Pearlwort

In springtime, the island used to turn pink from the thrift or sea pink flowers that provided ground cover across the island. Some survive on rock faces and a couple of large clumps are growing out of the ruins of the abbot’s house (often mistaken for the church, as it’s the largest surviving medieval building); most provided food for the island’s rabbits, introduced by the monks and having no natural predators, except for a couple of birds of prey, have multiplied ever since, except when culled by humans or disease. Fortunately, the thrift has been replaced by sea campion, which isn’t to the rabbits’ taste, so the island isn’t reduced to bare rock. The pathways that wind around between the great banks of sea campion are surfaced with small star-shaped plants, easily confused with grass, called procumbent pearlwort, mixed with moss. This makes for an extraordinarily comfortable walking surface, softer and lighter than the most expensively underlaid carpeting, the next best thing to walking on air: as you put your foot down it feels as if you are in fact being lifted up rather than pressing against the ground. The first time I visited the island, several years ago, I felt that there was something almost spiritual about this, perhaps because it seems a rare welcoming gift to humankind from this otherwise inhospitable rock. I’m not the only one to have thought this. In some legends, pearlwort is said to be the first plant that Christ ever walked on, or, alternatively, that it was the first plant he walked on after he rose from the dead. In Scotland in particular it is said to have been blessed by Christ himself and/or St Columba. It could also protect against fairies and bring luck in love. Myths, of course, but a beautiful and deeply appreciative way of rendering the sense such felt affinities between our human world and our environment engender: a moment of grace amidst the storm and fog.

The Island

There is no protection from weather on the island, whether it is wind, rain, or—rarely—sun. The power was down throughout my visit, though there was bottled gas for cooking and for the gas lights, which provoked childhood memories of the tilley lamps we had to pump to get started on my father’s boat. It’s a different kind of light, softer—not so good for reading, but more restful than electric. The woodburning stove was good, but didn’t throw out much heat and was a long way from the bedrooms. We were encouraged to use as little water as possible, even for the toilet, but the heavy rainfall before and during the visit meant this wasn’t a problem. The summer could be different.

The seagulls are never entirely quiet and occasional bouts of squawking continue all through the night. Basically, this is a seabird colony and the ten or so humans on the island are just visiting. The black cliff plunging a hundred feet or more down into the water are packed with birds in perpetual motion, paired on the narrowest of ledges at every level. A razorbill comes to sit near me, watching me constantly before toppling off the edge of the cliff, his wings whirring. Suddenly, one day the auks—razorbills, guillemots, puffins—vanish according to a logic of their own, though some reappear before we leave.

According to legend, St Adrian was martyred here in the year 895, together with 6000 monks, though the island could scarcely hold 6000 monks let alone feed them for any period of time. In fact, all the legends about St Adrian are confused, though some holy man was venerated here from the seventh century onwards and traces of the early church have been traced beneath the medieval monastery, whose foundations are still visible. It is almost impossible for us to imagine ourselves back into that life. Even today, the island can be cut off for days and even weeks from the mainland by wind or fog. Yet they lived here, possibly with a dozen or two goats, fish and fowl to catch, and some few vegetables; occasionally maybe offerings from the sick who came here for a miracle or—which I think more likely—who came to die and be buried close to the saint who would intercede for them and their sinful lives on the day of resurrection. And perhaps had been coming here to die since before Christianity.

Who can read the minds of those who lived before modern civilization and the modern ‘self’ appeared? And how will it be when that ‘self’ too disappears?

The island, of course, will continue—until in a hundred thousand or a million years the waves wear it down or drown it. Whether humans will witness that day must be doubtful.

Beyond the National Church

Following what I wrote in my last blog about Israel, it is—fairly obviously—an even greater and far more self-contradictory error, when Christianity defines itself in terms of its relation to a particular land or nation. The Church of Rome, the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Southern Baptists, the People’s Church of Denmark, the Russian Orthodox Church … Of course, in the light of Patriarch Kirill’s seemingly unqualified fusion of Russian Orthodoxy with Putin’s war in Ukraine this last has become notoriously questionable and many Orthodox theologians around the world have condemned the Russian Church’s current position as the heresy of ethno-phyletism, that is, identifying the cause of the universal church with a particular people. In this case, it is Russia, but the Russian Church is only one in a long line of churches that have gone down this path.

I note that a nation, a political entity, is not quite or not necessarily the same as a land, a geographical entity, although the two mostly, one way or another, hang together.  But where Israel can clearly point to the biblical promise of land to Abraham (no matter how problematic such a promise is as a guide to contemporary policy making), the Christian churches are without excuse. Paul’s ‘in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek’ should have nipped any identification of the Church with a national or ethnic community in the bud. The formula agreed by Catholic and Protestant churches in the sixteenth century that ‘cuius regio eius religio’ (the ruler has the right to determine the religion of the realm), should have been a non-starter. The word ‘Catholic’ is still there to remind us that the horizon of the Church’s life and mission is universal, not in the sense of aiming at a global empire but as being without restriction to people of every tribe, nation, and tongue. (In this sense, ‘Roman Catholic’ is an oxymoron.) At the same time, the Christian vocation is supremely individual, a passage through the eye of a needle that fits only one person at a time—and although a new community awaits us on the far side of that passage it is no longer a community in which we are bound to the sovereign claims of any one nation or people but go forth to meet each other in the simplicity of our humanity.

All of which is to say, that the lives we live and cannot avoid living as living in a particular land as citizens of a particular polity are non-ultimate: give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but unto God what is God’s.

The hidden witnesses

Franz Rosenzweig was one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of modern times. Together with Martin Buber he was working  on a new translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, with the aim—in which many think they succeeded—of making German itself sound ‘Hebrew’. Sadly, Rosenzweig died before the work was finished—and also four years before the start of the Hitler regime that would change Jewish history forever. Whether the experience of the Nazi state would have changed Rosenzweig’s mind we cannot know, but his philosophy is profoundly Anti-Zionist. For Rosenzweig, Jewish identity is not, should not be, and cannot be based on land.  With reference to the Davidic star that is the symbol of Israel, he wrote that ‘Fundamental to the character of the star, to its being a star, is that “its flames must be fed eternally from within . . . ”’, meaning that ‘Israel’ is defined by what he calls ‘the community of blood’. This makes Israel entirely unlike other nations, whose identity is  based on their occupancy of a certain land, whereas Jewish identity is based solely and exclusively on the continuity of Jewish life through the generations. In Judaism, even the idea of a ‘holy land’ exists only as an object of historical longing, not as a category of geopolitical identity. Other peoples know from experience that the occupancy of their land is only ever temporary, that sooner or later a new conqueror will come or the people itself move on and, similarly, that their lan­guage is heavy with the burden of its own transience. ‘Eternity’ can therefore never find defining form in their lives—only in Judaism is this possible, since only here is it true that ‘the people is a people only through the people’ and not through the transient possession of land or language.

As Rosenzweig will go on to argue, the self-definition of a nation by virtue of land or language feeds the violence that is endemic to what he calls ‘the nations’, i.e. ‘the gentiles’. By not being part of this otherwise universal struggle for land and national identity, Israel is able to be the bearer of the biblical messianic promise of a Kingdom of peace for all. The implication is that if this were to change and ‘Israel’ were to define itself by land and language, then it would no longer be able to serve the nations as the bearer of this promise. It would just be one nation amongst others.

The reasons why modern Israel came about when and as it did are inextricable from the terrible crimes committed against European Jewry. The scale of those crimes might, of course, have changed Rosenzweig’s mind, as it changed the minds of other Anti-Zionists. This seemed like the only chance to escape a seemingly endless cycle of murderous violence. But looking in from a distant outside, his analysis seems only too true: that the possession of land brings with it the near inexorable logic of war and when Israel bases its identity on the promise of land rather than on the prophetic demand for justice and the messianic promise of peace, Israel’s promise to be a light to the nations is cruelly extinguished. If that light burns on, it has once more become a light concealed from the world in those scattered just ones who live, labour, and pray in a secrecy so deep that even they may be unaware of it, as in André Schwarz-Bart’s epochal novel, The Last of the Just. For the future of Israel and the future of the world, may their hidden witness not vanish from the earth.

An Imperfect Saint

Saturday

Yesterday morning, I stepped out of my hotel into the neat March-chill early morning streets of Leuven for a breath of air before a busy day. Across the road was a Church and the door was open, so I thought I’d look in. It was a surprise. On the outside, it was just one of the many late medieval brick churches in that beautiful city; inside it had been reconstructed in a modernist, almost brutalist style and on the walls was a photographic exhibition with larger than life black and white photographs of the successive deterioration of the face of a leprosy victim. Not for the weak-hearted. But I quickly learned this was not a random choice of subject, since the Church was, in fact, the Church of St Damien, whose leprosy-scarred mortal remains  lie in a large black sarcophagus in the crypt.

Damien was a Belgian missionary to Hawaii in the late nineteenth century, who found himself called to go and serve in a leper colony on one of the islands. There he lived amongst the lepers, tended their wounds, and did what he could to improve their condition. One morning at mass he addressed the congregation as ‘We lepers’ and his death followed some time after.

His model of heroic self-sacrifice was much praised by the Catholic Church, but elicited an outraged response from a Presbyterian missionary on the island, one Reverend Dr. Hyde. According to Hyde, Damien was far from deserving the honour of sanctity since he was, in Hyde’s view, ‘a coarse, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted’. All improvements, continued the Reverend doctor, were down to ‘our’ Board of Health, not Damien’s misdirected and ignorant labours. The final damning charge was that he had impure relations with women and probably contracted leprosy from one such illicit liaison.

Hyde’s letter would probably have been entirely forgotten and was unlikely to have had much impact on Damien’s Catholic admirers. However, it attracted the attention of Robert Louis Stevenson, who launched into an excoriating attack on Hyde in particular (‘with what measure you mete, with that shall it be measured you again’) and the Presbyterian mission in general, whose clergy, as he pointed out, had grown rich and were able to live in large comfortable houses that attracted the scornful comments of the natives. Furthermore, he contrasts the inertia of the Presbyterians with the action of Damien, bitterly commenting that ‘I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk cheerfully of that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to behold’.

Stevenson himself went to Molokai, and spoke with many of those who had known Damien. He confirmed that he was, indeed, a coarse and uneducated man, whose efforts were often clumsy and misdirected—although he would also admit errors when these were made clear to him and, as for the charge of his inappropriate liaisons,  Stevenson could find no evidence at all, though he does narrate a story of a man who repeated the story in a pub on Samoa. Hearing this, another man stood up and declared ‘You miserable little ——- … if the story were a thousand times true, can’t you see you are a million times a lower——-for daring to repeat it’. Yes, he says, Damien was coarse, uneducated, believed his religion ‘with the simplicity of a peasant or a child’, and clearly had no plan for the necessary reform of public health—but, he says, ‘by one striking act of martyrdom’ he drew the world’s attention to the colony and with it the personnel, the means, and the plans to bring about the improvements that were needed. Saints, as he says, are not always perfect, but hearing his story, ‘The least tender should be moved to tears, the most incredulous to prayer’.

I want my country back

Last week the Conservative MP and sometime vice-chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, defected to a new party called Reform—basically a revised version of the Brexit party. In a much quoted statement, Anderson said that ‘I, like millions of people up and down the country, want my country back’.

In a way, I understand Anderson’s sentiment—only in the opposite sense. One of my recurrent feelings since the Brexit vote has been precisely the feeling that ‘they’ have taken away my country, the country I thought I belonged to, leaving me not legally but emotionally stateless. I had thought that I belonged to a country that had embraced a multicultural and European path, a country in which the next generation would feel as at home in Rome, Berlin, or Paris as in London or Leeds. A different set of horizons had opened up and they were inviting. Of course, living in Scotland complicated matters, since it was essentially England and Wales that chose the Brexit path and England alone that found anything to admire in Brexit’s chief campaigners (when Nigel Farage visited Edinburgh, no taxi driver could be found willing to take him to the airport, I won’t even name the former Prime Minister). But though I have ever more strongly identified with my own Scottish heritage in these last few years, I too have known the sense that there are deeply good and deeply distinctive qualities of Englishness. Older than Anderson, Farage, and the ex-Prime Minister, I actually remember the England that they fantasize about, the cricket matches on the village green, the warm beer, the steam trains—oh, and unlike many of the new nationalists I actually committed to ‘the faith of the fathers’ by serving in the national Church. I cherish passages of Shakespeare, Herbert, Wordsworth, Blake, Ruskin and others that give ‘England’ a moral weight, seen also in the paintings of Constable, Turner, Spencer, and Nash, and enacted in the great social movement of the 20^th century. And I have known men and women of all classes who truly embodied the best of the values that England claimed for itself. All of that. I don’t despise ‘England’, then,—but ‘they’ have taken England from me, precisely because their rather narrow vision of England has appropriated England’s name in a way that seems scarcely to be contested in the public domain. Like Putin has appropriated ‘Russia’ and Trump ‘America’. I don’t want England ‘back’, because history doesn’t work like that. Something very valuable has been broken and even if, after the next election, the fragments are glued back together, the cracks will always show. The trust has gone—at least for my generation. Maybe—there’s a good chance—that the new generation will find a new path, if only they have the time to do it in.

Enemies of democracy?

When I was about fourteen, two or three of my school friends and I formed a school Communist society. This probably only lasted a few weeks and was never formally recognized as a school society or club. The main activities involved me going to the local public library after school, reading The Morning Star (Britain’s official Communist Party newspaper) and making notes on what I believed were especially important articles and then reading them to fellow members of the society the next day. Oh, and I also spent quite a lot of time sketching possible society insignia during idle moments in class or on the bus home.

I thought about this again this last week, when the UK government announced it was introducing a new definition of extremism, which includes any ideology that seeks to ‘undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights’. Communism, of course, sought to do just that—although for a while the Westminster parliament did have one elected Communist MP (who lost his seat three months before I was born). So, according to the new definition, I and my friends were definitely ‘extremists’ (and I have to admit retaining a certain scepticism about just how far the UK’s rather peculiar system of democracy, including an unelected upper chamber and its first past the post system of elections that gives massive majorities to parties that don’t even secure 50% of the vote, is genuinely ‘democratic’—and that’s before we get on to the power of vested interests that operate from outwith the political process). Now, I admit that we weren’t in practice a great danger to the state and, of course, there were no organizations (not even the official Communist Party) standing by to groom us into acts of violence. No one was going to provide us with guns or bombs, and if they had, we’d probably have run a mile. As I say, we only kept it up for a few weeks—I don’t think we even managed a school protest. Nevertheless, seen from the point of view of the new definition, we were extremists.

What do I take from these reflections? That even if it is true that extremism today can be very, very dangerous and acknowledging that, in my lifetime, hundreds of people have lost their lives to acts of political terror, Britain is becoming step by step more intolerant of genuine diversity of opinion. An intellectually responsible society cannot not allow the basic assumptions of its own political order to be exposed to radical scrutiny—a scrutiny that, for much of the 20^th century, shaped public political debate in this country. But the parameters of dissent are progressively narrowing—and I see less of a threat in students supposedly cancelling one or other controversial campus speaker (though how much this really happens, I don’t know) than in the top-down attempt to define the parameters of debate, a strategy that, history suggests, is always the best way to provoke ‘extreme’ reactions.

Existential Risks?

I recently received an invitation to an online seminar with Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus) and Gillian Tett (Provost of King’s, Cambridge) on the subject of existential risks, sponsored by the ‘Cambridge Existential Risks Initiative’. The blurb defined an ‘existential risk’ in the following way: ‘An “existential risk” (x-risk) is an event that could permanently and drastically reduce humanity’s potential, for example by causing human extinction,’ going on to list climate change, nuclear war, and engineered pandemics as amongst these risks. Well, who wouldn’t be concerned about those risks, though I am suspicious of the swift move to the pseudo-technical ‘x-risk’—just how much longer does it take to say ‘existential risk’ than ‘x-risk’? I also note that there are rhetorical echoes of the transhumanist agenda, who argue that the existential risks facing humanity today are so great that they can only be countered by re-engineering humanity and bringing about some sort of cyborg life, to be lived on this planet or en route to the stars.

To those who know their history of philosophy, this is a complete upending of the whole idea of the ‘existential’ as that was developed in existentialism. Existential in this ‘existentialist’ sense is about a self-and-self-world-relation that is not susceptible to technological fixes, since it’s about who we are and who we feel ourselves to be. It’s against this background that Heidegger described the advent of nuclear weapons as no more than the ultimate outcome of a loss in our human self-world relation that had long since taken place—very much in the spirit of Goethe’s ‘Lacking ourselves, we lack everything’ (a very rough translation). It is not a future threat, but a threat from a certain kind of moral-spiritual loss that long preceded Operation Manhattan. What the ‘Existential Risks Initiative’ is talking about is ‘survival’ not ‘existence’—and in muddling the terminology in this way it is further concealing what is even more urgently at issues than, for example, the climate crisis, namely, ourselves.

Goethe’s insight is not final, though. At least in Christian existentialism, the final desideratum is not ‘to be’ but to be in a certain way, the way of love. In this spirit, we can gloss Goethe’s saying with St Paul’s comment that ‘If I am without love, then I am a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal’.

20 Days in Mariupol

Following our meeting with the young woman from Mariupol, we felt obligated to watch the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol. I have not experienced war first-hand, but it seems hard to imagine a film that will give a more forceful depiction of what a war against a heavily populated city is like. It is not easy to watch ambulance crews taking the wounded into a hospital where doctors and nurses with dwindling supplies of painkillers and medicines are treating a never-ending stream of patients. The most difficult to watch are the deaths of small children.

I have often been sceptical about ‘evil’ as an ontological category. I still have reservations as to whether it is really helpful to imagine evil as a ‘thing’ or ‘force’ that has independent existence. That, I suppose, is the Augustinian in me. Yet when I see the results of the entirely unnecessary and arbitrary decision to unleash massive military force against a civilian population in the way that happened on 22nd February 2022, it is hard not to think that maybe there is such a thing as an ‘evil will’. In Church on Sunday, we sang the old words ‘the world, the flesh, and Satan’ and it seemed to me that, strip away the supernaturalism and they’re very precise: ‘the world’—our habitual going along with what the crowd or the authorities expect of us, Heidegger’s ‘das Man’; the flesh—our desires for personal gratification, sex, power, self-indulgence; Satan—those rare cases where we do wrong for no real reason, that is, where our action is disproportionately in excess of any possible reason (the world and the flesh have their reasons, even though they’re bad reasons): pure malice, which can be quite petty or, in the case of an insufficiently motivated war, on a grand, even global scale. I don’t wish to demonize Putin, but a decision, an action can, perhaps (in this sense) be rightly called ‘demonic’. What else could it be called?

And yet, watching 20 Days in Mariupol, it is not the insight into evil that remains, but the tenderness of a young mother, bending over her dead eighteen-month old child, stroking and kissing the inert body lying on the bloody hospital trolly where it died, before laying a blanket ever so gently over its face. Evil is not defeated Hollywood-style, but, in the end, it is love that endures.

Strangers on a train

It’s good to talk to strangers on a train.

Yesterday we travelled up to Edinburgh for the day and because it was the school half-term the train was very crowded. We found a seat at a table alongside a young woman and her thirteen-year-old son. After exchanging a few words about the view, we asked the mother where she was from.

‘Ukraine’, she replied.

After a pause, we asked if she was going to go home when it was over.

‘I can’t’, she said, ‘My home was destroyed’.

Then she paused, before adding, ‘I’m from Mariupol’.

And it was not only her home. Her whole family had been killed. There was no one to go back to.

‘And I don’t want to live in Russia,’ she concluded, even though she was a Russian speaker—and implying that she expected Mariupol to now remain in Russia for the foreseeable future. Given the current military news, she might, sadly, be right.

As she told the story, she spent two days walking to get out of Mariupol and, as she spoke, I remembered the television images of people like her fleeing that once beautiful city. It was many more weeks before she was able to finally leave Ukraine, staying briefly in several European countries before arriving in Scotland—which, she said (and we were pleased to hear) had been the most welcoming country. Now she works for a homeless charity and her son is acquiring a Scottish accent.

What was perhaps most remarkable about her story was that she told it without a trace of self-pity—just a clear, step-by-step factual account of what had happened and a hugely positive embrace of the new life into which history had so brutally thrown her and her son.

I once deeply offended a Russian correspondent by saying that Mariupol would join the list of place-names like Guernica or My Lai that symbolize the ultimate amorality of war. I have no doubt I was right.