The clear-minded, faith-driven Dietrich was never diverted by any fog of doubt as to his calling. He united himself with the core of Jesus’ teaching and found his  reality in “the plain duty of the Christian…to suffer with those who suffered.”   

Dietrich’s life as a theologian would be intertwined with Germany’s Jews right down to the family level. His twin sister Sabine married Gerhard Leibholz, a lawyer who was Jewish (and baptised as a child). Franz Hildebrandt, his closest friend, was Jewish on his mother’s side.

Before proceeding further, I should mention that there is a second line to Eric Metaxas’ subtitle  —  A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich. Righteous Gentile is a title bestowed on non-Jews who, during the Holocaust, assisted Jews despite danger to themselves, such as Oskar Schindler, immortalized in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.

In Yiddish, Bonhoeffer, the man of God who became an anti-Nazi activist, would be considered a Mensch, a man of honor and integrity. Like the “Seraphic Doctor,” Saint Bonaventure, Bonhoeffer thought and acted as God would have him do. In the end, he was a martyr to his Christ. A martyr in Hebrew is called a kadosh, one who is holy. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a kadosh. (Actually, there is no word in Hebrew for martyr; an approximation would be kadosh me’uneh, literally, “answering saint.”)

In July 1939, with war on the horizon , Bonhoeffer wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr (remembered today primarily for The Serenity Prayer).  One sentence from his letter stood out for me: “Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.”

His spiritual mentor was the Calvinist Karl Barth, described by Pope Pius XII as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas. Called the father of neo-orthodoxy, Barth shocked the liberal theological world of his time, the early 1920s, by affirming that God actually exists. In a nutshell, he preached that the God of the universe  is transcendent and unknowable except through revelation. His disciple carried on from there.

Bonhoeffer worked tirelessly to try to preserve true Christianity in Germany through the Confessing Church [from Matthew 10:32: "Whosover therefore shall confess (that is, acknowledge)  me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven"], opposed by the Nazified Reich church created by Hitler. As for the Fuhrer [from fuhr, to lead], Metaxas adds that he “had no other religion than himself.”

Metaxas does a superb job of taking the reader  through the course of the Nazification of Germany. The reorganization of German society to conform to the National Socialist (Nazi) plan, or Gleischaltung (synchronization), began immediately following Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power on January 30, 1933. Already by April 7, the  Arierparagraph  (Aryan Paragraph), which stipulated that government employees had to be of  “Aryan stock,” was in effect. The travail of the  Jews  was beginning.   

The Aryan Paragraph wasn’t enough to get Germany’s Jews thinking about packing their belongings. But the Sauberung (cleansing), the country-wide book burning frenzy that occurred a month later, moved more than a few German Jews to dust off their luggage and locate their passports. 

The most glaring of the libricides on that night of May 20 took place in Berlin.  Members of the SS (Shutzstaffel, Hitler’s personal bodyguard unit) and SA (Sturmabteilung, stormtroopers or brownshirts), along with university students and Hitler Youth groups, congregated in the Opernplatz (a landmark public square) and torched some  20,000 books, including those of Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Albert Einstein, et cetera. That was a message all German Jews could understand.   

Sigmund Freud, whose works were included in that night’s unholy biblioclasm, commented, “Only our books? In earlier times they would have burned us with them.” Freud died in September 1939, before millions of his fellow Jews  would be consumed in Hitler’s ovens.  

Next came the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which proclaimed that “the purity of German blood [was] essential to the further existence of the German people.” It stripped Jews, for one thing, of their citizenship. What designated a Jew was defined specifically. If you had 3 or 4 Jewish grandparents, you were Jewish. With 1 or 2, you were classified as a Mischling, a crossbreed. Conversion was no longer an option. (The Jews in  Germany, incidentally, numbered about 500,000 in 1930, or less that 1% of the population of 65 million.)

In October 1938,  18,000 of  the more than 50,000 Polish Jews living in Germany were deported back to Poland, which refused  them re-entry, and they wound up living in  Tobacco Road quarters between the two countries. On November 7, Hershl Grynszpan (Anglicized to Greenspan), a 17-year-old Polish youth, whose parents were among the deportees, shot Ernst vom Rath, a German official, in Paris, out of frustration over his parents’ plight. (Hershl mistook vom Rath for the German ambassador.) 

The incident played into the hands of  Reinhard  “The Hangman” Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office and Heinrich Himmler’s second in command at the SS. On the night of November  9-10, he   initiated what history would remember as Kristallnacht (”Night of Broken Glass”), aptly named for the thousands of windows broken throughout Germany and Austria during the pogrom (violent riot; mob attack; organized massacre of an ethnic group) that took place.

It was a night to remember. More than 1300 synagogues were burnt to the ground; over 90 Jews were killed; 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, where they were beaten, starved, and many died;  thousands of businesses were destroyed and countless homes ransacked. To add insult to injury, the German Jewish community was fined 1 billion Deutsche Marks to pay for the damages! 

The renowned Rabbi Leo Baeck, who survived the Holocaust at Theresienstadt concentration camp, said, in summary, that “the thousand-year history of the Jews in Germany had come to an end.”

Hitler, in his Berchtesgaden lair, was ecstatic. He now knew he had the German populace behind him in his plans to rid Germany of its Jews. Judenrein (G., “free of Jews”), which started out as a policy of  excluding Jews from organizations within the Third Reich, would culminate in a master plan to wipe out European Jewry.

With the events of Kristallnacht, Germany’s Jews realized it was definitely time to leave. Soon my paternal grandparents left Mannheim for New York.   

 Although the emphasis here has been on Hitler’s design for a Germany, and then Europe, that was  “free of Jews,”  the Fuhrer also had it in for gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and those with chronic disabilities. Already in 1933, he had plans for a genocide to rid the Fatherland of those he considered “useless eaters” and “life unworthy of life.”

From the foregoing, it can be seen that I am not at all sentimental about Deutschland. In fact, I would have been happy had the Allies adopted the Morgenthau Plan, which would have converted post-war Germany into an agricultural and pastoral country.  

Eric Metaxas, on the other hand, is germanophilic. Not that I find fault with him for being so, but  throughout the nearly 550 pages of  Bonhoeffer, he extols the efforts of anti-Nazi Germans, especially a coterie of army generals, with their plans to rid their country of the satanic Adolf Schicklgruber, and in doing so creates the impression, a false impression, that Germany was really full of “good Germans.”

Here’s one example to illustrate my point. In a letter (dated July 25, 1942) to British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden,  Bonhoeffer’s friend in England Bishop (of Chichester) George Bell tried to make the case that there was “a sharp distinction between the Nazis as such and a very large body of other Germans“ [my italics]. 

Anthony Eden replied to the bishop on August 4, pointing out “that the opposition in Germany…have so far given little evidence of their existence.” He wanted to see Germans “follow the example of the oppressed peoples of Europe in running risks and taking active steps to oppose and overthrow the Nazi rule of terror,” before Britain would assist a German resistance movement. Mextasas repeatedly speaks of the “Resistance” (spelling it in upper case), but there was no active German underground movement in existence during the war.

Eden concluded by stating that “the longer the German people tolerate the Nazi regime, the greater becomes their [my italics] responsibility for the crimes which that regime is committing in their name.”

Without doubt, there were stalwart Germans who stood against the evil regime, but they did not number so many as to be considered many.

When Metaxas speaks of the “German Resistance,” he is not describing, as I have already indicated, an armed underground movement within the borders of Germany, but rather conspiratorial plots to bring down one man, the Fuhrer, such as the plot code-named Operation Flash.

On March 13, 1943, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, aide-de-camp to General Henning von Tresckow, succeeded in planting a bomb on Hitler’s plane in Smolensk, where the arch villain was visiting troops on the eastern front. However, the bomb failed to detonate.  

Quite a few high-ranking military men were involved in plots to get rid of Hitler, with the Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, coming close. For the various men who were involved in the conspiracies to depose Hitler, I have immense admiration. To this day, I remember the devout Catholic Stauffenburg’s last words before being executed: “Long live sacred Germany!”

The anti-Nazi officers were mostly from the old Prussian tradition and despised the World War I ill-tempered and ill-bred corporal who had managed to become absolute ruler over the Fatherland. But they were wary, super-cautious, when it came to high-risk action against the people’s demigod. 

Metaxas’ research of his subject is quite thorough, but some of his insights are misleading. For instance, he makes the statement that “Germany was not ready to wage war” in September 1938 during the Sudetenland crisis and would have been defeated by the western powers had he tried to march into Czechoslovakia.

The Sudetenland was the name for those border areas of Czechoslovakia populated mainly by ethnic Germans. At a conference held in Munich in late September 1938, France’s Edouard Daladier, Britain’s Neville Chamberlain, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and Germany’s Adolf Hitler (Czechoslovakia had not been invited) signed the Munich Pact, which ceded the Sudetenland to Germany. Czecho-Slovakia, as the country was renamed, lost 3.5 million citizens, vast resources, and defensible borders.

Not to be overlooked, Chamberlain got Hitler to sign a peace treaty between the United Kingdom and Nazi Germany. Upon returning to London, he waved his copy of the treaty as he delivered his “peace for [sic!] our time” speech to a cheering crowd. Chamberlain was borrowing from Benjamin Disraeli, who upon his return from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 (which reorganized the countries of the Balkans), stated, “I have returned from Germany with peace in our time.” The original wording, from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, is: “Give peace in our time, O Lord.”

To address Metaxas’ point, Movietone News in those days supplied us every week with  images of Hitler’s powerful war machine. We would leave the movie theater feeling anguished — the term today is anxiety-ridden. In reality, it was Britain and France that were not prepared for war. France, which had a mutual military assistance treaty with Czechoslovakia, declined to challenge Hitler. Less than two years later, the Wehrmacht would conquer France in six weeks.

At the time of the Czechoslovakia crisis, we would also hear what relatives and friends of friends who had managed to make it from Germany to New York were relaying about Hitler’s massive military poised for war.

Hitler unleashed his war machine against Russia on June 22, 1941, ignobly ignoring the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, or the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union. 

He had already issued his infamous Commissar Order: the army was to shoot and kill all captured Red Army officers. The Einsatzgruppen (SS paramilitary death squads) had done the slaughtering of civilians, mainly Jews, in Poland, not the army. Now his front-line troops were being ordered to engage in fiendish butchery in addition to their soldiering.

Hitler justified his diabolical order with the explanation that the Red Army leaders had instituted “barbaric Asian methods of warfare.” When he unleashed the SS Einsatzgruppen during his invasion of Poland in 1939, he shrugged and said: “You can’t wage warfare with Salvation Army methods.”

With the failure of the Valkyrie plot of June 20, 1944, heads rolled. On February 7, 1945, as Bonhoeffer was being transferred from the Gestapo prison on Prinz-Albrecht Strasse in Berlin to Buchenwald, his friend and fellow conspirator Dr. Joseph Muller said, “Let us go calmly to the gallows as Christians.”

Bonhoeffer was hanged on April 9, 1945, at Flossenburg concentration camp for his part in the conspiracy, three weeks before Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin underground bunker, with the Russians closing in on him. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was 39.

In his most famous book The Cost of Discipleship, he had written, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Bonhoeffer had done the biding of God, and he went to his death as the early martyrs of the church had done.

The dignified General Henning von Tresckow took his own life so as not to reveal names of other Valkyrie conspirators under torture.

It was Hitler’s Commissar Order that snapped him out of the moral torpor that had gripped Germany since 1933 and had him exclaim: “The German people will be burdened with a guilt the world will not forget in a hundred years.”

People’s memories are short. Guilt, like shame, is out of season. As Omar Khayyam lyricized: “The Moving Finger writes, and having writ moves on….” The world has moved on.

However, there are times when I wonder if some, perhaps more than some, judging from their behavior, really belong to the same species as I do. As a corollary, there are moments when I wish I belonged to a different species.

Today there is only one surviving  member of the genus Homo, a single species, sapiens. Indeed, we are brothers and sisters under the skin, as the Good Book proclaims and biology confirms. Only we don’t behave toward one another as the Linnaean nomenclature has labeled us, Homo (man) +  sapiens (wise).

Christianity dwells on man’s sinfulness, blaming our original progenitors, Adam and Eve, for having started the sin problem while occupying  a uterine paradise not-too-many thousands of years ago. The original sin, disobeying the commanding voice of God, stuck to their protoplasm, and supposedly has been passed down as a dominant gene from generation to generation. Thus we are all inherently sinful. So goes that theory.

The Christian view of man’s sinful nature comes right out of the Hebrew Bible, but modern Jews, unlike those in biblical times, don’t dwell on sin as Christians do. If nothing else, the Adam-and-Eve tale does help explain, to the satisfaction of many, why we err morally and ethically.  

Some of us may look at the subject of man’s tendency to waywardness from a different perspective. The approach I embrace presupposes a world much older than the one Western religionists envision from their reading of the Book of Genesis.

I first encountered that alternative understanding  in my neuroanatomy course as a medical student in 1960. I’m referring to neurologist Paul MacLean’s triune brain theory. “Triune” refers to something threefold, such as the triune God of Christianity.

MacLean’s triune brain is composed of three layers, an older, newer, and newest layering. The oldest was laid down millions of years ago when reptiles dominated the earth. It was not replaced when mammals made their appearance but was layered over. The same layering process occurred when primates appeared, culminating in the highest developed layer, the prefrontal cortex in man. The layers are interconnected. We are still at the mercy of our oldest layer, our primitive, reptilian brain at the bottom of the brain heap.

Mother Nature has made us what we are, following along God’s plan. We may be a little lower than the angels, but we are part of the animal world. That is our reality.

When Charlie Allnet (Humphrey Bogart) tried to rationalize his drinking and slovenliness to the missionary Rose Sayer (Catharine Hepburn) in The African Queen with the words, “It’s human nature,” she responded, “Nature, Mr. Allnet, is what we are put in the world to rise above.”

There’s no problm reading the verse in English, which has  yam suph translated as “Red Sea.” The Hebrew yam refers to a sea, lake, or river, and raises no translationary issue. But suph translates as reeds, rushes, marshes. Thus, yam suph is quite rightly translated as “Sea of Reeds,” not “Red Sea.”

Leading biblial scholars, such as the “three H’s,” James Hoffmeier, Cornelius Houtman, and James Philip Hyath, maintain that the Israelites waded through  a marshy Sea of Reeds. Most modern biblical scholars have followed suit.

On the other hand, we have the Septuagint, the 3rd-century BCE Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which rendered yam suph as eruthra thalassa, Greek for “Red Sea.” It should be noted that the translators, 72 Alexandrian Jewish scholars, didn’t use the Greek words for “Sea of Reeds.”

They understood only too well that yam suph literally meant “Sea of Reeds,” but they also knew that yam suph actually was the Red Sea. The tradition from Moses to the time of the Septuagint held that yam suph  was indeed the Red Sea, not the Sea of Reeds.

In 1 Kings 9:26, we read,  ”And King Solomon [c. 1000 BCE] made a navy of ships in Ezion Geber, which is besides Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea [yam suph], in the land of Edom” (KJV). Solomon was building fighting ships to sail on a body of water and not through marshland!

A thousand years later, we have New Testament references to the Red Sea  –     in Acts 7:36 (”[Moses] brought them out, after he had shown wonders and signs in the land of Egypt, and in the Red Sea…”) and Hebrews 11:29 (”By faith they passed through the Red Sea…”) – that use eruthra thalassa, the Greek for Red Sea, and not the Greek words for “Sea of Reeds.” The authors of these two books were Jews who, after all, were fully cognizant of their tradition.

In the 4th-century Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Vulgate, St. Jerome rendered yam suph as mare rubrum to designate the Red Sea, and the King James Version of the Bible (1611) also translated yam suph as Red Sea. The translators knew exactly what they were doing.

Indeed, as already confirmed, yam suph means “Sea of Reeds,” but all the biblical citations imply a Red Sea crossing, not a soggy march through an inland reedy lake, such as Lake Timsah and the Bitter Lakes, a day’s journey from Rameses (q.v.), and two of the modern scholars’ favorite candidates for the Sea of Reeds.

What lay behind God’s plan in leading Moses and the Israelites in the desert to the Red Sea (as stated in Exodus 13:18)?

Moses began the Exodus from Rameses (modern Qantir) in the Nile Delta and followed the ancient trade route to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba. If you saw Lawrence of Arabia, Aqaba will sound familiar.

But where are we geographically in this account? you’re asking. Well, spread your left forefinger and middle finger as far apart as you can.  Your middle finger, pointing northwest, will be the Gulf of Suez, and your forefinger, the Gulf of Aqaba. The dorsum (back) of your hand represents the main body of the Red Sea. The two gulfs are thus projections or extensions of the Red Sea and as such are parts of the Red Sea. In ancient times, the gulfs themselves would also be referred to as the Red Sea. As for Aqaba, it is at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba (near the tip of your index finger).

During the time of the ten plagues visited upon Pharaoh, Moses and Pharaoh were actually sparring. What Moses wanted from Pharaoh was permission to take the Israelites out into the desert three days march from Rameses to sacrifice to the LORD. It was to be three days out and three days back plus one day for offering sacrifice, one week in all. Only Moses, of course, had no intention of returning. He had secured sufficient provisions from Pharaoh to make it to the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba, where he would find plenty of fresh water to be able to continue the journey to Mount Sinai. 

We have to remember that the Red Sea, like the Caribbean and North Seas, is a salty sea, as opposed to, for instance, the Sea of Galilee, an inland freshwater lake. Reeds grow only in freshwater rivers, lakes, and seas, not in saltwater seas. The salty Gulf of Aqaba is reed-free, yet it is called yam suph, Sea of Reeds.

Here is where I have to pause to say something about Colin J. Humphreys, minerals engineer, physicist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, and researcher in microprinting, eternal light bulbs, and computer chips in the brain, as well as amateur archeologist and lay biblical scholar, in brief, a contemporary polymath, and my chief source for an up-to-date analysis of  Exodus.

Humphreys is in the vanguard of scholars who are bringing the disciplined methodology and innovative tools of modern science to the study of the Bible. When it comes to the Red Sea versus Reed Seed controversy, the case he presents in his book, The Miracles of Exodus, is quite compelling.

Nevertheless, there is something left unsaid about his version of Moses’ route in the desert. Since the Red Sea is a salty sea, why would Moses expect to find fresh water, and plenty of  it, at Aqaba?

Humphreys is an enthusiastic amateur archeologist and biblical Sherlock Holmes.  Accompanied by his wife,  he spent the Easter week of 1999 at Taba, on the western shore of the Gulf of Aqaba, playing botanical detective. To shorten a long story, he did find great clumps of freshwater reeds, four to six feet high, growing at the northernmost part of the gulf.  He also found evidence that in Roman times the gulf extended farther north than today’s shore and was also — and this is quite fascinating — a reservoir of considerable fresh water back then. (The details are in The Miracles of Exodus.)

How did Humphreys come to find what no one else had ever found? The answer is startingly simple: no one had bothered to look. It is in their nature for scientists to bother to look.

Numbers 1:45-6 notes that Moses had 603,550 men from twenty years of age and upward “able to go forth to war.” When we add women, children, and non-Israelites, the number of people trekking their way to Mount Sinai with Moshe Rabinu (Moses the Teacher) sometime during the 13th century BCE comes to over 2 million.  

The modern academic study of the Bible, noted for challenging traditional belief, considers the notion of 2-million people wandering the Sinai desert quite implausible. As N.H. Snaith wrote in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, “When on the march, they would constitute a column twenty-two miles long, marching fifty abreast with one yard between each rank.” It does strain credulity.  

Marching, let’s assume,  ten abreast, and not including their donkeys, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats, they would have formed a column 150 miles long, according to archeologist Eric H. Cline (From Eden to Exodus). Even more preposterous.

 When you think about it, if Moses had over six hundred thousand fighting men, the Israelites would have been able to fend off Pharaoh’s pursuing army at the Red Sea and would not have required the most celebrated miracle in the Hebrew Bible to save them. Something certainly doesn’t add up.

Consider also, as the Israelites neared Mount Sinai, they were attacked by a nomadic tribe, the Amalekites. Exodus 17:8-13 describes the ensuing day-long battle, which went back and forth until the Israelites finally won out.

The Amalekites had attacked with an army of perhaps several thousand and were met presumably by an equal numerical force of Israelites. If Moses’ troops had indeed numbered some 600,000, it would have been a slaughter.

Another point, Deuteronomy 7:7 stresses that the LORD chose Israel even though “ye were the fewest of all people.”  According to the Encyclopedia of the Archeology of Ancient Egypt, Egypt’s population at the time was 3 million. With an Exodus population of 2 million, 2/3 of mighty Egypt’s, the Israelites would hardly qualify as “the fewest of all people.”

In a 1998 issue of Vetus Testamentum, the scholars’ journal on the Old Testament, British scientist Colin Humphreys, author of The Miracles of Exodus, came up with a reasonable re-interpretation of the above quoted passage. 

For Humphreys, it all boiled down to a key word, ‘eleph, translated as “a thousand” in the Numbers passage. But ‘eleph also carries the meaning of a “group,” such as a family, clan, or troop.

Numbers 1:21 states that the number of fighting men in the tribe of Reuben was 46,500. In the Hebrew text, this  is represented as 46 ‘eleph and 500 men, traditionally rendered as 46 thousand and 500 men. Humphreys suggests it should be read as: 46 troops and 500 men. That is, the tribe of Reuben contributed 500 men (46 troops), not 46,500.

A troop would have between 10 and 20 men, which was standard for armies at the time (supported by data contained in the 14th-century BCE  Amarna tablets of Egypt).

All in all, Humphreys, employing a sophisticated mathematical analysis, calculated a total of 5,550 men making up Moses’ fighting force. And a more realistic estimate of the number of Israelites participating in the Exodus would be about 20 thousand, not the multitude recorded in Scripture, but enough to have guaranteed the birth of a nation.

(For the reader interested in the complete Humphreys reference mentioned above, see the NOTE appendaged to the blog.) 

The idea of 2-million Israelites wandering around in the desert for forty years is unrealistic. The number is unwieldy, as already indicated, and there wouldn’t have been enough water available for their needs. But 20-thousand Israelites could have survived in the Sinai Peninsula. Modern biblical critics dismiss the saga of the Exodus as nothing more than theology told in the form of history, but we now have some credible support from the scientific community for the story’s authenticity.

NOTE: Colin J. Humphreys, “The Number of People in the Exodus from Egypt: Decoding Mathematically the Very Large Number in Numbers I and XXVI.” Vetus Testamentum 48 (1998), pp. 196-213.

Steven Tyler, a modern-day Peter Pan of sorts, adds to the themes of my March 25 blog, “Some Thoughts on Baby Boomers” (BBs). Edna Gundersen, author of the USA Today  piece, quotes the 63-year-old BB: “I’m glad I haven’t grown up…I  never want to. I get glimpses of adulthood in my sobriety, and I hate it.”

Tyler’s is the classic statement of a mind-body locked into the world of childhood. Shades of Michael Jackson and his Neverland, named for the fantasy island in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.

The singer fits the profile of psychoanalyst Dan Kiley’s description of the eternal youth as described in his book, The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up (1983).  (It should be noted that the Peter Pan syndrome, useful as it may be,  is not an official American Psychiatric Association diagnosis.)

For the reader inclined to pursue the subject at a  deeper level, there is Carl Jung’s  paper, “The Psychology of the Child Archetype” (in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung), and his disciple Marie-Louise von Franz’s book, The Problem of the Puer Aeturnus — the Eternal Youth, or Man as Boy.

My blog on BBs also dealt with narcissism, and on this  Tyler is quite blunt about himself. On page 102 of  Noise (I can’t bring myself to repeat the full title of his book),  he states, “Pretty much anyone who wants to be a rock star is by definition a raging narcissist —  then just add drugs!” 

I’m not about to comment on Tyler’s musicianship. I understand, from what I’ve read about him, that he tends to hurl his entire being into his music. According to Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, that includes “yelps, groans, growls, and squeals.”  I can see why he’s called the “Demon of Screamin’” and, as one of the illustrious inclusions in Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Singers of All Time,”  has become a household name (but not where I live).

In general, I find rock ‘n’ roll offensive to my auditory apparatus and will go out of my way to shelter my eardrums from it as much as I can. I’m in agreement with Pope Benedict XVI, who in a 1986 speech commented, “Rock and roll  is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship…”

Another statement of his, from The Ratzinger Report (1985): “The musical sense of  the younger generation has been stunted since the beginning of the sixties by rock music and related forms.” Stunted is definitely the case.

Details concerning Tyler’s earlier life of debauchery need not concern us here. For the curious, Gundersen deals with some of it in her USA Today story.

It’s enough for me to say that no group in today’s culure is more into the life of self-indulgence than rock performers. Even though so many of them are now in their 60s, their life’s philosophy remains hedonistic. Sex and drugs are part and parcel of the lifestyle of these child-gods.

It comes as no surprise that the sexually focused Tyler thinks singing began “with the first primate uttering a moan during sex.” Realistically, the earliest singing was in imitation of the sounds heard in nature.

What we might ask the Demon of Screamin’, so immersed in his music, is whether he experiences sexual arousal when playing or listening to music. This goes by the label of melolagnia for sex therapists.

Topliner trans-generational pop singer Tony Bennett has commented, “Without heart, there is no art.” Tyler adds: “I wear my heart on my sleeve.” There’s no doubting that his frenetic singing springs not only from his lungs and vocal cords but also from the polestar within his thoracic cavity.

Speaking of heart provides me with a segue back to Marie-Louise von Franz and The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, the book that developed out of twelve lectures she delivered during the winter of 1959-60 at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Eight of those dealt with an analysis of  Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince.

In December 1935, while flying from Paris to Saigon in an attempt to break the speed record for a prize worth 150,000 francs, French author and intrepid aviator Saint-Exupery and his navigator crashed in the Libyan desert. The details of their harrowing experience are recorded in his memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars. The Little Prince, which he wrote in New York City in 1942, begins with a flyer marooned in the Sahara desert. 

Written as a children’s book, Saint-Exupery sprinkles the novella’s pages with wisdom garnered from the ages. In one instance, the young prince, emerging from the Sahara desert, meets a fox who says to him, “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Perhaps, just perhaps, one day the nation’s youth, including man-boy Tyler, will understand the words of the fox.

I don’t recall how I stumbled upon her article on the Internet; I’ve never read anything on the Huffington news website before. From time to time, I’ve seen Arianna Huffington, the Post’s co-founder, on one or another TV news program as a political commentator. I did read one of her books, when she was still Arianna Stassinopoulos, Maria Callas — The Woman Behind the Legend (1981), at about the time I was writing  Journey of Faith (in which I mentioned how the chubby Callas finally succeeded in losing weight). Huffington, incidentally, is a Baby Boomer. 

It was Landon Y. Jones, longtime managing editor of Money and People magazines, who coined the term “Baby Boomer” in his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation. Jones defined Baby Boomers as those having been born between the years 1946 and 1964, a 19-year period. Most demographers go along with this definition, but not all. For instance, William Strauss and Neil Howe, in Generations, have Baby Boomers being born between 1943 and 1960.

Cultural historian Jonathan Pontell then identified a “lost generation” — between the Boomers and Generation X, which he called “Generation Jones” for those born betwen 1954 and 1965. President Barack Obama, born in 1961, would fit into this generational cohort.

January 1, 2011 became a red-letter day for Baby Boomers: the oldest crop was beginning to reach the retirement age of 65, when they would become Golden Boomers. So here come the Golden Boomers, still very much part of the scene, that is, vital [from L. vitalis, "of or belonging to life"], or as Dr. Diller phrases it, “aging but vital.”

There were 76 million births recorded in the United States from 1946 to 1964. Of these, 4 million had died by April 1, 2000, leaving about 72 million Baby Boomers, which is nearly 1/4 of our population.

Baby Boomers have an established identity, and I see no reason for them to seek  another, as Diller has it in mind to do. Golden Boomers are just beginning to emerge as a new group, and they, too, already have an identity — they are the Golden Boomers. Soon enough, they will number in the millions and will be a force to contend with.

Recall that Diller entitled her article “The Challenge of Aging in a Narcissistic World.” The key word in the title for me is “narcissistic.” In its general usage, narcissism implies an extreme degree of self-centeredness, characterized by such features as selfishness, vanity, egotism, conceit, egomania, self-absorption, et cetera. Freud described the condition in a 1914 essay, On Narcissism, deriving the term  from Narcissus, in Greek mythology a handsome young man who saw his own reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it.

Narcissism is etched into the Baby Boom generation. What’s also disconcerting, its incidence has been steadily increasing in today’s youth population, as Jean Twenge, Ph.D., psychology professor at San Diego State University, confirms  in The Narcissistic Epidemic. ( Also, see chapter 20, “Narcissism in Our Time,” in my book, Faith in a Hurting World.)

Baby Boomers are the forever-young generation, burdened by a fear of growing old (gerascophobia). You might also call theirs the Peter Pan generation. “Once upon a time there was a boy named Peter Pan, who decided not to grow up,” Wendy Darling explains to the pirate Captain Hook, in J.M. Barie’s play Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Earlier, Peter said to Wendy, “I want always to be a boy, and have fun.”

There is a bitter and harsh truth here: the price of eternal youth is a world without adulthood. Indeed, where are the adults in today’s youth-dominated America?

The Boomers have become, in a way, a metaphor for the young in general. America is a youth culture, in reality an adolescent culture, and today’s America displays the characteristics of such a culture: psycho-social (and psycho-sexual) arrested development. Adolescence thrives on energy, but energy is not enough.

I remember a line from Stephen Vincent Binet’s 1935 poem Litany for Dictatorships, his condemnation for our support of dictators: “We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.”

We struggle for peace, understanding, and justice, but we do so without wisdom. The young have their youth, but there is no wisdom with them. There is depth in the old saying: “No wise man ever wished to be younger.”

The biblical Job, in his response to Zophar the Naamathite, has the final word: “With the ancient [the aged] is wisdom; and in length of days understanding” (Job 12:12, KJV).

O’Reilly’s number 1 choice was The Godfather II (1974). New York Times movie reviewer Vincent Canby, “for a quarter century America’s most prominent ‘make-or-break’ critic,” as The Nation’s Stuart Klowans spoke of him, described the film as “a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from left over parts [from The Godfather I].”  His review gets even more critical, but enough.

Midnight Cowboy, Oscar’s selection as the best picture of 1969, came in as number 3 for O’Reilly. Critic Canby described the film’s co-protagonist, Joe Buck ( played by  Jon Voight), as “a little boy whose knowledge of life was learned in front of a TV set while his grandmother…lived with a series of cowboy-father images for Joe.” Canby added, “It’s not a movie for the ages.”

As his number 2 selection, O’Reilly chose a film about the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). “Dark, sobering…Schindler’s List will make terrifying sense to anyone, anywhere,’ wrote New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin. Not so for several Baptist clergymen, who were offended by nonsexual nudity shown in the movie. In one scene, concentration-camp inmates were forced to stand naked in a courtyard, lined up in rows, while the camp’s commandant proceeded down between the rows shooting prisoners in the head with his pistol, alternating to his right and then to his left, splattering blood in every direction. Garden-of-Eden modesty was not on the director’s mind, as it was on the minds of the Baptist critics.

Platoon (1986), considered by many the “best” film about the Vietnam war, was O’Reilly’s number 4 pick. Others choose Hamburger Hill (1987) and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) as the best from that era.

I would go with Kubrick, my classmate at William Howard Taft High School in The Bronx, New York, during the early 1940s. My brother was editor of the Taft Review at the time, and Kubrick was his sports photographer.

Casablanca (1942), voted the all-time favorite movie in most polls, was ranked number 5 by O’Reilly. When Casablanca came out in 1942, its co-star Ingrid Bergman referred to it as “the little film.” She was also working on Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and considered For Whom to be a shoe-in for an Oscar. However, Casablanca turned out to be the Best Picture of 1942.

Naturally, wth only 5 selections, O’Reilly has bypassed many a film classic. But not to include at least one of the “giant three” — Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Doctor  Zhivago!

Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), the thinly veiled biography of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, has been top-ranked by the American Film Institute for half a century. Movie critic Roger Ebert considered Citizen Kane the greatest movie ever made (noting that Casablanca is more loved).

Given his strong Catholic background — parochial school, private Catholic boys high school, undergraduate eduction at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY (founded as a seminary by the Marist Brothers, a Catholic congregation) —  it’s surprising O’Reilly didn’t include a single religious film among his five. There certainly are a number of such classics to choose from — Cecil B. DeMille’s  The Ten Commandments (1956), Franco Zeffirelli’s Anglo-Italian TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977), et cetera.

O’Reilly was born in 1949, and only one of his five selections, Casablanca, predated his birth. The other four belong to his “time.” One thing that characterizes post-World War II generations — the Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y or the Millennials — is how they belong exclusively to their own time.

Thus, it’s not surprising that O’Reilly missed the definitive movie about World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of the war. It was the first talkie (that’s how talking pictures were referred to in the ’30s) war film to win Oscars, for Best Picture and Best Director (Lewis Milestone). Modern movie-maker Steven Spielberg acknowledged Milestone’s cinematic influence when he made Saving Private Ryan.

The World War II years had their share of eminent films. Mrs. Miniver (1942), starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, won 6 Oscars, including Best Picture. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) garnered 7 Oscars, one of which was for Best Picture. The film was based on a novella, Glory for Me  (1945), by MacKinlay Kantor, written in blank verse, and was adapted for the screen by playwright and screenwriter Robert Sherwood.  Hollywood had exceptionally talented screenwriters in those days, major writers of the Great Depression years who had migrated to Movieland to earn a living.

Even The Young Lions (1958), based on Irwin Shaw’s powerful 1949 World War II novel of the same title (starring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin), was a more compelling film, for me, than O’Reilly’s number 2 pick, Platoon.

All in all, now equipped with a more panoramic view of filmdom, perhaps O’Reilly and the many Godfather II enthusiasts will consider the possibility that there may be films to rival their number 1 choice.

As appealing as Godfather II’s leading character, the sartorially elegant family man Michael Corleone may be, he is nevertheless an inglorious mafioso murderer.

If it pains Michael Corleone fans to have their “hero” labeled a sociopath, perhaps they will be mollified to hear him referred to as a well-mannered young man with superego lacunae — holes in his conscience.

Corleone is listed as the 11th most despicable movie villain in the American Film Institute’s ranking system of such characters, which, no doubt to the relief of his devotees, at least places him some distance from numbers 1 and 2, Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates.

Rounding out the American Film Institute’s’ top five villains are Darth Vader, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The AFI also publishes a list of movie heroes. The top five are: Atticus Finch, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Rick Blaine, and Will Kane. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid together are number 20 on the list, ahead of number 21, Mahatma Gandhi. You would think that a pair of sociopaths  like Butch and Sundance — to be politically correct so as not to offend any soft-hearted moviegoers, I will refer to them as nice guys with superego lacunae — would be in the other list (where at number 20 they would be between Captain Bligh and Mrs. Iselin of The Manchurian Candidtate). How the public loves its celluloid miscreants, evildoers, and scoundrels!

With crowds cheering and singing in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in February over Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, many Americans joined in the rejoicing, hopeful that democratic government was on the horizon for Egypt.

It was a youth rebellion, fought with cellphones, Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet. But before Americans get carried away in their enthusiasm over events in Egypt, they should know what the youthful throngs were thinking and saying in addition to “Down with Mubarak!”

Amidst all the exaltation, they talked exuberantly of shutting off the natural gas pipeline to Israel and once and for all doing away with the “detested, illegitimate Zionist entity.”

That obsessive, pathological hatred of the Jews so widespead in the Muslim world originates from passages in the Quar’an (Koran), and fundamentalist Muslims regulate their daily lives by their holy book.

Muslims also have a passion for jihad (”struggle”). A number of Koranic passages refer to this intriguing commandment, and every Muslim is called upon to be engaged in it. “Struggle” can represent anything from the struggle that goes on within one’s own soul to the violent jihad we have become familiar with, expressed so vividly in Sura 9:5, the “Verse of the Sword.” Jihad against the Jews is number one on their list of priorities. Then comes the rest of the West.

Rorschach testing isn’t necessary to find out what’s on the minds of Cairenes. Polling discloses that those young “freedom fighters” of Tahrir Square are overwhelmingly in favor of Sharia law, death for apostasy, and the return of the caliphate. Surprised?

In 1924, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, abolished the caliphate (dominion of the caliph, a successor to Muhammad). The caliphate was the original governmental system of Islam.

For Sunni Muslims, the ending of the caliphate was calamitous. In Egypt, the disorganization that followed led to the rise of a number of Sunni fundamentalist movements. The first of these, the Muslim Brotherhood, was established in 1928 by a talented, well-educated school teacher, Hassan al-Banna, who designed the Brotherhood as a political movement to combat Westernization.

Al-Banna was dismayed to see how Egyptians were adopting the hedonistic lifestyle of the West following the end of the First World War. Even the prestigious Al-Azhar University, founded in the 10th century and acknowledged throughout the Ummah, the worldwide Muslim community of believers, as the center of Islamic learning, was succumbing to secularization.

He had a flair for organization. In our country, most of us first heard the term “community organizer” when Barak Hussein Obama appeared on the presidential primary scene. The job title was made to order for al-Banna.

By the 1940s, al-Banna had seen the Muslim Brotherhood grow to where it had penetrated into every corner of the country. He could even send a well-equipped military contingent to fight against the Israelis in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. (He was pro-Nazi during the Second World War and was also, not surprisingly, an action-oriented jihadist.)

When a member of the Brotherhood assassinated the prime minister in December 1948, al-Banna’s days became numbered. He was gunned down in Cairo, Chicago-gangster style, a few weeks later.

Sayyid Qutb was a leading Brotherhood tactitian in the 1960s, who saw Islamic society no longer Muslim but as jahilyya (pagan), the way Arabia had been before the coming of Muhammad. Jahilyya, he taught, had to be overcome through violent revolution.

His brother Muhammad Qutb, of a like mind, would become Osama bin Laden’s university teacher in Saudi Arabia. In fact, high on bin Laden’s recommended reading list to Muslims is Sheikh Muhammad Qutb’s Concepts That Should Be Corrected.

To repeat, Osama bin Laden is essentially a Qutbist. His thinking was shaped by the likes of Muhammad Qutb and the Qutbists. And now we have come full circle.

At another time in human history, a rabbi from Galilee died an agonizing death nailed to a wooden cross for the redemption of mankind. There will be no redemption for the world if Israel were now to perish.

Today’s Middle East scene brings to mind Aesop’s The Frogs Desiring a King. As the fable goes, here updated, the Frogs were discontented with the sorry state of their society and petitioned Jove for a government that would ensure them an enhanced lifestyle: “Mighty Jove,” the cry went up, “send us a king who will rule over us and make us as happy as Bufo americanus.”

Jove was obliging and sent them King Posni. For three decades, King Posni kept the Frogs at peace with their neighbors, the Toads. But the Frogs were not satisfied, for King Posni was too kindly disposed toward Toadland. “Mighty Jove,” croaked one of the Frogs, “we desire a real king, one who will provide us with what we want — the things of the world and the annihilation of the Toads.”

Jove realized they would be tampering with global destiny. Sighing, he muttered, “Que sera, sera,” and sent them Brother Mustafa the Fox.

The Fox, patient as well as cunning, knew exactly how to prepare Frogland to war against the tiny kingdom of the Toads.

First off, it should be noted that Spiritual Passages, my main source for this exposition,  is more than a book; it’s actually a course. That is,  Spiritual Passages is to be studied, not merely read. In fact, your local university could conceivably catalog it as a 3-semester-credit course entitled “The Psychology of Spiritual Development.”

By the time you have digested the book’s contents, you will have met an array of fascinating figures from Abi’l-Khayr to Zoroaster, all while exploring the psychology of spiritual development.

Few in the Western world have heard of the Muslim mystic Abi’l-Khayr (d. 1049 CE). Fr. Groeschel quotes a penentrating passage of his on finding peace and joy in both the material and spiritual life.

You will come across some of the renowned mystics of Christianity in the pages of Spiritual Passages – Teresa of Avila (author of a classic spiritual guide to union with God, Interior Castle), John of the Cross (poet of Dark Night of the Soul), Gregory of Nyssa (little known and appreciated in the Christian West), Bonaventure (author of Journey of the Mind into God) — just to name a few, as well as Rabi’a al-Basri, in addition to Abi’l-Khayr, from the Muslim tradition.

Concerning Rabi’a al-Basri (c.717-801 CE), she was the first female Sufi saint, remembered especially for introducing Divine Love into Islam. Her biographer, the revered Persian poet and Sufi known by his pen names, Farid ud-Din and Attar, recorded that people spoke of her “as a second spotless Mary.”

Once when asked where she was from, she replied, “From that other world.” “And where are you going?” To this she answered, “To that other world.” Somewhat similarly, Christians speak of themselves as being in the world but not of the world.

Rabi’a was about as close to what can be considered the Christian “Holy Ones” as anyone from another tradition can get. For Jungians, she looms as an archetypal figure, as does Mary.

Readers are encouraged, by this writer, to flesh out the above-mentioned names for themselves. For example, and to be brief here, the 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, one of the 3 Cappadocian Fathers, was an important figure in the history of apophatic theology and spirituality, but he is not the household name he ought to be to Christians for his many notable contributions to the faith. He was, for instance, the first Christian to consider God as infinite and beyond our comprehension, but knowable through His manifestations in the world.

Care for a little test? Who were the other two Cappadocian Fathers and where was Cappadocia? What is apophatic theology? Have you figured out who the Sufis are? What is a Jungian archetype? And is it worth your time to read Margaret Smith’s The Way of the Mystics: The Early Christian Mystics and the Rise of the Sufis, where you can learn about the life of Rabi’a al-Basri?

For those not familiar with Fr. Benedict (”Abba Baruch” in Hebrew) Groeschel, he is a Ph.D. psychologist as well as a man of the cloth. Who else could discuss psychoanalyst Erich Fromm and Teresa of Avila and her protege John of the Cross in the same paragraph?

A few readers, perhaps more than a few, may be concerned that without any formal grounding in psychology they won’t be able to follow Fr. G’s discussion of the psychological stages of development, which constitutes a large chunk of Part I  of Spiritual Passages.

Not to worry. Gail Sheey’s Passages, a 1976 best seller, introduced the subject of psychological staging to the general public. Sheey, a journalist, picked the brains of psychiatrist Roger V.Gould (Transformations) and psychologist Daniel J. Levinson (Seasons of a Man’s Life) to gather up material for Passages.

Sheey’s book was described as “a road map of adult life.” Decades before she appeared on the scene, the “professionals” — Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, et cetera — had worked out human developmental outlines, which Fr. G explores at length in Spiritual Passages.

But Spiritual Passages is about the spiritual life, which the author defines as “the sum total of responses which one makes to what is perceived as the inner call of God.” St. Augustine contributed interiority, or inwardness, to advance the spiritual life. In The True Religion, he wrote: “In our interior the truth resides. Go inside, where the light of reason is illumined.” Rabi’a al-Basri and Teresa of Avila withdrew to that interior life in order to gain a better understanding of themselves and of God.

Fr. G asks, “Is psychology a help in understanding spirituality?” He answers his own question not unexpectedly in the affirmative. After all, he points out, spirituality is a phase of human growth and development — but not without “the impetus of grace, a help that comes from beyond any human source.”

Just as life goes better with a sound mind in a sound body, so it is with the spirit and the mind, which is why Fr. G  devotes so much ink to the stages of psychological development. When the spirit and the mind are in sync, then you are ready to consider the spiritual lfe.

Part II of Spiritual Passages is introduced with the caption: “A Psychological Understanding of the Three Ways.” The author divides the pursuit of the spiritual life into three stages: purgation, the illuminative way, and the unitive way, spreading the material out over 93 pages.

As an interjection, the 3-fold path to the spiritual life is generic, that is, found elsewhere in Christianity and other religions. In the Christian East, there is the aforementioned Gregory of Nyssa with his system of spiritual progression divided into 3 stages: an initial stage of darkness or ignorance, followed by spiritual illumination, and then a difficult or trying stage, spoken of as divine darkness of the mind while absorbed in contemplation of the incomprehensible God.

It is not my purpose here to lead potential readers of Spiritual Passages through the three stages of spiritual development as laid out by Fr. G, but to whet their appetite sufficiently so that they may be motivated to sit down in a quiet place with a copy of the book and begin their mystical exploration.

The author points out early in Spiritual Passages that we “are created with a capacity to seek and find God.” From the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, we have that familiar line: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” An equally valid translation reads: “Even the longest journey must begin from where you are standing.” In other words, nothing gets done until a body at rest begins to move; that is, it takes action. Who among those reading this account are prepared to take the first step in the mystic journey that leads to God?

A word of caution, though, for those who think their way to God will be a cakewalk. After sloshing my way through Part II, I had to wonder if even a talented teacher could cover Spiritual Passages adequately in one semester. Spiritual Passages, as stated earlier, is not to be read like a novel but studied like the Torah.