by W. E. Gutman
And, after enjoying an ephemeral burst of renewed attention, Hieronymus Bosch, the futurist, the prodigious “inventor,” the artist who warned against greed, lust and folly, Bosch, born in an ancient fortified city whose entire Jewish population was burned alive in the 13th century and where the wars of the Reformation would soon change the course of history, Bosch, who never lived to see his hometown transformed into a Nazi internment camp -- but could have foreseen it -- Bosch, the Alchemical Man who mocked the Church in a way only the Church could understand, was quietly returned to the relative obscurity from which he had all too briefly been plucked.
When it comes to stylish interments, no one outshines the Vatican, which buried all hopes of reunification or even meaningful dialogue with the Church of England when it announced, on October 20, 2009, that it would now welcome whole groups of Anglicans, their bishops, liturgies and even -- oh, hell, if they must absolutely have them -- their wives, to the Roman Catholic Church. This is a huge coup for Rome. It manages to publicly humiliate Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, the symbolic head of the Anglican Church, to vilify its adherents and to exploit the ideological divisions that cleave Christendom. As the British daily, The Guardian, so astutely points out,
“God always did move in mysterious ways.”
On November 3rd, Saint Malachy Day, Hubert de Ravaillac slips off his horsehair nightshirt. Naked, trembling with anticipation, he falls to his knees. Turning his gaze toward a point in space where God, Jesus and all the saints in heaven are said to dwell, he lunges forward and impales himself on the point of a crucifix he had sharpened for the occasion on the bare stone floor of his cell. Excruciating pain turns grimace to ecstatic smile as his entrails spill to the ground. He wraps his bloodied arms around his shoulders in a final farewell embrace then crumples lifeless in a pool of gore and squirming viscera.
Self-hatred is the grandest of love affairs.
No one knows for sure whether the 26-year-old priest was lucid enough to realize that he had spent the last three months of his life in the very same gloomy, damp chamber where, in 1814, after thirteen years of internment, the ill-famed but brilliant satirist and social commentator, Donatien Alphonse-François Marquis de Sade, who wrote, “God is a monster; religion is the cradle of despotism,” expired at the age of 74. It was the despotism of religion, the decadence of the aristocracy and the sleaze of the clergy that aristocrat de Sade railed against in his salacious novels and serious essays, none of which the young priest would have read -- or admitted to having read.
De Ravaillac’s Shakespearean suicide is ignored. The press is busy covering a world ravaged by political corruption, crippling economic downturns, urban violence, ethnic strife, disease, famine and war. At his parents’ request, his remains are cremated and his ashes are entombed in the family crypt.
The pope mourns his passing and prays for his soul.
Also on November 3rd, Israeli authorities announce the arrest of American-born Yaakov “Jack” Teitel, 37, a West Bank settler and religious fanatic with a 12-year history of terrorist attacks and murder plots against Arabs, including an east Jerusalem cab driver and a Palestinian shepherd. Teitel, who also targeted homosexuals, leftists and pacifists, sees himself as an emissary of God sent to Earth to eradicate all the profanities heaped upon the Almighty.
Some say he’s crazy. Others, perched on the stolen Palestinian headlands that ring the “City of Peace,” hail him as a martyr and call on the Almighty to heap all manner of calamities upon his censors.
So much for fellowship and ecumenism and the brotherhood of man.
POSTSCRIPT
The unthinkable is often preceded by the deceptive stillness of complacency. So, on November 5, a lone gunman opened fire in the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood, Texas, killing thirteen people and injuring ten others. The gunman, U.S.-born Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist of Palestinian descent, had appeared on the radar of federal authorities at least six months before the deadly assault. Internet postings by Hasan spoke of his frustration with the military establishment and his opposition to U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Private conversations hinted at his deepening devotion to Islam. Seriously wounded in the incident by civilian police officers, now paralyzed from the waist down, he has since been charged with murder.
Hasan likened suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade to save their comrades and sacrifice their lives for a “more noble cause.” He declared that Muslims must stand up and fight against the “aggressor.” The aggressor, it turned out, is the U.S., not the insurgency that rose in response to U.S. military action. Then he boasted, “I’m a Muslim first and an American second.” Abstraction turned to paranoia when he asked “whether the war on terror is a war against Islam.”
None of these tell-tale warning signs elicited more than passing curiosity. Nor did they prompt an investigation. No one had the imagination or instinct to decipher the clues Hasan left behind. He was in the throes of a gripping spiritual dilemma but no one found the courage to acknowledge that religion can transform men into crucibles of hatred, societies into citadels of bigotry.
The suspect’s brother, Eyad Hasan, released a statement which expressed his family’s “shock and disbelief”:
“I’ve known my brother Nidal to be a peaceful, loving and compassionate person who never committed an act of violence and was always known to be a good, law-abiding citizen.”
Platitude or irreconcilable truth? We may never know.
What remains unsaid at this writing is that Major Hasan's dastardly act was the predictable consequence of religion carried to its aberrant extreme; that history is peppered with gruesome instances of bestiality perpetrated for the glory of God. Somehow, no one dares qualify the Fort Hood incident, this latest manifestation of insanity, as the offspring of religious intolerance and fanaticism. God forbid, (pardon the expression), we should hurt the feelings of popes and rabbis and imams and their flock by suggesting that religion, in the best of cases, is an opiate that numbs all reason and, at worst, a sickness of the mind and a scourge. No one in the press or in intimate conversations will concede that no religion truly advocates peace and love -- except toward its own co-religionists. No one has the scruples to remember that Christianity was the first to wage wars of religion against Jews and Muslims.
I have read the Koran forward and backward and found nothing that advocates, even remotely, the kind of barbarism perpetrated by the jihadists. Alas, some of the language is so sublimely vague or figurative that it can easily be misinterpreted or distorted.
What is tragic about Major Hasan, a psychiatrist, is that he was unable to diagnose, let alone forestall, his own long simmering psychosis. Shamefully, despite glaring evidence of his conflicted loyalties, no one around him, not the military, not his fellow physicians, not his neighbors had the presence of mind to sound the alarm.
Engaged in inane conjectures, Americans are now wringing their hands yet again asking “Why” instead of pointing fingers at the real culprit: A love of God so intense and so all-consuming that it will inspire the cold-blooded murder of God's own “creation.”
On November 8, Pope Benedict XVI visits Brescia in northern Italy to pay tribute to his predecessor, the late Pope Paul VI. In a homily spiced with anti-Jewish allusions about Jesus’ distaste for “rabbinical disputations, improper practices in the Temple in Jerusalem” and the hypocrisy of the ancient scribes who, “while displaying great piety, are exploiting the poor and imposing obligations they themselves do not observe.” Look who’s talking.
Unembellished by the sublime, the ridiculous shows its face on November 13 as a fanatical Muslim group launches a massive and boisterous demonstration in London demanding that sharia law be imposed in Britain. Calling for the dismantling of the British legal system, demonstrators hold placards proclaiming that “communism is dead, capitalism is dying, Islam is the way for revival,” and warning that “Islam will dominate the world.” A poster
-sized photo of Buckingham Palace shows what the royal residence will look like once it is transformed into a mosque.
Across the “pond,” Michael Freund writes an inflammatory editorial in the right-wing, Brooklyn-based The Jewish Press calling for the faithful not to be intimidated by Muslim grievances and inciting them to worship at Temple Mount, one of Islam’s most sacred shrines. Freund also encourages American Jews to buy homes in the Israeli-occupied territories, and urges Israelis to keep Jerusalem “Jewish.”
In Washington, hard-right conservatives tell South Carolina Republican Congressman Bob Inglis that they are willing to let people who don’t have health insurance “die on the steps of hospitals” to make a point about the problem of “free riders.” Inglis, who is no flaming liberal, retorts:
“A guy named Jesus had some things to say about these kinds of concepts. I don’t want to live in a society that lets a few test cases die on the steps of a hospital.”
At about the same time, Mexican police arrest a 78-year-old man for killing a woman he swore was a witch who had cast a spell on him.
Gathering beneath Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel on November 21, the Holy Father addresses a group of 250 artists from across the world -- painters, sculptors, architects, writers, poets, musicians, actors and directors. The aim of the meeting is to “express the Church’s friendship with the world of art” and to encourage new opportunities for “collaboration.”
No one would blame “the various distinguished personalities present” for questioning the Pope’s sincerity, not to mention the Church’s motives for such dramatic spectacle of self-promotion. After all, director Ron Howard fell out of favor with the Vatican and scores of movies, among them The Tin Drum. Lolita, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Da Vinci Code and its sequel, Angels and Demons are still banned. Hundreds of prestigious authors, including Rabelais, Voltaire, Descartes, Gide, de Beauvoir, Defoe, Swift, Graham Greene and Sartre figure prominently in the Vatican’s Index, as are such literary gems as Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Boccaccio’s Decameron.
A report released on November 26, 2009 by the Dublin Archdiocese Commission of Investigations acknowledges that [habitual]
“clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Church authorities.”
The 720-page document asserts that the Diocese was
“preoccupied … with the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets…. It is abundantly clear that sexual abuse by clerics was widespread.
“One priest admitted to sexually molesting more than 100 children; another confessed that he had abused children ‘fortnightly’ for over 25 years.”
The report shoots down the notion that church leadership was unaware of the problem:
“The taking out of insurance was an act proving knowledge of child sexual abuse as a potential danger to the Archdiocese.”
On Sunday, 29 November, the First Sunday of Advent and of the new Liturgical Year, prior to leading the recitation of the Angelus, Pope Benedict XVI comments on “this Season, a period of preparation for the Lord's birth.” Quoting from Luke (21:28) he affirms:
“Whoever yearns for freedom, justice, and peace may rise again and raise his head, for in Christ liberation is drawing near.”
Somehow, that 2,000-year-old promise has failed to deliver tangible results. The “Savior” has saved nothing. Convulsing under rising waves of hatred, ignorance, stupidity and superstition, racked by mounting violence, the world still awaits liberation. Russia is drowning in alcoholism. AIDS ravages Africa. In defiance of half-hearted reprimands, Sudan pursues its genocidal objectives. Poverty, despair, ethnic strife and shifting allegiances inspire massacres in the Philippines. In Israeli occupied territories, Palestinians are fighting to preserve increasingly shrinking fragments of their homeland. Global warming puts the arctic on thin ice and threatens to engulf coastal areas and dozens of islands around the globe. The U.S. clings to the unchallenged two-party-system -- both parties the flip sides of the same tarnished coin, both indistinguishable one from the other except for the partisanships and antipathies they inspire in their respective camps, both tied to corporate wealth, both intent of blocking meaningful reform in the name of capitalism, both involved in larceny against the poor. The gap between the haves and the have not continues to widen.
As the year 2009 draws to a close, citing well-worn myths, among them that Freemasons worship Lucifer, several Protestant denominations known for their abhorrence of secular values, warn their congregants not join Masonic lodges. They include the all-powerful Southern Baptist Convention, The Society of Friends, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the Salvation Army, the Mennonites and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod.
Sic transit Gloria mundi.
Acknowledgments
This book was conceived long before I set out to construct it piece by piece from a patchwork of recurring childhood reminiscences, random musings hastily recorded in the dead of night and simmering emotions spiced up by the steady pace of history endlessly repeated. Several life-altering events and a harvest of images and insights gleaned during my years as an itinerant journalist also contributed to its protracted and painful gestation.
I must confess that when I decided to give this project wings, I was seduced by the notion that I would be penning the book I always wanted to read, an irreverent, vexing polemic -- part exposé, part history, part satire, part plausible conjecture -- a tract that could somehow help galvanize a world mired in myth and sanctified deception. Fighting windmills, as the Man of La Mancha noted after two, possibly three valiant quests, is pointless. The “giants” of blind faith, conformity and entrenched tradition are formidable foes, and common sense is swiftly submerged in the quicksand of fanaticism and ideological rigidity.
As I reviewed the manuscript one last time in search of stray typos and skewed syntax, I was seized with the notion that intellectual inertia can bring any forward momentum to a dead stop. From there, it was a short step to recalling the cynical French expression my old friend, mentor and alter ego Montvert was fond of quoting, “Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse” -- badly translated as “everything passes, everything becomes tiresome, everything breaks.” Everything includes anything that time renders irrelevant, including this unexceptional but candid work. I had no illusions about its utility or merit. But I kept going.
I am indebted to my parents, learned, urbane, fair-minded and liberal, for instilling a love of books and an appreciation for music, art and philosophy, for sparing me the enslavement of religious indoctrination and for tolerating, if not always endorsing, my most reckless antics, some that nearly cost me my life, some that nearly bankrupted them. To my mother, a selfless, unassuming woman of great culture and refinement, I owe my love of beauty and symmetry. From my father, a loving, iron-willed and incorruptible man who abhorred ostentation and pretense, I learned that self-esteem and a respect for truth are far more important than other people’s opinion.
I salute my teachers, in France, Romania and Israel. Their erudition, pedagogical skills and saintly patience for the lazy, unfocused, mercurial and rebellious student I was helped lay the foundation on which I would erect a lifetime career of endless beginnings and negligible achievements.
I can never fully assess the immense influence a number of prominent writers, poets and philosophers had on the person I would become. Their prose, verses and insights resonate as intensely today as they did in the days of my youth. Most were French; of these, one was denied a Christian funeral for his vitriolic anti-religious tracts; four were imprisoned, one for defying brutal colonial authorities in Indochina; the other for suggesting that the blind can be taught to read through the sense of touch; the third, the son of a prostitute, for vagabondage, lewd acts and “other offenses against public decency;” the fourth for stretching the limits of literary freedom in tracts that mixed
raw eroticism and civil disobedience. The others wrote in English, German, Russian and Spanish. Three hailed from England; one of them did not survive the spurious morality of his Victorian milieu. All were freethinkers, rebels and idol smashers, now long dead, but whose works and the socially progressive ideas they impart continue to inspire new generations of readers and mavericks-in-training.
I offer heartfelt thanks to the many editors who overlooked my shortcomings and put up, at least for a while, with my eccentricities, incendiary style and overt penchant for rabble-rousing. They deserve a special accolade for teaching me, when they tired of me and consigned me to the far end of a long unemployment line, that “freedom of the press” extends as far as but not beyond the editor’s desk and that it is generally reserved to those who own the presses.
“Without art,” said George Bernard Shaw, “the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” This maxim was driven home by my late maternal uncle Ionel, an art critic and author who fed my craving for esotericism and worked tirelessly to help refine my love of art. It was he who, after acquainting me with Giotto, Hals, Vermeer, Boucher, Kokoschka, Perahim and others, introduced me to Hieronymus Bosch. Poring over Bosch’s paintings was like rummaging through a freshly unearthed time capsule. Once stripped of their surreal symbolism, as Ionel had taught me to do, his images leaped at me, bringing back memories of things I had seen before, not on the flat surface of a canvas or the pages of a picture book, but in the inescapable actuality of space-time where the crudeness of reality is further debased by the incivility of man.