Books in Review

Briefly Noted


Copyright (c) 2001 First Things 117 (November 2001): 61-64.

Dante. By R. W. B. Lewis. Viking. 205 pp. $19.95.

Dante: A Life in Works. By Robert Hollander. Yale University Press. 222 pp. $25.

The work of Dante Alighieri is a compendium of medieval history, culture, politics, and religion. The problem in understanding him is not so much a lack of information about the poet and his times, as how to come to grips with the mass of subjects that are relevant to the Divine Comedy. Even the good modern editions with notes raise almost as many questions as they answer. Yale’s R. W. B. Lewis has written a rich and accessible introduction to Dante in his recent contribution to the Penguin Lives series. Lewis has also produced a comprehensive history, The City of Florence. He draws a great deal on that earlier work to situate Dante in one of the most important and vibrant of medieval cities. Florence was second only to Paris in size during the poet’s lifetime and energized the early Italian Renaissance. Indeed, Pope Boniface VIII, says Lewis, seeing so many Florence-born ambassadors in Rome, called the Tuscan city “the fifth element of the cosmos.” Lewis knows that the Divine Comedy and other Dantean works operate on several levels of meaning, but since he is writing a biography, he sticks close to what they say about Dante’s life. Along the way, he offers many stunning surprises and never fails to enlighten. Dante: A Life in Works, by Princeton’s Robert Hollander nicely complements Lewis’ book. As his title indicates, he approaches Dante through his literary achievement. Hollander is one of the greatest living Dante scholars, and his recent translation (with his wife) of the Inferno demonstrated again his mastery of the vast scholarship on Dante. He examines the various disputed questions in a chronological commentary on the works, but he never lets the controversies obscure the literary power of the poet and his daring claims for the way human love turned him toward redemption: “There are, as a wag has put it, only two classes of readers that are deeply offended by Dante’s claims for divine inspiration, believers and nonbelievers.” No publisher, Hollander reminds us, would have thought this visit to the other world by an exiled poet-politician was likely to be a successful literary enterprise. That Dante has succeeded for over three-quarters of a millennium in making readers passionately interested in his story is only one measure of his success.

Robert Royal

After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century. By Norman Birnbaum. Oxford University Press. 432 pp. $35.

The attempt—and failure—to bring about a genuinely socialist society remains the most momentous political-historical phenomenon of our times. It is thus appropriate that scholars continue to study and reflect on the question of socialism. What is troubling is that so many appear blind to the implications of that momentous phenomenon. Norman Birnbaum has done considerable research into socialist ideas and movements in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. But he seems to have learned little. His book is suffused with bitterness over the incapacity of these ideas and movements to transform political and social life in a fundamental way. Page after page, he bemoans a multitude of unrealized possibilities and alternatives. The result is a combination of careful scholarship with the barely contained utopian impulses of a former true believer. Birnbaum’s unhappiness arises from what he sees as a lack of meaning and sense of community in contemporary Western societies. These are legitimate complaints and preoccupations—ones shared by many figures on different points of the ideological spectrum. Yet few of them share Birnbaum’s far-left conviction that some sweeping—and unspecified—social transformation could deliver us from these ills by overthrowing the capitalist order. While he should be applauded for recognizing that the Bolshevik Revolution, which grew out of similar discontents, amounted to an “enormous tragedy,” his insistence on fanning the flames of political radicalism signals an unwillingness to reflect on whether revolutionary ends themselves, rather than some context-dependent contingency, might be the ultimate cause of totalitarian brutality. If Birnbaum’s book teaches us anything at all, it is that, although the opportunity to give effect to revolutionary hopes may have vanished for the time being, these hopes themselves are unlikely to disappear any time soon.

Paul Hollander

The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century. By A. James Gregor. Yale University Press. 256 pp. $35.

A. James Gregor sets out to demonstrate fascism’s similarity to communism—a proposition that will no doubt lead to discomfort among those who insisted throughout the Cold War that the latter system was far more benign than the former. He builds a convincing case, no doubt partially because of his decision to focus on Italian fascism—as well as the third world dictatorships that, following World War II, came to resemble it—rather than Nazi Germany. Gregor does not dispute that, at first, the Soviet system differed markedly from its Fascist counterparts, at least in theory and aim. Yet the two systems “share[d] a common origin in response to . . . common problems” with the process of modernization and industrialization. So similar were these origins and the assumptions that the two systems made about how to solve them that they eventually converged toward the goal of creating a “new society, and even a new man” as the only adequate response. While an elaboration of the relationship between fascism and Nazism would have enriched Gregor’s argument, his study is nevertheless enlightening and revealing.

PH

Maimonides’ Empire of Light: Popular Enlightenment in an Age of Belief. By Ralph Lerner. University of Chicago Press. 221 pp. $35.

Of all those who were personally students of Leo Strauss, none of them has remained closer to Jewish teaching than Ralph Lerner. One of Strauss’ greatest achievements was to persuade a number of assimilated or nearly assimilated young Jews that they could, with intellectual integrity, take up again the Jewish tradition. No one seems to have been so effectively persuaded as Lerner. In this book, he presents his own extended introduction to those works of Maimonides (who for both Strauss and Lerner is the philosophical Jew par excellence) that attempt to address more than just a philosophical elite. Following his introductions of these short works, Lerner presents excellent English translations of them by some of the best Jewish medievalists. Maimonides’ main concern was to dispel popular superstitions about Judaism, both because they falsely portray it and because they provide ammunition for enemies of the Jews who argue that Jewish revelation is intellectually and morally inferior to their own revelations. The spiritual and even physical continuity of the Jews and Judaism requires that the masses of Jews understand, as best they can, that the Torah is truly the law given by God to “a wise and understanding people” (Deuteronomy 4:6). In other words, Jews should embrace philosophic understanding of their faith and the world in order not to succumb to views that might appear to be truer and more noble. (Mutatis mutandis, Pope John Paul II argues the same about Catholicism in his encyclical Fides et Ratio.) What do we derive from Lerner’s perceptive portrayal of Maimonides’ contribution to the spiritual health of his people? In an age when Jewish survival is argued on grounds of nostalgia or spitefulness at its would-be exterminators, Maimonides the popular educator provides a model for Jewish teachers, especially philosophical ones, to keep persuading the people that it is not so much that the Torah is good for the Jews, but that it is good for the Jews to affirm the Torah’s truth and attempt to demonstrate it as much as possible. This book is highly recommended.

David Novak

One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism. By Rodney Stark. Princeton University Press. 256 pp. $24.95.

Sociologist Rodney Stark is, as they say, controversial. In book after book, he sets out to overturn received wisdoms, and with his earlier The Rise of Christianity he ruffled the feathers of the historical establishment. The pres­ ent book, which is also eminently worth reading, continues that pattern as Stark gives new meaning to “interdisciplinary” in his imaginative forays into sociology, history, comparative religion, and theology to demonstrate the ways in which monotheism shaped the Western world, and thereby the world. He deals chiefly, of course, with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but includes an extended excursus on why Hinduism may also be viewed as monotheistic. He effectively debunks the notion popularized in the nineteenth century—chiefly by Jewish scholars, which is regretted by contemporary Jewish scholars—that Islam was ever so much more tolerant of religious minorities than Christianity, and offers interesting speculations on why anti-Semitism (an anachronistic term) broke out when and where it did over the centuries. Stark persists in his long attachment to the economist school of the sociology of religion, “explaining” religion in terms of exchange theory, rational choice, cost-benefit analysis, etc. As in past books, that persistence becomes an annoyance that gets in the way of his argument at least as often as it serves as a useful explanatory device. Like other critical theories—gender, race, class conflict, sexual repression—economism results in reductionism and implausible squeezings of facts to fit the theory, although in this book Stark seems more aware of that danger and underscores that his explanatory system should not be taken as a device for discrediting the ways in which believers understand their beliefs and actions. One True God is bracing, rollicking, startling, belligerent, informative, and guaranteed to provoke second and third thoughts about what readers thought they always knew about religion and the history of the world.

The Hauerwas Reader. Edited by John Berkman and Michael Cart­ wright. Duke University Press. 729 pp. $27.95 paper.

Critics will say that this is all the Stanley Hauerwas you will ever need, and quite a bit more. Admirers will view it as the first course of a magnificent feast. The collection might have been titled The Essential Hauerwas, in two senses of that term: it captures the gist of the person and enterprise, and understanding Hauerwas is necessary to understanding theological ethics in our time. Hauerwas outrages and instructs, and is almost always worth the bother.

Breaking Faith: The Pope, the People, and the Fate of Catholicism. By John Cornwell. Penguin. 296 pp. $24.95.

The author of Hitler’s Pope explains how the Catholic Church has broken faith with his understanding of what the Catholic Church should be. He is hopeful that, if the next pope is a kind and loving man who agrees with him, the Church might be able to survive the twenty-first century.

Love & Economics: Why The Laissez-Faire Family Doesn’t Work. By Jennifer Roback Morse. Spence. 273 pp. $27.95.

Morse is an economist who was cured of libertarianism by becoming a mother. The book is a magnificent defense of marriage and family, but it is also more than that. It offers a readable and penetrating analysis of the ways in which rationality and calculated self-interest in human relations has stifled the expression of self-giving love, without which nothing works. She begins from the simple observation that we all enter life as babies. We never outgrow being dependent, but we can grow in our ability to give. Warmly recommended.

Characters in Search of Their Author. By Ralph McInerny. University of Notre Dame Press. 138 pp. $25.

The Gifford Lectures of 1999-2000 delivered by the extraordinary, and extraordinarily prolific, philosopher of Notre Dame. McInerny joins learning, wit, and lucidity in producing a reliable, and enjoyable, guide to reasoned faith and faithful reason.

The Fall & Other Poems. By J. Bottum. St. Augustine’s Press. 68 pp. $7 paper.

Some of the poems have appeared in these pages, more elsewhere. Bottum, back-of-the-book editor at the Weekly Standard, is one of the most consistently rewarding poets writing today. Faith, hope, and love keep breaking through the surrounding dusk. Highly recommended.