Surveying the Faith

Last week Red C Research published the findings of WIN-Gallup’s ‘Global Index of Religions and Atheism’, suggesting that Ireland was abandoning religion faster than almost any other country. The papers weren’t slow to regurgitate claims that whereas 69pc of Irish people were religious in 2005, only 47pc were in 2011. 

That’s not what the poll says, however. Contrary to Red C’s press release, the WIN-Gallup poll doesn’t find that Ireland is one of the least religious countries in the world; it finds that Ireland is one of the countries in which people are most reluctant to describe themselves as religious. This is a very different thing, not least as the word ‘religious’ means different things to different people. 

This was made very clear to me a couple of years ago at an Anglican church in Manchester, where I used to go so I could learn how evangelical friends lived their faith on their own terms, rather than relying on how my fellow Catholics described them. 

The curate spoke at length about how Christians shouldn’t be religious, because religious people are hypocrites. We’re called to love God, not to be religious, he said. Christianity, after all, isn’t a religion: it’s a relationship. 

I agreed with him up to a point. It’s a cliché that Christianity is a relationship rather than a religion, but it’s only a cliché because it’s largely true; the very word ‘Christian’ suggests that. 

Rather than meaning ‘follower of Christ’, it literally means someone who belongs to Christ as a member of his household. Romans 8:14-17 says that we’re brothers and sisters of Christ, God’s children rather than his slaves, and as 1 Corinthians 12:13 says, it’s baptism that adopts us into this family. 

Talking about this in the pub later, some of the regular congregation said they felt that the curate’s core point was sound but that he’d expressed himself poorly. Religious people can be hypocritical, but ‘religion’ shouldn’t be dismissed as mere lip service. 

Methodology

When discussing polls, it pays to look at the question and methodology. Ireland was one of the few countries in which this poll was conducted online; it’s difficult to see why Red C did this, as their website boasts of the accuracy of their telephone polling and warns that online polls are of questionable reliability in Ireland, where the over 55’s are inadequately represented in online panels and at least a third of adults lack internet access.

Red C's press release is adapted from WIN-Gallup's international press release, which conspicuously excludes Irish data from any tables showing how things have changed since 2005. Ireland, which Red C reports has experienced the second-largest decline in religiosity since 2005, is absent from the table of ‘ten countries experiencing notable decline in religiosity since 2005’, and from the two tables showing trends in religiosity and atheism in 39 countries surveyed in both waves.

It’s almost as though WIN-Gallup doesn’t regard the new data on Ireland as comparable with the 2005 data.

Allowing that the poll should be treated with caution, it’s hardly surprising that it found that the number of Irish claiming to be atheists seemingly has risen from 3pc to 10pc since 2005; the 2011 census figures and recent polls should have led us to expect as much. 

I doubt this figure will rise much further without government interference. If graphs in the official census highlights are remotely accurate, those most likely to deny a religious affiliation in Ireland are aged between 25 and 29, and even then only about 9.5pc of those do so. Denial of religious affiliation seems to drop back to 8pc among younger adults. 

Rather than rushing to embrace atheism, it seems Irish people are slipping into an ill-defined quasi-Catholicism, and it’s here that the question’s wording is all-important: “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced atheist?” 

The number of people willing to describe themselves as religious seems to have plummeted from 69pc to 47pc, whereas those rejecting atheism while saying they’re not religious seems to have risen from 25pc to 44pc. 

It’s difficult to tell what exactly this means, not least because the survey question – which confuses religious practice with atheistic belief – explicitly allows people who attend places of worship to say they don’t consider themselves religious. Red C thus observes that globally, “Most of the shift is not drifting from their faith, but claiming to be ‘not religious’ while remaining within the faith.” 

Judged purely on an Irish basis, this seems a fair judgement. The census found that 84pc of us still claim to be Catholic, even after the horrors of the Ryan and Murphy reports, but it’s clear that many of us have drifted from the teaching and precepts of the Church. 

Only about a third of us attend Mass every week, according to this year’s ACP and Irish Times surveys, while the Irish Times poll seemingly found a widespread rejection of basic Christian doctrines. For example, 15pc of those who’d call themselves Catholics don’t regard Jesus as the son of God, and 62pc believe that the Eucharistic elements merely represent Christ’s body and blood. 

Many who scorn atheism but wouldn’t call themselves religious would be among these; they’d probably consider themselves ‘spiritual’ rather than religious, or say that they have faith but disagree with organised religion. Others, though, would surely be ordinary Catholics, wary of boasting about their faith. 

Connotations

The word ‘religious’ carries uncomfortable connotations for a lot of us. A priest friend of mine once admitted that he found it hard to like a lot of religious people. “Some of the coldest, hardest, most unforgiving people I’ve ever met,” he said, “have been some of the most religious.” 

Outward Practice

‘Religious’, for him, clearly wasn’t a word to be crudely equated with ‘Catholic’ or ‘Christian’. It was, instead, something relating to outward practice rather than inward devotion; he’d found that people could be punctilious about their religious observance while being devoid of a spiritual inner life, or a simple love for other people. 

That’s not to say our external practice and attitudes don’t matter; on the contrary, they play a vital role in expressing and supporting our inner life. As Pope Benedict pointed out last week with reference to St Dominic: “… to kneel, to stand before the Lord, to fix our gaze on the Crucifix, to pause and gather ourselves in silence, is not a secondary act, but helps to us to place ourselves, our whole person, in relation to God.” 

Internal Realities

The problem, alas, is that too often our external and internal realities are at odds. Jesus made this unforgettably clear in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, in directing us to fast, pray, and give alms in secret, and in condemning as pedantic and hypocritical the ostentatious religiosity of the Pharisees. 

Familiar as we are with such admonitions, and increasingly suspicious of public displays of piety, it’s hardly surprising that for many of us the word ‘religious’ is a term we’ve become loath to apply to ourselves. Who wants to be seen as a ‘Holy Joe’, especially nowadays? Who dares to call themselves devout?


-- A version of this appeared in The Irish Catholic, 23 August 2012.

Primitive Dubbing Techniques

A friend of mine -- perhaps my closest friend, really -- had a little baby girl last night, all tiny and pink and perfect. I mentioned to an expectant friend today that the newcomer has a very pretty nose, which surprised me, as I tend to think of newborn babies as looking uncomfortably like Winston Churchill.

Oh yes.

She responded by pointing out that I'd not seen any of hers as newborns, and that my pretty nose comment reminded her of Asterix and Cleopatra. Rightly so, I'd say, but that in turn reminded me of this.

That third panel always strikes me as one of the finest comic panels I've ever seen -- it's utterly dependent on the incongruity of picture and words -- and possibly my favourite joke ever on a comic page.

Not Quite Forgotten...

Years ago, I attended a talk entitled something like 'Tedius Scholasticus: Another Forgotten Classic'. As it ended, and we packed up to head off down the corridor to the obligatory wine reception, the lecturer next to me sighed, and remarked that that was a classical author he would have been quite happy to have left forgotten.

That said, there are real gems in the minor league of the Classical canon. While not everyone can be a Thucydides or a Lucretius, there are delights to be found in the lower rungs. Two of my favourites are Publilius Syrus and whatever wag or wags were responsible for To Philogelos.

To Philogelos or 'The Laughter Lover' is a bumper fun joke book from the fourth century AD, supposedly compiled by a comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius. The jokes, I'm afraid, aren't the funniest, but are worth a read for all that. Here are a few:

'An egghead got a slave pregnant. At the birth, his father suggested that the child be killed. The intellectual replied: "First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine."'

'An Abderite wanted to hang himself, but the rope broke and he bumped his head. He went to the doctor and got some salve. After rubbing it on the wound he hanged himself again.'

'When a wag who was a shopkeeper found a policeman screwing his wife, he said: "I got something I wasn't bargaining for."'

'A Kymean constructed a huge threshing-floor and stationed his wife on the opposite end. He asked her if she could see him. When she replied that it was hard for her to see him, he snapped: "The time will come when I'll build a threshing-floor so big that I won't be able to see you and you won't be able to see me."'

'A rude astrologer cast a sick boy's horoscope. After promising the mother that the child had many years ahead of him, he demanded payment. When she said, "Come tomorrow and I'll pay you," he objected: "But what if the boy dies during the night and I lose my fee?"'

'A man, just back from a trip abroad, went to an incompetent fortune-teller. He asked about his family, and the fortune-teller replied: "Everyone is fine, especially your father." When the man objected that his father had been dead for ten years, the reply came: "You have no clue who your real father is."'

'While a drunkard was imbibing in a tavern, someone approached and told him: "Your wife is dead." Taking this in, he said to the bartender: "Time, sir, to mix a drink up from your dark stuff."'

'A young actor was loved by two women, one with bad breath and the other with reeking armpits. The first woman said: "Give me a kiss, master." And the second: "Give me a hug, master." But he declaimed: "Alas, what shall I do? I am torn betwixt two evils!"'

'A young man invited into his home frisky old women. He said to his servants: "Mix a drink for one, and have sex with the other, if she wants to." The women spoke up as one: "I'm not thirsty."'

'A misogynist was sick, at death's door. When his wife said to him, "If anything bad happens to you, I'll hang myself," he looked up at her and said: "Do me the favor while I'm still alive."'

Oh yes, there's far more where they came from. 255 more, to be precise, albeit with some duplication. Some aren't terrible.

Anyway, we used to be very fond of this collection back in my misspent youth. Not so much for the ancient jokes, of course, as for the endnotes. The edition of To Philogelos in our library had a prodigious quantity of endnotes, all detailing how various German academics speculated about why jokes were funny.

They tended to take the form of 'Moellendorf Willamowitz says that this is a pun on "salve", whereas Kromayer argues that this is a references to the sacking of the city by Philip II in 350 BC. Delbrueck thinks this is an allusion to Democritus, who was a famous citizen of Abdera.'

A German friend of mine -- who habitually borrowed this book to bring to the pub and show bemused friends -- was particularly besotted with the endnotes.

The great Publilius Syrus, on the other hand, is a very different kettle of fish: if the notes on To Philogelos filled us with joy, Publius Syrus filled us with wisdom.

Publilius was a Syrian who wrote Latin plays in the first century BC. His plays became famous for his maxims, such that the plays have all been lost but the maxims remain, with other similarly wise sayings being attributed to him. You can read all thousand or so statements in the Loeb volume Minor Latin Poets, Volume 1. 

Among the sort of things he says are:

'A suspicious mind always looks on the black side of things.'

'An angry man is again angry with himself when he returns to reason.'

'Count not him among your friends who will retail your privacies to the world.'

'In a heated argument we are apt to lose sight of the truth.'

'It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire when you live next door.'

'Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.'

'It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.'

'Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.'

'There are some remedies worse than the disease.'

'Hares can gambol over the body of a dead lion.'

And so forth. Profound stuff, you'll surely agree. The kind of thing that folk should absorb before jumping to conclusions, thinking oneself into a circle, and then charging around casting aspersions on people.

Um. Anyway, we used to keep it on the handy shelf back in our postgrad days, thinking he'd be a handy man whenever there was a crisis.

'What should we do?'

'Let's find out what Publilius Syrus would say,' someone would say, reaching for the little red book, opening it and random and treating our ears with his mellodious Syrian wisdom.

Great days.

I'm tempted to start a Publius Syrus Twitter account. Just to help people, you understand. 

A Republican Abroad: Reflections on Britain's Monarchy

I remember little about my first visit to England: being smacked for swearing, and meeting a cousin who I wouldn’t see again for more than thirty years; but then, I was barely two.

I was four the next time I visited, being roused from my bed in the dead of night by my dad, taken to my older sister’s flat, and bundled onto the boat, to sleep on the floor through the night and tread nervously across the gangway to Liverpool’s Pier Head in the morning, looking down at the Mersey’s dark waters. I wasn’t good at heights, even then.

I’ve clearer memories of that second trip, much of which was spent with a cousin a few years older than me: a taxi from the port to my mum’s elder sister’s house, my cousin teasing his older sister’s ‘yucky’ denim skirt and having his wrist hurt when one of his dogs tugged excitedly on the leash he’d wrapped around his hand, proudly whispering the few Irish words I knew to other cousins, skittering across the gravelled ground in a playground after ignoring instructions not to go on the slide as someone had put wax on it, admiring little rubber dinosaurs and finger monsters in a shop, and eating fish on Good Friday. I had a choice of packets of Monster Munch on the boat back home: not just the ones with the Cyclops on the back, the only ones you could get in Dublin, but ones with pictures and descriptions of the Minotaur and the Harpies too.

I’m not sure if modern crisp packets offer a rudimentary Classical education. I suspect not.

I really liked my knights

While I was there I was given a packet of toy knights by an aunt. Little silver-coloured plastic knights, wielding swords and maces. I was thrilled, and my cousin and I sat playing with them together by the window of the living room. ‘They protect the king,’ I said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said my cousin, ‘there are no kings anymore. Only queens.’  

‘What,’ I stared, ‘only queens?’

‘Only queens.’

A couple of years later a friend in Dublin earnestly informed me that the Queen had no power and that if she told me to kneel down in front of her then you wouldn’t have to, but that if Mrs Thatcher told me to then I would. That, of course, wasn’t an issue in Ireland, he said: ‘Because Ireland’s a free country.’

I had, it must be said, a somewhat confused childhood view of the British monarchy.

Strange though it seems, there were adverts on the telly when I was a boy, recruiting people for the Household Cavalry. I wanted to join, of course. Swords and breastplates, helmets and boots, black horses and red cloaks: the Life Guards looked like knights, and for a little boy besotted with the legend of King Arthur, this was clearly a career to which one should aspire.

Even now, I reckon the sovereign's escort justifies the monarchy's existence

Being English, my mother approved, though she was far less impressed by my reactions when she made me watch the opening of Parliament one year. The pageantry and the Queen cast no spell over me on that occasion, as I’d have rathered be drawing or reading or playing on the road: ‘Huh,’ I’d scowled, ‘I wish Guy Fawkes had blown it up.’

The years passed, and the British royal family’s shenanigans seemed like one of those soap operas that you never watch but occasionally notice in the background. To this day I’m not sure of the extent to which my memories of Charles and Diana’s wedding are my own or ones manufactured by Sue Townsend and planted in my head by the fictional pen of Adrian Mole. ‘Lady Diana is a commoner,’ I remember my Mam telling me. This mattered, clearly, and was a good thing, though I wasn’t sure why.

We had a Charles and Di tea caddy at home too, acquired at the time of the royal wedding. I think it lasted longer than their marriage. We told scurrilous schoolboy jokes about the royal family at school. ‘Did you hear that Princess Diana is forming a band with Chris Rea? She’s going to call it Diarrhoea!’* ‘Why does Prince Charles have a multicoloured willy? Because he dips it in dye so often!’

None too respectful, you’ll surely agree, but well, we were about ten, and it was no worse than what we sang about what the Queen got up to in 1976. No, I’ll not repeat it here.

A Modern Republic

Curiously, our own largely symbolic head of state, President Hillery, didn’t impinge on my consciousness at all. He met ambassadors, and signed legislation, and inspected the armed forces, and played golf, and generally kept to himself. I remember seeing a red squirrel when peering through the gates of his official residence one day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one since.

1990 changed that, of course, as we had the first presidential election of my lifetime, with Mary Robinson beating Brian Lenihan and Austen Currie in an AV election.** Robinson changed the Presidency dramatically, expanding the office beyond its official role of ‘Head of State’ to give it a new direction as – to borrow the terminology of Antony Jay’s Elizabeth R – ‘Head of Nation’. She deliberately imbued the office with symbolism, and paved the way for President McAleese’s two terms. McAleese’s presidency, I think most Irish people would agree, was a model of what the presidency can be, and her role in 2011’s visit of the Queen brought that home.

Those English people who seem to think that the only alternative to a constitutional monarchy is an American-style executive presidency merely show how limited their knowledge is of political systems. There are lots of ways to run republics.

Ah, sure, the English are known for the craic...

When I moved to England the first time, back in 2001, I was scornful of the monarchy; it was obviously an anachronism, and an indignified one at that. As the thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday passed I muttered about atrocities being committed against the Queen’s subjects by the Queen’s soldiers, and as the Queen’s fiftieth jubilee approached I scowled and told my friends in halls that there was no way I’d be joining them at the jubilee party at our brother hall.

Minutes before my friends set out I relented, and nine of us headed off, arriving just as one corpulent student – a South African, I think – finished belting out ‘God Save The Queen’. We settled in for an evening of drinking games and even karaoke, with Russell, visiting Dave, insisting that we all join in a rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ that was as energetic as it was surely cacophonous. At the end a drunken undergrad stepped up to join us, so we left him to slur a high-pitched ‘any way the wind blows...’

Afterwards he challenged me to a fight with giant inflatable boxing gloves in the bouncy castle the boys had hired. I smiled and let him charge at me, and stepped aside so that he fell. He struggled to his feet, and I knocked him over again. And again. And again. Letting him steady himself, I waited for his charge once more and again stepped aside so he crashed to the mat. And again I smiled as he wobbled upwards, before knocking him over again.

Afterwards my friend Paul, who died in an accident almost exactly four years later, admiringly said ‘Mister Daly! I’ve never seen such malevolent delight on anyone’s face before!’ He definitely approved.

Back in our own place, we set up a table and chairs and sat drinking and chatting on the lawn till half four. Koji, a Japanese fellow in our hall, joined us and took to running about – for no discernible reason – with his T-shirt drawn over his head. Madeleine rested her head on my shoulder, and we all decided it was time to crash. We planned to rendezvous at breakfast, and belt out at least a bar or two of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to startle the undergrads, some of whom had witnessed our travesty.

Needless to say, not one of us made it to breakfast.

It had been an absolutely superb night, and the first one we’d had out in weeks where we hadn’t been on edge for half the evening, expecting some kind of trouble. Mary McAleese is great, I thought, but she’s not once given us an excuse for a party.

Not a system I'd establish, but one I can embrace

Last year’s Irish presidential election was a horrible affair, such that I don’t know many people who wouldn’t happily have had Mary McAleese for a third term if only the Constitution would allow it. There was something incredibly unedifying about choosing a head of state – who we’ve now come to think of as a head of nation – through an election that dragged all manner of dirty linen and closet skeletons into public sight.

British republicans who cry out for the glories of an elected head of state seem to be speaking from dogma, not experience; they seem like embodiments of the saying about the grass being greener on the other side. The fact is that there’s something to be said for people being reared and trained through decades for such a role, with there being no question of who the next in line for the job will be.

I’m still a republican, of course; even with nasty elections like the 2011 one I prefer the Irish model of having a largely ceremonial president to a largely ceremonial monarch as head of state, but I’ve come to see that the British solution isn’t that bad, really. It’s not one I’d invent if I were charged with coming up with a political system, but it’s not a bad one to have ended up with, and it's such that I'm wary of attempts to tinker with it. I'm not sure how many wooden blocks can be eased away before the Jenga tower falls.

The monarchy gives constitutional stability, and expresses national unity, and provides a justification for the country being called the United Kingdom, after all. Get rid of the monarchy and the UK would need a new name. For starters.

God save the Queen, so. On balance.



_________________________________________________________________________________
* Yes, I know. Exactly the same joke was made about Chris Rea becoming lead singer of Dire Straits. It makes more sense in that context.
** Yes, because despite the lies of the No lobby in the 2011 AV referendum, more than three countries in the world use AV, with one of the ones using it being the only country with which the UK shares a land border. The first two times I voted it was in AV elections. I still think it's a better system than the absurdity that is FPTP, where the typical MP goes to Westminster having been voted for by fewer people than voted for other candidates.

Bunting

Years ago, some weeks before the last jubilee, I was living in halls when one of my fellow students asked me for help with an essay; I can't remember the topic, but people regularly came to me for advice on essays, whether they were on history, French cinema, Spanish literature, developmental economics, physiotherapy and the mechanics of the human elbow, or whatever.

My own work done for the evening, I ambled down to Sophie's room -- let's call her Sophie, for convenience -- to help her with her work. I knocked, and she answered, and I entered. And stared.

She'd been doing laundry, you see, and was drying it in her room. And not just any laundry, mind. Underwear, of which she appeared to have vast quantities.

She'd drawn lines of twine about her room and hung her laundry from these lines, such that her room was decorated with a multitude of thongs, myriad colourful triangles swaying in the slight breeze her window let in.

To this day I have never seen more pants.

We sat down to work, but after about the fifth time I frowned, restraining an obvious joke about whether she was expecting the Queen to visit, Sophie realised what was bothering me, started to laugh, and suggested we go down to the common room.

Even now, I can't look at bunting without thinking of Sophie's room and shaking my head. This jubilee weekend is proving quite a challenge.

Moral Markets

Dug from the files, and in response to a tweet...

Future World Leaders and Opinion Formers...

Some years ago, for reasons both convoluted and improbable, I attended a conference along with – among others – Lech Walesa and Mikhail Gorbachev. The two giants of the late Cold War debated the brutality of the Soviet system and the sometimes deeply exploitative nature of our own. As they drew to a close, Mr Walesa gestured dramatically across the stage, and said perhaps communism could have been a good system after all, if only it had always been run by people like Mr Gorbachev.

Afterwards my room-mate, a rising star in a leading American accountancy firm, flatly dismissed this. “He’s wrong,” he said, “it didn’t matter who was in charge; the markets wouldn’t have worked.”

Although I thought my room-mate was probably right, I’d felt some of Mr Gorbachev’s criticisms weren’t far off the mark; should wealthy countries really be able to bolster their own positions by hiring the best and brightest from poorer countries for salaries unimaginable at home? Didn’t that deprive developing countries of the very people they most needed to build their own economies, thus undermining real competition and perpetuating global inequality?

And, of course, as we all learned so painfully in 2007, any cockiness we had about the efficiency of our own system was completely unfounded; our markets, it turned out, didn’t work either. Our house was built on sand.

Catholic Social Teaching

In 2009 Benedict XVI issued his third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, building on more than a century of Catholic social teaching to place the Church at the service of the world in terms of love and truth. Offering a Catholic vision of economics, politics, and society, Benedict rejected the idea that left to its own devices, an unfettered market would serve humanity at large:

“Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility. Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.”

It would be too easy to dismiss this as utopian idealism. Catholic social teaching, aside from being deeply rooted in Sacred Tradition, overlaps remarkably with the observations and theories of such luminaries as Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prizewinners who have long criticised traditional economic theories as lacking on both ethical and methodological grounds, seeing them as missing the point of what it means to be human.

Will Hutton’s 2003 The World We’re In, recognising the American economy of the day as the unstable chimaera it was soon proven to be, called on Britain to move away from neo-liberal economics towards the more stakeholder-focused varieties of capitalism found in such countries as Germany and the Netherlands. Unlike shareholder models of capitalism, which hold that a corporation’s sole social responsibility is to make profits for its shareholders, stakeholder models of capitalism recognise that a wide range of interest groups have a stake in corporations, and thus that corporations have duties to a larger society.

Hutton had been pleasantly surprised to see John Paul II, in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, apparently embracing such a view:

“The purpose of a business firm is not simply to make a profit, but is to be found in its very existence as a community of persons who in various ways are endeavouring to satisfy their basic needs and who form a particular group at the service of the whole of society.”

Addressing a 2008 Vatican conference, Hutton argued that the modern “knowledge economy” has made such an approach even more important than when John Paul II first outlined it. Our challenge, he said, is to try to shape capitalism “so that it does things in its own long-term interests and those of society”.

Caritas in Veritate had been partly written in response to such challenges, and it is interesting that both leaders of Britain’s main political parties appear now to be channelling aspects of Catholic social teaching, albeit indirectly. The Anglican Phillip Blond and the Jewish Maurice Glasman have been profoundly influenced by Catholic social teaching, and it is clear that their ideas are taken seriously – if not always fully understood – at the higher echelons of both Conservative and Labour parties.

Reciprocity -- the Missing Ingredient?

A few months back I attended a talk in London by Professor Daniel Finn, a prominent American scholar of economics and Catholic social thinking. Having already that day met the Archbishop of Westminster, Finn led a public discussion of whether markets could be made to operate in a way that would serve the common good rather than simply generating wealth for a relatively small number of people.

In exploring how we might assess a market’s morality, Finn asked us to consider what he called its “moral ecology”, this being a combination of its regulatory framework, the provision of essential goods and services, the morality of individuals within organisations, and the presence of a vibrant civil society.

Focusing on the central issue of morality, Finn quoted Caritas in Veritate:

“The earthly city is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion.”

Finn observed that although these “relationships of gratuitousness” are central to our humanity, such reciprocity is almost wholly absent from economic textbooks, centred as they are upon exchanges and contracts.

Describing how we hold doors open for each other, Finn explained that reciprocity is a hybrid of contract and gift; we do such favours in the general expectation that people will either return the favour or perform similar favours for others. Highly ethical companies, he argued, tend to be notable for the role played within them by reciprocity. It builds trust, boosting social capital such that business thrives and everyone gains.

Finn’s idea that the promotion of a culture of reciprocity – rather than regulation – could hold the key to making markets moral might seem naïve, but the necessity for such an organic approach was foreseen in 1992 by Peter Drucker, probably the twentieth century’s most influential management guru. Identifying a host of problems that would face us now, Drucker said:

“All of these will be central concerns, especially in the developed world, for years to come. They will not be solved by pronunciamento or philosophy or legislation. They will be resolved where they originate: in the individual organisation and in the manager’s office.”

It may be that making people moral remains our best hope for making markets moral.

Contemporary Catholic Perspectives: Reaping the Harvest

One of the most absurd features of Enda Kenny’s notorious Cloyne speech last July was his quoting from an obscure Vatican document, penned in 1990 by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, to create the false impression that the Pope believes that the Church is above the law.

Wondering how the Taoiseach had come across such a document, I speculated that the passage might have been drawn to his attention by his close adviser Frank Flannery, whose brother, Father Tony Flannery, was one of the founders of the Association of Catholic Priests, and is currently under investigation by the Vatican.

The relevant document, On the Ecclesiastical Vocation of the Theologian, describes the Church as a mystery of communion, in which we share a bond of faith with our fellow Christians throughout history.

As the faith of the Church today must remain essentially that of the earliest Christian community, polling public opinion to determine what to think or do and opposing the Church’s sacramental teaching authority on the basis of such polls is specifically warned against: we cannot impose our opinions on the truth.

Leading questions, dodgy answers, and shocking grammar...

It’s somewhat ironic then that this week the Association of Catholic Priests has published the results of an opinion poll assessing people’s opinions on such matters as ecclesiology, whether women can be priests, translation from Latin into English, and the Church’s teaching on sexuality.  It seems that the ACP either didn’t get Rome’s memo, or didn’t bother reading it.

As published, Contemporary Catholic Perspectives is a disappointing document, rife with grammatical errors* and revealing a readiness among Irish Catholics to embrace theological errors thus divorcing themselves from the fullness of Christian teaching, the wider Church, and their fellow Christians through history.

I can't help but wonder what the leaders of the Association of Catholic Priests  –  the leaders, now, not ordinary members who've joined out of a sense of frustration with the hierarchy  –  think when they pray the Nicene Creed and say they believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. 

• 'One' in what sense? Do they really believe the Irish Church should be united in faith with the Church everywhere else in the world, or indeed throughout history? The Irish Church and the Church in Ireland are one and the same, after all. There's no distinction between the two, much though some might want to wish there were, with their cries for Rome to keep out of our affairs and stop trying to tidy up the mess we've made. Don't they believe that the English translation of the Mass should say the same thing as the Irish, German, French, Spanish, and other translations of the Mass? Don't they think Irish Catholics and Filipino Catholics should pray the same prayers?
• What about 'holy'? 'Holiness' means a lot of things, but at its basic meaning is the notion of being set apart for a special purpose  –  should a Church that's to be set apart to serve God be bending over backwards to accommodate itself to the passing whims of  modern society, whether in one country or a batch of them?
• And 'Catholic'? Attested to as a way of describing the Church as far back as 107 AD when Saint Ignatius of Antioch was en route to his martyrdom in Rome, the word means 'universal' or 'according to the whole', but do people understand that their faith should be a comprehensive totality, and one that's to be found everywhere rather than being merely a modern Irish phenomenon? 
• And as for apostolic, don't they understand that the faith of the apostles and our connection with them through our bishops and especially our communion with Rome cannot be selected from according to our own arrogant desires without breaking that link? How important to they think our communion with the See of Peter is?

In what sense do the likes of the ACP see themselves as Catholic? I'm not saying they're not, of course, as sacramentally they'll be every bit as Catholic as, well, the Pope, but what do they understand the Creed to mean?

And yet...

Sloppy and depressing though it is, the survey is nonetheless far from useless. It shows just how right the Apostolic Visitation was when it observed a widespread tendency among Irish clergy to hold theological opinions contrary to the fundamental teachings of the Church, and stressed the desperate need in Ireland for deeper formation in the content of the faith for young people and adults. Of course, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knew this anyway, but it's good to have numbers. I trust numbers.

84 per cent of people living in Ireland, according to the latest census, self-identify as Catholic, but it seems most of these have little idea of what it is that Catholics are expected to believe and do, let alone why, while many of those who criticise the Church waste their energies raging against a phantom Church that exists only in their imaginations.

I always find it hard to supress a wry grin whenever people start to rant about children being indoctrinated in Catholic schools. If it’s indoctrination that Catholic schools are engaged in, then they’re obviously not very good at it. We’re reaping the harvest of decades of bad catechesis, and when we consider how we should rear our children in our faith, we need to face this fact.

Obligatory autobiographical bit, with comic anecdote...

My own experience of Irish religious education in the 1980s would have been typical of the era.

Preparation for my first Confession and first Holy Communion was clear and comprehensive, as was that for my Confirmation, but whatever I was taught in between was unsystematic and not the sort of thing to stick. In secondary school I only ever heard the word 'transubstantiation' in history class, with reference to Martin Luther and the Council of Trent, with me having picked up a smattering of other information from doing the likes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in English class. 

My abiding memories of religious education in secondary school consisted of watching lots of films, raising money for Concern and the Simon Community, a school Mass or two, a couple of afternoons in the school oratory during one of which we all sniggered when someone broke wind, and one memorable visit from the local parish priest.

'Morning lads,' he said.

'Morning, Father,' we replied.

'What are you doing in religion now, lads?'

'Gandhi, Father,' we said.

A look of utter confusion waltzed across his baffled face. 'Oh,' he said, after a moment. 'That’s good. Because Gandhi was a good man. Now he wasn’t a Catholic, mind, but he was a good man.'

And, to be fair, he was. We weren't learning about Gandhi because he was a Hindu, mind, or because his actions had deep roots in his religious faith, though they very definitely did. We were learning about him because he was nice. 

My teachers were talented and dedicated people who meant well, and I’ve fond memories of them, but the fact remains that in a good Catholic school, run by brothers, religious education boiled down to five years of well-meaning agnosticism with a hint of Catholic seasoning.

I always think folk should be wary of meddling in things they don't understand...

That Catholic education in Ireland is in need of a comprehensive review is something the Visitation highlighted, but such an urgent project seems to have been pre-empted, at least for now, by the Government’s drive to encourage schools to be divested from Church patronage.

Ruairí Quinn’s ambition that half of Ireland’s Catholic schools be so divested looks set to be neutered by the report of the advisory group to the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector. The group has recommended, not that 50 per cent of schools should be transferred from diocesan patronage, but that fewer that one school in 50 should.

More worrying, however, is the advisory group’s recommendation that rule 68 of the Rules for National Schools, requiring teachers to inculcate Christian values throughout their teaching, should be abolished, and that each faith-based school should be obliged to display images reflecting all the school’s students’ religious traditions.

While I’d disagree with those theologians who’ve described these proposals as a frontal assault on faith-based education, I’d certainly agree that they could prove a devastating flank attack with the potential to deal a mortal wound to Catholic education in Ireland.

In his 1919 book Irish Impressions, G.K. Chesterton commented on the sincere assurances given by English socialists to Irish Catholics in 1913 that they would care for Irish children in England and would refrain from interfering with the children’s religion:

'Those who offer such a reassurance have never thought about what a religion is. They entertain the extraordinary idea that religion is a topic. They think religion is a thing like radishes, which can be avoided throughout a particular conversation with a particular person, whom the mention of a radish may convulse with anger or agony. But a religion is simply the world a man inhabits. In practice, a Socialist living in Liverpool would not know when he was, or was not tampering with the religion of a child born in Louth. 

If I were given the complete control of an infant Parsee (which is fortunately unlikely) I should not have the remotest notion of when I was most vitally reflecting on the Parsee system. But common sense, and a comprehension of the meaning of a coherent philosophy, would lead me to suspect that I was reflecting on it every other minute'

There is the little matter of the Constitution, not to mention the ECHR etc...

Religion is a holistic thing, and the right of Irish parents to have their children raised in their faith – whatever that might be – is something that should not be lightly disregarded.

It might be argued that this is not the job of the State, but the Constitution recognises that the family is the primary educator of the child; if economic reality requires parents to outsource education to the State, then it is only reasonable that they should exercise their democratic right to influence the State to educate their children as they would wish. 

Our right to observe, practice, teach, and otherwise manifest our beliefs – save when it's necessary that that right be curtailed – is enshrined in the Constitution and the European Convention of Human Rights. That doesn't  –  indeed, it mustn't  –  mean imposing their faith on others, but it does mean having the confidence to stand up and say 'no' when people representing a small minority of the population try to reform the national education system as though their views were normative for Ireland as a whole, rather than, say, just 6 per cent of people. 

Ruairí Quinn believes that the requirement that Irish national schools inculcate Christian values in their students is at the core of what’s wrong with the current system.  Perhaps, though, in a country which is 84 per cent Catholic and more than 90 per cent Christian of one sort or another, the problem is not that Irish schools are too Christian; it’s that they’re not Christian enough.

_____________________________________________________________

* I'd list them, but that might be a bit off-topic. There are four on the first page alone, though. And in case you're wondering what I'm doing posting at such a crazy time of night, I've been on a boat, and am currently sitting in a rather jolly ferry terminal, waiting on a train. It's a couple of hours away yet.

Stationary at the Cross: A Good Friday Meditation

The Cross, says John O’Donohue in Eternal Echoes, is a unique axis in time. It is where time and timelessness intersect. All past, present, and future pain was physically carried up the hill of Calvary in the Cross, so that it could face the new dawn of resurrection, and be transfigured. This, he says, is the mystery of the Eucharist, which embraces Calvary and the Resurrection in the one circle:

‘In Christian terms there is no way to light or glory except through the sore ground under the dark weight of the Cross.’

O’Donohue describes the Cross as a lonely, forsaken symbol, with the most terrifying image in Christian theology being a state of absolute exclusion from belonging. We all know that moment from the Passion accounts, of course, the moment when Jesus cries out ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ – My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

This, says Pope Benedict in the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, was no ordinary cry of abandonment. Misheard and misunderstood by some of those nearby, the faithful recognised this as a truly Messianic cry, the opening verse of the twenty-second psalm.

‘Jesus is praying the great psalm of suffering Israel, and so he is taking upon himself all the tribulation, not just of Israel, but of all those in this world who suffer from God’s concealment. He brings the world’s anguished cry at God’s absence before the heart of God himself. He identifies himself with suffering Israel, with all those who suffer under “God’s darkness”; he takes their cry, their anguish, all their helplessness upon himself – and in so doing he transforms it.’

Given the suffering that’s ever-present in our world, and how at times we seem awash in a sea of tragedies, it staggers me that I have only ever seen one artistic attempt at expressing this moment of divine agony and isolation.

This may seem trivial, but just as how we talk of things reveals how we think of them, so too does how we picture them. Theology is not simply a matter of what we say. I’ve known Protestant friends purse their lips at the thought of crucifixes in Catholic churches, arguing that representations of Christ on the Cross are expressions of his suffering that fail to recognise that the sacrifice of the Cross is finished, and that Christ is now glorified in Heaven. They’ve misunderstood what the crucifixes represent, but they’ve recognised something very important nonetheless.

Iconography matters.

Before the eleventh century it was relatively rare to see crucifixes on which Christ was not depicted alive and looking ahead, his eyes wide open. Such iconography expressed an understanding of the Cross prominent in all sermons on salvation in Acts and which was, in one form or another, the early Church’s dominant understanding of the Crucifixion: that the Cross was not a defeat, but was the path to resurrection and God’s supreme triumph over sin, death, and the Devil.

While the landscape of early medieval iconography wasn’t as smooth as he thought it was, the Swedish Lutheran bishop Gustav Aulén hit on something very important when he wrote in 1931 of how things changed during the Middle Ages.

‘What was lost was the note of triumph, which is as much absent in the contemplation of the Sacred Wounds as in the theory of the satisfaction of God’s justice. This is reflected very significantly in later medieval art. The triumph-crucifix of an earlier period is now ousted by the crucifix which depicts the human Sufferer.’

There can’t be many of us who haven’t seen myriad representations of the Crucifixion in our lifetime, but almost all of them – cinematic ones aside – will have been variants on a theme: a dead Christ, his head almost always resting on his right shoulder, his side bleeding from the spear driven into it by the Roman soldier when making sure that he was dead.

These pictures and sculptures all serve to express a truth – that God became Man and gave his life for us – that though all-important nonetheless omits something that was central to earlier Christian thought.

Of course, the sacrifice of our Lord on the Cross is a mystery, and it is a mystery that cannot be dismissed with a single neat theory. Tom Wright, until recently the Anglican bishop of Durham, has it right when he points out that ‘when Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.’

It is through the mystery of the Eucharist that we actively participate in the memory of God; this was brought home to me with great force when in Leeds last November, for the second Catholic Voices training weekend.

Charles I’Anson’s crucifix in the chapel at Leeds Trinity University College is like no crucifix I have ever seen. Completed in October 1971, the crucifix was the fruit of eighteen months of work by the college’s then senior lecturer in sculpture; made from bronze and fibreglass, and modelled upon I’Anson himself, the crucifix depicts neither a Christ looking forward in confidence nor one in gentle repose after having given up his spirit.

People often don’t grasp just how agonising crucifixion was, or how it killed. It was a slow punishment, and killed – in most cases – by suffocation. The crucified needed to stay as erect as possible in order to breathe, and as legs and arms gave out, pressure gradually built on the chest, forcing victims of the cross to inhale constant shallow breaths simply to stay alive, until eventually even the shallowest of breaths proved too much.

I’Anson’s crucifix depicts Our Lord pushing himself away from the Cross, driving himself upward and forward and crying out. It portrays a dying man’s supreme act of will, showing Jesus forcing his limbs to support him so he can gather the air to cry out, whether to ask why his Father had forsaken him, or to commend his spirit into his Father’s hands.

It’s a representation of agony, but it’s not a representation of defeat; on the contrary, it is a magnificent, gritty, idealised rendering of triumph, and not just any triumph, but the greatest triumph there has ever been, that moment when history and eternity were as one, and God reclaimed what was his, defeating sin, death, and the Devil.

Too rarely in my life have I had more than the driest and most academic understanding of what the Mass meant, but on that November Saturday, as the Eucharist was held up before I’Anson’s Crucifix, I understood.

Britain's 'muddled' document on proposed gay marriage

It’s increasingly difficult to avoid the same-sex marriage debate in the British media, now that the government’s consultation on the redefinition of marriage has been launched.

A muddled document, to say the least, the consultation confuses marriage with marriage ceremonies, treats civil and religious marriages as though they’re legally distinct institutions rather than being exactly the same thing, avoids the question of how marriage is currently defined in law, and openly admits that the practical consequences of redefinition should be left up to the courts.

The very concept of such a consultation is itself highly irregular; parliamentary practice normally involves the drafting of a green paper to explore the possibility of changing the law, followed by a white paper putting forward government policy and inviting further comment, eventually leading – perhaps – to legislation.

In contrast to the usual process, the government seems to be trying to railroad through parliament a policy spectacularly absent from the electoral manifestos of both governing parties. The consultation really only addresses how this policy could be implemented, effectively disregarding the question of whether such a radical change in law and custom is desirable, practicable, or wise.

The consultation’s first two questions, asking whether marriage should be opened up to same-sex couples, are evidently intended merely to provide a veneer of legitimacy. The document stresses that those questions are asked only out of interest, and Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat equalities minister, has given a “cast-iron guarantee” that marriage will be legally redefined by 2015, regardless of popular opinion.

Popular opinion seems to be divided on the topic, to judge by the widely differing results of three recent polls, with one firm – ComRes – having found that 70 per cent of people believe that marriage should continue to be defined as the union of a man and a woman. There’s certainly no great enthusiasm for the proposed change.

It is notable that ICM, which found the highest support for legalising same-sex marriage, also found that the vast majority of people – 78 per cent – believed the issue should most definitely not be a parliamentary priority. ICM also observed a widespread unwillingness for schools to be allowed teach that same-sex marriage is identical to marriage between a man and a woman.

Divisive

So divisive a debate has naturally become almost ubiquitous in the media; I’ve discussed the matter on the radio myself, the first time with the feminist and lesbian journalist Julie Bindel, the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, and the LGBT activist Marc Delacour.

Part of the challenge in such discussions, I’ve learned, is to resist the urge to focus so much on “winning” that we fail to listen and truly engage with what others say. Julie Bindel, in particular, said something upon which I’ve since reflected quite deeply, given how acrimonious and polarised the general debate has become.

“Civil partnership provides what every single couple in the world is looking for in terms of legal protection and the right of next-of-kin, and I would extend that to brother-sister, two sisters, two best friends. I signed a civil partnership agreement with my partner ... we didn’t do it because we needed anyone to see that we have a good, stable, happy relationship.”

She argues that the State should abandon the marriage business altogether, because while it should protect committed couples – something it can do through a modified version of the civil partnership scheme – it has no business approving or withholding approval of people’s private relationships; if committed couples wish to have their unions religiously solemnized, that is their own business and no concern of the State.

Essentially a variant on the French system, it’s a similar argument to ones I’ve heard put forward by libertarian friends.

France

In France, religious marriages have no legal standing whatsoever; only civil marriages are recognised in law. People get married by a civil authority such as a mayor, and then – if they so wish – have their legal marriage solemnized afterwards in a religious ceremony.

The obvious advantage of Julie Bindel’s proposed system is that it would establish an indisputable legal equivalence between same-sex couples and unions of men and women, whilst also preserving long-recognised rights to freedom of religion and conscience by restricting the term ‘marriage’ to religious institutions; nobody would be obliged to recognise same-sex civil partnerships as marriages as the law would not recognise them as such, and clerics would not be obliged to celebrate same-sex marriages as marriages would be exclusively religious affairs.

It’s a tempting idea, and one I think I might subscribe to, were it not for one crucial problem, leaving aside how those already wed in civil ceremonies might be unhappy with no longer being able to call themselves married!

Just as the redefinition of marriage is not a “gay issue”, neither is it a “religious” one. Marriage is a social good, the one institution we have that exists to promote the idea that children should grow up with the love of a mother and a father. I’m not convinced that it should only be for religious bodies to make that case.

Of course, in practice the abolition of marriage is on the cards in England anyway. Since the seventeenth century, parliament has recognised marriage as the union of a man and a woman, primarily for the purpose of bearing and rearing children; marriage differs from civil partnerships also by requiring vows and sexual consummation.

The government’s consultation proposes that marriage should henceforth be recognised as the union of any two consenting adults, makes no mention of children, says that vows should no longer be absolutely necessary, and effectively abolishes the need for consummation as always understood.

In other words, if marriage to be opened up to everybody, every distinctive feature of the institution would need to be changed, such that marriage, as currently understood, would no longer exist, being replaced by a new institution called “marriage” but functionally indistinguishable from civil partnership.

Like the baby brought before Solomon, it seems marriage cannot be shared without being torn apart.

 

 

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 29 March 2012.

The Parthenon Sculptures: A Reflection

The internet being the internet, Stephen Fry having added his voice to those calling for the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum to be returned to Athens will doubtless lead to a great clamour in his wake, largely from people who've hitherto not given the subject more than two minutes' thought.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It is, at any rate, not an unusual thing. 

Remember the invasion of the Falklands? Sue Townsend got it right in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾:

'10am. Woke my father up to tell him Argentina has invaded the Falklands. He shot out of bed because he thought the Falklands lay off the coast of Scotland. When I pointed out that they were eight thousand miles away he got back into bed and pulled the covers over his head.'

Fiction, sure, but one that reflected something all too true; despite all those nowadays who claim that the Falklands are as British as Whitehall, back in 1982 huge numbers of Britons had no idea where they were.* Still, in no time at all Mrs Thatcher had Britain crying out for their return, for reasons of national pride and strategic sheep purposes.

Having won her glorious victory over a few thousand ill-equipped Argentinian youths, she went back to the polls in 1983 and was rewarded by having her share of the vote drop to 42.4%, while the two main opposition parties garnered 53% of the vote between them. Of course, the British electoral system being a model of democracy and known for how it so accurately reflects the will of the people, this translated to a massive victory for the Conservatives.

If burglars sold your most treasured possessions...

But I digress. The important thing, at any rate, is that huge numbers of Britons knew nothing about the Falklands when they were invaded, but brushed up quickly. 

Likewise, even those who've never given the Parthenon Sculptures a moment's thought before Stephen Fry piped up will have been able to think quickly about this, do some research, and quickly realise that there's not really any good reason why they're in London rather than Athens.

No, it won't do to claim that they were bought fair and square from the legitimate rulers of Greece two hundred years ago. Greece was occupied by the Ottomans at the time, and the Greeks were far from happy about being under imposed foreign rule -- so unhappy, in fact, that within nine years of the Parthenon Sculptures being shipped overseas, the Greeks began a successful revolution that won them their independence.

The Parthenon Sculptures weren't the Ottomans' to sell. That so many of the Parthenon Sculptures are in London now is a simple case of receipt of stolen goods.

Yes, we all know they'd probably have gotten damaged had they been still on the Acropolis during the War of Independence, with the Turks using the Erechtheion as a munitions store, just as they'd so disastrously used the Parthenon a century and a half earlier during a war with the Venetians. That most of the sculptures were away safely in London at the time surely preserved them. That's great. The Greeks are genuinely grateful for this. And as a reward, the British people have had two hundred years to admire them. It's time to give them back.

It is, frankly, dishonourable to try to pretend that they belong in London. It's the kind of thing that utterly gives to lie to any supposed sense of 'British fair play'.

That said, it's important to understand that we shouldn't be talking about returning them to Greece. We should be talking about returning them to Athens. There'd not be much point in sending them back if they were to end up in Corinth or Thessaloniki.

Pull up your seats. This bit matters. I'll simplify, but not by much.

An Education to Greece

The Acropolis -- the 'high city' -- was the ancient historical heart of Athens, a safe hilltop settlement. As time went on, more and more people began living around the base of it and on nearby hills, such that it became the religious and ritual centre of the city, the city's temple precinct. During the Persian invasion of 480-479 BC, the Persians occupied the city and destroyed the temples on the Acropolis as an act of revenge for their humiliation at Athenian hands in the battle of Marathon a decade earlier. Having eventually driven off the Persians, the Athenians resolved to leave the Acropolis as it was, as a permanent memento of what they'd experienced and triumphed over.

A few decades later they had second thoughts, and under Pericles embarked on building programme that -- in tandem with much else -- was destined to make Athens not merely, as Pericles put it in his famous Funeral Oration, 'an education to Greece', but an education to the whole world.

On the Acropolis this led to the construction of the huge monumental gateway called the Propylaia, the small Temple of Athena Nike which stood beside it, the rather ornate Erechtheion -- one important part of which is also in the British Museum, a series of smaller shrines, and above all the Parthenon, the great temple to Athena the Virgin.

Designed by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates, who factored in a couple of marvellously subtle optical illusions that made the building even look more elegantly regular than it actually is, and with the whole project supervised by the sculptor Pheidias, later to become known as the creator of the Statue of Zeus at Olympia -- one of the seven wonders of the ancient world -- the Temple was an architectural and artistic eulogy to Athens.

It's crucial to understand this. The Parthenon wasn't just in Athens. It was of Athens. It was about Athens. Its whole purpose was to celebrate and glorify Athens. It makes no sense save in the context of Athens. It is this, more than anything else, that makes the Parthenon Sculptures a special case.

A City Immortalised in Marble

The first phase in the sculptural project was the carving of 92 metopes in high relief; the metopes were square marble slabs, just over five foot high, depicting battle scenes, placed high up around the exterior of the Parthenon. The first ones visitors to the temple precinct would see were a series of metopes showing Greeks fighting Amazons, but as they followed the images around the long northern side they'd see a series of fights and duels from the Trojan War, then an array of depictions of the Greek Gods fighting giants, and finally, along the long southern side they'd see episodes of combat between Greeks and Centaurs. 

Every single set of metopes is designed to convey the same message: Greeks are not barbarians -- strange and sometimes savage people who make weird 'Bar bar' noises when they speak --  and when Greeks fight barbarians, they win. The Greeks, the Parthenon was saying in none too subtle a way, are the best.

Why would visitors experience the metopes in that order? Well, that's because the order in which they followed the imagery was largely dictated by the inner Ionic frieze, carved in low relief around the main body of the building, and visible from a distance between the Doric columns. It's represented in blue in the following diagrams, with the metopes being in red.

More than five hundred feet long and more than three feet high, the frieze, carved after the metopes were complete, focuses sharply on Athens itself rather than Greece in general. Depicting an idealised version of the annual Panathenaic Procession, the main narrative of the frieze heads north from the south west corner and turn east along the temple's long northern flank, the procession culminating at the eastern end with a depiction of the Gods, and what seems to have been the presentation of the peplos -- or woman's robe -- to Athena; every four years the highlight of the procession was the decoration of Athens' main cult statue of Athena with a newly-woven peplos.

Of the 378 figures that were on the frieze, 192 were cavalrymen. This is no accident: they represent the 192 Athenians who fell defending Greece in the Athenian victory at Marathon, that victory that John Stuart Mill said was a more important event in British history than the Battle of Hastings. 

Those 192 Athenians were buried just twenty-six miles from the Parthenon, graced with the rare honour by the Athenians of having been buried where they'd fought and died, rather than being brought home. It's impossible to downplay how much Marathon meant to the Athenians; when Aeschylus, arguably the greatest of ancient dramatists, died, his epitaph said nothing about his many artistic achievements. Instead it said just one thing: that he had fought at Marathon.

If the Doric metopes had celebrated Greece and Greece's superiority over barbarians, using legendary victories to celebrate such recent triumphs as Salamis and Plataea, so the Ionic Frieze celebrates Athens, Athena, and the immeasurably great Athenian achievement in having defeated the Persians at Marathon. 

Don't think for a moment, by the way, that it would have been difficult to have seen the frieze, tucked away as it was high up behind the columns and under the shadow of the roof. Greek sculptures in Antiquity weren't the understated  white marble beauties we see today; they were painted in the most vibrant of colours and were designed to catch the eye. Here, for instance, is a reconstruction of part of a pediment from the temple of Aphaia on Aigina:

The Parthenon sculptures would have been just as brightly painted, and would have been quite clear from some distance.

At either end of the Parthenon were its own pedimental sculptures, rendered in green in the diagrams; carved in the round after the Ionic frieze was complete, these were among the supreme sculptural achievements of classical Greece. At the western end, visitors would see the famous conflict between Athena and Poseidon over who would have patronage of Athens -- and can you imagine a better visual boast for a city than a depiction of the Gods themselves competing to see who would have the honour of being associated with it? 

Supposedly it was the legendary King Cecrops who chose between the Gods, picking the one who gave the greatest gift. Poseidon drew forth sea water from the ground, offering the Athenians that mastery of the sea they would later use to beat the Persians at Salamis, but Athena simply planted an olive tree, giving the Athenians the plant that would be the source of much of their wealth from then on.

Pediment on top, Doric metopes below, Ionic frieze within, all facing out. Simples.

 The eastern pediment depicted the birth of Athena, fully armed and fully aware, from the head of her father Zeus. A war goddess, she was prudent with it, unlike the bloodthirsty Ares, and so it was that the Athenians were to see themselves as people who could and would fight with courage and skill, but would not dedicate their lives to combat. As Thucydides records Pericles as saying in his funeral oration:

'... we rely, not on secret weapons, but on our own real courage and loyalty... There are certain advantages, I think, in our way of meeting danger voluntarily, with an easy mind, instead of with a laborious training, with natural rather than state-induced courage.'

Inside, of course, was the giant chryselephantine statue of Athena herself, a wooden core plated with gold and ivory, just like Pheidias' later masterpiece at Olympia; alas, it has been lost to us for many centuries.

As it should be...

In the summer of 2010 I visited Athens for my fourth time, and on a memorable day that saw me twice giving directions to a flustered Dylan Moran and later walking into a lingering cloud of tear gas, I made my way to the new Acropolis Museum.

Situated just a few minutes walk from the Acropolis, with just the Theatre of Dionysus** between the two and with the Acropolis itself clearly visible from inside the museum, it's pretty much a model of what a museum should be.

Visitors to the museum walk in at ground level, looking down onto archaeological excavations of the classical city that's below nearly every footstep in central Athens, and work their way upwards through the museum, each floor representing and featuring artifacts from a later period, culminating, as you'd expect, with the Parthenon Gallery on the third floor. 

A few pieces of sculpture are all that's original there; otherwise plaster casts take the place of missing pieces, the vast majority of which are  in Bloomsbury but which are also scattered in the Louvre and elsewhere. Not merely do massive windows on all sides give a clear view of the Acropolis itself and the Athens guarded over by the Acropolis, but the gallery is arranged in such a way that the pieces -- or their replicas -- are placed in such a way that they can viewed in the same order that they were always meant to be viewed, seen in the same Greek light by which they were always meant to be seen.

Spaced out as they'd have been on the Parthenon itself, the pieces in the Acropolis Museum are organised in the correct order, facing outwards in glorious natural light, telling the same story they first told almost 2,500 years ago.

They're not crammed into a dimly-lit room, with the metopes huddled around the pedimental sculptures at the ends, and the frieze facing inwards in the centre.

Yes, I know people get to see them for free in London. That's wonderful. I'll genuinely miss them if they go back home, as they're something I make a point of visiting almost every time I'm in London. But I've seen them lots of times, and the British Museum will hardly be impoverished without them. No museum housing the Sutton Hoo or Mildenhall treasures -- or indeed the Lewis Chessmen -- could ever fall from the first rank of the world's museums; and I don't think there's any danger of the Rosetta Stone being credibly summoned back to Egypt.

The Parthenon Sculptures are about Athens. They only really make sense in Athens. We've had two hundred years to look at them. I think it's time the Greeks had their own chance.

And let's face it, they could do with the money.

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*Down in the south Atlantic, if you're still wondering. Careful when you spread out your map, as the odd toastlet or biscuit crumb is liable to render them invisible.

** Not to be confused with the Theatre of Herodes Atticus, a mistake memorably made by Indiana Jones' fraudulent father.