Conspiracy Theories

Eamon Duffy

• BuyFlesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination by Aviad Kleinberg, translated by Jane Marie Todd
  Harvard, 340 pp, £19.95, May 2008, ISBN 978 0 674 02647 6

Aviad Kleinberg’s clever, wide-ranging and tendentious book begins by recounting an experience which he cannot quite decide whether to classify as a moment of blinding insight or one of personal weakness. He was watching a television interview with Mother Teresa, in which she told of her first encounter with a dying leper. The leper had asked her why she was caring for him, and she had answered: ‘Because I love you.’ To his own bewilderment, Kleinberg, ‘a sceptic by nature, and when it comes to religious phenomena . . . even more sceptical’, found that he accepted Mother Teresa’s claim unquestioningly. ‘For an instant, at least, I believed that those words were the pure truth,’ and that this absolute love for the leper dying in her arms ‘transformed the scene from a banal act of Christian charity into something heroic, sublime even’.