book reviews

by wm. b. smith

How to survive HTX
SURVIVING THE AGE OF VIRTUAL REALITY. By Thomas Langan (University of Missouri Press, Columbia, MO 2000), 184 pp. HB $29.95

We know that a participant in a culture is a citizen. The term evokes a sense of civic responsibility (civility), knowledge of tradition (education), and confidence about the world he is shaping (hope). But what do we call the contemporary individual who participates in that amorphous and highly artificial world of virtual reality? He is not a citizen, exactly. Nor is it accurate to say that he lives in a culture. Perhaps he is, as author Thomas Langan suggests, an uneasy inhabitant of the new and center-less world system of HTX: HT standing for High Technology and X meaning “No Name.” It is also “X” because it excises a multitude of past verities, including cultures and civilizations, and maybe even personal identities.

What is happening to us, and how can we survive such a radical transformation of our accustomed way of living? This is the substance of Professor Langan’s fascinating philosophy-thriller about our present age in the ethereal and evolving world of virtual reality. As HTX continues to engulf us, will it squeeze out the very meaning of life, replacing traditional meanings with mere technical training? Will it cause us to forget our roots in the past, leaving us with neither memory nor gratitude for what our ancestors did to make our present life possible?

We need to get our bearings, Langan advises, so that we do not lose our souls to HTX. We need to be horizontally grounded historically and vertically connected with the transcendent.

Langan’s style of thinking and writing echoes that of Marshall McLuhan. Like his illustrious predecessor, Langan looks to what people rarely notice to understand what they cannot help but notice. He scours history, analyzes commerce, investigates techniques and technologies of all sorts, dissects politics, reads obscure authors, and welcomes the insights of poets. The result is a tour-de-force about how we got to where we are and what we can do about it. Just as Kierkegaard refused to be reduced to a paragraph in Hegel’s concocted system (and thereby founded modern existentialism), so too, we should refuse to be reduced to the HTX concocted pseudo-realities of being “resources,” “personnel,” “customers,” “consumers,” and “suppliers.” We are not instruments for HTX (Cog ergo sum), but God-created entities whose order of being infinitely more important that the demeaning order of having. We are, after all, human beings with personal identities.

Emerging from the thicket of intellectual virtuosity appear (time and again, sane and simple messages: “Man cannot serve both God and Mammon”; “God calls us to full self-responsibility in realistic circumstances”; “The family remains the single most powerful influence on the future.”

Despite the excursions into intellectual labyrinths, there is the occasional humor and congeniality. Take for example, what the author playfully describes as Langan’s Law: “The quality of being efficace is inversely proportioned to the quality of being sympathique.” Here is a simple and effective tactic for countering the dehumanizing potentialities of HTX The sympathetic individual, alive to the moment, is free to be personable and understanding. The efficiency type is obsessed with turning every minute to his advantage and has no time to be present to others. “Time is money” is a dehumanizing strategy. “Taking the time” to express care is mutually enriching on a personal level. And what could be a more tongue-in-cheek transition from one chapter to another than the following: “In the accelerated synergism generated by this elaborate dialectic [between software and hardware], man is getting swept up into the breathless new life of the HTX phase two!”

Surviving the Age of Virtual Reality is an exploration — insightful, learned, provocative, tentative, daring, challenging, and hopeful. We can look forward to additional fruits of the author’s continued explorations in the form of discoveries (though he will be reluctant to identify them as such) — in subsequent publications. Stay tuned!
Donald DeMarco
St. Jerome’s University
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Help for daily meditation
DIVINE INTIMACY. Meditations on the Interior Life for Every Day of the Liturgical Year. By Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, O.C.D. (TAN Books and Publishers, P.0. Box 424, Rockford, IL 61105, 1964/ 1996 reprint), xxx + 1227 pp. PB $35.00

It is not easy to find a book of daily meditations that will stand the test of time. One that has done that very well is this outstanding volume by the Carmelite Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen. During my fifty-three years as a Jesuit I have used many meditation books and without hesitation I can say that this is the best one I have come across. I have been using it almost daily for about twenty years.

Some years ago I reviewed in these pages the updated version of this volume, that is, a reworking of it according to the new liturgical calendar after Vatican II. That edition comes in four volumes and has many references to the documents of the Vatican; the Sundays are arranged according to the A, B and C cycles.

The volume now available from TAN Books is the original as it was written by Fr. Gabriel, so the meditations for Sundays are based on the Sunday Gospel readings of the traditional liturgical calendar. Thus, it is very useful for those who attend the traditional Latin Mass. Priests who celebrate the Latin Mass will find a wealth of ideas which can be used in the preparation of the Sunday homily.

The meditations are based on the Carmelite way of praying, that is, the presence of God, reading, reflection, and then response by making acts of faith, hope, love and the other virtues.

Each meditation has a brief introduction, two main points followed by a colloquy, usually taken from one of his favorite Carmelite authors — St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Therese of the Child Jesus and Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity. About three pages are dedicated to each day of the year so it does not take long to read through it and get ready for prayer.

Anyone who wants to grow in the spiritual life by spending some time in prayer each day would do well to get this book. You can pray through this book every year and never get tired of it. Each time you use it you will find something new. The book is obviously the fruit of a holy priest who prayed very much and its purpose is to help others to pray. You can’t go wrong on this one.
Kenneth Baker, S.J.
Ramsey. N.J.

Between fact and fiction
PILATE: THE BIOGRAPHY OF AN INVENTED MAN. By Ann Wroe (Random House, New York, NY 1999), xv + 400 pp. $26.95

The average Catholic usually has to wait a whole year until he hears the Gospel mention the name of Caesar Augustus, the great Roman Emperor reigning when Jesus Christ was born. But every Sunday he hears the name of a man who, but for his meeting with Jesus Christ on a certain Friday morning, might have remained an obscure Roman bureaucrat: Pontius Pilate.

Although Christians regularly proclaim Jesus as crucifixus sub Pontio Pilato, relatively little is known about the Roman procurator of Judea from A.D. 26 to about 36. The absence of extensive Gospel and other contemporaneous sources, however, has not stopped Christians throughout the ages from supplementing the record with their own sometimes fanciful speculations.

The slim historical record might deter some writers from tackling Pilate: there is not much on which to write a strict biography. That is what distinguishes Wroe’s achievement: she manages to write a delightful 400-page work that is eminently engaging and readable, a book that has already made some U.S. bestseller lists. Her subtitle explains how she did it: this is a biography of the invented Pilate.

Wroe seeks to extract all that she can from what strict scholarship can tell us about Pilate. When the record stops, however, she turns to speculation about Pilate (and she is clear about when she is speculating). There is a Pilate of the Fathers, a Pilate of the apocrypha, and a Pilate of legend and folklore. Wroe masterfully brings them all together. She also fills in the gaps about Pilate with what we know about the lst-century Roman world: what emperors were like, the networks by which one rose or fell in the Roman bureaucracy, Roman religion and Roman customs.

The result is a popular account that is both and neither biography, cultural studies, and history. The reader starts in the kind of world in which Pilate was born. From where might his ancestors have come: Samnite nobility who fought against Rome, Spaniards, or (according to medieval legend) Germanic? How might the young Pilate have maneuvered to get an overseas assignment in his day? And what exactly did being a first century Roman official in Judea involve? Who was his wife, who makes such a fleeting appearance in Matt. 27:19? Was Procula a superstitious Roman or, according to one Coptic tradition, a convert and saint? Was Mrs. Pilate a vain, self-absorbed creature or one of the women at the tomb?
What was Pilate’s typical day like? What do we know about Pilate’s relations with his Jewish subjects? Wroe, for example, combines the storyteller’s skills with the historian’s data to put flesh and bones on the episode the Gospels pass over almost as an aside. In Luke 13:1 the Evangelist mentions Jesus speaking about “the Jews whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices.” Wroe fills in the details, showing how Pilate regularly had confrontations with his subjects or such issues as importing imperial banners (with their religious significance) into Jerusalem. What emerges is a Pilate who is stubborn, intent on Romanizing, and insensitive to the religious concerns of those he ruled.

The bulk of Wroe’s reflections, however, centers on Jesus’ Trial. She puts the events of Jesus’ Trial in historical perspective, explaining just what scourging, mock crowning, and crucifixion meant. She explores the discussions between Jesus and Pilate, from the question of how such judicial proceedings functioned to the way that Jesus and Pilate, each coming from different perspectives, talked past each other over the meaning of “truth.” Who was Pilate that Friday? A man seeking to acquit Christ? A man backed into a corner and solving his problem in a utilitarian way? Or a judge who, after having finished his case on a typical morning in Judea sent the Redeemer of the world to his death, left the bench and “then went to lunch”? (p. 271).

Wroe concludes with Pilate and the Resurrection, examined from myth and legend, and speculation about the death of Pilate. Tradition has it that Pilate was eventually recalled from Judaea. Did he return to Rome? Did the Emperor try him for his injustices to Christ, as the Golden Legend suggests? Was he exiled to Vienne? Or to Lausanne, as a 14th century text proposes? Did he commit suicide, as Kazantzakis suggests? Or did he just end his days as a retired government employee buying fruit in a Roman market?

Between fact and fiction there can be a wide gulf and Wroe does not try to bridge it. What she does unite, however, is history, myth, legend, tradition and speculation to talk about Pilate: the Pilate who walked the pretorium and the stages of medieval Europe’s mystery plays, the Pilate with his first century superstitions and the Pilate whom pious Christian traditions made into a covert (and sometimes even overt) witness to Christ. For readers whose acquaintance with Jesus’ times is limited, this book serves a valuable purpose. The Christian message cannot just remain in Church; it needs to “infect” the larger culture. Wroe’s book, already on secular best-seller lists, does that.

As a Catholic reviewer, however, one caveat is in order: Wroe’s notions of freedom and destiny are at least classically Protestant. Confronted with the Johannine Christ, who is master of his fate, Wroe repeatedly seems to come to an almost fatalistic reading of Pilate’s encounter with Jesus. Pilate comes across as destined to be the efficient cause of Jesus’ execution, which is willed from above, and so appears at times as just a cog in the divine machinery hurtling towards the Redemption. Wroe’s ideas about the relationship of freedom to God’s plans are not Catholic. While her research for this book is impressive, one wishes that, on the subject of Jesus’ appointment with his end, she had read Romano Guardini’s classic Freedom, Grace and Destiny. That said, this excellent book deserves wide popular readership.
John M. Grondelski
Seton Hall University
South Orange, N.J.