Inquest on the Shroud of Turin/Report on the Shroud of Turin/Portrait of Jesus
Zeik, Michael
her ex-husband in plastic and uses him as a place mat. Enter Darryl Van Horne, a pushy Manhattanite who sets up an alchemist's lab in an old mansion, and promises to refurbish it in a way that...
...REPORT ON THE SHROUD OF TURIN John H. Heller Houghton Mifflin, $15.95, 225 pp...
...the characters themselves, and their situations, lack transcendence...
...There is, deposited in a vault in Turin, a long linen cloth, fourteen by three and a half feet wide, on which appear two faint images, head-to-head, exhibiting respectively the front and back of a nude man...
...Or, if it matters...
...Yet Updike's achievement seems to be more one of artistic virtuosity than of coming to terms with a great theme, and often he dazzles with a superficiality that reminds one of a Fourth of July sparkler -- sparks but no heat, light but no illumination...
...finding a voice -- Delta Wedding, The Optimist's Daughter, The Ponder Heart, and Stories collected in 1980 -- might piece together some of the material in this book...
...The linen cloth can be traced back 627 years to the town of Lirey, France...
...A "Southern School" they of course donot form, unless from their work one wishes to conclude that Southern writers are idiosyncratic...
...They do make fascinating reading...
...in other words, alien to all traditional artistic categories, the image on the us the particulars of white, middle-class social life in the rural Northeast...
...the picture it bears will probably remain in my mind as the true visage of the Rabbi of Nazareth...
...Her mother, who had grown up in West Virginia, was introspective, moody, almost morbid in her concern for her family's welfare -- a romantic who kept an open novel, floury on top, on the kitchen shelf while she baked her family's bread...
...Nevertheless, there is something about the Shroud that makes it especially interesting to the twentieth century: whereas most other mysterious religious phenomena seem alien to modern man, given our technological zeitgeist, it is precisely contemporary technology which has revealed to us the surprising facts about the Shroud...
...The narrator has been reading Kierkegaard...
...Further, Prof...
...Frank Tribbe, an attorney who was for twenty years Assistant General Counsel of the U.S...
...and the Shroud, insists Joe Nickell, ex-professional magician and private detective, is one of them...
...Heller, too, is on occasion too anecdotal for my taste...
...Now for the other side of the story, In 1978, the church permitted a team of forty scientists to study the Shroud for a period of five days, using almost every conceivable-type of modern technology...
...Her father, brought up on a farm in southern Ohio, was curious about practical matters -- he kept maps, a telescope, and a gyroscope in the living room, a barometer on the dining room wall, and made and flew excellent box kites...
...Its history prior to 1357 is conjectural...
...As a preeminent novelist of manners, Updike makes meaningful every nuance of behavior that occurs in Eastwick, and like Jane, sprinkles every happening for pungency...
...Predictably, Darryl and the three witches become involved, and then disinvolved...
...The problem with that brief story, however, is also the problem with Updike's new novel...
...First of all, the New Testament itself is completely silent on the existence of such a remarkable burial cloth...
...The Shroud of Turin is not about to demonstrate it...
...Well, unlike Buddhism, Christianity admits -- nay, asserts that it is a religion based on faith...
...The man has wounds...
...In any case, their own Jewish background would make them hesitant to revere "images" -- especially one which would have been ritually impure in the first place, owing to its contact with a corpse...
...I have somehow managed to practice the faith without too much paraphernalia...
...PORTRAIT OF JESUS Frank C. Tribbe Stein & Day, $19.95, 281 pp...
...He was, indeed, silenced by the very pope to whom he appealed for a condemnation of the Shroud...
...Since the scientific tests in 1978, by the way, new evidence has accumulated...
...At the end one wonders, in the words of one of Updike's coven, which witch is which...
...Conclusion...
...and Tribbe's for historical material...
...II Shroud was itself a "negative...
...I wish, however, that Tribbe had not seen fit to include material on other "unexplained" images of Christ, all but one of which, to my mind, lack the nobility and credibility of the Shroud...
...In an early Updike story, "The Astronomer," the narrator relates a visit to him and his young wife by a learned astronomer...
...In April 1983 she took time to reflect on her life, her writing, and the possible relations between them, with herself as subject and object...
...From the vast array of his objections, I present the four that stuck in my mind...
...Nevertheless, I recommend his book for scientific data...
...Max Frei, a botanist and pollen expert, whose testimony is regularly accepted in European courts of law, has identified pollen on the Shroud which could only have come from plants that grew in Palestine and Anatolia -- some of which have been extinct for centuries...
...the rest were Jews, I June 1984:341 agnostics, and Protestants...
...The Middle Ages, of course, are notorious for the manufacture of religious relics...
...But I'm not unbiased...
...This book, first delivered as the inaugural William E. Massey Lectures at Harvard, is the result...
...John Heller, however, a Yale biophysicist, speaking for the rest of the team, asserted that McCrone had not removed his test samples from the Mylar tapes on which they were mounted, before analyzing them...
...Thirdly, the particular weave of the cloth was unknown until medieval times...
...Edessa, in Anatolia, safe from the persecutions of the pagan Roman Empire, had a Christian community which in the first century A.D., boasted of an image of the Lord' 'not made by human hands...
...There was one exception: the microanalyst, Walter McCrone, extensively quoted by Nickell, insisted, as already noted, that the so-called blood stains were only ferrous oxide pigmentation...
...She comes from a family exemplary in outward matters and warmly united at home...
...For there is in Updike's work, and in this novel as well, invariably a war between rationalism and mysticism, between what is known, felt, and sensuously apprehended on the one hand, and what is beyond reason on the other...
...Enter Darryl Van Horne, a pushy Manhattanite who sets up an alchemist's lab in an old mansion, and promises to refurbish it in a way that may prove an environmental threat both to the marshes and mentality of Eastwick...
...The team, by the way, had only a few Catholic~members...
...Her fiction is most often set in the South, in Mississippi scenes she knows, and their tone is personal -- often first person...
...So much for the silence of Scripture...
...They weaken an otherwise sober presentation...
...Their Commonweal: 342...
...The coins have been identified as the "Julia" coins, struck in 29 A.D...
...All this is by way of personal background, before telling you that I am thoroughly impressed with the phenomenon of the "Shroud of Turin...
...The wounds are the wounds of crucifixion...
...Here she is speaking autobiographically (one hopes no official biography will be attempted) and from the heart...
...a treasured amusement, but no treasure...
...What of Nickell's other objections...
...In short, it is indemonstraI Listening, seeing, ONE WRITER'S BESINNINES Eudor8 Welty Harvard University, $10, 104 pp...
...Mm.gas-et Wimsatt E UDORA WELTY is celebrating her seventy-fifth birthday this year...
...Of course this does not mean that she is rattling skeletons better left in peace...
...After the astronomer leaves, the narrator says: "The mingle on the table was only part of the greater confusion as in the heat of rapport our unrelated spirits and pasts scrambled together, bringing everything in the room with them, including the rubble of footnotes bound into Kierkegaard...
...Whether or not the authenticity of the Shroud can ever be established beyond doubt (by carbon 14 tests...
...Alas, it is the conception, the interspersed commentary, that is multi-dimensional...
...In essence, this novel is yet another charming, clever, deft spell conjured up by an incredibly prolific imagination in Updike's continuous battle against the demons of the Enlightenment...
...The confusion, the scrambling pasts and spirits, and the rubble of footnotes (which turn into literature) areall central for Updike...
...And last, the alleged blood stains on the linen are merely particles of ferrous oxide, a standard base for red pigment...
...She draws, as a writer must, on her own experience, but not directly, as she explains...
...The time is the 1960s during the Vietnam war and the rising American drug culture...
...I also have a problem with certain details of the Fatima story...
...Michael Zeik E XCEPT for my picture in a high school yearbook, there is not a holy relic in the house...
...As for the conjectural history of the cloth prior to its exhibition in medieval France,~ Dr...
...Perhaps no major American writer since Faulkner, or Hawthorne, has been able to find such richness in regionalism and parochial superstition...
...Also contrary to all artistic tradition, the wounds appeared on the wrists, not the _9 hands, of the crucified...
...It was, so to speak, a sacred puzzle reserved for us...
...Born in Jackson, Mississippi, where she still lives, she is one of a renowned crop of Southern writers: William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Spencer, and Flannery O'Connor among them...
...The forty scientists were virtually unanimous that the image on cloth had not been produced by any artistic, chemical, or physical technique now known to man...
...As regards the medieval bishop who claimed to have detected artistic forgery, all sorts of petty jurisdictional quarrels might have led to his accusations...
...Information Agency, points out that the first Jewish Christians were not in a position to flaunt any relics of the crucifixion...
...Heller and his colleagues assert that their samples passed "six irrefutable tests" for blood...
...After the conversion of Constantine, the image was supposedly transferred to the capital...
...Perhaps no major writer in English since Yeats has been able to create literature out of personal experience to the extent Updike has...
...Most paintings, for my taste, are either too "pretty," too "Aryan," or both...
...This image is the only representation of Jesus Christ that satisfies my own theological and esthetic expectations...
...Since even the New York Times - - evidently worried by the possibility of a mass religious conversion of its reading audience -- saw fit to write an editorial on the Shroud, I can presume that most of you know what has been going on...
...He has done it each time with shimmering, learned bursts of words, wit, and in this case, witchery...
...First photographed in 1898, the images produced a "positive," not a "negative," imprint...
...A reader of her short stories and novels ble...
...Secondly, the first French bishop who went on record regarding the Shroud, denounced it as an artistic forgery...
...from Constantinople it passed, via the marauding Crusaders "and the Knights Templar network, to Lirey, France...
...But at the end, one is hard pressed to take seriously the spirits and parts and rubble of Kierkegaardean implications...
...While it hopes not to violate reason, it certainly transcends it...
...It must have been painful as well as pleasant to record for the public so many details of daily living, so many private facts, about herself and her forebears...
...One cannot laugh off facts like these...
...Again and again John Updike has told I Getting the picture II I INQUEST ON THE SNROUD OF TURIN Joe Nickell Prometheus Books, $14.95, 178 pp...
...to honor Caesar's mother who died that year...
...Computer enhancements of Shroud photographs has suggested the presence of coins on the eyelids of the figure (consistent with first century Jewish burial customs...
...Gilbert Raes of the Ghent Institute of Textile Technology has judged that both the material and the weave of the Shroud are totally consistent with first-century textiles and looms...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 11
