{"id":26214,"date":"2016-11-28T05:55:29","date_gmt":"2016-11-28T10:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=26214"},"modified":"2016-11-27T23:15:25","modified_gmt":"2016-11-28T04:15:25","slug":"an-epic-christian-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2016\/11\/an-epic-christian-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"An epic Christian novel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Laurus\"<\/a>I\u2019ve just finished Laurus<\/a>, a novel by the Russian author Eugene Vodolazkin, an Orthodox Christian, and I\u2019m still savoring the experience, which is one of being immersed in the medieval mind.<\/p>\n

The novel is the story of Arseny, who as a lad is apprenticed to his grandfather, a physician. \u00a0Arseny has a gift of healing that goes beyond his expertise in herbal remedies. \u00a0A love story ensues, which sets him on a quest for atonement, both for himself and for the woman he caused to sin. \u00a0Arseny becomes a \u201choly fool.\u201d \u00a0Then, accompanied by a western Catholic who has visions of the future, he sets off on a long and perilous pilgrimage to the Holy Land. \u00a0Then he becomes a monk. \u00a0Then an anchorite. \u00a0And, overall, a kind of saint.<\/p>\n

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The book is \u201cimmersive\u201d\u2013that is, wholly involving, so that reading it creates the illusion of entering the mind of someone who inhabits 15th century Russia, an amalgam of earthiness, superstitions, visionary experiences, medieval lore, intimations of eternity, and open-hearted piety.<\/p>\n

The book has the flavor of a postmodern novel, which shifting narratives and jumps in time that take us to the 21st century. \u00a0A blurb on the front cover compares Vodolazkin to Umberto Eco, a postmodern novelist who also writes about the Middle Ages. \u00a0But the real comparison should be to Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, the pioneer of \u201cmagical realism,\u201d the style that\u00a0blends gritty realistic writing with moments of strange fantasy, a combination that suggests\u00a0that all depictions of reality are imaginative constructions.<\/p>\n

But in an interview (which we\u2019ll be blogging about separately), Vodolazkin denies that Laurus<\/a> is a postmodern\u00a0novel. \u00a0A professional folklorist and medievalist, Vodolazkin says that he is simply depicting the mindset and worldview of medieval Russians. \u00a0Thus, going from past to present to future is simply the Christian insight that all time is connected in eternity. \u00a0Then again,\u00a0M\u00e1rquez said that his magical realism came from\u00a0the stories told by his grandmother, a devout Columbian peasant, for whom miracles were commonplace and in whose world the supernatural and the natural always intersected.<\/p>\n

There are different ways to be postmodern. \u00a0One response to the perceived end of modernism\u2013the purported age of reason and progress\u2013is to become a relativist who rejects objective truth altogether. \u00a0Another is to recover the pre-modern and to bring its mysteries and its trans-scientific sense of truth into contemporary life.<\/p>\n

So I appreciate the\u00a0sophistication of this novel, how it addresses the postmodern mind by recreating an ancient Christian mind. \u00a0That it is winning international literary awards\u00a0demonstrates its effectiveness.<\/p>\n

It is being said that this novel is quintessentially \u201corthodox.\u201d \u00a0Indeed, those of us with a Reformational theology will see some of the things that Luther was up against, especially Arseny\u2019s belief that he must contribute to his own atonement. \u00a0 If only he could know that the Christian life\u00a0could be so much simpler, a matter of\u00a0Christ\u2019s sufferings and not his own. \u00a0And yet we can learn from entering Arseny\u2019s worldview, which in many ways is bigger than the materialistic or relativistic worldviews of today.
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