In a worthy companion volume to his Jesus: A Life (1992), novelist-biographer Wilson (A Watch in the Night, 1996, etc.) adeptly recreates the milieu of Christianity's greatest interpreter and missionary. An ex-believer no longer certain about Christianity's historical verities, Wilson is still awed by its power to speak to a broken world. Contrary to the recent, politically correct view of the apostle as a misogynistic, possibly self-hating homosexual, Wilson makes a case for him as ``a prophet of liberty, whose visionary sense of the importance of the inner life anticipates the Romantic poets more than the rule-books of the Inquisition.'' The author works through irony and carefully nuanced suggestion, turning over each shard of broken evidence from the ancient world for a clue as to how Paul's ``richly imaginative, but confused, religious genius'' developed. His Paul could spread Jesus' message almost to the limits of the then-known world because he himself embodied a world of contradictions: Hellenized Jew and Roman citizen; a member of Jerusalem's temple police used to seeing horrifying crucifixions, who eventually made the crucified and resurrected Christ the compelling figure of his thought. The biographer, synthesizing much of the latest Roman and Judaic scholarship, establishes an excellent context for the world in which Paul moved: Tarsus, Paul's putative birthplace, where Mithraic rites and the worship of Herakles may have left lasting impressions on his theology; a Palestine seething with sects maneuvering against the Roman Empire; and a Rome growing ruthless toward this growing nationalist unrest. This is not a Paul setting down rules for all time, but one counseling followers to stay pure for the day of judgment they will see soon. Wilson overstates the case for Paul, rather than Jesus, creating the beliefs in the Eucharist and in Christ as savior that form the heart of Christianity, but he eloquently shows why Paul was ``perhaps the greatest poet of personal religion.'' (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04066-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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