In the time leading up to World War II, Fr. Walter Ciszek, an American priest, was trained in the Byzantine Rite, with the intent of travelling to Russia as a missionary. The war intervened, and Fr. Ciszek was posted to Poland. In the course of things Poland was occupied by Russian forces. The Russians were recruiting laborers to work in the Urals, and Fr. Ciszek and two other priests presented themselves (in civvies, of course) as a way of moving closer to their shared goal.

Things did not go as they had planned; the other laborers were afraid to talk about matters of faith, and then Ciszek was arrested as a Vatican spy. He spent years in the Lubianka prison in Moscow, and more years as a prisoner in labor camps, before he was finally able to return to the United States. In all, he spent twenty-three years in Soviet Russia. In that time, the only thing that sustained him was his faith in God. Or, more accurately, God sustained him.

Ciszek wrote two books about his experiences. The first, With God in Russia, is a thick, detailed account of everything that happened to him and everything he did. The second, the thinner He Leadeth Me, covers the facts quickly and at a high level, and focusses on the movements of Ciszek’s own soul, and the spiritual lessons he learned while in Russia. Most of these, not surprisingly, concern trust in God and what it means to accept His will.

Of the two, He Leadeth Me is the book I usually hear about, and having just finished it I have to affirm all of the praise it has been given. I used it as spiritual reading, reading and reflecting on a chapter or part of a chapter before going to bed. It works well for that, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself returning to it periodically. But I read With God in Russia first, and I really think that that’s the way to do it. The description of Fr. Ciszek’s experiences in He Leadeth Me are certainly hair-raising, but they don’t make the same impression as the more detailed descriptions in his first book. Consequently, I suspect it’s possible, while reading He Leadeth Me, to misunderstand just what it meant for Fr. Ciszek to trust in God so radically—to allow God to lead him through it.

Anyway, both are highly recommended.

I finished Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim a couple of days ago, in between checking the fire news on-line; I’d have read it long ago, based on all of the glowing reviews I’d seen, but I was waiting for it to come out in paperback.

The premise of Eifelheim is pretty nifty: what would happen if a party of extraterrestrials were “shipwrecked” in 14th Century Europe? Would they be hailed as demons? Would there be mobs with pitchforks and torches? Or would they, just maybe, be seen as oddly shaped men? Flynn chooses the latter course, and justifiably in my view. In my pursuit of St. Thomas Aquinas I’ve been getting an education in how the Medievals thought, and so far as I can tell Flynn absolutely nails it.

According to the Medievals, a man is a rational animal: an animal distinguished from other animals by being rational. And this was seen as the way in which Man is made in God’s image: Man shares God’s rationality. Note that there’s nothing in this about shape: if the ETs were demonstrably rational, the learned of the time would have judged them to be men.

Remarkably, there is historical evidence for this. It was generally believed that all manner of odd creatures lived in distant lands, including the cynocephali, or “dog heads”. And the topic of whether the “dog heads” were rational animals, and hence men, was discussed. (Indeed, St. Augustine addressed the general question long before the Middle Ages.)

It’s amusing how little has changed. The Medievals like to hear stories about odd races living in far off lands, and so do we…it’s just that we’ve explored this planet so thoroughly that we have to put the far off lands in other solar systems.

But Eifelheim‘s not just an interesting thought experiment. As a detailed and accurate picture of Medieval life and thought, it shines a fascinating light on the usual run of “medieval” sword-and-sorcery novels. I like those, too; but few of them are anything at all like the real thing.

All that said, I didn’t cordially love Eifelheim. It’s mostly a tragedy, when all is said and done, and I’m not really into tragedy; and it’s a serious book, at a time when I was really in need of something lighter. But please note: I finished it anyway, and was glad to do so.

One thing I did love: Pastor Dietrich’s argument that the Krenkl were men rather than demons, done in the style of St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae. I really have to hand it to Flynn. It’s one thing to research a subject well enough to fake it; it’s another to understand it. So far as I can tell, Flynn does.

I ordered a copy of Hillaire Belloc’s The Great Heresies after reading Heather’s post on Belloc’s birthday, as I’d been curious about Belloc for some time, and had had no idea where to start.

Let me first address the book itself, as an artifact. I’m grateful that the publishers have brought it back into print, but, honestly, I’ve never seen such a poor job of type-setting. The problem isn’t typographical errors, as such, though there are a number of them; it’s not even the weird line breaks that occasionally occur in the middle of the paragraph, or the way that the left margin migrates. The real problem is with the punctuation. There are many, many spots where, quite clearly, a dash or a colon or a comma is simply missing. It was maddening! If you can find an alternate edition, by all means do.

Now that I’ve gotten that off of my chest…

Heather’s right, the book is politically incorrect. It’s un-PC by modern standards; and unless I miss my guys it was un-PC by contemporary standards as well, and intentionally so. It’s clear they called him Old Thunderer for a reason.

The goal of the book is to discuss five “heresies”, where “heresy” is carefully defined as follows:

Heresy is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein.

The “complete and self-supporting” scheme is the Catholic Church, and the heresies are movements of thought, and of people, that set themselves up against the Catholic Church. The five “Great Heresies” Belloc discusses are:

• The Arian heresy
• Islam
• The Albigensian heresy
• Calvinism, and Protestantism in general
• Modernism

In each case he discusses the origin of the heresy, the Catholic doctrines it affirms and denies, the effect of the affirmation and denial, and the progress and end of the heresy.

It would be easy to write a blog post on each of these, but for now I’ll confine myself to some general remarks. First, in each case Belloc brings in some historical details with which I was unfamiliar. For example, he attributes the longevity of the Arian heresy to the support of the Roman Army; and the members of the Army were Arians because it set them apart from (and, from their point of view, above) the run-of-the-mill citizens. (Remember that at the time in question, the Army was recruited from the folk of the frontiers, or from outside the Empire entirely.) I’d want to check these details, and I suspect him of over-simplifying, but in general he seems to have things the right way round.

And second, a number of the currents he discusses, especially with regard to Protestantism and Islam, seem prophetic in the light of the headlines of the last decade. I’m thinking, for example, of the on-going disintegration of the main-line Protestant churches in America, and the melt-down of the Anglican communion.

There’s much here to ponder.

Newman 101, by Roderick Strange, is an introduction to the life and thought of John Henry Cardinal Newman. As a Catholic-turned-Anglican-turned-Catholic I have a soft spot in my heart for Newman, the more so as he had the good sense to swim the Tiber once only. At the same time, I’ve not known much about him, and got this book to remedy my lack.

The short version of Newman’s life is that he was an Oxford professor and a devout Anglo-Catholic. In pursuing Anglicanism as a branch of the ancient Catholic (i.e., “universal”) church, he found himself inexorably drawn across the Tiber, noting that “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” He became a member of the Roman Catholic church, and was ordained a priest, at a time when to be a Catholic in England was a very difficult thing. He was a great thinker, and his thoughts on the development of Catholic doctrine were influential on the conciliar fathers of Vatican II.

Much of his Catholic life was difficult; he was balked in many worthwhile projects, and was often misunderstood. He bore up under his misfortunes in a manner that is perhaps best described by the modern “psalm” the Anchoress shared with us today:

We take each day as it comes
Sometimes I hate my life
But mostly things are good

His exterior life was often hard and painful, but inwardly he was always greatly aware of God’s blessings.

The other thing I note about him is that although he was of an intellectual bent, and tirelessly followed the thread of truth like a bloodhound, seeking the truth was not for him a purely intellectual endeavor. The truth is to be sought with the mind and also with the heart—a thing that was also true, though it is easy to forget it, of my beloved St. Thomas Aquinas.

So what about Strange’s book? I dunno. I learned many things about Newman from it, but I don’t feel like I ever really came to grips with the man himself. Certainly I didn’t dislike it; but I had higher hopes for it.
To be fair, I wasn’t reading it under the best of circumstances, so I’m inclined to give the author a bit of slack. I’ll no doubt give it another try at some point in the future…unless I simply go back and make another attempt at Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua.