Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.     

 

THE MIND OF EL ESCORIAL

           

Once upon a time, kings and emperors could command architects to design great buildings to their specifications, in a way that only dictators can do now. Of course what the resulting buildings looked like would depend as much on the architects and builders as on the king’s or emperor’s wishes. Even so, there are many great palaces and castles across Europe that give some indication of the mind of a ruler with near absolute power.

We visited three of them during a recent trip to Europe.

Taking a daytrip out from Paris, we visited Versailles, which I last saw as an eleven-year-old in Europe with my parents and some of my siblings. Versailles is so clearly and so unambiguously a hymn to the worldly magnificence, wealth and power of King Louis XIV, designed to overwhelm visitors by its scale, by the extent of its grounds, by its statuary, design and decorations.

Walking down the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, we visited the Palace of Holyroodhouse, still occasionally the residence of the present queen. It was rebuilt to its present state in the 17^th century after the union of England and Scotland. It is like a pocket edition of Versailles – much smaller and more modest in scale, reminding Scots that they are subordinate to the country down south, and with the smashed ruins of Holyrood Abbey on its grounds further reminding Scots that their religion would now be dictated by the monarch.

But more than any other, the palace that incarnated the idea of a monarch was the monastery and royal palace of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, built for Philip II of Spain between the 1560s and 1580s. It’s about 28 miles north-west of Madrid – so about an hour’s train journey across the Castilian Plain from Madrid. Frankly tourists, and not claiming to be experts on Spain, we visited it as a daytrip when we were spending six nights in Madrid. Apparently the great majority of its visitors are day-trippers – about half a million of them each year.

It was one thing to bustle across the plain in mid-January, which should be the depths of winter, and to have a blue sky above us, and the great plain looking parched and yellow as if in mid-summer heat.  It was quite another to arrive at the small town of Escorial and find a bitterly cold wind blowing, despite the sunshine. It was mid-winter after all.

After a short taxi hop from the railway station, we were at the palace and monastery.

And here is the first thing that advises you of the mind of the king.

The outer walls of both palace and monastery are plain, bare, uniform and largely unadorned. They speak of a sort of magisterial austerity, even if they took the equivalent of millions of dollars to raise. You are not being told here of magnificence and worldly wealth, as at Versailles. You are being told of a formidable and fixed purpose.

Going through the main gate to the palace, you pass under a lintel with huge statues of the Old Testament Kings of Israel – David, Solomon and others. The religious purpose of the king is declared.

The Escorial is one of those places that does not allow tourists to take photos, though you may ache to do so. For some, the centrepiece would be the huge basilica within the palace, with its towering, elaborate and colourful altarpiece, incorporating at least seventeen paintings; and with huge canvases by El Greco and others around the walls, special chapels to saints abounding, and the general over-elaboration of late Renaissance art on the way to becoming baroque. In a way it is magnificent, at least declaring the centrality of religion to the king. In other ways, it is daunting and forbidding. This is the heart of Spain declaring it is ultra-Catholic in the face of the Protestant Reformation.

Royalty lies below religion in this schema – at any rate, all but two of Spain’s monarchs since the sixteenth century are buried in the vaults below the basilica. And down in this crypt, too, I delighted to discover the tomb of Philip II’s bastard half-brother Don John of Austria, which set me off remembering, from school, parts of G. K. Chesterton’s poem Lepanto, about Don John’s great sea victory.

But more than anything, what impressed me about the Escorial was Philip II’s great library. It contains thousands of folios and quartos from all quarters of the literate world – volumes in Spanish, Latin, Greek, Arabic and other languages. Many of them might have been banned by the Inquisition, but the king had special dispensation to possess them – and apparently he was an eager reader. The vaulted ceiling of the library contains Biblical scenes to rival the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Lined up along the floor of the library are the best astronomical and geographical aids that the sixteenth century possessed – great terrestrial and stellar globes; compasses; telescopes; what were then the wonders of modern science.

There are map rooms, which boast of Spain’s huge American empire, the largest empire the world had yet seen. But as for the king’s private apartments – they are modest and small.

Now how do I put all this together to read the mind of the king? He was a humanist scholar and a man schooled by the Renaissance. His library tells me that. He was firmly Catholic. He knew that there was a power set over his kingly authority. The great basilica tells me that.  He ruled a huge empire. The map rooms tell me that. Yet he was not personally vain. Indeed, he was something of an ascetic. His modest personal apartments tell me that. And those daunting external walls tell me that he knew much depended on sheer power.

English historical mythology casts Philip II as a villain and tyrant whose great Armada of 1588 was duly defeated. (Of course the Escorial has a triumphant painting of Spaniards defeating the English Counter-Armada of 1589.) But this really is a caricature. The king was a cultured and capable ruler in an age when all monarchs (including English ones) tyrannised subject peoples and asserted royal power.

What I do get from the Escorial, however, is something infinitely sad. The king’s great residence is a considerable distance from his capital city Madrid. When he is here, he is cut off from his people. Standing in the shadow of mountains, the palace is isolated. The wind whips across the plain. But, behind solid walls, the king finds absolute certainty. An ascetic, subjecting himself to the church’s authority, he knows he is not master of the universe. He has read enough to understand better than most people of his time the laws of nature and how the universe works. But he also knows that in Spain and in his empire, his word is law.

This is his burden and his curse. To be ascetic, well-educated, determined and the possessor of absolute kingly power.

How much could go wrong.

Something New

NOTICE TO READERS: For six years, Reid's Reader has been presenting an entirely free service to readers with commentary on books new and old. Reid's Reader receives no grants or subsidies and is produced each week in many hours of unpaid work. If you wish to contribute, on an entirely voluntary basis, to the upkeep of this blog, we would be very grateful if you made a donation via the PayPal "DONATE" button that now appears at the top of the index at right. Thank you.]
 
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“THE GLASS UNIVERSE” by Dava Sobel (4^th Estate – Harper/Collins, $NZ36:99)

            Astronomy made great advances in the 19^th century when photography came to its aid and astrophotography was born. Telescopes in observatories were organised to defy the rotation of the Earth and to stay focused on just one area of the night sky. Cameras fitted with specially prepared glass plates could now capture images of greater detail and clarity than a naked eye could see when pressed to the telescope eyepiece. An English firm perfected new dry (and chemically infused) plates, which meant that astronomers themselves no longer needed to treat their photographic plates with chemicals. Stellar spectroscopy allowed astronomers to work out the chemical substance of stars through their colours.

            The new precise and detailed photographic images of the stars were the “glass universe” of science-writer Dava Sobel’s latest work. The heavens suddenly seemed crowded as astronomers could observe far more than had ever previously been seen.  One picture in the 1880s “yielded 462 stars in a region where only 55 had been previously documented.” (p.19)

Nowhere was astrophotography taken up with such enthusiasm as at the observatory of Harvard University between the 1880s and the 1920s. “In less than a decade at the helm,” says Dava Sobel, “[Professor] Edward Pickering had shifted the observatory’s institutional emphasis from the old astronomy centred on star positions, to novel investigations into the stars’ physical nature.” (p.21)

It was men who watched the night skies, organised the telescopes and took most of the photographs – the type of men who won prizes and fellowships and became professors. But increasingly it was women who went through the business of analysing the glass plates and working out the magnitude, position, motion, brightness, colour and position on the spectrum of the stars observed. Comparing different photographic glass plates of the same area of sky, women were also assigned the task of hunting for “variables” – those stars whose brightness changed, possibly because they were part of a binary system or because they were emitting light at different rates in keeping with some process of growth or decay.  

Odd as it now sounds, the women who scrutinised the plates were called “computers”. They computed the distances, magnitude etc of stars. As observation became more precise, as tens of thousands of stars were observed for the first time, and as the sheer variety of stars became known, whole classification systems had to be altered and revised. These “computers” were at the forefront of devising the new systems of classification and hence of re-writing academic astronomy books.

You will now understand why Dava Sobel subtitles The Glass Universe  “The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars”. Her declared purpose is to bring to light those pioneering women in American astronomy who did the hard analytical work, in some cases without great public recognition, while the men who ran the astronomical institution often received the kudos.

She tells the stories of many such women.

There was, for example, Antonia Maury, of whom Sobel remarks  “Her two-tiered classification system, which addressed both the identity and the quality of the spectral lines, required a painstaking exactitude.” (p.49) Those last two words, “painstaking exactitude”, characterise much of the work of the “computers”. Glass plates were scrutinised in minute, indeed microscopic, detail, and stars reclassified according to systems that required multiple digits.

There was “Mina” (Williamina) Fleming, who classified over 10,000 stars, discovered ten novae and over 300 variable stars. Fleming was made “curator of astronomical photographs” and was therefore the first woman to hold a title at Harvard – but she was granted a lower rate of pay than her male colleagues.    

“ ‘In the Astrophotographic building of the Observatory,’ [Fleming wrote on] March 1 1900, on a lined yellow notepad, ‘12 women, including myself, are engaged in the care of the photographs; identification, examination and measurement of them; reduction of these measurements, and preparation of results for the printer.’ Every day they bent to their examination tasks in pairs, one with a microscope or magnifying glass poised over a glass plate in its frame, and the other holding a logbook propped open on a desktop or in her lap, recording the spoken observations of her partner. A hum of numbers and letters, like conversations in code, pervaded the computing room.” (p.89)

There was Annie Jump Cannon, who classified many hundreds of thousands of stars and devised the index system “OBAFGKM” which is still used by astronomers. Though it might now be condemned as “sexist”, it was Annie Cannon herself who made up the mnemonic for her index system: “Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me.”

Some of the women Sobel chronicles came from humble backgrounds, including a maidservant, but many came from the newly established colleges for women. Even if they were not paid well, they found the Harvard observatory one of the few places where they could gain meaningful employment in research. In fact some women college graduates begged to be employed for free, such was the prestige of the institution. But Mina Fleming “did not consider it good policy to place the observatory under obligation to anyone for services rendered gratis.” (p.105)

As well as the “computers” Maury, Fleming, Cannon and others, there was another class of women who influenced American astronomy. These were the benefactors, such as Catherine Wolfe Bruce, a wealthy widow who donated her astronomer husband’s advanced telescopes to Harvard; and Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of the wealthy man who basically invented astrophotography and who funded the Harvard work. The constant search for funds is one sub-theme of this book, with Professor Pickering often writing begging letters to the likes of Andrew Carnegie.

To remember innovators in science is obviously a worthwhile thing and Dava Sobel makes a good case for the patient, methodical, observant and highly focused women whom she praises. It is often a matter of recording their careful movements, as in the following precise passage:

“Miss Fleming removed each glass plate from its kraft paper sleeve without getting a single fingerprint on either of the eight-by-ten-inch surfaces. The trick was to hold the fragile packet by its side edges between her palms, set the bottom – open – end of the envelope on the lip of the specially-designed stand, and then ease the paper up and off without letting go of the plate, as though undressing a baby. Making sure the emulsion side faced her, she released her grip and let the glass settle into place. The wooden stand held the plate in a picture frame, tilted at a forty-five degree angle. A mirror affixed to the flat base caught daylight from the computing rooms big windows and directed illumination up through the glass.  Mrs Fleming leaned in with her loupe for a privileged view of the stellar universe. She had often heard the director say ‘A magnifying glass will show more in the photograph than a powerful telescope will show in the sky.’ ” (pp.25-26)

By this stage, you are probably persuaded that this is a very worthwhile book. It praises science, it gives an important role to women, its heart is in the right place.

But there are a couple of difficulties in the articulation of Sobel’s feminist theme. First there is the obvious fact that, once the “computer” women are factored in, the progress of astronomy was dependent on both sexes. As an experienced science-writer, Sobel author is fascinated by astronomy itself and its results. Hence, willy-nilly, the book becomes a history of men as much as of women and frequently wanders away from the Harvard “computers”.

Second, unlike her earlier best-selling book Longitude, this book cannot focus on one person and gradually becomes an institutional chronicle, with much information on who was appointed when, what departmental rivalries were going on, and other – not particularly enlightening - detail. In the story of many women’s toil, there is no single breakthrough or “Eureka!” moment; no climax to which the story can build; and hence much dull plodding.

I found myself frequently snatching at the incidental details on the periphery of Sobel’s main narrative. It was amusing to read of Harvard’s (eventually successful) attempts to set up a subsidiary observatory in the clear air of Peru while an armed uprising was going on in that country. There are tantalisingly brief references to the eccentric Percival Lowell, and to Professor Edward Pickering’s younger brother William Pickering, both of whom became obsessed with the notion of “canals” on Mars and even sent articles to credulous newspapers about vegetation on the moon – much to the consternation of more level-headed astronomers. There was the way international events disrupted research. During the First World War, American and British astronomers were separated from their valued German counterparts, meaning they had to catch up with the latter’s observations years after they had been made. This disruption was part of the reason that the great English astronomer Arthur Eddington (the man who confirmed Einstein’s theory of light by astronomical observation) became a lifelong pacifist. And towards the end of Sobel’s narrative, there was, from 1918 through the 1920s, the battle among astronomers over whether the universe was just one huge galaxy of stars; or whether our Milky Way galaxy was simply one galaxy among millions. This academic battle was stimulated by the earliest observations, thanks to astrophotography, of spiral nebulae.

The Glass Universe is a book packed with such interesting information, but in the end, it is a noble and worthy piece of work rather than an intellectually stimulating one. It walks patiently from datum to datum – a bit like the women whom it celebrates.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE” (“CIEN ANOS DE SOLEDAD”) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (first published in Spanish in 1967; English translation by Gregory Rabassa)

A couple of times before on this blog (see my reviews of The General in His Labyrinth and Autumn of the Patriarch), I have peddled the tale of how I spent seven weeks or so reading the major works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) ahead of writing a newspaper review of Gerald Martin’s biography Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life. Each time I have discussed this Nobel Laureate, I have made a point of noting that his two most-read novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, never really appealed to me, even though I know that One Hundred Years of Solitude has sometimes been called the most significant Spanish-language novel since Don Quixote. I suppose it is now time for me to explain why I am a heretic in this matter, so here goes:

I have tried very hard to like One Hundred Years of Solitude because it is universally regarded as Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece and the key South American novel – but I simply did not engage with it and in the end found myself only dutifully marching through it.

In “magical realist” style (much as Garcia Marquez and others came to hate that term) the novel covers at least one hundred years (and then some) in the life, across six or seven generations, of the Buendia family in the small Colombian town of Macondo – which reportedly stands in for Garcia Marquez’s hometown of Aracataca. Some of the characters, such as the matriarch of the first generation Ursula Iguaran, live through the whole period. Others, such as her son Colonel Aureliano Buendia (who is said to have fought in 32 wars) exert an influence over many generations. Time is stopped, sped up, reversed etc. and of course repeats itself, sometimes with the implication of the “eternal return”, which has befooled more than one person who can’t be bothered investigating in detail the changes that history brings.

Despite its careful structure, the novel is essentially episodic – which meant that I engaged with it only on an episodic level, enjoying individual stories that are embedded in it, but little else.

It is hard to discern which themes are implicit or intentional. In the early chapters, there is much talk about the introduction of modern technology (railways etc.) to the basically pre-industrial society of Macondo and its region; hence there is presumably a balancing of the modern and the pre-modern – the scientific and the magical. There is also much about the creative power of the word and the imagination. It is the gypsy Melquiades who introduces much of the technology in the early section, and near the very end of the novel a young descendant of the Buendia family finds writings by Melquiades which could suggest that the whole story of the Buendias family is a figment of the gypsy’s imagination… or could the gypsy be a personification of Fate or Time or History?

The town of Macondo vanishes at the end of the novel, and is preserved only in the memory of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who introduces himself as a very minor character towards the end.

In the matter of politics, it is interesting to see how Garcia Marquez views the struggles between Liberals and Conservatives with complete impartiality. Colonel Aureliano Buendia fights for the Liberals, but in the political to-ing and fro-ing, the regime he favours is shown to be neither more benign nor more popular than its Conservative rival, and is just as corrupt. This dispassionate view of the political scene is true of Garcia Marquez’s later novels, too, as is the author’s relatively amused view of the Church, which is basically seen as backward but harmless, and is taken for granted as a background factor in everyone’s life. There is some gentle mockery of excessive religiosity. Jose Arcadio, one of the later Buendia offspring, is raised by his pious mother in the hope that he will become pope. But he does not study at all when he is in Rome and instead he becomes a wastrel and a sensualist.

Of course Yanqui imperialism comes in for condemnation with one episode, set in the 1920s, in which thousands of striking workers are massacred to advance the interests of a North American–owned banana company, whose presence has totally changed Maconda’s economy. The massacre is blithely denied and written out of the history books so that nobody any longer believes it happened  – a very ironical instance of the creative power of the word.

Only research subsequent to reading this novel told me that much of the action is deeply rooted in Colombian history. The 32 wars in which Colonel Aureliano Buendia fought were Colombia’s many military upheavals between the 1880s and 1901. The period between 1901 and 1930 was when the country’s economy became heavily controlled by the (American) United Fruit Company, and the mass shooting of striking workers took place in 1928. One Hundred Years of Solitude has often been interpreted as commentary on colonialism and neo-colonialism. According to a critical consensus the “solitude” of the title points to Macondo representing the unassimilated Hispanic culture which has never fully attuned itself to the South American continent and hence which often feels isolated and receives modern developments from the wider world as if they are “magic”. This false consciousness has to disappear before a real, grounded national character can emerge. Yet when he was alive, Garcia Marquez disavowed any specific political “message” for the novel, and one of the reasons for the novel’s popularity is that it can bear many conflicting political interpretations.

This tells you (superficially) what the novel is “about”, but it does not really give you my reasons for being so lukewarm about it. Basically, my objections resolve themselves into three things.

First, I never attuned myself to Garcia Marquez’s (wilful) confusing use of proper names. Across six or seven generations of the Buendia family, a very small pool of personal names is used. Nearly all the men are Aureliano, Jose Arcadio or such imaginative variants as Aureliano Jose. The women across the generations are all variants of Ursula, Amaranta and Remedios. Yes, there are some exceptions, but as very few people are characterised distinctively enough to separate one from another, it is frequently difficult to know who is being discussed – or to care. I should note, by the way, that some have seen a subtext of incest running through this novel – the founding patriarch and matriarch of the Buendia family are first cousins; there are superstitions about babies being born with pigs’ tails; repeatedly, across the generations, reproduction rarely happens in marriage, or it happens in marriage only after many obstacles are placed in its way. It is an inward-turning society that is being depicted.

Second, there is that deadly, boring, killing, monotonous South American machismo. It is hard to find in this novel any exception to the notion that love is nothing more than seduction and sexual conquest. Frankly, it bored the hell out of me to be told that Colonel Aureliano Buendia fathers seventeen different bastard sons on seventeen different women (all of the sons being called Aureliano); or to have yet another account of somebody’s visit to a brothel; or to be given yet another boastful macho account of seduction and copulation in various poses and angles. It is odd how, apparently, South American culture encourages even left-wing writers to measure themselves by the activity of their penises. Women in this novel are either matriarchs OR they are incredibly sexy and willing OR they are cold and cruel and turn away their faithful dying-for-love swains. (There are two or three examples of the latter class in the novel).

In this field, characters remain cartoonishly shallow stereotypes. Does this mean that I am not attuned to the novel’s intended “epic” style – the broad sweep of an historical panorama rather than the intense close-ups of the tighter narrative? Maybe – but the characters are still shallow.

Third, the historian in me rebels at the violation of linear time. Anterior action (reported in conversation etc) is fine. Flashbacks and memories are fine. But when the hundred years-plus are stirred together as if they are one mythic event, we are really confronted with mystification (i.e. “fudging”) by the author. Often, Garcia Marquez’s style comes across as an evasion of cause and effect and historical specificity. As for the magical realist trimming – to me they are just that. Trimmings.

I have just said negative things about a novel that is held in almost universal esteem, so I am on the wrong side of most commentators and many millions of readers. It is sometimes a burden to have tastes and opinions of one’s own, no matter how well-founded they are.

Something thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

“YOUR CALL WILL BE RECORDED FOR TRAINING PURPOSES”

           

Do you ever feel that the machines and monsters are taking over?

Without being paranoid, I often get this feeling when I have to tussle with recorded messages on Answerphones.

In New Zealand, we have one major difficulty whenever we ring customer services related to telecommunications or the running of computers. Our queries will be re-routed to a Help Desk, which will probably be located somewhere like Manila. We then often have to contend with people who have English as a second language and who sometimes have impenetrable accents. I say “sometimes” advisedly because I have, of course, sometimes spoken to Filipenas in such circumstances, who speak English better than you or I do.

But before we get to speak with a real, live human voice, we have to go through the implicit threat that is embedded in so many recorded messages. It is the one that says “Your call will be recorded for training purposes.”

Now what is this recording really saying?

It is really telling us that if we get annoyed or frustrated at the long wait we are often put through; or if we are given useless advice; or if we are required to explain for a fourth or a fifth time, and in exactly the same words, what the trouble is; then we are not allowed to blow our stacks or the company in question will have something to hold over us.

“Your call will be recorded for training purposes” really means “You are at our mercy and don’t you forget it. Don’t think of shouting ‘Your customer service is ****ing useless’. Don’t think of using forthright or angry language – because we’ve got this little recording of you which we can play back should you choose to challenge our incompetence through the law courts.”

Naturally this sort of blackmail is only one problem with recorded messages. My most recent tussle with a recorded message was when I rang an Auckland picture theatre. I am not so technologically incompetent that I do not know how to book film tickets on line. I had been doing just that when a glitch in the system told me that my payment could not go through and I would have to ring the theatre to confirm my booking. I duly rang the theatre. An answer machine told me that staff were busy and I would have to ring back in a quarter of an hour. I did so. Same message – ring back in quarter of an hour. Again, I did so. And so on through four different calls before I finally got an answer from an unrecorded human voice.

In this case, the problem was that the picture theatre had a standardised message, which did not really tell the truth. And it might have been more useful if it had instructed me to ring back in an hour.

I sometimes long for the days where answerphones did not exist and calls were answered by human beings rather than by robots. Remember those old photos of rows of women plugging pegs into switchboards? How often scenes set in such telephone exchanges used to appear in Hollywood movies. But alas, those days are gone, and we now have to talk to machines and recordings.

            And they are threatening us.

Something New

NOTICE TO READERS: For six years, Reid's Reader has been presenting an entirely free service to readers with commentary on books new and old. Reid's Reader receives no grants or subsidies and is produced each week in many hours of unpaid work. If you wish to contribute, on an entirely voluntary basis, to the upkeep of this blog, we would be very grateful if you made a donation via the PayPal "DONATE" button that now appears at the top of the index at right. Thank you.]
 
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“SACRED HISTORIES IN SECULAR NEW ZEALAND” edited by Geoffrey Troughton and Stuart Lange (Victoria University Press, $NZ40)

            When it comes to reviewing volumes of essays by different hands, I tend to adopt the plodding but accurate approach of looking at each essay in turn and making specific remarks on each. [See on this blog my recent review of New Zealand Society at War 1914-1918, edited by Steven Loveridge]. As I see it, collections by various authors offer different perspectives and viewpoints, and cannot be summed up easily in generalisations. Each author has to be considered in turn. This is true even when the essays have some themes in common.

            Sacred Histories in Secular New Zealand is the second collection Victoria University Press has published of papers presented at conferences of the RHAANZ (Religious History Association of Aotearoa New Zealand). The first such collection was The Spirit of the Past (2011) to which, as a matter of record, I contributed one paper. The RHAANZ is a body of academics and graduate students in university History, Theology and Religious Studies departments, and in denominational training colleges, who have a twofold purpose. First, to counter the secularist approach to New Zealand history, which undervalues (or ignores) the important religious element. And second, to research and present scholarly studies on all matters in New Zealand relating to religion.

            This new collection offers 10 essays, which were presented as papers at RHAANZ conferences over the last six years. The first two contributions are by the collection’s editors.

Geoffrey Troughton’s Introduction notes that New Zealand is increasingly secular in terms of those who opt for a “No religion” status in the census, but that this does not necessarily herald a completely secularised future world. Respectable academic studies suggest that only New Zealand, France and the Netherlands will soon have a majority who have no connection whatsoever with religion of some sort. On the world scene, then, New Zealand is anomalous. And paradoxically, despite New Zealand’s increasingly non-religious climate, the study of religion flourishes in New Zealand academe.  Often this is a matter of taking religion seriously and correcting the imbalance of New Zealand history books, which ignored the influence of religion on our history. But does this mean that religion is now being studied as an exclusively historical phenomenon? There has been, in many New Zealand history books since the 1950s, the secular tradition of seeing religion in negative terms, and of creating the myth in which the secular state alone can create harmony between different belief systems. But, says Troughton, this is to ignore religion’s real mediating role in many disputes. Before he proceeds to introducing the individual essays, Troughton notes that secularism means many things – historically, it did not mean anti-religion but the acceptance of different religions flourishing in the same national space. The themes that Troughton sounds in this essay are essentially the ones that justify the existence of the RHAANZ.

The first essay is by Stuart Lange, whose study of New Zealand evangelicalism, A RisingTide, I reviewed on this blog three years ago. Lange takes one common RHAANZ complaint head-on. His purpose is to discuss how both laudatory and disdainful views of missionaries arose in New Zealand historiography. He discovers that the early writer Arthur S. Thomson (in 1859) mixed praise of missionaries with criticisms of their impact on Maori. But for most of nineteenth century this approach was ignored for a more general hagiographic tone or for works which praised missionaries for their civilising influence and for helping to make New Zealand modern. This was true even of secular historians like William Pember Reeves. But in the 1950s and 1960s there came Keith Sinclair’s and Judith Binney’s disdainful view of missionaries as puritanical destroyers of Maori culture. Says Lange: “This disdainful view has almost become orthodoxy. It has become commonplace to sneer at missionaries, or to assert that the missionary outlook was ‘biased’ (and thus to assume that a sceptical twenty-first century viewpoint is bias-free.)” (p.29) Lange instances this in the recent negative writings about missionaries by Matthew Wright and Richard Quinn. He also notes the virtual disappearance of references to missionaries in the hefty 2009 New Oxford History of New Zealand. To this can be added the voices of the Maori Renaissance, which depict Christianity as a cultural intrusion, and the total absence of books about Maori Christianity by Maori. Yet, in what is almost a hopeful sign, Lange sees a new ambivalence. In his generalisation-filled general histories of New Zealand, James Belich usually adopts a sneering and condescending tone about missionaries, but at least he has to concede that there was some merit to the missionary endeavour. More recently, Vincent O’Malley’s The Meeting Place and Tony Ballantyne’s Entanglements of Empire (reviewed on this blog) are far more equitable in showing the mutual influence of Maori and missionary. Now, in academe’s Theology and Religious Studies departments, there are many more studies of the real situation of missionary and Maori, thanks in part to RHAANZ and conferences and publications. This chapter is an excellent overview of the problem, although perhaps it could have stated more clearly that the anti-missionary mythology persists in popular culture, despite academic studies.

Malcolm Falloon’s essay is a far more specialist affair. It is a close examination of one of the best-known stories associated with the Maori adoption of Christianity in the nineteenth century. This is the story of the murdered Maori girl Tarore, whose death and whose copy of the gospels were said to have ultimately brought peace to hitherto warring tribes. Falloon’s article is not sceptical of the story, but notes how versions of story, by later historians, underwent many changes depending on the polemical purpose of the teller. Falloon himself respects the story and its significance, but basically argues that its greatest impact resides in its most authentic historical form, void of later decorations.

John Stenhouse’s essay is another exercise in re-inserting the religious into a subject that has too often been interpreting in purely secular terms. Discussing the Liberal historian and politician William Pember Reeves, Stenhouse argues that, from the mid-20^th century, and thanks to Keith Sinclair, Oliver and others, Reeves was seen as the paradigm of the New Zealand secular progressive and socialist, eschewing church and Christianity in general. This was the view of Reeves presented in an age when the supposed “puritanism” of New Zealand was being condemned and churches were regarded as retrograde. But by looking closely at what Reeves actually wrote, Stenhouse shows that Reeves’ thinking was profoundly influenced by Christian example and ethics, as Reeves himself openly acknowledged. Further, despite Sinclair’s inane observation that “a simple materialism” was New Zealanders’ natural religion, Stenhouse shows how much religious matters were at the forefront of most New Zealanders’ minds at the very time that Reeves and the Liberals were reputedly creating the secular state. He states: “With all due respect to Belich, it must be said that Reeves did not see the state as operating in a secular sphere hermetically sealed off from religion. He saw church and state as overlapping and collaborating, most harmoniously.” (p.66)

However, like others of Anglican background, Reeves often excoriated the “Nonconformist” prohibitionists and disliked religious schools – hence the erroneous view that he had somehow come loose from his Anglican roots.

Nicholas Thompson’s piece is about the anti-Catholic tour of the former nun O’Gorman in the 1880s. Apart from its being a chronicle of her tour and the sectarian tensions in its wake, the main point of his article seems to be that religious harmony in New Zealand most of the time was the result of a pact between the churches, and not of sectarian neutrality or indifference.

John Milnes’ discusses sectarianism in New Zealand in the First World War. He claims: “No single denomination… was exclusively the object of attack. The various denominations defended themselves against accusations, and in turn criticised others, from their own positions of supposed orthodoxy and correctness.” (p.87) He proceeds to quote texts of the day showing vigorous, and often bigoted, intra-Protestant controversialism, and of course controversialism between Catholic and Protestant. With this article I take issue on a number of points. In my view, underpinning much Protestant opinion of the time was the assumption that the British Empire was the acme of human achievement and morality, and that therefore anything that criticised it must be the work of the devil. This follows on from the confusion of religion with the secular state, such as became the norm in Protestant nations since the Reformation. Basically, the weakness of Miles’ article is its failure to acknowledge that, as a minority, Catholics were on the defensive against the aggressive opinions of those who regarded themselves as New Zealand’s “norm”. His formula of continuity and equal aggressions ignores this situation. His concluding words are “…no one denomination was purely a target or a victim. All gave as good as they got.” (p.105)

Allan K. Davidson’s chapter on military chaplains in the First World War notes that Catholics worshipped separately from other denominations and then, having noted this, moves on to discuss the tensions that sometimes arose between Anglicans on the one hand and Presbyterians, Methodists and other Protestants on the other over (a.) the proportional allocation of chaplains; and (b.) whether or nor “combined” religious services were a good idea. The more evangelical Anglicans tended to respond well to combined worship, whereas the High Church types thought such services lacked the type of order and formality they preferred. In the end, after having examined such controversies at length, Davidson is able to show that in care for soldiers there was much cooperation between all denominations.

Kirstine Moffatt’s contribution is on the novels of two evangelical novelists, Herman Foston and Guy Thornton, whose New Zealand novels were very popular among early 20^th century evangelical readers, but have never been republished. She lauds them for their activism, but admits they are not very well written and tend to be overtly preachy. Her main point seems to be that these writers addressed working class males in “manly” ways, basically by showing that one could be both “manly” and Christian. She really makes a case for their historical value in revealing what these novels said about Christian aspiration at the time.

John Tucker’s article is on J.J. North (John James North 1871-1950), Baptist leader and controversialist and “arguably the most influential leader in the history of the New Zealand Baptist movement” (p.139) Tucker’s essay is about North’s preaching. Baptists were at most 2% of New Zealanders. Like every other author who has broached this subject, Tucker tells us that this evangelical church centred its teaching on the Bible, the cross, conversion and social action; and in this North was “a traditional evangelical preacher who appealed to a conservative evangelical constituency in a period when liberal theology was gaining ground within mainstream Protestantism.” (p.146) Tucker, in what is largely a simple, laudatory article, tells us what a powerful preacher North was, how well-read he was, and how attuned he was to the social problems of his day. But we are still left with a figure from another age – especially in North’s anathemas against gambling, drinking and dancing, and in his heated anti-Catholic polemics, which amounted to sectarian bigotry.

Far broader in its perspective is Peter Lineham’s survey of how Christmas has been regarded in New Zealand.  Although Catholic churches have celebrated midnight mass at Christmas almost since their arrival in New Zealand, there was in Protestant churches a great reluctance to actually set aside Christmas as a special day. Indeed most Protestant churches had little idea of a church “year” with special canonical feast days. As for the Anglicans, only the High Church ones, influenced by the Catholic revival, saw Christmas as special. Only in the early 20^th century did Anglican churches begin to have services at night and it was not until the 1930s that that the lessons-and-carols service came to New Zealand Anglican churches. Lineham then switches to talking about the secular festival, the rise of Santa Claus and the sidelining of the Christian Christmas. He ends with the sour and ambiguous note that after all, given the pagan origins of wassail, Christmas has hardly ever been an exclusively Christian festival anyway. This sounds like a surrender of Christmas to commercialism, and is not wholly true anyway. Christmas qua Christmas is and always has been Christian, even if elements of its celebration come from outside Christianity.

Finally, Kevin Ward’s article considers what the census reveals about religion in New Zealand. In 1961, Christians were 90% of the population; in 2001 about 60% and by 2013, 49%. 20% of the population attended church weekly in 1960. Now weekly church attendance is down to about 10%. Says Ward: “History and recent research shows [sic] that if participation in churches declines then eventually Christian believing and participation also decline.” (p.172) However, on the same page he claims more optimistically “These changes are better understood as expressions of religious transformation rather than of the decline of religion.” (p.172). The big decline in religious observance was in the 1960s, with the most rapid decline being in mainstream Protestant churches. Some Protestants argued that this was offset by the growth of evangelical and Pentecostal churches; but these churches were a tiny part of the whole church-going community and, even with some limited growth, they remain so. Decline in some mainstream churches was partly offset by immigration.

What accounts for the rapid decline in traditional religious worship? Ward argues that it is not a matter of simple secularisation, because despite the great increase in the “no religion” proportion of the population, it is clear that religious beliefs of some sort persist in the majority of the population. So the article turns to issue of “spirituality”, meaning vaguely-defined but non-institutional beliefs, which still influence much of the population. This is turn leads to Ward’s conclusion that, modernity having collapsed, in an age of pluralistic post-modernity, Christianity is still a major part of attempting to provide framework of values for society as a whole.

Is this conclusion justified optimism, or is it whistling in the dark? “Spirituality” being such a slippery object, I am inclined to believe the latter.

So, having bashed my way gracelessly through the ten essays in this volume, how do I sum it up? The essays are scholarly and well-informed. On some issues they are enlightening. The complaints Stuart Lange, Geoffrey Troughton and John Stenhouse make about the biases of New Zealand historiography are fully justified, but they are by now familiar, and almost obligatory, in RHAANZ conferences or publications. Of course some articles (Malcolm Falloon’s, Nicholas Thompson’s, Kirstine Moffatt’s) are principally of specialist interest, while others (Peter Lineham’s, Kevin Ward’s) have a broader social perspective. Like other academic collections, this is necessary groundwork for future studies of New Zealanders and their beliefs.