THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

"The believer," argues Ratzinger, "is always threatened with an uncertainty," and in times of trial quite suddenly and surprisingly temptations "cast a piercing light on the fragility of the whole that usually seems so self-evident to him." Consider Therese of Lisieux, whose sisters were scandalized by her written admission that "I am assailed by the worst temptations of atheism." Tormented by arguments against the faith, her firm belief seems to have faded, and she worries that she now wears "sinners' shoes." For Juan Pablo atheism is more than a temptation; it is an absolute answer. He finishes with a bitter belief in "progress"; "the future" is his heaven, his only obligation. And yet there was a time when it was Valencia who he hoped would hold "a movement to the future." All of his failed loves could find fulfillment in her. If this is the case, this positivist mercenary who suppresses all second-guesses is surpassed by Valencia's own burgeoning faith.

"There's another type of religious tradition which is really much more about, you know, doubt, and working your way towards more and more difficult questions. And I think that's the tradition that appeals to me." So said Phil Klay during an interview with NPR's Terry Gross. Missionaries is an uneven novel: some sections read like an op-ed essay; the vast number of intersecting characters amounts to an alternation between fully actualized beings who solicit your suspension of disbelief and others ill-defined to conjure soulful engagement; at times his pen can wax gratuitously graphic. The Juan Pablo thread throbs with the most blood and Spirit, even as it is underwritten by doubt.

Klay must know that (to cite Kierkegaard) "Not only in the world of commerce but also in the world of ideas our age has arranged a regular clearance-sale ... they are not content with doubting everything, but 'go right on.'" Formerly neither faith nor doubt could come so cheaply, for "faith was a task for a whole life-time because it was held that proficiency in faith was not to be won within a few days or weeks." Affiliated as he may be with the religious tradition devoted to doubt, in his new novel Klay "goes right on" beyond the hell of wholesale hesitation; he transcends what Ratzinger calls "the oppressive power of unbelief in the midst of his own will to believe." To be sure, the novel ends before Valencia's "faith returned more fully to her." And yet, we are assured of her eventual return to the God to whom Durer's painted hands prayed.

It is worth pondering why Klay refrains from representing her religious turn in real time. Is it because--as Kierkegaard would have it--neither doubt nor faith should come cheaply, and so her resting in Christ must wait for the next four-hundred page novel? Perhaps, but I am doubtful. I can't help wondering whether his restraint is in large part explained by Kierkegaard's parable of the clown who begs the townspeople to come to the flaming circus and help put the fire out. The townspeople can't take him seriously, even when he desperately assures them that the fire is real. As they mistake the earnest man for a total fool not only the circus but the village too burns to the ground. Ratzinger reads in this parable "an element of truth ... it reflects the oppressive reality in which theology and theological discussion are imprisoned today and their frustrating inability to break through accepted patterns of thought and speech" in order to make theological truths intelligible as seriously important for human life.

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