Open Book: Views & Reviews, No. 4
July, 1991
Copyright (c) 1991 Biblical Horizons
Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton University Press, 1991). Reviewed by Peter J. Leithart.
Valerie I. J. Flint, Professor of History at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, is refreshingly candid about her reasons for undertaking a study of The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. Unfortunately, her reasons are less than commendable: "My own concern, and the concern I hope the present inquiry to excite, is immediately, of course, with unreason and the supernatural in early medieval Europe; but I hope we might deduce, too, that there were and are places for them elsewhere, even now, and even in so apparently `rational’ a society as our own" (p. 12). She believes that early medieval Christians in fact "display a good deal more enlightenment about the emotional need for that magic which sustains devotion and delight" than we do (p. 4). We need, Prof. Flint suggests, a dash of irrationality to spice up the insipid rationalism of a modern, technological society.
Those quotations reveal as well one of the pervasive weaknesses of this book. Prof. Flint uses the terms "supernatural" and "magic" indiscriminately to describe both Christian belief and practice and occult belief and practice. Hence, throughout the book, she alludes to "Christian magic"; Christian magic is, it seems, a "kinder, gentler magic," distinguishable from pagan magic only in the fact that it helps rather than harms its objects. Despite the fact that "Councils and penitentials contain many condemnations of priests who did engage in condemned magical pursuits" (p. 355), Prof. Flint suggests that the priest is the Christian alternative to the magus.
This blurring of definitional lines has exceedingly serious consequences for Prof. Flint’s thesis. The book, after all, purports to be a discussion of a double process in the Christian response to pagan magic. First, there was a process of rejection, followed by a second process of "second thoughts." These "second thoughts" about magic by later Christian leaders (around the 10th century) took the form not merely of "tolerance" of pagan "survivals," but also the form of an "active rescue, preservation, and encouragement" of many of the same practices that had earlier been condemned. To sustain this thesis, however, Prof. Flint must firmly distinguish between Christianity’s view of the "supernatural" and paganism’s, between magic and miracle. But this is precisely what she does not do.
One example of the confusion must suffice. In a chapter entitled "Rescued Means," Flint argues that early medieval Christians employed "heavenly magic" as "an excellent way of combating the prevalence and popularity of the non-Christian earthly magic purveyed by conjurers and witch doctors and necromancers, love charms and potions, spells and the powers of the dead" (p. 128). Among the elements of "heavenly magic" that Christians "rescued" from pagan magic was a belief in the reality and power of demons. Demons were "useful as a means of isolating evil from good, and of inspiring an appropriate fear of it" (p. 146). Now, it is surely true that many of the wild medieval speculations about the powers and habits of demons were derived from extra-Scriptural sources, yet it can hardly be claimed that the medieval belief in demons is a belief "rescued" from paganism. It is, on the contrary, a belief clearly based on the Bible. Prof. Flint, on her assumption that the supernatural is the supernatural is the supernatural, cannot distinguish between firmly rooted Christian beliefs and practices and genuine rehabilitations of paganism.
Despite these serious methodological flaws, however, this book contains a good deal of useful information. She makes several important general points. First, she points out the variety of early Christian response to paganism; there is a continuum of responses, ranging from Boniface at one end to Gregory on the other. Boniface, the apostle to the German Saxons, typifies the confrontational approach; when Boniface saw a sacred oak, his axe hand started itching. Gregory, on the other hand, in a series of long, wise letters to Augustine, the Roman missionary to Britain, outlined another strategy. Instead of destroying pagan shrines and outlawing pagan holidays, Gregory suggested that pagan practices should be adapted to Christian ends. Both approaches, of course, are risky; Boniface risks a pagan backlash, while Gregory risks accommodation.
Second, Prof. Flint shows conclusively that pagan magical practices were readily available to medieval Christians, and constituted a real threat to the Church. As noted above, she so stresses the pressures of the contemporary situation that the biblical and patristic roots of medieval practices are downplayed. Yet, she convincingly argues that the pressure of alternatives to Christianity tempted the Church to rehabilitate and approve less serious forms of magic as a weapon against more serious practices. Astrology provides a case in point. At the Council of Braga (560/65), the belief that human destiny is controlled by the stars was condemned. By the 10th and 11th centuries, however, ancient manuals of astrology began to reappear, suddenly having become respectable. Part of the reason, she suggests, was that astrology was relatively harmless, and could be used as a weapon against more serious forms of magic.
Finally, Flint shows that there were throughout the period complex interchanges among science, magic, and Christianity. She suggests that the Church made common cause with magicians so as to defend their "supernaturalist" worldview from naturalistic attacks. At other times, as with astrology, "scientifically" grounded uses of a practice made it easier for the Church to accept.
In addition to these general historical points, Flint’s book is rich with tidbits of medieval thought and culture: the uses of such biblical passages as Saul’s encounter with the witch at Endor and Ham’s supposedly-magical attack on his father (pp. 333-38); the medieval theology of priesthood (pp. 355-64); the role of the Benedictines in rehabilitating magic; and much more.
The book raises several sets of large practical questions. Most prominently, it raises, as much of recent medieval historiography does, the meaning of Christianization. Clearly, the medieval world was in a real sense Christian, yet it is just as clear that it was far from completely Christianized. Our understanding of the Church’s degree of success in the past will have some effect on our understanding of the Church’s mission today. Similarly, the book raises questions about the appropriate methods of Christianization. When, if ever, do we "baptize" pagan shrines (knowing that idols are nothing) and when, if ever, do we tear them to pieces? Shrines are in fact easy to deal with. More difficult are questions about the Christianization of institutions, cultural practices, habits, customs, social and political structures. To what extent is it the Christian’s business to tear down those structures so as to build anew, and to what extent is it the Christian’s business to work within those institutions to turn them to godly ends? These questions are being pondered rather superficially by many today, and a sobering dose of medieval history might deepen reflection.
In the face of the growing tide of Satanism and the occult, finally, Prof. Flint’s book, despite her intentions, provides something of a cautionary tale. For it shows the budding of what the Reformers attacked in full bloom: the corruption of the Church by paganism. We need to beware, lest, through attempts at cooptation of the paganism that surrounds us, we fall prey to the same corruption.
Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Reviewed by Peter J. Leithart.
The philosophes of the 18th century often attacked Christendom using the tools of anthropology and comparative religion. Rousseau contrasted the idyllic equality of primitive, natural peoples with the bondage of life in society. Diderot explicitly contrasted Christian sexual mores with the morals of primitive islanders, and made sure that Christian morality suffered by comparison. This background makes all the more surprising the embrace of anthropology and comparative religions by students of Biblical studies, which began, as Mary Douglas shows, already in the last century. The old charge that modernism reduces theology to anthropology must be seen to have a double meaning.
Today, however, it is not only modernist Biblical scholars who are fruitfully employing the insights of various branches of anthropology and comparative religion. Anthropology takes seriously many elements of the Biblical world and Biblical teaching that are overlooked by more philosophical approaches to the text. Signs, symbols, gestures, postures, rituals, foods, "taboos" — all these are prominent in the Bible, yet go little noticed by those who seek only to systematize the text. So long as the presuppositions of modern anthropology are clearly understood, and its insights carefully evaluated from a Biblical perspective, there is no reason not to make use of anthropology.
Among the important concepts that anthropology and comparative religion bring to the fore is the idea of place, and especially of sacred space. Jonathan Smith’s slim volume is an attempt to arrive at a theory that synthesizes ritual and place. Among his larger conclusions are the following: place is a human construct, that is, humans are not placed, but rather they place (p. 28); ritual is not a response to sacred, but makes the sacred (p. 105); sacred things should be linguistically understood, that is, they are given meaning only by their place in the hierarchical system, and have no meaning in themselves (pp. 107-9); ritual is the temporal extension of holy space (p. 115).
We cannot accept all of Smith’s conclusions. After all, while it is true that human beings create places out of spaces, and thus humans place themselves and things, it is not correct to say that humans are not placed by anything else. God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden, and we understand that God "places" us throughout our lives. Moreover, for the Christian, Smith’s contention that ritual is not a response to the sacred, but makes the sacred, must be reversed: Worship is a response to truth and to God’s presence. Rightly understood, Christian worship does not call down God, nor it is designed to stimulate the worshipper into an enchanted state.
Smith’s theory, however, is of less interest than his specific discussions. In this review, I would like to highlight several of those points. First, Smith spends the first chapter challenging the late Mircea Eliade’s emphasis on the universality of the "cosmic center" theme. While admitting that Eliade’s construction may be found in some religions, he denies that it is universal. He advances a careful discussion of one of Eliade’s books concerning the Tjilpa (an Australian aborigine tribe) myth of the broken pole. For Eliade, the breaking of the pole was a return to primordial chaos, the loss of the connection with the transcendent world. Smith shows that Eliade’s understanding was based on a Christianized reworking of the original myth, and that the pattern of the myth is simply an event followed by a memorial of the event. Smith’s challenge to Eliade is convincing; yet, this does not reduce Eliade’s usefulness for students of the Bible, where the patterns that Eliade emphasizes are clearly in evidence.
Chapter 3 is an extended examination of the temple of Ezekiel, which he explicates using Louis Dumont’s distinction between hierarchies of status and hierarchies of power. Smith shows that the temple of Ezekiel is a complex spatial hierarchy, with zones of varying degrees of holiness marked off by barriers and by vertical changes.
From Ezekiel’s vision, Smith turns toward Jerusalem, where he examines the intriguing overlap of sacred spaces in that city. He argues that the rediscovery and exploitation of the Holy Sepulchre and Golgotha in the early centuries of the Christian era revolutionized the early medieval liturgy. A visitor to Jerusalem made a pilgrimage of the stations of the city, all of them associated with the life of Christ; at each station a portion of Scripture was read. This new emphasis on the chronology of the earthly life of Christ was reproduced in medieval liturgies and in the medieval Church calendar. Feast days that were once celebrated together were separated, as narrative patterns overcame the more thematic and doctrinal emphasis of the earlier liturgy. Ritual thus overcame the "divisiveness and particularity of space" (p. 95). This correlation of portions of the liturgy with events in the life of Christ relates to what Schmemann calls "mysteriological piety."
Finally, Smith discusses the Zwinglian attack on ritual, quoting Indian scholar J. P. Singh Uberoi to the effect that the source of modern Western rationalism is to be discovered in the Reformation debate over "the mode of presence of divinity in Christian ritual" (p. 99). By dividing between the real and the symbolic, Zwingli ushered in the dualism of the modern age. After Zwingli, modern thought has assumed that nothing can be spiritual and material at the same time: "Spirit, word and sign had finally parted company for man at Marburg in 1529; and myth and ritual was no longer literally and symbolically real and true" (p. 99). Ritual is therefore seen as something that takes place on the surface, and to say something is symbolic is to mean that it is merely symbolic. Again, Schmemann comes to mind, with his contention that Western theology "fell" during the medieval eucharistic debates when theologians first began to oppose "symbol" and "reality."
Smith’s book has a good deal that would be of interest only to specialists in comparative religion or anthropology. Yet, it also contains many stimulating insights into the patterns of Biblical revelation and of Christian history, and points the reader to a wide range of useful literature.
Open Book is published occasionally, funds permitting, by Biblical Horizons , P.O. Box 1096, Tyler, Texas 32588-1096. Anyone sending a donation, in any amount, will be placed on the mailing list to receive issues of Open Book as they are published. The content of all essays published in Open Book is Copyrighted, but permission to reprint any essay is freely given provided that the essay is published uncut, and that the name and address of Biblical Horizons is given.
BIBLICAL Horizons, No. 27
July, 1991
Copyright 1991, Biblical Horizons
The contents of this issue are available in revised form as Biblical Horizons Occasional Paper 18 which can be ordered from the Product Catalogue.
Biblical Chronology
Vol. 3, No. 7
July, 1991
Copyright © James B. Jordan 1991
By James B. Jordan
We have completed our overall survey of Biblical chronology, and now turn to a detailed examination of the Biblical information regarding the chronology of Israel’s kings. The first piece of chronological information we have regarding Israel’s kings is very cryptic, and it serves as an guide to the interpretation of some later cryptic verses we shall find as we go along.
1 Samuel 13:1 literally says: "A son of one year was Saul when he became king, and two years he reigned over Israel." There are two obvious problems with this verse. First, how could Saul become king when he was one year old, and especially since he obviously was much older? Second, how can it be said that Saul only reigned two years, when clearly he reigned for many more (including the whole time David was in exile)?
The actual number of years Saul reigned was 40, according to the inspired saying of Paul in Acts 13:21: "And then they asked for a king, and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for 40 years." This verse settles the larger chronological question, but it forces us to consider again what to do with 1 Samuel 13:1.
One solution, which we find in the New International Version, is to assume that 1 Samuel 13:1 has become corrupted in transmission. A few late manuscripts of the Septuagint (Greek) translation of the Old Testament read that Saul was 30 years old when he began to reign, so that is how the NIV renders the first half of the verse. Then, taking Acts 13:21 into account, the NIV assumes that a number had dropped out of the second half of 1 Samuel 13:1, so that it should read, "and 42 years he reigned over Israel." The NIV footnotes explains that the translators have assumed that Acts 13:21 is giving a round number when it says he only reigned for 40 years.
If, however, there is a way to interpret 1 Samuel 13:1 without changing it, we should do so. Besides, Saul must have been older than thirty at this time, because he had a grown son, Jonathan, who was old enough to serve in the army with him. Saul was probably about 40 when he began to reign, reigned 40 years, and died at about 80 years of age.
Martin Anstey (Chronology of the Old Testament, p. 164f.) points to a better interpretation, but misses the mark. With many older commentators, he states that Saul’s 2-year reign only covers the time when he legitimately ruled Israel. For the remainder of his reign, he says, "are years of the unrecognized and illegitimate tyranny of Saul, the usurper of David’s throne, and the rejected of the Lord" (p. 165).
The problem with this interpretation is that David was not yet anointed, so Saul could not be usurping David’s throne. In fact, David would not be born for eight more years. Also, David never regarded Saul’s reign as an illegitimate usurpation of his throne. In fact, David went out of his way to accord Saul respect as the Lord’s anointed and as Israel’s proper ruler.
The first half of the verse, Anstey maintains, should not be translated "A son of one year was Saul when he began reigning," but rather "A son of one year was Saul in his reigning." In other words, 1 Samuel 13:1 means that Saul has already reigned one year, and has only two more legitimate years to reign. This is how the translators of the original and new King James versions interpreted the clause, for they rendered it: "Saul reigned one year."
It is true that the phrase translated "when he began reigning," is literally in Hebrew "in his reigning," but this is the phrase used everywhere else in the Old Testament to denote the beginning of a man’s reign (2 Samuel 2:10; 5:4; 1 Kings 14:21; etc.) Unless it means something else here, which is what Anstey asserts, we shall have to look for another interpretation.
So, then, first of all, what does it mean that Saul was only one year old when he began to reign? The answer is not hard to find. As I have shown elsewhere, Saul was adopted by Samuel as his son when Samuel anointed him king (1 Samuel 10:9). Thus, Saul was said to be in the company of the prophets, "and who is their father?" (1 Samuel 10:12). Their father was Samuel, and so at this point Saul was adopted by Samuel. (For more information on this, and what it means for the king to have the prophet as his father, see my essay, King Saul: A Study in Humanity and the Fall, available for $5.00 postpaid from Biblical Horizons , Box ??????, Florida).
After this adoption, Saul was made a judge, and he defeated Nahash ("serpent") the Ammonite. After that victory, Saul was proclaimed king (1 Samuel 11).
Now we are in a position to understand the meaning of 1 Samuel 13:1a in context. It means that a year after Saul’s adoption by Samuel, he became king "when he was one year old." This interpretation does full justice to the grammar of 1 Samuel 13:1 as well as to its context.
Now, what about the second half of 1 Samuel 13:1? What were Saul’s two years of reign? Many older expositors link this half of the verse with verse 2, so that it reads: "and when he had reigned two years over Israel, Saul chose. . . ." This is also the way the translators of the original and new King James versions took it. The problem with this translation is, again, that the phrase is a formula used everywhere else for the actual length of a king’s reign (2 Samuel 2:10; 5:4; 1 Kings 14:21; etc.).
Moreover, the King James translation does not make much sense: "Saul reigned one year. And when Saul had reigned two years. . . ." Why not just write, "And after Saul had reigned two years"? If the writer of Samuel meant to say this, why would he use words identical to a formula he will later use to denote the king’s age at the time of his accession, and the length of his reign?
We have seen that in context Saul can properly be said to have been one year old when he became king. Now, the text tells us that he reigned for two years. What happened during these two years. The events are recounted in 1 Samuel 13-15, which record the three falls of Saul. At the end, after Saul’s third and final rebellion against the Lord, Samuel announced to him that the kingdom had been taken from him, and that he had been rejected from being king (1 Samuel 15:26-28). Yet, even though Saul was rejected at this point from being king in a spiritual sense, Samuel continued to treat Saul as king in a national sense (1 Samuel 15:30). Saul’s kingship was not illegal (contrary to Anstey), but it was assuredly doomed.
What we need to learn from this interpretation is this: Sometimes the chronology will date a king’s reign not from his natural birth, but from some other spiritual event in his history, or in Israel’s history. Sometimes the length of a king’s reign will be given in terms of something other than his literal rule over the nation.
What this means for us is that we cannot simply run through the text of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles and add up years, assuming in every case that they measure the literal age of a man when he begins his reign and the literal number of years he reigns. In most cases, of course, such a procedure is proper, but in every case we have to read the information in context, comparing Scripture with Scripture, and make sure that our interpretation is sound before adding up the numbers.
Saul in Context
Back in Biblical Chronology 2:2 (February, 1990), we saw that from the time Israel conquered Canaan to that of Jephthah was 300 years (Judges 11:26), while the time from the exodus (40 years before) to the fourth year of Solomon was 480 years (1 Kings 6:1). That leaves 140 years from Jephthah to the fourth year of Solomon.
Subtract 40 for David’s reign, 40 for Saul’s, and 4 for Solomon’s, and we have 56 years left. There were 40 years of Philistine oppression at the beginning of this period, 18 of which are included in Jephthah’s 300 years. During the first 20, Jephthah, Samuel, and Samson were growing up. During the second 20, Samuel and Samson judged Israel. The battle of Mizpah took place immediately after that, in the year Samuel died and right at the time Elon the Zebulunite, the northern judge, also died (Judges 12:7-12). That leaves 33 years between the battle of Mizpah and the call of Saul, and 34 years until Saul became king at the (adopted) age of one year. Samuel was 74.
This means that Saul was probably born just before the battle of Mizpah. He grew up under the judgeship of Samuel. Samuel was about 35 years older than Saul. Saul’s rejection of Samuel’s counsel becomes all the more culpable in the light of this chronological investigation.
David was 30 when Saul died, so that David was born in the tenth year of Saul’s reign (2 Samuel 5:4). Samuel was 84. Saul had already been rejected for eight years. Since Jonathan was already a member of the army when Saul was rejected, he must have been at least 20 at that time (Numbers 1:3). Thus, Jonathan was about 28 when David was born. If David was anointed by Samuel at the age of 10, this would be at the mid-point of Saul’s 40-year reign, and Jonathan would be 38. Samuel was 94.
If David was 15 when he slew Goliath, Jonathan would be 43 years old at the time he and David formed their friendship. (We should note here that 1 Samuel 16:15-23 is placed in the text out of chronological sequence. These events happened after the defeat of Goliath in chapter 17.) Samuel was 99.
David served as Saul’s armor bearer for several years, and then joined the army at age 20. He became so popular that Saul drove him out into exile, probably at the age of 23 or so. Samuel was 107. Jonathan would be about 51 at that time. During David’s exile, Samuel died (1 Samuel 25:1), perhaps at the age of 110 (compare Joshua 24:29).
David became king when Saul died at the age of about 80, and Jonathan died at the same time, at about 58 years of age. Saul’s youngest son, Ishbosheth, was 40 (1 Samuel 31:2; 2 Samuel 2:10).
Open Book: Views & Reviews, No. 4
July, 1991
Copyright (c) 1991 Biblical Horizons
Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood: The Struggle for World Dominion Between Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev & the Capitalist West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990). Reviewed by Peter J. Leithart.
The subtitle of this massive volume gives a good idea of its major theme. Martin, the hard-hitting former Jesuit, examines the three major players involved in the "millennial end game" to determine the future geopolitical shape of the world. Gorbachev, Martin argues, is seeking the "Marxification" of Western Europe and America; the most powerful of the various Western globalists have a democratic-capitalist globe as their aim; John Paul II, whom Martin insists is a figure of immense geopolitical significance, has a vision that is "religious and specifically Christian from a Roman Catholic perspective" (p. 492), and hence John Paul specifically rejects the secularisms of East and West.
So much could, of course, be surmised from the book’s subtitle. No subtitle — nor a brief review, for that matter — could begin to capture the impressive range of issues and figures that Martin discusses. Several important themes emerge.
Martin stresses that, for all his global significance, the current Pope has no control over his Church. In a provocatively titled chapter, "The Judas Complex," he bluntly charges that many Roman Catholic officials are guilty of malfeasance. The abuse of office involves generally the refusal to teach and enforce Roman Catholic doctrines and practices, and centers on four specific issues: the Eucharist, the uniqueness of the Roman Church, the supremacy of the Pope, and a range of reproductive issues. Martin is a hyper-traditionalist Roman Catholic; he launches an attack on Vatican II’s emphasis on the Church as the "people of God," and summarizes the Catholic teaching that the Mass "presents the real live Sacrifice of the body and the blood and physical life of Jesus consummated on Calvary" (p. 667), a formulation that even Aquinas would be hesitant to endorse. For all his admiration of John Paul, Martin chides him, as he did in his earlier book, The Jesuits, for not weeding his own garden.
One of the best parts of this book is Martin’s classification of the various minor actors on the world stage. He divides them into three general categories: Provincial globalists, Piggyback globalists, and Genuine globalists. Provincial globalists believe that "sooner or later the world at large will somehow take on the ideas and mind-set of the group" (p. 283); when that time comes, the Provincial globalists will fashion the world into a macrocosm of their provincial microcosm. In this first category Martin includes Islam, Evangelical and cultic millennialists, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the other major non-Christian religions. Piggyback globalists, in contrast to Provincial globalists, are "global activists" (p. 292) who have "developed to a high art the ability to ride piggyback on the structural setups of everyone else’s organization" (p. 293). There are three categories of Piggyback globalists: Humanists, Mega-Religionists who are seeking the fusion of all the world’s religions (for example, the adherents of Baha’i), and New Agers.
There are two related categories of Genuine Globalists: Internationalists, whose ranks are filled with "political bureaucrats" whose activities include "forging legal agreements and pacts between nations and, increasingly, between blocs of nations" (p. 313), and Transnationalists, "money men and company men who operate at a certain rarefied level" (p. 313). Genuine globalists, unlike Provincial and Piggyback globalists, have their own institutions to advance their agenda: financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), trade agreements like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT), and international political organizations like the United Nations. The efforts of the Genuine globalists are also aided by the increasing homogeneity of global popular culture; Sean Connery, Martin mentions in passing, is a huge star in sub-Saharan Africa. The power of these genuine Western globalists is not to be gainsaid; several times Martin repeats Bill Moyers’s finding that "just about a dozen or fifteen individuals made day-by-day decisions that regulated the flow of capital and goods throughout the entire world" (p. 326). Yet, Martin argues that the globalist tripod of trade, finance, and security is unstable, largely due to its dependence on the fading hegemony of the United States.
Another of the strong portions of this book is Martin’s insightful description of the convergence of Eastern and Western culture. In this connection, he emphasizes the role of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose revision of Marxism "haunts" both East and West. Gramsci discerned that the true genius of Marxism was its thoroughgoing materialism, and that therefore the true enemy of Marxism was not any particular social class, but the Christian culture that united manager and worker in one civilization. Gramsci’s subtle strategy, therefore, was not to foment proletarian revolutions, which are unlikely to appear, but to "Marxize the inner man" (p. 248), so that Western man would adopt "not merely a non-Christian mind but an anti-Christian mind" (p. 250). Martin’s summary of Gramsci’s program is worth quoting in full:
In the most practical terms, he needed to get individuals and groups in every class and station of life to think about life’s problems without reference to the Christian transcendent, without reference to God and the laws of God. He needed to get them to react with antipathy and positive opposition to any introduction of Christian ideals or the Christian transcendent into the treatment and solution of the problems of modern life (p. 251).
Marxist politics would, Gramsci perceived, follow logically from a Marxist mind.
Martin sees Gramsci’s ghost everywhere he turns. Gorbachev’s smiling Marxism is one version. Before Vatican II, then-Pope John XXIII struck a deal with Nikita Khrushchev in which the Pontiff agreed that the Council would not condemn Communism if the Soviet leader would permit Russian clerics to attend. By avoiding the condemnation of the Communist system, Vatican II left the door wide open for Liberation Theology and hence became the "midwife" for the triumph of Gramsci’s secularist social vision. In the West, meanwhile, social life is being evacuated of any transcendent symbols or norms; happiness has replaced holiness as the chief end of man. Given the convergence of worldview between the East and West, it is no surprise that among the first Western exports to Eastern Europe were foreign language editions of Playboy.
Martin includes as well a fascinating discussion of Poland’s strategic and political significance in European history, in which he recalls early modern Poland’s policy of religious toleration; the 18th-century Partitions of Poland deprived Europe not only of its "northern bulwark," but also of a model of a religiously pluralistic society. At the same time, Martin emphasizes the distinctively Roman Catholic foundations of Polish culture, and claims that the Freemasons were largely responsible for the destruction of free Poland. His discussion of the training of Pope John Paul under Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski is a classic case study in prudent Christian resistance to tyranny.
Martin’s book is sometimes repetitive, and one at times gets the sense that he has oversimplified things a bit. When he attributes thoughts and conclusions to John Paul II, it is not clear where Martin is getting his information. But the strengths far exceed the weaknesses. Martin’s panoramic sketch of the contemporary world is rooted in a Christian understanding of man and God, and his writing is clear, crisp, and tough without being belligerent. In all, it is a book well worth reading.
Open Book is published occasionally, funds permitting, by Biblical Horizons , P.O. Box 1096, Tyler, Texas 32588-1096. Anyone sending a donation, in any amount, will be placed on the mailing list to receive issues of Open Book as they are published. The content of all essays published in Open Book is Copyrighted, but permission to reprint any essay is freely given provided that the essay is published uncut, and that the name and address of Biblical Horizons is given.
