Friday 13 February 2009

Book Review: Le Roi des Derniers Jours by Barret and Gurgand

My step brother brought me a case of books from a library which was closing down next to where he lives. Most of the books are very high-brow, prize-winning literary oeuvres, all of them practically new. Either the librarian was a bit ambitious for a small Alsacian town, or else my step brother thinks very highly of my literary ability and pre-selected all the ones that sounded clever enough, leaving the rest behind.
That's how I came to read Le Roi des Derniers Jours and it was absolutely impossible to put down. I'd been wanting to learn about Anabaptism for a while, because I'd gathered here and there that my own sympathies often lie with it. Le Roi des Derniers Jours is a mix of fragments of Anabaptist theology and a war story that can compete with Thucidides' Pelopponesian war.
It all starts pretty good: the Anabatist preachers take Luther's reformation a bit further and insist on a new form of worship and communal life, redistributing wealth and so on. They're pretty fired up and convince enough people that they eventually form a majority in the city of Munster, in which they try to re-create the apostolic way of life.
This "dangerous heresy" is opposed by the local Roman Catholic bishop who fears that it might spread further and who is prepared to everything to contain it.
For their part, the Anabaptists are so convinced that their doctrine is right that they are prepared to recant if anyone can convince them that they are wrong theologically, but would rather die than give it up because of sheer cowardice.
Munster becomes assieged. Inside; they're busy re-creating the new Jerusalem. Not all of it is rosy: some of their ideas are pretty fucked-up and they're pretty tough on sin. Still on the whole, they sound genuine. Outside, the bishop just wants to bring them back to the Roman fold.
It all goes very very wrong. Inside Munster, the beautiful ideals are increasingly laced with despotism in a completely confusing way (one minute you're completely taken by the beautifully equalitarian sermons, the next you think they're a bunch of self-aggrandizing fucked-up loonies).
Also, the anabaptists are pretty certain that God Godself will intervene to save them, turning stones into bread and that kind of jazz, which -suprise- does not happen.
Finally, assieged Munster is so destitute that a lot of the Anabaptists are leaving the city. At first this was not permitted, and the leaders tried their hardest to keep their sisters and brothers from giving up the faith, but towards the end they can' t cope with this weak contingent, and let them go if they choose too.
This means that starving crowds are arriving into the Roman bishop's army, and he doesn't know what to do with them, because the leavers might still be secretely sympathetic to Munster and would spread "the heresy" the minute they entered new towns. But he can't quite kill starving women and children. So he sends the leavers back into already destitute Munster, who is less than enthusiastic about having the traitors back.
But because everybody in the region knows that Munster is starving, some knights desert the bishops' ranks beacuse they think he's being inhumane, thereby remaining within the Roman fold but disobeying a bishop. On the ground some of the bishop's soldiers take the leavers in anyway, or enable them to go through the ranks unhindered.
What makes this book particularly fascinating is that nearly ALL of these folks are inspired by the message of Christ, at least as they understand it. The Anabaptists for sure... Then the bishop who actually tries his best to get all the Munster folks into confessionals and back into the Roman church, the knights who desert or undermine the bishop because they think he's being cruel, the soldiers on the ground, and all the captured Anabaptists who die as martyrs for their faith.
This book really got my head spinning. I almost feel like doing a Ph.D. in reformation studies (umm... okay, maybe not a Ph.D. you'd think I'd learned my lesson by now). It got me thinking about God, God's way with the world, idealism, life in community, Catholicism, the spirit of the reformation and the contribution anabaptism like nothing else had done before. Definitely worth a read.