CITIZENSHIP MUSINGS

For here have we no continuing city.

                                                                            Hebrews 13:14

                                                                                                             

The heart searching that followed the end of World War II included the desire – as after the first Great War – that such a conflict should never happen again.  One reason for it all was seen as nationalism; ergo, to get rid of nationalism, you need to get rid of nations.  It’s John Lennon’s ‘Imagine there’s no countries’ made political policy.  No countries, no nations.  No nations, no nationalism.  No nationalism, no war. 

            The problem with this sort of thing is like the typical school anti-bullying policy.  The people who sign up to it are the victims, and those who would never bully any one anyway.  The ones who ignore it, and carry on as before, are the bullies.  In the same way, serious nationalists aren’t going to give up on nationalism: they will simply take over the territory of those who do, and thus have more space in which to be nationalistic. (Especially if they eliminate those they have conquered.)

            Be that as it may, Britain since the War has made a valiant attempt to stop itself from being a nation state: even if it still says ‘UK’ on the Internet when you call up a list of countries  to make a credit-card payment, or find a postal rate.

            It has stopped teaching its history, and, increasingly, its literature. 

Give Northern Ireland back to Ireland.   That’s actually something I approve of: not because I have anything against the Northern Irish, but it sort of makes sense for them to be linked to an island of which they are a geographical part, rather than to one of which they are not.  Give Wales, back to Wales, Scotland back to Scotland, and England back to England.  It might be argued that this strategy doesn’t get rid of nations, it only creates four where there had been one; but what it does ensure is that they become too small to be a threat to anybody.  (And hence reduce the threat of war.)

Eventually, anyway, if the European super state becomes a reality, new administrative lines will be drawn, and southern coastal England will become linked to its northern French equivalent across the Channel in some new-style Eurocounty.

 

In the meantime, what had once been Great Britain now becomes, as far as possible, just a geographical area: a sort of world in microcosm, and inhabited by all the world’s nations. 

But however admirable this global-village/world-in-miniature philosophy, one must have leave to doubt if it has taken account of the actual history of the world.  Nations have tended to fight their neighbours, even within recent history, quite as often as they have lived in peace. And if you put the nations side by side in a confined space, and then tell them to retain their own identities,  aren’t you potentially creating an opportunity for them to war against each other without even having to cross the sea, or invade another territory to do it?

It might be said that Britain – or whatever we like to call it – is merely emulating America, which has successfully integrated different nationalities.  But America – historically, anyway – hasn’t been as rigorously multicultural as we have:  keep your identity and national traditions in private, sure, but also merge into the general melting pot.   Keep your own language, but also learn American English.  And America, even if now as multiculturally-committed as Britain, has a lot more space in which to get away from other people if you want to. 

            In 1997, British Airways abandoned the Union Jack on the tailfins of some of some of its planes, in favour of ten ethnic designs.   The project foundered when air traffic controllers raised safety concerns.  There was uncertainty about whether they would be identified as British planes: an unconscious irony about Britain’s new role in the world.

In the last decade or so, there have been indications that the British – or whatever it is – idyll may be somewhat under strain: a bombing on the London Underground by home-grown terrorists, riots in northern cities, a growth (its actual size difficult to assess, and perhaps nothing more than a protest vote) in support for the BNP and EDL, curbs on immigration as a key election issue that not even a party in power can afford to ignore.  When an asylum seeker reported the immigration officer who would have allowed her entry into Britain in exchange for sex, he himself turned out to be an illegal immigrant, calling existing procedures into question.  And so on.  A report about a school with 158 different languages from all five continents suggests an educational challenge even for the most committed of multiculturalists. 

            The net result of all this has been something of a sea change amongst those who make the decisions on our behalf.  There have even been surveys about what it means to be British; and a points system to ensure that new batches of immigrants are able to speak some English (especially important in the case of medical staff, where misunderstandings resulting from imperfect language grasp have resulted in death).

            And then, in the wake of 7/7 came the compulsory citizenship initiative for schools: all students – for a moment, I nearly said pupils – must be made to feel they belonged to one common community. 

            If I understand the spirit behind this right, it’s rather like the reassurance given  to the new marines in the film Full Metal Jacket.   “Most of you will be sent to Vietnam.  Some of you will die.  But the Marine Corps will live for ever.  Through the Marine Corps,  you live forever.”

            This is ostensibly very good advice: you get your meaning and identity by belonging to some larger unit like the corps, or the nation state.  But there are two  problems with it.    

            For a start, it is a lie.  The Marine Corps won’t last forever, any more than did the Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman or British Empires.  Secondly, it is a solution for secularists.  Religious believers – or, at any rate, the types who bother officialdom – believe that their individual identities will outlast the nation state.

 

When Locke wrote his pamphlet about religious toleration, he felt obliged to exclude Roman Catholics: Catholics had another centre of loyalty outside Britain.  But that must be true, too, for every serious Protestant, no less than for any serious Muslim.

             Many who are Muslim in name only are probably happy to leave Britain as it is: provided it leaves them alone to get on with their lives in peace.  But for a serious Muslim, first loyalty cannot be to Britain, but to the Umma, the worldwide community.   Except for that bit of Britain which is now effectively Muslim, Britain is still Dar ul Harb.  That is to say, the zone of war: even if the jihad to turn Britain Muslim is  achieved by example through quality of life, or by the power of peaceful persuasion, rather than by violence.   What can the educational ideal of citizenship, unless I have misunderstood it, say to such as these?    

And the Christian, although living in the earthly Babylon of whatever country he or she happens to inhabit, belongs rather to the Heavenly Jerusalem, with a membership made up of fellow citizens who are believers, but also of fellow believers in all nations across the world, those believers who have gone before, and those who are yet to come.  In this sort of context, and whatever one’s duties to the state in which one finds oneself, to be a Christian matters more than to be a Briton.

Christ said there would be no marriage in heaven, for it was an earthly thing that would no longer be necessary.  Does our nationality fall into the same provisional category?  Perhaps, then, we should not mourn if the nationality we have now does vanish in a European or global identity; for it may be simply another of those earthly things that are destined, in any case, to pass away.  

On the other hand, since the promise is that we shall be more ourselves, not less, it may be that in the afterlife we shall retain some of the national characteristics of the citizenship we had in this life: insofar as it has been responsible for shaping  an individual personality.  Voltaire could never have been anything other than French, nor Dr Johnson other than English.

 

 

FLAT-EARTH SYNDROME

 

 

 

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

       Voltaire

 

In the old film Nicholas and Alexandra, Kerensky – newly come to power – ponders what to do about the Bolsheviks.  Kerensky has fought for freedom of speech.  Can he allow freedom of speech to the Bolsheviks, when their aim is to abolish freedom of speech?

Locke, when arguing for religious toleration, felt unable to extend this to Catholics.  The Catholics, in his view, would have abolished religious toleration if religious toleration allowed them to regain their former religious status. 

In the interests of freedom of information, do you have a duty to reveal your battle plan to the enemy general?   In the interests of honesty, should you reveal the most intimate details of your private life on television?  What are the limits of national security and personal privacy?

Toleration cannot afford to tolerate intolerance, or it will simply be supplanted by its opposite.  Everyone in power has to operate some form of censorship as a matter of survival.   Anyone who doesn’t soon ceases to be in power.   The quickest way to get rid of pacifism is to allow it; whereupon you will be defeated by a totalitarian neighbour that forbids pacifism. Hitler banned pacifism in pre-war Germany, but funded it in Britain.

And so on.   This conflict between what is desirable and what is actually possible is never free from public life. 

 

Different people are influenced in different ways by what they see or read.  That is why there is a TV watershed, and age limits in the cinema.  Does the same sort of distinction apply when criteria other than age limits are involved?  Should those who make a living from the traffic of ideas have access to material that might be damaging to others?   

When I was still at school, my concept of a university was of a place where the free interchange of thought was possible without the sort of constraints and strictures indicated above; just as you can say things within the House of Commons that you would not be allowed to say outside.  That was what academic freedom meant. 

My heroes were Voltaire, for supporting the right of others to hold opinions at variance with his own; and Socrates, for his willingness to take an idea and examine its implications.   I was aware, even at that stage of my life, that ideas could be hazardous to your health.  Voltaire said what he thought, and earned himself a spell in the Bastille for his pains; although he had not, in fact, written the particular work for which he was imprisoned.  (He probably would have written it, if he had had the opportunity).  Socrates’ insistence on following things through to their conclusions led him to a cup of hemlock, but also laid the basis for the Western tradition of free inquiry.

            My first sense that change was in the twentieth-century intellectual wind – that the sort of restrictions imposed by society on speaking your mind were now also within the groves of academe – occurred while university was still a future prospect for me.  It was a news item on television.  A politician, addressing a university audience, was booed and jeered until he abandoned his attempts to speak. 

            I had missed the beginning of the episode, and I only found out later that the politician was a man called Enoch Powell, and the venue was the University of Essex.  Powell had apparently made a controversial speech a short time before, and it was to this that the students were objecting.

            But it all seemed a very far cry from Socrates, or Voltaire.  Socrates would have listened with interest, and, if there was error, would have tried to pinpoint where that error lay.  Voltaire, likewise, would have listened, and would then have provided rational counter-argument had he considered it appropriate.  

            While at university, I read a book relatively new at the time:  The Universities, by V H H Green.  From this it was clear that the Essex episode, far from being an isolated incident, was becoming a recognized feature of academic discourse.  The way to treat an unpopular view was to deny it a platform or, failing that, to shout it down: a cure, Green noted, “more repellent than the disease”. 

            Back then, in the 70s, it was still the infancy of the phenomenon: when the barbarians at the gates had barely found their way inside the academy. Since then, the invasion has come to full maturity: as evidenced in 2005 in the case of Harvard President, Larry Summers. 

The controversy happened at a closed faculty symposium on women in science, Questioned on why there were not more women in tenured science positions at Harvard, Summers suggested, among other points, that there might be “different availability of aptitude at the high end”.  During his remarks, Nancy Hopkins – a biology professor at MIT  – left the room and reported Summers to the Boston Globe.  Her justification  for not staying to hear the conclusion of the arguments: was, “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up”.

In the resultant sound and fury, Summers offered a $50 million ‘diversity program’ to promote more women to  higher positions.  Nothing wrong with that, except for the ominous message that hysterical reaction produces a result that argument cannot.  In an academic context, if Summers was wrong in his opinions, then surely he should have been refuted with convincing counter-evidence?  As it was, Nancy Hopkins’ behaviour could be said to have reinforced Summers’ point about “different socialization patterns”.  As Harvard academic Stephan Thernstrom expressed it:        “If hearing ideas that she deeply disagrees with makes her physically ill, I suggest that Professor Hopkins’s temperament is ill suited for academic life, the life-blood of which is free enquiry and unfettered debate.”

A minority opinion, however, in important tranches of the modern university. 

 

Why exactly did the academic sea change happen?  Since it is the worldviews evolved in the 60s that currently control the social mindset of the West, that is the place to start the search. Crucial in this context would appear to be Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 essay ‘Repressive Tolerance’. 

            Marcuse, formerly of the Marxist Frankfurt School, argued the need to suppress conservative speech and cultural access because conservatives represent the rule of a repressive and dominant social class.  “Revolutionary tolerance” could not be neutral towards rival viewpoints.  The need to be “partisan” would justify not appointing staff with the wrong social, religious or political views, and would make the exclusion of conservative texts from reading lists a necessary duty.

            An obvious difficulty with this is the designation of the Right as the dominant class.  Suppose  Marcuse’s strategies are successful – as they have been in many areas of academia – and the Left achieves control.   Is the Right still to be excluded if it ceases to be the dominant class?  If so, doesn’t that make the Left repressive in its turn?

            And where would it stop?  Would Pythagoras’ theorem of the square of the hypotenuse become untrue, or have to be suppressed, if Pythagoras turned out to have been a political conservative; or would the suppression apply only to his politics?  Even then, shouldn’t the perceived truth or otherwise of the opinion be the criterion, rather than its source? 

Defining the limits of “repressive tolerance” is like the difficulty in defining “reasonable force” when a teacher restrains a violent child.  One person’s ‘reasonable force’ is another person’s ‘assault’: especially if there is money to be made from suing. 

The danger of repressive tolerance is that it can so easily turn into repressive intolerance in which all views you happen to disagree with are simply excluded. 

To do that with impunity, you have to be certain that you have the full truth.  Can you be sure?  How does Political Correctness know that it is correct?  It knows it is correct because Political Correctness says it is.   But that’s like you being the one who writes a reference about you when you go for a job interview.  Someone outside the loop must be the one to make the judgement.

 

I remember some years ago looking at the corrugated trunks of redwood trees in Yosemite.  At one time, it was feared that annual forest fires must harm these ancient giants, and fire breaks were created to protect them. 

            As a result, the trees ailed: falling prey to insects and  diseases  that the flames had killed off.  They had thrived on the fires.  Exposed to them once more, they regained their health.

            In the same sort of way – or so it seems to me – truth is refined in the furnace of conflicting views.  Try to cosset it, and truth dies.

 

If physical muscle is to develop it needs resistance.   This applies no less to mental muscle.  If you want to develop intellectually, find intellectual enemies and cherish them. 

 

Let us conclude with an imaginary scenario to highlight the problem caused by departure from the old academic ideal of teaching how to think rather than what to think. 

            You know with certainty that the world is round like a plate.  But then along come interlopers who think that  it is round like a ball. 

            If you are Socrates, you consider the merits of this new argument; indeed, if you find it convincing you adopt it in preference to the view of the world you currently hold.

            If you are Voltaire, you listen to the argument; and then demolish the absurdity of it with mordant wit. 

            If you are a modern academic totalitarian, you deny the heretics  a platform, or  – if they succeed in finding one – you turn off their microphones.  You ensure that their views may not be published, and you deny them access to research funding. 

            In doing this, you may have the high motive of wishing to protect the populace from falsehood.

            But may it be, alternatively, that you are not certain of the truth of your own viewpoint, and  wish, above all, to avoid its exposure to a  rational alternative? 

RESURRECTION, HOLOCAUST AND DENIAL: A RESPONSE TO 'THE READER'

Blessed are they who have believed and have not seen.

                                                                        John 20:29

 

I believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon because I have been told so.  But I can’t prove it: I wasn’t there.  Maybe whoever said he did – Suetonius, if I remember right – was lying because of some private agenda.  As far as I know, there are no Roman historians other than Plutarch to confirm the account; but if there were, what if there was a conspiracy and they were all lying?  The existing oldest record of the event is, in any case, only a copy of an original.  With that copy, what about scribal intervention, redactorial interpretation etc?  Not that it matters much to the modern world who among the Ancients crossed what or whom. Most people I know have only the haziest notion of who Caesar was, never mind Suetonius, and would be hard put to define the Rubicon.  Was it the entrance to a Roman building?

            I believe that the Armada invasion happened.  There are more records to say it did than there are about Caesar, and they are more recent.  There are also artefacts from the galleons.  But these could have been brought in from elsewhere.  The whole story could be a lie: some sort of anti-Spanish or anti-Catholic conspiracy cooked up by Protestant England.  How do you prove an event ever happened, once it has receded into history?

            I believe the date of my birth because I have a certificate recording the circumstance.  In this instance, I was there, even though I remember nothing about it.  The date could, of course, be wrong: based on collusion between my parents and the hospital authorities.  Where is scepticism to end, unless rolling ever onwards into madness?

 

If there is modern doubt about what once seemed assured, equally there is modern assurance about what must be, at best, uncertain.  We say that the New Testament records are unreliable because they are so old; but seem confident to talk about the sounds and colours and skin textures of dinosaurs, which are much older.  We can talk about the prehistoric with confidence precisely because it is exactly that – pre-historic – and there are no written records to contradict our interpretation of surviving artefacts. 

            Social – as opposed to biological – evolutionary theory sometimes assumes continuous progress: as if everyone in the past was less intelligent than those who followed them.  I wish most modern conversations I have encountered could even begin to touch on the sorts of issues raised by Socrates in virtually any Platonic dialogue, and with the same degree of intellectual liveliness.

To  moderns, the savagery of the caveman seems a given.  However, as G K Chesterton pointed out, the Lascaux cave paintings show an exquisite sense of how animals move.  Allowing for primitive colours and limited facilities for lighting within the caves, they are a towering aesthetic achievement, created with love for the subject. We may assume that the paintings relate to primitive religious rituals to ensure success in hunting, or that the animals depicted were the totems of the tribe, but this is pure speculation.  The cave in which they were found might equally have been a nursery, and the pictures might have been there to entertain the kids.  Who knows?  What is missing is eye-witness evidence.

 

It is simply not true that everybody was superstitious in the past and isn’t now.  Some people were superstitious then, some are superstitious now: as ten minutes in a New-Age shop will show you.  When Paul preached Christ and resurrection, the Greeks thought he was talking about two gods.  When they found out what he meant, they laughed at him.  They knew perfectly well that dead bodies don’t come back to life.   The Resurrection was as unbelievable – or believable – in 40 AD/CE as it is today.

            One way in which Paul could counter this sort of scepticism was to say, don’t just take my word for it: ask the other apostles.  One of the definitions of an apostle was one who had seen the risen Christ.  As Paul said, Christ appeared to a group of over five hundred.  Some of them are still alive.  Go and ask them what they saw, or think they saw... 

            Ever since ‘Source Q’ was first postulated, there has been much soul searching in that Matthew traditionally precedes Mark, but Mark is thought to be earlier.  One plausible solution to the problem is the oral record.  An oral Aramaic version of Matthew probably came first, followed by the written Greek of Mark, followed by a Greek translation of the Aramaic version of Matthew. In that sense, both traditions are correct:  Matthew is both earlier than Mark, and later.  Oral records then, after all, were not the sort of Chinese-whispers distortions they would be today: there were Greeks who, given the shortage of writing materials, knew Homer by heart.  Ditto Biblical accounts. That is why in Plato’s Phaedrus, Thaumous criticises Theuth’s invention of writing on the grounds that it will atrophy memory.  Nevertheless, when those who had known Christ in person were dying out, written records were needed to replace their verbal testimony and make it accessible to the widest possible audience. 

            The reliability, or otherwise, of those records is all we have to go on today,  which is why establishing that The Gospel of Thomas was not written at the same time as Mark, but is a Gnostic distortion arising in Syria post-160 AD/CE is a matter of laborious and intricate scholarship for us. Refutation would have been much easier for those living in the Second Century...

 

We are now on a similar cusp of history as the First Century was with the death of the eye witnesses to Christ.  “One day no one will march there at all”, from The Band played ‘Waltzing Matilda’, was prophetic when it was written, but has since come true: all the ANZACS who endured the horrors of Suvla Bay are now dead.  Five hundred years or so hence, will future Australians sceptical about an Oz defeat-in-arms believe that the Gallipoli campaign ever happened?  It will be a matter of faith in the historical record.  What if only a British record survives?  A slander dreamed up by those Pommy bastards, to get their own back for losing at cricket. 

            What about the Holocaust?  There were once the survivors on both sides of the event.  You could talk to Primo Levi, before he committed suicide.  In 1979, the BBC was able to interview Sergeant Wagner of Sobibor Concentration Camp – who said he felt no remorse – before he, too, committed suicide.  At any rate, he was found on the floor with a knife stuck in him, a year after the interview.  If it wasn’t suicide, maybe some one had a grudge against him.  What about?   What was it, about which Wagner felt no remorse?  There are fewer and fewer eye witnesses to whom these questions can be asked. 

            Holocaust denial is happening, and is sure to increase.  All the photographs of the dead at Yad Vashem are just part of a Jewish plot.  The cinematic evidence is faked.  Sure Jews had their heads shaved, but that was to protect them from lice and typhus. Sure some died: there was a lot of illness about.  Those buildings at Auschwitz?  Poles will invent anything to pull in the tourists.  And so on.  I am exaggerating, but not by much.  All the ingenuity brought to bear in denying the validity of the Gospels could soon be unleashed on the Holocaust. 

We have a vested interest in getting rid of the Holocaust.  We would all be a lot more comfortable if we didn’t have to believe it had occurred.  It offends the sense of innate human goodness in which Moderns have been taught to believe.

            That is why The Reader – both as novel and as film – comes at such an important point in history. The title is multi-faceted, but in one sense those of us who in place or time never experienced the event are all ‘readers’ in our attempt to make sense of what happened.  Hanna’s question to the Judge – “What would you have done?” – can hit all of us who did not have to make such choices with a horrible immediacy.  But is what are we reading in The Reader fact or fiction?  And how long before a fictional version of real events blurs into total fiction: especially among those for whom there is no such thing as objective fact?

 

Guessing the future is a notoriously unreliable business, but interpretation of the archaeological remains at Carthage might make us ponder.

            In Leviticus 18:21, there is a warning against delivering your children by fire to Moloch. In other words, do not copy the practices of your neighbours. From the perspective of another culture, historians Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch refer to child sacrifices at Carthage, including babies roasted to death on a bronze statue.  The bones of babies and young children have been found in the ruins of Carthage in what looks to have been a child necropolis.

            Proof of ancient practices?  Not a bit of it, say those touchy about the practices of their ancestors.   They were children who died of disease.  But the bones show no signs of disease, we may counter.  These were healthy children.  Ah, they reply, but claims of child sacrifice are simply enemy propaganda...  The Carthaginians were descendants of the Canaanites, who were the enemies of the Israelites.  Demonize your foe.  The Romans hated Carthage, which proves their historians must have been lying. Anyway, one Roman historian makes no mention of it, and there are no Carthaginian records of child sacrifice.  Yes, but not to mention it is not to say it didn’t happen: maybe he had other things to say, and limited space.  And what if there were Carthaginian records that didn’t survive?  A lot of what Suetonius wrote is lost to us forever.  Or what if details about child sacrifice were never put in writing because the parents hated having to do it and didn’t like being reminded?  And so on. 

Some of the worst orders – at least one concentration-camp commandant was relieved of his post for refusing to obey orders unless he had them in writing – given by the Nazis were purely verbal: precisely because they didn’t want to leave written evidence.  In the last functioning stages of the death camps, they tried  to destroy all their records and nearly succeeded. Imagine, then, this hypothetical scenario. Suppose someone in the future managed to complete the task and dispose of all the surviving Nazi evidence, leaving only the records of the British and the Americans from the Nuremberg Trials.

            Reliable evidence?  Of course not.  They’d been at war with Germany.  Trying to discredit the enemy.  What else would you expect?  And so on.

            In Christ’s story in Luke about the rich man Dives and the poor man Lazarus, Dives – now in torment – asks Abraham if Lazarus – now in bliss – can visit Dives’ brothers to warn them to mend their ways.  Pointless, says Abraham. “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will pay no heed even if someone should rise from the dead.”

To what extent Christ was talking about himself is a fascinating subject for speculation, but equally so is his insight into the scepticism of his time.  It is not simply that people can’t believe.  Far more difficult is that people don’t want to believe, and if they don’t want to, they won’t: whatever the evidence.  Seeing with your own eyes becomes meaningless when you don’t believe in the reality of the moral law.  We, by contrast, believe neither in the reality of the moral law, nor even in the reality of perception.  In that succinct summary of the hard heartedness rather than the hard headedness of his own era, Christ also highlights our own hopeless inability to believe in even the possibility of truth.

            A hundred years hence, then, will belief in the Holocaust have become like belief in the Resurrection: a matter of faith?

SHAKESPEARE THE ANTI-SEMITE?

Back in the old pre-Euro days, there  were EU discussions as to which great European figures might be depicted on the future European banknotes.   Shakespeare was discounted on the grounds of  his anti-semitism.

This may just have been an excuse to try and sneak in Dante or Goethe in preference; but if it was meant sincerely, then I am not at all sure that it was fair; for I am not sure that it takes due account of context. "I have nothing against Jews," might seem a neutral enough statement. But it might become heroic if uttered in a Gestapo torture chamber. And I think the portrait of Shylock is a great deal braver than some of us, with our modern (or postmodern)  perspectives, give Shakespeare credit for.

But let me try to set the context I am arguing for.

At the first outbreak of the Black Death, Jews in Germany - as uncertain as anyone else about the cause, but making shrewd guesses - suggested to their gentile neighbours they might try boiling their water. In the hysteria of the time, this message was quickly passed on and distorted. What did the Jews know about the water that no one else did? From here it was but a step to the rumours about deliberate poisoning. From an act of altruism arose a set of German anti-Jewish pogroms, and a lingering reputation for contaminating the drinking water of Christians.

It is this tradition, I think, that Marlowe is drawing on in his depiction of Barabbas: who poisons all the wells of Malta in his revenge against the Christians.

I know it is bad practice (forbidden since the days of A C Bradley)  to speculate about the psychology of writers, but here I am going to do so anyway. I think there were two main stimuli behind the creation of Shylock: apart from the fact that one of the stories Shakespeare drew on featured a Jew. The one was Shakespeare's intention to counter - or, at least, broaden - the portrait of Barabbas. The other was his reaction to the fate of Roderigo Lopez.

With apologies to those who know the details already, Roderigo Lopez was Queen Elizabeth's Physician, arrested tried and executed on the grounds of trying to poison her. Not a blameless figure, but almost certainly innocent of the charges: the main evidence being his own confession obtained under the same sort of persuasion applied to Guy Fawkes. Another case of fear-generated hysteria - in this case, of foreign enemies rather than microbes - needing to find a scapegoat.

And in the history before that time, Jews had been imprisoned in Clifford's Tower in York by Richard I when he could not repay their loans, and later expelled from England altogether. It would have needed a braver dramatist than Shakespeare to come before Elizabethan audiences with an entirely sympathetic portrait of a Jew.

Shakespeare, as a writer, is a hedger of bets. He is far less willing to lay his cards on the table than, say, Milton. Galileo recanted on the Solar System, and survived; Bruno refused to recant his planetary and other heresies and was burned alive. Shakespeare is the Galileo, not the Bruno, of literature.

But Galileo recanted knowing that he had laid the foundations of a truth that would be seen by future generations; and I wonder if Shakespeare is not a Galileo in this sense as well. There is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare wrote for his own time, rather than for posterity: for it was his own Age that paid him. But I like to think, nevertheless, that he gave in Shylock a portrait he hoped would be grasped by the perceptive among his own audiences; and more clearly, generally, by those which followed.

I think there is a deep and ironic ambiguity about the supposed happy ending to The Merchant of Venice. Shylock becomes a Christian; but the portraits of Christians are, as a generality, such that this can hardly be an occasion for rejoicing. Jessica, having run off taking a chunk of her father's money, romanticises with Lorenzo about celebrated nights from classical antiquity. But the stories, if you look at them closely, all concern love affairs that ended tragically. And the abiding image of the final act is the candle in the darkness: like a good deed in a naughty world. Shakespeare intends us to see, I think, that this sort of ambiguity runs right though the play: including his least - or most - sympathetic character.

I should like to draw on two comparisons: King Lear and Dickens. There is a great deal of social criticism in King Lear, but it is almost all veiled. It is spoken either by the King in his madness - never, when he is sane - or by the Fool, or by Edgar in feigned madness. Social criticism is all right when safely uttered by idiots.

And yet the power of the language invades the subconscious...

Fagin is a much less sympathetic - as well as much funnier - figure than Shylock. At a symbolic level, with his red hair and his toasting fork, he is the Devil straight out of the medieval mystery plays: tempting the youthful and innocent soul. But he is also based on the real-life fence Ikey Solomon: transported, like the Artful Dodger, rather than hanged, like Fagin. If anything, although the portrait is unpleasant, it is probably less so than the real-life original. Underage female prostitution is only lightly touched on in the novel; and there is nothing at all about the rent-boy networks that would have been a sideline of some of the Victorian pickpocket gangs.

To suggest that a Jew could not be evil would have been as big a lie as to suggest a Jew could not be good. And yet Dickens, aware of having given only one side of the picture, countered with the poignant picture of Riah: the gentle, gentile-exploited Jew of Our Mutual Friend.

Now, Shakespeare simply did not have that option. His audiences would have lapped up a Fagin, but to give them a portrait of a Jew like Riah would probably not have been tolerated by the theatre goers of the time: any more than the authorities would have been pleased to hear Lear’s, social criticism if uttered by a sane king or a normal peasant.

So Shakespeare - unparallelled before or since for tolerance and understanding and depiction of human diversity - had to compress his Fagin and his Riah together: in the hope that the surface portrait of the one would be countered by the subconscious power of the other.

For which, in the end, is meant to linger more forcibly?

My daughter, my ducats; my ducats, my daughter!

Or, and with a weight of twentieth-century experience behind it that Shakespeare could not have anticipated:

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

SHAKESPEARE: CATHOLIC OR PROTESTANT?

“Thou smilest and art still, out-topping knowledge.”

                                                              ‘Shakespeare’: Matthew Arnold

 

Somebody, I forget who, said that from reading the Sonnets one would have to conclude that Shakespeare was either homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual.

            To this might be added asexual: if the ‘I’ of the poems is a fictional character – as well he might be, just like Hamlet – rather than Shakespeare himself.  It is never safe to deduce biographical details from fiction.

            Even finding a fragment of someone’s diary would not necessarily prove anything definitive.  A diary can be, among other things, a literal record of events,  an emotional record of hopes and fears and fantasies, or an intellectual record of evolving opinions.

Something written one day in depression might be counteracted by a different entry when the mood had passed.  You might say you hate someone after a row, and that you love them after the quarrel is resolved.  If the discovered fragment contained only one of these and not both, a very lopsided picture might emerge.

            Again, if the discovered diary extract were from the record of a spiritual or intellectual pilgrimage, then the  extant January entry might be very different from that of November: which is missing.

 

To explore an idea does not mean that you have to believe in it, to understand a concept does not mean that you have to accept it, to imagine an event or a relationship does not mean that you must have personally experienced it. In Dr Faustus, Marlowe wrote a Christian play.   This tells us that Marlowe understood Christian doctrine.  It does not tell us whether or not Marlowe himself believed it. 

 

The same applies to Shakespeare. As with Shakespeare’s sexuality, so with his religion. From  the corpus of  the plays one would have to conclude that Shakespeare was a Protestant, a Catholic, an agnostic or an atheist. 

            I do not propose in the brevity of this essay to answer what is an unanswerable question from the available data.  I merely seek to show, from a few random examples, Shakespeare’s awareness of both Protestant and Catholic issues. 

 

In Act 5 Scene 1 of Hamlet, the gravediggers debate whether Ophelia is truly eligible to lie in hallowed ground, having committed the Catholic mortal sin of suicide. The first of them cites the Scripture – however fallaciously - to justify his argument, and this right of the common people to debate religious questions seems essentially Protestant; although about an essentially Catholic topic. The dispute that follows between Laertes and the Priest seems not only about what sort of rights to rites Ophelia has forfeited by her action, but also about Catholic versus Protestant forms of burial.

 

“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen.” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 4,1,209).   Thus Bottom’s citing of St Paul in his attempt to explain his dream.

 Is this an example of Tyndale’s claim, “I will cause a boy that drives the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou doest!”?  If so, this particular yokel is not the best endorsement, given the muddle he has made of it.  Is he an argument for leaving the Bible in the hands of the priests? 

On the other hand, if Bottom did not benefit from access to Scripture, Shakespeare himself certainly did.    Macbeth, for instance, is full of  Biblical allusions.  To give just two examples, “Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell” (4,2,22) cites Isaiah 14:12 about the fall of Lucifer,  while “The very stones prate of  my whereabout” (2,1,58) recalls Habakkuk 2:11. 

“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”  Sonnet 73.  Does this mean birds signing late into the evening?  Or does ‘late’ mean ‘recently’?  Is this a veiled criticism of the dissolution of the monasteries and the disappearance of sweet-voiced Catholic choristers? 

            Is the lament for the passing of things Catholic echoed in Twelfth Night with Sir Toby’s complaint about the threat to cakes and ale?  (2,3, 110).

Harmless, genial Catholic practices are fading with the gathering gloom of Puritanism.  On the other hand, Malvolio has protested about a bear baiting (4,5,7).  Given the hideous cruelties inflicted on bears, any system seeking an end to their sufferings can’t have been all bad. 

            Like Macbeth, Twelfth Night is suffused with religious imagery.  “Now Heaven walks on Earth” (5,1,91) might have been  pleasing to Elizabethan Protestants and Catholics alike as a doctrine common to both, but what about Feste’s addressing Olivia as ”Madonna”?  Is Feste a crypto-Catholic? 

            If so, what are we to make of Feste’s successful attempt to prove Olivia a fool in Act 1 Scene 5?  

Olivia is in sustained mourning for her dead brother.  Feste argues this must be must be because she knows his soul is in hell.  On the contrary, she knows his soul is in heaven.  If that is so, why does she mourn?  Take away the fool.

What is carefully missing from this exchange is the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory: whereby Olivia’s actions and emotions would have had some purpose in speeding up her brother’s access to Heaven.

            If Purgatory is conspicuous here by its absence, in Hamlet it is conspicuous by its presence.  Old Hamlet is confined to fast in fires until his “foul crimes” are “burnt and purg’d away.” (1,5,12).  His problem is that he has died without the Catholic sacrament of Last Rites: has gone to death, “with all my imperfections on my head.”.  All this is far removed from the Protestant view that it is your faith in Christ’s redeeming sacrifice that leads to your salvation.

            If Old Hamlet is Catholic, Young Hamlet is Protestant.  Young Hamlet is a student at Wittenberg, where Luther had been a professor.  Young Hamlet’s comment about Polonius – that “a certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him” (4,3,22) – is a convoluted pun about the Diet of Worms: the body before which Luther was called to explain himself. 

            On the other hand Young Hamlet’s resolution not to kill his uncle while Claudius is at his prayers, and to wait until some act “that has no relish of salvation in’t” (3,3,91) – ‘works’ rather than ‘faith’ - shows Young Hamlet in a Catholic rather than a Protestant frame of mind.  So does his invoking of Saint Patrick (1,5,136) , who removed the snakes from Ireland, but not the serpent that now wears Old Hamlet’s crown. 

 

In 1757[1] the owner of the house where Shakespeare was born decided to have the building re-roofed.  Under the original tiles, some secret documents were found that established Shakespeare Sr as a Catholic sympathiser.  (The fact of where the documents had been hidden is itself indicative of their incriminating nature). 

            Is this the real-life equivalent of the situation that we find in Hamlet: a tension between a Catholic father and a Protestant son?  Perhaps.

            And then again, perhaps not.  Either way, establishing with reasonable certainty the religious sympathies of the father does not entitle us to thereby surmise the religious convictions of the son.   

The unresolved questions about Shakespeare still abide.

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[1] See Hamlet in Purgatory, Stephen Greenbelt, Princeton , 2001 p248ff.