Crossing the Threshold
By Kelly Jane Torrance
The Associated Press reported early this morning that Pope John Paul II is receiving nutrition through a feeding tube. His increasingly frail health is likely the reason Rizzoli moved up publication of the 84-year-old pontiff's fifth book, Memory and Identity: Conservations at the Dawn of a Millennium. But the book itself should put to rest any suggestion that the Pope has been anything but alert during the last few years.
Memory and Identity came out of conversations the Pontiff had in 1993 with two Polish philosophers. An anonymous editorial note at the beginning says the Pope has revised the transcripts, setting them "in a broader context." It is unclear how much of the work is new, but he mentions such recent events as 9/11 and the Madrid bombing of last year.
Indeed, this is the first of the Pope's books to address politics in a deep way. His thoughtful religious faith is always at the center, of course. And much of this book will only appeal to Christians--there are a few chapters on the mystery of redemption, for example, that are very Bible-focused. But any reader should marvel at how he connects these two fundamental topics in new ways. Clever, for example, is a section that relates patriotism to the fourth commandment, the injunction to honor thy mother and father. And his other frequently-used sources include Aristotle and Kant.
The Pope is, of course, a very learned man, and the book can be high minded at times. But he writes clearly, and even readers with no background in philosophy can follow his arguments. He fits a lot into 172 pages. The book is a theology text, philosophical treatise, meditation on freedom, and history, particularly a Polish history, rolled into one.
The most engaging parts are those about his homeland, Poland. Many readers will be bored by some of the longer digressions on the country. But the Pope lived in one of the nations hardest hit by the twentieth century's twin totalitarian ideologies, Nazism and communism, and on this subject he is particularly eloquent: "Not even the insane storm of hate unleashed from East and West between 1939 and 1945 could destroy it," he says of his homeland.
The Pontiff himself is credited with helping to bring about the downfall of communism, and his reflections on the subject are long awaited--and humble. "[A] contributory factor in its demise was certainly its deficient economic doctrine, but to account for what happened solely in terms of economic factors would be a rather na•ve simplification. On the other hand, it would obviously be ridiculous to claim that the Pope brought down communism single-handedly," he writes. (He is often unassuming: "The sense of being an 'unworthy servant' is growing in me in the midst of all that happens around me--and I think I feel at ease with this.")
He warns that the victory over the ideology responsible for more deaths the last century than any other was not a complete one: "We know that communism fell in the end because of the system's socioeconomic weakness, not because it has been truly rejected as an ideology or a philosophy. In certain quarters in the West, there are still those who regret its passing."
Memory and Identity, ultimately, is a book about the problem of evil. How did such monstrous acts take place in a supposedly advanced century in civilized countries? As the Pontiff affectingly notes, "The evil of the twentieth century was not a small-scale evil, it was not simply 'homemade.' It was an evil of gigantic proportions, an evil which availed itself of state structures in order to accomplish its wicked work, an evil built up into a system."
His answer is Original Sin. It is not as simple an answer as it seems. Saint Augustine, the Pope writes, described Original Sin as "self-love to the point of contempt for God." It is not merely that we are born sinful, it is the particular nature of that sin that led to such atrocities. "If man can decide by himself, without God, what is good and what is bad, he can also determine that a group of people is to be annihilated," the Pontiff explains. Our society may be more secular now, and we make think it impossible to repeat the history of the twentieth century, but the Pope would reply that we do so now, as the millions of abortions performed every year attest. He sees that issue as one of the most important confronting us now.
Who, when faced even with small tragedies, has not found it difficult to hold onto faith? At the end of the book, the Pontiff speaks for the first time of the 1981 assassination attempt that left him close to death. From here he moves to other "manifestations of violence," from Nazism and communism to the more recent terrorist attacks from east to west. His closing pages will provide inspiration to millions, as surely as his other works have.
"There is no evil from which God cannot draw forth a greater good," he concludes.
*****
The big story in publishing on the right this past week was the news that Mary Matalin will head a new conservative imprint, Threshold, at Simon & Schuster. Matalin is best known for being married to Clinton strategist James Carville. The Washington, D.C., consultant is also the sometime host of CNN's soon-to-be-cancelled Crossfire and a Bush administration insider.
The imprint will publish six to ten books annually, starting next year. Its first will be a memoir by Mary Cheney, who is best known for being a gay Republican. She worked on both her father's Vice Presidential campaigns and became a news item of her own last year when both John Edwards and John Kerry brought her up during a debate.
Some on the right might cheer the news that a major publisher will add more conservative authors to its roster. But hopes shouldn't be raised just yet. Simon & Schuster had a conservative imprint before--The Free Press--which now prints a variety of titles.
Simon & Schuster's move is part of a larger trend, though. Penguin started Sentinel two years ago, which has published Mary Eberstadt's Home-Alone America and Mona Charen's Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim To Help (and the Rest of Us). And Random House has Crown Forum, publisher of Michael Medved's Right Turns and Ann Coulter's How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).
Of course it's not any desire for diversity in publishing that leads the big publishers to start such imprints--it's the dollars. Most (but not all) of the books published under these ghettos are the high style, low substance books that become easy bestsellers. It seems unlikely that Matalin's imprint will publish much that is challenging. A release stated that the books to be published would have "a topical bent that is consistent with Ms. Matalin's well-known conservative views." Take that together with the fact that Matalin plans to continue her work with the Bush administration, and it's almost certain that no books critical of one type of conservatism will meet the Threshold.
"But political tactics are ephemeral. Books last," Matalin said in one interview. One wonders how many of the bestselling conservative authors will be read in 50 years. Regnery Publishing in Washington, D.C., is responsible for many of those bestsellers. But it has also published such classics as William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale and Whittaker Chambers' Witness.
But conservative authors should aspire higher than just to publish in a conservative ghetto. One of the most successful right-wing authors of recent years is former Weekly Standard writer and current New York Times columnist David Brooks. His two bestselling books were published not by a conservative press but by...Simon & Schuster.
Kelly Jane Torrance is arts and culture editor of Brainwash. Her website on culture can be found at www.kellyjanetorrance.com.
