Martyrs
PRUSAK, BERNARD G.
AFTER YOU Martyrs Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith Edited by Susan Bergman HarperSanFrancisco, $23,334 pp. Bernard G. Prusak This book cuts to the heart of the matter, the heart of...
...O'Brien reproves Patrick Pearse, an Irish insurrectionist executed for his role in the Easter 1916 uprising, for a "metaphysics of rarefaction," conflating language and spectacle, poetry and performance...
...Just when martyrdom and the self had seemed saved from masochism and anomie, Rudman and O'Brien and Ascher trouble the waters again...
...Early zealots, it is argued, were effectively suicides...
...Bernard G. Prusak This book cuts to the heart of the matter, the heart of Christian faith: the folly of a God who died naked on a cross...
...Medieval crusaders would sooner have killed than be killed...
...Martyrs is hard-hitting, and by turns jagged, raw, and nauseating...
...Martyrdom has fallen from grace...
...To the willingness to believe, or to the truth of that belief...
...Implausible...
...The tension created by placing Woiwode's account of the murder of Alexander Menn alongside Early's analysis of the ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, is shocking...
...This collection of essays by twenty first-rate writers neither eschews ambiguity, nor succumbs to it...
...Why don't people believe today...
...Kathleen Norris tackles the sickening case of Maria Goretti, a little Italian girl celebrated by some Roman Catholics as the embodiment of a sexual ethic: better killed than raped...
...Don't come into the faith just for the heck of it...
...And Ascher, remembering the missionaries killed during the Boxer Rebellion in China, questions the boundary between faith and fantasy: "When do faith and stubbornness merge and become something else...
...The writers-among others, Larry Woiwode, Carolyn Forche, Paul Elie, Robert Ellsberg, Gerald Early, Patricia Hampl, Mark Rudman, Peggy O'Brien, Kathleen Norris, and Barbara Lazear Ascher-explore and contest the complexities martyrdom conceals...
...It was hot, and the sun was beating down...
...And another question: Can we live with that...
...Religious martyrdom, Bergman says, constitutes something like a "shadow narrative" to the twentieth century's horrors, which is a suggestive way to describe the contributions to her book...
...or the subversion of biblical hermeneutics (in the old days, God was God and the devil was the devil...
...And what a fall it has been...
...Happily, Martyrs is not another apologetic...
...Martyrs gives us some clues...
...In his best imitation of Dostoyevsky, Woiwode recreates the Russian Orthodox priest's violent death-"[H]is consciousness started fraying at its edges like window screen being ripped to shreds"-and evokes his passing into eternal light...
...There is nonetheless something unrelenting to this book, something that won't let good enough alone...
...it raises philosophical and theological questions as well...
...Eminent freethinkers have long greeted religious devotion and heroics with a sneer...
...They hold out hope...
...And, after all, the essays document violent death...
...What does martyrdom prove...
...None of these essayists denies the darkness of human being-our duplicity and our mystery-but they all pursue and redeem it...
...No more so than lives of Christian faith in what editor Susan Bergman calls this "age of atrocity," what the Russian poet and martyr Osip Mandelstam called our "tyrant century...
...and I got to feeling sick...
...Martyrs is composed of narratives, but does not just tell stories...
...Missionaries courted death with ignorance and arrogance...
...refuse to recognize that faith does not take us out of the world or set us against it, but might enable us to be in it otherwise, hopefully, and more fully...
...And it struck me how impossible it was to pray there, and also how impossible it was not to pray there...
...Did you hear the shot?' 'I saw the hemorrhaging, the blood from the nose, the ears, and the mouth, and there was nothing I could do.'" This book hits like a hammer on ice, shatters, even explodes...
...But is such sacrifice rather random and senseless...
...Here he beckons...
...It seems to me that many opponents and outspoken exponents of Christianity refuse to recognize that it offers the possibility of a relationship...
...Rudman proposes that Mandelstam "became perplexed about where the borderline of fantasy and fact lay between his erotics of exile...and the gruesomeness of being in actual exile...
...how do they do it...
...Early, by contrast, never even touches on King's murder...
...Martyrs may leave us with the impression that Christianity is all misery and no joy, even a sickness...
...Because the scandal of Jesus the Christ has been drowned out and leveled off...
...Norris decries not only the enthusiasm for Goretti's eternal virginity, but also the blindness to her authentic virtue: bravery before inevitable violence...
...Where once there was no greater glory than to die for Christ, and a selfless death obviated the need for further apology, today we know better...
...And greatness was not the willful glorification of the self, but its loss in a story greater than itself, its transfiguration into a site for the drama of revelation to play itself out...
...For Stein, Hampl quotes a friend, "truth did not exist as an abstraction..., but as something incarnated in persons...
...at Dachau, prayer is the only "answer...
...For most moderns, nothing-unless our gullibility and errant dogmatism...
...Of course the message is not new...
...No, this is hard-nosed stuff, and it goes against the grain...
...What is martyrdom's truth, to what does a martyr witness...
...neither aches to restore the halcyon days of yore, nor revels in randomness...
...Martyrdom is mythologized as the resolution and the readiness to die for faith: "Yes, I care enough...," etc...
...I went into it and knelt in a pew...
...This is the lesson Patricia Hampl draws from Edith Stein...
...I was terrified by the nuns' devotion...
...Why does anyone need redeeming...
...This summary may make the book sound masochistic...
...his dense but hypnotic prose made me wonder whether martyrdom itself is not a distracting abstraction...
...And too many apologetics egg this scorn on...
...The Carmelite nuns have a cloister, consecrated to the Holy Blood, outside the western wall...
...Why ever look for it in religion...
...Although I had visited Munich several times already, I had never gone to the camp...
...Last summer I made a pilgrimage to Dachau...
...Don't come just looking to sleep at night...
...In the aftermath of a martyr's death," Carolyn Forche comments in her essay, "mythol-ogizing begins in earnest...
...Martyrdom has been demythologized, and ambiguity has stolen the show...
...Forche also writes, regarding the murder of Oscar Romero, "[A young soldier in the death squads] had been intrigued...at the way blood from a slit throat makes a soft bubbling sound...
...Not because of bad music (if only there were organs, etc...
Vol. 124 • January 1997 • No. 1
