Locked in a Shared Hallucination

It's interesting to see journalists admitting that there's nothing new about the kind of behaviour we've recently seen so bizarrely displayed in the viral Ed Miliband loop. Krishnan Guru-Murthy, on Channel 4's news blog, explains how common it is, and why it's so common: politicians expect their interviews to be drawn from for sample soundbites, so repeat their key message again and again so that TV stations have no option but to use it, and the Fourth Estate happily plays along.

Charlie Brooker had a great piece about this in yesterday's Observer, in which he says that the interview 'sounds like an interview with a satnav stuck on a roundabout. Or a novelty talking keyring with its most boring button held down. Or a character in a computer game with only one dialogue option. Or an Ed Miliband-shaped phone with an Ed Miliband-themed ringtone. Or George Osborne.'

Gideon, as Charlie points out, did exactly the same thing when interviewed last October, with the interview going as follows:

George: 'Well, I think we've got a double dose of good news today for Britain. We've got strong growth figures -- actually the strongest growth in this part of the year for a decade -- and at the same time we've just heard that the country's credit rating has been secured, and I think this underpins confidence in the economy, and I think it is a vote of confidence in the government's economic policies, and I think it gives us the confidence now to look to the future with some optimism.'

Interviewer: 'But even with these growth figures you have to admit that your cuts programme hasn't come in yet, VAT will rise next year, job losses haven't happened yet -- things could get worse.'

George: 'Well, I think what you see today is a double dose of good news today for the British economy. First of all, strong growth figures -- actually the strongest growth for this part of the year that we've seen in a decade -- and also we've just heard that the country's credit rating, which had been put at risk by the previous government, has been secured. Now both those things will underpin confidence in the economy, and I think they are also a vote of confidence in the new government's economic policies.'

Interviewer: 'Do you still worry about a double-dip recession?'

George: 'Well, I think what you see today, in an uncertain global economic environment, is Britain growing -- growing strongly -- the strongest growth we've seen in this part of the year for a decade -- and also our country's credit rating being secured. That's a big vote of confidence in the UK, and a vote of confidence in the coalition government's economic policies.'

Interviewer: 'The experts say that your cuts are unfair, and now in the first opinion poll they're showing also people think they're unfair. Do you have a problem with that?'

George: 'I think people know that this country had some serious economic problems and that the debt problem had to be dealt with. They see a new government has come in and dealt decisively with it, and now today we've got this double dose of good news. First of all strong growth figures, but also the country's credit rating reaffirmed and secured when it had been put at risk by the previous Labour government, and I think that will underpin confidence in the recovery going forward.'

It's well worth watching, actually, though Charlie's right to say that the clip should be accompanied by a message saying 'WARNING: WATCHING THIS MIGHT MAKE YOU FEEL A BIT MAD'. It does have that effect; indeed, he gets it spot on when saying that watching Osborne, or Miliband, or Alistair Darling in a clip he saw last year is a terrifying experience.

'First you think you're hearing things. Then you wonder whether time itself has developed hiccups. Finally you decide none of these people can possibly be human. Because they look absolutely, unequivocally insane.'

And if anything, it seems, it's worse if you're the person asking the questions.

The Myth of Mary

Speaking of myths, as I was yesterday, one of the most pervasive myths about the Catholic Church is that Catholics worship Mary. I keep hearing versions of this, and often from people who should know better. They say that Catholics worship Mary, that Catholics regard her as more important than Jesus, that Catholics think of her as a goddess, that Catholics believe they're only saved by praying to Mary, and that Mary is the real centre of what faith many Catholics have, with Jesus just being a sideshow.

None of this is true, I'm glad to say, and not merely because Marian devotion appears to have faded to some degree in the Church over recent decades, something that Karl Rahner thought was due to the Christian tendency to make an ideology -- an abstraction -- out of Christianity. And abstractions, he said, have no need for a mother.

Catholics don't worship Mary, and have never done so. To have done so would be in flagrant opposition to the first commandment. Indeed, worship of Mary has been condemned as heretical since at least the fourth century, when Epiphanius of Salamis spoke out against the Collrydian tendency to think of her as a goddess and to offer sacrifices to her. Mary, he insisted, was holy and venerable, but she should not be worshipped; indeed, worship should be reserved to him who was born from Mary's flesh. The Church still holds to this line, as it has always done, with Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, insisting that that 'no creature could ever be counted as equal with the incarnate Word and Redeemer'.

As a general rule of thumb, if you're a Protestant and want to find out what the Catholic Church teaches, you shouldn't go to your favourite Protestant writer, no matter how smart and erudite he or she may be. Go and have a look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and use the index, looking up, say, 'Adoration, as principal act of the virtue of religion', 'Mary, veneration of, not adoration,' 'Mary, veneration of, prayer to', and, straightforwardly, 'Worship, and adoration of God.' As part of the Catechism's exposition of the first commandment, it says:

'Adoration is the first act of the virtue of religion. To adore God is to acknowledge him as God, as the Creator and Savior, the Lord and Master of everything that exists, as infinite and merciful Love. "You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve," says Jesus, citing Deuteronomy. To adore God is to acknowledge, in respect and absolute submission, the "nothingness of the creature" who would not exist but for God. To adore God is to praise and exalt him and to humble oneself, as Mary did in the Magnificat, confessing with gratitude that he has done great things and holy is his name. The worship of the one God sets man free from turning in on himself, from the slavery of sin and the idolatry of the world.'

The key thing to understand is that the Church is and has always been adamant that worship is for God alone and that devotion to Mary 'differs essentially from the adoration which is given to the incarnate Word and equally to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and greatly fosters this adoration.'

Catholics don't worship Mary. They honour her. They venerate her. They love her. They don't worship her.

That Catholics should honour Mary shouldn't scandalise anyone. As Jesus' mother, she would have been honoured by him and if Jesus honoured her, is it so surprising that we should do likewise? I'm always baffled by those Christians who try to push her aside, like an embarrassing relative, a madwoman in the attic. The Bible's pretty clear, after all, that she's blessed amongst women, and one whom all generations would call blessed.

Paying honour to Mary in no way detracts from the worship due to God alone, any more than visiting someone's house and talking to their mother insults the person who you've come to see. If anything, it pays a greater honour to the person your visiting. There are three main prayers associated with Mary, none of which should set Protestant hearts a-flutter.

• The Magnificat, said every evening as part of the Divine Office, has as its theme the greatness of God. It addresses Mary's humility and the fact that it is by God -- and by God alone -- that she is saved, saying that all generations shall call her blessed. It's a straightforward quotation from Scripture, and hardly something to panic any self-proclaimed 'Bible Christians'.
• The Hail Mary, said in various contexts, consists of two quotations from the Bible, both of which are deeply Christological, focused as they are on the wonder of the Incarnation, and a petition. The petition simply asks Mary for her prayers, which people should be okay with: we're called upon to pray for each other, and to ask each other for our prayers, as part of the community of love that is the Communion of Saints.
• The Rosary, finally, is a number of things, but above all it is a meditation on the life and promises of Christ, as seen through the eyes of she who was the first Christian, the bearer of the Word. Said in its entirety, the prayer entails contemplation of twenty different Christian mysteries, and is expressed through the recitation of the central Christian beliefs as proclaimed in the Apostle's Creed, the manifold praying of the Lord's Prayer and the trinitarian doxology known as the 'Glory Be', and most especially the Incarnation-centred 'Hail Mary', all introduced and concluded by the sign of the cross, that physical reminder of the death Christ suffered for us.

The Marian prayers don't celebrate Mary, save as a way of glorifying God by celebrating someone who he has especially honoured. Their purpose, ultimately, is to honour God, and especially to lead us deeper in our love for him through meditation on the mysteries of his Incarnation, including his teaching, suffering, death, and resurrection. Catholics may pray to Mary, but they don't worship her, that being for God alone.

What's more, Marian devotions aren't things that Catholics must do if they want to be saved -- an annoyed Protestant friend told me today how she'd been irked by one of her friends having claimed this, as she knew this wasn't true. They're gifts to help us get closer to God, and it's God and God alone that Catholics worship. Mass, after all, centred on that sacrament the Church calls the source and summit of Christian life, isn't offered to Mary.  

Catholics love and honour the mother of God. They don't worship her, and anyone who claims that they do shouldn't be trusted as a source for anything at all about Catholicism. It's one thing to disagree with the Catholic understanding of Mary; it's another to lie and to claim that understanding is something that it's not.
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And again, if you don't believe me there are a few places you can look to see whether I'm fairly reflecting Catholic teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, of course, should be the standard go-to to find out what the Church teaches, and you shouldn't neglect the footnotes. I'd also recommend The Rosary of Our Lady by Romano Guardini, Hail, Holy Queen by Scott Hahn, and perhaps most especially Mary, Mother of the Son by Mark Shea.

Holy Hookers and Historical Myths...

I first  heard about Sacred Prostutution a few months before I started university, in an episode of Neil Gaiman and Jill Thompson's 'Brief Lives' storyline in Sandman. The episode, touching on themes that Gaiman would later explore far more fully in American Gods, was at least in part about happens to gods when people stop believing in them. In this case, the Babylonian goddess Astarte, or Ishtar, has been reduced to working in an American strip club, soaking up the 'worship' offered her by her drooling clients.

Temple Prostitution is first attested in the pages of Herodotus, and at the time I first heard of it, I didn't know quite how delightfully unreliable Herodotus is. I happen to like him a lot, and work with him constantly, but one needs to sample him with the saltshaker at the ready. Herodotus talks about sacred prostitution as part of a discursus on Babylon in the first book of his Histories, where he says:

'There is one custom among these people which is wholly shameful: every woman who is a native of the country must once her life go and sit in the temple of Aphrodite and there give himself to a strange man.* Many of the rich women, who are too proud to mix the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages with a whole host of servants following behind, and there wait; most, however, sit in the precinct of the temple with a band of plaited string round their heads -- and a great crowd they are, what with some sitting there, others arriving, others going away -- and through them all gangways are marked off running in every direction for the men to pass along and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her seat she is not allowed to go home until a man has thrown a silver coin into her lap and taken her outside to lie with her. As he throws the coin, the man has to say, 'In the name of the goddess Mylitta' -- that being the Assyrian name for Aphrodite. The value of the coin is of no consequence; once thrown it becomes sacred, and the law forbids that it should ever be refused. The woman has no privilege of choice -- she must go with the first man who throws her the money. When she has lain with him, her duty to the goddess is discharged and she may go home, after which it will be impossible to seduce her by any offer, however large. Tall, handsome women soon manage to get home again, but the ugly ones stay a long time before they can fulfil the condition which the law demands, some of them, indeed, as much as three or four years.'

I was thinking about this recently when I yet again came across someone on the Internet warbling about temple prostitution in ancient Corinth. This is, I'm afraid, a common trope in lazy Christian preaching, and someday I'll get round to tracking down why it's so popular. The guts of the issue is this: Saint Paul, in chapters five to seven of his First Letter to the Corinthians, has a lot to say about sexual immorality in Corinth, and so all too often when people talk about this they wheel out cliches about how Corinth was particularly notorious in the ancient world as a centre of sexual vice, and how the huge temple of Aphrodite had thousands of sacred prostitutes and was the corrupt heart of Corinth's decadence. Sometimes you'll even hear rubbish about how Paul's comments at I Corinthians 11 about women covering their hair were driven by his desire that long-haired Christian women not be confused with long-haired prostitutes from the Temple. 

This, frankly, is poppycock, and one of those things that set my teeth on edge. Sure, there's a lot of argument about what means what in ancient history, but you don't need to dig into the real research to find out how ridiculous it is that anyone should be holding that first-century Corinth was a bastion of cult prostitution. The whole idea is a modern myth, based on a spectacularly stupid and lazy reading of the following passage from Strabo's Geography, in which Strabo talks of how fabulously wealthy and powerful Corinth used to be, and after talking of Corinth's famously rich eighth- and seventh-century rulers, says:

'Again, Demaratus, one of the men who had been in power at Corinth, fleeing from the seditions there, carried with him so much wealth from his home to Tyrrhenia that not only he himself became the ruler of the city that admitted him, but his son was made king of the Romans. And the temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans, whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely squandered their money, and hence the proverb, "Not for every man is the voyage to Corinth."'

The son in question, for what it's worth, was Tarquinius Priscus, reputedly Rome's king between 616 and 579 BC, so what Strabo should be understood as saying here is that Corinth had been incredibly wealthy six hundred years before he wrote, and that back then the temple of Aphrodite was so rich it had a thousand temple prostitutes. That things were rather different in Strabo's own day are immediately apparent to anyone who bothers to read the next paragraph, in which Strabo comments at some length on how the former grandeur of the city is apparent when one looks at its ruined defensive walls and the remains of a building so badly ruined that he cannot tell whether it was a great palace or temple. He specifically says that the city of his own day is a new city, rebuilt by the Romans.

This, of course, would hardly be surprising to anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of ancient history or archaeology. Corinth had been destroyed by the Romans under Lucius Mummius in 146 BC, and was only reestablished as a city in 44 BC when Julius Caesar, shortly before his assassination, ordered it be rebuilt as a Roman colony. Over the following century, during which it became the capital of the new Roman province of Achaea, Corinth grew in size and once again became a thriving port city, albeit a Roman one, very different from the Greek one of centuries earlier. Like any other port, prostitution was common there, but we've no evidence whatsoever that suggests it was vastly more common in Corinth than in Massilia, Ostia, Alexandria, Brundisium, Piraeus, or any other first-century Mediterranean port.

Given how easy it is to find this out, I've got to a point where I have no patience with people who trot out this kind of rubbish. It's one thing for people in the pews to believe it; it's another for preachers in the pulpits to propound it. All teachers, of whatever sort, have an obligation to honesty and lazily repeating this kind of claptrap shows at best a cavalier attitude to historical reality. Temple Prostitution didn't exist in the Corinth of Saint Paul. It's as simple as that.

To be honest, whatever about the arguments that sacred prostitution never existed in the Mediterranean world, I'm very sceptical that Corinth at any rate was ever a centre for such a practice. A trip to the site should start one wondering, to begin with, not least because the ruins of the temple of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth don't look like they could have been associated with a hundred temple prostitutes, let alone a thousand. Herodotus, talking about how disgraceful Babylonian temple prostitution is, and saying that a similar practice prevails in Cyprus, doesn't make any mention of Corinth; indeed, if cult prostitution was common in any major Greek city,  Herodotus would hardly have thought Babylonian temple prostitution so remarkable. It seems that the absolute most that could be said about Corinthian prostitution, even in the city's heyday, was that as a city with two ports, Corinth was a city with no shortage of prostitutes, and that all of Corinth's prostitutes were protected by the goddess Aphrodite, to whom they paid honour, but that in no way were their sexual relations associated with -- let alone performed in -- the temple.

* That's an unfamiliar man, not one who was notably strange, whether in appearance, manner, or way of life. Just, you know, in case you wondering.

Eolai's Cycling Tour of Ireland - And He's Off!

So, the Brother's finally set off on his jaunt -- a 32-County Painting Tour of Ireland. It was nodded to in a couple of pieces in yesterday's Irish Independent. 

He posted a thoughtful and witty and oddly poignant little recording on Audioboo in the early hours, before he'd packed and set out. It's worth a listen. I'm not sure where he is right now, but a few hours back he was painting in the hills south of Dublin somewhere.

The bike's impressively loaded, as you'll see, thanks to the Brother's Xtracycle, which he happily refers to on a regular basis as the best thing he ever bought. As far as I can tell he's carting around paints, brushes, canvas, a seat, tools, and all the other stuff you'd expect if you were cycling round a whole country, covering two or three thousand miles over a couple of months. Which, of course, you would do, wouldn't you?

Anyway, you should follow his adventures on his website, and on Twitter. I expect there'll be no shortage of pictures. It's about Irish social networking and the internet as much as it's about cycling and painting, after all.

Painful Lives

I had to go to Waterstone's in the Arndale Centre the other day as a birthday present needed buying. While there, present in hand, I got thoroughly baffled at why Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, Clive James's fascinating collection of biographical meditations, had been shelved alongside dictionaries and books on the history of English. It's basically a biographic compendium, or a collection of autobiographical thoughts, or a survey of the cultural history of the twentieth century. Take a look at what James has to say about Sophie Scholl, that being a fair sample of the hundred essays that comprise this wonder, and then ask yourself whether that's the kind of book that belongs with style guides and lexicons.

Mind, the science of shelving clearly eludes me. I mean, take a look at this, the 'Painful Lives' part of the Biography section. Make you you scroll right down to the bottom. 

 Or, at least, the Bottom's sister. Painful lives indeed. And the Queen Mum? Seriously?

The Myth of Constantine

Today being the Solemnity of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, celebrated throughout the Catholic and Orthodox world, and in theory in the Anglican one too, it seems as good a day as any to start into my Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church.

Most of these myths, as I've said, are straightforward misrepresentations of doctrine and practice, but three are myths that simply fly in the face of all historical evidence.

The first myth, then, is the claim that the Catholic Church was created by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.

The basic thrust of the myth is that before Constantine Christianity was a simple, pure faith, and that the semi-pagan Constantine spoiled it by adding all manner of pagan elements to it, thereby creating the corrupt institution that is the Catholic Church. If you're drawn to New Age stuff, you'll follow the variant of this you'll read and see in the likes of The Da Vinci Code, arguing that before Constantine came along Jesus wasn't even seen as divine. If you're a Protestant, you'll basically claim that Jesus had always been seen as divine -- which is true -- but that before Constantine came along the Church was just like your church, whatever that may be, with Constantine having added pretty much everything you disagree with in historical Christianity.

This is all nonsense, I'm afraid, and played no small part in why Blessed John Henry Newman conceded, following an extensive and thorough investigation of early Christian history, that 'To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.' It wasn't long, of course, before he felt that to do other than to assent to the authority of the Catholic Church would have been hypocritical.

Arian and Pagan Emperors
The first clues to the absurdity of this broad hypothesis, in whatever form, lie in what we know of the major characters of the era, with particular reference to dates. During the fourth century, there was rarely just one emperor at any given time, but nonetheless, certain figures were dominant, and it's worth thinking about them for a minute. Constantine I was on the scene between 306 and 337, and while nobody really understands Constantine's religious views, it's clear that by the end of his reign he tended more towards Arianism than Catholicism, and the fact of his moving the seat of imperial power to a Constantinople is a rather broad hint that he thought of Rome as an obsolete backwater. His son Constantius II who was around between 337 and 361 was at the very least semi-Arian. Constantine's nephew Julian ruled between 361 and 363, and persecuted the Church as part of a campaign to restore the Empire's pagan identity. His successor Jovian was an orthodox Christian but ruled for just one year, and Jovian's successors Valens and Valentinian were divided in their views, one being Arian and the other being Catholic. It was only with the accession of Theodosius I to the imperial throne in 379 that the whole empire was ruled by a Catholic.

A good barometer for judging the Catholicity, for want of a better word, of Rome's emperors during the period is to look at the life of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius was the Church's greatest champion of the orthodox view of the Incarnation, and was the first person who we know of to have identified the 27 books of the New Testament that Christians regard as canonical, listing them in his Easter Letter of 367. Over the course of his life Athanasius was exiled from his see in Alexandria by Constantine, by Constantius (twice), by Julian, and by Valens. Think about it: if the Catholic Church was really the quasi-pagan creation of the Roman emperors, would four emperors have gone to so much trouble to silence its greatest spokesman?

A Dog that Doesn't Bark
That's the first point. The second is this: we have no evidence whatsoever of a rupture in mainstream Christian belief and practice during the period, other than that Christian worship ceased to be a furtive activity; it became possible to build large churches for large congregations that could now worship in the open. Neither Ambrose nor Augustine, for instance, give any indication that the essential teachings and practices of Christianity had changed in any way under Valentinian and Theodosius.

What of under Constantine? Even despite his late Arian tendencies and his sidelining of Rome as a seat of imperial power -- in truth, it hadn't even been the nominal capital of the west since 286 -- might he not have corrupted Christian beliefs and practices in other ways, introducing Pagan Roman customs and ideas and thus in some sense creating the Catholic Church? Well, in principle this might have happened, of course, but good luck finding evidence of it: there isn't any. Now, sure, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but given that this was an era where people would riot over disputed points of dogma, Catholics and Arians falling to blows with depressing regularity, you'd at least expect to find some traces of dissent or approval about new teachings and new forms of worship.

Same Beliefs, Same Practices, Same Faith
Perhaps most importantly, we have quite a bit of evidence for what the Church was like well before Constantine, and, putting it bluntly, it is essentially and recognisably the Church today. Think of what most people regard as the most distinctive features of Catholic Christianity:

• Sunday as a day specially set aside for worship, with the Mass as the central act of worship, the Mass being understood as a sacrifice, and Christ being believed present in the Mass under the appearances of bread and wine.
• An ordained priesthood, with priests serving under local bishops, each one of these bishops serving as a point of local unity and as a conduit to the universal Church, claiming a pedigree of orthodox episcopal succession going back to the Apostles.
• The Church in Rome as having a unique primacy and authority in the Church, with the bishop of Rome claiming an episcopal succession back to St Peter, and acting as a visible point of unity for the whole Church.
• Honour being paid to the saints, veneration of the physical remains of saints, the belief that the saints in heaven can hear our prayers and pray for us, and the usefulness of prayers for the dead.

Every single one of these practices and beliefs is attested in Christian writings from more than a century before Constantine legalised Christianity. Clement of Rome, the author of the Didache, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, the author of the Martydom of Polycarp, the author of the Shepherd of Hermas, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Tertullian among others collectively attest to the Church of the second century -- indeed, the Church of the late first century too -- as being in its essentials recognisably the same Church that still exists today.

That's not to say that the Church is right about what it teaches and does -- though I think it is -- just that it has neither invented what it teaches now nor abandoned what it taught in Antiquity. This is something that can be tested quite easily. Sure, the Didache and Clement's Letter to the Corinthians, almost certainly the two earliest extra-Biblical Christian texts, were only rediscovered in the nineteenth century, but I don't think this is an excuse for people pretending or acting as if Christians wrote the Bible in the first century and never wrote another word afterwards,  ignoring the Bible and doing their own thing for the next 1400 years.

Indeed, leaving aside the fact that it flies in the face of all historical evidence, the whole notion that the Church as a whole went off the rails in Antiquity or the Middle Ages is profoundly unbiblical. The Bible features Jesus saying he will be with the Church always, assuring the Apostles that who hears them hears him, and guaranteeing the Apostles that the Spirit will guide them; it shows the Apostles and the elders of the Church in Jerusalem claiming to speak with the authority of the Spirit, and it identifyies the Church with Christ himself; indeed, Paul calls the Church the pillar and bulwark of truth. 

If anyone's determined to argue -- honestly -- that the Catholic Church, which even now includes roughly half the world's Christians, was founded by Constantine and not by Christ, they need to be able to justify this both historically and theologically. Where do they think the Church described in the Bible was to be found in the centuries between John and Luther, if it was not that Church that Ignatius and Augustine called Catholic?

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And if you don't believe me, go and take a look at the relevant sections in J.N.D. Kelly's Early Christian Doctrines, Henry Chadwick's The Early Church, and perhaps most especially the ancient Christian texts themselves in H.S. Bettenson's Documents of the Christian Church, James Stevenson's A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrating the History of the Church to AD 337, or the Penguin collection called Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers.

More than eight weeks of Summer gone already...

This is ridiculous. Seemingly Met Éireann, the Irish meteorological agency, has taken to running with all the other eejits that think that Summer is the three months of June, July, and August. It takes the view that Summer is defined as the three warmest months of the year, based on data over a thirty-year period; so Summer is, as far as they're concerned, June, July, and August in a typical year. It has, rightly, no time for the nonsensical claim that the seasons begin on the Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox, and Winter Solstice, ascribing the use of these astronomical dates as markers for when seasons begin purely to the needs of diary manufacturers and the like, but this doesn't change the fact that their basic thesis is clearly absurd.

Think about it. It was the Summer Solstice just a few days back. What else do we call the Summer Solstice? Yes, it's Midsummer's Day. Midsummer. That's the clue. It falls in the middle of Summer. It's not just a quarter of the way in, much less the day that launches the season. It's pretty much bang in the middle of the season. Go and read Shakespeare, if this doesn't ring any bells.

To have the Solstice fall in the middle of Summer, Summer needs to take up May, June, and July. It's common sense. Likewise with the Winter Solstice -- if it's Midwinter's Day, as it is, then Winter must be November, December, and January.

Despite the meteorological agencies' claims, the traditional European seasons have never been defined by weather. They're not about climate. They're not about fluctuating temperatures, not least because that leads to honest people such as Swedish meteorologists admitting that seasons begin at different times in different years and in different places. They're about light and darkness as experienced in the Northern Hemisphere -- obviously, the months are differnt in the Southern Hemisphere, but the principle's the same. Summer is the quarter of the year when we have the most hours of daylight, and Winter's the quarter when we have the fewest. 

For what it's worth, this means that Autumn is defined as August, September, and October, something the Irish calendar makes very clear, as the Irish names for September (Meán Fómhair) and October (Deireadh Fómhair) literally mean "middle of autumn" and "end of autumn".

And yes, I know it often rains a lot in May. So what? Do you remember June, July, and August of 2007 and 2008? Sodden, they were. Absolutely miserable. Dividing the seasons astronomically, so that the quarter of the year with the most daylight is called Summer and the one with the least is called Winter is meaningful, stable, objective, relevant through the hemisphere, and it's how this was traditionally worked out throughout history.

The Tale of One Bad Rat, or, thoughts on teaching adults to read comics

 I was talking to my housemate last night about Watchmen, raving about it as I tend to do, and following Pádraig Ó Méalóid in scorning the Zach Snyder film based on the book. I'd not say the film is a travesty, but I think Pádraig was almost exactly right to have said:

'It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing. Watchmen is the most perfect graphic novel there is, and a huge amount of work went into making it that way, and attempting to streamline that for the big screen was never going to work. Alan Moore said it was unfilmable, and I have seen that he was completely right.'

Anyway, I wittered away about why I felt the film didn't work -- how it had fundamentally missed the point of the book, misunderstood the nature of the book's characters as created by Moore, seemed oblivious in all but the most cosmetic of ways to the how the fabric of the world of Watchmen differs from that of our own world, and been unable to play to the book's strength. It has strengths, to be fair -- the credit sequence was funny and clever, the casting was excellent, and every so often the sets were spot-on, but in the main I thought it missed the point and substituted brashness, gore, and gratuitous violence and nudity where Moore and Gibbons had been elegant, subtle, and often just matter-of-fact. 

At this my housemate pulled me up, as someone who had liked the film and never read the book, saying that he'd liked it and didn't agree with me, so I went and got the book and tried as best I could in a hasty way to point out how the book works, panel by panel. I wished I'd Gibbons and Kidd's Watching the Watchmen to hand, but I did my best.

My housemate's intrigued now, and is tempted to buy the book for himself, but I'm a bit wary of him reading it just yet. Watchmen, to be frank, isn't a book to start a new comic-reader on. It's too complex, too sophisticated, to dependent on familiarity with the form and its grammar. 

Years ago I went to a talk by Bryan Talbot, back when he'd just written The Tale of One Bad Rat, where he talked of how he'd been amazed in the aftermath of his avant-garde The Adventures of Luther Arkwright to learn that there were people who couldn't read comics, who found them complex and hard to follow. How does one read a page? How does one read a panel? What do you read first -- the picture or the speech balloons or the captions or the thought bubbles or a combination of them all? It was with this in mind that he wrote and drew The Tale of One Bad Rat the way he did.

The Tale of One Bad Rat is about as legible, and sad, as beautiful, and as hopeful a comic as one could ever hope to read, and it's become one of a handful of comics I like to show people who don't read comics if I want to show them how good work can be done in the medium, work as valid as anything in film or prose. Originally intending the book as a story of a girl obsessed with Beatrix Potter who runs away to the Lake District, Talbot needed to explain why she ran away, came up with the idea that she'd been abused, and then decided that if he was going to involve child abuse in the story then he'd better do it properly.

He did the work, and the result is a masterpiece, utterly nailing the distrust, the difficulty in forming relationships, the hatred of being touched, and the obsessional imagery that can so often haunt abuse survivors, while nonetheless showing paths to healing and being a beautiful and gentle ode to Beatrix Potter, the Lake District, art, and rats.

As a primer in what comics can be and what comics can do, it has very few rivals. I rather wish I had my copy here. It's something I'd like to show people so they can understand.

On Shaving the Roman Way

One of my occasional online haunts is the blog of Paul Gogarty, an old friend and until recently one of my home constituency's deputies to the Dáil, the lower house of the Irish parliament. About a month back he wrote a long and rather detailed post about the Eurovision and shaving. Now, the Eurovision I can take or leave, though I agree with the Brother that it's a better way of learning about geography than having a world war. Shaving, on the other hand, matters to me, and as Paul was clearly having ethical and practical issues with his blades, I wrote to give him my own thoughts on the subject.

I said something like the following...

As you'll know, I've been broke for years. What you'll not know is that I have sensitive skin, and that I like a close shave. These three factors pose a bit of a challenge, but over the last two years I have solved this problem.

The Blade

For the blade, I use the classic Wilkinson Sword double-edged razor, using the kind of blades teenage girls use to cut themselves. You know the ones.

Its very simple, very sharp, and very cheap. It takes a tiny bit of getting used to, as with a Mach 3, say, one uses pressure from the hand to effectively rip out one's bristles, whereas with this it's merely the weight of the head, combined with the angle at which one holds the blade, that slices away the hairs. I started using this as I found that shaving oil, which I used to use when I was travelling, as I so often was, tended to clog multi-blade razors. No matter how much I rinsed them, they'd get blocked up with a mass of oily bristles. Single blades can't clog.

For a while I experimented with a traditional straight razor, but the learning curve on it proved too demanding. I liked the idea of only ever having one blade, which I'd sharpen and re-sharpen, as it struck me as both cool and good for the environment, and so resolved to learn with a straight razor loaded with disposable blades, but found that I couldn't get it right. It wasn't the nicks that bothered me -- I'd expected them -- it was that after shaving my face would alternate between glassily-smooth patches and patches of horrible scurfy stuff, the latter having a tendency to appear overnight. I decided I couldn't be arsed with going through weeks of that, so turned to a more conventional handle and head arrangement.

(I've been shaved with a straight-razor, for what it's worth, one balmy night in Cappadocia last summer, with a young teenage boy drawing the blade over my face as his boss watched approving. Oddly, it wasn't as unnerving an experience as I'd feared beforehand.)

Oil

Secondly, I've stopped using foams, gels, soaps, and even creams when shaving, though I like the Palmolive shaving cream a lot, especially when applied with a brush which raises the hairs to make them easier to slice away. Instead, inspired by poverty and having run out of shaving oil one Christmas at home in Dublin, I've changed to Olive Oil.

Other oils are quite thin, and can clog one's pores, but Olive Oil, especially extra virgin oil, is viscous enough to form a layer that won't harm the skin and will actually enrich it, while providing lubrication and protection as you slice away the hairs.

I usually keep about an inch of oil in a mug, with a few drops of clove oil mixed in*, and leave my razor -- head down -- in that, as keeping the blade in the oil prolongs its life. The oil will get a bit dirty, in that some bristles will invariably find their way in, but I think that's a price worth paying.

So, when shaving in my neo-Roman way, I start by showering and then pressing a hot, wet flannel against my face; I then dab my fingers in the oil and smear it all over my face, rubbing it in especially where I intend to shave; I then set to work, shaving with the growth to begin with and against where necessary, judging by feel as I pull the skin and relubricating whenever I need to; once smooth, I use the hot wet flannel again to remove all oil and freshen the skin, and then use cold water to close up the pores. Mission accomplished.

(Then you must clean your sink, as you don't want oily rings and bristles around it, and your other half or your housemates certainly won't want that.)

People keep saying I have freakishly-young looking skin for someone my age. I don't know if this is true, or they're just being nice, but if they're right I reckon it's due to the olive oil.

Don't use oil with chilli in. That would be bad.

G.

* Clove oil acts as a very mild anaesthetic, which can be handy if you nick yourself while shaving.

Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church: A Taster

I wondered the other day whether somewhere out there in the world there's a Giant Bumper Book of Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church, annoyed as I was to see such respected Protestant preachers as John Stott and Don Carson perpetuating complete falsehoods about the Church, and someone soon told informed me that, in a sense, such a book exists. Roman Catholicism by Loraine Boettner, an American Presbyterian who worked for the Internal Revenue, was first published in 1962 and certainly looks like it fits the bill; while I doubt anyone I know has personally waded through Boettner's ranting, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if his ahistorical, unscriptural, and flat-out illogical claims have had indirect effects. Maybe people I know have read stuff or heard stuff by people who've heard what Boettner said, for instance, and who have passed on his gibberish on trust...

If you have a long spoon and fancy supping with the Devil, it seems you can read the whole thing here; I've had a glance, but am too busy to wallow in vitriol, bile, and hogwash. Still, if you want to waste your money you can squander it on Amazon.

With this in mind, I have a yen to write a series of short posts over the next couple of months -- an intermittent series, broken up by other things, as is my nature -- on Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church I've come across or been actively confronted with in the last few years. Offhand, I can think of about fifteen things I've stared or sighed upon hearing and then had to laboriously refute in conversations since moving to England. I'm sure if I thought harder I'd think of more, but just off the top of my head...

1. The Catholic Church was not created by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.
2. Catholics do not worship Mary, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
3. Catholics do not worship Saints and Relics, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
4. Catholics do not worship Statues and Pictures, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
5. Catholics do not only ever think of Jesus as being in the arms of Mary
6. Catholics do not only ever think of Jesus as being on the cross, and the Church does not teach that Jesus is sacrificed every single time the Mass is said.
7. Catholics do not believe the Pope is always right, and do not have to do whatever the Pope says.
8. Catholics do not believe the Pope can overrule the Bible, and the Church does not teach that he can do so.
9. Catholics do not believe we're saved by doing good works, and the Church doesn't teach that we are.
10. Catholics do not believe they can be forgiven their sins if they put money into a box by a statue of St Peter in Rome, and the Church doesn't ever offer forgiveness for money.
11. Catholics were not forbidden from reading the Bible in the Middle Ages, and translations of the Bible were not banned by the Church.
12. The sixteenth-century Catholic Church did not add books to the Bible at the Council of Trent.
13. The Catholic Church does not teach that only Christians can be married, or that Christians whose marriages weren't presided over by priests are living in sin.
14. The Catholic Church does not teach that all non-Catholics will go to Hell.
15. The Catholic Church does not teach that everybody will go to Heaven.

Three of these are historical points, but those aside, almost all of these, as far as I can see, come down to misunderstandings about terminology. A major part of the problem is that Catholics and Protestants use language differently, and so Protestants and Catholics can often agree completely on a subject while sounding as though they differ absolutely, purely due to how both groups use words. Protestants see Catholic practices or read things by Catholic writers, and often do so in a spirit of sincere curiosity, but misunderstand what they're looking at or reading, and make assumptions which are fundamentally wrong.This is why one of the first requirements of any honest debate is that terms should be defined; without properly defined terms, things get confused and the most well-meaning people wind up at loggerheads over things about which they essentially agree.

I'm not saying there aren't real differences between Catholics and Protestants. There are. They're just not the ones above.

Roger Olson had a good piece about a similar matter the other day, saying, in connection with debates between Arminian and Calvinist Protestants, but stressing that this applies to any honest discussions of any theology:

'We need to distinguish carefully between criticism and misrepresentation.  Fair criticism is valid; misrepresentation in order to criticize (straw man treatment) is invalid and should itself be criticized by everyone.'

So anyway, I reckon I'll give this a shot soon. Fifteen or so short* posts, spread out over a month or two, interspersed with witterings about work, life, drawing, cycling, books, films, and whatever. None of them will be apologetic, in the sense that they'll not be about proving 'why Catholics are right' or 'why Catholicism is Biblical' or anything like that. They'll just be about what Catholicism is, and what Catholicism most certainly isn't. Not just yet, though. I've something to finish first.

* No, really. That's the plan.