who hide behind curtains

memorizing the forbidden to them holy words of their prophet.

Let me sleep in the swarming caravansary and inhale the dust

spiced by donkeys.

Let me enter through the gates of the city of Yazd

and visit the somber merchant whose teenaged son ran away

disguised as a beggar.

Let me smell the curried rice that steams under muslin for hours.

Let me sip tea from the coal-boiled samovar through a cube of sugar.

Let me bite into spit lamb that has roasted over the sweet fire.

Let me chew taffied, pistachio gaz.

Let me console the merchant and his wife who will weep for decades.

Let me tell them it is not a sin to not want, that they should forgive

their succulent home for the boy’s ascetic departure.

They may not have heard how he knocked on hundreds of doors

in Bombay, how he chanted 12,000 times prostrate. “There is no God

but God” before returning to Persia, to the minarets of Shiraz.

They may not have heard how he clothed the poor in Kashan

with his weaving, and that he would marry and see his children

have children and grandchildren

They may not have heard that he would find his Beloved

before his luscious death at a hundred years old, before

the joints of his pain would make him cry out in laughter.

[Page 47]

Let me chant for them the Tablet of Ahmad that will be sung

for centuries, the history of our race.

Let me chant for them this prayer as I face the sun rising

over the Atlantic.

Let me chant for them the words that have tumbled the shah

of my despair and freed my orthodox heart from its dynasty of sorrow.

Let me chant for them this song of the Nightingale of Paradise

so my young daughter hears it in her bedroom, so it becomes more

than just syllables, more than just my utterance that streams

into her gray, fluid sleep, so she too will feel hunger in the darkness,

so she too will call out when she wakes.

—Peter Murphy

Copyright © 2000 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States

[Page 48]

[Page 49]

Science and Religion:
Paradigm Shifts, Silent Springs,
and Eastern Wisdom

A REVIEW ESSAY BY STEPHEN R. FRIBERG

Copyright © 2000 by Stephen R. Friberg.

THE twentieth century was the century of science and technology. Blessed at birth with steam, electricity, telephones, telegraphy, advances in medical understanding, and the press, it saw the flourishing of the automobile and the rise of the airplane, radio, television, computers, the Internet, and genetic modification of life forms. The century’s big stories—the two world wars, the worldwide embrace of nationalism, and the development of a nascent international order—were all bound closely to scientific and technical advances, typified at mid-century by the awesome power of the atomic bomb and its sophisticated delivery systems. Religion, by contrast, seemed a spent force, a remnant of simpler times.

By the 1950s, views of religion held by the world’s intellectual elite were dominated by a conviction that science alone provided sure and valid knowledge. Logical positivism, preponderant in Anglo-American philosophy and the philosophy of science, held that religion was neither empirically verifiable nor analytic (that is, a statement of logic). To A. J. Ayers, the leading English logical positivist, religion was meaningless—intrinsically nonsensical— when not simply false. Others sided with Freud, viewing religion as wish projection, the unconscious desire to have a comforting divine father. Many spoke of religion as a childlike, primitive way of understanding nature, a prescientific form of explanation.

The 1960s saw many of the assumptions underlying the intellectual elite’s rejection of religion questioned. It became apparent that logical positivism, being neither empirical nor analytic, contradicted itself. New analyses of science moved into the resulting void, the most notable being Thomas S. Kuhn’s study of paradigm shifts in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962). Kuhn’s analysis argued that “normal” science operated with fixed “paradigms.” Paradigm shifts, accompanied by transformations in the way that scientists saw the world, occurred when the old paradigms no longer adequately explained phenomena. More controversially, Kuhn argued that transitions between paradigms took place in a way akin to religious conversion, denying validity to the traditional perspective that regarded science as the steady accumulation of an ever-growing knowledge. He also argued that normal science was highly conservative— almost monastic—in its devotion to established paradigms. Transitions between paradigms, he wrote, were also affected by cultural considerations, not only the purely factual considerations insisted on by the positivists.

Kuhn’s book opened the door to intellectual points of view that saw religion as more than meaningless statements or prescientific myths. Widely influential, it also opened the [Page 50] door to developments in science studies, the history of science, and philosophical relativism (including postmodernism) that have dominated the study of science since the book’s release. These days, of course, everyone talks about paradigms.

Rachel L. Carson’s Silent Spring (New York: Houghton, 1962) has sometimes been seen as a significant challenge to the prestige of science, although its recommendation was more and better science. A searing, powerfully argued, and thoroughly researched book that exposed and indicted the indiscriminate use of insecticides and pesticides in farms, towns, forests, rivers, and bays throughout North America, Carson’s book made three central points: First, the chemical industry had created a plethora of new chemicals, many poisonous, that were rapidly being introduced into an unreceptive environment. Second, chemicals were being used to kill insects, pests, and unwanted plants with little or no comprehension of their effects on animals, humans, or other denizens of ecosystems. Finally, ignorance of the way that chemicals were dispersed in the world’s ecosystem was widespread, as was the lack of scientific knowledge of the ties and interrelationships that formed ecosystems.

Silent Spring created a nervous awareness that science and technology, followed blindly, could destroy life even when intended for beneficial nonmilitary applications. It showed that scientists, narrow-mindedly pursuing profit, often acted ignorantly and implied that the narrowly focused specializations of modern science could have dangerous consequences. Carson described ecological systems as networks of animals, plants, bacteria, and other life forms interacting in complex and varied ways with each other and with weather, geology, geography, and human populations. Understanding such systems required integration of knowledge from widely diverse specializations. Silent Spring created a worldwide environmental movement strongly aware of the inadequacies of scientific responses to environmental problems.

A looser, more critical attitude toward science, and an appreciation of the “wholeness” of ecosystems, combined with the sixties’ fascination with Eastern religion, found its voice in Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975). A seminal work of New Age literature, The Tao of Physics examined the parallels between Eastern mysticism and modern theoretical physics. Eastern mystical traditions, concerned with balance and harmony and focused on the interrelatedness of all things as well as the inevitable traces of consciousness in every understanding, were described both as anticipating modern science and being validated by it. This worked to confer the prestige of modern science on Asian mystical traditions, already highly regarded for their sophistication and beauty, directing open-minded intellectual attention their way. An increased awareness of these traditions was an important result. The book no longer commands the respect it once did, in part because those influenced by it later found it frequently naive or sometimes incorrect, but it provided a much-needed correction to the Eurocentrism of modern intellectual discussions based on science.

Ian Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1966) was influential in considerably smaller circles than the other books described here. Its importance lies in its being the starting point for the current discussion of science and religion. Only now finding a larger audience, this discussion is currently the most promising intellectual development regarding religion. Issues in Science and Religion summarized historical developments that gave rise to the split between science and religion, carefully outlined stances in both philosophy and science then relevant to religion, and compared methodologies used in both. Part of its [Page 51] importance was that it provided a coherent overview of the issues involved, along with a series of relevant and well-formulated questions. The answers Barbour proposed to these questions—extrapolations from Whitehead’s process theology—were generally not persuasive, but this worked to motivate a search for better answers. Because this search has been conducted as a dialogue with universally valid sciences, it has had the salutary effect of moving participants toward a universal (as opposed to sectarian) understanding of religion. The dawning of the twenty-first century finds a rapidly growing interest in this discussion, manifesting itself in conferences, journals, popular magazine articles, and spillover into the major science journals.

Thomas S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolution, Rachel L. Carson’s Silent Spring, Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics, and Ian Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion are important not only because they were influential in shaping current perspectives about science but also because they have moved those perspectives to a closer accord with the Bahá’í scriptures on science. In brief, the Bahá’í scriptures offer the highest praises to science, holding that the “most noble and praiseworthy accomplishment of man . . . is scientific knowledge and attainment.” But the Bahá’í scriptures also emphasize that science (or more correctly, material science) cannot alone solve the problems facing humankind: “Science cannot cure the illness of the body politic. Science cannot create amity and fellowship in human hearts.” Instead, the Bahá’í scriptures emphasize that both science and religion are needed. They are like the two wings of a bird: “Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.”

Kuhn’s book on scientific revolutions, by bringing science down to earth, has brought the discussion closer to the recognition that there should be a balance between science and religion. Science, according to Kuhn, is not some inaccessibly high bastion of revealed knowledge. Rather, it is the fruit of human intellectual effort and has constructive aspects that play roles rather similar to reasoned belief in religion. The effect of Kuhn’s book has been to encourage a much wider and broader range of thinking that has not only brought about revolutionary changes in science and technology but has encouraged scientists and those inspired by science to seek a reevaluation of the truths of religion as well. Carson’s Silent Spring has had a similar effect. One cannot, she says, simply sit back passively and subscribe quiescently to the thoughts and plans of those who claim to speak with the authority of science if one wishes to safeguard the environment. Everyone has the responsibility to actively pursue and promote scientific understanding. All must actively demand increased understanding of ecosystems and the environment. More than anyone else, Carson has forced the awareness that science requires initiative and support from everyone if it is to be directed at solving crucial and important problems in the world. Capra has furthered the “democratizing” of science by showing that some of the esoteric and metaphysical aspects of science are also found in established religious traditions in Asia. This has not only helped to demystify science but has bestowed some of the prestige [Page 52] of science on Asian religious traditions. Finally, Barbour’s book has raised to international prominence the central theme of the Bahá’í teachings on science and religion— the oneness of science and religion. All four authors have written with the conviction that science is the necessary and most fruitful means of obtaining knowledge but have buttressed this understanding by a recognition of the need to consider and promote science in the larger context of human progress and understanding.

If a global civilization is to flower, the Bahá’í writings hold, it will require “a progressive interaction between the truths and principles of religion and the discoveries and insights of scientific inquiry.” In areas requiring technical expertise, science can greatly contribute. But, as Kuhn and Carson have shown, it tends to be conservative and specialized, responding to external factors—social and cultural—as much as to its own internal goals. The larger issues—the purpose of life and its proper goals—lie in the domain of religion. The books described here, widely influential in the twentieth century, have contributed immeasurably to the now widely recognized need for a dialogue between science and religion, “the two most potent forces in human life.”

[Page 53]

Chaim Potok: Finding Gold
in the Clash of Cultures

A REVIEW ESSAY BY GEOFFRY W. MARKS

Copyright © 2000 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

AS I look back on the books I have read over the last thirty years, the author whose works stand head and shoulders above the rest in terms of their having inspired me to make connections “between contemporary life and contemporary religious teachings and philosophy”—as World Order’s masthead states its aims—are those of Chaim Potok, the Jewish-American novelist, historian, rabbi, and Talmudic scholar.

The themes that run throughout Potok’s work—the clash between religious and secular world views; the tension between faith and science; the individual’s search for truth and response to Covenant, scripture, and divine commandment; the struggle to find one’s way within the matrix of community, heritage, and personal calling—are certainly at the center of my life but are seldom found in twentieth-century fiction. For most writers, they are far out on the periphery, if not off the map entirely—discarded relics of a distant past of little relevance to modern life. Yet for Potok these themes lie at the heart of human experience. Whether through the struggles of the characters in his novels or the lens through which he examines the many layers of the Jewish experience in his historical works, Potok focuses on the human being’s central challenge: how to understand and respond to the Creator and His purpose, how to live in an ever-changing world but hold eternal verities at the core of one’s life.

Historians and readers of history will find in Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jewish People (New York: Knopf, 1978) an epic story told through the eyes of a participant-observer who looks beyond the chain of cause and effect to find deeper, underlying patterns that reveal a people who for four thousand years have endured recurring patterns of calamity, resurrection, renewal, and flowering, a people who time and again have languished in obscurity, but then emerged, through the irrepressible power that comes from a shared devotion to scripture and tradition, in a new and vigorous form, gaining recognition, prominence, and prosperity, only to face yet again a new calamity.

For Potok, human evolution is shaped by the interaction and reaction, the fracturing and fusion that come from the clash of various cultures and faiths. “Old religious beliefs,” Potok writes in Wanderings, “are seldom erased when new ideas appear; both dwell side by side in the same culture that gave them life, often in the same person, like geological layers of living tissue.”

At the end of Wanderings Potok reflects on the state of the Jewish people today and issues a challenge to his coreligionists to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the [Page 54] establishment of Israel and the diffusion Of Jews throughout the Americas and other lands free of “the foul smell of Europe” and arise to build a third civilization:

I feel myself part of that venture. I think of Sumer and its rushing rivers, Egypt and its rising Nile, Canaan and its terraced hills and fertility cults, Greece and Rome, Islam and Christianity, Jerusalem, Babylon, Cordova, Toledo, the Rhine valley, the Ukraine, Vilna, Odessa, Kishinev. What will Jewry make of itself for the next thousand years?

It is not difficult for Jews to remember the historical traumas of their past: the crusades, the persecutions at the time of the Black Death, the Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain, the degrading ghetto centuries, the Chmielnicki rebellion, the Russian pogroms, the massacres during the First World War, and finally the Holocaust, in which the European branch of Jewry perished—the core, the very heart, of both the sacred and secular in Jewish life, the branch that produced the great Talmudists with whom I once studied as well as Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Albert Einstein. In some future time, eyes will gaze upon us as we have gazed in this book upon the worlds of the past. They will say of us either that we used our new freedom—the freedom we sought but were never granted by Europe—to vanish as a people, or that we took advantage of the secret opportunity concealed within the persistent but hidden trauma we are now experiencing—a Jewry and Judaism decisively changed by its confrontation with modern paganism—to reeducate ourselves, rebuild our core from the treasures of our past, fuse it with the best in secularism, and create a new philosophy, a new literature, a new world of Jewish art, a new community, and take seriously the meaning of the word emancipation—a release from the authority of the father in order to become adults in our own right.

The themes of struggle and emergence that run through Potok’s historical works are also played out by the characters of his novels. Potok’s protagonists are vibrant, authentic, and multidimensional people who pursue spiritual quests within a community with which they stand in conflict. Whether it be Danny Saunders (The Chosen [New York: Knopf, 1967], The Promise [New York: Knopf, 1970]), the gifted eldest son of the Hasidic rebbe who was expected to inherit his father’s position as leader of his people but defied his father and community in the pursuit of a more secular ministry in psychiatry; his father, Rebbe Saunders, the embodiment of the Hasidic tradition, who is forced to face the consequences of his son’s decisions; Professor David Malter, the liberal Talmudic scholar and father of Danny’s best friend Reuven, who takes Danny under his wing and nurtures his questing mind; Reuven, who struggles to accommodate the merits of contemporary scientific text criticism while upholding the divinity of the Torah as he prepares for rabbinical ordination; Asher Lev (My Name Is Asher Lev [New York: Knopf, 1972], The Gift of Asher Lev [New York: Knopf, 1990]), who follows his calling as an artist, creating pain in his Hasidic family and scandal and loathing in his community by drawing naked female forms and using the crucifixion in his work as a symbol of suffering, Potok’s characters live honorable, virtuous lives. They exhibit integrity and faithfulness, chastity and fidelity in their relationships. They sacrifice themselves for higher causes; struggle to win the battle over their own selves; fight the prejudices of those around them; face persecution, trial, and calamity. They struggle to balance emotion and reason, art and logic, science and religion, the secular and the sacred. They wrestle with how to honor one’s heritage but not be imprisoned [Page 55] by it. They have quirks, inconsistencies, and weaknesses that make them wonderfully human.

In a talk at Southern College of Seventh-Day Adventists in Collegedale, Tennessee, in 1986, Potok summed up his aims as a novelist:

One of the things we are taught very early is that each of us is a unique creation. We need that sense of uniqueness to take us through the travail of existence. We are taught that we count as individuals, that the group we belong to is a unique group, and that this group counts in the spectrum of the broader community in which all of us live. That uniqueness is then challenged by ideas that inevitably impinge upon us from other kinds of uniqueness.

When individuals are brought up in the heart of such a community or culture, they learn and commit themselves to its values. They usually understand the problems inside that community and are willing to cope with those problems. They see the world through the systems of values of that unique community. At the same time however, they experience important ideas or values that come to them from the general world outside their community. These ideas come to them from the core, the heart of that general world. When a person finds his or her own inherited values to be in conflict with those of the general culture, he or she experiences what I have come to call “core-core culture confrontation.” All of my books are an attempt to explore the dimensions of this kind of confrontation.

To illustrate the point in a personal way, Potok relates an experience he had while walking through “a Japanese market in Tokyo one afternoon”:

I came into a Shinto shrine where an old man with a long, white beard was praying to an idol. Dressed in a tattered grayish suit, unadorned, with a book in his hands, swaying back and forth he reminded me of the old Jews in the Synagogue I used to pray in when I was a child. The intensity of the prayers in that synagogue was no more intense than that of this old man as he prayed to the idol. For a moment, I stepped outside myself, and looking down at what I was seeing, I asked myself, “What’s going on here? Is the god that I pray to listening to this old man’s prayers? Why not? Where are you going to have greater intensity of devotion in an act of prayer than at this moment with this old man in front of this idol? If the God I pray to is listening to this old man’s prayers, what are Christianity and Judaism all about anyway?” There I experienced a dramatic confrontation of cultures. . . .

Potok believes that such confrontations are “profoundly rich.” “As we go about trying to fuse these cultures together,” he concludes, “very often, gold is created. We are all of us made richer as a result.”

There is much to learn from the Jewish experience. Indeed, there is much to emulate: reverence for the Word of God and its place at the center of one’s life; the tradition of learning; respect for parents; the cohesive power that comes to a community that observes the Sabbath, holy days, and festivals; the pursuit of excellence as an expression of faith; maintaining identity and dignity in the face of persecution and genocide. Yet there is also much to avoid, especially the ill effects of religious insularity. Indeed, Potok’s characters fight more against the parochialism and bigotry of their own communities than that of the outer world, and one sees how living in a community kept separate from the world by thick walls of culture and tradition can create an implosion within the psyche that causes a crisis of identity that can lead either to a more integrated and mature world view or to dysfunction and disassociation if the struggle for a new equilibrium is [Page 56] abandoned. For those bent on walking the spiritual path with practical feet, and those interested in creating a community that is distinctive but in a state of dynamic and creative interaction with the world, Potok’s writings open up a rich vein of experience. Moreover, Potok has created a method and style well suited to his themes and in itself worthy of study.

Chaim Potok was born in New York in 1929. He was ordained as a rabbi in 1957 and earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1965 from the University of Pennsylvania. Additional novels include In the Beginning (New York: Knopf, 1975), The Book of Lights (New York: Knopf, 1981), Davita’s Harp (New York: Knopf, 1985), and I Am the Clay (New York: Knopf, 1992). Children’s books include The Tree of Here (New York: Knopf, 1993), The Sky of Now (New York: Knopf, 1994), and Zebra and Other Stories (New York: Knopf, 1998). Another historical work is The Gates of November: Chronicles of the Slepak Family (New York: Knopf, 1996). Biographies include Isaac Stern: My First 79 Years (New York: Knopf, 1999) and Tobiasse: Artist in Exile (New York: Rizzoli, 1986). Paperback editions of Potok’s novels and historical works are published by Fawcett Publications, New York.

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Authors & Artists

STEPHEN R. FRIBERG, Visiting Scholar in the Applied Physics Department at Stanford University, has published more than forty-five scientific articles on quantum mechanics in leading international scientific journals, including Science and Nature.

DIANE HUFF, an MBA candidate at Golden Gate University and a World Order editor, is a development supervisor at CTB/McGraw-Hill. She taught English as a second language for twenty years at Universidad Rafael Urdaneta in Venezuela.

NINA MARIN, a patient service/materials management coordinator, makes a first appearance in World Order.

GEOFFREY W. MARKS received his M.A. and doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. Until recently, he managed a literacy and adult basic education and training organization in Cape Town, South Africa. Among his compilations is Messages from the Universal House of Justice, 1963-1986, published by the U.S. Bahá’í Publishing Trust.

GARY L. MORRISON is the Head of Admissions for the Yew Chung International Schools based in Hong Kong. He holds a master’s degree in Southeast Asian Studies from Yale University and a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts.

PETER MURPHY has published poems in numerous journals, including The American Book Review, the Atlanta Review, and Commonweal. His awards and fellowships include those from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the National Endowment For the Humanities.

KEVIN A. MORRISON, a member of the World Order Editorial Board, holds a degree in political philosophy and theoretical sociology from Hampshire College.

JIM STOKES, a long-time editor of World Order, is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. His two-volume work, Somerset, which includes records of early English drama, will soon be followed by Lincolnshire: Records of Early English Drama.

JOAN IMIG TAYLOR, a frequent contributor to World Order, passed away in 1998 at the age of eighty-four.

MILAN VOYKOVIC, making a first appearance in World Order, received his Ph.D. from the University of New South Wales, Australia. He lectures frequently on topics related to Eastern and Central European history and is currently preparing his dissertation, a study of the culture of thriller fiction in Britain from 1898-1945, for publication.

ART CREDITS: Cover design by John Solarz, cover photograph by Steve Garrigues; pp. 1, 8, 20, 28, photographs by Steve Garrigues; p. 36, photograph by Camille O’Reilly; p, 38, 48, photographs by Steve Garrigues; p. 52, photograph by Darius Himes; p. 56, photograph by Steve Garrigues.

FORTHCOMING

• A special tribute to the Báb on the 150th anniversary of His martyrdom.
• Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, Dorothy Marcic, Gayle Morrison, and Michael Penn consider more significant books of the twentieth century.

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