Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith.

This book cuts to the heart of the matter, the heart of Christian faith: the folly of a God who died naked on a cross. Why don't people believe today? Not because of bad music (if only there were organs, etc.), or the subversion of biblical hermeneutics (in the old days, God was God and the devil was the devil). Because the scandal of Jesus the Christ has been drowned out and leveled off? Here he beckons.

Martyrdom has fallen from grace. And what a fall it has been. Where once there was no greater glory than to die for Christ, and a selfless death obviated the need for further apology, today we know better. What does martyrdom prove? For most moderns, nothing - unless our gullibility and errant dogmatism. Martyrdom has been demythologized, and ambiguity has stolen the show. Early zealots, it is argued, were effectively suicides. Medieval crusaders would sooner have killed than be killed. Missionaries courted death with ignorance and arrogance.

Of course the message is not new. Eminent freethinkers have long greeted religious devotion and heroics with a sneer. And too many apologetics egg this scorn on. Happily, Martyrs is not another apologetic. This collection of essays by twenty first-rate writers neither eschews ambiguity, nor succumbs to it; neither aches to restore the halcyon days of yore, nor revels in randomness. No, this is hard-nosed stuff, and it goes against the grain. Implausible? No more so than lives of Christian faith in what editor Susan Bergman calls this "age of atrocity," what the Russian poet and martyr Osip Mandelstam called our "tyrant century." Religious martyrdom, Bergman says, constitutes something like a "shadow narrative" to the twentieth century's horrors, which is a suggestive way to describe the contributions to her book. None of these essayists denies the darkness of human being - our duplicity and our mystery but they all pursue and redeem it. They hold out hope.

Martyrs is composed of narratives, but does not just tell stories; it raises philosophical and theological questions as well. What is martyrdom's truth, to what does a martyr witness? To the willingness to believe, or to the truth of that belief?

The writers - among others, Larry Woiwode, Carolyn Forche, Paul Elie, Robert Ellsberg, Gerald Early, Patricia Hampl, Mark Rudman, Peggy O'Brien, Kathleen Norris, and Barbara Lazear Ascher - explore and contest the complexities martyrdom conceals. The tension created by placing Woiwode's account of the murder of Alexander Menn alongside Early's analysis of the ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, is shocking. In his best imitation of Dostoyevsky, Woiwode recreates the Russian Orthodox priest's violent death - "[H]is consciousness started fraying at its edges like window screen being ripped to shreds" and evokes his passing into eternal light. Early, by contrast, never even touches on King's murder; his dense but hypnotic prose made me wonder whether martyrdom itself is not a distracting abstraction. "In the aftermath of a martyr's death," Carolyn Forche comments in her essay, "mythologizing begins in earnest." Martyrdom is mythologized as the resolution and the readiness to die for faith: "Yes, I care enough...," etc. But is such sacrifice rather random and senseless? And another question: Can we live with that?

Martyrs is hard-hitting, and by turns jagged, raw, and nauseating. Forche also writes, regarding the murder of Oscar Romero, "[A young soldier in the death squads] had been intrigued...at the way blood from a slit throat makes a soft bubbling sound." "'Did you hear the shot?' 'I saw the hemorrhaging, the blood from the nose, the ears, and the mouth, and there was nothing I could do.'" This book hits like a hammer on ice, shatters, even explodes. Don't come into the faith just for the heck of it. Don't come just looking to sleep at night.

This summary may make the book sound masochistic. And, after all, the essays document violent death. Martyrs may leave us with the impression that Christianity is all misery and no joy, even a sickness. Why does anyone need redeeming? Why ever look for it in religion? It seems to me that many opponents and outspoken exponents of Christianity refuse to recognize that it offers the possibility of a relationship; refuse to recognize that faith does not take us out of the world or set us against it, but might enable us to be in it otherwise, hopefully, and more fully. This is the lesson Patricia Hampl draws from Edith Stein. For Stein, Hampl quotes a friend, "truth did not exist as an abstraction..., but as something incarnated in persons." And greatness was not the willful glorification of the self, but its loss in a story greater than itself, its transfiguration into a site for the drama of revelation to play itself out.

There is nonetheless something unrelenting to this book, something that won't let good enough alone. Just when martyrdom and the self had seemed saved from masochism and anomie, Rudman and O'Brien and Ascher trouble the waters again. Rudman proposes that Mandelstam "became perplexed about where the borderline of fantasy and fact lay between his erotics of exile...and the gruesomeness of being in actual exile." O'Brien reproves Patrick Pearse, an Irish insurrectionist executed for his role in the Easter 1916 uprising, for a "metaphysics of rarefaction," conflating language and spectacle, poetry and performance. And Ascher, remembering the missionaries killed during the Boxer Rebellion in China, questions the boundary between faith and fantasy: "When do faith and stubbornness merge and become something else?"

Kathleen Norris tackles the sickening case of Maria Goretti, a little Italian girl celebrated by some Roman Catholics as the embodiment of a sexual ethic: better killed than raped. Norris decries not only the enthusiasm for Goretti's eternal virginity, but also the blindness to her authentic virtue: bravery before inevitable violence.

Last summer I made a pilgrimage to Dachau. Although I had visited Munich several times already, I had never gone to the camp. It was hot, and the sun was beating down; and I got to feeling sick. The Carmelite nuns have a cloister, consecrated to the Holy Blood, outside the western wall; I went into it and knelt in a pew. And it struck me how impossible it was to pray there, and also how impossible it was not to pray there; at Dachau, prayer is the only "answer." I was terrified by the nuns' devotion; how do they do it?

Martyrs gives us some clues.

Bernard G. Prusak, a 1995 graduate of Williams College, is Commonweal's 1996-97 editorial intern.