Beatified Bones

If you’ve read A Morbid Taste for Bones, Ellis Peter’s medieval murder-mystery, you will understand just how important holy relics were for any aspiring religious institution of the day, not just bones but skin, finger and toe nails, blood, hearts, anything associated with the saintly. And the trade wasn’t just in body parts. Bits of the true cross, the crown of thorns, the nails of the crucifixion, they were all there, right across the Christian world.

The thing is, you see, relics were big business; relics brought fame, fame brought pilgrims, pilgrims brought money. Where there is a demand there will always be a supply, with the suppliers not all that scrupulous or that bothered with authenticity. Saint Mary Magdalene must have been the oddest looking person who ever lived. She had eighteen arms. That’s not so bad, I suppose, because they had to be spread across five bodies!

It’s easy to smile with condescension from the sceptical heights of the present on the gullible enthusiasms of the past. But relics and the pursuit of relics was in so many ways the defining feature of medieval Christianity, both in the Catholic west and the Orthodox east. In Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe Charles Freeman does a first-class job of putting the whole thing in proper perspective, in a fashion that is both scholarly and entertaining.

The passion for body parts defined medieval Christianity, separating it from the classical past, where pagan writers associated it with necromancy and witchcraft, or from a Judaic tradition which found the practice wholly repugnant. But for the Christians of the Middle Ages, the high noon of faith, relics were far more than objects of morbid curiosity or simple veneration; they had power, the power of the living Christ and the saints; the power to heal, the power to work all sorts of miracles.

When I was nineteen I walked with a group of friends on the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of Saint James the Greater, son of Zebedee, were supposedly laid to rest in the early Middle Ages. We went as curious tourists but for the millions who came before us, those who trod this way in earlier centuries, a visit to the saint was a way of lessening the burden of sin, of decreasing the time one had to spend in purgatory.

It couldn’t go on, of course. As faith waned credulity waned also, not all that surprising when one considers that Rome boasted along with the heads of Peter and Paul some of the manna from heaven, five loaves and two fishes from the feeding of the five thousand – clearly well past their use by date – and the foreskin of Jesus, the only fleshy part he left on earth. Elsewhere one could find the breast milk of the Virgin Mary in such abundance that John Calvin, the reformer, observed “Had the Virgin been a wet-nurse her whole life, or a dairy, she could not have produced more than is shown as hers.”

A lot of it is dryly amusing, the obvious fraud which must have been obvious even at the time, but Freeman tells his story without condescension. Relics are no longer fashionable, not even in the Catholic Church, but its owing to them that we can still admire splendid reliquaries or, more important, the churches and cathedrals that were built to magnify them. These bones, as Freeman suggests, shaped the Gothic, grand reliquaries of light and space.

Freeman, as all good historians should, attempts to understand the past in its own terms. In Holy Bones, Holy Dust he explorers the way in which relics played a part in past identities, in the religious experience of ordinary people, that cross-section of humanity that Chaucer brought so vividly to life on the pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury.

Freeman’s book is an excellent reminder that relics were once central to human identity. Once, I wrote, but pause for a moment and think. Relics, the veneration of objects, might be said never to have gone away, merely to have degenerated into a secular form. Here we are in an age where people on EBay determinedly bid for an item associated with celebrities, living or dead, things that carry no promise or power whatsoever.

I can picture in my mind’s eye the pilgrims gathered at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, ready to set out for Canterbury. I bequeath on them the miracle of foresight, the ability to look into the modern age. See how they laugh at our credulity.

The Decline and Fall of the News of the Screws

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

Yes, what is it you want to read about? Murder, George Orwell proceeds; for this is the opening paragraph of the Decline of the English Murder, an essay published over sixty years ago. What we have been reading about over the past week is the decline – and fall – of an English newspaper, the News of the World, the one the author mentions in his opening, for so long something of a national institution.

British people will know all there is to know about this downmarket publication. If I tell those of you who are not from these islands that this newspaper is known colloquially as the News of the Screws then you may get a flavour of its style and content. Murder was certainly a favoured topic, as was sex, sex and more sex, scandals of any kind, especially those involving the great and the not so good. For the long time it has been the best selling Sunday newspaper in England, at one point having a print run greater than any other newspaper in the world. Not any longer. Today it closed and closed for good. There will be no more news of the screws.

The paper, established in 1843, has been part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire since 1969. It’s also long been a kind of vox populi - the peoples’ voice – loud and harsh, certainly, but going in for a fearless – and ruthless – exposure of the hot topics of the day. News reporting was part of its make up, but as the world of publishing became ever more cutthroat, as the pressure to be the first to get hold of the story became ever more intense, it could not resist a certain amount of news creation.

Still, the mass readership lapped it up, Sunday after Sunday, the more salacious the story the better. In order to keep its edge the paper took to hacking into the phones of public figures. There is no news here; this practice was uncovered some time ago, the occasion for an ongoing scandal and undisclosed payments to those whose privacy was attacked in such an unscrupulous and underhand fashion.

I would guess that most of the readership did not care that much that their favourite Sunday read was behaving in such an unethical manner. They may love celebrities, they may love to read about celebrities, but this comes with quite a high degree of prurience, jealousy and petty-minded resentment.

Celebrities are the new aristocracy. If the peasants defer to them they also dislike them; they are more than happy to see them fall on their faces. So, who cares if their phones are hacked, who cares if their latest peccadilloes are exposed? Those who live by publicity shall die by publicity. The News of the World has spoken; the News of the World is the voice of the people.

Alas, the journalists hacked several phones too many; they started to hack the phones of the people. The people here included Milly Dowler, a murdered schoolgirl; they included the families of those killed in the 7/7 suicide attacks in London; they included the phones of the relatives of soldiers killed on active service. It all came out last week. At once the mood turned. At once a tsunami of national disgust overwhelmed News International, the company that publishes the News of the World and several other Murdoch papers.

The peasants rose. But this is the modern world; there are no more pitchforks and torches. Instead the masses took to Facebook and Twitter in their attempts to undermine the Bastille. Advertisers, the chief source of any newspaper’s income, were put under pressure. Accounts were closed, first a trickle, then a flood.

The pressure was too great. Last Thursday James Murdoch, son of Rupert, announced that the News of the World, carrying no adverts, would publish its final edition on Sunday, with the loss of some two hundred jobs. It’s really an exercise in damage limitation. Not only was the scandal no longer sustainable but it also had the potential to impact on the corporation’s wider interests, including its ongoing attempt to gain a controlling interest in British Sky Broadcasting, the largest subscription television service in the United Kingdom.

I have mixed feelings here. I never read the News of the World; the kind of story it carried carried no interest for me. I think the editors behaved deplorably over phone hacking, a gross breach of privacy which has done so much damage to the credibility of the press. But I also think that the journalists are victims. If some of them behaved badly I have no doubt that this was a result of a bad corporate culture, one where the Murdochs set the mood.

And then there is the people, those who cheered at one moment and howled at the next. I’m not keen on internet flash mobs but I’m even less keen on hypocrisy. It was the public that demanded the kind of story that kept the News of the World on edge, always seeking to maintain or increase its circulation. Cheering or howling, there is nothing more contemptible than a mob, particularly in a mood of self-righteous indignation.

O Brave United World

The Pink News, Europe’s largest gay news service (it has to be, it says so), is in a celebratory mood, celebrating that the United Nations recently passed a ‘historic resolution’ calling for “universal rights for gay, lesbian and trans people.” A ‘trans person’, don’t you just love the jargon?

The UN is rather in the mood for grand gestures at the moment, gay rights one day, internet rights the next. Frank La Rue, the Special Rapporteur (excuse me?) from Guatemala, called for the governments of the world to protect citizens access to the internet as a key tool for enabling their human rights. I imagine the gay bloggers and trans people from places like North Korea and Iran will be absolutely delighted with this breakthrough on all fronts.

I’m expecting further advances by the day. Let’s see: we could have a resolution to the effect that it’s a human right not to die or, if we must, it’s a human right to go to heaven or Wisconsin, whichever is the closest.

Enough limp attempts at levity. I have nothing but contempt for the UN, as big a failure in its own way as the old League of Nations. The hypocrisy the place generates is stunning. Here we are, an empty statement on gay rights which will do nothing to stop judicial murders in Iran. Here we are, a statement on internet rights that will make not one bit of difference to the plight of the dirt-poor peasants of Guatemala.

Oh never mind the little stuff. Look, rather, at the big picture. Here we are, an organisation that sanctions aggressive action against Libya on the grounds that civilians had to be ‘protected’, presumably on the assumption that civilians are more important there than in Syria or Zimbabwe. Here we are, an organisation that created a safe haven in Srebrenica, only to stand back, impotent in the face of mass murder. Here we are, an organisation that stood back in the face of genocide in Rwanda. Here we are, an organisation that declared the war on civilians in Darfur was not genocide, a great comfort, I feel sure, to the dead.

Looking over the history of the UN there is only one point that it acted with any effectiveness, in 1950, when a common front was presented against the communist aggression in Korea, only possible, though, because the Soviet Union had absented itself from the Security Council. But ever after it was no more than the sum of its divergent parts, a forum for the likes of Communist Castro of Cuba or Islamist Amadinejad of Iran to launch verbal attacks on the United States from a safe haven within American soil.

Still, at least it keeps Rapporteurs gainfully employed. What on earth would we do without them, trans people and sanctimonious resolutions?

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!

Dragon Baba’s Den

“What’s so funny?”, my partner asked, as I was overcome by a fit of the giggles. It was last Sunday morning. I was looking through the Sunday Telegraph, opening at the International News section, not usually noted for its humour. But there is was – an illustration of some Indian guru, sporting the most ridiculous Afro hairdo that I think I have ever seen. I had to put my tea down!

The story ‘God’ and the secret stash by Gethin Chamberlain concerns one Sai Baba, yet another tiresome Indian ‘holy man’, yet another fraud. He’s dead now but apparently he had a following of fifty million people worldwide when he was alive, people who paid - paid being the operative word, it would seem - for his message of ‘love and service.’ If I tell you that his followers included the risible and money-grubbing Sarah Fergusson, duchess of York, then I think you will have a fair idea of the true value of ‘love and service.’

It seems to be the old, old story: stupid and spiritually impoverished Westerners like the Daft Duchess and Goldie Hawn, a fading actress and another acolyte of Hair Man, reaching East for supposed spiritual richness. And what do they discover? Why, a laughable phoney, busy soaking the rich, and busy, it now appears, sexually molesting his younger followers, deluding everybody by passing off cheap trickery as miracles.

No sooner had the bogus Baba entered another state of incarnation – a snake, probably – than the rumours started to spread. He has an ashram in the town of Puttaparthi in Andhra Pradesh, within which there is a personal lair, a dragon’s cave, locked away since his death in March. Well, giving way to popular demand, it’s now been opened. And what was found therein, a new wave of enlightenment, perhaps, a revelation from beyond the grave? No, just loot, lots of loot.

Like Fafner, the old Baba was sitting on a horde, in a room stacked with gold, diamonds and cash. Apparently the haul amounts to some £1.6million in rupees, 98kg of gold and 307kg of silver. I don’t expect the Nibelung haul was half so valuable! Apparently there are good grounds for believing that there is even more, secreted away elsewhere, treasure sent by his many followers in the belief that it would help in spreading the message of ‘love and service.’ The police intercepted members of the Baba’s Sathya Sai Central Trust driving away with the equivalent of £50,000 in cash. It was to pay for a memorial, they said.

It’s not just the fraud that amuses me it’s the awful vulgarity of the whole thing, the vulgarity of the living Baba. When he and his hair occupied this mortal plain as many as 10,000 people would crowd into the ashram’s central hall, a gaudy palace in white and blue décor, replete with golden lions and chandeliers. One look at this and I would have been off! But, no; in they came, cricketers, Bollywood stars, politicians and the duchess of York, herself something of an expert in downmarket vulgarity.

I don’t suppose there will ever be an end to this kind of nonsense in a world where people are rich in goods but poor in sense. One Baba goes and another Baba comes. For every wise person there are ten thousand fools, waiting to be gobbled up by the dragon. We only have one existence, one life. Celebrate it as it is in all of its carnate imperfections, and tell the Babas to bugger off, peace, service, ashram, golden lions and all

Mirror, mirror on the wall

The best artists are those who offer new ways of seeing and the best pictures are those which offer themselves as a challenge. Hieronymus Bosch died in 1516 but his art still seems astonishingly modern to me, as bitingly satirical in its own way as the paintings of George Grosz in the twentieth century, rather a paradox considering that his style was late Gothic, untouched by the new fashions which had emerged out of Renaissance Italy. Bosch is a Pre-Raphaelite before the Pre-Raphaelites!

Like Grosz, Bosch looked on the world with a bitterly cynical eye. The two men could not be further apart - Grosz the left-wing chronicler of Germany after the First World War; Bosch a Christian pessimist troubled by the apparent ascendency of evil, a theme he touches on time after time.

I have before me a print of Christ Carrying the Cross, a painting in the collection of the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in the Belgian city of Ghent. It’s an extraordinary piece of work, touching on a very ordinary theme in late medieval art. I simply can’t look at this in a detached frame of mind, or look with equanimity at the ugly throng through which Christ and the two thieves make their collective way to Calvary, suffering and death.

The suffering has already begun, the devils already at work in taunting and mockery. There, on the right-hand side, are the two thieves. At the bottom is the bad thief, turning on his tormentors in defiance, ugliness returned for ugliness. At the top the good thief, sneered at by a particularly vicious looking friar, already looks corpse-like in hopeless resignation.

In the middle of this human storm, and in the middle of the painting, is Christ with his cross, a little like the eye in calm serenity, ignoring all of the malevolence, deeply introspective, the only sign of emotion being a single tear forming on his lower lashes. His serenity is mirrored in that of Saint Veronica on the bottom left, looking down at the veil which she has given Christ to wipe his brow, the cloth now showing an imprint of his face.

The noteworthy thing about the crowd, friar and all, is that it is not Biblical, at least not so far as dress. These are the people of sixteenth century Flanders, people the artist would have been familiar with: merchants, clerics, soldiers, some prosperous burghers of the day, judging by their headgear and general apparel. The figure to the right-hand side of the good thief even looks like a Duke of Burgundy.

Bosch was a Catholic and this work, thought to have been painted some time after 1500, possibly on the threshold of the Reformation, is an act of faith in a time of uncertainty. But what is it saying, exactly? Is there a message in that malevolent friar, I wonder? He, representing a mendicant order, an order given to charity, is the most malign among the crowd, teeth like fangs, his face showing no grace or Christian mercy whatsoever. Why put a friar in a picture that lifts him out of his own history and places him among the first century Jews of Palestine? Is this an observation on the state of the Catholic Church, the church of those monster popes Alexander VI and Julius II? These are just questions. I don’t have any answers.

This is a dark painting, pessimistic in outlook. There is no humanism here, the intellectual fashion of the day, and precious little humanity. Simon of Cyrene is present, certainly, the man who helped Christ carry his burden, but he, looking upwards, is cast into the shadows under the Cross. Then there is the blind side, the fourth wall, occupied across the ages by other spectators, shifting members of that crowd, people like me and like you. Do we participate? Are we, too, among the mockers? Is this a mirror?

Michael Prodger, writing some weeks ago about this painting in the Spectator, points out that Carl Jung, the psycho-analyst, claimed Bosch as an early discoverer of the unconscious. In fact Jung is not the first to make such a claim, even though the terms used were different.

José de Sigüenza, a Spanish historian and theologian born later in the same century that Bosch died, wrote of him that “The difference between the work of Bosch and that of other painters lies in the fact that the others depict man as he appears on the outside. Only Bosch dared to paint him on the inside.” Look, see; it’s not a very comfortable suggestion.

Let a Million Bloggers Bloom

Let a hundred flowers bloom, Mao Zedong once said, only immediately to start rooting up the garden. Now, in a wholly modern development the frustrated promise of free speech has found a new outlet on the internet, where a million bloggers have been talking. They have been, loudly and persistently on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like micro-blogging service. The hot topic recently has been the fate of the people in the People’s Republic, the fate of those bold enough to stand as independents in elections.

I had always assumed that voting in China was a kind of dance routine choreographed by the Communist Party, a dull, meaningless and wholly predictable quadrille. But at the lowest level of the electoral pyramid citizens can actually vote for other citizens, people who are not part of the official apparatus; or at least they can try to.

Even in local elections the Party has long attempted to micro-manage affairs, assuring that only approved candidates get through. But, emboldened by the forms of communication and solidarity offered through the internet, an increasing number of real independents are putting themselves forward. According Li Fan of the World and China Institute in Beijing more than a hundred people have declared their candidacy for the elections to the various people’s congresses that will be held across the country in the coming months.

The Party is nervous, the Party is always nervous, never more so than now with the Arabs showing the world a networking revolution. Silence is no longer an option, especially as Li Chengpeng, an author, critic and micro-blogger, has announced to his three million followers on Sina Weibo that he is prepared to stand.

The Economist reported that the emergence of such candidates has been accompanied by a series of local disturbances across the country. Although the details are hazy it appears that thousands of police officers were required to suppress a riot in the town of Zengcheng in Guangdong province, brought on by an altercation between security guards and a street vendor. Before this there had been serious disturbances in Lichuan in Hubei after the death of a local legislator and anti-corruption campaigner in police custody. Such incidents, according to Xu Chunliu, a Beijing blogger, are only encouraging others into politics, himself included, as he announced to his twelve thousand followers.

Meanwhile a government official in an interview with a state-run news agency said that independent candidates had no ‘legal basis’ and that campaigning in ‘non-approved settings’ – meaning Sina Weibo – would not be tolerated. “Soliciting votes through the internet”, the Global Times, a Beijing newspaper, declared, “could destroy the operating rules of Chinese society.”

In other words democracy is a threat to civilization as we know it, meaning a threat to oligarchy as the Chinese have experienced it. Bloggers of all countries unite! Bloggers of China keep on writing on the new Democracy Wall.

A Future for the Birds

Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, is a Twerp. That’s no secret, I know, but I should make it clear that I mean that he Tweets on Twitter in his bird-like fashion, delightfully informing his many devotees about his bouts of diarrhoea, among other things.

But the little bird had fallen strangely silent of late, the occasion for much speculation in the garden. Did Sylvester finally manage to catch Tweety? Actually, no; he just flew off to Cuba some three weeks ago, seemingly for an operation to remove a pelvic abscess. But like so many other things surrounding the man that turns out not to be true. Not noted for his brevity, he briefly announced at the weekend from his Havana exile that he is recovering from an operation to remove an – unspecified – malignant cancer. Not to worry; he will return, he announced, to continue leading the socialist revolution.

There are a few vultures at home not entirely convinced that he will. Even before the latest health news the intriguers in Caracas were already been staking their ground, making ready to fill the political vacuum. Caesar is indisposed; long live Caesar, long live Chavez. Oh, I don’t mean Hugo; I mean his older brother, Adan, who obviously sees himself as the bird on the wings.

Adan, if anything more radical than his sibling, is certainly the man to advance a ‘socialist revolution’ which has brought this oil-rich country to its knees, its wealth squandered away in one bird-brained scheme after another. At the weekend he addressed a gathering of Chavez supporters at a health vigil for Brother Hugo, telling them that force could not be disregarded in “applying and developing the revolutionary programme.”

And what a programme it has been, with inflation running at 30 percent and unemployment at almost 10 percent. The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (yes, that’s the country’s official title) is a little bit like the goose in the fairy tale. Not laying golden eggs fast enough it was eviscerated in the onward flight of the ‘revolutionary programme’.

What an irony it is that a country rich in natural resources has become used to power cuts, shortages of water and a crumbling infrastructure. While production is falling in most branches of the economy there is at least one buoyant sector – organised crime. Caracas, the capital of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is a place best avoided, given that it now has, according to the London Times, the highest murder rate in the world.

Hugo Chavez had one way of dealing with adverse criticism – silence. The press has been gagged and judicial independence all but ended. He has role models here, ‘brothers’ as he has referred to them, brothers other than his brother. The obvious one is his good friend Fidel Castro, but Chavez’s fraternity also embraces well-know ‘progressives’ like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Venezuela is now so used to misrule that it’s even missing Hugo. I suppose that’s not really that surprising with Adan getting ready to become the Tweeter-in-chief, flying to power on a ‘revolutionary programme’, pointing to a future that is strictly for the birds.