Father Frank is a Genius

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 195 29 November 2005 The Libertine A hardened old atheist is on his deathbed. Anxious for the salvation of the sinner’s soul, the Church strives to convert him. His parish priest offers him the consolations of religion. Confession, anointing, the sacraments, all that. Assures him warmly of God’s love, forgiveness, mercy, etcetera. Pointless. The fellow counters: “Thank you. I do not believe in God.” A highly educated man we are dealing with, see, a hard-headed rationalist, trained in science. So a brilliant Dominican preacher, skilled in debate, is summoned. To no effect. The old chap is himself a dialectician, a relentless reasoner, adroit at refuting the cleverest arguments. Then a subtle Jesuit has a go…still no joy. The case looks hopeless when an aged Franciscan, a rather down-to-earth, non-academic priest, steps forward. Left alone with the sinner for two hours - he succeeds! Taken in hand at five in the morning, the atheist confesses at seven and passes peacefully away at eight. People are astonished. “Father, how did you do it? You must be fantastic at arguing.” “I didn’t argue”, mutters the old friar, “I just made him very scared of hell.” Sigh…maybe that’s right. A mali estremi, rimedi estremi, as Italians say. But God can go one better. Like in the true story of a notorious Restoration rake, now the protagonist of The Libertine, a turbid movie starring Johnny Depp and John Malkovich. “You won’t like me”, hisses at the audience a Mephistophelean Johnny Depp. Yeah. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester was not the sort to introduce to your maiden aunt. The author of the play ‘Sodom or the Quintessence of Debauchery’. Poet and courtier. Friend and boon companion of King Charles II, his ‘father in vice’. Basically, Venus and Bacchus – wine and women, ad nauseam – held him in thrall. “I have been under the influence of drink for five consecutive years” lamented the Earl at the end of a tragically short life. London’s dens of iniquity were partly responsible. Quirky historian John Aubrey writes of Rochester that “when he came to Brentford the Devil entered into him and never left him till he came into the country again.” (NB Boring Brentford, in the London banlieau, is where Fr Frank happens to live. Old Nick seems conspicuous by his absence – ought to cross myself!) Yet this voluptuary was a no mean poet. A spicy satirist worthy of Juvenal. And a composer of stirring amorous lyrics. Problem is – his verse is exceedingly bawdy. No way the priest can reproduce it here. As late as 1964, the appalling “A Ramble in St James’ Park” was still unprintable in England. But beware: Rochester was no vulgar pornographer. His rationale for blunt Anglo-Saxon words was polemical, anti-Scriptural. As the Puritans had undertaken to call things by their Biblical name, the naughty Earl, the scion of a famous Cavalier, undertook to call everything ‘by its own name’. Which only goes to show the limitations of realism. Along with booze and venereal disease leading to the libertine’s undoing, I must regretfully count not horses but philosophy. Rochester was a Hobbist. Not a Hobbit, no. A follower of the writer Thomas Hobbes. (No mention of this in the movie: a case of philosophy not being sexy enough?) The author of Leviathan produced an implacably mechanistic and materialist system, immensely influential at the time. Man and nature consisted of matter in motion and its modifications, that’s all. First causes, free will, the immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, a future state were all rejected. Little wonder these crude tenets found favour with the decadent Stuart court. A pseudo-scientific creed that denigrates an afterlife of rewards and punishments will always find besotted votaries – till it’s time for a ‘reality check’, that is… For Rochester the reckoning came early. Aged 33, body dreadfully wasted owing to his injudicious debaucheries, a pain-wracked ‘skin and bone’, he lay dying at Woodstock. There learned Anglican divine Gilbert Burnet visited him. Dr Burnet naturally sought to lead the sick man to repentance. His reasonable arguments convinced only imperfectly. The Earl accepted that vice and impiety were contrary to human society. He agreed, if restored to health, to ‘forbear swearing and irreligious discourse’. Yet, he still held there was nothing wrong in gratifying his self-destructive appetite for sex and wine. Worse, he confessed to an impoverished idea of God of Spinozistic flavour: “...a vast Power that wrought everything by the necessity of its nature…there was not to be either reward or punishment…to love God seemed to him a presumptuous thing and the heat of fanciful men.” Hardly the change of heart you’d expect from a contrite sinner. Breakthrough at last came via neither cold reasoning nor hellfire horrors but through an act of God’s amazing grace. Conveyed by Scripture – the awesome 53rd chapter of the book of the Prophet Isaiah. The Suffering Servant passage foreshadowing the coming of Christ. It prophesies the Messiah’s redemptive work on sinful humanity’s behalf: “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed…He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth…he bore the sins of many, and made intercession for our faults.” Rochester later related that, as he heard Isaiah read “he felt an inward force upon him…so that he could resist it no longer.” “Mr Hobbes and his philosophy have been my ruin”, he eventually declared. “This, this is the true philosophy”, he then exclaimed, putting his hand on the Bible. Well, all very edifying. But was it, really? Were the clergy preying on the weakness, even the disturbed mind of a decayed scrap of humanity at death’s door? Or were they genuinely seeking to save the reprobate’s eternal soul? Discuss. I wonder, I just wonder, does Rochester, the tragic libertine, stand for much of our society today? Huh! I can hear the inward groan: “Spare us the sermon, Fr Frank. No need. We got your drift” – and so I won’t preach. But you can’t stop me praying for another tremendous act of divine grace. Revd Frank Julian Gelli FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 194 23 November 2005 Plural Beds “Polygamie au banc des accuses”. The riots in the French suburbs have put polygamy in the dock, writes the influential Le Monde. Some immigrants’ vast plural beds allegedly are behind their children’s revolt. Youths lacking a father figure in the home are more prone to anti-social behaviour…it goes like that. How bizarre. Father Frank couldn’t agree more a father is a jolly good thing. But surely it is fatherless monogamous families that are our Western society’s bane, if any. Bet there are plenty of those in France. I wonder whether the liberal media across the channel put monogamy on trial when investigating youth delinquency? As to multiple wives, consider the Mormons. Until 1890, when an intolerant, persecuting US federal government bullied them into forsaking it, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints did practice polygamy. Indeed, Brigham Young, who succeeded Joseph Smith as leader of the Church, boasted 27 wives (though not all of them alive at the same time) and 56 children. But it does not seem that Brigham’s children ever complained of the lack of a father figure. Nor does it appear that polygamy either alienated or caused social unrest amongst Mormon youngsters. On the contrary, LDS youths were and are known as models of conservative citizenship. Hard-working, industrious, honest, law-abiding and chaste. So much for plural marriage necessarily breeding hooligans, then. Sociology apart, it’s curious the custom should provoke so much prejudice. There is no divine command against polygamy in the Bible. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and Solomon had more than one wife. True, Jesus in St Mark’s Gospel (10:8) lays down that a man and a woman in marriage “… shall become one flesh.” But the thrust of the Lord’s words is directed against divorce, not polygamy. And ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ are generic terms designating genders. Moreover, the ‘one flesh’ remark harks back to Genesis, the beginning of creation. Clearly, Hebrew sacred writers never interpreted the passage to forbid plural marriage, or Scripture would have castigated the patriarchs for that. As to the New Covenant (I Timothy, 3:2), St Paul notably rules that, amongst a bishop’s qualities, he should be “the husband of one wife”. Dig that? Those mitred old goats! What didn’t they get up to! Like it or not, some criticism of polygamous practice is implied there. To be sure, beyond St Paul stands the Messiah himself. Granted that the personal love life of the Lord must forever remain an enigma (pace the Da Vinci Code rubbish), all the evidence points to Christ being unmarried. Even non-Christian traditions, hostile and friendly alike, never mention a Mrs Jesus of Nazareth. (A liberal theologian once quipped that, if such a female ever existed, she would have kept an impossibly low profile.) In that respect, Christ might more akin to an abstinent Master like Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha, than to married Prophets like Moses or Muhammad. Accordingly, strict monogamy would appear more becoming to followers of a religion founded by a holy celibate than polygamy. The Christian world used to acknowledge as much. Virginity and celibacy for centuries were its highest ideals. I haven’t noticed President Chirac, Sarkozy and their laiciste gang praising those virtues lately… Remarkably, a certain Shia Muslim’s somewhat quirky communication to me proffers an extra-reason for Christ’s unmarried status: “As you Christians hold that Issa son of Mary is the Son of God, I well understand it’s impossible he could have had a wife. Bad enough to have a son of God – imagine having to reckon with God’s grandchildren! No, that had to be prevented from happening, I do see it.” Intriguing! By the way, as Christianity arose out of Judaism, I usefully learn from Rabbi Isacco Israelovici - a former Italian Army comrade (how green we all were then, eh, Isacco?) – that Jews took plenty of time to legislate on the matter. Ashkenazi rabbis did not officially rule out plural beds until about 900 AD. Sephardic Judaism, however, still leaves the possibility open, although 100 rabbis altogether are needed to allow a man to take a second wife. Hmmm… must be pretty rare, I guess. But why beat about the bush? What Gallic secularists are gunning for are Muslims, especially those of African origin. Islamic plural beds make the not-so-fecund heirs of les droits de l’homme jittery. But Muslim teaching is complex. The Qur’an does indeed allow a believer as many as four wives (Surah An-Nisah, 3). Actually, that number is restrictive vis-à-vis the pagan customs of pre-Islamic, polytheistic Arabia, when a man could enjoy an unlimited harem. The Qur’anic text also hedges the permission about with qualifications. Should a man not be able to deal justly with plural wives, for example because he lacks the means to support them, only one is lawful. Relevant is also the Sunna, the personal custom and practice of the Prophet Muhammad, one of the sources of Sharia law. One would expect the Messenger to be a normative model for all Muslims. Interesting though that Ibn Taymiyya, the famous medieval jurist widely regarded as a Wahabi forerunner, was not married. And King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, a most pious monarch, had only one wife. African Islam… I must plead anthropologically ignorant. Can only get anecdotal about my friend Mouftah, an excellent Nigerian Muslim. He has two spouses. Trust me: he is the best of fathers. “Frank, women view polygamy very differently from men”, my beloved Marian now cautions me. Fair enough. They are bound to, I suppose. But surprises are always possible. In 1870 a US congressman had the brilliant idea of abolishing plural beds by granting the vote to women. He assumed that Mormon women would rise up by ballot against polygamy. But when the territorial legislature of Utah granted women the vote – they prompted voted as their husbands did. Funny, isn’t it? FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 183 16 August 2005 Salman the Hopeless “Muslims, unite!” you, dear Rushdie, wrote in The Times last week, adding “a new Reformation will bring your faith into the modern era”. What a clarion call! Sounds almost as if you were putting yourself forward as a progressive Caliph of a restored, reinvigorated Muslim umma. Or another Saladin, perhaps? Or even the awaited Mahdi? Must have cheered many believers in Britain, subjected as they are right to attack and vilification, to have found a bold champion such as yourself, a household name, an egregious writer and intellectual….but, wait a minute. Something isn’t quite right. I seem to remember – aren’t you the same Salman Rushdie whose Satanic Verses caused an uproar worldwide, was deemed insulting to Islam’s Holy Prophet and got you a death sentence for blasphemy? Forgive my being candid but – you have done it again! Your status as a novelist I will not dispute. Because I have not read any of your books. Friends say they are stodgy, pretentious, unreadable. Maybe. I reserve judgment till I have time to find out for myself. What I question is the half-baked ideology and wrong-headed theology adumbrated in your article. First, you advocate an ‘Islamic Reformation’. Capital ‘R’. A term synonymous with Protestantism. A version of Christianity that jettisons church traditions and authorities in matters of faith. Insists instead on the supremacy of the Bible. True Protestants were iconoclasts, by the way. Often thuggish. Smashed and vandalised churches, shrines, stained glass, altars, relics all. (They would have got on well with the Wahabis, really.) Thing is, eminent Prots like Luther and Calvin were adamant about the infallibility of Scripture. Conversely, not all that great about tolerance. In theocratically-ruled Geneva, Calvin burnt at the stake theologian Miguel Servetus for denying the Trinity. Luther himself was a virulent anti-Semite, as it happens... All that for the record. Later, much Protestantism partly degenerated into rampant individualism. Spawned countless fissiparous, oddball sects, from Jehova’s Witnesses to Seventh-Day Adventists. Some even dissolved into atheism. Story too tedious to recount – I can’t for the life of me see why Muslims should see that tired trajectory as worthy of imitation. They already have their share of sects, anyway. As for serious Protestants today, well, you’d be surprised to discover how much they have in common with sincere, traditional Muslims, believe you me. Indeed, my former fellow King’s College student, professor Ian Markham, has wisely asserted that religious dialogue itself, in order to be relevant, should be one between good Muslims and “conservative Christians”, i.e. Christians who read, value and follow their Bibles. So, there! In fact, dear Salman, none of my Muslim friends dream of seeing the example of later Protestant, liberal Christianity, as a model. They do admire European high-tech and material achievements, sure. The way modern European man has watered down the truths of revelation, abandoned the Bible and forsaken the faith of their fathers, they simply despise. And, I do too. Second, the matter of the nature and status of the Qur’an. You advocate, as a liberal panacea, situating al-Kitab within history, not beyond it. A very knotty, potentially dangerous matter – it landed you in a spot of trouble before, I think - and who am I, a poor Christian, to rush in where angels fear to tread? No problem for me to look at my faith that way. It is not the Book that is ultimate for me but the Man. The central event of Christianity, Christmas, God made man in Christ, happened at the intersection of history and eternity. Bethlehem and the Empyrean, Heaven and Earth literally locked together at the Incarnation. The whole of the Bible for me leads up to that tremendous, natural-and-supernatural event. Revelation’s point, its raison d’etre hinges on, and is subordinated to it. Eternity met with and became incarnated in, time. Both history and super-history together play out their key part in the cosmic drama of man’s salvation. The Muslim paradigm of revelation is different, granted. If you knew more about your religion, however, you would know that Islamic theology does not rest only on the Qur’an but also on the ahadith, the Prophet’s sayings. And, surprise, surprise, there is already a sort of historical-critical science of the ahadith. Hope that pleases you… Third, I could not help a very broad grin on reading that, according to you, the Qur’an should be read “as a plea for the old matriarchal values in the new patriarchal world”. Now, sucking up to the ladies is a move that might win you favour in London and New York’s literary circles. Over here too, from 10 Downing St to suburban Anglican Vicarages. Serious Muslims, though, in my experience are a bit more discerning than that. Truth is, Salman, I do actually know lots of Muslim women. Some even converts from paganism (the correct name for the actual creed of most people in Britain today). Most of them wear the hijab – voluntarily. They are proud of their religion. Find comfort in it. Rejoice in it. I tell you, they are not chattels. Far from it. They hold their head high. They are real women. Talk of matriarchy would make them laugh. Only a few cracked ideologues and pandering blokes like yourself mouth that kind of cant. Women don’t give a hoot about matriarchy - whatever that might be. Not do they care about its opposite, patriarchy. Professional feminists do. Muslim women, in my modest experience, don’t. And why on earth should they? They can do one better. Be the real thing: mothers… Tell you a secret, Salman. Not too long ago I was shopping in that area of lost souls, Hammersmith, when I saw walking towards me a chap of middle stature, with familiar glum features: you. I then remembered the old fatwa on your life. The thought crossed my mind: “How much money is this guy worth? What if…?” But I dismissed it. I would not wish anything bad on you. But stop playing with fire. Religion is too important to be left to intellectuals. As to your fellow Muslims – they need you like a hole in the head. FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 177 22 June 2005 Insurrection “He’s gone! To fight Jihad. Ah, poor son of mine! What will happen to him?” From somewhere in the Middle East, the distressed words of a father. A caring, tolerant, peace-loving dad. (Friend of mine, actually.) Desperate at the thought his beloved boy could now be in the inferno of post-Saddam Iraq – carrying out acts of violence – perhaps, God forbid, even about to turn himself into a suicide bomber. Lamely, I tried to console him: “Don’t distress yourself unduly, Zalman. How can you be sure? He is such a nice lad. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’d never…” “Ya Frank!”, an e-mail message shot back “It’s useless. He wants to join the insurgents. I know. He left a note…” Jihad. A potent, ghostly word. Not one to be trifled with. Because, rightly or wrongly, it conjures up a spectre haunting Europe, nay, the whole West. The spectre of Islamist insurrection. Holy War. The horror of 9/11. The vaguely apocalyptic, by now done-to-death cliché (yawn), ‘clash of civilisations’. All that and…more. Why not the Id? The monsters of the Unconscious. The loathing of the Other – maybe even of oneself. Hasn’t Jean Baudrillard insinuated the deracinated West deep down envies, is jealous of Islam? Of its metaphysical certitudes? Quite bloody likely. Jihad, note, has many meanings. Basically, it signifies a striving. Against one’s inward, sinful, ungodly drives. Thus Oswald Spengler called jihad ‘the asceticism of Islam’. It may also mean other, natural strivings. (During the last Ramadhan, in a mosque I heard a young preacher speak of a woman in the grip of ‘the jihad of childbirth’.) As outward, violent effort, it means a war of self-defense. However, when hunted Osama B.L. and his faithful lieutenant, fallen physician Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri, invoke this hugely emotive word, there can be no doubt as to what they have in mind. Whether these fighting men have the authority to summon a jihad, and whether it is licit to declare holy war against an enemy that includes many fellow Muslims, well, I am a poor Christian, aren’t I? Such nasty knots I must leave to the learned amongst my Islamic friends to untie. But Zalman mentioned ‘the insurgents’. Uprising. An etymologically suggestive term, as oddball, heretical Hegelian thinker Max Stirner showed in his anarchic, profoundly subversive treatise, The Ego and His Own. Explosive stuff. Revolution and insurrection are not the same, Stirner argues. Revolution aims at a new state arrangement. It is a political, social act, often by violent means. Insurrection, by contrast, designates no armed rising, but an in-surgere, in Latin a ‘rising up’, a re-arrangement, not of the masses but above all of individuals. The revolutionary strives to overthrow an established order, the insurgent to straighten himself, to ‘get up’, to rise above things. Insurrection needs not be a violent fight against the institutions because, if it thrives, they will collapse automatically, like a house of cards. Rank, petty-bourgeois, self-defeating adolescent individualism, Fr Frank, surely! Prima facie, it may look that way but wait. Amazingly, Stirner singles out Christ as his typical insurgent. Christ, the Prince of Peace. The Messiah rejected by many of his own people because he did not seek to emulate King David’s military exploits. The Christ who rode into Jerusalem on a war-horse but on a humble donkey. The Saviour who never called for bloodshed, for violent rebellion against the Roman emperor. (“Give unto Caesar…”) And that in a Palestine in which the air was so inflamed with armed struggle that the Messiah’s enemies accused him precisely of that before Pilate. (St Luke 23:5) So, why wasn’t Christ a revolutionary, a guerrilla like Che Guevara? He was not that because he was no vulgar political agitator but an insurgent. One who raised himself up, above the shallow expectations of the world. And, in the process, caused others to do the same. Hmmm…Christ was sort of like Gandhi, then. Is that it? NO! No way. Totally erroneous. Jesus as Gandhi is a line of thought current in some Muslim circles – and they do mean well – but it’s absolutely the wrong image. Forget the pious, fraudulent travesty of a Jesus ‘meek and mild’. Think rather of a tigerish Christ. The Christ who with a whip drove the traders out of the Temple. The Messiah who overcame and cast out legions of angry demons. Who rebuked Satan, ‘the Prince of This World’. Who stood up to a powerful religious establishment, calling them ‘brood of vipers’, ‘the devil’s children’ and ‘white sepulchres’. Whose spiritual strength was such as to willingly accept to undergo the horror of the Cross. The Christ who, above all, overcame in himself the temptation to be a conventional Anointed One, another murderous Joshua, another, lesser King David, another cheap, violent demagogue raging away in a wretched, paltry, insignificant Levantine polity. Instead, he lifted himself above the stale hopes and unholy urges of contemporary power-worshippers. Listen to Stirner: “Exactly because Christ cared not a jot for overthrowing the government, he was in truth its deadly enemy and destroyer. For he, calmly and inexorably, raised himself up, walled in the old world, and built over it his own Temple, oblivious to the wailings of the immured therein.” Stupendous, no? Er…Fr Frank, if you say so. Only wish Stirner would explain his explanation. Back to the guys fighting in Iraq – suicide bombers included. What about them? Again, it’s above all Muslim cause. Competent Muslim authorities should judge. Christian ethics forbids suicide bombing but so does it condemn aggressive war, regime change, disproportionate civilian casualties, ill-treatment of prisoners and so on. Condy Rice calls for Syria to make it impossible for foreign Jihadists to enter Iraq. By the same logic, Western forces and various mercenaries in that unhappy country ought to get out double-quick. But, pardon the cliché, there is no quick fix. Woe to those who first create a hell and then complain it is a place full of demon.