FRIAR LAWRENCE AND THE GOLDEN MEAN

Revisiting Don Quixote in one of his essays, George Orwell cites Nietzsche’s observation  that later generations do not always read a literary work in the spirit that the original audience, or the author, might have done.  When the crazy old man has half his teeth knocked out with a sling bow, we moderns tend to feel pity.  But in Cervantes’ own day, Nietzsche speculates, the episode might have been considered screamingly funny.  Perhaps so, in an era when people burned each other. 

            Long before Reception Theory – that the audience creates the meaning – became current, the truth of Nietzsche’s observation can be seen in the response of Romantic critics to Dante’s Francesca da Rimini.  Dante, the character in the poem, weeps for pity; but Dante, the poet, doesn’t.   If you take the stanzas without preconception, they read like a Browning monologue: the more the protagonist speaks, the more she condemns herself.   Romantic critics, however, unashamedly brought their preconceived values to the text.  Passion is magnificent.  Francesca has passion. Therefore, Francesca is magnificent.

 The rights and wrongs of who owns a work of literature – writer, reader, or both – are not my concern in this essay.  I am simply exploring whether the way in which we moderns regard Romeo and Juliet is necessarily that which the author intended.

 

As long as I’ve been alive – and that’s a long time, now -  any production, stage or screen, any critical discussion, has seemed to assume as a matter of course that Shakespeare is on the side of the lovers against their parents, of youth against age, of  the freedom to choose your partner for love against commercially-arranged marriage.    That Shakespeare explores these issues in the play is indisputable, but to explore is not necessarily to approve; any more than to say that because Milton explores evil, he must thereby endorse it. 

            In Much Ado about Nothing,  the case against conventional marriage and parental control does seem to me to be convincingly argued: the characters of Beatrice and Benedick, and their values, are deliberately introduced into the original story in contrast to – and implicit criticism of – the stiff conventionality of Hero and Claudio.  But I find no such convenient touchstone for comparison in Romeo and Juliet: if anything, and particularly in the case of Romeo, an implicit criticism of the excesses to which uncontrolled passion can lead.  And in Shakespeare’s political and history plays, there is – at the least – an ambivalence about the unthinking mob, about the dangers of upsetting the existing order of things.  What I am saying, I suppose, is that the key speech about degree in Troilus and Cressida has its counterpart in Romeo and Juliet, and that the Ulysses of Romeo and Juliet is Friar Lawrence: although his concern is with the horizontal rather than the vertical.

            The equivalent of the Degree speech is Friar Lawrence’s opening gambit in Act 2 Sc3.  Arguably, this is the most important speech in the play: certainly as much so as the more-famous Prologue.   

 

            Two such opposed kings encamp them still

            In man as well as herbs – grace and rude will;

            And where the worser is predominant,

            Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

 

            Balance is all.   Get the amount right, and you have medicine; get it wrong, and you’ve got poison.   Partly, this speech anticipates Juliet’s apprehension before she drinks the potion that the Friar has prepared for her.    Far more, it reflects the excesses of passion that poison communal and personal health. The anger and irrationality and hatred that fuel the feud threaten the stability of the city state, and generate the violent reaction of love in the younger generation.

 

Take the lovers at face value, and the sort of things that Friar Lawrence says are simply what you would expect an aged celibate to say.  That, certainly, is the modern view.  It may be so; or it may be that that Friar Lawrence is Shakespeare’s spokesperson in the play, with perceptions akin to the Friar in Much Ado who asserts Hero’s innocence. Much hinges on how we view the presentation of Friar Lawrence, which will be in turn be influenced by how we interpret Shakespeare’s - or, indeed, our own - attitude towards Catholicism.   

            Romeo when we first meet him speaks in oxymorons, and these violent extremes characterise him all through the play.  When Romeo justifies himself against Friar Lawrence for his rapid change of heart – “Thou chid’st me oft for loving Rosaline.” – the Friar points out that he was criticising not an emotion, but an excess:  “For doting, not for loving, pupil mine.”  Rosaline – one of the most sympathetic characters in the play although we never meet her – had realised this about Romeo: that he was more in love with the idea of love than he was with her. 

Friar Lawrence’s conversation to Romeo is peppered with warnings about excesses of speed or rapture:  “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast.”; or  “These violent delights have violent ends…  Therefore love moderately.” It is the external voice of reason against the inner voice of passion; but, of course – or there would be no tragedy – the heart fails to listen to the head.

     

All Shakespeare’s plays are too multi-faceted to be confined to any one interpretation.  However, there can still be an overall prevailing view: nearly everyone except a PhD candidate looking for something original to say seems to feel that Shakespeare is on the side of  Othello rather than Iago, or of Hermione rather than Leontes.  When sense is ignored by sensibility, disaster follows.  That could well have been Shakespeare’s ‘message’; so that we moderns do indeed experience the play in a way quite other than what was intended. 

Stranger things have happened.  One of the resolutions of Swift’s old age was, “To despise all small children, nor to let them come near me hardly.”  It was the punishment of posterity that his most famous work should end up as a children’s classic. 

LITERAL TRUTH AND LITERARY TRUTH

“Now what I want is Facts!”

         Hard Times

 

In one of his essays, David Daiches – Professor of English in the University of Sussex at the time he was writing – tells of an experiment he undertook while visiting an American university: Buffalo, I think.  As students came out of an English seminar, he put to each of them this question:

            Literature is about people who never existed, and events that never happened.  Why read it?

            This is not a new question, and the definitive answer to it was given centuries ago by Sir Philip Sidney in his Apology for Poesie.  Any defences of literature that I give can lay no claim to originality, but are merely variations of Sidney’s arguments, updated. 

 

In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare gives Bohemia a sea coast.  Bohemia is in the middle of Europe.  Maybe Pandosto, on which Tale is based, was geographically accurate. I don’t know, I’ve never read it, and its chief claim to fame today is as a source for Shakespeare. 

            But Shakespeare was never a slave to his sources: he would take what he needed, throw the rest away, and then see where his imagination led him.  In Tale, Shakespeare wants to explore two kings moving in different directions in parallel kingdoms: hence the adapted Bohemia to match Sicilia: which indisputably does have a coastline.  It matters only if we want Shakespeare as a guide to the layout of Europe.  But we can get that from an atlas; whereas what we can’t get from an atlas is Shakespeare’s exploration of guilt and reconciliation. 

The Wind in the Willows is likewise disappointing if we demand that it shall give us lessons in natural history.  Water rats, after all, don’t row boats or compose poems about ducks; badgers don’t wear carpet slippers; toads don’t get leaves in their hair.

But the book is magnificently ‘true’ in its depiction of a particular place - the Thames riverside; of a particular time - the Edwardian glow before the First World War; and of a particular emotion- friendship.  And in a bizarre way, the essence of each animal has also been captured.  A mole would not be gruff in the way that Badger is. Although they are both water creatures, Toad’s movements are not those of Otter. 

Peter Porter entitled one of his collections of poems Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces.  In doing so, he is quoting Isaiah’s curse on the Babylonians, as rendered by The Authorised Version.

Modern translations substitute ‘jackals’ for ‘dragons’, but in this context either word is equally indicative of ruin where there once was splendour, and is ‘true’ both for Porter’s theme of the decline of western civilization and for Isaiah’s prophecy of doom.   But the distinction between the two creatures would be relevant if you were reading a guide as to what you might expect to find in an African safari park. 

In one of his parables, Christ compares the Kingdom of Heaven to the mustard seed: the smallest of all seeds that can grow into a tree, and have birds nestle in its branches.

Sober botanists have pointed out that there are smaller seeds than mustard seeds, and larger garden plants than mustard trees – I’ll take their word for it, I’ve never seen a mustard tree – and the Bible is therefore not to be trusted. 

But Christ may simply have been using a figure of speech.  When Conan Doyle's Watson says, “I am the most long-suffering of men.” he does not mean that he has undertaken a comparative analysis of everyone else on the Victorian planet, or even in London.  He simply means “I am very tolerant”, and Christ’s image of something large and useful from small and unpromising beginnings is a comparable example that does not need exact precision to make its point. 

Christ might have said – with equal truth – that great oaks from little acorns grow; only this might have been puzzling to his audience of Galilean yokels.    It is not even certain that Christ himself would have known about oak tress. On the one hand as God – and therefore as inventor of the oak tree – he must have done; but as a man who had grown up in Galilee, he might not.  It is a riddle – the blend within one person between the human and the divine –  to which we cannot know the answer this side of the grave; although it might be an interesting question to put to Christ in the hereafter.  

 

In Bleak House, Krooks – the gin-sodden old miser – ignites and explodes, dripping yellow bile onto the lodger in the room beneath.  Dickens apparently believed that spontaneous combustion of humans was possible.  Science itself might have believed this at the time Dickens was writing, but Science has since shown the belief to be erroneous.  Whatever nonsense the scene may be in a literal sense, symbolically it has hardly been affected:  reinforcing the theme of yellow disease – jaundice – that runs through the book. 

            Homer may, or may not, have believed in his gods.  His audience certainly did: Plato condemned Homer for making the gods laugh, which was an unseemly example for the impressionable young. 

            We today tend not to believe in Homer’s gods, and yet they are absolutely key to the text: bickering and interfering at every stage of the struggle between Greeks and Trojans.  Does that mean we can no longer read The Iliad?

            Not a bit of it.  Treat them as natural, or irrational, forces, and consider the rapid reversals of fortune that may occur to any of us in the course of a week, and they are alarmingly true to life. 

 

For the insatiable fact seeker, determined to salvage at least something from the wreck of knowledge that is literature, the ‘I’ of narrative sounds promising.  Thus ‘I’ equals autobiography: even if the character’s name is Pip, and the author’s name is Charles. 

            I recall a discussion with a girl about Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems, in which  she asked me if I knew who the real-life ‘Lucy’ was.  When I said that ‘Lucy’ might have been imaginary, she looked at me first in bafflement and then in disappointment. 

            But the power and truth of the Lucy poems are not that they explore a real person – they may do, they may not – but that they explore a real situation: a shy young man who sees the beauty and value of a shy and unassuming young girl.  There are thousands upon thousands of shy anonymous lovers of shy Lucys; and thousands of people who are taken for granted, and whose true value is seen only after they have died and it is too late to make amends.  And the Lucy poems are a celebration of all such people – past, present and future – and their ‘truth’  lies not with whether Wordsworth knew a real-life Lucy or  not, which could happen to anybody, but with his skill in depicting the emotion inherent in such a situation, which is a rare gift. 

            Years ago, when Deidre Barlow was on the verge of leaving Ken Barlow in the television soap Coronation Street, newspapers ran pictures of her with the headline, ‘Will She, Won’t She?’  If you had asked readers and viewers about whether Deidre really existed, nearly all of them would have known perfectly well that she didn’t.  Neither did Ken.  What they were responding to was the truth of the situation, and its echo of a decision many of them would have made, or still have to make, in the course of their own lives. 

            Why else did I cry at the death of Lee Scoresby’s daemon, Hester the hare, in The Subtle Knife?  Daemons don’t exist, and I’ve never seen Hester. But the power of Pullman’s writing had reminded me painfully of the death of a beloved animal of my own. 

 

In the same vein as the ‘I’ voice in narrative, there are those who prefer realism in fiction to fantasy, on the grounds that realism is more like real life.  This seems to me illusion: both genres are artificial – even stream-of-consciousness narrative is artificial – and both represent the selection of one experience rather than another, and the patterning of such choices, that is the writer’s craft. 

“In the early years of this century, such a linen-weaver, named Silas Marner, worked at his vocation in a stone cottage...”   No he didn’t.  Silas Marner never existed; although weavers like him did.   Michael Henchard was never mayor of Casterbridge, although the truth of his situation – an individual unable to adapt to change – is as valid as ever it was.  But both of them are as much fictional creations as Gandalf the Wizard, jerking Bilbo Baggins out of the settled routines of his sheltered hobbit life. 

We may, of course, argue that the events in Silas Marner could really have happened, unlike the events in The Hobbit;  that Raveloe is a recognisable village, in a way that the village of Bree in The Lord of the Rings is not.  And yet, in reading Tolkien’s descriptions, many readers feel they have experienced English pubs, the Oxfordshire countryside, and the landscapes of The First World War. 

            If the events of The Lord of the Rings could not have happened, the situations could.  A threat hanging over the human race is a reality with which everyone can identify.  Both Marner and Rings are concerned with the regeneration of an individual: in Marner, it is the driving force of the narrative, in Rings it is the sub-plot involving Gollum.

           

            ...and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo’s

            knee  - but almost the touch was a caress.  For a fleeting moment, could one of

            the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old

            weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time,

            beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved

            pitiable thing. 

 

            Sam, misreading the situation, duly intervenes; the green light returns to Gollum’s eyes, and the moment of potential redemption is gone forever.  If anything, Rings is more realistic in this respect than Marner, for Silas is successfully reintegrated into society, whereas in real life such attempts are often doomed to failure. 

            Diggory Venn in The Return of the Native is another such selfless character as Sam, whose well-meaning interference simply exacerbates misfortune.  And the situation is as true of the one work as of the other; although the one is set in mythical Middle-earth and the other in realistic rural Dorset. 

            The last of the Elven ships leaves the Grey Havens, taking with it Elrond and Galadriel, Gandalf and Frodo.  Sam, left behind, “saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West.  There still he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth.”  

            Many readers will feel from this ending quite as much regret for the passing of an Age as they will feel from the ending of the much more realistic Brideshead Revisited.  Perhaps more for the loss of the Elves, than for the loss of effete and decadent aristocrats. 

Sidney said – I am paraphrasing – that history is about what happened, whereas literature is about what happens. Literature is ‘true’ if it is a valid exploration of an imagined experience.  We can share the situation of Hamlet – a situation that never existed in reality – and feel his confusion to be true, even if it is not the same sort of truth as the truth known to historians.   For literature is the truth about the human condition.  It enables us to view the world through the eyes of others – whether we like what we see, or not – and, in doing so, to extend our understanding of our own complex mortality.

 

 

THE WORLD VIEW OF 'SE7EN'

The film Se7en came out in 1995.  Seeing it shortly after its release, I found myself puzzled as to where it was coming from.  From the atheist perspective I had at the time, it seemed to be dealing with Catholic themes – Dante, Aquinas, deadly sins and cardinal virtues – without  itself having a Catholic perspective towards them. 

     Revisiting it in 2012, now from a Christian perspective, I think I was right in that initial assessment.  That is to say, I think there is a religious viewpoint; but one that is neither Catholic in particular, nor Christian in general.  This review will try to illustrate what I mean. 

Before that, some purely technical observations.  Given that it was written from scratch, rather than derived from an earlier novel, this film thrives on anachronisms.  Somerset wears a hat.  He uses a metronome instead of an alarm clock and a typewriter instead of a computer.  Although the Internet was well under way from 1990 onwards, Somerset visits the city Library to do his literary research.  The detectives use torches, when it would be much easier simply to flick a light switch.  All this seems to me to work very well.  There is a sort of deliberate archaism about it that blends seamlessly with the medieval themes. 

     Studying Doré’s illustrations for the Purgatorio, Somerset pauses over Arachne turning into a spider: possibly the creepiest and most evocative of all Doré’s Dante drawings.   John Doe’s bland disclaimer about the dead dog – “I didn’t do that.” – is a masterly piece of black humour.  This is a great film, in many ways; and in making it, the director of the truly awful Alien 3 had come a long way in a very short time. 

     The deliberately grainy, sepia-effect photography, the absence of light bulbs, the near-continuous rain all convey a murky atmosphere that reflects the murky theme very effectively. 

     That said, the blurred soundtrack – presumably deliberate for the same blurred and murky reasons – seems to me to work far less well, and you really need access to subtitles to find out what is being said.  Brad Pitt as Detective Mills is a particularly bad offender in this regard.  Except when he is yelling “Fuck off!” at somebody I find it almost impossible to hear what he is saying.  The audibility of John Doe/Kevin Spacey comes as a relief.

 

So much for technique, what about the message?  For this is a film that seems to be making a statement about something.

     When I first saw it, I thought initially that it might be a critique of urban life.  Mills has come to the City from somewhere less toxic.  Tracy wants to escape from the City to somewhere else.  Talking about his retirement – I think that is what it was about insofar as it was audible – Somerset says he wants to be “far away from here!”

     As the film progresses however, the existence of elsewhere, and the possibility of getting there, seems to diminish.  John Doe talks of, “a world this shitty”: the problem is greater than the immediate vicinity, and greater than urban decay.   Mills will end up trapped within the City’s systems.  Tracy will never escape.  Nor, it seems, will Somerset.  When asked where he will be he now simply says, “Around.” 

     You cannot escape this City, for this City is the human condition: any time, any place.  The name John Doe is an Americanism for the typical guy: a sort of American Everyman.  The society depicted by the film is possible because of universal human apathy: the whole human race is indicted.  It may not be too fanciful to see the rain as a reminder of Noah’s Flood:  impending disaster for the sins of mankind.

     The world view explored in this film is probably best described as Gnostic.  I do not mean that it is necessarily consciously so.  But when a religious temperament is denied conventional belief, then Gnosticism is often the default position; and I think that this is the case here. 

     The ancient Gnostics believed in the evil of matter and the vileness of the body; for the world had been made by a corrupt demiurge.   They rejected marriage and, above all, procreation; the best hope for this hopeless world was for the human race to die out as quickly as possible.  

     Let us consider this in the light – or dark – of the film.   John Doe declares that he has been chosen.   Even if we accept his premise that it is not wrong to murder morally guilty people, it is possible to find flaws in his line of moral reasoning: or the reasoning of the power controlling him. The glutton, for example, might not be simply gluttonous.  His body might have difficulty in processing food, in which case the issue of his obesity would be medical, as much as moral.  

     By the corpse of the lawyer chosen to represent greed, there is a quotation from The Merchant of Venice.  Or so Somerset says; actually, most of it is composed by Doe himself.  And in Shakespeare, of course, the contract falls apart because no blood is allowed; only flesh.  On that basis, Doe’s decision to cite Merchant seems ill judged since with him there is blood.  Plenty of it.

     Doe condemns the victim of pride as ugly inside for not wanting to live.  On the other hand, if you were a fashion model, relying on your face for a living, it would not be unreasonable to feel that your world had come to an end when you lost your nose.

     Doe says his victims are not innocent, but Tracy is.  All she wants is to get out of the city for the sake of her unborn baby.  By his own logic, Doe might deserve to die because of his envy.  But Tracy does not; for she is not envious.   And so on. 

     Somerset asks if Doe sees himself as chosen by a higher power.  He does not specify whether this power might be God or the Devil.  Doe has a fluorescent red cross above his bed and a bible in his bedside drawer; but that, in itself, tells us nothing.  Crucifixes feature in Black Masses.  The Devil can quote scripture for his own ends. 

     If am right about the film’s Gnosticism, then it would be meaningless, anyway, to ask such an either/or question.  There is only one higher power, and from it we can expect neither logic nor justice; for it is malign.   

     Less speculative is the conversation between Somerset and Tracy as to whether or not she should abort her baby.  Somerset says that he and his girlfriend aborted their baby because they did not want to bring a child into such a world.  That seems to me to be directly in the best traditions of Gnostic pessimism.

 

The Gnostics were brave people.  They confronted the way the world is, without the benefit of revelation.  Instead of seeing a good world – spoiled, but one day to be redeemed – they found a bad one: the product of a malign creator, and evil in its essence.  This film seems to me to be directly in that tradition.  If you confront the world’s evil as a sensitive soul, and don’t accept the Christian or the atheist explanation, then the sort of mindset depicted in Se7en will very likely be the result.  

 

THEOLOGY IN 'THE VICAR OF DIBLEY'

When The Vicar of Dibley began in 1994, I treated it with less attention than it deserved.  I was an atheist at the time, and bothering about vicars of either sex seemed like fiddling while the Church burned.   To change the metaphor, if I considered the issue at all, it seemed analogous to putting extra crew onto The Titanic so that more of them could be drowned when the thing eventually sank.  Parish council meetings typified for me the irrelevance that religion had become in my own – and in the nation’s – life. 

            I caught snatches of episodes and found them creditable, if over-the-top, comedy.  What failed for me was the batty old woman with outlandish recipes: marmite instead of chocolate.  Why?   This seemed to me the humour of desperation,  and it struck the same false note that I found with Rowan Atkinson’s performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral.  I was glad that she seemed to have faded out of the later episodes.

            Since then I have come back to religious faith and to a loose affiliation with the Church of England.    As such, I sat down recently to watch the series as a whole with a completely different set of assumptions.  As a sideline, I now understood the disappearance of the old woman: she died.

The Vicar of Dibley was an enormous hit for the BBC: at its height, drawing audiences of fifteen million.  It coincided with the ordination of women priests, and played an important role in encouraging their acceptance by the British public.  About this central theological issue of the series I simply do not feel qualified to comment; although I am aware that are theological issues involved rather than simply the need to combat social prejudice. 

            Overcoming social prejudice is, however, the way in which the series interprets any reluctance to accept female vicars.  Geraldine arrives with minimum preamble and says she supposes they were expecting a bloke.  Insofar as justifications for women priests are given at all they are that so many male vicars are gay – Geraldine’s bishop seems to have a succession of male partners – and that the previous vicar was virtually a woman so they might as well have the real thing. 

            Geraldine’s reason for choosing the ministry is The Sermon on the Mount and this – perhaps unconsciously – is the real clue to the theology of the series: which is overwhelmingly ethicist.  If you were a Martian, and watched The Vicar of Dibley to try and understand Christianity, then you would think Christ had said just two things:  “Love one another”   and “Turn the other cheek”; the latter, of course, subject to sexual innuendo from uncomprehending hearers. 

            But even if you take Christ as being nothing more than the source of ethical injunctions, some of these are more challenging than The Vicar of Dibley might suggest.  What about the call to a follower to take up your cross?   Then again, no relationship must matter more than loyalty to Christ.  Geraldine by contrast, in the earlier episodes has pictures of Christ and Sean Bean on the wall. At one point, she says that Sean Bean is the more important.  Any one could say as much in a lax moment, but there is nothing to suggest that this is not her real conviction, or that there is any reason why a female vicar should not have an extramarital sex life.  As Geraldine herself puts it, she is holy in more ways than one. 

Christ gave the commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength.  As it is, we are shown  a parish council with a Tory bigot – as far as the series goes, this is a tautology: a Tory is a bigot by definition; a closet homosexual who later outs himself; a libertine who appears never to have heard of Christian marital  ethics, never mind trying to follow them; a farmer whose sexual interest in his animals grows in proportion to his sexual interest in the vicar; and – until the death of the culinary organist reduces their number to two – three plain imbeciles.  For all I know, they may be representative enough of a rural parish; but what is lacking in all of them is any sense of loving God, or even believing in his existence.  To that extent, at least, the series is untrue to reality; and I suspect – assuming the presence of the indwelling Spirit within believers – in other ways as well. 

            Ego tripping.   In Christianity, pride is the greatest sin. With the episode Celebrity Vicar, Geraldine lets television appearances go to her head.  Things fall apart when her friends are ridiculed in the press, and she is ostracized as a result.  She apologises to them; but, again, there is no sense of anything other than a human dimension: no sense that she might say sorry to God.  

            It might be argued that religion should be kept out of comedy, but it’s difficult when the subject is religion: particularly a faith in which the cross – an innately unfunny image – is the central focus.   The mere fact that the series could have been made, though, is itself a tribute to the spirit of tolerance within Christianity.  Attempts to see the funny side of Islam have had unfortunate consequences: perhaps certain Danish newspaper editors had confused it with Christianity.   Unless they wanted to highlight the difference: make fun of Islam, and people die.

In the series, of course, the cross is not given any particular prominence: other than as a decoration on a jumper.   Preparation for the Christmas sermon is cited as the most important task in the Vicar’s year.  Following the lead of secular culture, Christmas in Dibley is the most important annual religious event.    The main significance of Easter, by contrast, is the Easter Bunny. 

As Tom Wright pointed out, if you remove the accounts of the Virgin Birth, you lose the opening of Matthew and Luke.   If you take out the Resurrection, you lose the whole of the New Testament.  Paul preached Christ and Resurrection: if the Resurrection has not happened then our faith is in vain.    If you can accept the Resurrection, you need have no trouble with  the Virgin Birth.  It doesn’t really follow the other way round. 

            In the second – and vastly inferior to the first –  Christmas episode, Geraldine says something to the effect that Christ had two things going for him: a really nice personality and a lovely fluffy beard.  At one point in the first episode, Christmas Lunch – and my personal favourite by far – she  does express some religious views that probably echo what a lot of the viewers at the time understood by Christmas.   A baby is born, the poorest of the poor.  His teaching – when  he grows up – to love one another still inspires millions.  He was put to death just for telling people to love each other.  He’s gone, but his message lives on.  She also believes he was the son of God; although what she means by that contentious expression need be nothing more than one unusually endowed with a sense of the divine.  I am guessing; unless I missed something, what she means by it is never explained.  It is also – again unless I missed something somewhere – the only time that there is any actual reference to God. 

            The teaching may still live on, but the rest of what Geraldine says is debateable.  It is probable that Joseph had quite a thriving carpentry business, just as Christ’s disciples – until they gave it up to follow him – probably made a prosperous living selling salted fish.  The idea of their poverty – Christ’s in adulthood was self-imposed, and genuine, and made possible because of wealthy disciples – probably derives from a later date when Christianity came to terms with the classical heritage, and probably reflects the distaste of certain Greek philosophers for any form of manual labour.  Christ was sentenced for blasphemy – for claiming to be God – and the execution was carried out by the Romans on the basis that Christ was King of the Jews and therefore a potential political threat.  The view that he’s gone would explain why, in the series, so much is made of Christmas  – the only new life is that arising from new birth – and why  so little, in comparison,  is made of Easter. 

            The doctrine of the Second Coming is touched on as well: but not as anything one ought to take seriously.  Alice latches onto the idea and wants to know when he’ll arrive; since not to tell people when you’re due is like being  a very rude guest.

 

There is a certain  experience you can have during a service in a great cathedral; or simply from walking round it during a choir practice..   You can admire the architecture, enjoy the choral element, meditate upon the social phenomenon that is the congregation,  but never once consider what the building and the services within it  have as their primary function.

            The Vicar of Dibley reminds me of that sort of situation.  The location is ravishing, the introductory music from the Christ Church  choir is haunting; we meet a series of lovable caricatures in some richly-human situations..  The story itself is life- enhancing: a newcomer to a small community overcoming initial prejudice to find  love. and acceptance: even indispensability.  Geraldine may not be able to give much in the way of spiritual advice, but there is no doubting her effectiveness as a counsellor, or of the Vicarage as a haven for the emotionally – I hesitate to say spiritually – troubled.

            The point is made over and over again: Geraldine is the best vicar Dibley has ever had.  Unlike the old days in which the congregation had consisted of the Parish Council, the church is now full. What is less clear is why she should not have been equally effective if offering a purely secular counselling service; or why the church should not be quite as full if it functioned simply as a social club.

 Within the parameters it sets itself, the series overwhelmingly establishes the case for female vicars.  But what it cannot do, by those very same parameters, is to demonstrate why vicars of any complexion should exist in the first place.  It may be great on Christ’s second commandment: that you should love your neighbour as yourself.  What is missing is his first commandment: that you should love the Lord your God.

 

NARNIAN RACISM

    For  every Arthur, there is a Mordred
            For every Sydney, a Cecil Rhodes.            

                                    That Hideous Strength

 

Philip Pullman’s distaste for the Narnia sequence is forthrightly established: to talk about “nauseating drivel”, after all, is to lay one’s cards on the table with a vengeance.  With Lewis and Pullman we have two irreconcilably-differing views of existence: the conclusive truth of either resolvable only by individual death, or by the end of time.   What does concern me about Pullman’s attack, and for which some conclusion can be drawn, is the accusation that the Narnia books are “blatantly racist.”

            Accusations of racism in the modern world are a bit like the old accusations of witchcraft:  to be accused is, in a sense, to be condemned. That is because ‘racism’ – I do not say that this is true of Pullman, but it is undoubtedly true of some of those who use the term – can be downgraded to mean anything we happen to disapprove of.  ‘Witchcraft’ probably suffered the same fate: concourse with the Devil, undoubtedly, but also an opportunity  to acquire some one else’s husband, wife or land;  to settle old grudges; to wipe out any sort of suspect opinion; or simply to indulge one’s sadism by sticking pins in naked women.

Lewis made the point that the term ‘Christian’, like the term ‘gentleman’, had become meaningless: people could use both words and understand totally different things by them.  The same now applies, I fear, to calling some one a ‘racist’.  The anecdote that it has been deemed ‘racist’ to speak of ‘black’ or ‘white’ coffee is, I hope, apocryphal; but the mere fact that the anecdote exists is an indication of the sort of confusion we are in.  Surely the colour of coffee is to do with the amount of milk added, unless we are to deem Nature racist for making milk white and coffee brown?  Grant that and what are we to make of the racist implications of day and night?   Was Shakespeare being deliberately racist when Macbeth speaks of “night’s black agents”?  At what point does legitimate social concern degenerate into sheer absurdity?

I once heard a conversation arising from Pullman’s diatribe against Lewis in which The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was said to be racist because Edmund asks for Turkish Delight.   But is this sustainable?  The context is wartime rationing: and the chance to get something exotic, delicious and unobtainable.  It has had a spell put on it for a bad purpose – namely, the enchantment of Edmund – but there is no suggestion that the substance is wrong in itself: racists, in my experience, would hardly use as bait a food from a culture they despised.   One might just concede the point if the Turkish Delight had been offered by the Calormenes; but, in fact, it’s produced by the White Witch in a westernised, pre-war presentation box. 

Pullman, fortunately, is clear in what he means by Lewis’ racism.  For Lewis, “light coloured people are better than dark coloured people.”  Whatever the justice or otherwise of Pullman’s accusations of sexism or “reactionary prejudice” in Lewis’ writing, this particular statement seems to me as unfair as it is untrue.

If we consider Lewis’ work as a whole, his view of colonialism is unremittingly aware of the suffering and injustice that it caused.  In English Literature in the Sixteenth Century he compares early with later exploration, and speaks ironically of the ‘training’ of the conscience – ie its abolition – necessary to undertake the colonialism of the Nineteenth Century.  In his essay on Spenser, he speaks of the poet as being involved, through no direct fault of his own, in “an abominable policy in Ireland”.  For some moderns, I think, the oppression of one white race by another white race does not constitute racism: it is merely a family quarrel.   Racism can occur only when a race of one colour oppresses a race of another colour.  But on that, too, Lewis had something to say.

            Apart from his science fiction, Lewis wrote at least two essays on the possibility of life in outer space, and on what would happen if the colonial principles applied on Earth were transposed to other planets.  Thus in The Seeing Eye:

“I observe how the white man has hitherto treated the black…. I do not doubt that the same revolting story will be repeated.  We shall enslave, deceive, exploit or exterminate…”

And in Religion and Rocketry

“…we shall, if we can, commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonised pity, and burning shame.”

Such statements – and the bracketing of Cecil Rhodes with the villainous Mordred of Arthurian legend - seem to me only very doubtfully racist by any definition of the term: we should remember that, for Lewis, ‘creature’ meant ‘created being’: a child of God.

Lewis would have been as aware as anyone of the vision of the redeemed in Revelation, 7.9:  “a vast throng of all tribes, nations and languages”.  For Lewis, what divided people was not their skin colour, but their response to Christ.  In The Great Divorce – his response to an aspect of the Blakean view of life espoused by Pullman – we are given the view that there are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done”; and those to whom God says, “Thy will be done.”

            In Mere Christianity Lewis compares the human race to a tree, and the common link between the Calormenes and the Narnians was established when Lewis was planning the Narnia sequence.   Lewis sketched out an outline of Narnian history.  In 180, Prince Col leads followers into uninhabited Archenland.  In 204, outlaws from Archenland flee across the Southern desert and set up the new kingdom of Calormen, which by 300 has become a great empire: time, obviously, is compressed here.   The point is that the races are linked.  The Calormenes are ex-Narnians made darker by a hotter climate: calor men.  The ‘men’  reference is arguably sexist, but the ‘calor ‘ whether you define it as ‘colour’ or ‘calor’ suggests the pigment that stops you getting skin cancer.

            Lewis has been accused of calling a Calormene a “Darkie”.  Actually, he doesn’t.   A dwarf does, which is not the same thing; unless we are simple enough to assume that writers create only characters of whom they approve. Because Macbeth says, “I am in blood steeped so far,” it does not mean that Shakespeare advocated genocide, or was himself a serial killer.  

What are we to make of the depiction of Calormene culture?  The Calormene Empire is much larger and more powerful than Narnia. The Calormene Empire has slaves, but then so does the Charn of Jadis the White Witch.  If there are Calormene slavers in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there is also Pug, the Narnian. When King Caspian, putting his new kingdom to rights, abolishes slavery in The Lone Islands, Pug complains that he will be beggared.  Caspian replies better to be a beggar than to continue trading in broken hearts.  That seems to have been Lewis’ take on slavery, whatever race was practising it. 

            Tashbaan, the Calormene capital, is in many ways an impressive city, and – significantly – when the new world is created at the end of The Last Battle, a redeemed Tashbaan is still there.  The banquet that Shasta eats, though different from a Narnian meal, is delicious.  The gardens, with their tinkling fountains, are beautiful.  Aravis tells her story in “the grand Calormene manner”, and Narnian Bree thoroughly enjoys the technique. The Calormene poets, though sometimes pompous, are a source of moral truth.  Emeth – ‘truth’ in Hebrew – quotes them with Lewis’ obvious approval. 

True, the Vizier quotes them as well.  True, also, that the depiction of the Vizier and the Tisroc is satirical, but it’s nothing compared to the home-grown Arabic satire in  The 10001 Nights: the character of the Barber, for instance,  or the antics that give rise to Scheherazade’s peril in the first place. 

Susan declines to marry Rabadash, but that is not because he’s non-white, or because marriage would lead to sex and sex is bad.   She declines because the Narnians discover Rabadash’s true personality:  “a cruel, bloody and luxurious tyrant”.  Prince Cor marries Aravis, and King Lune welcomes her as a daughter.  The Hermit makes no discrimination in his treatment of her.   Nor, for that matter, does Aslan.

As to Calormene religion, I do not feel, as some have done, that Tash is an equivalent of Satan; although there may be echoes of the dragon of Revelation.  It is the witch Jadis who brings evil into Narnia.  Tash is more of an offshoot, like the idol worship of the Old Testament.  The worship of Tash, with its emphasis on human sacrifice, has echoes of the ancient Semitic religions.  ‘Tash’ is Turkish for ‘stone’, and the pictures of Tash are reminiscent of the Assyrian eagle-headed gods in the British Museum.   (Before we damn Lewis’ racist use of a Turkish word for something evil, we should remember that ‘Aslan’ is Turkish for ‘lion’.) The cult of ‘Tashlan’, with its blending of different religious systems, recalls the activities of Jezebel and Ahab; and it is the Narnian Shift who establishes it, quite as much as the Calormene Rishda Tarkaan: who does not believe in the reality of Tash or Aslan.

            With Tashlan, Lewis was undoubtedly criticising the view that all religions say the same thing and that all are equally true.  That was not because Lewis thought Christianity superior by virtue of its being a Western religion – which in origin, of course, it isn’t – but because he believed it to be God’s self-revelation. 

            In Mere Christianity Lewis expressed the view that there was truth in other religions, except when they specifically clashed with Christianity.  (Reincarnation and the Christian view of the afterlife cannot both be right; although they can both be wrong.)  In the same book, he took the view that some belonged to Christ without knowing it, that Christians recognised each other across barriers “of creed”. This is the idea that is explored with Emeth: who encounters Aslan despite being a faithful servant of Tash.   Such an inclusivist view has proved unpalatable for some: Lewis has been called “the devil’s wisest fool” on the strength of it by some Christian fundamentalists. But whatever we make of it doctrinally or ideologically – I myself happen to agree with it – I doubt that we could call it ‘racist’. 

At the start of this essay I mentioned witchcraft trials. These are gone, but the spirit that gave rise to them is perhaps still with us.   The rage to tell us what we may, and may not, think – addressed to us in intemperate language; the terrifying certainty that is one remove from the urge to persecute: these things are not, I fear, confined to religious believers.