VIRTUES AT WORK
Eastland, Terry
VIRTUES AT WORK Six Who Changed Our Time By Terry Eastland In Great Souls, David Aikman has assembled brief biographies of six modern figures, all but one of whom are still living: Billy Graham,...
...Thus, for Aikman, Graham's life is centrally about "salvation," Mandela's "forgiveness," Solzhenitsyn's "truth," Mother Teresa's "compassion," John Paul's "human dignity," and Wiesel's "remembrance...
...His book, however, is not precisely a book about believers (Wiesel's attitude toward God, for example, is hard to nail down...
...Aikman adduces some telling statistics: Between 1950 and 1997, Graham preached 206 crusades in America and 182 abroad...
...Mother Teresa was, of course, compassionate to the poor, the handicapped, and the dying...
...Engrave it into your minds...
...Each of these six has indeed "changed the century," and for the better...
...Of all our Great Souls," writes Aikman, "the pope is surely the most universal in the range of his experience, the extent of his travels and interests, the breadth of his conception of life...
...of Solzhen-itsyn's famous critique of the West, delivered as a commencement speech at Harvard in 1978...
...Rather, free-dom—the liberty of a people degraded by apartheid—would seem to be his great preoccupation...
...Her new life as a missionary to the poor of Calcutta and beyond followed, but even as she loved her neighbors she also loved God...
...VIRTUES AT WORK Six Who Changed Our Time By Terry Eastland In Great Souls, David Aikman has assembled brief biographies of six modern figures, all but one of whom are still living: Billy Graham, Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, and Elie Wiesel...
...There are occasions in Great Souls when one wishes for more analysis from Aikman—of the theological vitality of the "New Evangelicalism" that he rightly credits Graham with establishing...
...You are at Auschwitz...
...Elie Wiesel, survivor of the Holocaust, is about nothing if not remembrance—unless it is also reconstruction...
...And Auschwitz is not a convalescent home...
...She certainly gave up her life to help the "poorest of the poor...
...Pope John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyla in Poland, is the most complex figure treated in this book (and the one most admired by the author, who calls him "the greatest single Christian leader of the twentieth century...
...Nor is his book precisely about spiritual things (such as salvation, in Graham's case) or the distinctively Christian virtues (such as love, in Teresa's...
...Wiesel's only book about the Holocaust was his first one, Night, but his subsequent novels and writings have, as Aikman points out, alluded to it or its consequences in the lives of individuals...
...The reader of Aikman's Great Souls is left, then, with Nelson Mandela, who fought apartheid before being imprisoned for crimes against the state from 1964 to 1990, only to see the demise of the old system and, in 1994, his election as president of a constitutional democracy in which blacks and whites have the same rights...
...Aikman comes close to recognizing the first half of this when he invokes a Greek word for love, agape, in discussing Mother Teresa's compassion...
...This is a fine accomplishment, and it can be credited to the fact that Aikman is both a journalist for secular media and a believing Christian...
...Graham also has gone to great lengths to protect his ability to preach that message credibly by fashioning rules that guard against the common ministerial temptations of money, sex, and glory...
...Yet Aikman's profile of Mother Teresa, the best of the six, provides better reasons for concluding that her overriding virtue was not simply the compassion that Aikman sees, but something broader—love: love of man and love of God...
...By turns sardonically funny, anguished, or burning in slow fury," writes Aikman, "Solzhenitsyn accomplished something truly rare in all literature, the moral impaling of an entire political system with sustained literary power...
...Wiesel has indeed remembered...
...Ultimately, Great Souls is about commendable qualities that people of any religious commitment, or even of none at all, can and should recognize...
...But Aikman, who for many years covered international affairs for Time magazine, is not content simply to detail the lives and salute the remarkable achievements of these eminent persons...
...spreading the message of salvation, for he has always and everywhere been a preacher who preaches Christ...
...It can fairly be said that, beginning with the publication in 1962 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his truth-telling was of first importance in helping set the Russian people free...
...My goal is always the same," he once said, "to invoke the past as a shield for the future...
...But even if Mandela's forgiveness is of the sort Aik-man defines, it has not been the virtue or preoccupation that most distinguishes the man...
...Billy Graham, for example, has obviously been preoccupied with Terry Eastland is publisher of the American Spectator...
...to show the invisible world of yesterday and through it, perhaps on it, erect a moral world where men are not victims and children never starve and never run in fear...
...Yet, even as related here, it invites a different assessment as to Mandela's overriding preoccupation or virtue, which Aikman says is for-giveness—specifically Mandela's forgiveness of white South Africans since his release from prison...
...But she was not just preoccupied with Jesus' second commandment, to love thy neighbor, but even more his first, which is to love God with all of one's heart and soul and mind...
...Aikman recounts what an S S officer told young Wiesel upon his arrival at Auschwitz: "Remember it forever...
...Upon receiving the Nobel Prize in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared that "one word of truth shall outweigh the whole world...
...As pope, John Paul has centered many of his writings and sermons on the human person and the need to assert and protect its irreducible worth...
...But Aikman deserves credit for writing biographies that not only are reliable and highly readable but also—because of the figures he chose to write about—morally elevating...
...And his preoccupation with the defense of the individual has ranged across a wide variety of subjects—abortion and euthanasia, war, capitalism, democracy, and human rights...
...And perseverance in behalf of that freedom for twenty-seven years of imprisonment seems his great virtue...
...Rather, his intention lies in showing how each life, as he puts it, "has demonstrated one overriding human quality, or preoccupation, or virtue, more than any other...
...These have not been parochial crusades, Aikman points out, since Graham has included as co-workers in his evangelistic efforts both liberal and conservative Protestants, as well as Roman Catholics...
...His is a remarkable story...
...At the age of twelve, a young Albanian girl named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, she told her family that she wanted "to belong wholly to God...
...Except perhaps in the case of Mandela, it is hard to disagree with these assessments...
...In Oslo to accept a Nobel in 1979, she told journalists that her heart belonged "entirely to the heart of Jesus...
...His great preoccupation has indeed been to write the truth—the reality of communism as Solzhenitsyn and other Russians brutally experienced it...
...Yet Aik-man's assessment of John Paul as centrally concerned throughout his life with human dignity is one that fits this multi-dimensional figure well enough...
...Graham has thus united—to further the gospel message— Christians who otherwise have strong doctrinal disagreements...
...or of the ideas elaborated by Pope John Paul II, an intellectual of high distinction...
...It's a concentration camp...
...As Aikman points out, John Paul as a young man living in a Europe tortured by Nazism and communism came to understand that these philosophies, in opposition to his own faith, did not recognize human beings as people, much less as creatures of God Himself, bearing His image...
...Aikman says this virtue is not genuine if something is demanded in return, and it seems odd to say that Mandela's forgiveness has been demandless, extended as it has been in a practical context in which he plainly has wanted to effect major political changes...
...She thought and prayed for six years, Aikman relates, before leaving her family and her native Albania to belong wholly to God...
Vol. 4 • September 1998 • No. 2
