Fidei defensor

I grew up in the Church of England and while I no longer attend, apart from family days and holidays, and even then only to please my parents, I still retain a considerable affection for the institution, for the part that it has played in the history of this nation. If I did not feel affection, a lingering sense of respect, I could look upon the pronouncements of Rowan Williams, the muddle-headed Archbishop of Canterbury, with equanimity; but I cannot; he retains the power to madden me with some of his more outrageous statements.

So, yes, I value the Church of England just as I value Christianity, as I value spirituality in general. Even so I can respect atheism, those who have no place in their personal life for God our any form of spiritual insight; those whose horizons are purely (I was tempted to write bleakly) material. What I loath is the atheist proselytisers, those who would discard one set of absolutes only to promote another, bringing to the debate the worst forms of intellectual intolerance. God is dead; Richard Dawkins is alive. The new faith is totalitarian secularism, worse in ever way than the old faith of ritual and transcendence.

I understand in his latest Papal Bull Dawkins has said that the real abuse by Roman Catholic priests may not be the ‘groping of child bodies’ but the ‘subversion of child minds.’ Saint Richard would have it otherwise; he would chase Christianity to the margins of superstition and darkness in the creation of the kind of an earthly paradise, outlined by John Lennon in Imagine, a song with a message I cannot listen to without a compete sense of loathing. There is no earthly paradise. More particularly, as we should know from the history of the past hundred years, the attempt to create one always ends in hell.

The recent attacks on the Catholic Church, the disgraceful insult that the apparatchiks in the Foreign Office offered to the Pope, and through him to all Catholics, shows that the faith, Christianity in general, needs a defender. It could ask for no better one than Peter Hitchens, one of my favourite polemicists, who has recently published The Rage Against God, an exploration of his own journey from Marxism and atheism to belief.

In this he brings to bear his lucidity and acidy wit against the aggressive secularism taking hold of a society that has no longer and clear idea of itself. One only has to look at the progress of Mad Hattie Harperson’s equality legislation, which effectively tried to dictate what people thought of homosexuality. We are dealing her with new forms of state corruption, of the subversion of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech; of the subversion of moral choice itself. Though qualified in England, similar legislation in Scotland saw a fine of £1000 being levied against a Baptist preacher for saying that homosexuality was contrary to the teachings of the Bible.

Hitchens compares what is happening in our morally debased society with what happened to organised religion in Soviet Russia when faced with the aggressive atheism promoted by the state. The parallels not too extreme, at least I do not believe so. There has been a long process of secularisation at work, but it has taken more pervasive forms in our recent history, with the likes of Harperson and Dawkins occupying the high ground, sitting on judgement on all below. Who would ever have believed that Christianity would have been on defensive in the land of Augustine? It’s time to fight back; time for a spiritual renaissance. The alternative is grim beyond measure; the alternative is barrenness; the alternative is Dawkins.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Black Mass

I first came across a full description of the Black Mass on reading The Damned, a novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, a ninetieth century French novelist, though I heard of it prior to this. The whole thing struck me as laughably silly, like some kind of grotesque pantomime. It is, of course, both a Christian heresy and a Christian fantasy, conceived by priests and practiced by apostates; it has nothing at all to do with witchcraft or paganism.

Performance of the inverted rite be traced no further back than the reign of Louis XIV, and seems to have been constructed on the kind of information that the Inquisition had obtained in earlier ‘confessions’. Literary mention of it is also made by the Marquis de Sade in Justine, in which it is performed by an evil monk. It’s best to take that as a measure of how bizarre and fantastic the whole thing is, what an inversion of reality. It seems only proper that it was de Sade who first gave this practice literary life, for his whole life was a kind of pantomime, a kind of living Black Mass.

Jesus of the Muslims

There is a rather interesting article in the most recent issue of the New Statesman by Medhi Hasan headed Jesus: the Muslim Prophet, based on an appreciation of The Muslim Jesus, a book by Tarif Khalidi, the former Cambridge professor of Arabic and Islamic studies. Khalidi’s book would certainly seem to be an impressive piece of scholarship, drawing together all of the sources about Jesus to be found in the Muslim tradition. These all paint a picture of a man broadly similar to that of the Gospels-a patron saint of asceticism, the lord of nature, a miracle worker, a healer, a moral, spiritual and social role model.

The big difference is that Jesus, known as Isa in the Arabic, is conceived of as a prophet, not as the Son of God. Even so he is given the singular honour of being referred to not only as a Prophet or a Messenger but also as the ‘Word’ or the ‘Spirit’ of God, a designation conferred on no other in the Quran, not even Muhammad himself. Of all of the prophets recognised by Islam, which includes the Jewish figures of the Old Testament, Jesus is considered to be second only to Muhammad, the precursor of the Prophet of Islam.

By the lights of Islamic theology it was Jesus’ task not to bring a new revealed law but introduce a new path or way based upon the love of God, quite different from a Jewish tradition based more upon reverence for the law and fear of God. It’s because of this that he is referred to in the mystic tradition advanced by the Sufis as ‘the prophet of the soul’, which I personally think both profound and rather lovely. I was also fascinated to discover that Muslims also believe in a second coming of Jesus, that he will appear before the end of the world to do battle with the Antichrist, referred to as Dajjal.

Mary, known as Maryam, also has a special place of reverence in Islam, considered to hold the most exalted position among women. Indeed, she is the only woman mentioned by name in the Quran, even having a chapter named after her. According to tradition, Muhammad is said to have described her as one of the one of only four women in history who achieved perfection. Islam also endorses the Christian belief in the Virgin Birth.

I agree with the point made by Hasan that so much more could be made of this common tradition to improve the understanding between Christian and Muslim communities across Europe, especially in times like these, especially when there is so much ignorance, prejudice and fear around, as if a whole faith community were best represented by a few ignorant fanatics.

The chief point about the Muslim Jesus is that he is a historical figure, much like Muhammad himself, the kind of figure who would have been recognised by the early Christian sects like the Ebionites and the Nazarenes, with the later man-made Christology, introduced by Saint Paul and others, stripped away. Again it’s worthy of note that American evangelicals like Franklin Graham are prepared to describe Islam as a ‘wicked religion’ while identifying with Judaism which allows no place for Jesus at all.

Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, an imam in Leicester and the assistant general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, has urged Muslims to engage in the public and outward celebrations of Jesus, his birth in particular. He is entirely scathing of those absurdist politically correct councils like Birmingham, who attempted to substitute ‘Winterval’ (ugh!) for Christmas. “It’s a ridiculous suggestion to change the name of Christmas”, he said, “Britain is great when it comes to celebrating diverse religious festivals of our various faith communities. They should remain as they are, and we should celebrate them all.”

Anyway, Kahlidi’s book sounds completely fascinating. I’m happy to report that it’s now on my Christmas list. :-)

Tertullian and the Nature of Heresy

For Tertullian, an early Christian apologist, the Church alone bore the apostolic rule of faith, revered the canon of Scriptures, and bore through its ecclesiastical hierarchy the sanction of apostolic succession. Heretics were those who challenged any of these precepts. They were people who refused to accept the rule of faith, as others did. Instead they challenged people to raise theological questions to which there was no answer, "...being ready to say, and sincerely of certain points of their belief, 'That is not so' and 'I take this in a different sense' and 'I do not admit that'".

Tertullian has it that all such unnecessary questioning automatically leads to heresy-"This rule was raised by Christ, and raises among ourselves no other questions than those which the heresies introduce and which make men heretics!" Heretics, moreover, are those who do not restrict themselves to the Scriptures, but bring in other writings or challenge orthodox interpretations. Heretics are, quitesimply, rebels, in theological and in practical terms.

The answer was to believe and never question. It seems clear what practcal form this kind of thinking would take, to the fires of the Middle Ages and beyond.