Dickens and Christmas

From “The Pilot”, 1994, comes this piece by Tony Keogh on Dickens and Christmas, as a suitable posting for today.

I love “A Christmas Carol” and have done ever since I read a small version, barely large enough to fit in a hand, but small enough to smuggle upstairs, and read in bed, under the covers by torchlight, when I was supposed to be fast asleep.

The version with Alastair Sim is of course one of my favourite versions, but the version with George C Scott is still a very faithful adaptation, very close to the script, wonderful performances throughout. The Patrick Stewart version, probably the longest, is the only one to have sequences like the lighthouse, out at sea, on Christmas day. And the Muppet’s Christmas Carol is again a wonderful rendering, with a superb performance by Michael Caine. Even the brief “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” captures something magical from the story.

As Tony Keogh explains, the Victorians resurrected Christmas as a festival, and most of what we regard as a “traditional Christmas” (though not all) does not go back much further than Victorian times. But the longevity of Christmas since shows they laid a sure foundation, and their recreation and renewal of the Christmas celebrations is, I think, something worthy of praise.

There are some elements of Christmas which remain and are Mediaeval in origin, but very few which could be considered overtly Pagan. The Saturnalia festival, for example, as well as feasting,  involved the conception of more children (or at least activities intended to lead to that). That doesn't feature greatly in modern Christmas celebrations!

The identification of feasting as something wholly pagan is a false attribution, for while the ancient Pagans had festivities, we must not forget that the Christians also did before the Puritans took over, abolished Christmas, and gave us a lingering legacy that it was two feasts, a religious Christian one and a pagan (and more secular) one. Miracle plays, as well, abolished by the Reformers, used to poke fun at the Church, and combine religious stories with ribald humour and irreverence.

Dickens and Christmas
By Tony Keogh

It was October 1843 that Charles Dickens began the writing of one of his most popular and best loved books, "A Christmas Carol." It was written in six weeks and finished by the end of November, being fitted in between the intervals of writing the monthly parts of "Martin Chuzzlewit," a work which was causing him some financial anxiety because the public did not seem to have taken to it as readily as to his earlier serials, "A Christmas Carol" would, he hoped, bring in a better financial return.

John Forster, biographer, noted how the story, once conceived, gripped Dickens. "He wept over it, and. laughed and wept again, and excited himself to an extraordinary degree: He walked thinking of it fifteen and twenty miles about the black streets of London," often at very late hours of the night. He kept Christmas that year with an extraordinary zest, "Such dinings, such dancing, such conjurings, such blindmans buffings, such theatre going, such kissing-out of-old years: and kissing-in o£ new ones, never took place in .those parts before."

Savouring the atmosphere of Christmas in London became part of Dickens' annual routine. Every Christmas Eve, he went to visit the Christmas markets in the East End between Aldgate and Bow, and he liked to wander in poor neighbourhoods on Christmas Day, "past the areas of shabby genteel houses in. Somers or Kentish Towns, watching the diners: preparing or coming in."

"A Christmas Carol" captures in many places what Dickens so acutely-observed, “The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp-heat of the windows made pale faces ruddy as they .passed. Poulterers and grocers' trades became a splendid joke, a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do."

There is the doubt that. "A Christmas Carol" is first and foremost a story concerned with the Christian Gospel of liberation by the grace of .God. Dickens intended it as such and it was received as such. It is, about an incarnational religion which refuses to drive a wedge between the world of the spirit and the world of matter.

The cornucopia of Christmas food and feasting reflects both the goodness of creation and. the joy of heaven. It is a significant sign of a shift in theological emphasis in the nineteenth century from the Atonement to the stress on the Incarnation; away from Good Friday and Easter to Christmas, which, I think, pertains to this day. It was a stress which found outward and visible expression in the sacramentalism of the Oxford Movement, the development .of richer and more symbolic forms of worship, and above all, the-revival and increasing centrality of the keeping of Christmas itself as a Christian festival.

For centuries, Christmas as a festival was neglected and took a very poor second place to the Christian Passover of Good Friday/Easter. In fact, when the Westminster Directory was substituted for the Prayer Book under the Commonwealth of Cromwell, Christmas was abolished. The rubric stated, "There is no day commanded in scripture to be kept -holy under the gospel, but the Lord's Day, which is the Christian Sabbath," therefore, "festival days, vulgarly called holy days, having no. warrant in the work of God, are not to be continued." It has to be said that the abolition was not universally accepted.

However, there can belittle doubt that the popularity of Dickens' "A Christmas. Carol" played a significant part in changing the consciousness: of Christmas and the way in which it was. and still is celebrated;

The popularity of his public readings of the story is an indication of: how much it resonated with the contemporary mood and contributed to the increasing place of the. Christmas celebrations in both secular: and religious ways which was firmly established by the end of the nineteenth century.

W H Auden: 1907-1973 Part 3

I've been trawling through the archives at the library again, and in particular for Sundays, "The Pilot" which was the monthly magazine for the Church of England in Jersey for many years. Every month, there would be pieces from the minister of each church, along with various other articles of interest.
 
In 1995, the Reverend Tony Keogh began a series of articles in "The Pilot" under the umbrella title "God and the Poets", and here is the part of his series on W.H. Auden. I thought it was a shame that it should be buried in the past, so I've transcribed it for my blog.

Other parts are at:
http://tonymusings.blogspot.com/2014/05/w-h-auden-1907-1973-part-1.html
http://tonymusings.blogspot.com/2014/05/w-h-auden-1907-1973-part-2.html
 
God and the Poets: W H Auden: 1907-1973 Part 3
By Tony Keogh

Auden had started writing poetry at school but it was at Christ Church, Oxford that he began to understand something of the English poetic tradition into which he was born. His early attempts were influenced by de la Mare, Hardy, Housman and many others besides. In his search for his own voice, he discovered T S Eliot in 1926 and for a while, he became. a slavish imitator, even believing that a poet should be depersonalised and look like a stockbroker. Youonly have to see photographs of Auden to know that that was impossible.
 
Of all the walks in Oxford, his favourite was the towpath which ran beside the gasworks, as it corresponded to Eliot's "dull canal round behind the gas house" in "The Waste Land." However, at this stage, he was devouring much of the works of contemporary poets, Emily Dickinson among many others, but he was no plageriser or cork in the waves; all were put to use in finding his own voice in his own poetry. As Christopher Isherwood wrote, "By learning to speak with the tongues of other poets, he was continually enlarging the range of his own strongly individual poetic language."
 
He was: inseparable from the Oxford English Dictionary and, later on, these volumes would be worn out with use and the fact that he was in the habit of sitting on them to eat his meals. There was a freshness and colloquialism in his poetry, but everyday monosyllables were combined with recondite words, often of classical derivation, though Auden had little Latin and less Greek. Such was the audacity of the man and his love of language, its meaning and sound, that after two or three months in Berlin, he began to write poems in German.
 
After leaving Oxford, he earned his living as a master in various preparatory schools, where he was well liked by both colleagues and boys. Stephen Spender thinks that this was probably the happiest period of his life.
 
He moved 'in the fashionable circles of young poets and men of letters, such as Spender, Isherwood and Day-Lewis. It is clear that he was courting socialism and even Marxism as a possible creed for himself. This was the time of the last days of the German Weimar Republic and the dark night of Nazism was about to descend. Observers clearly identified Auden and his group with the left in politics.
 
While at Oxford, Auden had driven a car for the TUC in the General Strike. In his autobiography, "The Thirties and After," Spender says of Auden that "in. his poetic journey from psychoanalytic symbolism (Eliot) to Christian theology, Marxist materialism was the most transitory of his ideological ports of call."
 
Auden was a ruthless self-editor, much criticised for it, and scarcely a trace of Marxism now remains in his work. The Spanish Civil War was the test case. These young men all supported the Republicans. Auden wrote a poem, "Spain," which expresses the Marxist view of history in a line such as "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder," a sentiment which freedom fighters, liberation theologians and post-modernists would applaud today. George Orwell castigated such opinions as of "the pink-pansy left," and as expected from those who had not experienced the barbarism of violence. Auden himself changed the line to "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder;" but he soon came to dislike the poem as a pose and suppressed it.
 
Going to Spain, he found to his astonishment that he could not abide the sight of gutted churches, burnt by the Communists: he was on his way back to Christianity. He had never been irreligious, the "maybeness" of God was always there. He lamented his lack of specific mystical experience, in contrast to Eliot, but we may question this, while admitting that his religious experience was essentially of intellectual conviction.
 
In his introduction to the anthology edited by Anne Freemantle, "The Protestant Mystics," he tells of an incident in his own life as early as 1933. On a fine summer's night, he was sitting on a lawn .after dinner with three colleagues, two women and a man. They had not drunk any alcohol. They liked each other but were not intimate and the conversation was casual, about mundane matters. Quite suddenly."I felt myself invaded by a power which though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly because thanks to the power I was doing it- what it means to love one's neighbour as oneself."
 
He was convinced - and later had proof in one case - that his companions were undergoing a similar experience; though the conversation continued as before. Nor was there a new intimacy between them, but "I felt their existence to be of infinite value and I rejoiced in. it."
 
He felt penitence for the many times he had been "spiteful, snobbish, selfish," but this was transcended by joy. The, feeling was still there the next morning; though weaker. Intense for two hours, .it did not vanish completely for two days or so; the memory of it was undoubtedly a factor in his return to the Christian faith, though when it happened, his abandonment of that faith was at its height.

W H Auden: 1907-1973 Part 2

I've been trawling through the archives at the library again, and in particular for Sundays, "The Pilot" which was the monthly magazine for the Church of England in Jersey for many years. Every month, there would be pieces from the minister of each church, along with various other articles of interest.
 
In 1995, the Reverend Tony Keogh began a series of articles in "The Pilot" under the umbrella title "God and the Poets", and here is the part of his three part series on W.H. Auden. I thought it was a shame that it should be buried in the past, so I've transcribed it for my blog.
 
God and the Poets: W H Auden: 1907-1973 Part 2
By Tony Keogh
 
Wystan Hugh Auden was born at York on 21st February 1907, the third son of a physician who was also a classicist and an antiquarian. His mother, Constance Rosalie Bicknell, was the more powerful influence of his parents and long after her death in 1941, he would judge his actions and sentiments by whether or not they would have met with her approval. She was a devout Anglo-Catholic.
 
The Audens were of Icelandic descent and the sagas on which he was brought up greatly influenced all his writings. The name "Wystan" was of a Mercian prince, murdered in 849 after objecting to the marriage of his widowed mother to his uncle, contrary, to Canon law; Auden thought it very Hamlet-like. It was given to him partly because Auden's father had been educated at Repton where the parish church is dedicated to St Wystan.
 
The family moved to Birmingham when Wystan was a year old as his father was .appointed the Schools Medical Officer. After wartime service with the RAMC in some of the most dangerous theatres: of war, Dr Auden became part-time Professor of Public Health at Birmingham University.
 
Although Wystan spent five years at St Edmund's School, Hindhead, where he: first met his' lifelong friend Christopher Isherwood, he was never an English "southerner." The midlands and the north spoke to him much more than the trimmed lawns and leafy suburbs. The industrial devastation and the disused mines and. factories came to possess his imagination. As he wrote in a poem of the 1930s, "Letter to Lord Byron":
 
"Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on.
The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton"
 
Limestone, .not chalk, was his landscape the Pennines, not the Downs his spiritual home. The poem, "In Praise of Limestone," written in 1948, his own favourite is, in some sense, a personal testimony: The landscape moves him as he gazes on it, but also because it symbolises his own temperament, inconstant: limestone dissolves in water and is secretive with its underground: streams and caves. The poem recalls that statues and fountains are made out of limestone rock, which reminds him that:
 
"The blessed will not care what angle
they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. "
 
Yet he ends, immediately after, with the supreme gift that limestone has bestowed on-`him:
 
"Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless
love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the
murmur of underground streams, what I see
is a limestone landscape."
 
At thirteen, Auden went to Gresham's School at Holt in Norfolk. He was confirmed in 1920 and went through a period of Anglo-Catholic enthusiasm which, at Gresham's, he came to suspect as arising from "quite straightforward and unredeemed eroticism." Gresham's religion was "nothing but a vague: uplift, as flat as an old bottle of soda: water," while most who attended the Anglo-Catholic church in which his family worshipped at home seemed to him in some way handicapped, loving God because no-one else would love them. Christian images began to repel him when they did not seem risible. Yet he continued to go to church and loved .singing hymns as he did for the rest of his life. He left school, so he said, "a. confirmed anarchist individualist."
 
He began writing poetry whilst at school and his vocation suddenly dawned on him when a friend asked him what he did. He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, to read Natural Sciences but changed to English.
 
He had a famous conversation with the English don, Neville Coghill, the memory of which appalled him later:
 
"And what' are you going to do, Mr Auden, when you leave University?"
"I am going to be a poet."
"Well, in ... in that case you should find it very useful to have .read English."
(After a silence) "You don't understand, I am going to be a great poet.
 
Next month: W H.Auden's early career, the Spanish Civil War and his road back to Christianity.
 

W H Auden: 1907-1973 Part 1

I've been trawling through the archives at the library again, and in particular for Sundays, "The Pilot" which was the monthly magazine for the Church of England in Jersey for many years. Every month, there would be pieces from the minister of each church, along with various other articles of interest.

In 1995, the Reverend Tony Keogh began a series of articles in "The Pilot" under the umbrella title "God and the Poets", and here is the part of his three part series on W.H. Auden. I thought it was a shame that it should be buried in the past, so I've transcribed it for my blog.

God and the Poets: W H Auden: 1907-1973 Part 1
By Tony Keogh

W.H. Auden was a man who "inspired" love. Everyone who met him spoke of his kindness, generosity and humility. He was not only a poet but a writer of plays and prose. His literary criticism and his lectures reveal one of the finest Christian minds of his generation, yet in him was the enigma of the human condition. How can such heavenly gifts be-found in so earthy and human a body, for one cannot avoid the more sordid aspects of his life.

The Protestant work ethic was at the heart of the man; he had a fetish for punctuality and the ordered day, his output was prodigious - to quote Stephen Spender, he was "untidy, untied up, short-sighted. He drank too much for many years and at the last; crawled around in carpet slippers (he suffered from corns) and ragged clothes, never without a cigarette between his lips, his once fair and pallid face rugged.

Henry Moore described his face thus, "... its deep furrows like: plough marks, crossing a field:" Spender again, "He was more unrecognisably different when old from when young than most people." He was homosexual and knew agonies of love which are perhaps especially acute for that orientation, though for the: last thirty-four years of his life, he had a permanent relationship with Chester Kallman who, among other things, taught-him to love opera, and became his collaborator as librettist and one of the two men - Christopher Isherwood was the other - who could criticise his work without causing pain.. Whatever else the relationship gave him, it certainly gave him security.

In. his inaugural lecture .as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, in 1956, Auden maintained that. "knowledge of an. artist's life, temperament and opinions is unimportant to an. understanding of his work". This may be disputed, though it is possible for an understanding of the work to be perverted by too prurient an interest in the private life.

Many of the artistically inclined live simultaneously in higher and lower worlds and although the latter may take over: and lay a trail of wastage and destruction, it is not always so, although it does seem to be a constant theme of recent biographers. We have discovered in recent years that Einstein was a wife beater, Churchill a racist, Larkin a porn enthusiast and, recently, Grahame Greene: has been shown to have been a somewhat bizarre adulterer. At the end of it all, though, it does seem almost sinful to allow the glory of a batsman's innings, full of wondrous strokes, to be marred in our minds: by the awareness; painful to the moralist as this may be, that he maybe a womaniser or over addicted to whisky; and we should not always be looking for an author's autobiography in his work.

In the next two articles, we will look at Auden's writing and the Christian Faith which suffused the last half of his life... We may heed lines from the final stanza of Auden's poem, "At the Grave of Henry James" with which Humphrey Carpenter concludes his biography:

"There are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives. "

Christianity and the Arts

I've been trawling through the archives at the library again, and in particular for Sundays, "The Pilot" which was the monthly magazine for the Church of England in Jersey for many years. Every month, there would be pieces from the minister of each church, along with various other articles of interest.
 
In 1993, the Reverend Tony Keogh began a series of articles in "The Pilot" under the umbrella title "Christianity and the Arts"I thought it was a shame that it should be buried in the past, so I've transcribed it for my blog.

Christianity and the Arts
By Tony Keogh
 
The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
Out of the firmless stone, when the artist united himself with stone,
Spring always new forms of life, from the soul of man that is joined to the soul of stone;
Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or lifeless
Joined with the artist's eye, new life, new form, new colour.
(TS Eliot, "The Rock")
 
"Momentarily to every man comes the crossing of the wires with reality. It may be the Caliban moment -
 
"This isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs - lost in a flash; or held a little while in utter bliss. Remembered and sometimes written down: Saints in contemplation . . Bach working at a keyboard ... Fra Angelico working on the San Marco frescoes .. . Einstein working at the notion of relativity ..,. they all knew it. This is a kind of spiritual nuclear fission." (Lawrence Lee).
 
These two men, trying to describe their experiences as creative artists, see those experiences in terms of religious activities. This is not surprising when we remember that the opening chapter of the Bible is a poem about creation, the creation of a universe which God saw as good.
 
Indeed, both the Old and the New Testaments begin with a description of the two greatest acts of God - the Creation and the Incarnation. The earth is given to man for his enjoyment, delight and stewardship; form and content are perfectly fused in the Word made flesh.
 
Degas' statement that "everything, everything in this world has a sacred meaning" reminds us of the Bible's assertion that in Creation, God saw all that He had made was good, and it is from this creation that the artist selects his raw material, his subject matter, and transforms it by bestowing on it what the poet Vatery called "harmonious and unforgettable shape," the relationship between Christian belief, the artist and his work intricate and complex.
 
Generalisations are dangerous, but I think we need to make a general distinction, with respect to Christian art, along the following lines:
 
Christian art can be regarded as an historical category. It simply applies only to those works whose themes are overtly Christian -paintings of Biblical scenes, music settings of religious texts, literature dealing with the main themes of Christian belief.
 
The term can also be used in a wider sense as indicating some connection between a work of art and a Christian vision and understanding of the world. Some novels, plays and paintings, may be said to share in the Christian vision even if they have no explicit Christian reference.
 
Lastly, we can use the term "Christian art". as a re-enactment of creation. It could be said that all works of art are reminders that man reflects God in his own image and to create.
 
I hope in these series of articles to show how God has made himself known through the gift of the artists, and if you accept the three fold way of considering "Christian art," you may not be surprised at some of the artists, through whom we can experience the Creator and Incarnate God.

 

Alfred Tennyson, 1809-92: Part IV: Conclusion

I've been trawling through the archives at the library again, and in particular for Sundays, "The Pilot" which was the monthly magazine for the Church of England in Jersey for many years. Every month, there would be pieces from the minister of each church, along with various other articles of interest.
 
In 1995, the Reverend Tony Keogh began a series of articles in "The Pilot" under the umbrella title "God and the Poets", beginning with a four part look at Tennyson. I thought it was a shame that it should be buried in the past, so I've transcribed it for my blog. Here is part 4.
 
Tennyson's In Memoriam can be read at
http://www.online-literature.com/donne/718/    
 
And there is a discussion of Tennyson and the poem with Melvin Bragg on "In Our Time" at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0124pnq   
which can be listen again, or download as Podcast.

God and the Poets:
Alfred Tennyson, 1809-92: Part IV: Conclusion
By Tony Keogh

Throughout his life, Tennyson was attracted by certain aspects of mediaeval Catholicism and its cult of chivalry, also by the monastic life that could lead to union with Christ, the heavenly Bridegroom, as in "St Agnes Eve." His great friend, particularly in his middle years, was Sir John Simeon, a Catholic convert from Tractarianism, like Newman, but, unlike him, fierce in his ultra-montanism, the name given to the tendency in the Roman Catholic church which favoured the centralisation of authority and influence in the papal Curia, as opposed to the national or diocesan independence.

The declaration in 1870 by the Vatican Council that the Pope was infallible marked a substantial triumph for Sir John Simeon and his fellow ultra-montanists. Tennyson deplored such movements. "The thunderstorm that rattled the Roman rooftops during the vote on infallibility continued to re-echo in his verse," stated Levi in his biography. Tennyson was fundamentally liberal, both in his politics and in his theology.

"In Memoriam" (1850) is his greatest religious poem. Composed over many years, as he told a friend, it "begins with a funeral and ends with a marriage - begins with death and ends with the promise of new life; a sort of divine comedy - cheerful at the end." The marriage was that of Edmund Lushington to Cecilia Tennyson, his youngest sister, in 1842.

The orthodoxy of the poem's beginning and end, intermittent in its one hundred and thirty-one sections, was due to his own bride's influence before publication. "Christianity is tugging at my heart," he said in Cheltenham, just when marriage seemed a genuine prospect. Emily Selwood, his intended bride, had hesitated because of religious differences.

"In Memoriam" deals with human grief at the death of a dear friend, Arthur Hallam, and what time does to that grief. It deals with the questions it raises and how, in the end, there is emergence from tragedy and devastation to hope that this death is not a sign of the futility of life and existence on earth, but the presage of immortality and what Teilhard de Chardin was to call the "Omega Point of Creation."

Tennyson, in the later part of his life, set to and arranged his poems written over many years in chronological order, so that his collected works become, in the words of T S Eliot, "the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself." It is a passionate and moving record of how Tennyson coped with grief through long years in which it was partly healed through other experiences of love and friendship.

In the works of Tennyson, there was always the Victorian danger of sentimentality, "The good tears start," as Browning put it; yet in his tragic sensibilities, he never lost the true sense of the joys of human love or a faith in the God who sees a sparrow fall.

Alfred Tennyson, 1809-92: Part III: Marriage and Fame

I've been trawling through the archives at the library again, and in particular for Sundays, "The Pilot" which was the monthly magazine for the Church of England in Jersey for many years. Every month, there would be pieces from the minister of each church, along with various other articles of interest.
 
In 1995, the Reverend Tony Keogh began a series of articles in "The Pilot" under the umbrella title "God and the Poets", beginning with a four part look at Tennyson. I thought it was a shame that it should be buried in the past, so I've transcribed it for my blog. Here is part 3.
 
Tennyson's In Memoriam can be read at
http://www.online-literature.com/donne/718/   
 
And there is a discussion of Tennyson and the poem with Melvin Bragg on "In Our Time" at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0124pnq  
which can be listen again, or download as Podcast.
 
God and the Poets:
Alfred Tennyson, 1809-92: Part III: Marriage and Fame
By Tony Keogh

After the tragic death of Tennyson's youthful friend and companion Arthur Hallam, he sought solace, not in any out-ward show of grief, but in restless travelling.
 
He journeyed extensively throughout England and Scotland- With his widowed mother and family still at home, he moved from Lincolnshire, with mixed feeling of grief and relief, to Hertfordshire, to Kent and to Cheltenham. He flirted somewhat, wrote verses to attractive women of his acquaintance, but never descended to the low life, though once it was only fear of being seen by some journalist which kept him from going to Holborn Casino, but this, one has to say, was out of innocent curiosity, almost like Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote.
 
His heart seems to have been stolen early by Emily Sellwood, four years his junior, though there were gaps in their relationship. A fairly plain looking woman, she was gentle and good. After a while, she and Tennyson became engaged but the engagement was broken off through her father's opposition and they did not marry until 1850, by which time he was established as a great poet and had been made Laureate in succession to Wordsworth.
 
Prone to depression and a victim of financial mismanagement, he had some severe hydropathic treatment in Cheltenham in 1840, but his poetry rarely faltered. W H Auden summed up his years from his marriage and recognition, "From then on he led the life of a famous author. He bought a house in the Isle of Wight at Osborne, he built another house in Surrey, he went on writing, he visited the Queen at Windsor, he was gazetted to the peerage, he still wrote. On 8th October 1892 he died and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
 
His first child was stillborn. Thereafter, he had two sons, Hallam, called after Arthur, to whom he was particularly close and who become his secretary; and Lionel, who pre-deceased him as a young married man.
 
He was a "Great Victorian" in the charmed circle of Carlyle, Thackeray, Browning and Gladstone. He combined imperial patriotism and loyalty with Dickensian indictment of injustice and the state of the poor. "City children soak and blacken sense in city slime," and amid his hopes of "one far-off Divine event to which the whole creation moves." Perhaps he had some premonition of 1914 and the horrors of our century.
 
Unlike his wife, he seldom went to church. He did not need the benefit of clergy or involvement in institutional religion, sacraments or sermons. In this, he was typical of great sections of middle and upper Victorian society. They often saw the sense of the stability of an established church, but could not always understand what being a member of the Church of England had to do with going to church.
 
He did, however, enjoy breathing in the spiritual and intellectual atmosphere of his time as he did the air of Lincolnshire or Cambridge or the Isle of Wight, and this in the age when bishops and theologians
were at home in the salons. He had a faith which, every now and then, gleamed forth in Christian affirmation, but paid lip service also to Victorian agnosticism and "honest doubt," though his reaction to the modernist crisis of the 1860s was to learn Hebrew.
 
His was an evolutionary creed before Darwin and he wrote of "The Higher Pantheism" for the somewhat curious Metaphysical Society. This poem contains the lines: "Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit can meet .Closer is He than breathing and nearer than hands and feet."
 
His was an inward vision, often blurred through personal sorrow and his struggles with the fact of death and nature, so indifferent and, at times, ruthless. He did not believe in hell and in "The Lotus Eaters," implicitly attacks Christianity for committing some to "endless anguish." Personal relationships were at the heart of the universe and each individual was of incalculable value, in spite of evidence to the contrary. He cherished the hope of immortality, though "dimly." He prayed, though in his last days, he sometimes felt that God was not listening.
 
His belief in prayer was mystical rather than prophetic or intercessionary. After reading his "Holy Grail" to a woman friend, he said that there were moments "when the flesh is nothing to me when I feel and know the flesh to be only a vision. God and the spiritual the only real and true ... depend on it - the spiritual is the real."
 
These are lines written at Aldworth, his Surrey home:
 
"Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."
 
That is not dissimilar from a famous passage of Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century English mystic. The Lord showed her "something small, no bigger than a hazel nut lying in the palm of my hand, and I perceived that it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought: What can this be? And I was given this general answer; It is everything that is made."
 
Julian's faith is more convincing and deeply Christian. The hazel nut lasts because God loves it. Her work "Shewings" is about the Passion of Christ in which is contained the whole meaning, not only of life, but of the life of God, the Blessed Trinity.
 
Tennyson is not a poet of the Passion, like Herbert or Hopkins, and the Trinity passes him by. The "Holy Grail" contains the precious blood, but this is the mystic prize of the human quest for purity through chastity and discipline rather than the token of the self-giving love of God for human kind, streaming over all the earth, descending into hell, washing away sin, praying to the Father for us.
 
Postscript: I have been asked about books on Tennyson. The most recent and probably the best biography is by Peter Levi, published by MacMillan. There is an excellent book of selected poems in the Penguin Poetry Library Series.

Alfred Tennyson, 1809-92: Part II: The Early Years

I've been trawling through the archives at the library again, and in particular for Sundays, "The Pilot" which was the monthly magazine for the Church of England in Jersey for many years. Every month, there would be pieces from the minister of each church, along with various other articles of interest.
 
In 1995, the Reverend Tony Keogh began a series of articles in "The Pilot" under the umbrella title "God and the Poets", beginning with a four part look at Tennyson. I thought it was a shame that it should be buried in the past, so I've transcribed it for my blog. Here is part 2.
 
In Memoriam can be read at
http://www.online-literature.com/donne/718/  
 
And there is a discussion of it with Melvin Bragg on "In Our Time" at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0124pnq  
which can be listen again, or download as Podcast.
 
God and the Poets:
Alfred Tennyson, 1809-92: Part II: The Early Years
By Tony Keogh
 
Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809, the sixth of twelve children of the Rector of Somerby in Lincolnshire. His paternal grandfather, a solicitor and businessman, disinherited Tennyson's father, his eldest son George, and ruled over the family like an ogre. The Rector himself was addicted to alcohol and died in 1831 after some distressing episodes, aged fifty-three.
 
Alfred went to Louth Grammar School but was unhappy so was educated at home until he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. He was critical of Cambridge as a whole, a society of "puddle-paced square caps" and "tiny-witted teachers," whom he wrongly charged with whipping and rusticating John Milton; this severe re judgment was much regretted by him later on. He left without taking a degree, which did not concern him over much since he and his friends knew that he was going to be a poet which profession did not require the accolade of academe. In fact, Cambridge was emerging from its eighteenth century torpor to become the university of Lightfoot, Westcott, Hort, Jebb, Kelvin and eventually Rutherford and Hawkings.
 
Tennyson received training in the Classics; essential to his own poetry, and belonged to a group of young intellectuals known as the Apostles, of which the "Coleridge" among theologians, F D Maurice, a great friend of Tennyson throughout his life, was an early inspiration. In later years, the Apostles came to be
regarded as homosexual in orientation, but Tennyson was at an age of innocence in male friendship and Freud had not yet appeared to make society sex-obsessed.
It was at Cambridge that Tennyson met his greatest friend of all, Arthur Hallam, a promising scholar and poet, who became engaged to one of his sisters. It was a tragically brief friendship of barely four years yet therein lies its pathos and its abiding influence.
 
Hallam and Tennyson went abroad together in 1831 on a curious excursion to the Pyrenees to take money to a Spanish revolutionary general, the money having been collected from those, including the Apostles, who were anxious to support the growing movements of European democracy which, so feeble at this time, became the hallmark of nineteenth century history. To quote Auden, "This was Tennyson's first and last excursion into practical politics."
 
Hallam journeyed to Vienna and Budapest in 1833, partly at his father's suggestion, to aid his convalescence from serious influenza. He was excited at what he saw, both in art and society, but he caught a slight fever in Austria on his way home and died suddenly on 15th September.
 
Tennyson did not display devastated outward grief: "He seemed less overcome than one would have expected," was the comment of a friend. The death coincided with some harsh reviews of his poetry which made him desist from further publications for almost a decade, but he could not stop composing verse. Almost at once, he began the masterpiece which took him the next seventeen years to write - "In Memoriam."

 

Alfred Tennyson, 1809-92: Part I: An Introduction

I've been trawling through the archives at the library again, and in particular for Sundays, "The Pilot" which was the monthly magazine for the Church of England in Jersey for many years. Every month, there would be pieces from the minister of each church, along with various other articles of interest.
 
In 1995, the Reverend Tony Keogh began a series of articles in "The Pilot" under the umbrella title "God and the Poets", beginning with a four part look at Tennyson. I thought it was a shame that it should be buried in the past, so I've transcribed it for my blog. Here is part 1.
 
God and the Poets:
Alfred Tennyson, 1809-92: Part I: An Introduction
By Tony Keogh
 
Alfred Tennyson was a large, dark, untidy man, swarthy as a gypsy, clumsy in movement, with a bricklayer's hands, yet handsome in a way. In his youth, he was once rebuked for his dirty shirt. "So would yours be if you'd worn it for a fortnight," he rejoined.
 
Later on, Queen Victoria, whose laureate he was and neighbour on the Isle of Wight and with whom he was to become close friends, told Edward Lear that "he would not come to see her because he did not know how to bow." He smoked for nine hours - shag in a clay pipe - and drank at least a bottle of port a day. He could be gruff and growling, rude at times and in deep melancholy; yet his marriage at the age of forty-one seems to have been one of an almost mystical happiness, in spite of his wife's ill health for the last twenty years of her life. "The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her," he said.

He loved to read his own poetry to audiences of family and friends, this in his fine, deep voice, with a Lincolnshire accent. As well he might, for it is lyrical and mellifluous beyond most. "He had the finest ear, perhaps of any English poet," wrote W H Auden, "he was also undoubtedly the stupidest" - a harsh and debatable judgment, though there are many worthy people who are very unsure that poets or any artists of genius would score heavily in an intelligence test.
 
Like Shakespeare, Tennyson has contributed many well-known phrases to the language, still material for Trivial Pursuits if not now the staple diet of tabloid journalism or small talk:
 
a land in which it seemed always afternoon." (The Locust Eaters).
 
"In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." (Locksley Hall).
 
"T'is better to have loved and lost; Than never to have loved at all."
 
"Nature, red in tooth and claw." (both, In Memoriam).
 
"More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of." (Morte d'Arthur).
 
"Theirs is not to reason why; Theirs but to do and die. " (The Charge of the Light Brigade).
 
He was nothing but a poet. From infancy to his death at the age of eighty-three, verses sang in his mind and he often wrote them down much later. He was essentially an oral poet. His major works germinated for years and he was a constant revisor. As laureate for forty-two years, he had to compose much official, establishment verse, by no means all devoid of inspiration or without captivating memorable images.
 
News items often prompted him, or the suggestions of his friends and his romantic views of the classical and mediaeval past, but his greatness comes from his awareness of nature and the depths of his own experience and solitary brooding. Greatness in poetry is not possible without sorrow and times of despair. He knew both to the end.
 
There is also nostalgia. From a youth he had Virgil's "sense of the tears of things," and a regret for the past even when there was so little that he needed to regret in his own direct experience. Poets are often old in youth and youthful image- Whatever their vicissitudes, their days - long or short - are in Wordsworth's phrase, "bound each to each", even if the cord is frayed or broken             early. Tennyson used to talk of "the passion of the past", "it is distance which charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate today in which I move." He was always capable of the most beautiful images, whether of the country, the elm trees,
 
"their broad curved branches,
fledged and clearest green,
new from its silken sheath; or
the heavens, Mars following white Venus,
whiter than all the stars
Down to the quiet limit of the world."
 
Or the city, "Inextricable brickwork image in image. "
 
He is the poet of the new railway as well as of the flowing river and the waves of the seashore.
 
Next: Tennyson's early years.

Through the Christmas Study Window

Today I've decided to post another extract from "The Pilot", and once again from Tony Keogh as in 1996, he delved into the historical background to the festival of Christmas. It was in fact written on 5 November, as Christmas editions of magazines (as I know well enough) have to be into the editor and off for printing early. Tony Keogh was, at the time, Rector of Trinity Parish Church, Jersey, and is also probably well known locally as one of the founding members of the Jersey Democratic Alliance.

Through the Study Window
by Tony Keogh

It is lunchtime of Bonfire Night and I am putting pen to paper a little earlier this month as I prepare to travel to the mainland for a couple of weeks. I shall be staying my old college, St Michael's Theological College, in Llandaff, Cardiff, for some respite and study leave. As I look out of the window, the sun is shining like a golden dollar and behind the glass, it is quite warm,  outside, the late autumn nip is very evident.
 
The thought of returning to the city of my birth has triggered other thoughts, thoughts of childhood. Among the writers who have left an indelible impression on that period of my life was Rudyard Kipling, with all his tales of derring-do in such exotic settings as India.
 
However, the one book which left the longest lasting impression was "Puck of Pook's Hill." This was a different book and Kipling's fantasy was potent magic. The theory goes that there were some places in England where, if you were a child (in this case, Dan and Una), people who had stood on that same spot centuries before, would suddenly and inexplicably materialise. With Puck's help, you could time-travel by standing still. On Pook's Hill, lucky Dan and Una were able to chat with Viking warriors, Roman centurions, Norman knights, and then go home for tea.
 
I have no hill but I do have the Parish Church and when I look at it, I sometimes wish that I had Puck's help. I would love to be able to go on an excursion back in time and to walk and talk with my predecessors. The urge is particularly strong as we prepare for Christmas, but it is an impossible dream. The next best thing is to read the historians' books about Christmas.
 
The first writers of Christmas were some of the Gospel writers. It is difficult for us to shed our cultural baggage but we need to if we are to capture the spirit of those simple and awesome events.
 
The baby Jesus and His mother Mary, the stable and the manger, the shepherds in the fields, the message of the angels, the Wise Men and the star of Bethlehem. It is hard to believe, even for us Christians, that the birth day of Christ was not separately commemorated by the church for several centuries after that first Christmas Day.
 
In the first centuries of the church, birthdays were frowned upon; in the third century, Origen condemned them as pagan and made the telling point that Pharaoh and Herod were the only Biblical personages who were recorded as keeping birthdays.
 
In fact, it was not until the 11th century that we begin to see the English Christmas take shape; gradually and fitfully, the northern pagan feast of "Yule" and "The Feast of the Nativity" were synthesized to form a new institution in which the Christian and pagan constituents were intermixed. By the Norman Conquest, the Christianisation of England was complete and the Twelve Days of Christmas were solidly established as the main annual holiday, the season of religion, rest from labour and a time of traditional merriment, which were to remain until the age of Puritanism.
 
It cannot have been long before the Conquest that the English language was enriched with a new word -"Christmas" - to describe this much-loved festival. It is of at least symbolic significance that in 1043, the scribes who were responsible for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles referred for the first time to 25th December as "Christmas" instead of, as hitherto, "Nativity", "Midwinter Mass" or just "Midwinter."
 
From a stable in Bethlehem to the present day, it is Christmas which we celebrate. As we prepare for this great festival, let us join all the ages into one; to travel back to Bethlehem, but also back down the ages of which our ancient churches are a reminder, and wonder what new traditions we will add for those who come after us, although I hope and pray that we shall not return to the excesses under the   17th century Puritans.
 
John Evelyn, a prominent diarist of the day, records that each year between 1652 and 1655 there was an absence of Christmas Day services in London, although in 1652, he found "an honest and brave divine who preached at Lewisham on Boxing Day." Can you imagine members of the honorary police bursting in at the Christmas Communion services and breaking them up? This was a common occurrence under the puritan rule. In one famous episode, the whole congregation of Exeter Chapel was arrested by Commonwealth soldiers in the midst of a Communion service on Christmas Day.
 
At least we can hope for a more peaceful Christmas.

Through the Study Window

Here is another extract from Tony Keogh, this time writing his "Through the Study Window" in June 1996, which was obviously a better start of summer than we had this year. I like the meandering style, and the description of life as a "patchwork quilt".
 
From this week, I remember a lovely evening walk past sheep, horses and cows out onto the headland above Portelet, and an amble along St Brelade's Bay at high tide, where children were in high spirits, jumping off the slipway into the sea. There were meetings with a friend at the central market, and all the colours and smells of the flowers and fruit and vegetables as one passes through. And an old man, who had fallen and hit his head, in whose aid I was able to play a small part. This is a patchwork, small little incidents, which just seem to stand out. That's the nature of life as we remember it.
 
Obviously what we select to remember and forget in anything autobiographical shapes the story, and the same was true of ancient biography.
 
It was once very much a maxim that the Gospels were not biographies, and they certainly are not in the modern sense, which proceeds from birth, through childhood, adulthood, old age, and to the grave in an orderly fashion. But studies have been done of ancient biography, which was quite a different genre, and there can be no doubt that the gospels, especially that of Luke, present themselves as a similar genre to that of the ancient world. Interested readers can refer to the comprehensive study by Richard Burridge, "What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography"
 
Of course, one of the significant features of the gospel narratives is their patchwork quality. They are stories about incidents, strung together like pearls on a necklace, pearls of great price - but they don't have perhaps the continuity of historical linkage that one gets in a modern biography; in that respect, they are more like Tony Keogh's patchwork quilt, and more like our own lives, as we remember them, than something written up by an outsider.
 
Through the Study Window by Tony Keogh
 
AT THIS time of the year, the church through the window is almost blocked from sight by the trees and shrubs, growing lusher by the minute. I am just back from an early morning walk - a very early morning walk! Even at 6 am, I could feel the heat of the coming day. The sky was as blue as blue and Bouley Bay was skirted in an orange mist which my old Cornish aunt Kate called pride of the morning. The rabbits in the fields and the neighbouring cats looked in stunned disbelief at this strange creature, Homo Sapiens, invading their kingdom at this Godly hour of the morning. All of this to the chorus of a hundred songbirds, conscious of only one thing, that they are alive at the start of a new day, as they sing their hearts out. Colette Bisson's rooster, built like Pavarotti, belts out his own aria. Now you know that it is morning.
 
Soon it is time to turn home for a shower, breakfast, the daily office and prepare for the day. A few weeks ago, I took part in a Monday morning interview on Radio Jersey with Fiona Spurr. I was reminiscing about my childhood in Cardiff, especially during the war, and several people were kind enough to telephone and say how much they had enjoyed the programme. One of those was the wife of an elderly blind Cardiffian who lives near the hospital who invited me for a cup of tea and a chat with her husband about the old city. I shall be visiting them this afternoon so I shall let you know how I get on.
 
One of my favourite and regular ports of call is our local parish school and I have an extra interest now that my grandson Joshua is there full-time. One of the teachers came into the staff-room recently for her coffee break, declaring that everything was going wrong. I told her the story of my story bag, which is a coloured pillowcase. In it, I place an object, then I give clues to the congregation as to what might be in the bag. Ten years ago, I placed a bundle of sticks, tied with string, in the bag and told the story of a father with five sons who were always squabbling. The father handed the bundle of sticks to each son and asked him to break the bundle; all failed. Then he untied the bundle and gave each son a stick. They had no difficulty in snapping their single sticks. To emphasise the point, I handed the bundle of sticks to some of the children. All failed to break the bundle, then an older boy named David advanced down the aisle with great gusto, took the bundle of sticks and promptly broke it across his knee into dozens of pieces. End of story!
 
The point of the story appeared ruined. That was ten years ago. Recently, friends on holiday from the mainland listened as I repeated the story; this time, no-one broke the sticks. After the service, over coffee at the Rectory, Margaret and Peter reminded me that that they had been in the congregation ten years previously and had never forgotten the story, not because of the story, but because of David's part in causing it to go wrong. They told their vicar and that story became part of his repertoire, all because it went wrong. It is not always success as the world sees it which advances God's Kingdom.
 
It is now 10.30 am and I feel that I have a done a full day's work already. We have had a stream of visitors at the Rectory this morning - the children from Scallywags Play Group are playing in the back garden, our Churchwarden, Deputy Roy Cabot, has called to collect the Churchwardens' wands in readiness for the swearing-in of the Church Officers tomorrow; two sisters from London, Ontario, are here to find their great grandparents' grave (Jill tells them that de Gruchy is the most common name in Trinity but they are in luck, there is a gravestone); as luck would have it, Lizzi - who has visited Canada three times - has just come in so the three of them are discussing things and places Canadian.
 
The postman has delivered the usual 'binnable' circulars along with some more Gift Day envelopes, and the plumber, an old friend, has been to replace a worn-out washer.
 
This is getting to read like a patchwork quilt rather than a written article but our lives are like patchwork quilts and, possibly more so when one lives in a rectory, vicarage or manse. I must close now as I must take an electric fan to father-in-law to keep him cool while he enjoys the Test Match, and then there are some ashes to be collected for interment tomorrow morning.
 
The church is still there through the window and the promised heat of 6 am is very evident. Keep cool. Bless God.

Through the Study Window

In 1996, the Reverend Tony Keogh wrote an occasional series of articles in the monthly magazine "The Pilot" which he called "Through the Study Window". Here is one on mobility and the idea of life as pilgrimage, and how the nomadic ideal is important even if we don't physically move.
 
My late partner Annie Parmeter spent a good deal of her twenties on the road in England, living with traveller and Romany communities, doing odd jobs, gathering scrap metal for sale. Despite the fact that these communities were mostly law abiding, they were often harassed by the law as if they were law breakers.
 
And there are people in Jersey who live in vans, often moving from one location to another. They may have odd jobs, but owning (as for most locals) is probably out of their reach, and they prefer this lifestyle to renting. Sometimes there is a "clampdown" and the police move them on. I visited some with Annie, as she had friends there. I'm not going to mention some of the places they resided, for obvious reasons.
 
It is very hard for a settled society to come to terms with the nomad, something Tony Keogh brings across very well. And yet the great Jewish leaders - Abraham, Moses - lived nomadic lives. The fragment we have of Jesus life just before his death was out "on the road", an itinerant ministry.
 
The nomad life is sign of the ephemeral nature of existence and for Christians, a signpost for life as pilgrimage and not to become settled and complacent (as the Israelites so often did), for humanists, a cautionary note that every day is precious, for every day could be the last.
 
Through the Study Window by Tony Keogh
 
Through the window, the sun is pleasantly warm; outside, the east wind makes it feel like winter. At this moment, 2.20 in the afternoon, the church is obliterated by a large marquee on the Rectory lawn as Alison, our elder daughter, is celebrating her 30th birthday with a mega party tonight.
 
Overhead in the clear blue sky, I can see the vapour trail of a jet and I can hear an aeroplane taking off from the airport. Along the road, I can hear the traffic - cars, lorries and motorcycles. Who said that this was a quiet country parish?
 
I sometimes think that everyone is on the move: some societies find that mobility is disconcerting and that stability is every-thing; other societies take mobility for granted. The American Dream, for example, started with the covered wagon and recent censuses show that more than 43 million Americans move house each year.
 
This is an annual migration roughly equivalent to the entire population (men, women and children) of England and Wales relocating themselves every year and it all seems to pass unnoticed except, apparently, for the large number of entries in the Yellow Pages for truck rental companies!
 
I suppose that it would be a nightmare scenario if everyone in Jersey moved home each and every year yet the Christian church is meant to be a community on the move; we are a pilgrim people. We are reminded that we are like the great Jewish patriarchs of old. "They only saw them [that is, God's promises] from afar off, and they admitted that they were strangers and pilgrims upon the earth (Hebrews 11:13).
 
None of the great Jewish patriarchs entered into the full possession of the promises which God had made to Abraham. To the end of their days, they were nomads and they never lived settled lives in a settled land, they were forever moving on and were to live as strangers in a strange land.
 
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews used certain vivid Greek words about them. He called them "xenoi." "Xenos" is a Greek word for a stranger and a foreigner. In the ancient world, the fate of the stranger was hard; he was regarded with hatred, suspicion and contempt. In Sparta, "xenos" was the equivalent of "barbarous" and the stranger and the barbarian were one and the same thing. A man wrote, complaining that he was despised "because I am a 'xenos', a foreigner." Another man wrote that, however poor a home was, it was better to live at home that 'epi xenes', in a foreign country. When communities sat down for a common meal, those who sat down to it were divided into members and 'xenoi - members and outsiders. This word could even mean a refugee and, all their lives, the patriarchs were foreigners and pilgrims in a land which was never their own.
 
At any time and in any place, it can be an unhappy thing to be a stranger and a pilgrim in a strange land but in ancient times, there was added to that natural unhappiness the bitterness of humiliation. That picture of the pilgrim and the stranger became the picture of the Christian life. Tertullian said of the Christian, "He knows that on earth he has a pilgrimage, but that his dignity is in heaven." Clement of
Alexandria said, "We have no fatherland on earth." Augustine said, "We are pilgrims exiled from our fatherland."
 
It is not that Christians should be foolishly other-worldly, it is not that we should detach ourselves from the life and work of the world, but that we should remember that we are on our way. There is an unwritten saying of Jesus, "The world is a bridge. The wise man will pass over it but will not build his house upon it." The Christian is a pilgrim of eternity.
 
It is now 3.30 pm. The sun still shines and the traffic still trundles. The tent, the symbol of the nomad, is still on the lawn. Alison is thirty. This year sees the anniversary of my thirty years of full-time ministry and twenty years of Rector of Trinity. We have travelled a long way and not just physically. I hope that you will enjoy the rest of the trip to heaven.

Writing on Islam in 1989

In a 1989 edition of "The Pilot", the Reverend Tony Keogh (then Rector of Trinity) looked at Islam. This was in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, and the Iran / Iraq war, but before the more radical forms of Islamic extremism expressed in 9/11, and the London Bombings.
 
Nevertheless - despite being written in 1989 - it is a very informative and in many ways prescient piece of observation, especially with regard to the distinction between political systems which change over time, and religious systems, which can all to readily become ossified, and coupled with a degree of certainty among their adherents, cam be a positive danger in a way that political systems can not
 
As Jacob Bronowski remarked in "The Ascent of Man", standing at Auschwitz:
 
"This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.. "
 
And nowhere is such arrogance more likely to surface than in religion. As C.S. Lewis noted (in "The Four Loves"), it is the highest aspirations, the higher loves which are capable of greater perversion, of a greater fall.
 
That is something which should be always guarded against, the arrogance which not only knows, but proceeds to dictate to others, and cannot consider that it can be wrong. This is probably something which is found more in contemporary Islam than Christianity, which has become more diverse in tolerating differences of opinion.
 
In Islam, for example, the majority of scholars still take the traditional view that apostasy is punishable by death or imprisonment until repentance, at least for adult men of sound mind. A recent excellent documentary on BBC Radio 4 by a British Muslim highlighted that this view is even held by numerous Muslims in Britain, although it is not given such a high profile as we see in Malaysia, where death threats are commonplace. Identity cards in Malaysia and Egypt state religion, requiring formal procedures to alter religious status, ensure that much more control by a climate of fear.
 
Tony Keogh writing on Islam in 1989 in The Pilot

Dear Friends,
 
During the 1960s and '70s, a phrase which was often heard, when religion was discussed, was, "All religions are the same really," or "We all worship the same God, really!" The 1980s and the creation of various Islamic republican states, has surely killed that myth.
 
I remember in the early '60s a university lecturer prophesying that it would not be the super powers of east and west who would threaten world peace in the future but it would be man's diverse views on religion which would constitute the greater threat. It is clear that my former teacher's words are coming true and it is easy to see why.
 
Political systems, by their amorphous nature, are subject to change, so each new generation has to operate them in the light of contemporary conditions, and as people in one political system learn more about their opposite number, so they borrow ideas from each other.
 
However, in religion, we are not primarily talking about systems but about the hearts, minds and spirits of people. If religion is not to cause a cataclysmic end of the world as we know it, we need to take a leaf out of the politicians' book and try to understand other people's faith. I believe that this issue ranks alongside ecology and nuclear arms as a potential for the disaster of mankind.
 
The first thing that needs to be understood about Islam is that, of the great world faiths, it is the baby. It was founded by Mohammed (c.570-629).  According to the Islam calendar, Moslems are in the 15th century, or Middle Ages. Many of the attitudes which we see in the Islamic world would he easily recognised and, more importantly, accepted by medieval Christians.
 
Islam did not invent the execution of heretics; Christian history is full of such practices from the Crusades to present-day Northern Ireland.
 
I cannot, in the space available, do justice to the whole history and beliefs of Islam. Let me instead take just one aspect which is probably more misunderstood than any other by the Christian west: this is the Islamic concept of `jihad' or `The Holy War'.
 
It is essentially divided into two. The `Great Jihad' is fighting one's lower nature, it is internal rather than external, striving in the path of God to overcome one's evil tendencies. Man shares with the animals certain characteristics which, if let loose, would make him a very dangerous animal. To bring those passions under control, that is what the `Great Jihad' means. Man, so say Islam, has a tendency to over-estimate himself' and to under-estimate his spiritual potential. He has a tendency to control and exploit his environment and other human beings. The `Great Jihad' is essentially against such tendencies.
 
For the Christian, there is no great problem. The internal war between good and evil is a constant topic in the New Testament, especially in the writings of St Paul (Ephesians Chapter 2). It is with the `Lesser Jihad' that we have our greatest problems as Christians.
 
The `Lesser Jihad' is fighting, not internally but externally, on behalf of the community and because of its visual impact in the media, the west has had a tendency to think this is the sum total of Islam Jihad (the Holy War). There is one very important proviso about waging a Holy War and that it has to be in self-defence -- hence the problems in the United Nations about ending the Iran/Iraq war. The negotiations broke down over who had started the war, hence which side was practising the Islamic law on self-defence and which was not.
 
Like all great movements in history, to the followers of such movements, it is not what actually happened in the history of that movement which is important but what the present day followers want to believe happened; this is as true of Christians as it is of Muslims. It is a fact that Muslims have waged war - wars of conquest, wars in the ordinary sense, and as often as not all related to religion or faith.
 
It is also clear that some Muslims, in this respect, have not exercised the Great Jihad.
 
It is at this point that Christians and Muslims part company for Muslims have no sense of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness and it is at this point that we have to stand by the Cross of Christ or throw it overboard. Hence in the Muslim world, they have the brutal mutilation of the body as a punishment and as a restitution to grace; the Muslims have a greater sense of Allah's mercy in the afterlife than in the present one.
 
A brief world about the Koran; it is a grave mistake to call it the Islamic Bible, it would be much nearer the mark to call it the equivalent of Jesus Himself. The Koran - the book itself, its writings in which not one mark or dot can be changed, re-translated or modernised - is the living word, the logos of Allah. In it, Islam recognises the great prophets of the Old Testament; it also recognises Jesus at the penultimate prophet, before Mohammed, although the' Koran has its own versions of Jesus and His teaching.
 
For example, when Peter cut off the ear of the temple guard at the arrest of Jesus, instead of Jesus healing the ear, the Koran quotes Jesus as saying, "Not yet, Peter". Islam would have problems justifying the Lesser Jihad ifs they followed the Bible's account of the event.
 
One of the great ironies in all this is that both Islam and Judaism claim Abraham as the father of their people. It has its own poignancy to think that the conflict in the Middle East is basically a civil war among people who stem from the same source.
 
Bearing all this in mind, it is important, I think, to try to understand the faiths of other people and I would recommend the following books to you - "The Faith of Other Men" and "Islam in Modem History", both by Wilfred Cantell Smith, published by Mentor; also "The Religious Experience of Mankind" by Ninian Smart, published by Collins. This last book I can thoroughly recommend. Professor Ninian Smart was one of my teachers and was a superb teacher and writer.