Word: martyrdom
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Martyrs are rarely popular. Their persecutors, haunted by persistent ghosts, find them stronger in death than in life. Their fellow believers, faced by heroic example, find them reproaching a safe and compromising existence. By the 18th century, the whole business of martyrdom was widely considered to be fanatical and rather ill-mannered. A gibbous Gibbon age that saw the fall of the Roman Empire as caused by Christianity was apt to feel that the early Christian martyrs were really the spiritual aggressors who provoked legitimate rulers. In other words, those martyrs asked...
...spiritual conversion. Others saw him as a martyr only to ambition, who lost out in a struggle for power with his King. Britain's Alfred Duggan, a first-rate historical novelist (The Little Emperors), takes a polite middle ground. He does not really care for the business of martyrdom either, and accepts King Henry II's description of Becket as "a very good actor [who] played his part so carefully that he became the character he was imitating...
Duggan is a master at painting the background of this drama-the clothes, the customs, the pageantry. He reconstructs the dialogue of his characters and reads their thoughts. But somehow he never seems to read their souls. Why did Becket choose martyrdom? In Duggan's view, Becket was goaded to death by a kind of perverse romanticism: as a Norman knight ringed by his enemies, he died to show the English that it was "the Norman custom to stand fast." This mutedly rationalist ending of an otherwise excellent book will fail to satisfy many readers. It shows, once again...
...heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance." In due course the sinner appears, but the book's hero is on the scene from Page One, a Roman Catholic priest, about to travel the age-old road to martyrdom. Jesuit Father Janos is a good priest and a soldier of Christ in his heart, but he has had to fight few battles for the Christian faith in Roman Catholic Hungary. Then, as he sees Red agitators play on the needs and greeds of the peasantry, Father Janos wonders...
...attempting one of the following: 1) to drive the restless from wholesome entertainment on a day of boredom in order to encourage desperate amusements; 2) to entice disbelievers into the moviehouses on weekdays by banning harmless moral productions on Sundays; 3) to promote a Christian revival by a mild martyrdom of Christian art . . .; or 4) to annoy moviegoers by being arbitrary and inconsistent...