Brother Ass, your body

While Karl Popper spuriously deduced twentieth-century totalitarianism from Platonism, an arguably better link can be established between the pagan Greek idealisation of the (manly) body and the Nazi cult of the healthy and fit Aryan Übermensch.

St Francis, far removed in both spirit and time from pagans and nazis alike, took a more sensible view on the human body which Francis preferred to think of as 'Brother Ass'. St Francis's view of the body is relayed by C S Lewis in The Four Loves in the following way:

Man has held three views of his body. First there is that of those ascetic Pagans who called it the prison or the "tomb" of the soul, and of Christians like [Bishop] Fisher to whom it was a "sack of dung", food for worms, filthy, shameful, a source of nothing but temptation to bad men and humiliation to good ones. Then there are the Neo-Pagans (they seldom know Greek), the nudists and the sufferers from Dark Gods, to whom the body is glorious. But thirdly we have the view which St Francis expressed by calling his body "Brother Ass". All three may be - I am not sure - defensible; but give me St Francis for my money.

Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body.

technorati tags: Popper, Plato, Platonism, totalitarianism, pagan, paganism, Christianity, Christian, Greek, Nazi, Aryan, uebermensch, C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, St Francis, Assisi, Bishop, John Fisher, body, ass, donkey,

Till Far, igen

Nostos, hemfärd

Ingenting annat än himlen
för honom som ligger med
ansiktet, det olyft-
bara, uppåtvänt.

Röda lyktor, tulpaner,
står tända utanför,
där vårens hemslöjdsmatta
för andra fötter vävs.

Ingenting annat än himlen,
ett drivande grått, det blå
flödet utan detaljer,
att ordlöst drunkna i.

Ensam på detta från vinröda
skymningar bortvända hav.
Nostos. Hemfärd till glömskan,
som var före allt.

-- Hjalmar Gullberg, 26.4.59

technorati tags: Nostos, hemfärd, Hjalmar Gullberg, far, saknad

God in the dock

Icarus

The public Western 'dialogue' on faith and religion continues apace and is gathering in ferocity.

In what is perhaps Richard Dawkins's most vicious attack on organised religion yet, this time in the Washington Post's On Faith panel discussion (here), he labels the Roman Catholic Church as potentially the 'greatest force of evil in the world' and continues to revel in remarkably frenzied invective by describing the Church's recent offer of a place to disaffected Anglo-Catholics as 'dragging its flowing skirts in the dirt and touting for business like a common pimp: "Give me your homophobes, misogynists and pederasts"'.

It is not entirely difficult to understand why the Daily Telegraph's Damian Thompson wonders whether there's 'something wrong' with Dawkins (here)...

In any case, the here is not to voice outrage at a debate on faith and religion that is seemingly spinning out of control and losing all sense of perspective on that which it is ostensibly aiming to illuminate, but to recall some rather perceptive words written by C S Lewis during World War II and published as Mere Christianity.

Pondering the changing relationship between God and man in the modern era, Lewis writes:

Modern man has reversed the relationship between God and himself. The ancient man ... approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge [although 'kindly' is hardly Dawkins's approach]: if God should have a reasonable defence for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock.


I doubt, however, that Lewis could have imagined the debate getting this noxious.

technorati tags: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, God, judge, dock, man, humanity, religion, Christianity, belief, faith, Richard Dawkins, Catholic, Church, Anglo-Catholic, Damian Thompson, Icarus, hubris

The next Pope?

Cardinal Peter Turkson of the Cape Coast, Ghana has been appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to head the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (report here).

His new and weighty role within the Church has the media inevitably speculating (which is probably of little use given the Byzantine, if that expression may be permitted in this context, process of electing popes) on whether Cardinal Turkson is likely to become Africa's first pope since the fifth century.

Previous African popes were St Victor I (second century), St Miltiades (fourth century) and St Gelasius I (fifth century). In recent decades, Roman Catholicism has expanded faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world.

technorati tags: Cardinal, Peter Turkson, Vatican, Council for Justice and Peace, Pope, Benedict, St Victor, Miltiades, Gelasius, Cape Coast, Ghana, African Pope, Roman Catholic, Catholic

Judge for yourself

I recently blogged on a not very generous review by Paul Johnson of Diarmaid MacCulloch's colossal history of Christianity, the recently published and much discussed A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. It is only fair to note, that in response to Johnson's review, one reader noted:

Sir: Paul Johnson’s review of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity (26 September) is unnecessarily mocking in tone. Mr Johnson describes Professor MacCulloch as ‘essentially a comic figure’. Any reader of the review who is unfamiliar with the rest of MacCulloch’s work will be unaware that far from being the figure of fun portrayed by Paul Johnson, he is (along with Eamon Duffy) the most distinguished historian of early modern religion working at present in the UK.

C.D.C. Armstrong
Belfast


Archbishop Rowan Williams has reviewed the book here.

Having remained curious about MacCulloch's book, and having now also listened to Andrew Marr discuss the book with the author himself on tonight's Start of the Week on BBC Radio 4, I've now decided to make my own mind up.

The book is duly ordered and on its way. All 1184 pages of it.

technorati tags: Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Paul Johnson, Spectator, Eamon Duffy, Cambridge, C.D.C. Armstrong, Andrew Marr, Rowan Williams, Start the Week, Church, Christianity

'n Boer maak 'n plan

Afrikaner family, 1886


South African farmers, 2009

The South African government has signed a deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo which will make available available for South African farmers about 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) of farmland (here).

Given the serious tensions surrounding land ownership and the unequal distribution of land in southern Africa, a legacy of the colonial and apartheid eras, farmers in the region are likely eager to embrace new opportunities where they arise.

The Congo deal is intended to improve food security for the Congolese and the 30-year land leases will provide new opportunities for South African farmers, many of whom presumably have worries about their standing at home given (some) popular pressure for an increased pace of land reform coupled with the high levels of violence against farmers that remain quite serious.

It is often suggested that two of the most dangerous professions in South Africa (in terms of the likelihood, on a per capita basis, of becoming a victim of violent attacks and murder) are farming and policing, with white South Africans overrepresented among farmer victims and black South Africans overrepresented among police victims.

In Zimbabwe, the violent struggle to resolve the legacy of extremely uneven land distribution has led to de facto ethnic cleansing of white farmers and their African workers (many of the latter being immigrants from neighbouring countries), and collapse of the country's economy. Some of the commercial farmers expelled from their lands in Zimbabwe have taken up farming in neighbouring Zambia and Mozambique, and as far afield as Nigeria.

Considering the explosive legacy of land in southern Africa, this is a deal bound to have some interesting implications for politics, economics and development in the region.

technorati tags: land, land reform, farming, Boer, maak 'n plan, Agri SA, Congo, South Africa, colonialism, settlers, Zimbabwe, ethnic cleansing, Congo

Pilgrimage

Saint James Major by Carlo Crivelli, 1492


I go through life as a transient on his way to eternity, made in the image of God but with that image debased, needing to be taught how to meditate, to worship, to think.

-- Donald Coggan, Archbishop of Canterbury

technorati tags: Donald Coggan, Archbishop, Canterbury, transient, eternity, God, meditation, worship, thinking, Saint James, Carlo Crivelli

Why Obama is failing

David Bromwich (Yale) has written an thought-provoking article in the current issue of London Review of Books, 'Obama's Delusion', on why Obama's presidency might well be running into a brick wall.

Among Bromwhich's provoking comments on the perhaps surprising turn of post-Bush politics:

The model of the Republicans today is John C. Calhoun, the political theorist of the slave South and deviser of the rationale for local nullification of federal policies.

[O]n 21 May, [President Obama] gave a speech on law and national security at the National Archives [transcript and video here]: the worst speech of his presidency. He said that his paramount duty was ‘to keep the American people safe’: that word, safe, which was accorded a primacy by George W. Bush it had not been given by any earlier president, Obama himself now ranked ahead of the words justice, right, liberty and constitution.

...

Preventive detention was a step President Nixon had proposed to Congress in 1970, but he never found the support or the temerity to put the programme into effect. Yet here was a Democratic president and professor of constitutional law doing what Nixon and for that matter Cheney and his assistants had only dreamed of.

technorati tags: Obama, Bush, Cheney, Nixon, Clinton, Calhoun, David Bromwich, Guantanamo, preventive detention, South, Dixie, Republican, Democrat, Fox News, Limbaugh, Joe Wilson, terrorism, Afghanistan, Israel, constitutional law, safety, justice, right, constitution, immigration

Too many apologies?

The writer and retired Spectator columnist Paul Johnson (disappointingly replaced by James Delingpole), a man of esteemed age and leisure who can thus dispense with overy sensitive considerations of collegiality, takes Diarmaid MacCulloch to task when reviewing his 1100+ page tome A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (here).

Johnson is clearly less impressed with MacCulloch's writing style, and undue concern not to 'offend' (for all sorts of more and less strange reasons), than with the content. Johnson writes:

The reason I find him essentially a comic figure is that, while obviously successful at his trade (and a great collector of literary prizes), he appears to be absolutely terrified of offending people, especially powerful groups who know how to use their muscle. Of course dons, especially Oxbridge ones, are so heavily supervised now in what and how they teach, that professors cannot be too careful, especially if they hold a chair in such a tricky and contentious subject as religious history. A don can now get into trouble merely for failing to answer the emails of students who attend his lectures. Then again, MacCulloch’s book is to accompany a television series on the subject, and the demands of the medium constitute an added dimension of worry and conformity to elitist fashion.


The review is, however, not wholly negative and MacCulloch's work seems a tremendous effort and of interest to anyone wanting to learn more about the Church.

technorati tags: Paul Johnson, Diarmaid MacCulloch, History of Christianity, Oxford, Oxbridge, Don, political correctness, church, Christianity, PC, Delingpole

The dangers of mixed marriages

Uhura and Kirk, first 'interracial kiss' on American television, 1968

When my wife and I arrived in Northern Ireland, we soon became aware that a 'mixed marriage' in Ireland refers to something entirely different (namely one between Catholic and Protestant) than in Alabama where we were married and where, like in the USA generally, it refers to an interracial marriage.

In his amazing little book, Persecution in the Early Church, Herbert B Workman provides a vivid description of a 'mixed marriage' (between Christian and heathen) in the Roman Empire in the days of the early Church, and the difficulties with which those entering into one may have been faced:

For the Christian wife, conflict with her heathen husband would be accentuated by the arrival of the first baby. No woman who had worshipped the Child of Bethlehem could ever allow to go unchallenged the patria potestas, the right of the father to decide which of his children should be permitted to live, and which should be cast into the street, or exposed on the Island in the Tiber. 'If it proves a girl', writes a father in Alexandria to his expectant wife, 'throw it out'. As to this and other evil practices sanctioned by a home-life in many respects elevated and pure the issue was clear. But our sympathies are less assured in other matters, for instance, Tertullian's portrait of a Christian wife who has at her side a servant of the devil - this is his pleasant name for her husband. The man, he says, is sure to be such a brute that if it is a fast day he will 'arrange to hold a feast the same day'. He will further prove his allegiance to Satan by taking it ill that his wife

'for the sake of visiting the brethren goes round from street to street to other men's cottages, especially those of the poor... He will not allow her to be absent all night long at nocturnal convocations and paschal solemnities ... or suffer to creep into prison to kiss a martyr's bonds, or even to exchange a kiss with one of the brethren'.

After this it is a little matter that her signing 'her bed and her body with the Cross' will arouse his suspicions. If the fellow endures his wife and her ways at all it will simply be because of her dowry, or that he may make her his slave by his threats of dragging her before the executioner. We can hardly believe that all pagan husbands were brutes, or all Christian wives so lacking in at times in discretion. But, at the best, the situation in a mixed marriage was difficult, almost impossible, as Tertullian, in spite of his extravagance, rightly saw.


Methinks we have it a bit easier in this day and age - all the other dysfucntions of modern life and the decline of the family aside!

technorati tags: mixed marriage, Catholic, Protestant, interracial, miscegenation, Workman, Prosecution in the Early Church, Christian, heathen, pagan, Roman, patria potestas, Tertullian, wife, husband, Uhura, Captain Kirk, marriage

When wisdom is king

Solomon, King of Israel, engraving by Gustave Doré

Proverbs 1: 20-33 (King James Version)

Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets:

She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying,

How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?

Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you.

Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded;

But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof:

I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh;

When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.

Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me:

For that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the LORD:

They would none of my counsel: they despised all my reproof.

Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices.

For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them.

But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil.

technorati tags: Solomon, Israel, wisdom, Proverbs, Bible, Old Testament, Gustave Doré

1 September 1939

Westerplatte monument, Gdansk (then Danzig)

On this day in 1939, Adolf Hitler began resolutely to hammer the last nail in the coffin of what was a globally dominant European civilisation when he ordered the German armed forces to attack Poland at Gdansk and World War II was thus begun (Times archive of the events here).

While the beginning of the end came already with the Great War, commencing with some enthusiasm on all sides in 1914, it was the second World War that signalled the final decline of imperial Europe and the (at least temporary) shift of Western economic, political and intellectual power and leadership westward across the Atlantic to America.

Might a calamity of similar consequence dislodge Western dominance in the wake of the briefly proclaimed moment of unipolar American power and the steady rise of its main Asian competitors? Rather let us hope we continue to remember the lessons of total war in Europe.

September 1, 1939

by W H Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

technorati tags: WWII, Westerplatte, Gdansk, Hitler, 1 September, September 1, 1939, Great War, civilisation, empire, Auden, world war, total war

Gud, människan och kärlek

En vacker passage, en av de mest välkända i hela det nya testamentet, från Paulus första korintierbrev, om "kärlekens lov". Speciellt tänkvärt i detta moderna och ofta tankelösa tidevarv då många människor gärna och på ett oärligt vis vill förknippa våra heliga skrifter (Bibeln, Koranen osv) med våld, förtryck och hat.

1917 års översättning av Den Heliga Skrift, Bibeln:

Om jag talade både människors och änglars tungomål, men icke hade kärlek, så vore jag allenast en ljudande malm eller en klingande cymbal.

Och om jag hade profetians gåva och visste alla hemligheter och ägde all kunskap, och om jag hade all tro, så att jag kunde förflytta berg, men icke hade kärlek, så vore jag intet.

Och om jag gåve bort allt vad jag ägde till bröd åt de fattiga, ja, om jag offrade min kropp till att brännas upp, men icke hade kärlek, så vore detta mig till intet gagn.

Kärleken är tålig och mild. Kärleken avundas icke, kärleken förhäver sig icke, den uppblåses icke.

Den skickar sig icke ohöviskt, den söker icke sitt, den förtörnas icke, den hyser icke agg för en oförrätts skull.

Den gläder sig icke över orättfärdigheten, men har sin glädje i sanningen.

Den fördrager allting, den tror allting, den hoppas allting, den uthärdar allting.

Kärleken förgår aldrig. Men profetians gåva, den skall försvinna, och tungomålstalandet, det skall taga slut, och kunskapen, den skall försvinna.

Ty vår kunskap är ett styckverk, och vårt profeterande är ett styckverk;

men när det kommer, som är fullkomligt, då skall det försvinna, som är ett styckverk.

När jag var barn, talade jag såsom ett barn, mitt sinne var såsom ett barns, jag hade barnsliga tankar; men sedan jag blev man, har jag lagt bort vad barnsligt var.

Nu se vi ju på ett dunkelt sätt, såsom i en spegel, men då skola vi se ansikte mot ansikte. Nu är min kunskap ett styckverk, men då skall jag känna till fullo, såsom jag själv har blivit till fullo känd.

Så bliva de då beståndande, tron, hoppet, kärleken, dessa tre; men störst bland dem är kärleken.

technorati tags: Gud, människan, kärlek, Paulus, korintierbrev, Bibeln, nya testamentet, helig skrift, kärlekens lov, Paul, Corinthians, charity

The ghost of Enoch Powell

The legacy of Britain's controversial twentieth-century Conservative politician Enoch Powell - generally remembered for his 'Rivers of blood' speech - continues to impact on contemporary British politics.

In a recent interview, Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, who was recently derided for stating that he would not wish the NHS 'on anyone' (although a recent report on the appalling practices in parts of the vast NHS machinery puts those comments in perspective), created another furore by stating that:

In a British context Enoch Powell, he was... somebody who understood the importance of national democracy, who understood why you needed to live in an independent country and what that meant, as well as being a free-marketeer and a small government Conservative (video here).


Predictably this statement was seized upon by Lord Mandelson and others in the Labour party to suggest that not only have the Tories sent to Brussels a man who dares to criticise the NHS, but also someone who, by mentioning Powell in a positive way, must be some sort of crypto-racist (here). Of course, as the enjoyable Guido Fawkes' blog informs us, Hannan's detractors conveniently forget the following:

In 1998, then Prime Minister Tony Blair states: '[Powell] was one of the great figures of 20th-century British politics, gifted with a brilliant mind.'

In 2007, Hannan himself states: 'For what it’s worth, I think Enoch Powell was wrong on immigration. The civil unrest that he forecast, and that many feared in 1968, didn’t materialise. Britain assimilated a large population with an ease that few countries have matched. Being an immigrant myself, I have particular cause to be grateful for Britain’s understated cosmopolitanism.'

Lastly, noting that Hannan's intellectual heroes include Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, 'Guido' suggests that 'the fact is that Hannan and his ideological fan base (such as it is) are more liberal on immigration policy than the official Labour Party position'.

But why let that get in the way of a juicy guilt-by-association story?

technorati tags: Daniel Hannan, Enoch Powell, Peter Mandelson, Conservative, Tory, Labour, racism, immigration, xenophobia, libertarian, Milton Friedman, Hayek, Rivers of Blood, NHS, Blair, Guido Fawkes, ad hominem, smear, guilt by association

Gender bender? The Semenya controversy

18-year old South African runner Caster Semenya has generated enormous controversy since winning the 800 metre Gold at the World Athletics Championship in Berlin. There are, apparently, questions about whether she is actually female, and a 'gender identification test' (?!) revealed three times the level of testosterone normally found in a woman.

In any case, Dave Zirin comments on the Semenya controversy in The Nation and suggests that a good dose of Western insensitivity about what should be appropriare gender roles underpins the controversy and has led to some rather hostile reactions in South Africa where the runner is apparently widely supported.

Whatever the merits of the case, Zirin's puts forth a general argument about South Africa being more tolerant on matters sexual than is the United States:

It perhaps shouldn't be so surprising that they recognize the West's "intolerance and prurience." Unlike the United States, South Africa has same-sex marriage.

The Afican National Congress Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, while arguing in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage, said, "In breaking with our past...we need to fight and resist all forms of discrimination and prejudice, including homophobia."

Unlike the United States', South Africa's Constitution formally prohibits discrimination based on sexuality. The Constitution reads:

The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.

This does not to mean South Africa is some sort of Shangri-La for LGBT people. But it does suggest the United States can stand to learn at thing or two about discrimination and human sexuality.


How deeply ironic it is to read this on the same day that The Times publishes an article about 'corrective rape' of lesbian women in South Africa. This in a country which has one of the world's highest incidences of rape per capita (an estimated 150 women are raped daily), and where (especially 'butch-looking') lesbian women are regularly persecuted as in the case of the recently raped and murdered 29-year old Eudy Simelane, a woman who was the national football team's captain:

In South Africa’s sprawling black townships Ms Simelane was the most famous victim of an increasing trend in anti-gay violence. There, lesbians live in fear. At least twenty women have been killed in the past five years. They are often victims of a phenomenon known as “corrective rape” — the rape of a lesbian by a man either to punish her or cure and correct her sexual orientation.


Somehow I doubt that the legality or otherwise of same-sex marriage, noted twice in Zirin's article, is a significant, let alone determining, factor here...

technorati tags: Caster Semenya, Eudy Simelane, Dave Zirin, gender, sexuality, homosexual, lesbian, homophobia, rape, corrective rape, athletics, same-sex marriage, discrimination, LGBT