Savages

Savages. Often 'naked'. Used to be a cliche', worthy of Bouvard and Pecuchet. Now a defunct stock phrase, owing to PC. But a photo in the Evening Standards made me smile. It shows an elderly British couple flanked by two African friends in Kenya. The Africans wear shirts and trousers, as self-respecting, civilised human beings. But the two Brits are semi-naked, as if on a beach. The contrast is striking.
Quite apart from the rather pathetic, ludicrous effect resulting from a couple of elederly folks displaying their sagging flesh, it made me reflect: 'There is no doubt who are the savages now'.

Storms over China

‘In Xinjiang, Uighurs and other Muslim groups struggle against Sinification’. A line from page 255 of The Clash of Civilisations. That controversial Zeitgeist book, mentioned only in ritual refutations and shrill anathemas. But Professor Huntington was right. The brave people of East Turkestan are indeed rising in revolt against forced assimilation by the Chinese. The Uighurs, a people whose name Westerners do not even know how to pronounce correctly, fight on to defend their culture and religion. Like little David taking on Goliath the giant, the battle seems pathetically unequal. Perhaps 15 million Uighurs versus 1.300 million others, mostly Chinese. But here the priest thinks of Hegel’s phrase, the cunning of Reason. It means events that occur at crucial times in human history. Causing tremendous upheavals that nevertheless result in the triumph of freedom. Who knows whether the neglected, defenceless Uighurs be not one of them? Are they perhaps the spanner in the works? The joker in the pack? The tiny, insignificant speck of grit that will grow and grow and eventually cause the Chinese tyranny to break up and disintegrate? Only God, the mysterious, Supreme Reason, knows...
The Uighurs are the forgotten Muslims of China. An ancient people. They appear in the medieval Travels of Marco Polo. Actually, the great Jesuit missionary to China, Matthew Ricci, wondered why Marco Polo’s names of Chinese cities are not Chinese names. After he met a Uighur man, the lights dawned: Marco had approached China via and with the Uighurs. A Turkish people who speak a Turkish language. So many of Marco Polo’s names are Uighur names, not Chinese. And the Uighur chap appeared to Father Ricci visibly non-Chinese in looks. His eyes were not narrow, almond-eyed, but round, like a European. Nor did the man think of himself as Chinese. Interestingly, he would not eat pork. Because he was a Muslim. Blood is thicker than water, eh?
When I visited East Turkestan, back in 1991, on a trip from Ankara where I was the turbulent chaplain, I was struck by how many words heard in the local markets sounded like Turkish. So I tried out my modest Turkish. Faces beamed. People festively gathered about me, as if I was a long lost relative happily come back. They assumed I was a Turk. A large fellow with a wispy beard even pointed to his daughter whom he said I should have married. (An offer I was sorry to refuse, as the girl was rather pretty.) But when I asked about their lives some lowered their voices and looked about, as if fearing being overheard. Some Chinese-looking men hovered nearby, clearly spying on us. My would-be father in law spoke enough broken English to convey his meaning: ‘We are not free. They are killing our culture. We can’t practice our religion. Can’t go to Haj. Young people are not allowed to the mosque’, he confided, sotto voce. Others agreed.
China is desperate to crush the Muslim Uighurs. They realise how Uighur resistance might encourage other minorities to rise up. So the Communist regime squeals hysterically about separatism and terrorism and Islamism. But various human rights organisations speak of brutal repression, religious and cultural. Furthermore, the Beijing dictatorship has altered the ethnic make-up of the population of East Turkestan, by pouring in millions of immigrant Chinese, while forcing natives to emigrate. Uighur girls especially, lured away with false promises. Talk of ‘ethnic identity’ makes people uncomfortable in the West, but for the Uighurs it means a very simple thing: survival. The survival of their people, their culture and their religion.
Back in March I heard a talk given by Uighur Enver Tohti at Abrar House in London. (Enver! Huh! Dig it? Shades of Enver Pasha and his Panturanism dream!) He said that East Turkestan has been the home of Uighurs of 2000 years. A free and independent country for most of them. But it was only in 1876 that the Manchurians succeeded in invading the country, butchering a million people. The Manchurians renamed their conquest Xinjiaing. Ever since, the country has been under military occupation. Still, the Uighurs never relinquished their hope of independence. An Islamic republic was proclaimed n 1933, and again a Uighur state existed briefly before Mao took over after WW2 and the Communists invaded in 1949 and again changed the country’s name. Today East Turkestan languishes under an alien colonial rule. The people’s sufferings have been ‘unimaginable’, Enver said. And he spoke of cultural genocide. But despite all the dangers involved, the Uighur spirit remains indomitable. It culminated in the spontaneous uprising in the capital, Urumqi, last July. ‘The worst riots since Tiananmen Square’ a journalist called them. Apposite comparison, as a similar, cruel repression followed. Now six Uighur men have been sentenced to death for the revolt. My heart goes out to the young men, whom I saw on TV in the dock, held by Chinese cops. An obscene mockery of justice. It should be the blood-drenched gangsters in Beijing to hang, methinks.
China is plugged as a financial wonder of all wonders. An unbelievable success story. Soon, it may become the world’s largest economy. The biggest producer of industrial and agricultural products. Its teeming cities seem the apotheosis of post-modernity. Immense skyscrapers, glamorous shopping malls, nouveau riches, trendy-looking, Westernised young people, wealth and prosperity galore, all that jazz. Yet the Communist regime is insecure. Above all, it fears religion. It keeps savagely persecuting the harmless Falung Gong practitioners. (Even doing breathing exercises is a threat to tyrants, apparently.) It has formed a ‘patriotic’, alternative Catholic Church, muzzled and subservient to Communist Party clap-trap. Significantly, the Hong Kong Cardinal Zen Zekiun has exhorted all Chinese Catholics not to kow-tow to Beijing. Protestant groups also languish under many disabilities. But it is Islam, a religion on the march, which could well prove to be the nemesis of the heirs of Mao’s Long March, insh’allah.
The cunning of Reason. Marxist-Leninist dogma, for Marxists the intellectual and concrete incarnation of Hegel’s Reason, saw religious beliefs as doomed to gradual, final extinction. National sentiment, too, was prophesied to be on the wane, to be replaced by a universal classless society, an undifferentiated, maybe miscegenated, amorphous humanity. The old Soviet Union was meant to be a prelude to that. All nonsense, mercifully now defunct. As the Uighur heroic resistance shows, the divine, transcendent Reason we call God may have the last word.

'Age generally make men more tolerant; youth is always discontented'. Thus contends Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Well, I certainly differ from Hegel's generally wise oldies. I am definitely not growing more tolerant, in the sense of being more contented. Quite the opposite. The boy at heart in me, perhaps. The adolescent. But is that bad? The old today hardly mirror the virtues of Biblical patriarchs. The glorious discontent of youth may be preferable to the stodgy, safe maxims of today's old codgers. As to tolerance, what is it? And is it really a virtue?
Maybe Catholic writer Paul Claudel got closer to finding the answer when he said: 'La tolerance? Il y a des maisons pour la tolerance!' Quite sharp. 'Maison de tolerance' is the old French name for a brothel. So Claudel was saying that tolerance is a kind of prostitute. Like prostituting yourself to ideas that seem wise and acceptable but are actually pernicious. And of course getting quite well paid into the bargain...
Be that as it may, I am determined to stay discontented. Like Count Pococurante in Voltaire's Candide. But, unlike Voltaire's character, having some good reasons to be discontented. The chief reason being that I am a Christian.

Hell

Hell is ugly people.

Marx, Philosophy, Onanism

Marxism, they say, is dead. But Marx's intellectual brilliance lives on. Last night, dipping into 'The German Ideology', I came across this searing remark under the heading Philosophy and Reality:
'Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to each other as masturbation and sexual love'.
A thought that should be meditated on day and night by all the self-abusers who teach in philosophy departments anywhere in our moth-eaten Western world. A thought that harks back to Marx's devastating XI thesis on Feurbach: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various way; the point is to change it.'
Academy philosophy leaves everything, the world, as it is. 'The point is to change the world'.
Huh! That's it. True philosophy is praxis. What Ali Shariati, I think, claimed about Islam. A religion of praxis. And the priest, this marginal, obscure Christian, makes the same claim for the Logos, for Christianity: 'We must change the world.' Christ came to set the old order on fire!
Dig this: onanism was condemned by God in Genesis. Marx was right...

President Ahmadinejad's Speech and I

I have just by chance dug up again my Ahmadinejad jottings. They had gone missing. I mean, the notes I jotted down when Iran's President spoke back in early June. A few days before the much disputed elections. I had been invited to attend the ceremonies in memory of Ayatollah Khomeini. They included being addressed by this notorious enfant terrible.
After being searched - no camera allowed - we are ushered into a spacious hall. Sit on comfortable leather armchairs. Behind the podium, the Iranian flag. Colours of which remind me of the Italian tricolore.
I sit near a small, friendly chap from Kuwait, wearing flowing Arab dress.
After listening to readings of Qur'anic verses, and a Syrian female declaiming I know not what in Arabic, we sit for about an hour and chatted. Until, suddenly, Ahmadinejad makes his entry, from a side door/
All hell breaks loose. Like a pious Southern Italian crowd might do in the presence of Padre Pio. People rush to hug him, kiss him, shout at him. Eventually, things quietened down.
The President is not a bad-looking chap. In fact, he looks far better in reality than in the photographs you see in the media. His visage is pleasant and and his expression affable. He wears grey trousers, a nondescript jacket and an open-necked pale blue shirt.
Here is a sample of what he said (after invoking the Hidden Imam), as I took it down, though I can't swear these are his exact words - I mean, as I heard them through the simultaneous interpreter:
'The capitalist system, liberal democracy, the Marxist system - they all were opposing man'
"Liberal ideas have reached a dead end.'
'Ayatollah Khomeini came to hoist the banner of human dignity.'
'Democracy and Liberalism: they have two major shortcomings: 1) exclude the masses from real participation. Power is restricted to a few people. 2) Erosion of human values and ideas, eg promotion of homosexual behaviour.'
'Liberalism also is on the ash-heap of history.'
'Liberal ideas are based on Satanic concepts.'
'Liberal philosophy has reduced people to animal status.'
'The way between economy and Heaven has been cut-off.'
'The best rulers in the world are the most pious.'
'Jesus will come back.'
'Religion in the West is pushed out of the public arena.'
'The holocaust is a historical deception.'
'The Ghaza bombardment...a cold-blooded atrocity.'
'Why do they call the Palestinians terrorists? Because, when attacked, they defend themselves.'
And much else.

I have recently written an open letter to Ahmadinejad, so I won't repeat what I said. Basically, I invited him to be another King Cyrus. To be nice to the Jews and not to attack them. Insh'allah, he will heed my words.
As to his views on liberal democracy, they look remarkably like the views of Pope Pius IX in the 'Syllabus', a list of various ideological errors fashionable in the 19th century.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose!

A Nun's Silence

A Roman Catholic nun being interviewed today Sunday at lunchtime on BBC Radio 4. Sister Catherine Cowley. Prior to her vocation, she was in banking. Now she is based at the Convent of the Assumption, in Kensington Square. (My old Parish. She was almost a parishioner of mine. Huh!)
Sister Catherine, who does not wear a wimple or any such demode' religious trappings, sounds quite sensible. She spoke many reasonable and, yes, wise things. About the market and ethics. How the market cannot claim to be immune from ethical criteria. Greed. The common good. And so on.
There is nothing in what Sister Catherine said that I could fault. In fact, I agree with what she said. Still, there is something that bothered me about her. Not about anything she said but what she did NOT say. What was that?
She did not, even once, mention God or Christ.
Maybe I am being unfair, extreme, obstreperous (well, that me, folks!) but this I know: a nun who does not mention God is no good.

Ibn Zina

Hua Ibn Zina! let out in utter disgust my Iraqi friend Ahmed. Ibn Zina – not the politest expression in the hallowed Arabic language. He meant Tony Blair. Ahmed has big feelings about the former British PM. ‘Frank, the nasty Ibn Zina is going to be president of the European Union. Ya Allah! How low have you Europeans sunk! You can’t allow it to happen!’

Dear Ahmed, actually if phoney Tony does get the job, the looming, centralised super state, the Moloch called the EU, would get the boss it deserves. Remember - Moloch was a blood-drenched idol to whom Canaanite children were offered in sacrifice. Dig the analogy?’

The day after his friend’s outburst the priest was in Oxford. In the beautiful chapel of Keble College. There hangs Pre-Raphaelite artist Holman Hunt’s painting, The Light of the World. One of England’s most celebrated religious works. Shot through with spiritual symbolism, it shows Christ as Lux Mundi. Like in the Book of Revelation, the Light of the World stands at a door and knocks. ‘Let me in’ Christ begs. The door is that of the human soul, encrusted with ivy and weeds, signifying the multitudinous sins which obstruct man’s salvation. Behind the Saviour’s crowned head the bright morning star is the harbinger of sunrise, the dawning of a new era, bringing humanity glad tidings of liberation from death and evil. A’adhim!

There is however a second light in the painting. A bright one, streaming out of the lantern Christ carries. Pious cryptographers say it means the light of conscience. The conscience of sin, that is. Without which there can be no repentance and no redemption, either.

The penny dropped. The light did indeed dawn for me. I realised what is the chief problem with Blair. Not that he sinned. Only prigs and hypocrites are sanctimonious about individual faults. Sinning is universal. But so is forgiveness. If he admits his guilt, God will forgive even an Ibn Zina. (Indeed, what fault could a child have if was born a ‘child of adultery’?) If the sinner shows genuine metanoia, the Christian term for a true change of heart and mind, God will hug him back. But nothing indicates the light of conscience has ever dawned for Blair. Instead, his inner sky is still covered up in darkness. A dark that seems to go on and on. No daybreak for him. But then no forgiveness either. And so no redemption.

After he resigned as PM, Tony joined the Catholic Church. Well, why not? ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’ says Christ. But traditionally a conversion to Catholicism often entailed the embracing of a stricter rule of life. Consider the Plantagenet King Henry II. At his instigation, four Norman knights entered Canterbury Cathedral and slaughtered that ‘turbulent priest’, Archbishop Thomas Becket. A sacrilege that outraged all Christendom. Henry quickly showed his remorse by doing penance barefoot at the martyr’s tomb. He also submitted himself to a vigorous scourging by Becket’s monks. An exemplary atonement which edified the peoples of medieval Europe. Now, I would not expect Blair to stand in central Baghdad and subject himself to an avalanche of shoe-throwing by irate Iraqis – though I would enjoy the spectacle. That would be a touch too theatrical. Still, the man has shown no sign whatever he has repented of his participation in the unjustified aggression on Iraq, with all the ensuing deluge of evils for that unhappy country. Worse, it seems he now intends to ‘reform’ the Catholic Church. That he desires to make it a ‘progressive church’. To conspire to turn it into a weak and feeble and spineless outfit, like the loose, permissive Church of England which he has abandoned. Infernal cheek! After having wrecked his country’s social and moral fabric – his government was the most anti-Christian British government of modern times - this Ibn Zina wants to corrupt the true church. La samaha Allah! If that isn’t demonic, what is?

Yes, Christ stands at the door and knock. He craves to come in and enlighten the soul with the true light of redemption. Note that in Holman Hunt’s painting the door has no handle on the outside. A clever touch to convey the point that God does not force himself unto the sinner. Instead, he expects a free, felt response. The inner light, the light of conscience should generate that reaction. People these days tend to appeal to conscience in self-exculpation, rather than in self-accusation. A worrying tendency. But it is true that conscience can at times be degraded. Heinrich Himmler, the dreaded SS Reichsfuehrer, once witnessed a concentration camp execution. He fainted. When came to, he reproached himself. ‘I must steel myself against such unmanly emotions’, he said. Clearly, the original light of Himmler’s conscience had been tragically darkened by the wicked National Socialist creed. In Blair’s case...well, the Labour Party can’t be that bad. Besides, Ibn Zina has spoilt even that. His New Labour bears only the faintest relation to the noble, generous tradition of British humane socialism. He and his bunch of squalid adventurers have polluted that, too.

You don’t have to visit Oxford to admire Hunt’s The Light of the World. A bigger version is in London. In St Paul’s Cathedral. Where last week a memorial service took place for fallen British soldiers. Blair was there. Rowan Williams bleated a little criticism aimed at you know who. Better than nothing. But the Archbishop missed a great homiletic chance. He should have pointed out the picture that hangs nearby - The Light of the World. The light that comes into the world to enlighten every man. The light that shines in the darkness – and the darkness does not overcome it. And he should have intimated to his congregation that the light of conscience is there to remind us of the consciousness of sin. A sin which cries out for repentance, for atonement, for genuine, real penance.

‘Great, Frank! You should be the Archbishop of Canterbury!’ emotes Ahmed.

No, dear friend, I don’t think I should. I am a tad too turbulent for that.

Views of Hell

Hell conjures up different pictures for different people. For Swedenborg Hell is an abominable stench. It is also littered with rundown shacks, dunghills and shabbily dressed individuals.
For Sartre, notoriously, Hell is other people.
For Svidrigailov, a libertine in Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, Hell - or rather, eternity - is a small room, filled with spiders.
For Dante it is an underground prison, containing various torture chambers.
For me, - this is tentative - Hell is, I think, a place filled with noise. Schopenhauer said that intelligent people are very sensitive to noise. I am not particularly intelligent, alas, but noise really disturbs me. My immediate neighbours right now are having some extensive works done. So I have plenty of noise close by. I really do dislike that very much.
I also dislike people playing their walkman music too loud in the Tube - I'd love to beat them on the head when they do that.
I would not however do what Schopenhaur did to the lady who was making a noise on his landing. He beat her up and threw her downstairs. No, never. Not to a lady. Very bad, especially for a philosopher like old Arthur, who built his ethical system on compassion.
Hell - not a pleasant subject, I admit. Heaven is much more suitable for meditation.
I cannot however state what Heaven is like for me, though I have a very definite picture. It would not be very wise.

Chinese Dilemma

Thinking about young atheist Nick Barrett's comment on his blog. He such an edifying godless boy. Always full of impeccable PC thoughts. Not all that bad. Eg how we should be concerned about the starving around the world, rather than for dramatic accidents like planes crashing and so on. But imagine this scenario: you are granted one million pounds. To get them, you must press a button. One million quid will show up on your normaly piffling bank account. Only, at the same time a Chinese person will drop dead somewhere in faraway China.
China - more than one billionpeople. A veritable anthill. None of whom you know. One ant less - what difference would it make, eh?
Young Nick would be able to do so much good with that million pounds. Hel many starving people, for example. And pressimg a button...it isn't like Raskolnikov, having to do the deed yourself. Messy. Awful. Risky. This is painless, clean. Easy.
Why not do it? What arguments would count against pressing that button, I wonder?

Crime of Suicide

Stumbling through a pathless thicket, you absent-mindedly break a twig off a tree. Then you freeze. In agony, the tree trunk is crying out: ‘You have torn my limb away! Have you no pity?’ Astonished, you behold thick, dark blood dripping away from the broken branch. It is true. The tree is alive!
‘You’ are in fact the poet Dante. Making his way through the second level of the seventh circle of Hell. In a rough wood, Dante comes across the shades of suicides. Changed into the shapes of trees – quite rightly, in the Sorrowful Kingdom those who in life have done violence to their own bodies are denied a human shape. Moreover, fierce harpies pick off their leaves, causing regular, unending torments.
Vivid poetry but only poetry. Mercifully, because I would never wish people like Kerrie Wooltorton to undergo a similar fate in the hereafter. Poor Kerrie was the depressed woman who, according to the Daily Telegraph, took poison after signing a living will. She then called an ambulance and was taken to hospital. There she handed the medics a note – she desired them to make her passing comfortable but not to stop her from dying. So, fearing prosecution or even being struck off if they tried to save her life, the doctors let her die. RIP? Not according to Christian teaching, I fear.
St Thomas Aquinas calls suicide crimen maximum – the greatest crime. First, it is a sin against God, the author of man’s being. Because the creature has no right to dispose of himself arbitrarily, against the will of the Creator. (A similar argument is advanced by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo.) Although the Bible has no explicit divine command against self-killing, the prohibition is implicit. Significantly, the lowest figure in the Gospels is a suicide, Judah Iscariot, Christ’s betrayer. His desperate end is emblematic of the depth of his degradation.
Second, suicide is a crime against self. Against the love which naturally every person cherishes for himself. Such love is not to be equated with selfishness. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, the highest moral injunction in the New Testament, presupposes as the highest standard of care a natural inclination to self-preservation. In other words, self-love. A people who regularly and systematically cut off their limbs, starved themselves to death and threw themselves down cliffs, might be the denizens of a science fiction planet – they could not be those we know on planet Earth. That is why self-destruction is deeply unnatural – contrary, opposed to the gregarious social drives which the provident Creator has implanted into human nature.
Third, suicide is a crime against society, or, as they say today, ‘the community’. Against the rampant individualism of our time, this may sound a bit totalitarian but it is not. Himself an inveterate individualist, the priest accepts that man is a social animal. Anyone outside this norm is either a beast or a god, Aristotle affirms. Someone not human. Even if ‘the community’ sounds rather impersonal, think of family, loved ones, friends. Kerrie’s own relations – how have they felt when she took her own life? Was it fair to them?
I myself have known someone who committed suicide. His name was Nick Duc. ‘Frank, we failed him’, my friend C. told me at the time. ‘Had we really cared for Nick, had we really shown him our love, he would not have done it.’ Maybe. Or maybe, had Nick cared for us, been aware of our hurt, he might have thought twice about doing what he did, who knows? The point is that no man is an island. Every person fits into a network of relationships. Suicide does not just kill a single person, it wounds, it offends many others. That is what Aquinas meant by a crime against the community.
Dante, note, does not absolutely condemn all suicides. Noble Cato, who stabbed himself to death rather than survive the destruction of Roman freedom by Caesar’s tyranny (liberta’ va cercando ch’e si cara, come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta), is in Purgatory, not Hell. That means that eventually he will attain salvation. The idea is that freedom is so precious that it is all right to sacrifice your life for it. I agree. For a just cause, a soldier may rightfully die for his country, hearth and home. But Cato’s sacrifice smacks of Stoic pride, ethical aloofness, a sense of inhuman superiority. Liberty being already lost, his sacrifice was for nothing. Dante’s poetic Muse dimmed the poet’s theology, I feel.
‘...the Office ensuing is not to be used...for any who have laid violent hands upon themselves’ directs the rubric for the Burial of the Dead in the Anglican Prayer Book. The historical doctrine of the Church of England never beat about the bush – self-killing is so absolutely sinful that suicides should be denied burial in consecrated ground. Now the Labour Government has passed the Mental Capacity Act, which makes living wills into law. Another piece of devious secularism, another bit of demolition of this country’s legal and ethical safeguards. Consequently, if a physician ignored a living will and saved his patient (isn’t that his job?), he might find himself charged with assault. Did any of the 26 Episcopal bums-on-seats in the House of Lords warn about the unchristian implications of the living wills? The grave perils incumbent upon them, such as abuse by relatives and endless litigations? Did any mitred pate utter any whimper of criticism? I know I am naive but...insh’allah someone did.
Nick Duc and Kerrie Wooltorton, where are they now? Unbelievers and sceptics will scoff at the very question. Of course, death is the end. Survival is a chimera, an illusion, a savage superstition. The Christian faith disagrees. Kerrie and Nick have not perished. None of us will. (Condemnation is not the issue – besides, the idea that fear of hell would deter anyone from sinning sounds these days as quaint as belief in Red Riding Hood.) But, please, check out the question the grieving children ask of Aliosha Karamazov at the end of Dostoevsky’s great work, Brothers K.: ‘Is what religion teaches true? Is there another world? Shall we meet our dead friends again?’
Check also, pray, Aliosha’s reply.