Rev'd Frank Julian Gelli
"The Christians have no faith at all. We are not like them. We have faith in our religion." Harsh words. By an incensed Muslim lady yesterday morning. During a phone-in session on Islam Channel. On the Agenda programme, hosted by feisty media pasionaria Yvonne Ridley, in which I was turbulently taking part. The subject, naturally, being the offending, riots-sparking cartoons of the Prophet. Why don't Christians display a similar indignation when their own faith is routinely ridiculed and abused? A reasonable query, surely.
Righteous revulsion can show itself in various ways. Last week, while on another televised discussion, Al Mustakillah's 'Family of Abraham,' the priest suggested cursing blasphemers. Crazy? Fundamentalist? Fanatical? Hold your horses. Check out the Book of Common Prayer, still an authoritative Church of England service book. The Commination, or 'denouncing of God's anger and judgments against sinners'. A string of curses, taken, er… from the Old Testament, e.g. 'cursed is he that lieth with his neighbour's wife.' Not impossible to imagine it could be a handy text…but, wait a minute. Didn't Jesus say "Pray for those who persecute you"? Praying for your enemies is an evangelical precept. Besides, it usually annoys your enemy a lot!
Ignoring the culprits might be another strategy. Gilbert and George, that desperately unfunny couple, have produced a sacrilegious display, somewhere on show here, to revive interest in their flagging career. Hardly noticed. And rightly so. Why campaign against the dreary duo? To gift them the oxygen of publicity? They crave that. No. Oblivion must be their condign, exquisitely effective punishment.
Violence may be yet another option. But violence is stupid, irrational, unspiritual. I hate it. No. No way.
My irate Muslim lady, however, has put her finger on something real. That's Kulturkampf. Clash of cultures, the Germans call it. Damned right they are.
Guess it all started way back in AD 727, with Byzantine Emperor Leo III. His attack against images of Christ in human form was followed up by an iconoclastic church council at Constantinople. Convoked by Leo's successor, Constantine V Copronymous (literally, and with apologies to readers: the Shitter), the council anathematized the making, setting up and venerating of icons as contrary to God's commandments. Previously, the Umayyad Caliph of Damascus, Yezid II, had ordered the destruction of all images in his realms. A case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc? What's certain is that for over a hundred years icon-lovers were savagely handled. St Germanus, the Patriarch, was deposed, imprisoned and exiled. Monks were dragged out of their monasteries, tortured, mutilated and executed by the thousands. Sigh…what would Jesus have said? But icon-lovers were rallied by St John of Damascus, then writing in safety under Islam. Yes, the Old Law forbids the making of 'graven images,' St John neatly argued, but, since God became man in Christ, the human shape has been invested with a new, special dignity. Hence it is now licit for Christians to make and venerate sacred icons. QED. It fell to two women, God bless them, Empresses Irene and Thedosia, to bring the persecution to an end. All's well that ends well.
Hmm…is it? Yes, the freedom to depict the Divine has enriched Western and Eastern art, spirituality and culture immensely. Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo, Durer, Michelangelo, Murillo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck…that lot. Come to London's National Gallery, behold their art, enjoy a thrilling sensory feast, a foretaste of the ineffable joys of the invisible world. The priest might even be there to initiate you into those bracing mysteries. Isn't he Blue Badge guide, after all?
But, Achtung! Liberty to paint good icons entails the possibility of painting bad ones. In other words, the holy can be depicted with either reverence, as it ought, or, alas, with irreverence. The rot started first on the literary level, with that veritable oxymoron, the (benighted) Enlightenment. Witty Voltaire got his poison pen into revealed religion, including Islam, in a stream of popular tirades. It opened the floodgates. When in the last century the surrealist painter Max Ernst painted a portrait (most mediocre) of the Blessed Virgin chastising her divine son, a corner was turned.
I wish my Muslim lady understood that modern European nations no longer fashion their laws and mores according to Christian ethics. Culturally our continent has been scarred by successive waves of socialism, anarchism, Marxism and positivism, with their deep-seated anticlericalism and antagonism towards religion. The result is that our intellectual, chattering elites still hold with Voltaire's notorious 'ecrasez l'infame': the mortal enemy, religion, the 'infamous one', must be crushed. Hence, age of faith over, and civil and penal sanctions removed from blasphemy, the sacred has for long been fair game.
"Our people come to England, think it's a Christian country and then Englishmen say 'don't believe in God,'" complained an Arab friend to me. Which illustrates the culture clash. Muslims appear to believe that Europe is still Christian. It ain't. Coming from cultures where the state is not inimical to religion, and lacking the secularist experience, they naturally wonder about the churches' strange inanity. They impute to us the sins of our governments, our media, our institutions. But our societies have fallen back into a pre-Christian state of idolatry. Would that Moses came back again from Sinai to smash down the Golden Calf and put to flight its multitudinous worshippers, insh'allah!
On Islam Channel I said that my heart goes out to pious Muslims. I feel their pain. Their sorrow at having their Prophet attacked. I can share their feelings exactly because I know what it is like to have my own Lord and Savior belittled and insulted. As a former journalist, however, I value the freedom of the press a' outrance. So, I am conflicted. Especially as a European, I am at odds with my own prevalent culture. I both do and do not belong...
So, as Lenin said, what is to be done? A rhetorical question. Because I know the answer. Against our pagan culture, that's it! 'Pro Deo, contra cultura'. With God, against culture. A mighty counter-cultural struggle is in the offing, folks. Exciting, no?
Frank Julian Gelli is an Anglican Priest. He is founder and coordinator of the Arkadash Network, a spiritual fellowship devoted to Muslim-Christian friendship and reconciliation. E-mail your comments to the author at numapomp@talk21.com
Published February 12, 2006, The Epoch Times
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-2-12/38035.html
