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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University  

President Obama’s Press Secretary, Jay Carney, put it this way: “The President believes that everyone who serves the American people by working for this government needs to hold themselves to the highest standards of public service.” 

Mitt Romney was pithier; he said he’d “clean house.” 

A thoughtful US citizen might well wonder what they were referring to, sadly enough, because there are so many scandals to choose from. 

There is the GSA scandal, first of all: Hundreds of thousands of dollars squandered by a federal bureaucracy for lavish entertaining in Las Vegas and the Napa Valley. The outrage expressed for this one is already bipartisan and utterly emotive. 

But there is also the Secret Service scandal, involving (at present counting) twelve Secret Service officers who engaged in some lavish entertaining of their own, in Cartagena, Columbia, several short days prior to the President’s visit. Here the enquiry had less to do with the expense, and more to do with the sex. Apparently, a number of Secret Service officers had hired escorts—prostitutes, thank you very much—for a late night party at their hotel. 

Conspicuously absent from this list of potential scandals is the report printed by the Los Angeles Times that US service personnel in Afghanistan have been at it again, this time photographing themselves with severed body parts they claim belong to Taliban suicide bombers. 

So we’ve got a choice here, and we’ve got it all: money, sex, and violent disregard. 

My concern has to do with the sinking sense that I know exactly which one of these stories has legs. The military story is already half-forgotten 24 hours later. Apparently those people “who serve the American people by working for the government” get a pass. 

The GSA story has legs, especially as we learn more about what exactly transpired in Vegas and Napa Valley. The money can’t all have been for psychics and for clowns. 

The story that is sure to last is the Secret Service scandal. Because there’s sex involved. Sure, it’s sex somebody allegedly paid for, but nobody is alleging that a US government agency paid for it. These boys paid for their own party. It’s not a violation of public funds that’s at issue here; it’s sex, pure and simple. 

It is dismaying that the sexual obsessions of contemporary US culture could so completely stack the deck against caring about what, by any reasonable moral accounting, is the worst of these three. 

Ever since Homer first channeled his Muse, the mutilation of the enemy corpse has been a symbol of the very worst of which humanity is capable. And such violations almost always carried consequences, immediate ones. As we continue to turn a blind eye to what our own moral callousness vis-à-vis a perceived enemy, alive or dead, implies, invocations of “the highest standards of public service” will continue to appear to be as hollow and hypocritical as our enemies take them to be.

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

One of the dangers in reporting on the Republican presidential primaries, and now the looming presidential election season, is that national issues and agendas drown out any real connection to more local issues and concerns. I was reminded of this again last week as I drove through heavily wooded back roads of Alabama, and saw signage on trees relating to the primary election they held in back mid-March. Over and over again, I saw the name: Roy Moore. 

It was a familiar name but it took a moment to recall why. Roy Moore was elected as the Alabama State Supreme Court Justice in 2000. He infamously arranged to have a two-ton granite display of the Ten Commandments placed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building the next year. He did this in the middle of the night on July 31, 2001, without consulting the other Supreme Court justices. Moore was ordered by a US District Court to remove the monument and refused to do so. His eight colleagues overruled him, and the Ten Commandments monument was removed from the rotunda and taken on a nationwide fund-raising tour. Meanwhile, Alabama’s Judicial Ethics panel voted unanimously to remove Moore from his position on November 13, 2003. 

Moore ran unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for state governor in 2006, losing by a 2 to 1 majority to the incumbent governor, Bob Riley. He tried again in 2010, but came in fourth with only 19% of the Republican vote. In 2011, Moore formed an exploratory committee to consider a run for the White House, but decided the odds were long, even by his risk taker’s standards. 

And now Moore is back, running for his old job as Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. And while he has promised not to try to restore the monument, his views on the very tenuous separation between the Christian religion and the southern states is very clear. 

This time, Moore won his bid, and so now he will be on the ballot as the Republican candidate for State Supreme Court Justice in November. Moore has indicated that he does not wish to pick this fight a second time, and that the centerpiece of his understanding of judicial responsibility is how to adjudicate fairly and efficiently in a time of massive cuts in state spending in all social sectors, but especially for courts and policing. 

Fair enough, but his re-election website  tells a very different story, a story that makes the Ten Commandments monument, the subsequent debate it generated, and his eventual dismissal all central to his entire judicial philosophy. Moore’s own providential career, as he suggests quite clearly, has always hinged on the Ten Commandments. As the six-and-one-half minute video on his website makes clear, when God brought his future wife into his life in 1985, and shortly after they married, she was given the responsibility for decorating their new home. She placed a copy of the Ten Commandments prominently on the wall of that home. 

Later, when Moore took up his duties as Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice, he elected to bring that wall hanging into his courthouse. That decision prompted an immediate push-back from the ACLU, and the video suggests that this was what inspired Moore to up the ante by placing a much larger display in the rotunda in a manner that would be literally impossible to miss. His martyrdom to the cause of an inseparable church and state serves, he suggests, as “a reminder of our nation’s Godly heritage,” as well as of “the divine foundation of this nation.” Moore himself points to the real unity of his judicial career as a “long battle to recognize the sovereignty of God,” and to call the country back to its true identity as “one nation under God.” It is striking that the very next phrase of that pledge of allegiance—”indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”—is omitted from the video on his website. 

It really almost has to be that way. For Roy Moore is divisive, intentionally so. And he speaks far more of God and religious rights than he does of liberty and justice for the non-Christian citizens in our midst. That seems a distinctly backward set of priorities for the chief justice in any state to possess in the twenty-first century. 

Make no mistake about this; this is a big election with real legal and cultural and religious consequence. And it serves as a reminder of why we need to pay attention to more than just the presidential entries on the ballots, come November.

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Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Huff Post

One of the least remarked aspects of the early Christian reporting of Jesus’s death by crucifixion is the following:

Jesus let out a great cry and expired. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom Seeing this, the centurion who was standing near him when he expired said “Truly, this man was the Son of God.” (Mark 15: 37-39)

Make no mistake about the implications here: a Roman soldier presiding over this ghastly execution was converted to the correct view about Jesus by observing the way he died, not by seeing him raised from death. There was something about the death of Jesus that was unique, and even revelatory, according to Mark.

That was not Paul’s view of the matter, by all accounts. The epistolary Apostle goes so far as to say that if Jesus were not raised from death, then the Christian faith is literally nothing more than a vanity.

If there is no rising of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either; and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching has been vain and your faith has been vain. (First Corinthians 15: 13-14)

The consensus view is that Paul’s letters were written in the mid-to late 50s, whereas Mark’s Gospel was written right around 70 C.E., after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by centurions very much like the one he describes observing Jesus’s death.

Some important implications of this dating are the following. It could be the case that Mark was responding directly to Paul’s claims in this letter. It could be the case that he had never heard Paul speak, nor ever read this letter. It could be the case that Mark was responding to the kind of beliefs articulated by Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians, whether Paul was the original author of such views or simply one especially vocal proponent of them.

What is not in doubt is that the death of Jesus on a Roman cross represented a scandal with which all of his early followers had to deal. They dealt with it in many ways. We are witnessing a very significant fault-line here within the foundational texts of the New Testament, a fault-line that calls into question both the nature of Jesus’s death and its ultimate meaning. It’s a major theological parting of the ways, a parting easy to miss because it’s all contained in the same Scripture, point for point and book for book.

Let’s call it the parting of the ways between Good Friday Christianity and the Easter Sunday version.

Other Gospel writers tried to split the difference between these two versions, the one emphasizing the revelatory power of Jesus’s death versus the other emphasizing the revelatory power of being raised from death. According to Matthew, a number of “saints” were raised from their graves in the same moment that the Temple curtain split and Jesus expired; it was the vision of tombs opening that caused the centurion to draw his dramatic conclusion abut Jesus (Matthew 27: 52-54). According to Luke, when the centurion saw Jesus breath his last, he concluded that the Roman authorities had made a mistake: “Surely this man was innocent!” (Luke 23:47), he says.

Because of all this confusion over the details of Jesus’s dying and rising, it is worth taking a closer look at Mark’s brand of Good Friday Christianity. It presents us with a shattering vision, in every way.

It all began in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the night when Jesus’s ministry begins to come unraveled. We are told that Judas had decided to betray his teacher, and Jesus clearly has some sense of this as well. He prays to God, reminding his heavenly father than anything is possible to God, even delivering him from the coming trial. He begs to be so delivered; he is not. Instead, the disciples he asked to stand guard and stand their ground fail him. First they fall asleep, three times; later they flee. Jesus, suddenly powerless, is swallowed up by an imposing crowd and spirited away. His disciples will not see him again.

Jesus was tortured physically and emotionally, humiliated in a way that far exceeds the merits of the case or the normal practices of Roman centurions in their provinces. Mark spares no detail, no matter how horrible. Utterly abandoned and alone, Jesus is even mocked by the two men who were crucified alongside of him; this is another of those details that is easy to miss, but horrible to imagine. (Luke could not stomach this; in his version, one man mocks Jesus, whereas the other defends him, and Jesus promises that they will meet later in paradise, Luke 23: 43). Jesus’s final words are a quotation from Psalm 22, one of David’s purest anguish-songs: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Mark 15: 15:34). Then he expired (Luke couldn’t bear this detail either; in his version, Jesus’s last words are “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” Luke 23: 46).

Mark makes a point of telling us that Jesus’s disciples failed him repeatedly in the end, and failed even to be present at his death. This is shocking. Only some women who had followed him from the Galilee remained: Mary Magdalene, his mother Mary (she is called “the mother of James and Joses,” but since Mark earlier tells us that these were names of two of Jesus’ brothers, Mark 6:3, this seems like a coded reference to Jesus’s own mother), and Salome. These three women stand with Jesus until the end, then presumably also witnessed the centurion’s conversion to the correct view of things.

They also saw an unknown man who was favorably disposed to Jesus’s teaching, Joseph of Arimathea, take responsibility for Jesus’s corpse, and arrange for it to be buried in a nearby grave. That is why it was these three women who returned to that gravesite the next day to dress out Jesus’s body properly, as they had not had time to do the day before, in the whirl of violent Roman events.

That is when they find the stone at the mouth of the cave rolled away, and a mysterious man inside who informs them that “he is not here,” but rather has gone on ahead of them, returning to Galilee. They are ordered to return with this amazing news to the disciples, and especially to Peter, “but they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16: 8).

That is how Mark’s Gospel originally ended; all of the most ancient manuscripts end there. It isn’t the case that Mark doesn’t know of Jesus’s rising; in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus himself predicted it three times. Mark knows of the rising, but Mark does not want to show it to us. That’s Easter Sunday Christianity, not the Good Friday version. Mark’s Gospel is designed as a tragedy, and it ends as one.

(By the way, when Paul reminds his audience in Corinth that he has reported what was reported to him, he makes no mention of these three women. According to Paul, Jesus appeared after his rising to Peter, then to the twelve [whether this included Judas is not clear], then to five hundred people all at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and then in the end, to Paul himself on the Damascus road, First Corinthians 15:3-8).

Of course the main question is, Why? Mark’s Jesus expires with that question on his lips. Why would Mark tell the story this way? Who is he trying to convince? And how could he think this brutal story would be convincing to anyone?

There are several answers to this question, but the first one Mark answers pretty clearly in the passage with which I began. Mark thinks this way of telling Jesus’s story, the Good Friday version, will be convincing to Romans. The centurion who witnessed Jesus’s death did not need to see his rising to be convinced. Jesus’ death convinced him. The Roman audience Mark had in mind was schooled on Greek tragedy, and was very familiar with the idea that certain kinds of outrageous suffering can actually be redeeming. Salvation, in these peoples’s view, was through suffering, not from it.

Jesus’s unique suffering is what Mark urges us to consider, and never to forget.

If you tell the story of Good Friday merely as a prelude to Easter morning, then it is impossible to feel its raw power. Mark takes us as close to catastrophe and the heart of human suffering as a writer can go. Mark leaves us there, insists that we look more closely at the details of the thing. Really he is trying to make us feel it, ever and anew. That seems to be what the yearly commemoration of Jesus’s dying meant to Mark and his followers. And clearly, his Gospel is also a warning to anyone who confidently concludes that martyrdom is the surest path for the follower of Jesus to secure salvation. It was not easy for Jesus, Mark insists; it will be not any easier for you. All of Jesus’s disciples failed him in the end, every one. Romanticizing death, whether Jesus’ or his followers’, is the most tragic mistake the Christian community can make, in Mark’s judgment.

Good Friday Christianity was one important aspect of the early Christian movement, and it remains an important undercurrent in many more contemporary representations of Christian witness. Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke in these tragic tones when imprisoned by the Nazis; he wrote some remarkable letters in the Good Friday spirit before he was killed in prison. Dr. Martin Luthe King Jr. Preached a remarkable sermon in the spirit of Good Friday the night before he was assassinated. Cornel West, echoing his amanuensis, has made Good Friday Christianity, spiced with a liberal dose of his tragicomic blues sensibility, the very centerpiece of an activist, Afro-American Gospel. Such a liturgical sense of the Gospel’s tragic heart is alive and well in the Greek church, these days more than most.

Good Friday is celebrated — or rather, commemorated — in somber ritual tones in churches the world over, for the western churches it takes place this week, and for the eastern churches on the next. Mark is its premier evangelist. On Good Friday, if on any day, it is Mark’s shattered and shattering Gospel that demands close Christian attention, before we move up and away from it to the joyous epiphany of Sunday morning. Good Friday Christianity puts the agony in the ecstasy, insisting that there is no other way.

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By Louis A. Ruprecht, Religion Dispatches

On November 2, 1984, Velma Barfield became the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1962, and the first to be executed in the State of North Carolina after the nationwide moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in 1976. She was 52 years old.

For those of us who had worked on her clemency petition, it was a devastating blow. Then-Governor Jim Hunt was running for a seat in the US Senate against arch-conservative Jesse Helms. Inexplicably, Barfield’s clemency hearing had been scheduled just six days prior to the election. Helms made it a campaign issue, of course, suggesting that, were the Governor to grant Barfield clemency, then his true liberal stripes would be clear to everyone.

By contrast, even the staff at the Women’s Prison in Raleigh had written in support of Barfield’s petition; her work in counseling and religious instruction behind bars even earned her praise from the likes of Billy Graham. Everyone agreed there was no stronger clemency case on death row in the state.

But the governor’s peremptory meeting with those who presented the clemency petition lasted little more than half an hour, and it was clear to us that his mind was already made up.

The Barfield execution came back to life in the following spring, in the form of a letter from an eloquent if quirky citizen of the State of North Carolina; one who was opposed to the death penalty for religious reasons. He had calculated the approximate cost of executing Velma Barfield—not just the lethal injection, but the years of legal wrangling as well. According to his calculations, and given the current population of the state, exactly one cent of his own tax payment had been used to execute Velma Barfield—so he enclosed a check to the North Carolina State Tax Commissioner for 1984, in which he had withheld that suspect penny.

As you might imagine, the state took a different view, taking issue especially with this self-imposed tax break. Their point was that you do not get to pick and choose which state services you are willing to pay for, not even for religious reasons.

Especially not for religious reasons, since there are so very many of them.

The cash-strapped State of North Carolina spent a lot more than one cent to get that penny back. As they should have done, though this citizen’s symbolic point had been made quite eloquently by then.

No Picking and Choosing

I have returned many times to that story as I have listened to Catholic churches, Catholic institutions from hospitals to universities, and two Catholic presidential candidates all insist on what that poor guy from North Carolina was asking for: a religious exemption from paying for state services to which he was opposed on moral and religious grounds.

The state’s answer was simple in the spring of 1985: you don’t get to pick and choose the services you pay for, regardless of the reason.

This case raises an issue of considerably sharper interest, I think, given the Catholic Church’s consistent opposition to the death penalty, to preemptive wars (especially those conducted primarily through interdiction), to abortion, and now, we are told, to contraception.

So why has there never been a similar stink about Catholic exemptions from death penalty provisions? Why no such tax withholding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And why is the state bending over backwards to accommodate these religious sentiments about contraception, rather than some others?

One explanation might be historical: what a difference a generation makes. After thirty years of hammering away at the need for the secular state to accommodate religious objections to virtually every damn thing it does, the state is backpedaling and the Church is on the offensive. From 1979 to 2012, politicized Christianity isn’t just taking its place at the table, it’s trying to rewrite the menu. Anti-feminism has loomed large in that effort.

Clerical Hysteria

Which brings me to a second explanation, one that is not historical so much as it is hysterical. I mean that quite literally.

Hysteria is a term that derives from the Greek word for the uterus, and this is indeed a battle over women’s uteruses: over what goes in them and what stays out. The death penalty and international warfare simply do not energize the sex-obsessed American electorate the way that women’s sexual autonomy does.

What is the problem with contraception? It enables women to be sexually active without paying the price, as it were; the massive biological and sociological and personal costs that may come with unwanted pregnancy and bringing such pregnancies to term.

The end of the sexual act is procreation, from the Catholic perspective; sexual pleasure or expressions of love and affection are not legitimate ends if they are detached from the procreative intention. Contraception enacts that detachment. Moreover, by separating the sexual act from the intention of conception, contraception encourages women’s sexual promiscuity—so goes the Catholic thinking.

Rush Limbaugh’s tirade to this effect, for all of its bile, well describes what is at stake in this debate, for some people. The fact that men’s sexual promiscuity does not register as a concern of equal standing for such persons is itself quite telling.

To my eye, the most significant thing that has happened between 1979 and 2012 has been the significant and at times studied erosion of feminist achievements in mandatory, state-sanctioned equality. I’m talking about the basics here, the principal First and Second Wave achievements:

political equality, symbolized by a woman’s right to vote and to hold political office; and

economic equality, symbolized by the ideal, if not the reality, of equal pay for equal work.

But when the sexual equality of men and women is at issue—not sexual sameness, let’s be clear about that, just sexual equality—then the howling starts, and churches start withholding their money and support.

The debate is, in this sense, hysterical. And there’s a pretty simple solution to it. If you want to run as a Catholic hospital or a Catholic university and not offer the full array of health care services to women as mandated by the state, then don’t implicate yourself in any federal or state funding. Not one penny.

All the World a Stage

Now, I admit that this argument must seem overdrawn at first glance. There seems to be a fundamental difference between a citizen and/or organization withholding taxes for state services with which they do not wish to be identified, and a citizen and/or organization being asked to provide those services themselves.

The problem is that this creates a false distinction between the state as an actor and people as actors. State services are, all of them, provided by organizations and by people. Catholic institutions are claiming an exemption from the obligation to provide such services because they are religiously opposed to them. They are engaging in a selective opt-out, just like the guy from North Carolina.

I am not convinced that any of the charities, hospitals or universities involved in this debate are truly independent religious institutions that receive no federal dollars. An institution’s tax exempt status alone casts that into grave doubt. And these institutions seem not to recognize that one way for the state to insist on its way, and for them to gain their administrative freedom, would be to abrogate that curious tax exemption for an institution as wealthy as the Catholic Church in a time of real fiscal crisis. But clearly, this would lend itself to the very Big Brother vision of the federal government that created this controversy in the first place.

Instead, President Obama, ever the patient compromiser, attempted to create a new distinction, one of limited practical usefulness but great symbolic value, suggesting that insurance providers would be paying for these services, not the institutions themselves.

And that is when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, sensing weakness, intensified its position, indicating that it is not just opposed to being asked to pay for such services, but that any of the Catholics for whom they speak would be asked to provide them. This is fascinating; the Catholic Bishops now appear to be claiming the right to opt out of anyprograms with which they disagree. Here is their response to the president’s proposed compromise, in their words:

[this] continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions.

It’s not just about the money; it’s about Big Brother. And so:

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government.

So the problem is not with government per se, just with the president. This is why it is so rhetorically critical for them to refer to “Obamacare” rather than the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” thereby conveniently forgetting that this was a law passed by the Legislative branch of the US Government, not an Executive Order.

Now, it is perfectly within the Bishops’ rights to petition the US Congress to change a law, or even to vacate it and to start over, as it is their right to question the constitutionality of a law in the courts.

But that is why I began with the story from North Carolina. The question that should be asked is why the US Catholic Bishops are exerting so much energy and money and time on the matter of contraception, with no similarly public cries of outrage against the death penalty, state-sponsored torture, or the two preemptive wars in which the U.S. has involved itself for fully a decade.

Clearly there is a lot more to this debate than the First Amendment. It has to do with one of the most powerful patriarchal religious organizations in the world—be sure to recall that the bishops are all men, every last one of them—placing itself squarely in opposition to women’s sexual equality and autonomy.

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

It is hard to be anywhere in New York and not hear the name of Jeremy Lin. His accomplishments are impressive, and his story is compelling, but he also has clearly filled a void in the New York media world, at least where the struggling Knicks are concerned. 

The anomalous highlights of his meteoric two-week career are well known: a Taiwanese-American point guard who played college basketball at Harvard, one whose masterful timing in the pick and roll nonetheless failed to generate sufficient interest to earn him a starting role on any of the three teams who considered fielding him. 

At least until February 4^th, when the desperate New York Knickerbockers (then 7-15) decided to shake things up yet again, and started him. Lin played tenaciously and intelligently, and he led (if that is the right word) the Knicks to the first of seven straight wins, the last of which came with a buzzer-beating shot of his own against the struggling Raptors (9-21) on Asian Heritage Night in Toronto (“Be my VaLINtine” posted one eager fan). The Knicks’ streak came to a groaning halt last Saturday night with an 89-85 loss to the New Orleans Hornets at home in Madison Square Garden.  I heard those groans loud and clear in the New Jersey bar where I watched the fourth quarter. 

Given his religious commitments, comparisons between Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow were inevitable, I suppose—the up and coming star with some obvious technical flaws but great heart, the spiritual adept turning a struggling franchise around with repeatedly dramatic and last-minute victories they seem virtually to will into being. 

Enter David Brooks who, in a column drafted after the Knicks’ VaLINtine victory, curiously referred to “the Jeremy Lin Problem”.

Brooks refers to “a religious person in professional sports” as an “anomaly,” which seems rather odd to anyone who has witnessed the prayer circles before and after most professional football games, or the finger-to-the-sky salute after most home runs in baseball, but let that lie. It is the reasons Brooks finds the marriage of religion and sport “anomalous” that are worthy of consideration. 

For Brooks, there is an inescapable moral tension between what he calls “the ethos of sport” and “the ethos of faith.” By “faith,” he explicitly limits himself to the three scriptural monotheisms, so we might well wonder if what he really means to underline here is an apparent contradiction between pagan virtue and Christian virtue. 

Reading on, we discover that this is precisely what he means to do. 

The pagan virtues of the athlete, he tells us, are fierce competitiveness, personal ambition, pride, self-assertion and self-dramatization, a willingness to do anything to win.  By contrast, the virtue of the religious person may be captured in one word: humility. 

In other words, you can’t connect the Sermon on the Mount to the gridiron. 

Except that you can.  If you have never read the Sermon on the Mount, and just recall those memorable lines about the meek and the poor being blessed and inheriting the earth, then it’s easy to forget that Jesus in this same Sermon tells his hearers that if their hand or eye offend them, then they should cut them off or pluck them out.  Many a professional athlete engages in precisely that sort of ascetic self-denial throughout their relatively short careers. Religion, very much like professional sport, is a hard code.

But the key for Brooks is this: “[The athlete’s] primary virtue is courage–the ability to withstand pain, remain calm under pressure and rise from nowhere to topple the greats.”  He then casually throws out the conclusion that explains what this essay is really all about.  This athletic ethos, and this list of pagan virtues, is what ultimately explains the contemporary world of corporate, academic, and political life. 

Yowza. Let’s try to break that down. 

For Aristotle, that great summarian of pagan virtue, courage was indeed a headline virtue. It is the first virtue he discusses at any length in the Nicomachean Ethics and it has been remembered ever since as one of the so-called cardinal virtues.  Most of Aristotle’s examples in his discussion of courage come from the battlefield rather than the Olympics, however. 

It was Thomas Aquinas’s great achievement to suggest, and then to display how, pagan and Christian virtues were not necessarily incompatible. The point for Aquinas was to take the virtue of courage off of the battlefield, and to explore its essential qualities in other social arenas… like martyrdom. 

But Paul, himself reputed by the tradition to be a very early Christina martyr, repeatedly used athletic metaphors in describing the life of Christian faith (“I have run the good race,” he suggests most memorably, “I have fought the good fight”). Later Christians, already in the late first and second centuries, regularly referred to the martyrs as Christian “athletes” (it’s a Greek word, after all). 

Why does Brooks fail to see this? Why does he want to drive such a wedge between pagan and Christian virtue? Is he simply suggesting that Wall Street, the modern university and the US Congress cannot be Christianized? 

No, what Brooks misses is that Jeremy Lin is the member of a team, and that the virtues are social phenomena, not individual ones. 

Now, it is the case that there were no team sports at the ancient Olympics; Greek athletes competed ferociously, and they competed alone.  But team sports are the dominant feature of modern sport, and they are an essential feature of modern life. The key for a point guard like Jeremy Lin is not to score on every trip to the basket; the point is to enable someone on his team to score.  He is a brilliant passer as well as a deft reader of set screens and posts. His virtue is his ability to bring a flagging team together. 

That is what modern sports are centrally about. That is why we encourage young people, boys and girls alike, to play them. Sport is a school for virtue, and virtues like courage do not belong strictly to the athlete or to the Christian. They are supposed to belong in every social arena, regardless of confession or creed. 

That is the story embodied in the fledgling careers of Jeremy Lin, of Tim Tebow, of a hundred other athletes whose names we know, and the thousands more whose names we do not. It is primarily a story about teamwork, selflessly working toward common ends and aims, the demanding code of individual excellence married to our moral responsibilities for one another. 

And that is the story the current Republican ethos, an ethos that Brooks’s columns represent quite eloquently, seems most consistently to miss.

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University  

Riding through some winter-soaked mountain villages in the hills of Corfu with a friend, I passed a gorgeous and surprisingly large Byzantine church, surprising to me because we were in the middle of comparative nowhere. 

 “What church is that?” I asked her.

 “The Church of Saint George,” she replied. 

And it suddenly hit me: these people invoke saint’s names the way Protestants invoke denominations. The Church of Saint George, the Church of Saint Spyridon, the Church of Saint Stephen, the Church of Saint Catherine, the Church of the All Holy Mother of God… all Orthodox churches, and all different too. 

On a casual drive through any major American metropolis, you’ll see a similar string of various and varying Christian churches. I’ll take my home city of Atlanta as an example. If you drive down the central section of Ponce de Leon Avenue, a Lutheran Church is followed by a Mormon Church, then a Melkite Church, then a Presbyterian Church, and then an Antiochene Church, all within under a mile. On Peachtree Street closer to downtown, the situation is even more dramatic: two Methodist churches, one Episcopalian, one Lutheran, one Presbyterian, one Catholic, one Baptist and one non-denominational, all within one city mile. 

This is actually a fascinating situation, the significance of which is easy to miss. Every one of these “denominations”—even ones like the Catholic and Orthodox churches that technically claim to be the church universal and not a denomination—is believed to have the right to a place on that public street. They belong on the street. That doesn’t mean that I, in my church on Sunday morning, have to believe that your church’s doctrines are legitimate; clearly, what is preached in these various pulpits on Sunday morning are incompatibles. But I believe in the legitimacy of the church’s presence on the street, whatever I may think of what goes on inside. We are neighbors, after all, and that’s just being neighborly. 

We tend to take this form of denominational pluralism for granted, and hence we often fail to realize historically how it came to pass, and politically what it means. Historically speaking, English and American (and other) streets began to look like this in the 1700s, after 150 years of seething religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics had burned a lot of the older streets to ash. By the early 1700s, it had become clear to most people that the fact of religious pluralism was not going to go away. Protestants and Catholics, most of them at any rate, no longer held onto the hope that one more argument, or one more pitched battle, was going to turn the tide in their favor. No more once-and-for-alls. Religious differences were here to stay. And the new political challenge was how to allow for and accommodate that pluralism, not to deny it or try to make it disappear. 

To see the power and the novelty of the religious rapprochement symbolized by the new  denominationalism, we need look no farther than that most eloquent spokesperson for the European Enlightenment, Voltaire. Exiled from France to England between 1726 and 1728, they were English streets like Peachtree that grabbed the philosopher’s attention. Here is how he described it in his Sixth Philosophical Letter: 

If there were only one religion in England, one would have to fear despotism; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but they have thirty, and they live happy and in peace. 

“Happy and in peace”… that’s the dream of an effective secular politics that takes religious pluralism for granted. 

But now comes the twist. Something else had happened to England between the early 1500s, when the trouble and the beheading began, and the early 1700s when thirty different religions seemed like a happy compromise. Namely, England got richer. A lot richer. 

The British Empire and British Navy, sure. But think the East India Company. Think the global commerce that empires are designed to protect. To the eye of many a wealthy British burgher, religious wars were simply bad for business. 

I’d like to suggest that we see something similar happening in the United States in this election season. Until fairly recently, the field of Republican presidential hopefuls looked a lot like Peachtree Street in Atlanta: an evangelical Protestant who used to be Lutheran, who was born in Iowa and lives in Minnesota; a lukewarm Mormon who was born in California and recently returned from China; a lukewarm Baptist who was born in Tennessee and lives in Atlanta; a fiery Roman Catholic who was born in Virginia and lives in Pennsylvania; an evangelical “born-again” Protestant who was born and raised in Texas; a Mormon who was born in Michigan but who has lived and worked all over the place; a former Baptist who used to be Lutheran and later converted to Roman Catholicism, who was born in Pennsylvania but also lives near Atlanta now; and a nominal Baptist who was born in Pennsylvania, lives in Texas, and almost has to be an atheist to be consistent with his Libertarian philosophy. What power could be more absolute and unchecked than God’s, after all? 

Now that is one complicated American street. And sure, we’re down to just four candidates now, but the situation is no less complicated for the reduction: one lifelong Roman Catholic; one Roman Catholic convert; one Mormon; and one quasi-Baptist Libertarian. And let’s face it, we’re really down to two: a lifelong Mormon and a Roman Catholic convert. So who represents the religious mainstream of the United States? The point is, there isn’t one. There never really was. Because religious wars are bad for business. 

None of this is to say that religion does not matter, deeply so, to some of these candidates and to some of their constituencies. There are a great many evangelical and fundamentalist churches in which the idea that the Pope is Antichrist is preached on a regular basis, and these tend to be the same churches that argue forcefully for the view that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is an heretical Christian offshoot. But precious few of these churches argue that a Catholic or Mormon church does not belong on an American street. Their right to exist is fairly settled. 

Can a Mormon or a Catholic run for president? Of course they can. In this election cycle, they are being asked to run against a US President who was born in Hawai’i and lived in Chicago, who was not raised religiously, but who came to a fairly loose and undefined Christian faith that is Protestant in its basic tenets, and whose middle name (Hussein) leaves some still confused about his true religious identity. 

(Mitt, Newt, Barack… they’ve all got funny names this time around.) 

There is a lot more to this campaign than religion and a lot more to North American religious pluralism than doctrine. It’s about the right to happiness and the quest for peace. Both of which are good for business. 

In 1980, Ronald Reagan presided over a powerful new coalition that linked long-entrenched business interests with a conservative Christian social agenda. That coalition proved formidable for a decade. Since then, the Christian conservative members of the Republican coalition—those who are honest with themselves, at any rate—have begun to wonder if they weren’t being played all along. Whenever the chips are down (as they are now) and a choice between economic conservatism or religious conservatism is demanded, then the Party goes with business. 

Saint George or Saint Spyridon doesn’t really matter here. What we have learned since the South Carolina primary, and re-learned in Florida and Nevada, is what matters most in this moment of deep economic unsettlement. Mitt Romney declared an income of $21 million last year, the vast majority of it from investments. Newt Gingrich declared an income in excess of $3 million, the vast majority of it suspicious-sounding. 

In other words, these are very wealthy men who are very political and very, very well-connected. And this is what their Party represents.

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

The Super Bowl continues to be one of the most visible and influential cultural events in the United States. For that very reason, it always warrants a closer look. This year was no exception, but what the look reveals is unexpected. 

Two years ago, the big story was not about the game, but rather about the advertising. The family of Tim Tebow was alleged to be involved in an anti-abortion advertisement that would suggest that they had considered aborting Tebow, in order to put a face on the loss of potential represented by abortion. The ad proved to be pretty benign, but the controversy lingered. The whole debate was shot through with religion.

Last year, the main story was the epic battle between two quarterbacks and two styles of quarterbacking. Aaron Rodgers won that contest with Ben Roethlisberger, securing the victory for his team and the MVP award. I read this story mythologically, suggesting that Rodgers played Odysseus to Roethlisberger’s Achilles and that what we saw was cleverness and elusiveness beat out brute strength. The religious valence was there (it always is, where myth is involved), but you had to dig for it.

This year, unsurprisingly, all the hype was about politics and regionalism; it is an electoral year after all. Governor Chris Christie offered the pithy observation on the Sunday talk shows that “the Giants train in New Jersey, they play in New Jersey, and most of their players live in New Jersey. The only thing New York about them is the NY on their helmets.” That being said, the Giants, whether belonging to New York or New Jersey, and the Patriots, belonging emphatically to Boston, are both identified with one of the two historic centers of American Independence, the Boston to Philadelphia corridor (northern Virginia was the other, but none of their teams went far this year). So it was figuratively as well as literally a contest between patriots and giants. 

Political pundits before the game reveled in the predictive symbolics of Super Bowl championships: the Patriots beat the Carolina Panthers in 2004, and the Republicans took the White House (Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was a vocal Bush-supporter that year).  The Giants beat the Patriots in 2008, and the Democrats took the White House (Giants quarterback Eli Manning did not weigh in publicly on that presidential campaign).

Yet the real story in the pre-Super Bowl build-up this year concerned Eli’s brother, Peyton Manning. The Super Bowl was played in Indianapolis, in the home stadium of the elder Manning’s Indianapolis Colts. Speculation continues as to whether Peyton Manning’s storied career (four times named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player, as well as the MVP in his team’s 2007 Super Bowl victory) is now over. Manning was sidelined for the entire 2011 season with a neck injury that required several surgeries and the fusing of some vertebrae; his rehabilitation has been agonizingly slow. 

Some fear that he will be unable to return to the game, and others fear that he will be traded from the Colts organization in the off-season, so that the team can begin to re-fashion itself for the post-Peyton era. Peyton Manning will be 36 years old on March 24^th. 

Football is not for the faint-hearted, and it is rarely a game for those older than Peyton Manning is now. The average career for a professional football player is roughly six years (not three as commonly reported). Quarterbacks can last quite a bit longer than that (who can forget Brett Favre’s decision to return to the game he loved for one season too many?). But football simply is not a game for old men.

The half-time show—fully one half hour long now, and an entirely independent ritual feature of the Big Game—tells another story. The Super Bowl organizers regularly select older singers/performers for their half-time theatrics: the Rolling Stones, the Who, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. When the organizers did go for youth, in the guise of Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson, a notorious wardrobe malfunction and FEC sanction were the results. 

This year it was Madonna, who performed admirably, and played artfully with religious forms. She entered the stage as Cleopatra, a priestess surrounded by her male court, in an explicit inversion of the gender stereotypes of most Super Bowl advertising. And she ended the performance with a rousing rendition of “Like a Prayer.” But she was wearing four inch heels, and has lost a half step over the years; her demanding choreography was awkward and she had trouble with the stairs. It took a moment, but you gradually came to realize that this timeless rock diva is now 53 years old. And so in the half time show, we were watching her gradual transformation into an elder priestess of sorts. Cleopatra with experience; the good don’t all die young.

Something similar happened in the second half of the game, after Madonna’s departure. Like last year’s Super Bowl, the game was billed as another epic contest between two quarterbacks and two quarterbacking styles. Tom Brady is cool, almost aloof at times, utterly unflappable under pressure, and possessing balletic grace and surgical precision. He shattered Joe Montana’s record for the most consecutive completions in a Super Bowl (16 in all).

Eli Manning is quite different, flashier when he is on, but far more inconsistent. Unlike Brady, he emotes, frowning shakes of the head at each at every three and out. His boyish face makes him look like a high schooler at times; his mind seems to wander, and when it does, his passes fall short. But then there come the flashes of real brilliance. Manning can be admirably self-deprecating, possessing an endearing aw-shucks quality evident in his repeated reference to his teammates as a family. He just turned 31 years old in January, and does not look it. Tom Brady, who will be 35 in August, does.

Every great quarterback is only as great as the receivers who help make him so. Both teams had assembled extraordinarily gifted receivers, bruising tight ends and wickedly fast wide receivers. But several of the Patriot receivers were playing hurt, and that arguably is what lost them the game. But so, too, did age. 

The game seesawed back and forth all night, neither team able to get separation on the scoreboard. As anticipated, the game would go down to the last play. 

But how it did so was instructive. With time running out and the Giants well within field goal range, the plan was to take the clock down to near zero, to keep Tom Brady off the field. But running back Ahmad Bradshaw could not counter his habitual drive to score, failed to stop himself, and tumbled ass-backwards into the end zone with just under one minute left in regulation. Manning was yelling at him not to cross the line as he fell. Ahmad Bradshaw is just 25 years old.

It had all the makings of a typical Patriot comeback, born of vast experience and a seasoned general leading the way—the long march down the field with precision passing and nonpareil management of the clock. And it might have worked out, had two receivers in a row not dropped balls thrown to them. Wes Welker’s drop was almost shocking, given how sure-handed he has been. He is just 29 years old. 

So it all came down to a last “hail Mary” pass (think Madonna) to the end zone as time expired. Brady’s pass was true, the ball tipped in and out of one receiver’s hands, and arguably the most talented of all the Patriot receivers, tight end Rob Gronkowski, might have snagged it before it hit the ground. But he was playing with a badly sprained ankle that visibly hampered his running all night long.  He is just 22 years old.

In the end, the evening belonged to Eli Manning, who was named the MVP of the game. He was asked how it felt to win this game in the stadium that was symbolically his brother’s house. Eli was not having it; he deflected the question by noting that it feels good to win this one anywhere. He was not going to talk about his brother, nor about Tom Brady, this evening. He has one more Super Bowl victory than his brother now, and one less than Tom Brady. He is mature, seasoned, a man. He has entered that rarified window in the world of professional sports where his intelligence, experience and emotional maturity are married to physical gifts that have not begun to taper off. The window from ages 30 to 36, say, when certain supremely gifted souls come into their own. 

Something happens then. Many religious traditions speak to that fact. Aristotle suggested that a person was incapable of serenity, the real goal of the philosophical life, until he has reached that significant spiritual age. We watched young men compete with mature men, in order to play out life lessons better understood by the elders. And in so doing, we celebrated what all rituals, religious and otherwise celebrate: that we are all links in a sacred chain of meaning, whose significance must be explained to us by those who have gone before.

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By Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Georgia State University

Time would not rob them of their power, but would add wisdom to their strength; the Fathers would be subject to the people, and the consul to the Fathers…..Livy, History of Rome, 2.56.16

I recently published a piece at “Religion Dispatches” about the Roman winter festival called Saturnalia.  A commentator noted that I had inadvertently confused (or rather, conflated) two very different divinities in that piece: namely, the Greek figures of Cronus and Chronos. I was grateful for the opportunity this provided to say what I should have said then with a bit more care and clarity, and the detail of these reflections seems perfectly suited to the non-at-all nerdy audience at “Religion Nerd.”

So here goes.

Greek and Roman religions were religions without canonical scriptures; their mythology is notoriously complex and, to modern eyes, often contradictory.  It is important to add that this does not mean that there was no religious writing in the ancient world; just the opposite, in fact. There was an excess of religious writing.  And of religious images, as well. There is so much writing from the ancient world about the gods, in fact, spanning so many centuries, that it is well-nigh impossible to make systematic sense of it all.

Add to that the fact that Rome later adopted a great deal of Greek mythology as her own, creatively adapting all that she borrowed, and you have the recipe for some very creative confusion indeed.  My original essay at RD was thus a very brief foray into what the Puritans would have called a “religious mingle-mangle.”

The Roman poet Horace famously quipped that “Captive Greece had conquered her conqueror,” as a way to describe the newfound Roman fascination with Greek mythology in the last century before the Common Era.  But the conqueror was still a conqueror, and so the later Romans felt free to make Greek myths over in Latin dress.  As we will see, if we were to name a single religious trope that fascinated the ancient world to the point of obsession, then it was sons taking over from their fathers, often wreaking havoc on what they took.           

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Saturn (Cronus) and his relationship to Time (Chronos). 

Perhaps the best known version of the story of Cronus comes from Hesiod’s Theogony, his long poem about the coming to be of the old gods.  Hesiod tells us (126ff) that Mother Earth and Father Sky bore a large number of children, among them Ocean, and Hyperion, and Memory, as well as the goddesses Theia and Rhea (later on, Earth bore the Cyclopes and other Giants as well, according to Hesiod, though later authors would disagree with almost every aspect of his divine genealogies).

The youngest of the sons of Earth and Sky was also the most rebellious: this was Cronus. And so begins a story that recurs throughout the early portions of the Theogony: a father is jealous of his offspring and tries to erase them; the sons supplant the father and take his place in response. 

In this case, Sky has taken to burying each of his offspring in the Earth until she groans under the pressure of it all.  She shows her son Cronus a vicious weapon in the form of a sickle, and together they lay a trap for the Sky.  When he returns to Earth, bringing Night with him in train, Cronus castrates him; the drops of blood give rise to the Furies and more Giants, whereas the severed genitalia Cronus tossed into the Sea gave birth to Aphrodite out of the bloody foam.  As I have already noted, other Greek and Roman literary figures remembered these events very differently; Hesiod was never canonical in the ancient world. 

Still later in the Theogony (435ff), Cronus impregnates his sister Rhea, and she bears Hestia, Demeter, Hera and Zeus.  But, in strange imitation of his own father, Cronus devoured each of these children in turn, until Rhea substituted a stone for the infant Zeus, then bore him off to Crete where he was hidden away in a cave and cared for by some mysterious figures called the Couretes. This story is related by the Roman poet Lucretius in De rerum natura 2.633ff, and according to another second-century Roman writer, Pausanias, one of the major mythic events commemorated at Olympia was this mysterious saving of the infant Zeus (Guide to Greece, 5.7.6ff). 

After a year, Zeus had grown to manhood and supplanted his father, Cronus, who vomited up the other children he had devoured, initiating the reign of the Olympians.  It is hard to imagine a more inauspicious start to an alleged reign of peace. 

Yet that it precisely what the Romans did with the myths of Cronus; they re-fashioned him into a symbol of what they called “the Golden Age.” As is often the case with myths, this happened in a fairly scattershot and unsystematic way.  That’s how religious poetry usually works (in fact, in another poem called Works and Days, Hesiod himself refers to the Golden Age of Cronus–consistency from one poem to another was not considered an ancient virtue). 

In the later Roman period, the figure of Saturn was associated with Cronus, but a Cronus very different from the one Hesiod described in his Theogony. “Crooked-counseled and terrible,” Hesiod had called him (138-139).  Not so the Romans. 

The Augustan poet, Virgil, identified himself explicitly with the old Hesiodic (and Arcadian) tradition of Muse-inspired poetry (especially in his Eclogues, 6.64ff).  But when he claimed to be singing a Hesiodic song himself, he referred to Italy proudly as “the land of Saturn” (Georgics 2.173). No Greek would have referred to the Greek mainland as “the land of Cronus”; such a boast would have seemed bizarre. 

What Virgil meant by that name is complicated.  He essentially re-invented this Saturnus/Cronus figure as a mythic, and subsequently deified, king of Latium who reigned during the Italic Golden Age (Georgics 1.336; 2.406, 539; 3.93; and Aeneid 6.794; 7.49; 8.319; 12.830).  He also regularly referred to the Olympian gods as “Saturnian”… and meant it as a compliment.

It was the Roman poet Ovid who probably did the most to popularize a new Roman way of looking at the myths of Saturn/Cronus, in his Metamorphoses. This marvelous book is far more than an encyclopedia of Greek and Roman mythology; it is really a book devoted to the fundamental tropes of flux and change, themes uniquely suited to the solstice, and to the trope of becoming something other than you were, a theme uniquely well-suited to a party like the Saturnalia. 

Ovid takes this image of the sons supplanting their fathers to new poetic heights.   what we soon discover is that Ovid’s entire epic is really an extended meditation on time.  Ovid begins (1.89ff) with an account of Saturn’s overthrow.  But he remembers Saturn as presiding over the world’s one and only Golden Age; the Olympian gods who overthrew him presided over an Age of Silver, not Gold. The third Age Ovid calls an Age of Iron, and he imagines it as fundamentally inferior to Saturn’s Golden Age in every way, with rebellion against the heavens breaking out continually.  There is no belief in progress in Ovid’s topsy-turvy poetic world, this world of continuous-change-in-time.  Saturn reigned at the very beginning of all these changes, and thus he was fast becoming the god for whom the word-play between Cronus (Saturn) and Chronos (Time) began to make sense, in a Latin world that did not speak much Greek.

This is made explicit by the Roman philosopher and statesman, Cicero, in his famously aporetic  reflections on the divine, De Natura Deorum ii.64:

By Saturn again they denoted that being who maintains the course and revolution of seasons and periods of time, the deity actually so designated in Greek, for Saturn’s Greek name is Kronos, which is the same as chronos, a space of time. The Latin designation ‘Saturn’ on the other hand is due to the fact that he is “saturated” or “satiated with years” (anni); the fable is that he was in the habit of devouring his sons – meaning that Time devours the ages and gorges himself insatiably with the years that are past.

This is all important poetic and philosophical evidence for what Saturn was becoming in the Roman mind after the conquests in Greece: the symbol of a nostalgized, purer past, one lost in the fluidity of time and the frenetic repetition of conquest.  It’s a hell of a poetic message for the newly emerging empire of Augustus that was already bragging about its “eternity” (and so it’s small wonder that the emperor eventually exiled Ovid from Rome to the Black Sea, though there are debates still today about what actually prompted this).

According to Livy, the Saturnalia was established very soon after a temple to Saturn was built in Rome (History of Rome 2.21.1).  He also claimed that the public feasts later associated with the Saturnalia came quite a bit later (History of Rome 22.1.1).  It was during the time when Hannibal’s forces were ravaging the Italian peninsula, Rome’s darkest days. The divine signs were uniformly bad: javelins spontaneously combusting; shields sweating blood; soldiers struck dead by lightning; glowing stones falling from the sky; even the most sacred statues along the Appian Way and in Rome herself had broken into a sweat.  These were very disturbing developments for a people notoriously superstitious by nature.

So the Roman Senate ordered the Sybilline Books to be consulted, then made gold offerings to Jupiter, silver offerings to Juno and Minerva, called for public feasts (called lechisternium) with images of the gods reclining on couches joining the people, then ordered an enormous series of blood sacrifices for Saturn. The irony of these symbolic religious reversals could not have been clearer: blood sacrifice for the alleged king of the Golden Age, gold for the son who supplanted him, silver for his wife and daughter, iron to slay the sacrificial victims, food and drink for all the gods. That was the topsy-turvy world the Saturnalia was designed to create, and it was all born of blood.

With the advent of Christianity in the empire, another son supplanted the religion of the fathers—but only up to a point.  The trope of fathers, sons, and sacrifice would receive yet another reinterpretation as Christians began to develop their language of the divine Trinity and salvific sacrifice.  In this sense, the feast for the Second Person of that Trinity, the Son—a son very unlike the Greek Cronus, and yet very much like the Latin Saturnus–would be held at the same time that the Roman Saturn had once enjoyed his.

Cronus… Chronos… Christ. That was the mythic connection I was trying to suggest when I concluded that “Saturnalia is a profound mythic meditation on death and rebirth, the refreshing cycles of natural time that make it seem obvious to celebrate life in the deadest season of the year, and to remember our losses at the high-point of the party.”

*****************

Related articles on Religion Dispatches:  Cronus, Chronos, and Christ  and For Saturn’s Sake, Remember the Dead

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Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Georgia State University 

I suppose it was inevitable. Since nature and the military both abhor a vacuum, the recent announcement of the military draw-down in Iraq almost inevitably meant that we’d soon be re-deploying our military forces somewhere else.

Still, the northern coast of Australia came as something of a surprise. President Obama announced yesterday that 250 US Marines will soon be shipping off for rotating six-month tours at an Australian military base on the north central coast of the island, near a city called Darwin. Their numbers are expected to escalate to 2500 in fairly short order, along with military equipment and long-range aircraft.

Since they’re headed to Darwin, it was also probably inevitable that this announcement, something of a curiosity on the evening news cycle, would be read as an exercise in the geopolitics of “survival the fittest.” In this case, the new troop deployment is seen as a symbolic check on growing Chinese influence in the region, especially noteworthy after several recent incidents prompted by the Chinese Navy’s intrusion upon the territorial waters of several neighboring states.

So the whole thing has been read as a check on Chinese power.

Perhaps it is that, but it is surprising that no one consulting the map has noticed what stands in between Darwin, Australia and the Chinese mainland… namely, the most populous Muslim country in the world, Indonesia. 

It is unclear that the Australians would accepted a deployment that had been framed for them in anti-Chinese terms. China is one of Australia’s biggest trading partners and they seem far less worried about an emergent China than American pubic officials have been of late.

But the Australians have been active and enthusiastic supporters of the War on Terror, and this deployment–assuming it is aimed at Indonesian-backed South Pacific terrorist networks more than the Chinese Navy–serves that purpose nicely.

This is not about a new threat but an old one. It is not about an emerging Chinese threat, whether miliary or economic at all.

No, this is about al-Qaeda and Islam.

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

In an essay I recently published at “Religion Dispatches,” I used Gary Laderman’s fascinating concept of “Republicanicity” as the launch-pad for the suggestion that what separates developments in the Republican Party from anything happening among the Democrats is simply this: the Republican Party is undergoing a battle to define its orthodoxy, a battle that has no direct parallel to arguments and power-struggles taking place on the political left. 

In short, a plurality of voices, sharing little more than a name in common, is currently in the process of sorting out a platform to which all bearers of the name might reasonably agree. 

I compared this to developments in the period of early Christian formation, since what we have learned in recent years is that orthodoxy doesn’t come first; heresy does. Put another way, the diversity of opinions all going by the same name, ‘Christian’, eventually created an untenable situation in which everyone recognized that all of the positions then bearing the name were no longer compatible. All Christians might refer to Jesus of Nazareth as “Christ” and as “Son of God,” or even as the Second Person in the Divine Trinity, but as for what those names meant and how they were to be imagined, opinions diverged wildly. 

The gospels were composed as one attempt to answer two burning questions lying at the heart of this new movement: Who was he? and Why did he die that way? Their answers differed as well, and in John’s case, his answers were put in such a way as to reject the other three gospel versions (Jesus never prayed in Gethsemane, according to John, because Jesus never doubted or wavered. He and the Father were one). 

It is important to keep in mind that these debates were never just debates about theology; they were political debates about who would control the movement, and that question always hinged on access to money, among other things. 

One of the most shocking examples of how wide a range of beliefs within a single movement can be may be found in the so-called Gospel of Judas.  In this gospel, we are informed not only that Judas never betrayed his Lord, but that he was actually the most favored disciple, deemed so trustworthy that he was called upon to perform the most difficult task of all: ensuring the death of his master.  In so doing, Jesus assures him, “you will release the man within me.” Jesus is apparently referring to the spirit that is housed a bit uneasily in a bodily frame. Hence Judas did not engage in an act of betrayal, but rather in an act of deliverance and liberation. 

Who was he? A Knowledge Savior, come to earth to show us the path to liberation. Why did he die that way? To illustrate the fact that death is the release into spirit, not a loss and not a tragedy. To render the most tragic kind of death imaginable as an anti-tragic triumph was the clearest symbolic way to make this point. Naturally, the other gospel writers (those who identified with other members of Jesus’s inner circle) had a hard time with that. Particularly because the people making this highly counter-intuitive argument were rich elites whose belief that they alone had access to secret knowledge made them the most obvious candidates for leadership positions in the movement.

Turn now to the fascinating attempts at defining party orthodoxy that we have witnessed at the last several Republican debates. 

All of the candidates share the name ‘Republican’, but that is about as far as their agreement extends. The two central questions around which this entire election cycle will pivot is, Who are we? And How did we let Obama take the White House? Answers to any given question seem ultimately to be addressed to one or both of those prime party directives. 

A fascinating moment in the Tea Party debate came when Governor Perry’s orthodoxy was challenged in light of an executive order he issued requiring all Texas schoolgirls to receive a vaccine for the sexually transmitted virus responsible for cervical cancer. The other candidates went through an orgy of recrimination, conniption after conniption all designed to call his orthodoxy (and his moral judgment) into question. 

His Abstinence Only credentials were questioned. His Libertarian credentials were questioned (especially by Michelle Bachmann’s sudden discovery of the importance of, well, a woman’s right to choose). And his medical judgment was questioned (in one of the true howlers to come out of that debate, Bachmann’s since-retracted claim that the vaccine caused mental retardation in at least one instance). 

Who are we? And how did we let Obama take the White House? With reckless sniping and self-serving Know-Nothingism such as this, one suspects. 

But none of this captures the essence of what is unfolding. Much as in the case of early Christian formation, arguments over orthodoxy were not just arguments about theology. They were arguments about money and power. Yes, Luke tells us that the early Christians pooled their resources and gave each according to his need. But the next thing Luke tells us is that some Christians kept their money in hiding and when this was discovered, Peter—through a terrifying exercise of power—called them out publicly and witnessed the couple drop dead as a stone. 

The real story of the executive order issued by a man who also appeared to revel in the 234 executions Texas has performed on his watch is a story about money, Merck money in this case. Yes, as the Governor insisted, the Merck corporation donated $5000 to his gubernatorial campaign (and he was offended, he sniped, that Sister Bachmann would suggest that he could be influenced by such a sum–he’s not that cheap, it would seem). 

Indeed he is not.  Merck donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Republican Governors group he chairs, and more besides.  And they produced the vaccine to which every child in Texas was required to submit. And so on: you line my pockets, I’ll line yours.  Despite his repeated poor performance sin these debates, Rick Perry continues to raise money like a juggernaut. And he is not lining his coffers with $100-200 contributions from the hoi polloi; no, he is after the big money.  His campaign is currently running on enormous infusions of cash from a select few corporate interests committed to his candidacy.  It is striking that his arguments and ideas have nothing to do with their support; his behavior in the state of Texas does. 

Judas is not only the most maligned figure in the New Testament; he is the disciple about whom there was always the greatest confusion.  In the New Testament itself (the Gospel of Matthew versus Acts of the Apostles), we see two very different views of the man.  In one version, he regretted what he had done, threw the money back in the faces of those who paid him for his betrayal, and committed suicide.  In the other, he took the money he was paid for his betrayal, bought himself a plot of land, then dropped dead as he walked through the fields surveying his profits.  Outside the New Testament, as we have seen, he was remembered not just as a disciple, but even as the favored disciple, the man with the most difficult job in the entire movement. 

I am suggesting that, while we have not quite reached the magic number 12 in the current Republican field (at least not yet), Rick Perry is currently playing the role of Judas to the tormented advocates of orthodoxy.  His latest problems—aligning himself with a minister who referred to Romney’s and Huntsman’s faith as a “cult”—seem to place him slightly at odds with other followers of the Lord. 

The name for the group that penned gospels like the Gospel of Judas was “Gnostic.” It derived from the Greek word for “knowledge,” and they got the reputation for being Christian know-it-alls.  But they were also notoriously among the wealthiest and well-connected of Christians. 

Taking the longer historical view, then, Rick Perry appears as the new Judas-figure in a movement uncertain about its path. As for whether his gospel will become the new Republican orthodoxy, I have my doubts. The Gnostics may have appeared to be in the ascendant for a time, but they lost their influence in the end and were eventually declared heretical. This much is certain, if Governor Perry manages to sell his heterodoxies, then the real story will be the money it took, not the theological arguments he expressed.

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

I suppose it was inevitable that the evangelical push-back within the Republican Party would eventually make Mormonism an issue, no matter how hard the Republican establishment tries to make it go away. 

And now it’s come at last–an entire week of Republican presidential hopefuls being asked point-blank if they think a Mormon (read: Mitt Romney) is a Christian. Only the fierce insistence that Tuesday’s debate be limited to economic questions kept this pot from boiling over again (though Jon Huntsman couldn’t resist one quick snipe at Rick Perry, who appeared befuddled all night anyway, and Michelle Bachman couldn’t resist the suggestion that Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, if turned upside down, becomes the number of the Beast). 

What’s been striking all week is, first, that presidential hopefuls like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich have toed the traditional line of secular Liberalism: religion is a private matter, they say; no one knows the heart of another, and it’s not the business of politics to decide who is a Christian. One would find this most welcome line of reasoning more plausible if they’d said the same thing when the question of whether Barack Obama is a Christian was a front-page news story. 

Others who have flirted more openly with the fire that is right-leaning evangelical ire, and the belief that America is the Christian city on the hill–like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman–will need to have more than a canned reply to this question, and that is why we haven’t heard more from them yet. They’ve got to figure out how to triangulate the Christian base they need with the Party establishment’s clear desire not to let this election get railroaded by religion.

Which leaves us with Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, two highly credible presidential possibilities who are self-identifying Mormons. Romney’s strategy for making this whole debate a winner for him is to seize the opportunity it provides to show evangelical Christians where their beliefs clearly coincide: in the view that America is indeed the biblical city on the hill, and that God has granted the US a unique destiny in world affairs. Our sacred duty, therefore, is to maintain the US’s singular status as a solitary military and economic superpower. Huntman’s views will be more nuanced; he has broad experience in China, after all, which complicates that simplistic aspiration a lot, and that is probably why we haven’t heard from him yet. 

But the Democrats have remained on the sidelines, by and large, content to watch what they hope will be another round in the Republican arena, where carnivorous presidential hopefuls eat each other’s young. This is a missed opportunity. 

Since the Republican hopefuls have opened the door on this question, Democrats should force them to walk through it. The question that is being asked when we wonder aloud if Mormons are Christians is whether other religious groups are allowed to staple their own beliefs and writings onto another religious community’s sacred scriptures. Is it enough if Mormons, with a new scripture they claim to be compatible with the Christian Bible, say that they are Christians? Do other Christian groups get to say that they are not?

Framed that way, it’s a far more unsettling, but also a far more interesting, question. After all, this is precisely what Christians did to the Hebrew scriptures and to Judaism. They stapled their own scriptures (which they called “New”), as well as their own strikingly un-Jewish values, upon them. 

Muslims did the same thing to Christians. And then Mormons did it again. 

So let us hear more from each Republican candidate as to what they think about some of their own supporters who claim that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a “cult.” And let us not content ourselves with questions about whether a Mormon is a Christian. Let’s go all the way and ask the obvious follow-up: do they think a Muslim is a Christian? 

Presumably, the answer will be No.  Then the question becomes: how is a Mormon any different? 

What becomes clearer when the debate is framed this way is that the difference between Mormons and Muslims is that Mormons are home-grown; they are indubitably, recognizably American. And that is what this debate has really revealed: the fact that a new kind of religious nationalism has emerged in the United States in the past thirty years, and that the Republicans have embraced it even as the Democrats have resisted it. 

Let the debate be framed that way, and it is a winner for the Democrats, every time.

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

At the same time that the US Supreme Court issued a second stay of execution in one week in the state of Texas, it permitted the execution of Troy Davis to go forward in the state of Georgia. And at 11:08pm on Wednesday, September 21^st, some four hours after his scheduled 7:00pm execution time, Troy Davis was indeed killed by a state-administered lethal injection. 

The range of emotions and the swirl of debates generated by this confusing juxtaposition are layered and complex: a white Army recruiter accused of rape and murder is spared, at least for now, while a black man accused of killing a police officer is not.  Both men insisted on their innocence throughout their circuit of appeals. 

I mention skin color because it is a part of the story of state-administered death no matter how we try to discuss the thing. The very fact that our system is organized to ensure that race is not a factor speaks eloquently to the fact of race’s inescapability in our judicial system, especially for the young black man. 

Yet I am less concerned with racial justice than I am with procedural justice. The manner in which Troy Davis met his end raises new and different questions about the death penalty in the United States. 

On September 21^st, Troy Davis had his second purported his last meal.  He elected to have the same meal that his fellow death row inmates had–not because he did not expect to be executed, but rather as an expression of solidarity with them. The execution of a person with a strong case for clemency is, as one can imagine, an emotionally devastating event for that state’s death row population. There is a hopelessness in the air for weeks after. 

Troy Davis was permitted to spend six hours with his family on the day of his scheduled death, a final private conversation.  He was then given some private time to himself and even permitted unusual access to music. He had his final meal between 4:00 and 5:00pm, then was prepared for death. 

But at the eleventh hour, and for the second time in his life, Davis’s execution was put on hold as the US Supreme Court asked to review the evidence one more time.  No doubt his hopes soared; certainly the hopes of the crowds gathered in vigil in Atlanta and Jackson, Georgia did. Those hopes were dashed just a few hours later when the High Court decided not to intervene in Davis’s case, and so he died just a few hours after he had expected to die when he awoke Wednesday morning. 

This is all very unusual. 

The fact that Troy Davis was convicted and sentenced to death twenty years ago in 1991, the fact that he suffered the double jeopardy of two last meals in his strange life behind bars, and the fact that his execution was once again delayed at the very last moment are all facts to which the vast majority of Americans across the political spectrum are opposed.

Supporters of the death penalty consider this endless round of appellate review excessive, almost as if we care more for the rights of the accused than we do the victim. Opponents of the death penalty consider this cruel as well as unusual, and thus a violation of the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution. No one can be happy with the manner in which we administer the ultimate penalty in this country. 

But the fact is that we will never be able to administer it any other way. The US Supreme Court has consistently held that the penalty of death is qualitatively different than any other kind of penalty and therefore subject to review unlike any other kind. Any prisoner sentenced to death has automatic rights to appellate review at multiple levels. Any prisoner sentenced to death in this country will languish on death row for a decade or more; will experience the surreal days and nights in which scheduled death dates come, are postponed, and return. As unusual as Troy Davis’s case may seem to us, it is in fact rather normal. 

The simple fact is that, given the constitutional commitments to individual liberty and due process of law—commitments for which we are justly proud—we will never be able to administer the penalty of death in the way other countries that have it—like China, Iran and North Korea—can. They do it fast, with little if any subsequent review. 

When I first became interested in the death penalty some decades ago, a famous case of serial execution took place in China. As a way to deal with the escalating problem of highway robbery, the government took 6000 men accused of the crime and shot them all together in a single morning. Highway robbery decreased dramatically. 

The point is that we can never administer the death penalty in that way. That is a very good thing; it is what makes us modern. It represents what is best and noblest in our system of justice. And it is in this sense that the death penalty is practically incompatible with the norms and the systems of justice that have emerged in Europe and the US in modern times. 

The only reason Socrates had time to talk with his friends while awaiting execution was the fact that Athens was celebrating a religious ritual during which the city was not permitted to kill anyone.  Had he been sentenced to death at any other time, he would have been killed immediately.  When Jesus was brought before the Roman civil administration in Palestine, he was tried, sentenced, tortured and killed all in a single afternoon. That pre-modern form of state-sponsored killing is no longer our own. 

We are trying, then, and failing, to administer a penalty that made sense in other times and makes sense in other parts of the world, as if still made sense in our own. The indignities and inhumanities that are born of those paradoxes and contradictions came into very sharp focus under some very harsh light last week. 

And it is in this sense that some of us may hope, however cautiously, that Troy Davis did not die in vain.

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

You don’t have to be a Marxist to notice the often astonishing overlap between big money and big religion.  Nor to be somewhat shocked by the bigness of the whole affair. 

Consider the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, one of the most popular and most-densely populated tourist destinations in Italy, nearly rivaling its much larger cousin in Rome.  It is a striking monument in every way, not least for the bizarre mish-mash of architectural elements and artistic styles that define this most funky profile. 

It’s a beautiful monument, and quite possibly the single most famous piazza in the world, but it’s a crazy kind of beauty. 

The Church of San Marco in Venice is as much a testimony to the mercantile spirit–and the sheer rapaciousness–of the Venetians as it is to the catholicity of their faith.  Stolen columns and bronze horses, the stolen corpse of Saint Mark the Evangelist, the stolen autograph copy of this same Mark’s Gospel—all of this, and much more, eventually found a home in this most opulent jewel of this Most Serene Republic. 

The general plan of the shrine dates back to the 800s, with the floor plan of the Greek cross borrowed from the Byzantines, and the five onion domes borrowed from the Muslims.  This unique Venetian aesthetic—of semi-shameless borrowing and creative thievery—defines the unique place this sanctuary holds in the history of art and of empire, alike. 

Christian legend has it that Mark the evangelist laid over on one of the islands in the Venetian lagoon, while en route from Aquileia to Rome.  It was there that he received an angelic vision, greeting him with the words Pax tibi, Marce evangelista meus. Hic requiescet corpus tuum, “Peace unto you, Mark my evangelist; your body will rest here.”  A suspect story, since Mark’s Greek was poor and his Latin non-existent, but this didn’t keep the Venetians from carving the first half of this famous Latin phrase under the paw of nearly every winged lion that graced every major port or entranceway in the empire. 

In any event, some ambitious Venetian merchants brought the prophecy to reality when they carted Mark’s corpse away from the then-Arab port of Alexandria, and gave it as a gift to the Doge, the elected short-term emperor of the Venetian Republic, who promptly commissioned the Basilica. 

And so commenced the long, complicated story of religiously inspired Venetian looting.  The city as a whole is awash in the corpses of Christian luminaries, from Jesus’s grandfather, Zeccaria, to early Christian martyrs like Lucia and Hieronymos, to a host of later Christian officials, administrators, and saints. 

A closer look at the facade of Mark’s marvelous Venetian basilica reveals that hardly anything matches.  It is as if things were taken from anywhere and everywhere, then placed wherever they seemed to fit.  And that’s pretty much how it was.  It’s almost as if your crazy uncle set out to build a church entirely from the things he found laying around in his attic.  Columns in all sizes and shapes, gorgeously marbled stone in various colors—all of this was carted back to Venice by ambitious Venetian merchants, from places as distant as Sicily, Ravenna, Constantinople, and points farther to the east. 

But surely the crowning ornament—and the most shocking act of rapacious self-aggrandizement—came during the now-notorious Fourth Crusade, led by the Venetian Doge, Enrico Dandalo, in 1204.  The Venetians were the only power at the time with the naval resources to transport such a large land army.  And so they did, but at a cost.  They essentially took the army where they needed dirty work done: to the rebellious port city of Zara on the Adriatic coast first, and then on to Constantinople.  The city was taken after a long siege and ceded to the Franks, while the Venetians were content to load their boats with ill-gotten treasures, most notably a beautiful team of four bronze horses that now grace the front porch of the Basilica (copies of them, actually–the originals are inside).  This is when the Venetian Republic began to style itself “Byzantium on the Adriatic.”  But it was a stolen Byzantium at that. 

The creation of that far-flung naval emporium that coincided with this ambitious architectural program was remarkable, and has left a surprisingly unified architectural style on much of the Mediterranean: from Venice, all along the Adriatic/Balkan coast and the Ionian islands, through the southern mainland of Greece and the supremely important island of Crete, then continuing east all the way to Cyprus.  It is remarkable when you look at the map, how one relatively small city came into control of such a massive mercantile network (Venice was in this regard much like Singapore, five hundred years ahead of its time). 

In the name of Saint Mark, the Venetians held onto it energetically and creatively for centuries, from the Fourth Crusade to the mid-1600s.  But then the Ottomans entered the Mediterranean and essentially imitated the route of Venetian conquests in reverse–from Cyprus, through Greece, and all the way to the Ionian islands, which they never managed to secure for themselves. 

Venice bounced back briefly under the Doge Francesco Morosoni, nicknamed Peloponnesiacus, for his significant retrieval of territory in southern Greece.  But these Venetian gains came at a cost the Greeks paid themselves: Morosoni laid siege to Athens, where the Ottomans were holed up on the Akropolis, and were using the Parthenon as a powder magazine.  Morosoni knew this… and promptly shelled the place.  The explosion was heard on islands fifty miles away, locals thought it was an earthquake, and the destruction of artworks that had survived for some 2000 years was immeasurable. 

True to form, Morosoni took the treasures that had not been blown to smithereens back to Venice, such as the monumental marble lions from the Athenian harbor—the Greeks called it Piraeus and the Venetians “Porte Leone” for the statues they coveted–and installed them at the monumental entranceway to the Venetian Arsenal. 

And then, with astonishing suddenness, it all came undone.  Such a thriving business center, with its titled Senatorial class and a wealth that earned it the nickname of “the Most Serene (Serenissima) Republic”… all of this was decidedly at odds with the egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution of 1789. 

And so Saint Mark’s naval empire ended, not with a bang (though a bang was threatened), but with a serene whimper. 

An up-and-coming general in the Revolutionary French army named Napoleon was in charge of operations in northern Italy.  He surrounded the city with his artillery, like a latter-day Morosoni, and threatened to reduce the city to rubble if they did not surrender. 

“I want no more inquisition, nor more Senate; I shall be an Attila to the state of Venice; the winged lion of Saint Mark must lick the dust,” he declared.  So the city submitted, and the Venetian Republic gave way to the French Republic, and the territory of the Veneto was handed off to the Hapsburgs in 1797.  But surprisingly, Napoleon did not loot Saint Mark’s, which would have seemed like symbolic payback. 

No, he had his eyes set on Rome. 

Napoleon’s revolutionary army continued south into the territory of the Papal States.  French forces occupied Rome and looted the brand new Vatican Museum, completed just four years previously, and took everything of any value back with them to Paris. 

And so the same, mad dance began anew. 

Only this time the ill-gotten loot did not go to a church.  It went to a museum, those preeminent temples of modern times. 

When it comes to big churches, big money, big art collections, and big religion, the lions never lay down with the lambs.

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

After Christmas and Easter, what’s the most important Christian holiday?  It’s not really a very Protestant question—since you need saints and Mary, and the whole ritual calendar they entail, to pose it—and even in the Catholic or Orthodox Christian world it depends very much on where you put the question. 

In Greece the question has a pretty clear answer: it’s August 15, the feast day of the “All-Holy” (Panagia) Virgin Mary.  And in Rome it’s equally clear: it was June 29, the Feast of Peter and Paul. 

A couple of things strike you about this last feast, right away.  First of all, it’s a strictly Roman holiday, unlike the Panagia for which most of Greece shuts down, even at the height of the tourist season.  By contrast, no other Italian city celebrates this festival as Rome does.  It’s actually a religious festival designed to celebrate the city of Rome, in its way.  Think of it in this sense as a subtle Roman combination of Thanksgiving with the Fourth of July. 

Still more unusually, the festival celebrates two saints together, Peter and Paul, men who were, according to the biblical record at least, sometime antagonists and never really co-workers.  So why celebrate these two saints together? 

The answer has a lot to do with the pre-Christian history of Rome, and the pagan residue that so often exists just beneath the surface of a great many Christian churches, Christian practices, and Christian holidays (think of the Druid trees at Christmas, the Dionysian rending and rejoining at Easter, and so on). 

In this particular case, Peter and Paul look a lot like Romulus and Remus, the mythic founders of the city of Rome.  Peter and Paul are deliberately juxtaposed to Rome’s primordial founders, almost as if to celebrate this, the second founding of the city… as a Christian city, in its new Christian guise.  Both Peter and Paul were believed to have made their way from Jerusalem to Rome, and both men were believed to have been martyred here, in the imperial capital.  This linkage of foundational violence, of the founder’s death and the founding of the city, is also very mythic and very old. 

There is abundant literary evidence for the connection of these two pairs of founding figures, the pagan pair and the Christian pair, in Roman mythology.  Ovid informs us (in Fasti VI, 795-796) that on the 29^th of June (“when as many days of the month remain/ as the Fates have names,” he quips), a temple was dedicated to Quirinus, “the god with the striped gown.”  Livy confirms this (in his History X, 46), adding that this Temple of Quirinus was dedicated with the rich spoils brought to Rome at the conclusion of the Samnite wars. 

But who was this Quirinus?  Ovid gives us the surprising answer (at Fasti II, 475-512): he was none other than Romulus himself, deified after his death, and commemorated as the primordial founder of Rome’s unswerving path to world conquest. 

You can see some remarkably suggestive iconographic parallels here. 

Romulus and Remus, rival brothers, only one of whom survives to establish Rome’s imperial destiny and to give the city its name.  So too with Peter and Paul, rival apostles, only one of whom was named by Christ himself as the Rock on which his church would be built, and who would lend his name to the most famous edifice in western Christendom. 

Peter is almost always depicted holding the keys to the Church Christ commissioned him to build.  Paul, by contrast, is almost always depicted holding the sword with which he was beheaded (as a Roman citizen, he had the ironic right not be crucified).  Peter was believed to have survived Paul, since he (and not Paul) is remembered as the first bishop of Rome, and thus the initiator of an unbroken chain of apostolic command.  Not enjoying Roman citizenship, he died by crucifixion (but upside down, so as not to claim any equality with his Lord). 

The stories regarding Peter’s martyrdom were more confused than Paul’s.  And it took a long time for Christians to settle on the precise date.  Peter’s martyrdom was commemorated on December 28th in the oriental Christian calendar, and on February 22^nd in Gaul.  Elsewhere, it was celebrated on the second Friday after Epiphany.  But not long after Christianity was established as the state religion of the empire with its “capital” in Rome, the date of Peter’s martyrdom was established as well: on none other than June 29^th (this was settled in the western, Latin-speaking churches by the late fourth century, and in the eastern churches by the mid-fifth). 

As so often in early Christian history, the emergence of Christianity as the defining cultural force of the empire, when viewed from one perspective, changed everything; viewed another way, it changed nothing, or put another way, the new faith was absorbed into the ritual life of the very world that it had come to conquer. 

Romulus was deified, renamed as Quirinus, and given a temple of his own on June the 29th. Then the Founder was to be reconceived in a Christian idiom, as a man named Simon who was renamed as Peter.  And after Peter was sanctified, the Founder received yet another temple in Rome, San Pietro, destined to be the premier religious edifice in all of western Christendom. 

But Rome remained Rome, always.  Peter’s successors were to live in a palace whose named (Quirinale) recalled Quirinus’s original temple, and bore the old Roman title of pontifex maximus when officiating at the Basilica of Saint Peter.  And this resplendent new temple dedicated to Peter was to celebrate his feast day on the selfsame date that the very first temple to Romulus was founded: on June the 29^th. 

Recalling the palimpsestic mish-mash that constitutes most religious traditions is to recall a central part of their allure, and offers a suggestive reminder of their fundamental humanity, a humanity that no divinization can quite erase.

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

“But every religion has its magic, and what is commonly called ‘practising’ a religion is practising its magic.”  R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938) 

What makes a saint a saint? This may seem like an odd question with an obvious answer, but really it is not. It’s no easier to capture the saintliness of the saint than it is to capture the secret magic of the magician, the inspiring musical power of the muse, or the prophetic power of the prophet. But it’s worth the attempt.

The question bears extra weight just now, as Pope Benedict XVI has initiated the process whereby his immediate predecessor, Pope John Paul II, will be recognized one day as a saint. The previous Pope’s beatification on May 1^st was celebrated with great pomp and circumstance, reminiscent of the more somber ritual attached to his death in 2004. John Paul II’s simple wooden coffin was removed from its temporary resting place in Saint Peter’s Basilica, placed on pubic display, after which it is to be transferred to a new crypt close to Michelangelo’s marvelous Pietà. Images of the beatified Pope are everywhere, perhaps nowhere more dramatically than at the Piazza of Saint Peter’s Basilica, where a gigantic image of the newly beatified Polish Pope dominates the oval.

We should pause to reflect on what constitutes a Christian saint, at least among those non-Protestant traditions that accept the notion of sainthood.  Who is eligible for sainthood, and where are they found?

Christians have never spoken with one voice on that topic, and indeed, saints have been drawn from very different arenas in different periods of Christian history.  Understandably enough, the earliest rolls of Christian saints were martyrs, men and women who were believed to have imitated Christ in the most literal way, by meeting a violent end in his name.

Later, when Christianity was made the state religion of the Roman Empire and martyrdom was no longer an option, the most rigorist of Christians left the cities of the empire altogether, creating alternative forms of community as ascetics, and hermits, and still later, as monastic figures.  By the sixth century, towering figures like Saint Benedict combined all of these images in Christian characters of enormous power and influence.

A more surprising development of the late Middle Ages was the idea that a king could be a saint.  As M. Cecelia Gaposchkin demonstrates in her marvelous book, The Making of Saint Louis:  Kingship, Sanctity and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (Cornell UP, 2009), it seems somewhat counter-intuitive too imagine a king as a saint.  Kings, after all, must wield power and must engage the tools of violence.  Kings killed the martyrs.  Kings were the corrupt officials in a hierarchy the hermits and monastics left the city to escape.  In the French case of Louis IX, the notion of saintliness was even stranger; he was, notoriously, a failed Crusader in a disastrous North African campaign.  Yet even he was sanctified.

The idea of a pope as a saint may seem more understandable to us, today.  But it is important to recall that, until the Modern period, popes were kings with standing armies, who ruled over papal states, fought wars of territorial conquest, and lost them as often as they won.  By the 1700s, Roman popes were no longer significant political players on the European stage, and so began the long process of re-describing their city as Roma Aeterna, whose power and preeminence went deeper than politics.  In that world, perhaps, a sanctified pope makes easier and better sense.  It is easy for popes today to speak in general terms about the importance of peace, as larger, more secular states wage wars.

Don’t get me wrong; it is important, and highly significant that they speak in these ways.  But, Vatican City is a strange sort of quasi-country whose leaders can rise above the common world of international politics precisely to the degree that they are not really players in that game.

Looking at the question of sainthood from the other side, what’s in it for the people who make a saint a saint?  This is actually a very important piece of the papal puzzle, and it bears recalling that Pope John Paul II oversaw the creation of more saints in his 23-year pontificate than the Roman Church produced in the previous five centuries.  Benedict XVI has continued to grease the wheels of this machine.  So clearly, something is going on.

At the crassest level, there’s a lot of money to be made in the saint business.  Local economies are stimulated by the construction of new sanctuaries and all of their attendant structures, and still more by the inevitable pilgrimage traffic such new saints and their sanctuaries inspire.  And not only the local economies—the ecclesial economy gets a boost from the saints as well.  Many a Christian has been inspired to give to the Church under the influence of the enthusiasm of having a saint recognized in his or her proverbial backyard.

There are more elevated interests served by the saints, to be sure.  They are–or rather, some of them are—much like the bodhisattvas, poets and other spiritual luminaries whose main purpose seems to be to remind the rest of us of the elusive yet seductive transparency whereby this world grants us subtle epiphanies of another.  They are the tuning fork for life’s harp, the singers of the song.  The saints are intended as an especially profound Catholic example of such music.

As Pope Benedict XVI himself put it recently, “the saints are those who best speak of God and bear witness to his love, giving life to lasting experiences… Saints combine their example with their words which makes them convincing” (this was in a speech delivered in San Marino-Montefeltro on June 19).

The saint is imagined as especially convincing.  And that power of persuasion has a lot to do with the modern media. John Paul II was many things, after all, but Rumi or Sant Francis he was not (his short-lived predecessor, John Paul I, seemed more in that line… dearly beloved, speaking of God as mother as well as father, and gone in just a month).

No, the images that come to mind in John Paul II’s case are less “spiritual” than that, somehow.  One thinks of his uncommon physical energy—the skiing, the hiking, the endless traveling.  One thinks of his uncommon sense of timing—meeting with, and forgiving, his would-be assassin. And then one is reminded of the tragic counterpoint to that, the faltering step and quivering hands of his failing later years.

In short, John Paul II was the first media-savvy pope.  The camera loved him and he clearly loved the camera.  Like the actor who knows his or her best features and knows which profile to favor, John Paul II knew how to present himself and his papacy in the best possible light.  He had a knack for seeming modern, even when his positions were most aggressively aimed against the modern age, and the Second Vatican Council’s spirited “new openness” to that age.

So what does Benedict XVI see in his predecessor that suggests saintliness here?  In a word, John Paul II was smooth, as Benedict XVI decidedly is not.  The camera does not love him, nor he the camera.  His body language communicates an awkwardness, as if he is not comfortable in his own skin, to say nothing of the uniform he is now required to wear.  His charisma is very much of the office; it is not personal.  Thus, the mantle of the papal media that he inherited from his predecessor cannot help but seem an awkward fit for him.

That media has subjected his papacy to the endless harsh light of scandal.  The timing of it all could not have been worse, nor more awkward-seeming.  Thus, to Benedict’s slightly jaded eye, his predecessor must seem decidedly beatific, judged by the harsher light of his own early career. 

In a word, a state of beaty is in the eye of the beholden

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. 

An important set of referenda was offered to the consideration of the Italian people on June 12th; the results were fascinating, and potentially instructive. 

The referendum invited the populace to reflect on three seemingly unrelated matters: 1) whether to pursue nuclear power as a new energy source; 2) whether to privatize the water management in the country; and 3) whether to undo the several legislative protections that Silvio Berlasconi had set in place to protect himself from what he deemed punitive and politically motivated legal proceedings directed at an administration that seems now merely to limp helplessly along from scandal to scandal. 

The overwhelming voice of the people was clear, and communicated with an overwhelming majority that bodes ill and ominous for the current regime, but offers some grounds for hope to a democratic citizenry that has all-too-often felt powerless in the face of a Neoliberal juggernaut. And not just in Italy; this is a development with exciting global implications. 

The third of these issues was clearly political, and had a certain predictability about it, after the nearly continuous revelation of corruption and abuse of power so prevalent in the current regime. 

But the other two matters are not so directly political; rather, they are elemental. 

In fact, the eminently Roman reasoning behind these reflections on Italian energy and Italian water take us back to the pre-Christian religion of the Empire, an empire that considered pure water to be one of the most powerful symbols of good governance.  A virtuous government provides its people with clean and abundant water; this was a political implication of the Roman religious intuition of the interactive relation of the four elements (fire, air, earth and water). 

Still more fascinating than these “elemental” reflections was the reasoning that lay behind the resounding No to the possibility of building nuclear energy facilities on the Italian peninsula (there are none at the present time). Germany’s recent nuclear backtracking had a lot to do with security and spent nuclear fuel.  But here in Italy it was all about the water, maintaining the purity of the water. 

The left-leaning pamphlets urging citizens to vote put the matter pithily: perche l’acqua è di tutti, “because water is everything (and for everyone).” 

The ancient Romans were the great masters of hydraulic engineering.  There are reasons why Rome’s extensive network of aqueducts is one of the most enduring symbols of the Empire. The ancient Romans were experts at moving water around–“keeping the good water inside and the bad water out,” as a plumber friend of mine put it recently.  

“That’s not as easy as it sounds,” he added, with a sad shake of the head. And that’s what this referendum reminded us about, the fundamental relation of the elements. 

The recent disasters in Japan demonstrated all over again how elemental, and how interconnected, these matters really are. The earth shuddering, the elemental force of water moving in massive density and at high speed, the shattering pollutive potential of nuclear waste seeping into water, whether groundwater or seawater, as well as into the ground, or dispersing on the wind. 

Earth.  Water.  Fire.  Air. 

Even Pope Benedict XVI seemed to weigh in on the referendum, albeit in an unexpected forum. On June 9^th, he met with six new ambassadors to the Holy See—from Moldova, from Equatorial Guinea, from Belize, from Syria, from Ghana, and from New Zealand—and he took the opportunity to share some reflections on the importance of what he called a human ecology. “The first six months of this year have been marked by innumerable tragedies,” the Pontiff observed, “which have concerned nature, technology and people.” He continued by offering a spiritual reflection on all three. 

Nature, he noted, is indeed created to provide for the life and well-being of human beings. But in fact, he added.  The relationship between the human and the world is more reciprocal and symbiotic than this, as our technology has made abundantly clear to us.  Human intervention can amplify or destroy a biological system.  We may live and we may die at the hands of technology.  Technology’s double-face was the real heart of this expression of Papal concern.  He pled for greater technological innovation renewable energy sources, warned about the vulnerability of water and of land, and insisted that this was a fundamental human right, a sort of ecological law of peoples. 

Benedict XVI had raised similar concerns in an under-reported video conference he held with the crew of the International Space Station on May 21^st.  He asked the astronauts what influence their privileged view from space had on the way they looked at international conflicts, and world affairs.  Astronaut Mark Kelly replied that the view from space offered a single world without  national borders, but that he recognized that these borders mattered in a world increasingly consumed with competition for limited energy resources.  He added that the International Space Station was powered by an entirely renewable network of technologies that provided them with considerably more energy than they needed.  If such technologies were more readily available on Planet Earth he added, “we could possibly reduce some of that violence.”    

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve3QLCJwWnY

These are suggestive moments in series. The Pope spoke of the politics of energy with astronauts aboard the Space Station just three weeks before the Italian referendum.  He offered his reflections on “Human Ecology” just three days before the referendum. And now the Italian people have spoken, in overwhelming majorities. 

In its heyday, the Roman Empire was capable of piping several thousands of gallons of water into the imperial city, per citizen, per day.  It seemed as if every emperor felt compelled to build an enormous public bath project as a gift to the Roman populace.  Still today, the Eternal City is awash in public fountains whose crystal clear water flows continuously, and the drinking of which is a supreme delight on hot summer days. 

Water is recognized for what it is, in Rome: as a gift—a gift of nature, yes, but more to the point, a symbol and a gift of good governance. 

Perhaps that is where to find the logic linking the referenda on Sunday.  Nuclear power is a threat to the purity of the water.  Privatization is equally a threat.  And so is corrupt government. The unifying logic here is that simple, that elemental: protect the purity of our water. 

For water—so said the Greek poet, Pindar, well before the architects of this referendum—”is sweetest and best of all.” 

*************************** 

Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. holds the William M. Suttles Chair in Religious Studies at Georgia State University.  He is an affiliate faculty member with the Hellenic Studies Center, is a research fellow of the Vatican Library Secret Archives, and regular contributor to Religion Dispatches.  Lou earned his MA in Theology and Ethics at Duke University and his PhD, Graduate Division of Religion, from Emory University.  He is the author of six books including Was Greek Thought Religious, God Gardened East, and This Tragic Gospel: How John Corrupted the heart of Christianity.

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

He was a largely self-educated writer who surpassed many an Oxbridge intellectual in general knowledge and in wit. He was a breezy and seemingly casual world traveler who nonetheless mastered that most difficult of all genres, literary travel writing. He lacked formal military training but was the mastermind of what was arguably the most swashbuckling Allied adventure of the Second World War. While he never went to university, he was undoubtedly one of the supreme literary stylists in the English language in this generation. And he was a student of comparative religion in a way that anticipated developments in the academic study of the world’s religions by more than a generation. And now he has died, on June 10^th, in his 96^th year. 

Patrick Leigh “Paddy” Fermor was born on February 11, 1915 in England. Like many another aspiring artist, his family and upbringing were unorthodox.  His father, Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, was a civil servant of the late empire, working for the Geological Survey of India; the boy rarely saw his father in his early years. 

His mother, Eileen Taafe Ambler (a name that would prove predestinate), was an aspiring if poorly known playwright and poet. While Paddy spent the first four years of his life in the care of family friends, and thus developed the habit of living in a completely undisciplined and relatively unregulated environment, he lived with his mother after the age of four and remained in her care after his parents’ divorce. He was expelled from more schools than many a lesser light attended, most dramatically from King’s School, Canterbury, after the revelation of a romantic dalliance with a local grocer’s daughter eight years his senior. 

This would prove to be a recurrent pattern in his life: the pendular see-saw from intense romantic involvements to long periods of almost hermetic isolation. 

At the ripe age of “eighteen and three quarters” (his words), Paddy Fermor decided to take a long walk, in lieu of attending university. He determined to travel by foot from the Hook of Holland all the way to Istanbul (a city he always imagined Greek-ly, and referred to stubbornly as “Constantinople” or “Byzantium,” its first name as a Greek colony). The trip took some years, and it gave both flavor and form to the rest of his extraordinarily long and extraordinarily creative life. 

But he did not begin to publish his reflections on the journey until fully forty years later, and that generational lapse between a youthful excursion and a mature reminiscence is a central feature in what makes his writing so singular, and the genre he created so difficult to define. 

Fermor departed in December 1933 and thus, as fortune would have it, he was deposited into the very epicenter of a world about undergo a cataclysmic geopolitical upheaval. He found himself traipsing through Bavaria just after Hitler’s ascension to the post of Chancellor. And thus he witnessed at first hand a sudden chilling in his hosts’ reception of a young man who was clearly a unusually charming representative of the very best that British culture had to offer in the late afternoon of its imperial career. 

His recollections of a first long night in a Munich beer-hall are among the most memorable descriptions in any work of history or of travel, and they fade out with his collapse into drunken unconsciousness under a table, the theft of his passport and his walking staff (adorned with metal plaques, mementoes from each of his stopping points on the way). 

Content to sleep under bridges and in countryside train-or police-stations, the young man’s fortunes shifted decisively at the Hungarian border. He fell into easy conversation at the bridge with a man who proved to be a local aristocrat of considerable means and who invited him to spend his first night in the new country in an apartment in his castle. While it was a point of pride for the young Englishman that he cover his ground on foot, the Count sent letters of introduction ahead of him by horse, and thus Paddy Fermor spent virtually every evening in the care of some local grandee, and normally under the roof of some castle or fortress. What he could not have known at the time was that he was walking through a dreamworld that was about to come undone, enjoying his guiltless dreams under rooves that were destined to be obliterated in just a few short years. 

But not yet. Fermor arrived at the Turkish border on New Year’s Day of 1935, and after a brief sojourn in Istanbul, he returned to Greece which had especially captured his fancy.  After a brief turn in the Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos (he was there on his 20th birthday), Fermor returned to Athens, then moved to Moldova with an aspiring painter (and Romanian princess) twelve years his senior, the divorcee Balasha Cantacuzene. The couple lived for three years in a kind of somnolent artistic bliss, she painting, he writing. 

But when the War finally came in 1939, Fermor bade paradise adieu.  He volunteered for the Irish Guards and, given his impressive language skills, he was sent back to Greece to prepare for the invasion everyone knew was coming. When the Italians were repulsed in the west and pushed back into Albania, German forces were diverted from the east to the south.  After a bruising five week thrust south through Yugoslavia, they made short work of a stiff Anglo-Greek resistance, the survivors of which (Fermor among them) took ship south to the island of Crete for what proved to be the last Allied stand in Europe. 

The German invasion came initially by air, and remains to this day the largest air invasion in military history.  The outcome was uncertain for five days (they lost more men in a week than they had in the entire French Blitz), but when German parachutists secured an airport on the western side of the island, they enabled the shipment of tanks and artillery in support. And thus Crete too was lost. 

Fermor fell back with the survivors to Egypt, where he rode out the rest of the War as an organizer of the guerilla resistance on Crete.  It was there, in a legendary bar called “Tara,” that Fermor and some friends first cooked up the caper for which they would become famous.  They parachuted into Crete in April 1944 and arranged for the kidnap of the German general in charge of the Cretan occupation.  Alas, by the time they got to Crete the murderous General, who had been the original object of their designs, was gone and had been replaced by the somewhat more benign Heinrich Kreipe. 

The group ambushed Kreipe’s car as he was leaving his headquarters at the “Villa Ariadne,” built by the noted British archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, as the headquarters for his excavation of the Minoan palace at Knossos.  Much to Fermor’s chagrin, the driver was spirited away from the vehicle and summarily shot.  Kreipe was put on the floor with a gun to his head, and Fermor, dressed as the General himself, passed through more than 20 checkpoints in the capital city of Herakleion before running the General’s car up to the northern coast. 

The plan was to abandon the car there and to make it appear that they’d been picked up by British submarines.  In reality, the northern coast was too dangerous for the British navy, so the men walked the General over two mountain ranges to the southern coast where they had scheduled a pick-up. 

Everything went wrong.  The radio broke down.  Then Kreipe fell and broke his arm.  Given the unexpected delays, they missed their rendezvous and were forced to hide out in mountains crawling with German patrols.  Finally, they secured a second radio, arranged a second pick–up, and got the General off the island nearly one month after his capture. 

Fermor never wrote a word about this affair, nor surprisingly enough, about his beloved Crete (his only contribution to this literature was a translation of the charming eyewitness report of a local messenger, George Psychondakis’s The Cretan Runner in 1955). One of Fermor’s fellows, William Stanley Moss, did write a short account of the kidnap, Ill-Met By Moonlight, which was later turned into a film in 1957 (with Dirk Bogarde playing a dashing and funny Paddy Fermor). 

After the War, and after some more time in Athens, Fermor left in 1949 for a long cruise by sail through the French Antilles.  He was accompanied by a Greek wartime companion and by his beloved Joan, the woman who would later be his wife.  They traveled for nearly a year and the book that resulted, The Traveller’s Tree (1950), immediately established Fermor as a writer on whom to keep an expectant eye (the only novel he ever wrote, The Violins of St. Jacques [1953], was set in a similar Caribbean setting under the looming presence of a volcano that brings the book to a strange and jarring close). 

This first book shows Fermor at his best both as a traveler and as a person of uncommon eloquence, wit and charm.  But of equal importance was the clear declaration of his utter fascination, not just with history, but with religion. 

Three long chapters devoted to Haiti make this plain.  As an organizer of a guerilla resistance himself, Fermor had keen insights into the dynamics of the Haitian War for Independence.  He understood well how the imperial interests of the French collided with those of the freed people under Toussaint L’Ouverture, and he accepted the horrific violence of reprisal and counter-reprisal as a murderous fact he neither supported nor avoided.  But of far greater interest are his observations about the Afro-Caribbean religious synthesis we know as “Voodoo.” Fermor describes his own unmistakable and unapologetic addiction to the evening “drumming and rumming” ceremonies, so aesthetically rich in music and dance, collective performance and spirit possession.  His observations are on a par with Levi-Strauss, another European expatriate from the War, whose Tristes Tropiques had just been published two years before.

And now the pattern recurs.  Fermor left his friends for another stint in a monastery, a Benedictine monastery in Normandy this time.  He’d gone there to write up his notes from the Caribbean, but he ended up so fascinated by the monastic life that he wrote a short book about it, a luminous meditation entitled A Time to Keep Silence (1957).  His reflections on what living in a different order of time is like make a significant contribution to the literature on monasticism and meditation, alike, rivaling those of another one of his direct contemporaries, Thomas Merton. 

Fermor’s finest books came next, and both were devoted to and inspired by, his beloved Greece. The first one, Mani (1958) is dedicated to the rough-hewn mountains south of Sparta where he would eventually build his own home; the photographs by Joan Eyres-Monsell offer a powerful supplement to the text, including a memorable excursus on Byzantine icon painting that shows how lightly and how lovingly he could wear his enormous erudition. 

Fermor moved to the Mani in 1964, when he and Joan purchased some land on a splendid coastline and designed their own home in local stone (thus settled, the two finally married in 1968—truly a life-companion, she died in 2003 at the age of 91).  Roumeli, Fermor’s elegant first meditation on the northern regions through which he’d walked thirty years earlier, appeared in 1966.  A chapter on the Byzantine residue in contemporary Greek culture is nonpareil, and shows him at his anthropological and linguistic best. 

Fermor did not write explicitly of the walk that started it all until many years later—forty years, to be precise.  He claimed that it was a mixture of humility, anxiety, and winsomeness that kept him from the task.  And while he planned to devote three volumes to the trip, only two of those volumes ever appeared.  A Time of Gifts was published to great acclaim in 1977, and includes that bacchanalian description of the Munich brewhouse.  Between the Woods and the Water, his delicately nostalgic recollections of Hungary and central Europe, appeared in 1986. There is rumored to be a complete draft of the long-awaited third volume, but his publishers will not confirm this. We can only hope that it is so. (Desperate to break the logjam of his writer’s block, they commissioned another short travelogue, Three Letters from the Andes (1991), that shows what made him so masterful as a traveler, equally at home in public archives and on mountaintops at fourteen thousand feet).           

Patrick Leigh Fermor represented the swansong of a supremely confident, if fading, empire as well as much that was best, and noblest, about her heyday.  Cosmopolitan in spirit, uncommonly gifted in languages and in music, a lover of poetry and folksong in equal measure, his table was legendary for the quality of the conversation and an impressive dipsomania (a term that often found its way into his writing). 

It was while working on an excavation in western Crete that I first read the two volumes describing his walk in the 1930s.  Some of the local workers informed me that he was living in Greece, in a Peloponnesian town called Kardamyli (it is mentioned in the Homeric poems).

So I packed up his books, two bottles of the notorious Cretan grappa called tsikoudia, and made my way to Kardamyli. 

I waited all day, as there appeared to be no one in the house.  Resigned by day’s end, I left the bottles with an appreciative note and began the long trek back into town.  Then the skies opened—a very rare event in Greece in the summer—that lasted all night.  I took refuge in a local hillside shrine dedicated to St. George.  I lit a lamp, drank a bottle of wine, and rode out the deluge.  The next morning broke bright and clear, so I returned one last time to the house at Kardamyli. T he bottles were gone, but there was still no sign of the man.  Dispirited, I left for good.  Then came a booming voice shouting my last name, and the legendary 85-year-old came scampering up the hill with the impressive stride of a man less than half his age.  He indicated that he was working just then, but that he’d be delighted if I’d join him for lunch. 

His table was all I’d heard it was, and more.  One could imagine the likes of former Cretan comrades like Xan Fielding who’d graced this same table, but still more all the writers and poets, like Bruce Chatwin, Freya Stark, Philip Toynbee, and of course Lawrence Durrell.  Paddy and Joan were equally interested in religion, and equally well-informed on the topic, so my profession was my ironic first point of entry.  We spoke at length of Haiti and the Afro-Caribbean, of the unique curiosities of North American Protestantism, but mostly they were interested, as I was, in the continuities between Classical and Christian culture.   

Hours passed, and bottle after bottle fell, emptied, to the carpet.  Finally, Paddy and Joan confessed the need for a nap, and set me down on a canape in their library, one of the world’s truly splendid rooms.  I took a long swim, reveled in my good fortune, and looked forward to dinner. It was more of the same, lasted late and then, the sky opening for the second time in as many days, Paddy drove me back into town in a hilarious staccato four-wheeled imitation of the scamper I’d seen him undertake earlier in the day.  “Write what you see,” he smiled, then he was gone. 

I was asleep within five minutes of finding my seat. 

We corresponded periodically after that.  His cards were always, charmingly equal parts word and image.  He had an endearing habit of bordering his notes with images—of clouds and birds in flight, mostly.  Knowing that he should be the one to write a book about Crete, but knowing that he had no time (or inclination? it was never clear) to do so, I told him that I might have a go of it.  He was enthusiastic, sent me postcards suggesting books I should read, inevitably things I’d neither known nor heard of before. 

He was a man of uncommon generosity, sing-song creativity, sparkling eloquence, in all of the ways that matter most a true gentleman.  We will not see his like again.  He wrote what he saw. And what he saw was mesmerizing.  But his life was ever a pendulum swing between writerly seduction and long, hermetic silences.  Having seduced so brilliantly with his prose, he has walked ahead of us yet again, eyes open, into the Great Silence.

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By Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.

On the day after Osama bin Laden’s unexpected death was announced by the US President, a fascinating new exhibition was previewed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  Entitled “Savage Beauty,” it bore more than a casual relevance to the city’s attempt to grasp the right tone in the twinned face of this assassination and the upcoming decennial commemoration of the September 11^th attacks. 

Naturally, that strange-sounding juxtaposition needs some explanation. It has something to do with the sacred. That is to say, it has something to do with an important aesthetic and religious category very popular among the Romantics: the Sublime. 

The idea was this. Beautiful things make us pause in appreciative wonder, beauty creating a mingled desire to possess or to imitate it.  Sublime things stop us short, dead in our tracks, startling us into a new awareness, and new ways of seeing.  Earthquakes and volcanoes can be sublime, as can the infinite expansiveness of deep space: it is part of Nature’s way of showing us how small we are, how replaceable, how cosmically insignificant.

In that sense, September 11, 2001 was a day punctuated with sublimity, the spiritual shock that stopped a nation in its tracks.  It was a reminder of the savage side of human nature, and of the world, a reminder of beauty’s savage underside.  Even a supernova is beautiful, if you are far enough away from it.

And yet the show at the Metropolitan showcased, of all things, a fashion designer, presenting an elegant and thoughtful combination of what were arguably the most ambitious and theatrical and sublime collections of his generation.

Alexander McQueen was born in Lewisham, South London, on March 17, 1969, the youngest of six children (and the third son) to Ronald and Joyce McQueen.  He died by his own hand on February 4, 2010.  He was only forty.

Alexander McQueen, more than any other living designer, managed to transform the runway show into performance art, and the fact that he choreographed four of these events each year for an explosive and creative span of five years speaks to the restless energy, the extraordinary imaginativeness, and the spiritual ambitions of the man.  If fashion can be conceived as High Art, and the creation of clothing as a Spiritual practice, then it will in something like the terms McQueen—created and left—in his meteoric wake.

McQueen’s meteoric rise through the ranks of a very exclusive club reads like Romantic mythology.  After attending primary school and a lackluster stint at Rokeby, he left school at age 16; he already knew that he wanted to be a designer, an artist.  He worked for two years at Anderson & Sheppard (1985-1987), tailors to royalty, then for one more year at Gieves & Hawkes (1988-1989), working mostly on military tailoring. He apprenticed himself briefly to Koji Tatsuno and Romeo Gigli.

And then he bought a one-way ticket to Milan where he stayed for less than a year (1989-1990).

What he learned in all of this was every aspect of the way in which clothes are made.  He learned cutting and stitching; he learned materials; he learned how to mix media.  He was like a painter learning how to mix paint, to stretch canvases, and draw backgrounds—all before getting an easel of his own.

Back in London and still just 21 years old, McQueen landed a coveted place at Central Saint Martins masters program; he designed his first runway show by way of graduating in 1992. It was called “Jack the Ripper,” and a woman who would become a longtime friend, Isabella Blow, recognized the genius in the thing and purchased the entire collection.

The title of this show bears some reflection, since one of the most recurrent complaints about McQueen’s work was that it displayed a kind of misogyny common enough in one version of the homoerotic fashion gaze. McQueen went to great lengths to counter this criticism by insisting that his fashion was designed to empower women.  “I want people to be afraid of the women I dress,” he said; “It’s almost like putting armor on a woman.  It’s a very psychological way of dressing.” His experience with military tailoring figured in many of his early collections.

Still, McQueen flirted more than casually with bondage, leather, and S&M in later collections. “I especially like the accessory for its sadomasochistic aspect,” he observed, and in a great many cases, his costumes included masks that hid the faces of the women he clothed entirely from view.

McQueen continued to design shows between 1993 and 1997, and he met his most important collaborator, Katy England, in 1994.  These shows garnered attention and remarkable appreciation.  One show in particular, “Highland Rape” (1995-1996), illustrates his purposes best.  Many took the name to be further evidence of his misogyny and celebration of violence against women.

McQueen found such criticism absurd, since the rape in question was clearly the rape of his native Scotland (his father was from the Isle of Skye). The show was a meditation on the Highland Clearings, and McQueen positioned himself in a stunningly original post-colonial position: as a native Scot who nonetheless adored London and cultivated his career in the capital of couture. There is great subterranean violence in his aesthetic, but no victims. The show brought him considerable and much-deserved fame.

So much so that in October of 1996, McQueen was made Chief Designer at Givenchy.  Still only 27 years old, McQueen would now design four shows a year, two haute couture and two ready-to-wear collections.  McQueen sold 51% of his interest in Givenchy to the Gucci Group in December 2000 and moved to Paris.

For the next decade, McQueen designed his own lines for his own house and choreographed shows that dazzled the eye and the imagination alike.  Women on rotating plates were ominously intruded upon by mechanical paint machinery.  Women moved on a chessboard, removing each other from action. Runway models walked through and were slowly drenched by artificial rain.

But his personal life was coming apart, Isabella Blow committed suicide on May 7, 2007, his mother died on February 2, 2010, and McQueen took his own life a week later, on February 11, 2010.

Alexander McQueen consistently identified himself as a Romantic throughout his brief career, and understood the vastly spiritual resonances of the term.  To be sure, suicide at age forty is itself a Romantic trope of long-standing. A voracious reader (he deeply admired Rousseau, Byron and Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, not to mention Delacroix and Beethoven) , he explored various dimensions of the Romantic adventure in different shows. “Highland Rape” (and “Widows of Culloden”), as I noted, were exercises in Romantic nationalism, right down to the tartan plaids. 

It was intellectually demanding fashion, always. “With me, metamorphosis is a bit like plastic surgery, but less drastic.  I try to have the same effect with my clothes.  But ultimately I do this to transform mentalities more than the body.”

Several shows [Dante, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Angels and Demons] were done almost exclusively in Gothic imagery. “Primitivism” and “Exoticism” were examined in shows [It’s Only a Game, Dance of the Twisted Bull, Natural Dis-tinction Un-natural Selection and

Horn of Plenty] where most of the clothes were made of feathers, skins, horns, West African tribal beads and the like. “Exoticism” was linked to “Naturalism” in shows where nature’s orgiastic violence was linked inextricably to the sublime.

In all of this work the essential theme was beauty’s savagery–the savagery of material, the savagery of the beauty, the savagery of love. “People find my things sometimes aggressive.  But I don’t see it as aggressive.  I see it as romantic, dealing with the dark side of personality.”

This is the most perennial of Romanticism’s many obsessions, and the chief source of its allure. McQueen had the Shakespearean line, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,” tattooed on his upper right arm. That’s from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A posthumous show was done in Autumn/Winter of 2010-2011, and it is the line with which the Metropolitan show concludes.

Entitled “Plato’s Atlantis,” McQueen imagined it as an exploration of “Darwin’s theory in reverse.” The central theme of the collection is water, and immersion, in the wake created by the global warming and polar melting.  What kind of humanism will emerge from these depths, in a world defined by water rather than land?  What is striking is that this is arguably his most serene and beautiful show, yet the least savage.  It is an imaginary spiritual glimpse beyond, after the deluge.  Nature is sublime; in that deceptively simple statement nineteenth century Romanticism becomes twenty-first century Postmodernism.

All of it tailored to a tee.

Perhaps a poem by Pablo Neruda best captures the essentially spiritual vision in McQueen’s fashion. Here is a portion of his marvelous “Ode to a Suit”:  

• • I ask whether someday
  • a bullet
  • from the enemy
  • will stain you with my blood
  • and then
  • you will die with me
  • or perhaps
  • it may not be
  • so dramatic
  • but simple,
  • and you will gradually  get sick,
  • suit,
  • with me,
  • you will grow old
  • with me, with my body,
  • and together
  • we will enter
  • the earth.
  • That’s why
  • every day
  • I greet you
  • with reverence and then
  • you embrace me and I forget you,
  • because we are one
  • and we will go on facing
  • the wind at might,
  • the streets or the struggle
  • one body,
  • perhaps, perhaps, motionless someday.

 McQueen could be pithier: “There’s blood beneath every layer of skin.” And, as he knew well, moving that blood across the skein of skin is the human heart.  His best work was always a heart-stopper.

A Partial Summary of Alexander McQueen’s Exhibitions

• Jack the Ripper  -  1992
• Taxi Driver  -  1993-1994
• Nihilism -   1994
• Banchee  -  1994-1995
• The Birds – 1995
• Highland Rape  - 1995-1996
• The Hunger – 1996
• Dante - 1996-1997

            [Givency]

•  Untitled  – 1998
• Joan - 1998-1999
• No. 13  - 1999
• The Overlook  – 1999-2000

             [Gucci buy-out]

•  The Dance of the Twisted Bull - 2002
• Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - 2002/2003
• Deliverance - 2004
• Widows of Culloden - 2006-2007
• La Dame Bleue  -  2008
• Eonnagata  -  2008
• The Girl Who Lived in the Tree  –  2008-2009
• Natural Dis-tinction Un-natural Selection -  2009
• Horn of Plenty - 2009-2010
• Angels and Demons  -  2010-2011
• Plato’s Atlantis -  2010-2011

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

 It seemed important to go there Monday, to see it, and to pay my respects.  And I was curious, of course, curious to see what my fellow citizens (and many others) would make of the place on such a day. 

The first thing that strikes you about New York City’s “Ground Zero” site is that it’s so many different things now; it is a massive construction site primarily. They are currently building a new transport hub underground here, to replace the one that was destroyed a decade ago. There are new skyscrapers going up all around the perimeter, none of them quite so ambitious as the Twin Towers, but impressive enough and throbbing with the energy of new commerce. And then there is the “National September 11 Memorial and Museum,” currently being built at the epicenter of that awful episode nearly ten years ago. 

The plans for the Memorial appear to be quite moving: a pretty landscaped walkway with memorials, and a large pit in the center with cascading waterfalls pouring into it. It will be a grand urban canyon in a way, a symbolic opening into an under-world, and the use of water seems especially fitting: the image of the flow of time, of eternity, of the liquid strength needed to carve granite, as well as the ideal of purification and of washing devastation clean. 

The atmosphere was quite moving at noon. There were lots of workers in orange and yellow vests, having lunch individually and in groups. The New York Fire Department and Police Department were well represented, the US military surprisingly less so. And there were loads of tourists, speaking a pretty cacophony of different languages, seeking out the best photo-ops, pointing at where it appeared the buildings must have stood, and where they fell. 

I remember where they stood, remember coming here as a child, passing through the labyrinth of subway lines and entranceways, ascending the escalator past the endless rows of designer boutiques, then emerging at street level and finding it beyond belief or comprehension, the way you had to arch yourself nearly upside down to see to the top of the thing from ground level. I felt very small and those buildings felt very, very overwhelming. The sense of overwhelm I feel here now is very different, informed more by the sentiments of tragedy and of adulthood. This is not a place for children, anymore. The aura of the place now has something to do with sensing the fragility of all human construction, the mingled amazement and confusion at the manifold projects human beings can put their creative energies to—from pure creation to sheer and total destruction. 

The Port Authority of NY & NJ has erected a screen all around the Memorial construction site, so there was little to see as we perambulated yesterday.  There was one area of the screen where some people had left impromptu flower bouquets, scrawled graffiti and handwritten notes, balloons and the like.  Pasted over the part of the screen labeled “Church [yes Church] Street,” others had taped up the front pages from many of Monday’s newspapers. 

USA Today was rather muted: “Osama bin Laden is Dead, Obama Says.” 

Not so the local papers.  The New Jersey Star Ledger opined “Justice Has Been Done.”  The New York Post was pithier: “Got Him.” The Daily News cut to the heart: “Rot In Hell.” 

By contrast, Newsday refused to permit the Towers to be trumped by the architect of their destruction.  Their front page showed a lovely sunset image of the Twin Towers and said simply, “We Will Never Forget.” 

Others posted other things in this same section of the screen: the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List”; a “God Bless America” bumper sticker; even the so-called Flag of Honor constructed out of the names of all those who lost their lives here a decade ago, each printed in stripes of red, white and blue. 

God knows it’s understandable, the tumultuous range of sentiments.  I felt it too, uncertain how to feel exactly, and unsure what I’d come expecting to find.  The havoc created here was beyond describing, and the grief of shattered human lives multiplied by the tens of thousands brings us very close to the sacred place where language fails to capture the essences.  Tears have been more eloquent in the past, and now, perhaps, a raised fist or two. 

There were surprisingly few of those there, mostly just men and women on their lunch breaks doing what citizens trained in the habits of democratic exchange do at their best: argue about politics, and never stop laughing as they do so. I heard many snippets of funny conversations around the perimeter—about Donald Trump, Bill O’Reilly, Jon Stewart, President Obama, all of it seasoned by the unique way in which New Yorkers can turn the F-word into an eloquent adjective or a necessary noun. I began to feel proud here, which is not what I’d expected at all. The workers and public servants seemed aware of the quiet solemnity of the place and enobled it with a dignity that can coexist most attractively with joking and respectful laughter. There was a no-nonsense atmosphere of casual solidarity possible only among those who know the world can fall to pieces and will need to be built anew. 

As I picked up to leave, one image on the screen suddenly caught the attention: It was the Statue of Liberty, but this goddess was not holding the flame of liberty aloft; she was holding Osama bin Laden’s severed head. 

So that’s the image I ultimately walked away with, and that’s the image I’m still grappling with now. There are famous stories told of Roman emperors confronting the severed heads of their fallen rivals, more often than not granting them in death the admiring admission that no one rises that far, that fast without a very singular skill set. We had to kill them because of the threat they represented to our principles, but we grant them the respect we always owe a worthy rival, anyone who could actually be a threat to us. 

“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him”… and then the real praise commences–that’s the ironic idea the Romans understood a very long time before Shakespeare exploited the dramatic potential of the idea.  But to see in this way, you must look the enemy head in the face, ponder it, learn what it has to teach and say. 

The Statue of Liberty was depicted holding that head as it faced away from her.  She held it aloft as a trophy; she was not looking at it.  I was. 

And that’s when it hit me. This place is no longer a grave-site. This last death has ended that. The Statue of Liberty stands alone on an island. Osama bin Laden’s earthly remains were allegedly buried at sea. There will be no visual marker, no image, no memorial. 

The September 11 Memorial, by contrast is a site under construction, very much like our nation itself, ever on the way to becoming something else, something fresh and new. 

It will become a place of meditation and a place to ponder the enormity of these events and what they mean today. Perhaps the goddess of liberty can hold up that head as something more than a trophy, or an image of revenge. Perhaps there will be time and space in which to contemplate that face, to turn it around, and to ask ourselves what we see in it now. 

How did such a person become possible? How did he rise so far in such a short period of time? As we reflect on these questions, perhaps we can become more intentional in deliberating over how to make such a person less possible in the future.

*******************************************

Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. holds the William M. Suttles Chair in Religious Studies at Georgia State University.  He is an affiliate faculty member with the Hellenic Studies Center, is a research fellow of the Vatican Library Secret Archives, and regular contributor to Religion Dispatches. 

Lou earned his MA in Theology and Ethics at Duke University and his PhD, Graduate Division of Religion, from Emory University.  He is the author of six books including Was Greek Thought Religious, God Gardened East, and This Tragic Gospel: How John Corrupted the heart of Christianity.  His current book projects are A Shrine to the Muses: The Modern Public Art Museum, Spiritual Space for an Irreligious Age and Winckelmann’s Secret History: the Birth of Art History and the Vatican’s First Profane Museum.

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By Louis A Ruprecht, Religion Dispatches

There have been ample opportunities over the past few years for explorations of the religious, cultural and artistic valence of the vampire, but it’s beginning to seem as if werewolves are every bit as worthy of our attention. We’ve learned a lot about them of late: in the CW Network’s The Vampire Diaries, HBO’s True Blood and the continued revelations in the Twilight films.

We know, for example, that werewolves are shape-shifters, much like vampires, though they are their sworn, almost genetically-determined enemy. But recently we’ve learned that they can also make treaties and commit themselves to truces, fragile though they inevitably are. Vampires and werewolves can have common enemies (like witches), articulate common purpose (survival, most obviously), or strive heroically and movingly against their natural antipathies. Their relationship looks a lot like the dance between capitalists and communists in the waning years of Soviet power. “Trust but verify” is their watchword.

And now this mysterious figure has come out of our collective dream-world once again, hard on the trail of a no-longer-little Red Riding Hood in Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, released earlier this month.

We may think we know her story pretty well, but that’s not necessarily true—not least because it’s not a single story and, like most folklore, every age imagines it anew. This mystifying maiden’s tale was told with charming elegance and great insight by Catherine Orenstein inLittle Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (Basic Books, 2002).

This wonderful book is full of surprises, like the fact that the werewolf, along with the witch, was an especially prominent figure in the inquisitorial landscape created by Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Or the fact that in 1589, Stubbe Peeter of Bedpur, Germany, confessed (under torture and threat of imminent execution) to being the serial rapist of his own sister and daughter, a child murderer, a cannibal, and a werewolf who had sold his soul in a sort of Satanic contract. This was widely reported in all the new-print European tabloids of the day.

And then there’s the fact that the Brothers Grimm were not the original source. That honor belongs to Charles Perrault, whose jarring and highly sexualized tale was designed for a very adult audience. Our prejudice for seeing fairy tales as child’s play may be Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s doing, though even their tales seem a little, well, a little too grim for children at times.

Perrualt’s story, published in Paris in 1687, went something like this:

Once upon a time, there was a young village girl who was more beautiful than any girl anyone had ever seen. Desire clung to her like an aroma, harried her like a curse, and defined her like a recurrent dream. Her grandmother made her a small, red hood that rendered her even more enchanting. And that was what she was wearing on the day her mother sent her on her fabled errand: to bring cakes and butter to her reportedly-ill grandmother.

The girl met the wolf on the way, but he was afraid to kill her there, for fear of the armed woodcutters all around them in the forest. He proposed a race to her grandmother’s house and took the shorter road himself. He knocked, pretended to be the girl. The unsuspecting grandmother invited him in and he promptly devoured her, then took her place in bed. The girl soon arrived, was invited in when she knocked, and then the wolf invited her to join him in bed.

So she strips herself of every garment, including that storied red hood, and joins the wolf, naked as Eve before the apple. Then comes their surreal bedroom chit-chat: What big arms! What big legs! What big ears! What big eyes! What big teeth… the wolf devours her in a gulp.

The moral of that story runs a lot deeper than the childish caveat, “don’t talk to strangers.” This is a very adult cautionary tale, with an overtly sexualized undertone: anyone can be a wolf. As the story’s poetic afterword put it, “Wolves may lurk in every guise.” And then there is my personal favorite: “Now, as then, this simple truth—sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!” (That’s Orenstein’s brilliant translation from the French).

We probably all remember what the Grimm brothers hung on the architecture of that strange tale. The red hood has become a red cap. The girl is invited by the wolf to gather a bouquet of flowers to take to her grandmother. And after the wolf has devoured both the grandmother and the girl, he falls into a noisy, snoring sleep. The noise attracts the woodman who, sensing that this is no matronly snore, bursts into the home and sees the wolf asleep. He cuts the wolf’s belly open while he snores on, saves the two Jonah-like women, and replaces them with Zeus-like stones. Then the wolf awakens, attempts to run away, but dies under the bizarre weight in his belly.

And there is, in fact, a second ending, and a second wolf. At an unspecified later date, the whole thing apparently happened again. Only this time Little Red Cap runs straight to her grandmother’s house and bolts the door. The wolf perches on the roof, looking for a way in. The grandmother takes the water in which she had boiled her sausages that morning, places it in a stone trough under the eaves, and when the wolf is attracted to the smell, he falls from his perch and drowns in the gravy. So the cruel devourer becomes the feast.

Later versions would add even stranger details. Like the one where the little girl is invited unwittingly to eat her grandmother’s flesh and drink her blood by the big, bad wolf (shades of the rumored accusations against Jews and Lutherans there). Later still, the wolf would become a more sympathetic character, as in the 1966 classic by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JOwxnVoG6Q

target=”_blank”>Li’l Red Riding Hood,” a song that described a red-clad girl looking so good—eyes, lips, and heart—that she is “everything a big bad wolf could want.” So the spooky fairy tale has now transformed into a sort of love-story.

The latest film version, Red Riding Hood, is thus a knowing participant in a very long folkloric tradition that takes us all the way back to Early Modern Europe. There are intriguing gestures toward each of the tales Orenstein rehearses, and they’ve even added a little vampire logic for good measure. These werewolves can pass their powers on with a bite, but only in the once-every-thirteen-year interval of a “blood moon.” And in their case, every generation of werewolf becomes stronger, not weaker.

The plot amounts to a fairly simple star-crossed lover’s story, but with a twist. The red-clad heroine has been matched in a most spirited way to a local woodcutter since childhood; the two dream of running away together, to escape the small town and its wooded environs.

But the girl has recently been betrothed to a well-to-do blacksmith in the town, so the lovers decide to leave. On the very day of their departure, the wolf strikes, killing Red’s sister. When the men go hunting for the wolf it strikes again. A church sponsored wolf-killer named Solomon (brilliantly played by Gary Oldman) arrives in town, and the Inquisitorial logic of the original myth becomes prominent.

The Inquisition comes looking for secrets, convinced that this wolf is living in this town. And everyone in town has secrets. Red’s mother, for example, had been secretly in love with a local blacksmith before she was married off to a woodsman. Her first child, the one who has just been murdered, was fathered by her lover, not her husband. And now this curse too has passed on to the next generation, as the girl with the brilliant red cloak made for her by a mysterious grandmother (beautifully played by Julie Christie) is secretly in love with a woodsman even as she is betrothed to a blacksmith.

The werewolf, it turns out, was her father. He killed his eldest daughter, and the man who sired her, in a rage. He killed the grandmother when she figured out his secret, and cooked her up in a stew. The resilient young lovers defeat him, but before dying, he bites his younger daughter’s lover, cursing him to be a werewolf in turn.

So the boy leaves her to save her, promising to return when he is more in control of his newfound powers. She waits for him in her grandmother’s house, well outside the protective barrier of the town. The film ends when the wolf returns at a full moon, with a casual nod of his head, and an erotic gleam in the red girl’s eye.

Naturally, we are trained by the myth to worry about Red. But as a student of religion, and myth, I still want to worry a bit more about the Wolf.

If the figure of the vampire is designed to explore the subtle, sexy edge between the living and the dead, then the werewolf, and his vast folkloric offshoots, is designed to explore a similarly subtle, and similarly sexy, edge: that between the animal world and the human one. These wolves—whether they’re hunting vampires or courting Red—are human beings who may all-too-easily be transformed into beasts.

And back again.

More often than not, with no real control over the matter.

There is a rich constellation of mythological images connected to playing with these edges. We might recall how, in the brief two-generation period of the heroes in Classical Greek mythology—Hercules’ and Odysseus’ generation—the main task before them was the clearing of the natural world of monsters; all the dangerous predatory elements that threatened humanity. In other words, the work of civilization could not proceed until the woods had been cleared of predators—wolves, and boars, and lions preeminently; animals that eat human flesh.

In that mythic universe, wolves symbolized everything that threatens the stable human order. The trouble is, with the thicket cleared, all we did was make more space for the realwolves: the men. Look at the Oxford English Dictionary if you’re in any doubt about that; under wolf we read “a man given to seducing women.”

Shifting our gaze from Greece to Rome, we may note that the mythic founders of that imperial city, the brothers Romulus and Remus, were nursed as infants by a she-wolf, thereby blurring the otherwise emphatic line between the world of wild nature and the human world of ordered city life. The twin founders of Rome inherited a kind of savage wildness with that strange mother’s milk, as their later fratricidal enmity shows us all-too-well.

It was as if the wolf had been introduced into the city, and thus, ever after, we would need to be on our guard against the terrifying transformation of a human being into a wild animal, a predator (and in his extremity, even a consumer of human flesh). Here’s the Dictionary again: “Any ravenous, cruel, or rapacious person or thing.”

The Stoic moral essayist, Seneca, drafted three long books “On Anger,” and he began with a most instructive description of a human face growing progressively and increasingly enraged. Stop, he says to us at the end of his long poetic description, and ask yourself what you are seeing now. No longer the face of man, this is the face of a wild beast. This was the central moral challenge for Stoicism, in fact—how to avoid horrific transformations like that.

This metamorphosis was not playful like Ovid’s god-inspired chicanery; it was terrifying, and all too human.

The wolves outside the city walls threaten the life of the city. The wolves hidden among us may threaten the city even more. These are powerful mythic tropes, both the Greek and Roman ones.

But the werewolf appears to be an Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic, rather than a Greco-Roman, myth. And what is most striking about these “werewolves” is that they are even more wolf-like than the wolves are. More predatory, more violent, more dangerous.

There’s some confusion about the etymology of ‘were-wolf’ which appears to derive from the linkage of the words for “man” (vir) and wolf. But we hear a vague echo of “true” (wahr) in the name as well. The werewolf as a man-wolf. The werewolf as a true wolf.

And the truest wolf of all is, precisely, a human being.

Isn’t this perhaps the telling linguistic and mythic insight that makes our current fascination with the wolf so poignant? We know that human beings may be wolves at the core, but we have yet to figure out how to domesticate the savage animal within.