fir st t h in g s November 2017
from the theology of Reformation
controversy, but displays through­
out an alertness to covert theologi­
cal claims hiding in the ambiguity of
the Greek. One need not agree with
H a rt’s judgment as to whether the
claims were or were not made by the
sacred author to be grateful for his
flagging the problems. Or again, the
great anthems at the beginning of
Colossians and Ephesians, so melo­
dious in the Latin of the Liturgy of
the Hours, are dismayingly clunky
at first reading; however, having
chewed through the difficulties while
reading H art synoptically with the
originals, one returns to the familiar
beauties inoculated against several
misunderstandings.
F
or whom is the book intended?
Hart avers that a new translation
is likely to cause consternation
“in countless breasts,” but this sur­
mise is predicated on the assumption
that the alarm will be caused by en­
countering the unfamiliar in place of
the expected. Yet how many are there
today for whom any translation of the
Bible could be called familiar? Apart
from a pious remnant, most readers
would find the Authorized Version no
less exotic than H art’s. My hunch is
that those who will best profit from
this work are serious students of
the Bible: theologians, seminarians,
clergy with a sermon to prepare, and,
most of all, New Testament exegetes
(for whom the cant phrase “target
audience” is, in this instance, only
partly metaphorical). My own review
copy has been on my desk for less than
a month, and I have already consulted
it a couple dozen times on questions of
interpretation, sometimes concurring,
always learning something new. I can
picture a similarly shabby clergyman
or academic crouched in his study a
hundred years from now, flummoxed
by the syntax of Galatians or 1 Peter,
giving up and stretching an arm to his
bookcase with a sigh: “I wonder what
sense that wild man Hart managed to
make of this shambles.. . . ” 0
Rare and Common
Sense
by Theodore Dalrymple
Simon Leys: Navigator Between
Worlds
BY P H I L I P P E P A Q U E T
T R A N S L A T E D BY J U L I E ROSE
LA T R O B E , 720 PAGES, $ 5 9 - 9 9
t is a curious fact that Commu­
I nist dictatorships were at their
most popular among Western
intellectuals while they still had
the courage of their brutality.
Once they settled down to gray, every­
day oppression and relatively minor
acts of violent repression (judged, of
course, by their own former high, or
low, standards in this respect), they
ceased to attract the extravagant
praises of those intellectuals who,
in their own countries, regarded as
intolerable even the slightest deroga­
tion from their absolute freedom of
expression. It is as if not dreams but
totalitarian famines and massacres
acted as the Freudian wish fulfill­
ment of these Western intellectuals.
They spoke of illimitable freedom,
but desired unlimited power.
Mao Zedong was the blank page
or screen upon which they could
project the fantasies that they thought
beautiful. China was a long way off,
its hundreds of millions of peasants
inscrutable but known to be impov­
erished and oppressed by history; its
culture was impenetrable to Western­
ers without many years of dedicated
and mind-consuming study; Western
sinologists, almost to a man, upheld
the Maoist version of the world, some
of them for fear of losing their access
to China if they did not, and thereby
created the impression that Maoism
was intellectually and m orally
respectable; and so perfect conditions
Theodore Dalrymple is a
contributing editor o f City Journal.
were laid for the most willing and
total suspension of disbelief. M ao’s
Thoughts—that is to say, cliches,
platitudes, and lies—were treated
by intelligent and educated people
as if they were more profound, and
contained more mental and spiritual
sustenance, than Pascal’s. As so often
before, mere reality as experienced by
scores of millions of people was of lit­
tle interest to intellectuals by compar­
ison with the schemata in their minds
and their own self-conception. “Let
the heavens fall so long as I feel good
about myself” was their motto. One
didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
nto this modern equivalent of an
I intellectual pastoral entered the
then-unknow n figure of Pierre
Ryckmans, writing as Simon Leys, a
Belgian sinologist of immense intel­
ligence and erudition, whose interests
had been until then more aesthetic
than political. The first published
book of this learned connoisseur
of Chinese art was an extremely
detailed and footnoted translation
into French of an early eighteenth-
century Chinese treatise on paint­
ing, Remarks on Painting by Shitao,
published by the Belgian Institute of
Higher Chinese Studies. Recherche as
this may seem to the overwhelming
majority of Western readers, one may
find even here the sensibility that en­
dured for the rest of Ryckmans’s life
and is evident in all his work. I quote
Shitao, or rather my translation of his
translation of Shitao: “Once stupid­
ity has been eliminated, intelligence is
born; once vulgarity has been swept
away, clarity becomes perfect.”
Leys’s books about the so-called
Cultural Revolution (neither cultural
nor a revolution in his view, but a sor­
did struggle for power in which once
again Mao was willing to sacrifice the
lives of millions of his countrymen on
the altar of himself) were occasioned,
or provoked, by the willful blindness
and, worse still, indifference of West­
ern intellectuals to what was actually
happening in and to the China that he
59

loved so passionately. In The Chair­
m an’s N ew Clothes, Chinese Shad­
ows, and Broken Images, he revealed
himself to be a polemicist of genius,
though one with a scrupulous and
scholarly regard for truth. From the
very first line of what he wrote, he
established an authority which was
simultaneously that of someone in
possession of the relevant facts and
of the most evident moral probity
(by no means coterminous). He was
one man against many, but his biting
wit, his contempt for special pleading
and intellectual legerdemain, his pro­
found common sense prevailed, and
his books will survive while whole
shelf-loads of works by his oppo­
nents, detractors, and calumniators,
and assorted academic Maoist thurif-
ers, will molder unread in the reserve
collections of libraries. As it happens,
I possess quite a few of these works,
mainly because I cannot bear to dis­
pose of any books once I possess them.
eys had a mind that excelled in
L both selection and exclusion: the
selection of the essential and ex­
clusion of the irrelevant. Perhaps this
was a result of his year of study of
Chinese painting, in which what is
not depicted is as important as that
which is depicted, but whatever its
origin, this exquisite faculty is evi­
dent in all he wrote. Who cannot at
once grasp the hinterland of meaning
of the anecdote with which he opens
Chinese Shadows?
We all know the story of the
recent mishap of an American
journalist: like everyone else, he
wrote an account of his trip to
China. The only thing is that he
never went. When this was finally
discovered, there was a scandal
and the poor devil found himself
dismissed. What is surprising in
this story is that his hoax was ever
uncovered.
From this we know at once, incon­
testably and without appeal, that a
60
REVIEWS
whole genre, a whole library of books
of so-called eyewitness testimony, is
utterly worthless. (The famous econ­
omist, J. K. Galbraith, wrote one of
them.) Not a few authors must have
blushed when they read this: They
had visited China without experienc­
ing it any more than had the Ameri­
can journalist who never set foot in it.
Again, the very title of one of
his essays, “The Art of Interpreting
Non-Existent Inscriptions Written in
Invisible Ink on a Blank Page,” tells
you the essentials of what you needed
to know about the decipherment of
publications coming out of China and
the kind of regime that made such an
arcane art necessary, and why anyone
who took official declarations at face
value was at best naive and at worst a
knave or a fool.
W hat Leys wrote in 1984 in a
short book about George Orwell
might just as well have been written
about him: “In contrast to certified
specialists and senior academics, he
saw the evidence in front of his eyes;
in contrast to wily politicians and
fashionable intellectuals, he was not
afraid to give it a name; and in con­
trast to the sociologists and political
scientists, he knew how to spell it out
in understandable language.”
Leys drew a distinction between
simplicity and simplification: Orwell
had the first without indulgence in
the second. Again, the same might
be said of Leys—who, of course, like
Orwell, had taken a pseudonym, and
with whose work there were many
parallels in his own.
But im m ense as was Leys’s
achievement in destroying the ridicu­
lous illusions of Western intellectuals,
as Orwell had tried to do before him,
it was a task thrust upon him by cir­
cumstance rather than one that he
would have chosen for himself. He
was by nature an aesthete and a man
of letters, and I confess that great was
my surprise (and pleasurable awe)
when I discovered that he was, in ad­
dition to being a great sinologist, a
great literary essayist.
Among his gifts was that of the
most precise and mordant quotation.
But perhaps “gift” is not quite the
word, for it took immense erudition
and highly disciplined discrimination
to quote so appositely. Nevertheless,
it was a kind of genius, for effort
alone would never have produced the
same results. Indeed, Leys published
a delightful book of quotations, The
Ideas o f Others, in which the quality
of his own mind is clearly reflected—
the quality of being able to see the ob­
vious but hidden truth, or the truth
that we have hidden from ourselves:
The moment good taste knows
itself some of its goodness is lost.
-C. S. Lewis
Great writers and artists should
take part in politics only as a de­
fence against politics.
-Tchekhov
In that last quotation lies the ex­
planation of how a man as funda­
mentally indifferent or even hostile
to politics as Leys should not only
have written so much about it, but
have written so well about it. Only
a man for whom politics is a regret­
table distraction from what is most
important in life has the detachment
to be so clear-sighted.
eys’s essays often com bine
L delicacy with deep irony— a
combination that few writers,
especially in our times of stridency
and parti pris, achieve. Here, for
example, is the beginning of his es­
say “An Introduction to Confucius”:
“If we consider hum anity’s greatest
teachers of wisdom— the Buddha,
Confucius, Socrates, Jesus—we are
struck by a curious paradox: today,
not one of them could obtain even
the most modest of teaching posts in
any of our universities.” We laugh—
which, of course, is the best tribute to
the seriousness of the point that he is
making. He goes on to explain, “The
reason is simple: their qualifications

are insufficient—they have published
nothing.”
In two sentences, Leys has pinned,
like a butterfly to an entomologist’s
board, the bureaucratic sickness that
has overtaken our institutions of
higher learning (and not only those
institutions). There is no madness
more difficult to treat than that which
believes itself sane, and there is no
irrationality greater than that which
believes itself perfect. It is no surprise
that Leys retired early from his uni­
versity chair because the university
no longer bore any resemblance to
what it had once been and misled
students and the rest of society into
believing it still was. A community of
scholars had become an organization
of foremen on a production line.
n his beautiful essay about the
I opening sentences of novels, Leys
relates how he was browsing in a
bookshop when he came across the
first words of G. K. Chesterton’s novel,
until then unknown to him, The N a­
poleon ofN otting Hill: “The human
race, to which so many of my read­
ers belong . . .” He bought the book
and left quickly, because the spectacle
of an old man (as he called himself)
laughing out loud to himself was likely
to cause alarm. The rest of the book
could not live up to its first eleven glo­
rious words, but it was not without its
virtues and witty lines: “Just as a bad
man is nevertheless a man, so a bad
poet is nevertheless a poet.”
He then compares Chesterton’s
opening line with that of Anthony
Burgess’s Earthly Powers: “It was
the afternoon of my eighty-first
birthday, and I was in bed with my
catamite, when Ali announced that
the archbishop was here and wanted
to see me.”
Leys had compared the opening
sentence of a book with a fisherman’s
lure, and he says of Burgess:
In the event, the angler had
his bite—because I bought the
book—but he did not succeed in
FIRST THINGS November 2017
landing the fish on to the bank
(at least where I was concerned),
since this massive volume has
continued for nineteen years to
gather dust majestically on my
bookshelves: I still haven’t read it.
He goes on to analyze what is wrong
with Burgess’s opening line by com­
parison with Chesterton’s:
I wondered, moreover, if, even
in its cunning, this first sentence
of Burgess’ novel was not to true
literature what an artificial fly is
to a real insect. . . . Burgess had
certainly fabricated a striking be­
ginning to his Earthly Powers-,
the only problem was that it smelt
of fabrication.
And this fabrication in turn suggested
a general problem in our culture:
A frequent danger for writers of
talent is that, in their desire to
impress the public, they come to
ruin their most ambitious efforts.
In the modern world, this tempta­
tion to throw dust in the eyes, to
which so many artists succumb,
EMMAUS
A C A D E M IC
O r ig in of
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Riik u o .v
PAUL
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pm Ranhard HtSiKi
(otcph tuning"
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reflects the domination exercised
by the publicity industry over
practically all aspects of culture.
Leys’s literary criticism is always of
wider significance than a mere evalu­
ation of books, im portant though
such evaluation is to him, just as his
writings on China reflect on the West
as much as they do on China. Leys is
truly a philosophe, in the eighteenth-
century sense of the word.
do not want to set him up as hav­
I ing been infallible, however. No
one can write as much as he wrote
without error; nor, I think, would
he have wanted anyone to think so.
(He quoted Orwell on the subject
of Gandhi’s supposed sanctity.) For
example, in criticizing the realpo-
litik of Nixon, Kissinger, and Alain
Peyrefitte, the Gaullist politician and
intellectual who argued that human
rights, not being a Chinese concept,
meant nothing or were inapplicable
to the Chinese, Leys quotes Claude
Roy with approval: “The real cleav­
age between right and left resides in
the [moral] privilege accorded or de­
nied to the men of power.”
NEW
RELEASES
Faith in Luther: Martin
Luther and the Origin of
Anthropocentric Religion
Paul Hacker
The Culture of the
Incarnation: Essays in
Catholic Theology
Tracey Rowland
61

This is an astonishing statement,
given all that had gone before in Leys’s
work, demonstrating that many on
the left had welcomed, supported,
and extolled a tyranny as great as any
the world has known, and is evidence
that Leys feared to be regarded as a
man of the right, an interesting and
culturally telling aspect of this other­
wise fearless and perspicacious man.
But even Homer nodded.
Leys is overwhelmingly a joy to
read, however, for his honesty, his
courage, his wit, his prose style, his
erudition lightly worn, his elegance
both of mind and expression, his
wisdom about art, life, and literature.
Unobtrusively, but crucially impor­
tant for him, he was a man of faith.
He was a true giant of our times,
and is now deservedly the subject
of a splendid biography by another
Belgian sinologist, Philippe Paquet.
his biography is long—seven
T hundred or so closely printed
pages— but unusually for a
modern biography, it is not too
at least not for anyone interested in
long,ful men who humiliate them; they
the life of the mind, and at the end
of it I was sorry to have parted com­
pany with its subject. I recall reading
a biography of Brecht of approxi­
mately the same length, which in a
certain way was a mirror image of
this biography: Whereas in seven hun­
dred pages Brecht hardly did a decent
thing, in seven hundred pages Leys is
revealed to have done nothing else.
This is not mere hagiography, for
while the author clearly admires his
subject greatly, this is because he
was admirable. I very much doubt
that anyone in the future is going to
reveal that Leys had feet of clay or
practiced the secret vices that are the
delight of biographers, publishers,
and public in times when we try to fit
great men into the procrustean bed
of our own mediocrity. What Paquet
demonstrates is that Leys (or rather
Ryckmans) was, from the first, the
remarkable scion of a cultivated and
remarkable family: One uncle was a
62
REVIEWS
learned, humane, and distinguished
governor-general of the Congo, and
another the doyen of scholars of pre-
Islamic Arabia. He was endowed with
what seems to have been a natural
independence of mind and (which is
much rarer) soundness of judgment.
U ndertaking a journey to the
Congo as a young man of twenty,
Ryckmans took no advantage of his
connections to travel luxuriously but
on the contrary insisted upon seeing
Africa from the bottom up. (No man
was less assuming or luxury-seeking
than he.) His published reflections
on the fate of Africa as it approached
independence are of an astonishing
maturity and penetration:
In outline, we might say that
their ambition [that of the Afri­
cans] pushes them at the same
time to reject and become Europe.
(When I speak of Europe, I mean
the Europe that they know, that
is to say the Europe in Africa).
They want to be like these power­
want to be those whom they do
not want. . . .
Who can blame them for
their avid ambition, their desire
for power, their cultural aridity?
These manacled men cannot plan
their escape except by imitation
of the only models of freedom
and grandeur that we have given
them. And what other image of
Europe have they than of greed
without measure, wealth without
spiritual justification, and the ex­
ercise of power without limit?
There may be better brief descriptions and fervent Evangelical, the only
of Africa’s predicament at the time of clergyman to sign the Declaration of
independence (and long after), but if Independence, he believed that reli­
so I do not know them.
he fact is that Leys demon­ and political order. He moved with
T strated the same penetration
and judgment on every sub­
there were many such subjects). His
ject on which he chose to write (and
was a kind of common sense raised
to a higher power, the same kind of
common sense that Dr. Johnson had.
N ot coincidentally, perhaps, Leys,
unusually for a Francophone writer,
and another m anifestation of the
independence and soundness of his
judgment, had a great admiration for
Johnson and what he called his “inex­
haustible source of wisdom.” I cannot
help but think of what a distinguished
man said to Boswell about Johnson’s
death: “It has made a chasm which
not only nothing can fill up, but which
nothing has a tendency to fill up. John­
son is dead. Let us go then to the next
best:—there is nobody; no man can be
said to put you in mind of Johnson.”
I think the same might be said of
Leys. E3
B R IE F L Y N O T E D
John Witherspoon’s American
Revolution: Enlightenment and
Religion from the Creation of
Britain to the Founding o f the
United States
BY G I D E O N M A I L E R
U N I V E R S I T Y OF N O R T H
C A R O L I N A , 4 4 O PAGES, $ 4 5
ere John Witherspoon liv­
W ing today, he would be
a regular contributor to
F i r s t T h i n g s . A Scottish Presby­
terian divine, learned philosopher,
gious societies—that is, churches—
had a public role in nurturing social
his family to the American colonies
in 1768 to become president of the
College of New Jersey located in
the village of Princeton. Almost at
once he was caught up in the debates
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