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Jul. 13th, 2024 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsHaving spent some time already today talking about Naomi Mitchison in good company, it seems a good day to post about Blood of the Martyrs, the only Mitchison I was able to find in the wild on our trip to Scotland.
I should note that the copy I acquired, unlike the copy I'm linking here, does NOT have "How the Slaves in Rome Found Victory In Christ" in large letters on the front. Instead it has a list of dramatis personae on the inside cover, beginning with ROMAN CITIZENS, Emperor Nero first of course, and then gradually crawling down through the social classes until, at the very end, there's a short list of slaves. Then there's an epigram: "Is it a god or a king that comes? Both are evil and both are strong."
You can see why I was slightly startled to find that, indeed, this book is about How The Slaves In Rome Found Victory In Christ -- though both choices are of course very deliberate.
The first chapter is from the point of view of Beric, a young man in a wealthy and politically important Roman household -- he's not technically a citizen, technically he's the barbarian son of a barbarian king who was taken to Rome as a prisoner, but as a child he was given to a Roman family to raise up and has been treated with affection more or less as the son of the house ever since. His future seems bright! But on the night in question, a small racist incident occurs that suddenly reminds him that to a large number people in Rome he is not in fact a person, but a barbarian; that suddenly for a brief moment puts him more in solidarity with the household slaves than with their Roman guests.
And from here we switch focus entirely to other real protagonists of this book: the household slaves, as individuals and humans, and how each of them happened to enter slavery, and how they ended up becoming Christians.
This is perhaps my favorite part of the book -- and I really liked a lot of the book, much more than I thought I would when I realized I, A Jew, had just started reading a historical novel about Finding Victory In Christ. Primarily, this is a narrative about people who have been dehumanized finding solidarity in each other. Mitchison is very clear and specific in her portrayal of the kind of Christianity she wants to write about and that is meaningful to her characters: it's a radical, revolutionary force of pacifist socialism. Paul is hanging around in this book, increasingly towards the end, and increasingly the book very kindly and gently suggests that Paul, an educated man of privilege, has perhaps fundamental misunderstanding of the Christianity from which the slaves are finding their strength. Its power doesn't come from a vision of the afterlife, but from the promise of a better world here, love and equality and fellowship here, empires and hierarchical social orders toppling in the here and now. Are there lessons to be taken from this to the modern day? God, Naomi Mitchison hopes so!
I said a couple times to various friends while I was reading that occasionally reading this book felt to me like a 1930s version of the kind of mildly didactic contemporary novel where everyone is always analyzing their own traumas in order to try and interact with each other in a perfectly ethical fashion. However, because it's the 1930s version and not the 2020s version, and also because this is a book specifically about the hope and potential for an ethical society, I find it endearing rather than annoying ... this comes out most in the relationship between Beric and his personal slave, Argas, two young men of around the same age who are trying to figure out how to treat each other as equals for the first time, and are also (explicitly, textually) attracted to each other sexually with all the additional complications that brings to the already fraught dynamic. The book is not a romance -- even aside from the fact that it's very much an ensemble novel, Mitchison would perhaps like to suggest that these two lads are really both madly and headily in love with the Radical Solidarity Of Christianity as refracted through each other -- but it's a major thread and worth mentioning.
As the book goes on, we hit the Great Fire of Rome and subsequent Christian purges, and it became increasingly clear that 'BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS' is a title that should be taken seriously. Things Get Bad. Then They Get Worse. People are offered points where they could turn aside, and don't, and there's a lot of stirring discussion of how their death might inspire others to really think for a moment about what's wrong with this world, about the new vision for what a different world might look like, and then in fact it does! The book, I think, does unironically want you to feel that the titular Christian martyrs are heroes -- inspirational in the Enjolras vein, allowing themselves to die for a new world embodied by Christ that would rise up like the sun, etc. etc. -- and here Mitchison and I must agree to disagree; I see the narrative power of claiming victory in the arms of death but I believe pretty strongly that it's pretty much always better to try and make change as a living person than a dead one.
And yet also Mitchison is not subtle, either, in the fact that she is writing from the future, and the Christianity that she and we know is not the Christianity that she's writing about. "Wouldn't it be awful if the state suborned the power of this movement and used it strengthen itself instead?" "No, it couldn't possibly!" "When will this new world come?" "SURELY it must be soon; how could anyone not see what's so self-evidently necessary!"
All of the quick summaries I can find on the internet for this book seem to be talking about it with a primary focus on Nero as a metaphor for Hitler and the rise of fascism, and that's certainly present -- the book was written in 1939 -- but to me (a person who is, admittedly, not a reader in 1939) that is much, much less present in the text than the really explicit call that Mitchison is making to overturn the whole corrupt global social order and re-envision the world in a new shape. Nero persecutes the protagonists, but they are already slaves. The whole thing has got to go.
I should note that the copy I acquired, unlike the copy I'm linking here, does NOT have "How the Slaves in Rome Found Victory In Christ" in large letters on the front. Instead it has a list of dramatis personae on the inside cover, beginning with ROMAN CITIZENS, Emperor Nero first of course, and then gradually crawling down through the social classes until, at the very end, there's a short list of slaves. Then there's an epigram: "Is it a god or a king that comes? Both are evil and both are strong."
You can see why I was slightly startled to find that, indeed, this book is about How The Slaves In Rome Found Victory In Christ -- though both choices are of course very deliberate.
The first chapter is from the point of view of Beric, a young man in a wealthy and politically important Roman household -- he's not technically a citizen, technically he's the barbarian son of a barbarian king who was taken to Rome as a prisoner, but as a child he was given to a Roman family to raise up and has been treated with affection more or less as the son of the house ever since. His future seems bright! But on the night in question, a small racist incident occurs that suddenly reminds him that to a large number people in Rome he is not in fact a person, but a barbarian; that suddenly for a brief moment puts him more in solidarity with the household slaves than with their Roman guests.
And from here we switch focus entirely to other real protagonists of this book: the household slaves, as individuals and humans, and how each of them happened to enter slavery, and how they ended up becoming Christians.
This is perhaps my favorite part of the book -- and I really liked a lot of the book, much more than I thought I would when I realized I, A Jew, had just started reading a historical novel about Finding Victory In Christ. Primarily, this is a narrative about people who have been dehumanized finding solidarity in each other. Mitchison is very clear and specific in her portrayal of the kind of Christianity she wants to write about and that is meaningful to her characters: it's a radical, revolutionary force of pacifist socialism. Paul is hanging around in this book, increasingly towards the end, and increasingly the book very kindly and gently suggests that Paul, an educated man of privilege, has perhaps fundamental misunderstanding of the Christianity from which the slaves are finding their strength. Its power doesn't come from a vision of the afterlife, but from the promise of a better world here, love and equality and fellowship here, empires and hierarchical social orders toppling in the here and now. Are there lessons to be taken from this to the modern day? God, Naomi Mitchison hopes so!
I said a couple times to various friends while I was reading that occasionally reading this book felt to me like a 1930s version of the kind of mildly didactic contemporary novel where everyone is always analyzing their own traumas in order to try and interact with each other in a perfectly ethical fashion. However, because it's the 1930s version and not the 2020s version, and also because this is a book specifically about the hope and potential for an ethical society, I find it endearing rather than annoying ... this comes out most in the relationship between Beric and his personal slave, Argas, two young men of around the same age who are trying to figure out how to treat each other as equals for the first time, and are also (explicitly, textually) attracted to each other sexually with all the additional complications that brings to the already fraught dynamic. The book is not a romance -- even aside from the fact that it's very much an ensemble novel, Mitchison would perhaps like to suggest that these two lads are really both madly and headily in love with the Radical Solidarity Of Christianity as refracted through each other -- but it's a major thread and worth mentioning.
As the book goes on, we hit the Great Fire of Rome and subsequent Christian purges, and it became increasingly clear that 'BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS' is a title that should be taken seriously. Things Get Bad. Then They Get Worse. People are offered points where they could turn aside, and don't, and there's a lot of stirring discussion of how their death might inspire others to really think for a moment about what's wrong with this world, about the new vision for what a different world might look like, and then in fact it does! The book, I think, does unironically want you to feel that the titular Christian martyrs are heroes -- inspirational in the Enjolras vein, allowing themselves to die for a new world embodied by Christ that would rise up like the sun, etc. etc. -- and here Mitchison and I must agree to disagree; I see the narrative power of claiming victory in the arms of death but I believe pretty strongly that it's pretty much always better to try and make change as a living person than a dead one.
And yet also Mitchison is not subtle, either, in the fact that she is writing from the future, and the Christianity that she and we know is not the Christianity that she's writing about. "Wouldn't it be awful if the state suborned the power of this movement and used it strengthen itself instead?" "No, it couldn't possibly!" "When will this new world come?" "SURELY it must be soon; how could anyone not see what's so self-evidently necessary!"
All of the quick summaries I can find on the internet for this book seem to be talking about it with a primary focus on Nero as a metaphor for Hitler and the rise of fascism, and that's certainly present -- the book was written in 1939 -- but to me (a person who is, admittedly, not a reader in 1939) that is much, much less present in the text than the really explicit call that Mitchison is making to overturn the whole corrupt global social order and re-envision the world in a new shape. Nero persecutes the protagonists, but they are already slaves. The whole thing has got to go.
