Author Spotlight: Earl J. Hess and Pratibha A. Dabholkar

The Cinematic Voyage of The Pirate: Kelly, Garland, and Minnelli at Work follows the model of Hess and Dabholkar’s previous study of Singin’ in the Rain. Drawing on exhaustive research in archives, memoirs, interviews, and newspaper coverage, it takes the reader from the original conception of the story in the mind of a German playwright named Ludwig Fulda, through S. N. Behrman’s Broadway production starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, to the arduous task of crafting a suitable screenplay at MGM. Behind-the-scenes issues such as Garland’s personal problems during the making of the film and the shaping of the film by Minnelli and Kelly are among the many subjects detailed here.


Preface

Among the many products of the Arthur Freed Unit at M-G-M, The Pirate has garnered a great deal of attention from viewers and critics alike as one of the most interesting film musicals of all time. Although not as universally acclaimed as Singin’ in the Rain, The Pirate is an important film musical to study for a number of reasons. It represents the start of Gene Kelly’s glory period as actor, choreographer, and dancer. It is a highlight of Vincente Minnelli’s directorial career, especially in the use of color, camera angles, and vivid depictions of sets and people. It shows Judy Garland at her best in a unique role that showcases her comedic talents. It is a superb case study of the difficult process of creating a film from a stage play and also a wonderful case study of the complexities involved in making a film under difficult circumstances. It was the first film musical to show a white man dancing with black men as equals and to show ethnically mixed crowd scenes in a natural way.

In addition, there are secondary reasons to pick The Pirate over other popular musicals as a subject deserving careful study. It is not merely a musical with an appealing story and songs such as Minnelli and Garland’s Meet Me in St. Louis or many of Garland’s other films, but it also has vibrant and superbly executed dances. Moreover, whereas other film musicals with good stories and vibrant dances, such as Kelly’s On the Town, have several weak segments that repeat viewers tend to skip in order to focus on the better parts, there is no weak segment in The Pirate—the entire film is delightfully watchable.

It is not that scholars have ignored The Pirate. It was a controversial film in several ways and has attracted considerable commentary, negative as well as positive, over the years. Arguments about its plot, acting, sets, and dances, as well as the place it holds in the creative work of director Vincente Minnelli, and stars Gene Kelly and Judy Garland, have raged since its initial release in 1948. Those arguments continue today, more than sixty-five years later, with some scholars calling the film a classic failure despite much merit and others extolling it as one of M-G-M’s brightest accomplishments. Nevertheless, we believe The Pirate has not received the acclaim it deserves in scholarly literature. The remarkable ways in which the film helped the careers of Kelly, Minnelli, and Garland, its pioneering depiction of race relations in musicals, and the mastery displayed in the staging, filming, and choreography of Kelly’s dances lead us to conclude that The Pirate is an underappreciated masterpiece.

It is often said that The Pirate became a cult classic soon after its release, rather than a general favorite among fans of film musicals, but that is only partially true. The Pirate did appeal to gay audiences soon after its release but it was appreciated by mainstream audiences as well. The film has been a hit with many college students since the 1970s, and a decade later, it began to be a popular topic of analysis for scholars who deal with gay theory and the cinema. At the same time, the film has won high praise from many viewers, critics, and scholars who savor the particular aesthetics of dance on film, with appreciation for the movie growing over the years. In fact, many fans of the film musical rank it as their favorite. In addition, devotees of the more than 300 films that have been made about pirates have often included the Kelly-Minnelli-Garland product among the top ten.

The Pirate is consistently ranked as among the best products of the Freed Unit, but there has not been an extensive study of the film to date. This book, The Cinematic Voyage of The Pirate: Kelly, Garland, and Minnelli at Work, provides a rich and detailed history of this highly acclaimed motion picture. It is a follow-up to our book entitled Singin’ in the Rain: The Making of an American Masterpiece, which is a comprehensive history of the most famous film musical of all time. Following the model for that book, we based our study of The Pirate on definitive research, including extant interviews conducted with participants and archival material held in repositories across the United States. Moreover, similar to our approach for Singin’ in the Rain, this study offers a comprehensive look at The Pirate by discussing all aspects of the film’s history: from the development of the initial idea for the movie through preproduction, filming, initial release, and marketing to its legacy in the writings of film scholars and critics well into the twenty-first century.

Although many viewers enjoyed The Pirate when it was first released, it was not universally appreciated by audiences at that time. Actually, musicals made shortly after World War II that emphasized fantasy and spectacle had a chance of doing very well. A likely reason The Pirate did not live up to its merit, despite its emphasis on fantasy and spectacle, is that audiences of the day simply did not get Minnelli and Kelly’s tongue-in-cheek humor underlying Kelly’s role as Serafin.

In contrast, critical reviews on the film’s initial release were mostly positive. Contrary to much commentary in books on the film musical, our extensive research in primary materials shows that The Pirate was not panned by critics when released in 1948. In fact, most critics went into raptures about the film, while others wrote negatively about only some aspects of it. Some reviewers since 1948, such as David Vaughan and Douglas McVay, have gone so far as to proclaim The Pirate the best film musical of all time. Nor was it a financial loss for M-G-M, as scholars have claimed. The movie actually made a profit, although not as great as it might have been.

The majority of commentators and critics between 1948 and 2010 have, at least, ranked it as a pivotal project in the careers of Minnelli (in terms of his use of color, boom camera work, and stylized setting) and Kelly (in terms of the development of his athletic dance choreography and the creation of “star” qualities). It also was the project where Minnelli and Kelly began their successful collaboration on films, and in which Garland began to experience the full impact of years of drug addiction and troubled relationships with her husband and mother. This book highlights the film’s role in the careers of Kelly, Minnelli, and Garland.

Kelly probably gained more than any single individual from his experience in working on The Pirate. Not only was the film the true beginning of his postwar fame as a dancer on the big screen, but he worked more intimately on choreography in this movie than on any previous film, and he played an important part in character development. His acting in an unusual role received much praise despite some criticism from those who missed or disliked the tongue-incheek quality of his portrayal. Kelly also learned a good deal about camera work and direction from Minnelli that he later employed very successfully in his own career as a director, starting with On the Town (1949) and proceeding all the way to Hello, Dolly! (1969).

For Minnelli, The Pirate was a landmark film. It exemplified his fascination with colorful locale, exotic costumes, and strongly defined characters, especially women. The director used his trademark boom camera work to full effect as cinematographer Harry Stradling shot a beautiful film. Minnelli also worked extensively to revise the final screenplay, imprinting his own vision on it. He worked closely with the Technicolor Corporation to create a richer product than the company had tended to produce. The Pirate is one of Minnelli’s most effective creations, displaying verve, irony, and a sardonic gusto that is unique among his films. It is Minnelli at his best.

Garland’s career hit a watershed with The Pirate. Her personal problems with drugs and her troubled relationship with her husband, Minnelli, came to a head during the filming of this movie. She missed many days of production, costing M-G-M a good deal of money and wasted time, but she turned in a stellar performance in a role that was unusual for her. Our history of The Pirate discusses Garland’s contributions as well as her problems.

The Pirate became, among other things, a gay cult movie, and Garland’s presence in the film helped to start that process. Gay audiences also appreciated Minnelli’s aesthetics and Kelly’s virile dancing. The book explains how The Pirate grew into an icon of gay studies scholarship.

In offering readers many opportunities to examine important aspects of filmmaking, this book starts with the development of the plot and script. The Pirate was based on a successful Broadway comedy of the same name that ran for 177 performances beginning in November 1942. It was written by Samuel N. Behrman and starred the famous Broadway actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. That production in turn was based on the 1911 play by German author Ludwig Fulda. After M-G-M purchased the rights to the Behrman play, the studio had some difficulty turning it into a film. Eight writers worked on the screenplay from 1943 to 1946 before Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett were assigned to it and came up with a suitable script, with help from Minnelli and Freed. But even this was not the final version of the screenplay. Minnelli and Freed, with the help of three assistants, heavily revised the screenplay during preproduction, making a total of thirteen writers, not counting the director and producer. This complex genealogy of the movie offers many opportunities to understand how film scripts evolved from previous works during M-G-M’s golden era and who among the many people working for the studio played a role in shaping the scripts.

The topic of plot and character development becomes even more complex when discussing a dance film, because the numbers are the highlights of the screen experience and their development takes place in the studio or in the mind of the choreographer, rather than on paper. The dance numbers may appear in places other than where the screenplay indicates, and the way the dances develop characters or plot can significantly modify the script. Although scholars tend to think of The Pirate as Minnelli’s project, Kelly played a huge role in planning and executing the film. As mentioned earlier, this was the start of their wonderful collaboration, and in his memoirs, Minnelli gave full credit to Kelly for his contributions. The Pirate was anything but an example of the auteur in action; it was a highly collaborative project, not only for Minnelli and Kelly but stretching from Ludwig Fulda to the most obscure technician on the sound

stage of M-G-M.

Another contribution of this study to film history involves a detailed analysis of the movie’s “film ballet,” an extended dance number with balletic aspects. The Pirate contains one of the most elaborate and impressive examples of film ballet in the genre. The purpose of this ballet was to represent important emotions and character developments portrayed thus far in the film. Dance director Robert Alton initially proposed a pedantic, literal scheme for the ballet in an extensive scenario that we found in the Vincente Minnelli Collection. But Minnelli and Kelly preferred a psychologically charged, surrealistic framework for the ballet that worked much better than Alton’s idea in extending the storyline and the characterizations. Ballets had become all the rage in dance films by the later 1940s, and both Minnelli and Kelly worked hard on this one. It involved impressive pyrotechnic displays and feats of dancing by Kelly that are noted by even those who do not particularly like the overall film. In subsequent movies, Kelly elaborated on the ballet concept, building on his work in The Pirate to produce classic examples of this type of dance in On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), and Singin’ in the Rain (1952).

The creation of the songs in this musical and Cole Porter’s contributions are also discussed in detail. However, Porter took little interest in the film itself and did not work to shape the movie. Arthur Freed, however, did play a prominent role as producer, not just in casting but in authorizing complex sets and costumes as well as in working with Minnelli to guide script revision and editing.

Our book also discusses the role of The Pirate in depicting race relations on film. Minnelli staged crowd scenes that were ethnically and racially mixed in ways that were unusual for the time. Kelly insisted on dancing with the Nicholas Brothers, a black dancing team, in a spectacular number. This is something no other film musical had done to date. Dances in films were segregated by race, and many musicals of that era even showed white dancers in blackface. Kelly’s dancing with the Nicholas Brothers as equals was a daring challenge to the segregated world of America in the late 1940s. Theater managers in many southern cities refused to show the film or requested the deletion of “Be a Clown,” the brothers’ dance number with Kelly, from the release prints. The Lunt-Fontanne stage version of The Pirate also included racial mixing, but it had no dancing in it, and the play was booked only in northern cities.

As a study in filmmaking, this book deals with the many goofs and gaffes to be seen in the release print of The Pirate, which the movie’s fans tend to find endearing rather than targets for criticism. We also discuss the censorship issues involving the script and lyrics in The Pirate, explaining why they arose and how they were resolved. Thematic, stylistic, and other types of links between this film and others are highlighted, so the reader can appreciate such connections.

As in Singin’ in the Rain: The Making of an American Masterpiece, we draw on a wide range of primary and secondary research sources. Archival and published primary materials are at the heart of our study. Reactions to The Pirate in the secondary literature are used to offer insights about the film’s long-range reception. We recognize that many online sources might not be fully reliable. Therefore, we use information from online sites in a sparing and critical way, and if no other source is available. For example, factual information from the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) is used in compiling the list of technical crew members who worked on the film. For that matter, we have critically evaluated the reliability of all material used in the preparation of this study, including archival and scholarly sources. Having studied the film and its history in great detail, we include our own analysis and scholarly opinions wherever relevant.

Although movie audiences were less enthusiastic than film critics when The Pirate was first released, enthusiasm for the film certainly grew with the passage of time. Freed may well have been right when he said this motion picture was at least twenty years ahead of its time when it was released in 1948. Our book includes a full discussion of critical and scholarly commentary over the years (including commentary by gay studies scholars) to help readers appreciate diverse views about the film as well as how perspectives changed over time.

British commentator John Cutts called The Pirate “a masterpiece of extravagant entertainment, a boisterous rococo romp” that continued to grow in stature as “a rich and rare musical experiment.” “There is no denying that this is a weird movie,” Victoria Large wrote nearly sixty years after its release, “one that comes by its status as a cult classic honestly. It’s loopy, knowingly camp, brightly colored, ambitious, and absolutely unique.” Adherents of the cult built around the film had all along proclaimed it a masterpiece, but the appeal of The Pirate extends beyond cult boundaries. David Vaughan thought the movie had come “very near to achieving one’s ideal of a dance film—that is, a film which dances all the time, and not merely in its spectacular set-pieces.” As Douglas McVay put it, bringing all the elements together accounted for Minnelli’s success in The Pirate. “If one is going to try to blend words, music, movement, dance sets, costumes, props, color photography and camera fluency into a total, effortless harmony, then this, surely, is the way to do it.” And yet, as film historians John Russell Taylor and Arthur Jackson have bemoaned, The Pirate “has never really had its due.”

Our book sets out to correct this situation and give this classic film its full credit. In addition to discussing all the issues mentioned in this preface, Appendix A includes our synopses and analyses of all the discarded screenplays so that interested readers can follow the twists and turns in creating the perfect screenplay for The Pirate. Appendix B catalogs something that scholars have missed in consistently praising the Goodrich-Hackett script over Behrman’s—namely, the huge number of lines from Behrman’s stage play that appear in the Goodrich-Hackett screenplay. Finally, we include short biographies of the major players wherever relevant in the book and also include Appendix C, which contains mini-biographies of everyone involved in the making of The Pirate—in order to give some credit to all the people who were part of this underappreciated masterpiece.

Author Spotlight: Dennis Okerstrom

Project 9: The Birth of the Air Commandos in World War II by Dennis R. Okerstrom 

Project 9 is a thoroughly researched narrative of the Allied joint project to invade Burma by air. Beginning with its inception at the Quebec Conference of 1943 and continuing through Operation Thursday until the death of the brilliant British General Orde Wingate in March 1944, less than a month after the successful invasion of Burma, Project 9 details all aspects of this covert mission, including the selection of the American airmen, the procurement of the aircraft, the joint training with British troops, and the dangerous nighttime assault behind Japanese lines by glider.  

The release of the book coincides with the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Burma. In a presentation at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, Okerstrom shared the story of Project 9 with the assistance of World War II veteran Dick Cole, age 98. Cole was with the 1st Air Commando Group, a forerunner to modern special operations units such as SEAL Team Six and Delta Force. Dick Cole served as Jimmy Doolittle's copilot during the Tokyo Raid and is one of only four surviving Doolittle Tokyo Raiders. Cole and Okerstrom are also joined by two other Air Commandos, Patt Meara and Bill Cartwright.

Dennis Okerstrom's The Final Mission of Bottoms Up: A World War II Pilot's Story is also published by the University of Missouri Press.

Author Spotlight: Kate Saller

The Moon in Your Sky: An Immigrant’s Journey Home by Kate Saller

The Moon in Your Sky: An Immigrant’s Journey Home brings to life the remarkable story of Annah Emuge. Growing up in Uganda under the rule of Idi Amin, Annah and her peers faced hardships few of us can imagine. As a young woman, Annah escaped to the United States, only to face more devastating challenges. How Annah overcame the trials she endured in the land she had thought would hold only promise for her and her family is a riveting story of perseverance that will inspire any reader. Annah’s sorrows give depth to the great joys she experiences as she not only survives but triumphs, devoting her life to the suffering of orphans left by the ravages of war in her homeland.   


Preface 

I had just finished speaking to the Rotary Club of St. Charles, Mis­souri, about my humanitarian work in Africa when a beautiful, stat­uesque black woman approached me. Without prelude she asked me, “Do you know how to get mosquito nets for fifty-four children in Uganda?” This was my introduction to Annah Frances Acam Emuge, the determined and courageous woman who is the subject of this book.

As I came to know Annah, I was amazed to learn about the joys and tribulations of her life. It seemed as if, every time she told me a story from her past, I was incredulous that one human being could have survived it, and yet that was just one part of her story. Annah was the third daughter born to a poor family in rural Uganda in 1959. I wrote her life entirely through her eyes, to give readers a full sense of growing up as a village child in a country being systematically decimated by its maniacal dictator, Idi Amin Dada. As a child and teenager, this remarkable young woman matured and set the course of her life while enduring the kinds of devastations and threats that we have read about in many such accounts of life in twentieth-century rural Africa. What set Annah’s story apart for me was that it is not about an individual overcoming such an existence, coming to the United States, and finding a clear path back to her roots to improve the lives of those left behind; rather, it is the story of a woman who was faced with even tougher challenges here, and of her extraordinary and largely solitary triumph over all of them.

Entwined in Annah’s tale of grace and strength is the sadder story of her husband, who came to this country filled with hopes and ambitions, only to find that they were all beyond his reach. The loss of his dreams, along with the realities of the life he found here, proved to be more than this talented and brilliant man could withstand.

To accurately portray Annah’s life, I created an outline of the book and then had her tape-record her recollections from each period of her life, one section at a time. I took notes from each recording and then interviewed her to fill out my knowledge of that part of her life. After writing each chapter from my notes, I went over the material with Annah to ensure that she felt it was an accurate and complete picture of her life at that time. As this pro­cess progressed, Annah and I realized that I am unusual among her American acquaintances in that I understand and have observed firsthand the life she led in Uganda, sleeping in mud huts and work­ing on the family’s subsistence farm to survive. Through my affilia­tion with the service organization Rotary International, I have been to five African countries, traveling to and staying in rural areas to immunize children, distribute mosquito nets to orphans, and coordinate the placement of filtered wells in poor communities with no access to clean water. In spite of the unbelievable hardships suffered by the people I encountered there, all of them were warm and wel­coming, finding joy in things like the simple act of offering me a crude, handmade stool to rest on in the shade as I worked. It was this same spirit that drew me to Annah when I met her.

Annah did get her fifty-four mosquito nets through Rotary con­nections, and St. Louis-area Rotarians donated the money needed to purchase them. She has now created a 501(c)(3) organization, the Atai Orphanage Fund (www.ataiorphanage.org), which col­lects donations to help support the children who live in the orphan­age created by her mother. I am a member of the AOF’s board, and we are proud to say that we were able to raise the funds to place a 240-foot bore-hole well on the orphanage’s land in 2010. Although the children sleep in mud huts and live a simple, poor life that dif­fers very little from Annah’s childhood there, they proudly tell any­one who asks that they have a mama in America who loves them. 

All of the author's proceeds from sales of this book will be used to support Annah and the orphans of Atai.

Author Spotlight: Sam Pickering

The University of Missouri Press has three books in print by Sam Pickering, who some years ago gained fame as one of the inspirations for the character of Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams in the film Dead Poets Society. In his most recent book, All My Days Are Saturdays, he writes about teaching and his recent retirement, visits to various locales, and, as he tell us, "the many people I meet . . . who tell me their stories, small tales that make one laugh and sigh." Also by Sam Pickering from the University of Missouri Press are Indian Summer: Musings on the Gift of Life and Walkabout Year: Twelve Months in Australia. Here he ruminates about a life of writing essays about life.

Vicki’s father bought an old farmhouse in Nova Scotia in 1947, and since marrying Vicki, I have spent summer months in Canada. Last week I watched an old woman with a blue cane shopping for strawberries in Sobey’s grocery in Yarmouth. Flats of strawberries lay displayed on a counter. Atop the flats were wooden boxes, each containing a quart of berries. The woman hobbled slowly past the counter sampling berries. From each of the first three boxes she selected a single berry, eating it slowly and then shaking her head and spitting the green topknot into a scrap of tissue paper. The taste of the berry she removed from the fourth box, however, met with her approval. As she chewed, she nodded. Reaching into the flat, she picked up the box and placed it in her grocery cart.

“Personally,” H. G. Wells wrote, “I have no use at all for life as it is, except as raw material. It bothers me to look at things unless there is also the idea of doing something with them. I should find a holiday, doing nothing amidst beautiful scenery, not a holiday, but a torture. The contemplative ecstasy of the saints would be hell to me.” 

A long time ago, I might have agreed with Wells. Nowadays, observing not only seems good enough but mete and right. Once upon a time I dreamed of legendary faraway places with unpronounceable names. Now I stay at home or, when I travel, wander familiar paths. Yesterday I jogged eight miles along backcountry dirt roads. A haze of bloodthirsty buccaneering deerflies sailed about me, all ready to board my head and shoulders. In past years I studied my shadow on the road and plucked the flies from the air before they unsheathed their sabers. I always bettered the record of the tailor of nursery fame who swatted seven flies in a single blow. During a run I never failed to make at least two of the piratical flies walk the plank every mile, often finishing a run having deep-sixed at least thirty of the one-eyed and peg-legged. Yesterday I ignored the flies and let the boldest settle on my neck and arms. Instead of letting the insects bother me, I looked at the flowers growing on the shoulders of the road, which included flags of blue vetch, sunny two-flowered Cynthia, and woodbine, its blossoms jeweled crowns set with white, pink, and yellow. While constellations of water lilies flickered like stars on the surface of still ponds, balls of bullhead lilies rolled in the currents eddying through slow streams.

A wag recently remarked that the lives of essayists are so dull that in order to enliven their days they eventually start sending themselves e-mails and telephoning their homes and leaving messages for themselves. Some even go bankrupt ordering items they don’t want just so Fed Ex or UPS will rap on the door and disrupt the humdrummery of fitting verbs to nouns and paragraphs to pages. Virginia Woolf once wrote that “a writer’s country is a territory within his own brain.” My country doesn’t fill the atlas. Rarely do I forsake the dirt road for the asphalt highway. Yet my country seems a wondrous place rich with domesticity and good humor—hokey stories that keep me smiling. After a time the lively person slips too easily into the cold grasp of good sense. Nonsense quickens, but it is harder to write. I jog and write in part because I don’t want to settle into an armchair and become one of those rancorous old boys who is not happy unless he is recollecting an aged grievance. Laurence Sterne argued that digressions are the sunshine, the life, and “the soul of reading.” For my part I am a rambler and think digressions are the heart of essays. Yesterday I broke my run to search for snakes, turning over bits of wood and broken fish boxes lying beside the road. I found six red-bellied snakes, small necklaces gleaming with life and, more important, bright with the capacity to make passersby appreciate the beauty of living.

I have written a couple of shelves of books. In them I described the appointments of my days: years when children trod the stage of my life, decades in classrooms, the stacks of many libraries, a few faraway places, and always a lively variety of people. Have I been successful? In my terms, you bet I have been successful. I have enjoyed a rich life and had great fun. Moreover, I’ve perfected the art of writing the unread, and I am now working on writing the unwritten. Last week I received a letter in which my correspondent called me “America’s Most Neglected Literary Treasure.” Of course I immediately carried the letter into the kitchen and read it to Vicki. “It’s always nice to hear from a friend,” Vicki said as she stirred the pea soup she was making. “How did you know the letter was from one of my friends?” I asked. “Oh, come on, Sam. What are friends for if not to praise and exaggerate wildly?” Vicki said. “Now leave me alone. Can’t you see I’m busy with this soup?”

Author Spotlight: Eugene Webb

In Search of the Triune God: The Christian Paths of East and West, by Eugene Webb

Under the broad umbrella of the Christian religion, there exists a great divide between two fundamentally different ways of thinking about key aspects of the Christian faith. Eugene Webb explores the sources of that divide, looking at how the Eastern and Western Christian worlds drifted apart due both to the different ways they interpreted their symbols and to the different roles political power played in their histories. Previous studies have focused on historical events or on the history of theological ideas. In Search of the Triune God delves deeper by exploring how the Christian East and the Christian West have conceived the relation between symbol and experience. 

Q. What prompted you to write this book?

A. There were several stages in the development of my interest in this topic.  I first came to Christianity myself as an adult with no prior attachment to any religious tradition.  At the time I found the doctrine of the Trinity perplexing, especially because the explanations I was given seemed both abstract and arbitrary.  I subsequently found that many Christians felt similarly.  Later, I decided it would be good to create a course on Eastern Christian traditions for the programs on Comparative Religion and European Studies that I had organized and taught in at my university.  Teaching the histories of both Western and Eastern Christianity I became increasingly aware of differences between them, and I found that most of these were connected in some way with their different ways of understanding this fundamental doctrine.  Since I also found that this was mostly unknown territory to both Christians and non-Christians, I decided a book explaining the differences could be helpful.

Q. What is the Triune God?

A. The Christian doctrine of God as triune--i.e., both one and three--was formulated in the fourth century CE in the Nicene Creed as a way of understanding the relation between God as the source of all that is and God as encountered in the personhood of Jesus of Nazareth and in the life of those who follow him and are incorporated into his life.  The development of that way of thinking about the relation between God and humanity goes back well before the Christian era, however, to early Hebrew biblical images of God breathing life into creation (the root meaning of the word spirit, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, is breath or wind) and of God calling Israel into a relation of sonship.  The early Christians interpreted Jesus as the one in whom that calling was truly fulfilled, and they believed the animating breath of God, the Spirit, was also uniting them with Jesus in his filial relation to God. 

Over time, the Eastern and Western Christian patterns of thinking about this diverged, with the West following Saint Augustine’s speculation about what there might be three of in the one God, while the East’s pattern of interpretation tended to be based on the story of Jesus’s baptism, with the Spirit descending to “rest upon” Jesus as a voice from heaven proclaims him “my beloved son.”  Few modern Christians in the West realize that the trinitarian creed they call the Nicene Creed is not the original one formulated and affirmed by the ancient ecumenical councils but an altered version imposed in his domain by Charlemagne (to conform the creed to Augustine’s speculations as well as to serve Charlemagne’s own political purposes in his rivalry with the Roman emperors in Constantinople) and that it was at first resisted by the papacy, which did not itself adopt the new version of the creed in Rome until the eleventh century.

Q. How do the Christian East and the Christian West differ in their conceptions of the relation between symbol and experience?

A. In the pattern of thinking that developed among Eastern Christian thinkers, the symbols of Father, Son, and Spirit expressed their experience of living, as they put it, “in Christ”—knowing the Son of God from within and knowing the Spirit as the breath of God moving them from within and raising them into participation in the Son’s life, a process Eastern Christians call “deification” (theosis).  In this way of interpreting them, Father, Son, and Spirit were experiential symbols that articulated in consciousness the three essential dimensions of the mystery Christians found themselves caught up in.

Augustine, on the other hand, in his book On the Trinity, began with the assumption that the doctrine of the Trinity must refer to three “somethings” (aliquid) inside God, and he tried to work out how to connect the biblical images of Father, Son, and Spirit with those.  In his interpretation the biblical images became speculative symbols used to identify a triad of objective components of the one God; they could have no experiential meanings because Augustine believed the experience of fallen human beings in this life could have no direct relation to the inner being of God.  After trying numerous triads to assess their fit, he concluded that Father must name God’s memory, Son God’s intellect or reason, and Spirit God’s will and that, since a will that did not proceed from intelligence or reason would be irrational and therefore defective, this implied that the Spirit must “proceed from the Father and the Son.”  (“And the Son” [Filioque] was the crucial phrase that Charlemagne added to the Nicene Creed to conform it to Augustine’s interpretation.)

Q. What are some other basic differences between Eastern Christianity and Western Christianity?

A. One is that the West adopted Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, which was a particular theory of human fallenness that involved both universal inherited guilt and a disposition to sin that is inexorable in this life (which ruled out the Eastern belief in the Christian life as a process of deification).  A further development growing out of that same theory is that “atonement” (which originally meant becoming “at one” with God), came to be thought of in the West as referring to Christ’s crucifixion as payment of the penalty due for sin, whereas in the East Christ’s atonement has been associated with the union of humanity and divinity in the Incarnation, in which, as St. Paul put it, Christ came as a son in order that he might be the first of many brothers (and sisters).

Still another difference was that in the West, after Charlemagne’s empire became broken up among his heirs and their rivals, the Church entered as an independent political power into the ensuing competition to claim the kind of authority Charlemagne had held, whereas in the East, where the Roman empire continued intact until 1453 CE and was succeeded by the Ottoman and Russian empires, the Church was never in a position to strive for such power.  This preoccupation with power has gone hand in hand with a tendency in the West to imagine the relation between God and humanity in terms of a command system entailing rewards and punishments, with Christ at the top of a chain of command in which he is represented on earth either by a ruler like Charlemagne or by popes or by an inerrant scripture.

Q. How have the differences between them manifested themselves in the lives of Christians?

A. It is important to recognize, to begin with, that there is diversity within both Eastern and Western Christianity and that due to influences passing back and forth over the centuries, individual Christians don’t conform consistently to the basic patterns of one or the other.  That being said, the frequently commented tendency of Eastern Christianity toward the mystical and of Western toward the juridical is not inaccurate as a broad description.  Eastern Christians often say that “theology is lived” and tend to look for examples of this in their monastic tradition (Dostoevsky’s portrait of the Elder Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov would be an example).  The Western tradition’s preoccupation with institutional power and its concern with knowing what to do to gain reward and avoid punishment has led to both inquisitions and rigid scriptural fundamentalisms. 

On the other hand, the struggles, both ideological and political, within the Western tradition of Christianity have stimulated valuable intellectual development in recent centuries, whereas that aspect of the Eastern tradition’s life flourished mainly before 1453.  I think both Western and Eastern Christians can recognize that there have been saints (and saintly lives even among people not formally recognized as saints) in both traditions during the whole course of their histories—both before and after they split apart.

Q. How did you first become interested in studying religion?

A. Growing up without a religious tradition but surrounded by a great variety of forms of religion, I first became interested in them because they seemed efforts to address the most searching existential questions: where do we come from, what are we here for, what are the best possibilities for human life?  As an academic study, however, my involvement with religion began rather indirectly.  My degrees were in philosophy and comparative literature, both of which I was also drawn to as ways of exploring such existential questions.  As it happened, after writing a book on religion and literature, The Dark Dove: The Sacred and Secular in Modern Literature, I found myself asked to organize a program on the study of religions in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, and I subsequently headed that program and shifted the larger part of my teaching to it.

My reason for being willing to undertake that role was that having studied the way possible visions of life could be explored through logical analysis and through metaphor and narrative, I became interested in the way they could also be concretely embodied and lived, which is what religions try to do.  The reason I have continued to find that a compelling study is that in the history of religions I found both the best and the worst of human possibilities expressing themselves.  I am convinced personally that religion has been and will always remain a powerful force in human life, but that shining as much light as possible on religious traditions may help to prevent their striving toward self-transcending love from being subverted, as so often happens, by the lust for power that Saint Augustine called libido dominandi.

See also the Author Spotlight for Eugene Webb's Worldview and Mind.