Saint Edmund Campion: Priest and Martyr, Evelyn Waugh
Modern art doesn’t often puzzle or interest me. In fact, it’s only done so once, a couple of years ago. An artist called Tracey Emin was up for an important prize against three men. But she didn’t win it. Someone called Steve McQueen did. I couldn’t understand what had happened. Surely being a woman was worth more than being Scottish, if that’s what Steve McQueen actually was?
Then I saw Steve McQueen on TV and the mystery was solved. He was black. After all, in modern art there’s no question of awards being made on merit. Same in modern literature. Advances in genetics may soon make it possible to design and create an unbeatable candidate for the Booker or Pulitzer Prize, if one isn’t already available. The unbeatable candidate would be female, from an ethnic minority, born and raised overseas, and so on.
That’s why I laugh whenever I hear that an artist or writer is “award-winning”. That says nothing about the quality of what they create, merely about what and who they are and whose buttocks their noses are buried between. Sadly, it has probably always been like that. Chess is the closest human beings have ever come to creating a perfectly fair competition decided purely on merit. Art and literature are too complex and too easily distorted by subjective prejudice and favor to achieve that. All the same, it’s probably true that when someone won a literary award in, say, the 1930s, it was slightly likelier to be deserved than it is today.
After all, Evelyn Waugh published this book in 1935 and won something called the Hawthornden Prize for it, and he certainly deserved to, because it is a beautifully written book:
It was no longer a question of theology, but of morals. Campion could not, like Cheney of Gloucester, affect to recognize in Cecil’s establishment the ancient Church of Augustine and Thomas ŕ Beckett; nor could he, like Grindal, find it probable that the truth, hidden from the world for fifteen centuries, had suddenly been revealed in the last few years to a group of important Englishmen.Waugh’s prose is always clear and often lapidary: that is, suitable for carving on a monument to be read for centuries to come. Rather like, he doubtless thought at the time, the liturgy of the Church in whose honor he was writing. Campion, the Elizabethan Jesuit whose life and gory martyrdom are the subject of the book, would have recognized a Catholic service in 1935 as a direct and barely changed descendant of a Catholic service in 1575. And Waugh believed that another few centuries on a Catholic service would still be recognizable to Campion, because it would still use Latin.
But before those few centuries could pass the Second World War intervened, and the seed it sowed blossomed twenty years on in the Second Vatican Council, which allowed Catholic services to use the venacular of the nations in which they took place. Waugh’s death was very likely hastened by this among many other changes instituted at the time, but in 1935 his confidence in the immutability of the Church and her doctrines was unshaken and the tone of this book reflects that. It is serene and tells of the persecutions visited by Anglicanism on Catholics more in sorrow than anger. Of the persecutions visited by Anglicanism on Catholics, however, it tells not at all. Unless, that is, one is already familiar with the period:
He [William Cecil, chief adviser to Elizabeth I] had not foreseen the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, which had broken the supremacy of the Huguenots …The Huguenots were French Protestants, and the massacre that had broken their supremacy involved the slaughter of hundreds of men, women, and children. Waugh does not mention this, nor the reaction of Pope Pius V, which was to order a medal struck in celebratory commemoration. This omission is quite in order with Waugh’s sympathetic treatment of Pius, who is a great embarrassment to liberal Catholics of the present day and so tends to be a hero to reactionary ones. Indeed, even by 1935 Catholic critics had begun to doubt the merits of Pius, who had become a saint a century after his death:
a disastrous figure, provoking … the bloody ruin of English Catholicism. That is the verdict of sober criticism, both Catholic and Protestant, and yet, as one studies that odd and compelling face which peers obliquely from Zucchero’s portrait at Stonyhurst … a doubt rises, and a hope; had he, perhaps, in those withdrawn, exalted hours before his crucifix, learned something that was hidden from the statesmen of his time and the succeeding generations of historians … that it was only through blood and hatred and derision that the faith was one day to return to England?And although this biography does not allow Waugh the sado-masochistic indulgences of several of his novels, he manages to express his devotion to blood, which was as important in his private psychopathology as it remains in Catholic theology:
The copy of the Summa which Campion was using at this time [his exile in Douai] survives in Manresa College, Roehampton; it is annotated in his own hand and opposite an argument on baptism by blood occurs the single mot prophčte et radieux, ‘Martyrium’.Which Campion duly embraced in one of its most agonizing and unpleasant forms: hanging, drawing, and quartering before an eager crowd that included a young Catholic aristocrat called Henry Walpole, who
secured a front place at Tyburn; so close that when Campion’s entrails were torn out by the butcher and thrown into the cauldron of boiling water, a spot of blood splashed on his coat.Inspired by this, Walpole became a priest himself and suffered the same death thirteen years later at York. The biography is therefore valuable not just for its prose but also for the further insights it offers in the morbid fascinations with death and its concomitants more obviously revealed in Waugh’s fiction. As history it is highly partisan and only very old-fashioned or reactionary Catholics are likely to be comfortable with its strictures and sarcasms at the expense of the Anglican Church.
The Tablet
Libby Purves is a fatuous and egotistical journalist, so it should come as no surprise to learn that she’s a Christian too. A Catholic as it happens, but because she’s a liberal Catholic that doesn’t make much difference. She wrote a prominent op-ed for the March 2000 issue of The Tablet, which, if you’ve not come across it before, is a great and widely respected Catholic weekly. Or rather, it was. That is, it’s still a Catholic weekly, but it’s not great or widely respected any more. Not that it ever should have been widely respected, because conservative theology is just as ridiculous as liberal, although it tends to be better expressed. Libby Purves’ op-ed is a good example of that. She’s writing about live – sorry, “real-time” – religious services on the radio:
There’s something about a real-time sharing of the moment that strikes a profoundly human response.As opposed to a profoundly avine or profoundly asinine response, I suppose. Elsewhere in this issue Nicola Meyrick enriches the spiritual store of the still male-dominated etc, etc, with an article in which, according to the front cover, she “confronts the new Darwinists”. Well, no: she sidles up to them, coughs in an embarrassed sort of way, and murmurs diffidently, “You can’t explain everything with genes, you know”. I’m not going to read the damn thing properly again to make sure, but from a skim through I don’t think she mentions God anywhere. After all, if she did that, she might make a mistake and slip God into something she wrote for the Guardian. Not that I know for sure she ever writes for the Guardian, but I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet.
Apart from that, there are reviews, letters from mad old Irish priests who still take all the mad old nonsense half-seriously, and friendly nods towards the Church of England – the big Christian churches have to stick together nowadays, because they’re getting less big all the time. In fact, as far as I’m concerned the Catholic church in the west is on its death-bed and magazines like the Tablet are recording the last twitches, farts, and dribblings as it slips into oblivion.
The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong
I read this book because I thought I’d be able to sneer at it almost as often as I laughed at it. To my chagrin, though I managed to sneer at it quite a lot, I hardly laughed at all, and worse, I learned a lot from it. As a history of fundamentalism in the three “great” monotheistic faiths – Judaism, Xtianity, and Islam – all I can do is recommend it heartily to anyone with an interest in fundamentalism, particularly in Iran and America.
As an analysis of fundamentalism, and religion in general, however, I don’t recommend it at all, because it shows all the scientific illiteracy, special pleading, and question-begging I’d previously associated with Karen Armstrong. I don’t know who started the fashion for dividing complicated phenomena along glib, either/or lines, but I suspect its popularity among people like Armstrong owes a lot to Nietzsche’s famous division between the Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of art: the spontaneous, intuitive, and ungovernable; and the calculated, rational, and controlled.
Armstrong comes up with a similarly glib division between the roles of mythos and logos in human culture. Mythos consists of the stories that bubble up from the imagination and spirit and give value and meaning to lives whose everyday practical details should be governed by logos, or cold, clear reason. Both mythos and logos express truth, but truth of two entirely different and incommensurable kinds, and because religion is concerned with mythos and politics with logos, woe betide us if we allow the two to mix, for disaster will follow as surely as it does if we mix two antipathetic chemicals.
These disasters, according to Armstrong, are readily apparent in the history of fundamentalism, which is an attempt to yoke timeless mythos to the logos that has flourished in the secular science and politics of modern Europe. I’ll resist the attempt to add proktos to her classification and say instead that her classification is far too simplistic because, among other things, it has no room for kratos, or power and authority.
And it does so despite the examples shrieking from the histories she unfolds. Pre-modern Judaism, according to her, knew the ancient wisdom that prohibits the mixing of mythos and logos, and she doesn’t seem to notice how this is contradicted by the tales she tells of rabbis in sixteenth-century Amsterdam excommunicating secularized Jews who challenged the authority of the Bible.
She also fails to notice the absurdity of her idea that religion, or mythos, cannot intrude on politics, or logos. And vice versa. One’s spirit can be nourished by mythos – for example, by the stories of the Hidden Imam in Shi’ite Islam – but one’s politics should be governed by logos. How is this possible? If one’s morals and behavior are influenced by religion, so will one’s politics be, and so the politics of religious people always have been, as far back as it’s possible to trace. Armstrong herself, despite constantly criticizing the failure of modernism to recognize the truth and value of mythos, is peddling the eminently modernist idea that religion should be regarded as rather like music: supplying emotions and not ideas.
In other words, mythos is “true” in the way that music or food is “true”: it supplies a psychological need just as music supplies an emotional one or food a physiological one. Not that I, as a deeply committed atheist and Antichristian, accept that it does that, in any case. Just as I don’t accept Armstrong’s idea that pre-modern religion was based on mythos rather than logos. The Xtian story that Christ was born of a virgin and rose from the dead is part of Xtian mythos and so, according to Armstrong, cannot be expressed as literal history and given the trappings that accompany literal history: dates, places, artefacts.
And pre-modern Xtians, unlike modern fundamentalist ones, recognized this. Or so she claims. I take leave to doubt it. In fact, I take leave to deny it completely. Although there is a continuous tradition of allegorical interpretation in Xtianity, it was never a very powerful or important one. The medieval church, for example, with a secure grip on both logos and mythos, dispatched large numbers of people into prisons or pyres for disputing its interpretation of the literal details of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, and fundamentalists, far from being misguided modernist innovators expressing imaginative religious “truth” in ways it was never meant to be expressed, stand squarely in that very ancient literalist tradition.
If they are mistaken in applying science, the most successful product of logos, to stories from the Xtian mythos, that is because those stories are wrong as literal, historical truth, not because they were never intended to be treated as literal, historical truth. Armstrong’s understanding of science in fact seems to be feeble to non-existent: she describes Darwin’s theory of evolution as being unsupported by evidence in a way pre-modern Baconian science had not been. Which is just untrue: Darwin had a great deal of evidence for his theory, though he lacked a good mechanism to explain the changes he observed.
And Armstrong’s ignorance of science seems evident elsewhere in the way she ignores the way religious experience is governed by psychology and neurology. Mythos and mythically based ritual may “nourish the spirit”, but they have to go through the body and brain first, which is why the biologically literate reader will see a significance in the following passages that Armstrong entirely overlooks:
The new genre of the Gospel Song transported the audience to ecstasy, so they wept, rocked violently back and forward, and shouted for joy. [pg. 88] … From the very first, Hasidic prayer was noisy and ecstatic; Hasidim would combine their worship with strange, violent gestures … [t]hey used to clap, throw their heads backwards and forwards, beat on the walls with their hands, and sway their bodies to and fro. [pg. 100] … Observers noted that when they [Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful] prayed, they swayed backward and forward, with their eyes tightly shut, their faces contorted and pained, and wailed aloud. [pg. 283]Rhythmic movements affect the chemistry of the brain, and the chemistry of the brain affects the emotions. The worshippers in question, like the biologically illiterate Armstrong, might conclude that their emotions arose from an encounter with the divine, but modern neurology would disagree. Of course, as a card-carrying liberal who regularly appears in the media to explain – or rather, explain away – religion and spirituality, Armstrong would probably react to such a claim by saying that biological explanations miss the point. But the point seems to be that biology accounts for everything quite satisfactorily and that religious claims to put human beings in contact with the divine are false. Religion, like language, is invented by human beings without outside help, and like language it is moulded – and distorted – by politics and human frailties like greed and hatred.
Armstrong, though her insistence that the twain of religious mythos and political logos must never meet is admirably secularist, cannot take the final secularist step of dismissing religious claims altogether, probably because she earns her living by teaching religion in a Jewish college and by writing about religion. Plainly, it would be difficult to do either if she openly repudiated the tradition that she claims to understand better than fundamentalists.
And that is why she fails to recognize certain unpalatable truths about the monotheistic traditions she is discussing:
… other fundamentalists accused the Pentacostalists of superstition and fanaticism; one went so far as to call the movement “the last vomit of Satan.” This vituperative and judgmental strain was one of the most unattractive traits of the new Protestant fundamentalism, and after the Scopes trial, this condemnatory attitude, which is so far from the spirit of the Gospels …Far from the spirit of the Gospels? Pull the other one, Kazza:
Matthew 23:33 Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?Xtianity, like the Judaism it sprang from, is an exclusivist faith that has used its “mythos” to justify vituperation and violence countless times in its history, however often people like Armstrong have bleated from the sidelines that religions should not behave like that. Unfortunately, they do, because they get their hands on kratos: power. In the many centuries between the triumph of Xtianity and the creation of the state of Israel, Jews had very little power over others, but the potential of their faith for violence and hatred remained as great as ever, as was proved after the creation of the state of Israel:John 8:44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it …
This theology of hatred and exclusion was, of course, a distortion of the Jewish faith. The Prophets of Israel, the Torah, and the rabbinical sages of the Talmud had all insisted on the duties of justice and lovingkindness, even to “the stranger” who did not belong to their ethnic group but who lived with them in their land. …Come off it, Kazza:
Numbers 25:5 And Moses said unto the judges of Israel, Slay ye every one his men that were joined unto Baalpeor. 6 And, behold, one of the children of Israel came and brought unto his brethren a Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses, and in the sight of all the congregation of the children of Israel, who were weeping before the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. 7 And when Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose up from among the congregation, and took a javelin in his hand; 8 And he went after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly. So the plague was stayed from the children of Israel.And admittedly, even Armstrong can’t completely ignore the violence and ethnocentrism preached by the Old Testament:
With fundamentalist selectivity, however, Kookists concentrated only on the more aggressive biblical passages, in which God commanded the Israelites to drive out the indigenous people of the Promised Land, to make no treaty with them, to destroy their sacred symbols, and even to exterminate them. (pp. 345-6)Indeed, the fundamentalists are selective, but no more than Armstrong and her fellow liberals are when they go to the Bible to justify their politics. If the Bible is mythos, and meant to nourish the spirit and emotions, why does it contain such graphic accounts of butchery and ethnic cleansing ordered by and rewarded by God?
Armstrong has no answer, and her insistence that fundamentalism is an aberration, rather than what happens when people living in the 20th and 21st centuries take religion as seriously as people in previous centuries did, is a misguided and dangerous one. Religions have always caused death and suffering, and if Xtian heresies like Nazism and Communism caused far more than medieval Xtianity ever did, that is because they had modern technology to use on much bigger numbers of people. If fundamentalist religion got its hands on the same technology it could kill at least as many, and perhaps far more. Indeed, it’s already come close to triggering World War III:
Strategists in Washington agreed that, in the context of the Cold War, when the Soviets supported the Arabs and the United States, Israel, the destruction of the Dome of the Rock could well have sparked World War III. The specter of nuclear catastrophe did not trouble these extreme Kookists, however. (pg. 348)“Kookists” being followers of one Rabbi Kook, believe or not, and these particular Kookists being frustrated in their attempts to destroy the Dome of the Rock only by the fact they couldn’t find a rabbi to bless the proceeding. I don’t think they can have looked very hard.
Just as I don’t think Armstrong herself can have revised this book very hard. It’s not difficult to read, but that doesn’t mean it’s well-written. Armstrong is fond both of clichés and of the bleeding bloody obvious, and combines the two with characteristic aplomb here:
The new scientific, secularist culture of the West had invaded the Muslim world, and it would never be the same again. (pg. 60)You don’t say? Unfortunately, she does, as she says the following:
the nub of raw religiosity that exists beneath the credal formulations of a faith (pg. 179)What on earth is a “nub of raw religiosity”? And what on earth does she mean by the following?
Fundamentalists felt obscurely castrated and profoundly undermined. (pg. 313)Castration is not usually an obscure process, though undermining might well be, so I think those adverbs should change places. Sloppy writing doesn’t necessarily mean sloppy thought, though the two often go together. As here, I think, and I’d like to think that what is valuable about this book – its history of the role of the CIA and Britain in the Islamic Revolution in Iran, for example – was lifted from the work of others. Then I could once again dismiss Karen Armstrong as the complete gobshite I’d long thought her to be. Still, half-a-gobshite is better than none.
The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God?, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
One of the great problems facing those searching for a cure for the HIV virus is that it is very good at mutating to survive whatever new threats are thrown at it. One of the great problems facing those searching a cure for Xtianity is that Xtianity is a lot like that too.
And if the HIV virus causes AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Xtianity causes AIDS too: Acquired Intellectual Deficiency Syndrome. One big difference, however, is that HIV AIDS kills the people infected with it. Xtian AIDS, on the other hand, very often kills people not infected with it. Millions of people have died in religious wars and persecutions for not believing Xtianity’s claims about God sending his only-begotten son to earth to found the one true religion, or for believing them in a heretical way.
If the authors of this book are right, all those millions died in vain. It’s possible that Jesus was a pagan god who never literally existed. But then people have been saying that or something very similar for much longer than this book cares to acknowledge properly. When I had read the first few pages and learnt what its thesis was, I turned to the index to look up “Frazer, James (Sir)”. There was one reference and when I turned to the page in question I found that it was a small one.
It shouldn’t have been, because Freke’s and Gandy’s arguments are founded on what Frazer published in The Golden Bough more than a century ago (in 1890, to be exact). And Frazer’s ideas are said to have been borrowed without due acknowledgment too.
What were they? That there is an age-old tradition in the world’s religions and myths of the dying and resurrected god-man who is sacrificed for the good of his people: Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Atys, Mithras, Dionysus, et alii. The crucifixion and resurrection of the god-man Jesus Christ fit suspiciously well into this tradition, as do his birth from a virgin and his miracles.
These ideas, you might think, posed rather a threat to the credibility of Xtianity, for they were based on the fact that the most important features of Xtianity were in existence long before Christ. Happily, however, Xtians had two good responses to this undermining of the foundations of their faith. One, by far the more effective, was simply to ignore it. The other was to say that prefiguration of Xtian doctrine in paganism was precisely what one should expect – the famous Xtian apologist C.S. Lewis, for example, said it was God preparing the way for Christ by allowing pagans to have fragments of the Truth.
In other words, as Voltaire once pointed out, faces are clearly designed for spectacles. Freke and Gandy don’t accept that argument – no sensible person should – and have taken Frazer’s ideas further by suggesting not merely that Xtianity plagiarized paganism but that Xtianity was invented altogether, as a Jewish version of the pagan mystery cults of the dying and resurrected god-man. In other words, Jesus Christ never existed, and literalist Xtianity is rather like a practical joke that got out of hand and started to be taken seriously.
And they certainly produce some compelling evidence to support this claim. There is very little evidence from contemporary or near-contemporary sources of the life of Christ, and some of that is definitely forged. We really know suspiciously little about Christ from non-Xtian sources, and those non-Xtian sources have of course come down to us through many centuries of Xtianity. Huge amounts of evidence are now lost to us, almost certainly for good, though there is always the chance that a buried cache of texts will turn up again like the famous Dead Sea Scrolls or the much less famous Nag Hammadi library.
This library, a collection of gnostic papyri found in the Egyptian desert in 1945, is another of the threats that the Xtian virus has easily surmounted. It proved that Xtianity had been far, far more diverse in its early days than the literalist churches had taught. The traditional view was, nonetheless, that Gnostic forms of Xtianity were heretical divagations from the pure teachings of Christ. Freke and Gandy suggest instead that the literalist churches have got it completely the wrong way round: Gnostic Xtianity was the original that literalist Xtianity corrupted.
And it’s here that they come up with one of their few original ideas: that St Paul, far from being the paragon of orthodoxy and scourge of heresy he is now presented as, was himself a Gnostic. Again, they produce some good evidence for it. Paul’s letters are suspiciously vague on the details of Christ’s life so lavishly set forth in the Gospels, and Paul uses some specifically Gnostic words and terminology: drawing a distinction between “spiritual” and “pneumatic” knowledge, for example, and speaking of antinomianism and the Elect.
But Freke and Gandy overlook a fact that they are at some pains to establish elsewhere in the book: that Gnosticism was tolerant and inclusive and, to the horror of literalist Xtians, would often allow women to take a full place in worship and preaching. Paul doesn’t seem at all Gnostic by those standards:
1 Corinthians 14:34 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. 35 And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.But then if the rest of the New Testament is anything to go by, those might not be Paul’s own words. One of the most entertaining aspects of this book is its discussion of how enthusiastically literalist Xtians, in the defence of Truth and Brotherly Love, have forged and falsified their own holy texts to attack their opponents. Some of the letters attributed to Paul are almost certainly not his, for example, and the Gospels have been edited and amended to create a more orthodox picture of Christ’s life and travels.
I can laugh at it all, but many haven’t been able to, because they’ve suffered from the power that literalist Xtianity was able to get its soon-to-be-bloodstained hands on. Freke and Gandy argue that the triumph of a literalist version of Xtianity was inevitable, because Gnosticism was too tolerant and pacific to defend itself effectively.
I agree, but I don’t agree with them that it is now time to return to that early Gnostic form of Xtianity and find the Christ that it is inside us all. The best thing to do with the virus of Xtianity, or any other religion, is to keep away from it and not be infected. Gentle Gnosticism turned into savage Catholicism and any irrational belief based on the supernatural has the potential to undergo the same mutation. Some are more likely than others to do so, however, and Xtianity is one of them. I look forward to the day when it, like the AIDS virus, is gone for good but I don’t think that The Jesus Mysteries is going to be one of the nails in its coffin.
Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition, by Simon Whitechapel. Creation Books, 2003. 192 pp. $14.95. Reviewed by Sebastian Perry.
This is a book that wears its heart on its sleeve. Part of a “Blood History Series” that includes such titles as Caligula: Divine Carnage and The Bloody Countess, Flesh Inferno is a lurid exposition of the grislier aspects of Catholicism’s history. Avowing from the start his contempt for the Catholic Church, Simon Whitechapel sets out to show how she is the “Mother of Abominations” (5) and only quantitatively rather than qualitatively different from Nazism in the persecution of her opponents. Along the way, he discusses subjects ranging from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and the writings of Sir Thomas Browne to modern psychological research, behavioural conditioning, game theory and mitochondrial DNA, all in his characteristically incisive and polished prose style.[1] Among the writers he quotes are Machiavelli, C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Lytton Strachey, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Marquis de Sade. Impressive as this eclecticism may be, the result is a narrative at times diffuse and unfocused. A mention of the Host, in the context of the popular belief that Jews regularly desecrated it, prompts a list of seven graphic examples of wafer-defilement from The 120 Days of Sodom, apparently because this will help us “gain some understanding of the horror” (41) of such an act to a devout Catholic. These and other quotations seem to have been included for their own sake rather than that of the argument. Another distraction is his maddening preoccupation with etymology. In places it can be illuminating, as when he discusses the link, obscured in modern English, between Ioudas (Judas) and hoi Ioudaioi (the Jews) in John’s Gospel. Elsewhere, however, his philological enquiry is as exhausting as it is exhaustive. Is it of particular importance or interest to note that Domingo de Guzmán’s surname means “good man” (27) or that Torquemada’s combines the Latin imperative, “torture,” with the Spanish word for “burnt” (51)? Does even the most ignorant non-Latinist need to be told that a spectacle “literally means something to look at” (66)? Sherlock Holmes’s method was “founded upon the observation of trifles”[2]: Mr Whitechapel similarly manages to wring deep significance from the most trivial of details. Thus, among the “uncanny” (33) resemblances between Catholicism and Nazism is the fact that members of the Inquisition and the Gestapo were both clad in black. One is inclined to respond with the words of Herod in Wilde’s Salomé: “It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.”
But the above are minor irritations, compared to the book’s chief intellectual failing: its astonishingly reductive and scornful attitude to religion. Christianity is described, with a nod to Richard Dawkins, as a “mental virus” (17); Judaism is later characterized as “a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder” (109). Actually, I’m being rather disingenuous. To anyone even cursorily familiar with Simon Whitechapel’s opinions, the arguments of this book will hardly come as a shock. What is surprising is the blunt way in which they are expressed and the minimal effort taken to defend or explain them. This passage provoked the largest number of marginal exclamation marks:
Christian morality is in fact no kind of morality at all: it is based on a simple calculus of benefit and loss that appeals not to abstract concepts of good and evil but to pure self-interest. In Christian doctrine, one does not do good and avoid evil as ends in themselves but as ends [sic] to gaining a reward and escaping a punishment. (90)The drawback to this kind of polemic is that it only caters to those who share the author’s opinions. Anyone not already convinced that religion is the radix omnium malorum is unlikely to be won over by such poorly explained assertions. Of the few Christians with the inclination or stomach to read Flesh Inferno, I doubt that any will recognize in it their religion as they actually live and experience it. “Christianity,” the author opines, “like all religion, is now and has always been a Bad Thing” (6). That in itself is debatable, but the possibility that for many centuries it was a Necessary Thing, or at least an Inevitable Thing, is never acknowledged.
Despite being a history book, this is an oddly a-historical work. It makes ample use of contemporary sources but is somehow entirely lacking in a sense of period. The narrative is pervaded by a rationalist disdain that seems to preclude any possibility of empathy with its subjects. One does not get the impression that the author cares any more for the victims of the Inquisition than for the men who tortured them. They are all contemptible entries in his catalogue of religious folly. And while it is grudgingly acknowledged in the preface that recent research has shown the death-toll of the Inquisition to be much smaller than had been previously thought, no attempt is made in the course of the book to place the Catholic Church’s activities within the context of the (often far bloodier) practices of other churches and secular authorities: “I agree that numbers and methods are very important as matters of objective historical fact, but beyond that my reaction is: so what?” (6). Indeed, putting the slaughter in proportion would hardly suit his anti-Papist agenda or live up to the sensationalist promise of the front cover. Therefore we get mealy-mouthed equivocation — “The Inquisition killed as many as it had to, and if it had had to kill many more it would have done so” (105) — and a virtual exculpation of Protestantism (6, 152) that is hard to justify, given its own record of atrocities.
All this is a pity, because there are truths in this book that many have yet to acknowledge: that complacency about the Inquisition among modern-day Catholics is reprehensible; that the Holocaust did not spring ex nihilo but grew at least partly out of centuries of institutionalised Christian anti-semitism; that the Catholic Church has still not admitted to wrongdoing in these matters; that theocracies are every bit as undesirable as secular totalitarian regimes. But, marred as it is by such a virulent anti-Catholic animus, Flesh Inferno will invite only derision from the people in whom it should provoke the most thought. Perhaps one day Simon Whitechapel will write a book that engages in debate with Christians and does not treat them as laboratory mice suffering from assorted pathological afflictions. In the meantime, I fear he will only be preaching to the converted.
Notes
[1] There is one curious lapse: the present-day Church’s attitude to the Jews is described as “anilinguing” (114) and then as “arse-licking” on the following page. Surely this isn’t what Fowler meant by “elegant variation”?
[2] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Bascombe Valley Mystery” (1892).
Work Defended
Behold, my desire is, that the Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a book! Job 31:35I don’t know how much attention the psychology of criticism has received, but from my own experience I know that one of its most important functions can be as a vehicle for one’s own ego. I also know that I should hate to make a career of it, partly because it’s so intellectually limited and partly because I should feel like a parasite: feeble as an original author may be, he is at least making his name in what might be called his own write. Fortunately for criticism, many thousands of young people are unaffected by these qualms and one of them carved a minor notch on his critical belt when he reviewed my book Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition in a previous issue of the newsletter. The book itself wasn’t very important to me: I’m not a historian and it was written very quickly after I had read a total of three books on the period. The sensationalist title and blurb were not mine and the publisher was very annoyed that the text did not match them.
Despite this, the review did irritate me, though not so much for its condescension, which backfired rather badly at one point, as for its dishonesty. When an author, even a feeble one, opines that “Christianity, like all religion, is now and has always been a Bad Thing”, he hopes that his educated readers will recognize the quotation and understand the self-deprecatory joke. Sadly, Mr. Perry seems to have done neither. However, he must surely have recognized the joke in describing parallels between Catholicism and Nazism as “almost uncanny”, but quoting the phrase in full would hardly have suited his anti-anti-Papist agenda, which is presumably why it appeared merely as “uncanny”. [SP’s suggestio falsi by suppressio veri was also at work in his failure to note that, after calling Catholicism the “Mother of Abominations”, I called Judaism the “Grandmother of Abominations”.]
The accompanying dismissal of color psychology as “the most trivial of details” is another example of the intellectual narrowness of literary criticism, but then that is one reason it is in the process of invasion and occupation by a group of wanton post-modernists who will bring it to speedy dissolution.* Fortunately, anyone even cursorily familiar with Mr Perry’s intellectual history will know that he is a true son of the modern Church, in that his opinions are rather like pre-modern London buses: if you don’t like one, don’t worry, because another will be along in a minute. There is hope for him yet, though there is not, I’m afraid, for the modern Church or for literary criticism. But please note that this is less a “blunt assertion” than a blunt prophecy: I give them both twenty years.
*N.B. Another quotation.