The Soprano saga continues. Who knew that an hour of watching some people at lake could cause such a knot in the stomach?

Well, when it’s the Sopranos…but of course.

I worried a bit when I saw 4 or 5 names taking writing credit for this one, but there was no reason. A quietly stunning ep, building in a way that planted a seed in the pit of your stomach from the beginning, a seed that twisted into an inexorable knot as the hour progressed. Creation continues to calmly level its gaze at Tony Soprano, challenging him to answer for the role he plays in distrubing and disrupting it. The past, grainy, yet tantalizing with "what if’s" and "why’s." The constant dance of self-delusion in which every character takes a turn, pretending that such ill-gotten gains aren’t stained with bloody fingerprints. The never-ending irony of murderous thugs and their enablers being outraged by others’ ethical and even social lapses.

And sin, personified in Tony Soprano – sin which cannot bear the happiness of others, which cannot bear to see a glimpse of even the potential for good, that must drag everyone and everything further down in the fires with it, until one who has done many things, but never yet taken a human life, is casually, slyly ordered to do so, and returning from the deed, is confronted, as Tony has been since the beginning, by the questions being asked of him by the deep, still lake.

Speaking of HBO: At First Things, Gerard J. Russello of the University Bookman, has an appreciation of Rome:

What was perhaps the most pro-Christian show on television did not have a single Christian character in it—and there was no way it could have. Rome, the hit series that has just completed its second (and for now final) season on the cable channel HBO, turned out to be a surprising affirmation of the Western religious tradition. While it is packed with sex and violence, its message—intended or not—is that the Roman world was desperate for Christianity.

snip

Finally, there is religion. Rome is saturated with it—there are prayers and oaths, offerings made to deities known and unknown, and religious processions and priestly orders. One of the strengths of the show is that, as with other aspects of daily life, the naturalness of religious belief is treated soberly and as a normal way to behave. But these gods rarely provide a guide to conduct or right behavior. At most, they serve to confirm the honor and shame-driven culture of the time. When Vorenus’ daughter is forced to work as a prostitute before she is rescued, Vorenus brings them before a priest to cleanse her and the other children of their shame. And, of course, there is always suicide as an honorable way out of dishonorable situations, a recourse several characters take during the series. A pagan world, in other words, is not one in which we control the gods, as trendy neo-pagans suppose, but a world in which we are ever at risk of offending some god for failure to make the right offering or sacrifice.

Some may quibble with the historical accuracy of this or that detail, but in the main the show has it right. The picture presented by Rome is provocative, troubling, and at times downright strange. Despite how well we know the story of the fall of Rome, and despite our clear debts to the Romans as a constituent part of our own culture, they are not us and we are not them, in large measure because of the interposition of Christianity. Indeed, the most recognizable people in the series are perhaps the Jewish characters, whose ethical structure is clearly recognizable as our own from the brief glimpses we are given of it.

From the account the series presents of life in Rome, it is no wonder that the message of Christianity, building perhaps on other mystery cults emerging around this time, would be so appealing to slaves, women, and others whose participation in Roman life was partial at best. As Walter Pater wrote in 1885, the revelation of the Christian message must have been seen as fresh air in a suffocating world: “Penetrating the whole atmosphere, touching everything around with its peculiar sentiment, it seemed to make all this visible mortality, death itself, more beautiful than any fantastic dream of old mythology had ever hoped to make it; and that, in a simple sincerity of feeling about a supposed actual fact. The thought, the word, Pax—Pax Tecum! —was put forth everywhere, with images of hope, snatched sometimes even from that jaded pagan world, which had really afforded men so little of it from first to last.” This breath of air was revolutionary, and we should do well to remember it in the context of our own resurgences into barbarism in the areas, for example, of family life and treatment of the poor.

All this is not, of course, to say that in some respects the ancient world improved immediately upon the rise of Christianity, or that, for example, marriages, even into the modern age, were not done for convenience or for reasons of power politics. But the point is that the intellectual and moral climate that made any improvement possible would not have been possible at all within the classical pagan world.

These days, some contend that a world without Christian restraints would be more egalitarian, less violent, and more individualistic. But for those with a historical sense, Rome shows that another alternative is more likely. The classical world was not all marble columns and noble rhetoric. It was a world where the strong ruled, and those who could not conquer were themselves conquered. Far from being egalitarian, the only clear rule was inequality: between masters and slaves, husbands and wives, or plebeians and patricians. Those wishing to reject the West’s Christian heritage should take a hard look at what that world was like.