It’s down to us,’ you declare in the editorial and your article in Sofia 81; and there are many images from Christian iconography – from the great painting schools and painters of Europe, which have affirmed a sensate view of the world, breaking through the ideological restraints of the Church to generate an alternative , humanist view of reality – generous and open-armed and in that sense also vulnerable. And in your detailed study of New Testament texts you make eloquent sense of the luminous poetry of the Christian myth in arguing for it as ‘an epic story, a poem or drama of humanity’s – and the whole earth’s – struggle for liberation’.
But while I would accept (and applaud) the spirit of this argument, and the delicacy and warmth of your affirmation of the Christian message, I find it difficult to go along with the belief system it gives licence to. The problem for me, is that this myth – trenchant and dramatic as it is – has hovered around the lives of too many generations of people now without ever being able to get anywhere close to coping with the contradictions of the material world it was Christ’s aim to provide a resolution to. Its idealist principles (its vision of life and death) have persistently played into the hands of the ideologists of material power as an instrument with which to strengthen their control over the mass of the people, vulnerable and insecure as they almost always have been.
These familiar texts may well reflect (and chart the course of) Christ’s ministry 2000 years ago as part of an alternative history that challenged the authority of Roman law and its oppressive ideology as imposed upon its subject peoples. But its idealist other-worldly appeal could not offer any sort of material challenge to the power of Rome except by becoming an institutionalised church incorporating ‘the image of (an) invisible God’ as ‘the head of the body, the church’ which holds ‘all things together’ by inducing fear of the unknown and of the Evil One. And that world gesturing to a world healed and re-made through the pain of Christ’s death, was very soon caught up in the fundamental disputes and derangements which then plunged Europe and the rest of the world into violent collision, thus virtually betraying the vision of Christ.
If the time for us, the kairos, as you put it, is now, that now has still not come, except for those who believe in an after-life. And it has not come perhaps because it preaches a non-material, metaphysical consolation for the oppressed, the hungry and the poor – their acquiescence, their acceptance of the injustices they suffer. Nor has the blessing of the poor and the hungry – poor and hungry as so many are – brought peace, because beyond the blessing lie the powers that dictate and control the actual conditions of material reality, the forces of production which determine the ways we live.
And there is no evading these conditions. It may be that the peacemakers are among the blessed; but they are continually confronted by men waging wars in the name of peace and justice; and this ugly reality is not to be overcome unless we are prepared to face up to it. The vision of global justice, that is, cannot in itself bring any sort of qualitative change; and the struggle for this must inevitably involve us in physical collision with the enemies of humanity.
In other words, Sobrino’s ‘crucified people’ must sometime or other, as he says, rise up against the passivity and acquiescence that make them victims. And so long as the ‘project of human possibility’ remains an ‘imaginary project’ they will remain victims. To declare that ‘we who are many are one body because we all share the same loaf’ is clearly inadequate, because the many are not, and have never been, ‘one body’; and they palpably do not ‘share the same loaf’.
True, the message of Christ is that we are all dependent on each other; which means we have to find grounds for trust, the trust and love of others, and organise together, collectively. But still one has to ask whether that vision of Christ is not itself flawed in its argument for a world transformed, let alone the one we actually live in; or whether, in coming down to this world 2000 years ago, it can speak for this world or remain anchored or ‘embodied’ in it. For as it stands, that vision mystifies the material, rises out of it into the invisible and the ethereal; and from that point on creates a false and irrational consciousness dominated by invisible powers; an ideology which dictates and enforces acquiescence through fear, timidity and awe, to an unaccountable and unanswerable Prime Mover (God) from somewhere supernaturally beyond our control.
Yes, of course, the Old Testament God is different from the god embodied in Christ through the New Testament, with Christ himself as a peacemaker. But in what kind of world? And to what end? That other world beyond death? But there is also the world of human society, the world we live in, the world of Europe’s countless wars, the devastating eruptions of the 20th A Humanist Agenda Christopher Hampton responds to Dinah Livingstone’s talk Down To Us published in Sofia 81.
If the time for us, the kairos, as you put it, is now, that now has still not come. century, which came to a climax with the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi creed and its death-camps. And that world too has to be taken into account in the reckoning: what it is that is down to us.
In other words, there are layers of ideology and of metaphysics to be negotiated, dealt with, understood and resisted in dealing with the interaction of the theory and practice of reality, if we are ever to break the regressive fundamentalist bonds which hold most people back from fulfilling their potentialities. We’ve had enough, that is, of the irrational hierarchic forces clamping down upon us from above. And we’ve never been more in need than now of a rational materialising alternative to these inflamed ideas and ideologies.
That is why I would find myself wanting to emphasise the need for the sanity and rigour of the work of the great historians – men like E.H. Carr, E.P.
Thompson, A.L, Morton, Christopher Hill, and Lord Acton. Acton, for instance, insisted on putting ‘conscience above both system and success’, and called for judgement because he believed that history was about justice, about giving ‘voices to those seen as hitherto voiceless in the master narratives of history – the poor, women, minorities of every ethnic, social and ideological description’. And as a Catholic radical, he was as severe in his judgement of the Papacy and the Roman Church, because of the damage they had done to the concept of progressive thinking and action, believing no-one and no crime should be permitted ‘to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong’. ‘Power’, as he observes, ‘tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ So the challenge continues – the pursuit of ‘truth’, the defence of human reason – as people like Galileo and Bruno knew it had to if there was to be any progress, even though they knew that the system had betrayed them.
And these, it seems to me, are the crucial issues, based upon the most rigorous and exacting standards, which cannot be expected from the visionary texts of the gospels, because their aim was to promote a vision and had a different purpose.
Christopher Hampton was a lecturer for many years at the University ofWestminster and the London City Literary Institute.His Radical Reader was reissued by Spokesman Books in 2006.