Venice, by Garry Wills
To understand a deeply religious culture, one must study how its theological assumptions are at play in all its aspects--its art, music literature, politics and economics--to say nothing of its self-understanding. This conviction makes Garry Wills a most interesting historian.
By contrast, much secular history seems to be written on the assumption that religion, particularly the Christian religion, is the self-deluded mytho-ideological rationale by which less enlightened cultures justify their materialistic aggressiveness and the social structures they devise to rationalize the privilege of the elite.
In his remarkable study of the rise and decline of the Venetian empire, Wills is certainly not naïve about its political, economic and military ruthlessness. He consistently draws a clear connection between the Venetians's lofty theological self-understanding and their crass self-interest. Yet he is also fully aware that no era, and certainly no empire, can achieve such rectitude, such consistency between what it says and does, as to be immune to deconstructive analyses revealing its hypocrisies.
