A few thoughts occasioned by our fighting over abortion and law, abortion and terror, abortion and Christianity, abortion and rights. They are scattered thoughts, alas. These debates do not bring out the best in us.
As I wrote it I was listening to War of the Worlds. Go figure.
1. When my parents married, my father refused to convert to Catholicism (he was a diffident Protestant, although he had very little time for any of it). This meant my parents married ‘behind the altar’, and that when the priest came to visit my mother and my newborn older sister, he told my mother that my sister was a heathen who would burn in Hell. My father heard it and decked the priest.
2. Are you a cattle-tick or a proddy-dog? Protestant, protestant ring the bell, protestant, protestant go to hell! Catholic dogs — leap like frogs — in and out of the waaaater!
3. It was a slow day
And the sun was beating on the soldiers
By the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
4. When the Roman historian Tacitus wrote his account of the great fire of Rome in AD64, he gave the first account of the early Christians, who — among other things — Nero recycled as firelighters in his gardens. No friend of Nero, when Tacitus came to describe the early Christians, he accused them of ‘hatred of the human race’.
5. When it came to religious education, the primary school didn’t know what to do with me, not with a ‘mixed marriage’ like that. I was told I’d have to sit out. I wanted to run around the oval instead of RE (I was that sort of child), but when I was told I’d have to sit quietly and read, I suggested that I spend each week in a different religious education class, even the Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and — shock horror — pagans. Well, it was the 70s.
6. The school — perhaps flummoxed by my request — acceded to it. I learnt a lot in a short space.
7. Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives–
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds.
8. In 197 AD, the early Christian writer Tertullian wrote an Apologia for his Christian faith. There had been a spate of persecutions in his home city of Carthage. There’d been the usual Roman response to the Christian refusal to partake in Roman civil religion — Christians to the lions!, although Christian criticism of the religious practices of the Roman Governor’s wife provoked a distinctive response from her. A devotee of Aphrodite, she had joined during a festival in a rite involving sexual celebration in the Goddess’ temple. This involved priests and priestesses and devotees dancing on the temple forecourt and pulling chosen revellers from the crowd by the hand — ‘like Bruce Springsteen in the clip to Dancing in the Dark‘, as one classicist friend puts it — and taking them inside for a very good time. Christians called the Governor’s wife a whore; pagans did not understand what the Christians were going on about. Her response was to send one of the Christian women to the Temple of Aphrodite instead of to the lions.
9. When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
10. Civil religion and monotheism do not get on well: witness the tussle over God, the Bible, the Flag, the military, the schools etc in the United States. To appreciate the Roman angst over Christian failure to partake in civic observances, recall the silliness that attended Barack Obama’s occasional failure to wear a flag pin on his lapel, or to put his hand over his heart when the Pledge was recited (this last practice was identical in the Roman world). Now multiply that hysteria by several orders of magnitude.
11. The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry
12. ‘Too many Christians, not enough lions’: graffito outside several amphitheatres in the Roman world, now popular among people with, ahem, a rather grim sense of humour.
13. I divided my time between Italy and the UK for most of 1996, and at one point had to make an unplanned visit to the UK end. The trip was urgent — I had business dealings to attend to — and I booked a flight that took me into Luton. I’d have preferred Heathrow or Gatwick, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. I arrived on June 17, shortly after this incident. I made the mistake of pulling the ‘greenie’ out of my pocket and showing it to the Sikh behind the counter.
14. I spent four hours in detention. This included a strip search. I was told we tend to know you people by the company you keep.
15. I have never renewed my Irish passport.
16. In his Apologia, Tertullian is writing for his fellow Christians: his is not a piece to cajole or persuade his enemies. He cheerfully insults everything pagan, in so doing revealing a great deal about himself (sexual hangups, natch) and about pagan religious practices (superficially sexually liberal, but actually highly managed). It’s a very revealing document. The most interesting section is his account of how otherwise sober and restrained Romans of both sexes would ‘break’ during festivals and appear to throw any morality out the window.
On these grounds then the Christians are regarded as public enemies, because they do not offer to the emperors either useless or lying or ill-advised honours. Men of true religion celebrate even their regular festivals conscientiously rather than wantonly. It is thus made an important duty, to bring out hearths and couches into the public street, to feast community by community, to recreate the city under the guise of a tavern, to produce mud by wine [a reference to libation], to run about in crowds for the enjoyment of outrages, insults and incitements to lust. Is it thus that public joy is expressed by public disgrace? Why does such behaviour become the festal days of emperors, but does not befit other days? Shall those who observe order out of regard to Caesar, abandon it on account of Caesar, and shall loyalty grant a licence for immorality, and religion give occasion to indulgence?
17. Anthropology can explain this practice, and its fundamental importance in maintaining social order: the festival represents entry into a liminal state, where normal social rules are upended for a period of time. In a seminal paper on liminality, anthropologist Victor Turner describes similar practices across a range of pagan/animist/tribal/polytheistic cultures. The practice has been largely obliterated by the monotheistic faiths, although many Latin-inflected cultures retain something of the old Roman carnivale and combine it with left over practices from Aztec or Inca peoples.
18. Monotheism counsels moral perfection, but we cannot be perfect. So we break. And we break each in our own way, in our own private hell, consumed by guilt as we break and punished by our monotheism for breaking. Tertullian rails at the queues of Roman women at the gates of the abortionist after their festivals, making an argument with a modern and familiar ring:
But to us, to whom homicide has been always forbidden, it is not permitted to break up even what has been conceived in the womb, while as yet the blood is being drawn (from the parent body) for a human life. Abortion is premature murder, and it makes no difference whether it is a life already born that one snatches away [Romans usually killed the physically disabled at birth], or a life in the act of being born that one destroys; that which is to be a human being is also human. The whole fruit is already present in the seed.
19. Medicine is magical and magical is art
We’ve got the boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart
20. Tertullian records that pagans considered Christians enemies of the free market.
21. Having lost both pagan liminality and monotheistic morality and retained only the latter’s guilt, we scrabble over the bones of religion all the while the free market cannibalizes the lot, repackages it and makes it both shiny and meaningless: This is what scientologists actually believe.
22. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
[Poetry by Philip Larkin and Paul Simon]
UPDATE: Pavlov’s Cat on a related theme.
