Books in Brief
The Reformation: A History by Patrick Collinson (Modern Library, 238 pp., $21.95). In his preface to this pocket-size history, Cambridge professor Patrick Collinson announces his audience as "the general reader who may know very little about the Reformation." As a brief survey for laymen, this book covers the essentials of its subject, including those unfamiliar to many college graduates. The Reformation is organized into chapters with textbook topics: Luther, Calvin, the English Reformation, the Radical Reformers, the Catholic Reformation, etc. Though this format is the standard one, Collinson effectively presents it as living history--aiming "to make issues that are remote from today's thinking and concerns as accessible as possible."
Though Collinson highlights Luther's "discovery of the Gospel," he has no unifying thesis. Nor should we expect one. As an introductory survey, his book concentrates on the basics. Collinson emphasizes as central to the Reformation the great Christian theme of renewal. On this point he asks the crucial historiographical question: Was the Reformation "a kind of midwife to the modern world?" He is best when he considers such sweeping questions, and Collinson argues well for the Reformation as a single, definitive leap toward modernity.
Though Collinson deserves praise for this helpful survey, he makes an unfortunate misstep. The organization of his book--into progressive reformers, radicals, and Catholic reactionaries--seems anachronistic. It skews our perspective to map the divisions of the Reformation according to twentieth-century politics. "Conservative" and "liberal" hardly fit disputes about how men perceive their relationship to God and salvation. Collinson's descriptions of Calvin as Marx-like and his Geneva as a sixteenth-century Moscow do not help us understand anything. It is not their issues we thus access, but our own.
--Daniel Sullivan
Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling by Alan Jacobs (Wm B. Eerdmans, 261 pp., $20). Alan Jacobs may be our best writer at exposing the simplistic failure of would-be "prophetic voices." The problem, he explains in Shaming the Devil, is that writers' lines are often "resonant--they sound prophetic--because they are simple, but they are simple because they ignore so much of the truth." After the attacks of September 11, for example, many turned to W.H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939"--despite the fact that Auden had thoroughly rejected it. He rejected it because he recognized the falseness of its most-loved phrases: Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return, and We must love one another or die. Both sound good, but the truth is not so simple. In the late 1940s, Auden wrote beside the poem, "This is a lie."
In a world prophetically reduced to two axes--one good and the other evil--all artists need to be reminded that truth is more complex. In "The Witness" (which first appeared in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, as did an earlier version of the brilliant essay "The Republic of Heaven"), Jacobs quotes Solzhenitsyn precisely on this point: "The line separating good and evil," he writes, "passes not through states, nor between classes, not between political parties either--but right through every human heart." The glory of Jacobs's book lies in this constant reminder. Shaming the Devil might equally well have been titled Against Simplicity, with a central message gleaned from Scripture: "Beware of false prophets." In an age when prophets are eagerly sought, bought, and sold, it is a message that bears repeating.
--Abram Van Engen