Going Low on Jerusalem

I blogged this book previously. And now it has popped up at the New York Times.

The fascination with blood and violence of the author is noted there:

He is especially fascinated by, indeed fixated on, human acts of violence. Relying heavily on the speculative theories of the anthropologist and literary critic René Girard, Carroll asserts that human society and culture are shot through with bloodshed that can be tamed only by further acts of bloodshed. The pre-eminent example of violence taming violence, he says, is religion, which arose out of the practice of human sacrifice — a ritual that enabled a community to channel and purge its primitive impulses in a single cathartic act of collective bloodletting.

The ancient animistic and polytheistic cults from which Judaism emerged regularly sacrificed human beings. The God of the Hebrews demanded that Abraham sacrifice his beloved son Isaac on Mount Moriah (widely believed to be the location of the Temple Mount in modern-day Jerusalem) but then called it off at the last minute, ultimately substituting circumcision as a nonfatal re-enactment of ritualized bloodshed that founds and forever marks the Jewish people. Christianity, which tells the story of another Father’s willingness to sacrifice his Son, sublimates the impulse to sacred violence still further, with the bloody sacrifice of the Lamb of God commemorated for the past 2,000 years in countless variations on crosses and altars, in liturgical practices and works of art.

but

Surely it isn’t unreasonable to expect that a book with Jerusalem in its name — twice! — will be about . . . Jerusalem. But alas, James Carroll’s “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” is not really about that ancient city, and despite what its subtitle suggests, it has next to nothing to say about how Jerusalem “ignited our modern world.”

That’s a pity, because the subtitle is provocative...Carroll’s talents might have resulted in a mesmerizing study.

Instead, Carroll has given us a sprawling, undisciplined mess of a book. The trouble begins at the beginning, with his opening chapter, which lurches from captivating passages about “the lethal feedback loop between the actual city of Jerusalem and the apocalyptic fantasy it inspires” to self-indulgent digressions into his autobiography. Carroll very much wants us to know that he is a former priest who left the priesthood in protest against the Roman Catholic Church. Yet the story he tells to explain precisely what drew him to don and then doff a clerical collar, and how this journey explains his motivation for writing this book, is so impressionistically pretentious that this reader, at least, was left scratching his head and scrawling question marks in the margins. Carroll speaks of kissing a “threshold stone” in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem that was “my threshold, a crossing into the rest of my life.”

I think he simoply exited the realm of rationality.

^