The Second Temptation shows Jesus set by the devil on top the Temple in Jerualem: 'if you are the son of God, cast yourself down, for it is written: 'He will instruct his angels to attend to you, and they will bear you up in their hands, lest you should dash your feet against a stone.'
(Matthew 4.6, Psalm 91.11).
The Temple was, in the time of Jesus, the most extraordinary sacred building in the classical world. Josephus, who gives a careful description of its history, its construction, and its function, writes with pride of the labour required to create the platform: those who visit the titanic retaining wall which survives as the so-called 'Wailing Wall', or who pace the enormous, barren platform which surmounts it, can still share the jewish historian's sense of stupefaction.
The site had orginally stood on the narrow summit of the hill known as Zion and the immense platform for the later Temple had been constructed by walling this hill on three sides, and filling in the space from the valley bottom to the summit. The foundations 'where the ground was lowest had to be built up 450 feet, in some places even more... unlimited funds and popular enthusiasm resulted in undertakings beyond belief, and a task with no end in sight was through patience and the passage of time completed.' (Josephus, Bellum Judaicum, 5.188-189).
The effect of the Temple when viewed from a distance was just as imposing: 'The outside of the building lacked nothing to astonish mind or eye. It was clad about with massive plates of gold, and as the sun came up it shone with such a blaze of light that people looking at it were forced to look away. To travellers approaching from a distance, it looked like a mountain covered with snow, because every part not covered with gold was whiter than white. There were sharp gold spikes on the roof to prevent birds perching there and fouling it (Josephus, BJ.5.222-223). Such was the 'Mountain of the Lord' : the place where it, was believed, the God of Heaven, deigned to alight upon earth, and dwelt in the Holy of Holies, a place so sacred that no one was permitted to enter it except the High Priest, once a year, for the rituals of the Day of Atonement.
Immediately at the foot of this sacred, silent and inviolable space was the area in which man sought to impress, propitiate or gratify the divinty by the sacrifice of bulls, sheep, goats, pigeons grain and wine as prescribed by the Law (Leviticus 1-17). Josephus tells us that the altar on which these sacrifices were perfomed was 22 feet high, 75 feet long and 75 feet wide, with four corners jutting out like horns, and with a gentle slope leading up from the south.
Apart from the daily rituals of ceremonial sacrifice, there was the constant slaughter of animals in fulfilment of the Law's requirements in respect of expiation and thanksgiving. Here, at the Passover, every family in the country was required to bring a lamb to be slaughtered, roasted and eaten on the same day, and the Solitude of the Holy of Holies was in extraordinary contrast to the crowds of men and animals thronging the outer court, and against splendour of the imposing courts was enacted the uproar and the bloody squalor of unceasing sacrifice.
The Temple was the visible expression of the grandeur of God, and also to the pride of his chosen people: a symbol, in one sense, of unity, grandeur and the covenant between God and Man. But the Temple was also the embodiment of the glory of the kings who had built it, and the legitimacy of the priesthood who mediated betwen God and Man.
This was an ideal beyond time, but with the passing of time it had compromised with earthly powers.
In the time of Solomon, the Holy of Holies had housed the Ark of the Covenant, the seat of the Law, and the living presence of God, but in 587 BC the Temple was sacked by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnessar, and the Ark disappeared for ever. There were many Jewss who believed that this disaster reflected the dissolution of the covenant between God and Israel, and that the dissolution was a proper judgment on the pride, stupidity and godlessness of the kingdoms.
But the Temple had always been at the centre of disagreement and division. King David had first resolved upon its construction, but was forbidden to proceed with it, and though the words of the Prophet who brought word to the King suggested that David's own son, Solomon, might build such a Temple, they pointed also towards a fulfilment of a different order: 'I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me'. (2 Samuel 7.12-14).
And there is a strong current in the Old Testament, which questions the acceptability of sacrifice, where it is offered without, or instead of, obedience (1 Samuel 15.22), humility (Psalm 51.16-18) and mercy (Hosea 6.6).
When the Babylonian Empire fell, the Persian Emperor Cyrus authorised the reconstruction of the Temple, and a number of Jews returned from captivity in Babylon so as to attempt the reconstitution of a theocratic state: but there was to be no Judaean King, and in the period that followed, the priesthood that had long been vested in the House of Zadok fell into the hands of whatever priestly family proved from time to time most adept in managing the interests of the dominant foreign power. In 39 BC this earthly mimicry of the sacred paradigm achieved even more substantial embodiment in the person of Herod the Great, a non-jewish usurper who achieved kingship by subordinating himself to the interests of Rome.
So, by the time of the incarnation, the earthly splendour of the Temple described by Josephus owed very largely to the earth-bound ambitions of Herod 'the Great' , and the priesthood, which officiated there could perfectly reasonably be regarded as part of a system founded on the betrayal of God's people - a new bondage unto Pharoah or Babylonian Captivity
Furthermore, the life of the Idumaean king had proved as scandalous as that of any of his Old Testament predecessors, and the priesthood could not but be discredited by their association with his régime and by their hostility to any current of religious idealism that threatened an established order which relied for its survival on mediating uncertainly between the Jewish people and the power of Rome.
Here, now, swept up to the pinnacle of this system is a nobody, remarkable only to an entity that has some undefined sense of an as yet undefined potential to reconfigure the spirituality of Man.
The prophet had proclaimed that 'the Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to the Temple' (Malachi.3.1), and he went onto predict a purification, a refining fire, a return to the pristine establishment, and the arrival of Elijah, 'the prophet of the great and dreadful day of the Lord' (Malachi 4.5).
Jesus' attitude to the Temple, like his attitude to the Law, was essentially in line with the prophetic thread that ran through it's history.
Having been circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, Jesus was brought to the Temple on the 40th day after his birth for the ritual of purification, which involved the sacrifice of a pigeon as a sin-offering, and a lamb, or, in the case of poor people, such as Mary and Joseph, a second pigeon as a burnt-offering (see Luke 2.22-24, Leviticus 12) and the ritual of redemption of the first born, which involved a payment to the priests of 5 Temple shekels Exodus 13, Numbers 18). It was on this occasion that Simeon spoke the famous prophecy in which he announced that Our Lord should be the salvation of all people - 'a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel,' adding ' Behold this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel' (Luke 2.29-34).
Luke tells us, too, that Mary and Joseph went annually to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. The evangelist does not say whether Jesus was taken too, but records that this did occur when the boy turned twelve: this was the age of bar mitzvah when Jesus became ' a son of the Law' and responsible for his own religious observances (Luke, 2.41-42). Jesus, missing for 3 days, and found at last in the Temple, 'sitting among the teachers, listening to them, and asking them questions,' emphasised his intimate connection with the Temple, asking his perplexed parents 'Did you not know that I must be in my Father's House.' (Luke 2.49).
This harmonious picture of the son of Man in his Father's House, communing with the teachers of the Law was to be in sharp contrast to the posture adopted in the run up to the Passover and the Crucifixion, when Our Lord scourged the money changers from the Temple with the words of the prophet Isaiah: 'my house shall be called a house of prayer for all people' - but you have made it a den of thieves' (Matthew 21.12-13, Isaiah 56.7). Jesus was, to go on to prophesy not only the physical destruction of the Temple, but to a new dispensation, in which his own death and ressurection was mystically contrasted with that destruction, thereby symbolising the replacement of a Temple Worship centred on animal sacrifice as prescribed by the Law with his own redeeming sacrifice and the establishment of the great sacrament within the framework of his Church: 'I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days' (Matthew 26.61).
The juxtaposition of Jesus and the Temple in this, the Second Temptation, is therefore fraught with historical and prophetic significance.
And yet, as in the case of the First, the nature of the Second Temptation is curiously banal. The Temple becomes no more than a backdrop to a cheap and pointless stunt, in which the Saviour is himself saved by the ministration of the Father, and the people acknowledge his elect status accordingly.
But here, as in the case of the First Temptation, what unfolds is a much greater and tremendous mystery. Our Lord is lifted up on the Cross to save others in a manner which Jesus, as reported by St John, expressly compared with Moses 'lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness' to save the repentant Israelites from the consequences of sin (John 3.14-15, Numbers 21.5-9). He is, on the cross, mocked and taunted by those who, referring to the accusation made at his trial, cry 'Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself. If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross (Matthew 27.40)and there is a grim irony when they add, at this salvific climax, the words 'He saved others; himself he cannot save' and 'If he be the King of Israel, let him come down from the cross, and we will believe in him.' (Matthew 27.42).
On the pinnacle of the Temple, Satan had quoted scripture: 'He shall give his angels charge concerning thee; and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone' (Matthew 4.6, , Psalm 91.11). These words appear in a Psalm which promises salvation and deliverance, saying 'Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he has known my name. He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be deliver him, and answer him. With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my salvation.' (Psalm 91.15-16).
As to the angels, Jesus had, at the moment of betrayal, referred to them, and rejected them: 'Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be,' (Matthew 26.53-54). And yet the words of the Psalm, however, justified by the resurrection after three days, must have seemed bitterly contradicted at the supreme moment of the Passion, when Jesus, rejected as God, King and High Priest uttered those chilling words - 'Eli, Eli, lama sabbachtani... My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me,' (Matthew.27.46)And even at the moment, the Saviour was misunderstood, and thought to be calling, and calling in vain, on the prophet of 'the great and terrible day of the Lord.' And yet, at the moment of his death, 'the veil of the Temple' which is said by Josephus to hve represented 'the whole vista of the heavens' was 'rent in twain' (Matthew.27.51) - truly, a new heaven, and a new earth (see Revelation 21.1).
Thursday, 4 March 2010
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Temptation Transcended: Part One: Stone, Bread and Flesh
Between his baptism and the commencement of his ministry, Jesus Christ spent 40 days and 40 nights in the desert, and was subject to temptation.
The number 40 is significant: 40 were the number of days that Moses spent in the cloud on Mount Sinai, receiving the Law, before God sent him down to the children of Israel with the two tables of stone inscribed by the finger of God (Exodus 24.18); 40 were the number of years that Moses and the children of Israel themselves spent in the desert, before the children of Israel - but not Moses - were permitted to enter the promised land (Numbers 32.13).
In considering the temptations set before Jesus, Matthew and Luke look back to Moses the first, and greatest, of the Jewish prophets. Moses it was who freed the Jews from their bondage in Egypt; who led the people through the desert; who received and bore witness to the Law on their behalf; and who finally conducted them to the land which they had been promised by God. Jesus, too, would liberate those who believed in him; would lead them through a hostile world; would give them a code to live by; and would bring them in due course to a promised land of their own.
The temptations are put to Jesus by a being whom the Evangelists designate ho peirazwn, or ho diabolos. Ho diabolos, is soon recognised in the somewhat disordered dress of garbled Greek. He is the devil - his name, in Greek, means the prosecutor, the accuser, or the slanderer. Ho peirazwn, is less readily indentifiable, but his name, also from Greek, means the tempter, the one who puts to the test. In finally dismissing him, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6.16 - ouk ekpeiraseis kurion ton theon sou - 'thou shalt not put the Lord they God to the test.'
Those looking back to Moses, will be struck by the end of the verse from Deuternomy that Our Lord quotes. This refers to the way in which the children of Israel are said to have 'put God to the test at Massah' when, you will remember, they insolently demanded water from Moses, and therefore from God, without trusting that God would, in any event, provide for them: Moses struck the rock, and 'water came forth that the people might drink.' (Exodus 17.6): The moment was a significant one, though, and Moses named the place Massah because the word derives from the Hebrew verb, nissà, - which means 'to test.'
Those looking forward to Jesus' future will remember the Lord's prayer, and 'lead us not into temptation', or 'put us not to the test' - mh eisenegkhs hmas eis peirasmon' (Matt.6.13). The repeated suggestions during the passion, that Jesus should prove his divinity by working a sign, or by saving himself, is an index of the godless balsphemy such 'putting to the test' involved (see Matt.27.39-43; Luke 23.39-37). And yet, when the side of Jesus was pierced to see whether he still lived, or had died, 'blood and water came forth' - the symbols of the life of the world, and the life of the body, and, in the case of blood, the symbol of sacrifice (John 19.35).
The substance of the first temptation, when Ho peirazwn proposed that Our Lord satsfy his hunger by turning stone into bread, resembles, in its nature, the exercise of the kind of power that it was granted Moses to exercise at Massah. It was, of course, a concern for bread had led to the enslavement of the Hebrews. The sons of Jacob left Canaan in search of bread, they found it in Egypt, and their descendants degenerated into the slaves of Pharoah. Liberated from their bondage, the children of Israel complained to Moses 'If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our full of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger' (Exodus 16.3). It was in response to this complant that God provided the children of Israel with manna in the desert. .
Our Lord himself did not deny or minimise the importance of bread: the first petition in the prayer which he taught us, is, after all, that God should give us, each day, our daily bread.
And in meeting the physical needs of others than himself, the Saviour was ready, unsolicited, to provide for thousands by miraculous means (Matt.16.9). The Lord was to transcend even that miracle, when, as he had promised (John 6.27), he broke the bread, and blessed it, and gave it to his disciples, saying 'This is my body, which will be given up for you.'
In the gospel of John, the Jews ask for a sign 'so that we may see it and believe in you.' (John 6.30, 6.58). They go on to say, 'Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He' (referring to Moses) 'gave them bread from heaven to eat.' But Jesus interrupts and says 'It was not Moses who gave you the bread fom Heaven, but it is my father who gives you the true bread from heaven... I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna of the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.' (John.6.31-32, 48-51).
When, in his response to the devil, Jesus says that 'Man does not live by bread alone' he is, as often, quoting scripture (in this case Deuteronomy 8.3).
In the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy Moses reminds the children of Israel of their 40 years in the wilderness. 'God,' he says, 'humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of Lord... Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child, so the Lord your God disciplines you... When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them...then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery... and fed you in wilderness... to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. Do not say to yourself 'My power and the might of my own hand gained me this wealth.'
Here then is the eternal promise, and the eternal temptation which God has renewed in the even more astonishing promises made through him; in transforming bread into his body, and in sacrificing that body for our salvation, Jesus did something that so transcended the suggestion made by the devil that it makes it the temptation look almost ridiculous in comparison.
When Moses came down from Sinai with the two stone tablets of the law, he was to find that the people had made idols for themselves, and had sat down to to eat and drink, and had risen up to revel (Exodus 32.6). What, in the context of Deuteronomy 8, would Jesus have thought of the world that his choseb people had made of the land that had been promised them through Moses? What does he think today of what, with full knowledge of Him, we have made of a world which faith in Him seemed once to have transformed?
The number 40 is significant: 40 were the number of days that Moses spent in the cloud on Mount Sinai, receiving the Law, before God sent him down to the children of Israel with the two tables of stone inscribed by the finger of God (Exodus 24.18); 40 were the number of years that Moses and the children of Israel themselves spent in the desert, before the children of Israel - but not Moses - were permitted to enter the promised land (Numbers 32.13).
In considering the temptations set before Jesus, Matthew and Luke look back to Moses the first, and greatest, of the Jewish prophets. Moses it was who freed the Jews from their bondage in Egypt; who led the people through the desert; who received and bore witness to the Law on their behalf; and who finally conducted them to the land which they had been promised by God. Jesus, too, would liberate those who believed in him; would lead them through a hostile world; would give them a code to live by; and would bring them in due course to a promised land of their own.
The temptations are put to Jesus by a being whom the Evangelists designate ho peirazwn, or ho diabolos. Ho diabolos, is soon recognised in the somewhat disordered dress of garbled Greek. He is the devil - his name, in Greek, means the prosecutor, the accuser, or the slanderer. Ho peirazwn, is less readily indentifiable, but his name, also from Greek, means the tempter, the one who puts to the test. In finally dismissing him, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6.16 - ouk ekpeiraseis kurion ton theon sou - 'thou shalt not put the Lord they God to the test.'
Those looking back to Moses, will be struck by the end of the verse from Deuternomy that Our Lord quotes. This refers to the way in which the children of Israel are said to have 'put God to the test at Massah' when, you will remember, they insolently demanded water from Moses, and therefore from God, without trusting that God would, in any event, provide for them: Moses struck the rock, and 'water came forth that the people might drink.' (Exodus 17.6): The moment was a significant one, though, and Moses named the place Massah because the word derives from the Hebrew verb, nissà, - which means 'to test.'
Those looking forward to Jesus' future will remember the Lord's prayer, and 'lead us not into temptation', or 'put us not to the test' - mh eisenegkhs hmas eis peirasmon' (Matt.6.13). The repeated suggestions during the passion, that Jesus should prove his divinity by working a sign, or by saving himself, is an index of the godless balsphemy such 'putting to the test' involved (see Matt.27.39-43; Luke 23.39-37). And yet, when the side of Jesus was pierced to see whether he still lived, or had died, 'blood and water came forth' - the symbols of the life of the world, and the life of the body, and, in the case of blood, the symbol of sacrifice (John 19.35).
The substance of the first temptation, when Ho peirazwn proposed that Our Lord satsfy his hunger by turning stone into bread, resembles, in its nature, the exercise of the kind of power that it was granted Moses to exercise at Massah. It was, of course, a concern for bread had led to the enslavement of the Hebrews. The sons of Jacob left Canaan in search of bread, they found it in Egypt, and their descendants degenerated into the slaves of Pharoah. Liberated from their bondage, the children of Israel complained to Moses 'If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our full of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger' (Exodus 16.3). It was in response to this complant that God provided the children of Israel with manna in the desert. .
Our Lord himself did not deny or minimise the importance of bread: the first petition in the prayer which he taught us, is, after all, that God should give us, each day, our daily bread.
And in meeting the physical needs of others than himself, the Saviour was ready, unsolicited, to provide for thousands by miraculous means (Matt.16.9). The Lord was to transcend even that miracle, when, as he had promised (John 6.27), he broke the bread, and blessed it, and gave it to his disciples, saying 'This is my body, which will be given up for you.'
In the gospel of John, the Jews ask for a sign 'so that we may see it and believe in you.' (John 6.30, 6.58). They go on to say, 'Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He' (referring to Moses) 'gave them bread from heaven to eat.' But Jesus interrupts and says 'It was not Moses who gave you the bread fom Heaven, but it is my father who gives you the true bread from heaven... I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna of the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.' (John.6.31-32, 48-51).
When, in his response to the devil, Jesus says that 'Man does not live by bread alone' he is, as often, quoting scripture (in this case Deuteronomy 8.3).
In the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy Moses reminds the children of Israel of their 40 years in the wilderness. 'God,' he says, 'humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of Lord... Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child, so the Lord your God disciplines you... When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them...then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery... and fed you in wilderness... to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. Do not say to yourself 'My power and the might of my own hand gained me this wealth.'
Here then is the eternal promise, and the eternal temptation which God has renewed in the even more astonishing promises made through him; in transforming bread into his body, and in sacrificing that body for our salvation, Jesus did something that so transcended the suggestion made by the devil that it makes it the temptation look almost ridiculous in comparison.
When Moses came down from Sinai with the two stone tablets of the law, he was to find that the people had made idols for themselves, and had sat down to to eat and drink, and had risen up to revel (Exodus 32.6). What, in the context of Deuteronomy 8, would Jesus have thought of the world that his choseb people had made of the land that had been promised them through Moses? What does he think today of what, with full knowledge of Him, we have made of a world which faith in Him seemed once to have transformed?
Thursday, 25 February 2010
Just Being There for Them
On 19 October I was in the Central Methodist Hall, listening to a debate on the motion that the Catholic Church was a force for good in the world. Opening the Debate, John Onaiyekin, the Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria argued that the motion was self-evidently true. Out of a total world population of 6.6 billion, there were 1.2 billion Catholics, and wherever there was a Catholic, the Catholic Church was present. Catholics in all walks of life were guided not just by purely secular aims, but brought to their work the ideals of their faith. 'The action of the Church' he said, 'is probably most significant in communities that are reduced to poverty and misery by human neglect, and hostile environment, whether it is schools, hospitals, clinics, refugee camps, HIV and AIDS, in all those areas, and in all those circumstances, if you go those places, the people will tell you that the Catholic Church is a force for good for the world.' Furthermore, that aid and assistance was, as a matter of policy, given to all persons, no matter what their faith, and without discrimination.
These points were rather lost sight of what followed: Christopher Hitchens concentrated initially on the historical sins of the Church (which were not the issue - the archbishop, and the Church itself having admitted them), saying that these were 'very serious matters' and not to be 'laughed off by reference to the occasional work of catholic charities:' And that, I think, was all that Mr. Hitchens said about the Church's welfare work in the world. Ann Widdecombe, who spoke next, reminded us of 'the billions of pounds that are poured into overseas aid by the catholic church, contributing more, year on year, than any single nation; imagine if the developing world had been left without the input of the medicine and the education that was brought to it by the missions; imagine the absence of those collections, sunday on sunday, for famine relief; imagine the absence of the Church in the local community...'
Stephen Fry, in reply, said he 'genuinely believed that the Church was not a force for good.' He adopted the same dismissive tone as Hitchens. 'Miss Widdecombe' he said, had 'reminded us that history is irrelevant, it's not important, all that matters now is the billions of pounds that go out of this extraordinary institution to relieve the poor around the world and make the world a better place.' Furthermore, if the Church 'liked to boast about the billions' for whom it was the sole purveyor of the truth, it was nevertheless only so 'because those billions are the uneducated and the poor, as again it likes to boast about, but they are the ones that it can tell and bully and domineer.' 'There is such an opportunity' he said, in summing up, ' owning a billion souls at baptism...to do something remarkable to make this planet better, and its an opportunity that is constantly and arrogantly being avoided.'
Finally, Christopher Hitchens claimed that there was only one way to alleviate poverty in the third world - the empowerment of women - 'Go to Bangladesh, or Bolivia, give women control over their reproductive cycle, throw in a handful of corn if you can, make them not just the beasts of burden and the beasts of childbearing that they have become, and the floor will rise, it just will. It never fails anywhere. Against this one solution, the Catholic Church has set its face: the efforts of the missionary church in the third world mean more people die, not less. It's as simple as that: more famine; more disease; more ignorance; more random and avoidable death.' Presumably this was somewhat pre-formulated, since Ann Widdecombe had already pointed out the reason for high birth rates in the third world was the high rate of infant mortality, and the absence of any system which provided for the support of the old.
Well - Hitchens and Fry carried the day. A poll conducted in the Hall immediately before the debate showed that 1,102 were inclined to vote against the motion that the Catholic Church was a force for good in the world, 678 were for it, and 346 didn't know. At the conclusion of the debate, a further poll showed that 1,876 were against the motion, 268 were for, and 34 did not know.
I was reminded of this debate, and this outcome by a small item on the BBC 4 PM programme broadcast a few days after the earthquake in Haiti. This item mentioned, almost by way of sideline, that despite substantial damage, the Catholic Hospital in Port au Prince had managed to re-open, six days after the earthquake, and of work done in the meantime, often in the streets in front of the hopital, to help the earthquake victims. This was at a time when considerable frustration was being expressed in the western media at the delay in getting help to Haiti. The immediate response in the richer nations had been hugely impressive, but the aid was just not getting through. Yet it struck me as highly significant that the Catholic Hospital was already there before te earthquake: already staffed and already paid for by the money provided, week in, week out, through collection baskets passed from pew to pew, by the thousands of catholics who, in accordance with the obligations imposed by their faith, attend each sunday to worship God, and to bear practical witness to idealistic beliefs.
Made curious, I have several times typed 'haiti -catholic - hospital' into my computer serach engine and I have been inspired and proud of the stories of catholic doctors taking leave from their well-paid jobs, saying goodbye to their spouses and children, and going to Haiti to provide unpaid, expert help in catholic hospitals.
Dr Rick Pitera for example, an anaesthetologist from Livingston, New Jersey, left his hopital, his wife and his three children despite friends and colleagues who begged him not to go. The hospital in Miot to which he went was founded in 1986 by the Montreal Province of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, and is supported by the Knights of Malta. The hospital has been open every day, ever since, and has never turned away people because they couldn't pay. The hospital has 75 beds, but the power supply has always been unstable, and the hospital has to operate without much of the equipment which we, in the West, take for granted. Within 2 and a half days, this hospital with 75 beds and two operating theatres had been turned into a hospital with 300 beds and 4/6 operating theatres. 50 people, most of whom had never worked together before, found themselves working as part of a co-ordinated team. Dr.Pitera described how his most agonising moment came when he had to amputate the foot of a 7 year old girl - the same age as one of his own daughters - he wept as he told the story.
The claims made by those who spoke for the motion that the catholic church was a force for good in the world were not very great. One can admit the historical charges laid against the church, although I think that they are themselves unhistorical, and irrelevant; one can admit that the Church's teachings on human sexuality are completely out of line with secular thinking in the west, although I think that this is a matter of premises, and not conclusions; one can admit the revolting, hypocritical abuse of truth, doctrine, and trust in the behaviour of certain priests towards the vulnerable and defenceless in their care, and I do - and will deal with it elsewhere; one can admit the failures in the hierarachy in being inappropriately merciful - and I will discuss that too; one can admit that the Church does not have a monopoly on charitable thoughts, or charitable words, or charitable deeds - after all, the more the better, and especially of charitable deeds. But talking, like Christopher Hitchens, of the Church 'laughing off' the charges made against it by 'works of occasional charity,' or, like Stephen Fry, of the Church 'constantly and arrogantly' avoiding 'the opportunity to do something remarkable to make this planet better' is biggoted to the point of lunacy.
I know that within a few weeks the flow of money to Haiti will begin to dry up, the resources currently available will be exhausted, the volunteers will begin to pack their bags and go home, or perhaps will be called to help in some other, more immediately pressing, field of human need. But what a comfort it is to know, that in thousands of churches throughout the world, Catholics, whether rich or poor, will continue to put money into the collection boxes to ensure that there will always be a hospital for the poor of Haiti, and that Catholics, at least, will at least have a right to be surprised and perplexed by the absence of immediate help, when the spotlight falls upon them, for those throughout the world who are the victims of what the Bishop of Abuja so concisely ane accurately described as 'human neglect and hostile environments.'
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
The Limits of Reason
One of the things that seems constantly to take people by surprise is that reason is no guarantee of truth. We are continually being told that the validity of one position, and the invalidity of another, is bound to be admitted by all men willing to consider those positions in the light of reason.
A moment's consideration shows that this is far from being the case.
Aristotle, for example, was of of the view that the spermatozoa of black men was itself black. This belief was perfectly reasonable but completely untrue. It doesn't, or course, prove that Aristotle never came across a black man (though it does, on balance, prove that a black man never came across him), but it may equally well be taken to demonstrate that, even in the ancient world, a black man could spot a sucker when he saw one.
More problematic, and less easily verifiable is Voltaire's proposition that 'it is infinitely more useful in a civilised socirty to have even a bad religion than none at all' because 'it is obvious that the sanctity of oaths is necessary, and that we must have confidence rather in those who think a false oath will be punished, than in those who think that they can take a false oath with impunity.' (see Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, sv Athée, Athéisme).
This too, seems a perfectly rational point of view, though it's the sort of thing that scandalises that champion of enlightened atheism, Bishop Richard Holloway.
For over one thousand years, all educated men subscribed to the Ptolemaic system of the universe which posited a celestial arrangement in which the stars were fixed entities in the rotating shell of a heaven with a complex system of crystal tubes along which the planets raced tunefully like brightly coloured balls in in an interplanetary marble run.
It all seems so much nonsense to modern man, of course, but Shakespeare wasn't the only acknowledged genius to take it for granted.
Nevertheless, it was, for a long time, commonly held that mediaeval man believed that the world was flat, and no doubt many did, just as many of its readers still think that The Sun is a source of general illumination.
The theory that the earth was a sphere was probably advanced as early as the 6th Century BC - or BCE, according to the donnish system of dating.
Plato and Aristotle certainly subscribed to the theory that the earth was spherical, but it was the Hellenistic philosopher Eratosthenes, known to his friends as B++, who, proved it geometrically by measuring the angle made at noon on the day of the summer solstice by the shadows of two upright sticks placed 500 miles apart.
Brilliant.
It was Eratosthenes, too, who devised the first armillary sphere, which subsequently evolved to model the intricacies of the Ptolemaic universe. The system was complex, but it was, in its way, beautiful, and it was generally held to testify to the glory and the grandeur of God.
So it is hardly surprising that when Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo began to posit an alternative system they met with considerable resistance. This was not only because man has generally found it more reasonable to believe that the established consensus is correct than what a particular individual claims to have seen through an unusual combination of lenses suspiciously like those used in a pair of spectacles - but also because a system which now appears hideous and unweildly seemed, at the time, and to the unassisted eye, the embodiment of reason and beauty.
The illusions engendered by the romantic cult of the genius have tended to obscure the fact that in nine cases out of ten, the scientific genius concerned has been primarily a genius for observation, and only secondarily for original thought. Such was the case with Galileo Galilei, whose theory as to the movement of the earth depended entirely on the use of a telescope - which the Tuscan seer did not himself invent. The cult of genius also obscures how unreasonable its heroes can be. Galileo, for example, was an arrogant, hot-tempered and vituperative little man who may reasonably be said to have set back the acceptance of his scientific work by serious defects of character and temperament.
Most reasonable people will admit that, where they are not rendered unattractive by bad manners, the views of scientists on subjects outside their competence are harmless, if not charming - rather like the opinions expressed by sports personalities on international affairs or by actors on the subject of morality.
More serious is the way in which scientific ideas have been adopted by self-proclaimed scientific rationalists to provide the basis for heartless and inhuman ideas.
Charles Darwin always refused to speculate in broad terms about the general consequences of his theory for politics, culture and religion, but this did not prevent a host of lesser men from filling the vacuum and using his theories to justify racism, sexism, discrimination, persecution, compulsory euthanasia, enforced sterilisation and genocide.
There was even a German Balt called Reinhold Seeberg who, in the years running up to the First World War advanced what one German historian has called a sub-lutheran 'theology of German Imperialism'. Professor Seeberg's 'God' was, like Odin, a god of strife, who tried and tested the nations in battle. Although an academic, Seeberg volubly championed the German cause in the First World War, and petitioned the imperial government to annex large tracts of Eastern Europe; he never reconciled himself to the Versailles Treaty; he regarded the Weimar Government as the tool of international capitalism; and he welcomed the rise to power of Adolf Hitler as the breaking of a new dawn.
'War' Seeberg maintained, 'is the great judgment of universal history. Some nations rise and some nations fall; the judgment of history is just.' For Seeberg, German defeat in the Great War was no ironic illustration of the proposition because, like many others, he subscribed to the toxic view that the German army had not been defeated in the field, but had been betrayed by an enemy within - Jews, Bolveshiks, or worst of all, Jewish Bolsheviks.
It was Seeberg who composed the elegant latin epigram for the War Memorial to the Graduates of Berlin University which reads 'Invictis Victi Victuri' which, though superficially delphic, is usually translated as 'To the Unconquered from the Conquered who will in time Conquer.'
It must all have seemed quite reasonable at the time.
A moment's consideration shows that this is far from being the case.
Aristotle, for example, was of of the view that the spermatozoa of black men was itself black. This belief was perfectly reasonable but completely untrue. It doesn't, or course, prove that Aristotle never came across a black man (though it does, on balance, prove that a black man never came across him), but it may equally well be taken to demonstrate that, even in the ancient world, a black man could spot a sucker when he saw one.
More problematic, and less easily verifiable is Voltaire's proposition that 'it is infinitely more useful in a civilised socirty to have even a bad religion than none at all' because 'it is obvious that the sanctity of oaths is necessary, and that we must have confidence rather in those who think a false oath will be punished, than in those who think that they can take a false oath with impunity.' (see Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, sv Athée, Athéisme).
This too, seems a perfectly rational point of view, though it's the sort of thing that scandalises that champion of enlightened atheism, Bishop Richard Holloway.
For over one thousand years, all educated men subscribed to the Ptolemaic system of the universe which posited a celestial arrangement in which the stars were fixed entities in the rotating shell of a heaven with a complex system of crystal tubes along which the planets raced tunefully like brightly coloured balls in in an interplanetary marble run.
It all seems so much nonsense to modern man, of course, but Shakespeare wasn't the only acknowledged genius to take it for granted.
Nevertheless, it was, for a long time, commonly held that mediaeval man believed that the world was flat, and no doubt many did, just as many of its readers still think that The Sun is a source of general illumination.
The theory that the earth was a sphere was probably advanced as early as the 6th Century BC - or BCE, according to the donnish system of dating.
Plato and Aristotle certainly subscribed to the theory that the earth was spherical, but it was the Hellenistic philosopher Eratosthenes, known to his friends as B++, who, proved it geometrically by measuring the angle made at noon on the day of the summer solstice by the shadows of two upright sticks placed 500 miles apart.
Brilliant.
It was Eratosthenes, too, who devised the first armillary sphere, which subsequently evolved to model the intricacies of the Ptolemaic universe. The system was complex, but it was, in its way, beautiful, and it was generally held to testify to the glory and the grandeur of God.
So it is hardly surprising that when Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo began to posit an alternative system they met with considerable resistance. This was not only because man has generally found it more reasonable to believe that the established consensus is correct than what a particular individual claims to have seen through an unusual combination of lenses suspiciously like those used in a pair of spectacles - but also because a system which now appears hideous and unweildly seemed, at the time, and to the unassisted eye, the embodiment of reason and beauty.
The illusions engendered by the romantic cult of the genius have tended to obscure the fact that in nine cases out of ten, the scientific genius concerned has been primarily a genius for observation, and only secondarily for original thought. Such was the case with Galileo Galilei, whose theory as to the movement of the earth depended entirely on the use of a telescope - which the Tuscan seer did not himself invent. The cult of genius also obscures how unreasonable its heroes can be. Galileo, for example, was an arrogant, hot-tempered and vituperative little man who may reasonably be said to have set back the acceptance of his scientific work by serious defects of character and temperament.
Most reasonable people will admit that, where they are not rendered unattractive by bad manners, the views of scientists on subjects outside their competence are harmless, if not charming - rather like the opinions expressed by sports personalities on international affairs or by actors on the subject of morality.
More serious is the way in which scientific ideas have been adopted by self-proclaimed scientific rationalists to provide the basis for heartless and inhuman ideas.
Charles Darwin always refused to speculate in broad terms about the general consequences of his theory for politics, culture and religion, but this did not prevent a host of lesser men from filling the vacuum and using his theories to justify racism, sexism, discrimination, persecution, compulsory euthanasia, enforced sterilisation and genocide.
There was even a German Balt called Reinhold Seeberg who, in the years running up to the First World War advanced what one German historian has called a sub-lutheran 'theology of German Imperialism'. Professor Seeberg's 'God' was, like Odin, a god of strife, who tried and tested the nations in battle. Although an academic, Seeberg volubly championed the German cause in the First World War, and petitioned the imperial government to annex large tracts of Eastern Europe; he never reconciled himself to the Versailles Treaty; he regarded the Weimar Government as the tool of international capitalism; and he welcomed the rise to power of Adolf Hitler as the breaking of a new dawn.
'War' Seeberg maintained, 'is the great judgment of universal history. Some nations rise and some nations fall; the judgment of history is just.' For Seeberg, German defeat in the Great War was no ironic illustration of the proposition because, like many others, he subscribed to the toxic view that the German army had not been defeated in the field, but had been betrayed by an enemy within - Jews, Bolveshiks, or worst of all, Jewish Bolsheviks.
It was Seeberg who composed the elegant latin epigram for the War Memorial to the Graduates of Berlin University which reads 'Invictis Victi Victuri' which, though superficially delphic, is usually translated as 'To the Unconquered from the Conquered who will in time Conquer.'
It must all have seemed quite reasonable at the time.
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Tired and Emotional
One of the things that struck me when I went to the Intelligence2 debate at the Methodist Hall on October 18, 2009 was the emotionalism of those arguing against the motion that the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.
Christopher Hitchens positively trembled with indignation as he took the Church of Rome to task for such historical indiscretions as the Crusades, the Inquisition, Slavery, and Anti-Semitism - all of which we may have cause discuss on some other occasion. 'Hitch' demanded apologies all round, and swiped those which the Vatican has already made, like a child taking a trick in a game of Top Trumps, screaming with excitement at the prospect of further tricks to come. How dare the Church preach a system of morals, he thundered, when its own history was a long record of transgression against the rights that we, in our own enlightened times, have enshrined and sanctified in law?
Hitchens' righteous anger was richly complemented by Stephen Fry's tearful self-pity - who, asked Fry, was the Pope to tell him, a homosexual, and proud of it, that his way of expressing his love, his way of expressing sexuality, and - dammit - his way of just having a little bit of fun was 'disordered' and a prelude to eternal damnation? Let everyone be free to believe what they liked in the privacy of their own home, all Stephen asked was to be left alone in the bedroom to do as he would be done by. After all, he asked, who was a sexless, repressed or hypocritical celibate like Saint Augustine to preach to anyone about the joy of sex?
The thing that struck me about these men's emotionalism was how at odds it was with the rationalism which both expressly espoused when they declared that they were the intellectual heirs of 'the Enlightenment'.
Quite what this meant was never made clear, and has always been a bit of mystery to me anyway. After all, putting Voltaire in the same category as Rousseau is rather like comparing Mozart with Beethoven - each of these great men were, roughly speaking, contemporaries, and yet no one but a fool would suggest that their personalities, philosophies or attitudes were remotely similar. Voltaire and Mozart are most alike in their wit, playfulness, and detachment of feeling (which is not in the least the same as its absence). Rousseau and Beethoven were anything but detached or playful, and would have been mortally offended to have been thought so, even if they were not without their own laborious variety of wit.
But Voltaire was nearly always able to find things funny; stupidity, it is true, excited his contempt, particularly when it was allied with cruelty; but on the whole he took the pragmatic view: life was as it was, and the best one could do was to laugh at folly, and avoid situations in which one might become its victim. For Rousseau, being a victim was what it was all about: he was the poor, lonely, put upon prophet living in a hopelessly corrupt and artificial age - the remedy lay in the sincere expression of one's intimate feelings - in short, what de la Rouchefoucauld once bitingly described as 'the bad manners of the young'.
Listen to the voices of revolution, from 1789 until our own day, and they are nearly all of this type - hectoring, sentimental, and completely lacking in humour - immediately identifiable as those of the adolescent sons of boring old Jean Jacques.
How Voltaire would have laughed at them!
How Voltaire would have laughed at the idea that the representatives of one idiotic generation should solemnly apologise to each other for the outdated idiocies of their ancestors.
As for homosexuality, Voltaire regarded it as no more than a passing phase and pretty well the consequence of locking boys up together in single sex schools at a time when most of them looked liked pretty girls anyway. It was something to grow out of as soon as the flower of adolescence faded and more attractive temptations became available to the unspoiled appetites of the very young. For, he added sobrely, 'what seems a charming faiblesse in the youthful Alcibiades is a disgusting travesty when manifested in a Dutch sailor or a Russian muzhik'.
How fortunate for the great man that he is safely beyond being dug up and frog-marched off to apologise for these unnatural, irrational, and hurtful views or, indeed, to have to hear the term 'enlightenment' appropriated to underpin the canting and self-indulgent pomposities of men like Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry!
Christopher Hitchens positively trembled with indignation as he took the Church of Rome to task for such historical indiscretions as the Crusades, the Inquisition, Slavery, and Anti-Semitism - all of which we may have cause discuss on some other occasion. 'Hitch' demanded apologies all round, and swiped those which the Vatican has already made, like a child taking a trick in a game of Top Trumps, screaming with excitement at the prospect of further tricks to come. How dare the Church preach a system of morals, he thundered, when its own history was a long record of transgression against the rights that we, in our own enlightened times, have enshrined and sanctified in law?
Hitchens' righteous anger was richly complemented by Stephen Fry's tearful self-pity - who, asked Fry, was the Pope to tell him, a homosexual, and proud of it, that his way of expressing his love, his way of expressing sexuality, and - dammit - his way of just having a little bit of fun was 'disordered' and a prelude to eternal damnation? Let everyone be free to believe what they liked in the privacy of their own home, all Stephen asked was to be left alone in the bedroom to do as he would be done by. After all, he asked, who was a sexless, repressed or hypocritical celibate like Saint Augustine to preach to anyone about the joy of sex?
The thing that struck me about these men's emotionalism was how at odds it was with the rationalism which both expressly espoused when they declared that they were the intellectual heirs of 'the Enlightenment'.
Quite what this meant was never made clear, and has always been a bit of mystery to me anyway. After all, putting Voltaire in the same category as Rousseau is rather like comparing Mozart with Beethoven - each of these great men were, roughly speaking, contemporaries, and yet no one but a fool would suggest that their personalities, philosophies or attitudes were remotely similar. Voltaire and Mozart are most alike in their wit, playfulness, and detachment of feeling (which is not in the least the same as its absence). Rousseau and Beethoven were anything but detached or playful, and would have been mortally offended to have been thought so, even if they were not without their own laborious variety of wit.
But Voltaire was nearly always able to find things funny; stupidity, it is true, excited his contempt, particularly when it was allied with cruelty; but on the whole he took the pragmatic view: life was as it was, and the best one could do was to laugh at folly, and avoid situations in which one might become its victim. For Rousseau, being a victim was what it was all about: he was the poor, lonely, put upon prophet living in a hopelessly corrupt and artificial age - the remedy lay in the sincere expression of one's intimate feelings - in short, what de la Rouchefoucauld once bitingly described as 'the bad manners of the young'.
Listen to the voices of revolution, from 1789 until our own day, and they are nearly all of this type - hectoring, sentimental, and completely lacking in humour - immediately identifiable as those of the adolescent sons of boring old Jean Jacques.
How Voltaire would have laughed at them!
How Voltaire would have laughed at the idea that the representatives of one idiotic generation should solemnly apologise to each other for the outdated idiocies of their ancestors.
As for homosexuality, Voltaire regarded it as no more than a passing phase and pretty well the consequence of locking boys up together in single sex schools at a time when most of them looked liked pretty girls anyway. It was something to grow out of as soon as the flower of adolescence faded and more attractive temptations became available to the unspoiled appetites of the very young. For, he added sobrely, 'what seems a charming faiblesse in the youthful Alcibiades is a disgusting travesty when manifested in a Dutch sailor or a Russian muzhik'.
How fortunate for the great man that he is safely beyond being dug up and frog-marched off to apologise for these unnatural, irrational, and hurtful views or, indeed, to have to hear the term 'enlightenment' appropriated to underpin the canting and self-indulgent pomposities of men like Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry!
Saturday, 24 November 2007
Forewarnings and Foredawnings
In the introduction to his published sermons (Seeing in the Dark (2005), Darton Longman & Todd, vii), Nicholas Lash tells the reader that his choice of the Blessed Fra Angelico's Agony in the Garden as the book's frontispiece owed, in part, to his publisher's amusement that a book of homilies should be prefaced by a picture showing a congregation fast asleep.
The slumbering apostles are, indeed, at the very centre of this painting. St.Peter, in his gorgeous saffron robes, is the most fully given over to sleep, reminding us that St. Peter was never one to do things by halves. St. John, on the other hand, sits with his elbow on his knee, and his hand against his cheek, in a posture just falling away from gentle meditation, whilst St. James sits with his hand clasped to his forehead in an attitude not far removed from grief.
In the Mystere de Jesus, Pascal movingly observes that it was only in Gethsemane that Jesus can ever be said to have sought the support and companionship of men: 'Jesus seeks some comfort at least from his three dearest friends, and they sleep: he asks them to bear with him a while, and they abandon him with complete indifference, and with so little pity that it did not keep them awake even for a single moment...' But this is not altogether fair. In St.Luke's account of the Agony, the disciples are said to 'have slept for sorrow', (Luke. 22.45), and when Jesus woke them with the words 'The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak' (Matt. 26.41) the remark may be read as more expressive of compassion than condemnation.
Vasari records that Fra Angelico commenced each painting with a prayer, and that he would shed tears while painting scenes of the Saviour's passion. Certainly, the calm and dignity of this fresco seem to stem from a very different reading of scripture from that of the passionate Frenchman.
The three disciples are central to the composition in terms of mass and illumination: St.Peter in particular, seems to glow with light, and the sweep of the contours below the sleeping forms, and the lambent backdrop of the cliff behind them, cocoons them in a womb of light.
It is only after we have dwelt upon these sleeping forms that our eyes seek and find the Saviour, at the top left hand corner of the fresco. This is the darkest part of the painting, and Our Lord seems both distant and remote: His isolation is emphasisied by the trellis, perhaps a sheepcote, that divides Him from the Apostles. Behind the housetops the sky is already turning grey and soon the ministering angel will be gone, and Jesus will return to His sleeping disciples with the words 'Come, let us arise and go, for he that hath betrayed me is at hand.'
So strongly focussed is the painting on the sleeping apostles, that the interior to the right, which takes up so large a part of the fresco, at first seems to have no connection with it. What we ask, are these two women doing here? Their attitude of watchful meditation contrasts strongly with the lassitude of the three disciples. One might think, perhaps, of the wise virgins, who were careful to trim their lamps, so as to be ready when the bridegroom came (Mtt.25.1-12), and one might remember the teaching with which the Saviour concluded the parable 'Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour when the Son of man cometh' (Mtt.25.13) - a text eminently appropriate to the Monastery for which the Blessed Fra Angelico painted the fresco.
In fact, the women are identified by the inscriptions in their encircling haloes as the studious Mary, pictured with a book, and the industrious Martha, her hands joined in prayer. The two played played no scriptural part in the events of the night before the Passion, and we are told by St.John that their home, in Bethany, was two miles from Jerusalem (Jn.11.18). But Fra Angelico knew, and we will soon remember, that they were the sisters of Lazarus, the man in whom Our Lord had given a foredawning of the salvation which He word work through his own death and resurrection.
Fra Angelico is buried in Rome in the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, and on his tomb appear verses which make attractive reading in an age in which creative genius, riches, and works of art are all but idolised:
Non mihi sit laudi, quod eram velut alter Apelles/Sed quod lucra tuis omnia, Christe, dabam:/ Altera nam terris opera extant, altera caelo/Urbs me Joannem flos tulit Etruriae.
That is:
'Let it not be to my praise that I was like a second Apelles/But that I used to give all my earnings, O Lord, to thy servants/For the works in which the World and in which Heaven delight are not the same/The City which bore me, Giovanni, was the Flower of Etruria.'
Thursday, 4 October 2007
What We Do In The Bedroom
Sir Mark Tully has just had published a book called India's Unending Journey: Finding Balance in a Time of Change (Rider, 2007) in which he ticks off the Christian Churches for their adherence to traditional teaching. 'Christianity', he observes, 'has been on the decline in Britain for many years now. If that decline is to be reversed... the Churches have to be more willing to accept uncertainty about some of their moral teachings, to acknowledge that the ways in which people live their lives have changed and that... the Churches must change if they are to remain relevant.' (p.91).
Sir Mark's principle concern in this context is evidently with sex, in which he thinks the Churches are unhealthily interested. 'Even today,' he says. 'I meet people who ask me, ' Why is the Church so concerned about what we do in bed? Why doesn't it care more about what we do when we are out of bed?' This, for Sir Mark, is a rhetorical question, and he offers it no answer: instead he suggests that if the Anglicans were to 'find a way of accommodating the modern research that shows that homosexuality is not a disorder, it would help dispel the image of an institution obsessed by sex. It would also surely bring the Church more into line with the message of a loving God that it preaches. Similarly the Roman Catholic Church must also question its certainty about birth-control and about the celibacy of the clergy. 'What modern people are looking for religion of experience.'
The problem with this kind of preaching is that it tries conclusions with premises. I have no doubt that if the Churches did revise their teachings on certain subjects, they would find themselves more in line with the prejudices of contemporary secular society. The same would no doubt have been true in the days when Christians were a persecuted minority in the pagan Roman Empire. But I am much more doubtful whether the abandonment of principle would reverse the decline in Christianity, since those whom it is designed to impress would probably be indifferent to it, and the only people likely to be alienated would be those who had previously taken the Churches teachings on these matters seriously. The history of the Churches in the last half century has been characterised by initiatives designed to make modern man more at ease within it, and it is at least doubtful whether the adoption of those initiatives have done anything more than to dismay the traditionalists. But the prior question is whether the Churches can or should abandon a large part of their moral teaching and claim, at the same time, to be following in the footsteps of the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Church Fathers.
It seems to me that in every decision the Churches make they have to refer not to the exigencies of contemporary fashion, but to the demands of faith. This means that in every decison of moral principle, the issue is to be considered not from the perspective of Man, but from the perspective God. The centrality of this requirement is perfectly apparently from the first of the two great commandments, which requires us to love God, with all our hearts, and all our souls and all our might. The words are well known, but the passage in which they appear goes on to emphasise them in a number of startlingly detailed provisons that are a lot less so. The words of the commandment, writes the Deuteronomist, are to be constantly in a person's heart; they are to be taught diligently to that person's children; they are to be the subject of their discourse both at home, and abroad, and at rising and at going to bed; they are to be bound as symbols to a person's hands, and upon a person's forehead; and they are to be written on the gates and the doorframes of houses, as, among orthodox Jews, they still are (Deuteronomy 6:5-10).
By contrast, the second of the great commandments, which requires that we love our neighbours as ourselves, is by no means so emphatically expressed, but is tucked away in two half verses (see Leviticus, 19.18, 34). It was Jesus himself who gave this commandment its special emphasis, and he did so in a way that clearly demonstrates its subordination to the first. In Matthew and in Mark Jesus says that the second of the greatest commandments 'is like unto' the first (Matthew 22.39, Mark 12.31), whilst in in St John, Jesus describes as a 'new' the commandment that 'ye love one another, as I have loved you;' thereby expressly linking, our love for our neighbour to, and making it dependent on, God's love for us (John 13.34).
If this is the logic, then our love for our neighbour is to be part and parcel of our love of God, and it is natural that it should be so, for God has created each of us in his image, and it is not right or respectful that we should prefer ourselves to others, or either ourselves or our chosen partners to God. It follows from this that we cannot simply hive off the area of sexual morality, and say that the Churches have no business to pronounce upon the issues which sexual morality raises, nor complain when the teachings which it upholds are based on considerations other than those which are prevalent in the transitory social systems in which we find ourselves.
Of all the generations of men that have ever lived, our generation puts the heaviest emphasis on love as the proper foundation for sexual morality. And yet this emphasis has some ludicrously paradoxical results when viewed from a Christian point of view. So overwhelming has the secular emphasis on love become, that an appeal to it is used to justify adultery, to condone the abandonment of unions sanctified by vows of permanence made before God, and to sacrifice the emotional interests of children to the emotional needs of the supposedly grown up.
When Dante placed the adulterous Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo in the Second Circle of Hell (a punishment that mystified where it did not revolt a number of Romantic poets and composers), his theology was spot on, and so was the punishment, which is to be blown about endlessly in a vortex which reflects the hellish vagaries of undisciplined passion (see Inferno, Canto V, Intesi ch’a così fatto tormento/ enno dannati i peccator carnali,/ che la ragion sommettono al talento').
To a person who accepts the true force of the first commandment, the idea that God has no business in the bedroom is a curious departure from reality - after all, one assumes that one of the doorjambs on which the Deuteronomist would have us pin its text is the one that leads to that very room. The Church's teachings on virginity, celibacy and continence have their roots in the teachings of the Saviour (aee Matthew, 19.12), and of St.Paul (1.Cor.7.7-8, 32-34), and the Church's teachings on birth control and homosexuality, while imposing restraints on sexual intercourse ar certain times or in certain cases, do not actually prohibit love, or non-physical forms of its expression. One may accept such teachings may be inconvenient, in the case of contraception, and make for unhappiness, or even misery, in the case of abortion or homosexuality, but to argue that the teaching should be abandoned simply for that reason carries no spiritual or intellectual weight whatsoever. And it is worth remembering that those to whom the first commandment is a guiding light are more likely to perceive the consitency of the Churches teachings on these matters than those who regard them as little more than an expression of ecclesiastical tyranny in the first place.
Sir Mark's principle concern in this context is evidently with sex, in which he thinks the Churches are unhealthily interested. 'Even today,' he says. 'I meet people who ask me, ' Why is the Church so concerned about what we do in bed? Why doesn't it care more about what we do when we are out of bed?' This, for Sir Mark, is a rhetorical question, and he offers it no answer: instead he suggests that if the Anglicans were to 'find a way of accommodating the modern research that shows that homosexuality is not a disorder, it would help dispel the image of an institution obsessed by sex. It would also surely bring the Church more into line with the message of a loving God that it preaches. Similarly the Roman Catholic Church must also question its certainty about birth-control and about the celibacy of the clergy. 'What modern people are looking for religion of experience.'
The problem with this kind of preaching is that it tries conclusions with premises. I have no doubt that if the Churches did revise their teachings on certain subjects, they would find themselves more in line with the prejudices of contemporary secular society. The same would no doubt have been true in the days when Christians were a persecuted minority in the pagan Roman Empire. But I am much more doubtful whether the abandonment of principle would reverse the decline in Christianity, since those whom it is designed to impress would probably be indifferent to it, and the only people likely to be alienated would be those who had previously taken the Churches teachings on these matters seriously. The history of the Churches in the last half century has been characterised by initiatives designed to make modern man more at ease within it, and it is at least doubtful whether the adoption of those initiatives have done anything more than to dismay the traditionalists. But the prior question is whether the Churches can or should abandon a large part of their moral teaching and claim, at the same time, to be following in the footsteps of the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Church Fathers.
It seems to me that in every decision the Churches make they have to refer not to the exigencies of contemporary fashion, but to the demands of faith. This means that in every decison of moral principle, the issue is to be considered not from the perspective of Man, but from the perspective God. The centrality of this requirement is perfectly apparently from the first of the two great commandments, which requires us to love God, with all our hearts, and all our souls and all our might. The words are well known, but the passage in which they appear goes on to emphasise them in a number of startlingly detailed provisons that are a lot less so. The words of the commandment, writes the Deuteronomist, are to be constantly in a person's heart; they are to be taught diligently to that person's children; they are to be the subject of their discourse both at home, and abroad, and at rising and at going to bed; they are to be bound as symbols to a person's hands, and upon a person's forehead; and they are to be written on the gates and the doorframes of houses, as, among orthodox Jews, they still are (Deuteronomy 6:5-10).
By contrast, the second of the great commandments, which requires that we love our neighbours as ourselves, is by no means so emphatically expressed, but is tucked away in two half verses (see Leviticus, 19.18, 34). It was Jesus himself who gave this commandment its special emphasis, and he did so in a way that clearly demonstrates its subordination to the first. In Matthew and in Mark Jesus says that the second of the greatest commandments 'is like unto' the first (Matthew 22.39, Mark 12.31), whilst in in St John, Jesus describes as a 'new' the commandment that 'ye love one another, as I have loved you;' thereby expressly linking, our love for our neighbour to, and making it dependent on, God's love for us (John 13.34).
If this is the logic, then our love for our neighbour is to be part and parcel of our love of God, and it is natural that it should be so, for God has created each of us in his image, and it is not right or respectful that we should prefer ourselves to others, or either ourselves or our chosen partners to God. It follows from this that we cannot simply hive off the area of sexual morality, and say that the Churches have no business to pronounce upon the issues which sexual morality raises, nor complain when the teachings which it upholds are based on considerations other than those which are prevalent in the transitory social systems in which we find ourselves.
Of all the generations of men that have ever lived, our generation puts the heaviest emphasis on love as the proper foundation for sexual morality. And yet this emphasis has some ludicrously paradoxical results when viewed from a Christian point of view. So overwhelming has the secular emphasis on love become, that an appeal to it is used to justify adultery, to condone the abandonment of unions sanctified by vows of permanence made before God, and to sacrifice the emotional interests of children to the emotional needs of the supposedly grown up.
When Dante placed the adulterous Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo in the Second Circle of Hell (a punishment that mystified where it did not revolt a number of Romantic poets and composers), his theology was spot on, and so was the punishment, which is to be blown about endlessly in a vortex which reflects the hellish vagaries of undisciplined passion (see Inferno, Canto V, Intesi ch’a così fatto tormento/ enno dannati i peccator carnali,/ che la ragion sommettono al talento').
To a person who accepts the true force of the first commandment, the idea that God has no business in the bedroom is a curious departure from reality - after all, one assumes that one of the doorjambs on which the Deuteronomist would have us pin its text is the one that leads to that very room. The Church's teachings on virginity, celibacy and continence have their roots in the teachings of the Saviour (aee Matthew, 19.12), and of St.Paul (1.Cor.7.7-8, 32-34), and the Church's teachings on birth control and homosexuality, while imposing restraints on sexual intercourse ar certain times or in certain cases, do not actually prohibit love, or non-physical forms of its expression. One may accept such teachings may be inconvenient, in the case of contraception, and make for unhappiness, or even misery, in the case of abortion or homosexuality, but to argue that the teaching should be abandoned simply for that reason carries no spiritual or intellectual weight whatsoever. And it is worth remembering that those to whom the first commandment is a guiding light are more likely to perceive the consitency of the Churches teachings on these matters than those who regard them as little more than an expression of ecclesiastical tyranny in the first place.
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