Love Story - FATHER FRANK’S RANTS

Rant Number 338 4 February 2009

The feelgood film of our time, the hype about Slumdog Millionaire goes. A hell of a movie, sure. Yet, stripped of its picaresque and Dickensian romps, at bottom it is a superb but simple love story. Boy Jamal falls for girl Latika. Despite abject poverty, degradation, abuse, child slavers, kidnapping, prostitution, torture, police, gangsters and the like eventually Jamal wins Latika. Oh, plus 20 million rupees from a game show. You might call it a happy ending.

Guess you have to be a eunuch to be indifferent to the genre. Everybody likes melodrama, a tale of romance, no? But Fred Nietzsche’s explanation why that is the case intrigues me: Christianity.

In a 1880 rainy, windy and sultry Venice, Nietzsche dictated to friend Peter Gast his Thoughts on Moral Prejudices. Later incorporated in Morgenroete, ‘Dawn’. Partly a venomous attack on Christian teachings about sin. “Passions become evil and vicious if regarded from an evil and vicious standpoint. Thus Christianity has made Eros and Aphrodite – grand, powerful and ideal forces – into hellish sprites and wicked spirits. Whence the torments that awareness of sexual impulses has caused in the mind of believers. Is it not horrible to turn normal and necessary drives into a source of inner misery, so making everyone’s life miserable? It resulted in private wretchedness.’ The Church’s turning Eros into Satan, the philosopher foams, has had a paradoxical outcome: the devil has become more interesting than all the angels and the saints. In consequence, ‘the love story is now the one real interest all social classes share…all our poetry and ideas are pervaded by the excessive importance we give to the tale of romance: because of this posterity will judge the whole heritage of Christian culture as mean and mindless’.

So, it is ultimately because of the Church’s doctrines on sex that people enjoy watching stories like that of Jamal and Latika. Never figured that myself! Nietzsche’s rants are always interesting, however, even when loopy. Like the priest (!), he was a fantastic cultural critic. He deserves serious criticism, therefore.

First, to give the devil his due, I can imagine Nietzsche having a point – though not quite the point he thought he had. Whenever there is a command ‘Thou shalt not’, natural human waywardness is such that it invites the rejoinder: ‘And what if I do?’ Besides, any prohibition implies an existing inclination towards flaunting it, otherwise why issue the prohibition in the first place? (There is no need of a law forbidding the eating of dirt or the tearing out of one’s own eyes, as human beings generally display no such inclinations.) This is captured in an aphorism by Lichtenberg. ‘If the drinking of water had been declared a sin by the Church, what an extra pleasure there would be in drinking it!’ The titillations of the forbidden fruit go back to the Garden of Eden. But it is possible that the Church having banged on about sexual sins too much, investing them at times with disproportionate importance, may well have added an extra thrill to contravening them. (In the Inferno Dante does not make that mistake. The gravest sins are not sexual.)

Second, as a classical philologist, Fred would have known that a negative attitude to Eros as physical love predates Christianity. In Plato’s classic discussion of love, the Symposium, Socrates distinguishes between a vulgar Aphrodite and a heavenly one. The former lusts after a body, the latter longs for union with a soul. It is heavenly Aphrodite which Socrates prefers. When besotted young Alcibiades seeks to seduce him, slipping into his bed, Socrates remains unmoved. Because for the philosopher to be in love with a soul is a better, higher love than being in love with a body. Not a view likely to be enthusiastically embraced by participants to TV programmes like Big Brother, admittedly, but then Plato would have looked upon such creatures with pity. The point is that a critique of erotic love existed in paganism well before the Church was formed. Call Plato names: repressive, reactionary, fascist, the lot. Still, a Christian he certainly was not.

Third, the early Christians initially rejected not just Eros but Mars. They condemned bloodshed, warfare and gladiatorial combats. Few would argue that it was wrong to do so. Do war and bloodlust have an added attraction because of the Church? Hardly. The satisfaction most Israelis feel about the punishment they inflicted on Gaza is a fact but there is no way the Pope’s writ runs in Tel Aviv.

Fourth, the German thinker’s erotic imagination was somewhat limited. Had he not flipped his lid and lived long enough to read Proust, he might have learnt that the sexual spectrum includes a variety of peculiar practices. There are very few human societies which would not place some constraints on those tendencies. Even outside monotheistic cultures, I am not aware that, say, China, Japan and Mesoamerica allowed unbridled, total and free exercise of all sexual impulses. I wonder whether Fred, brought out in a stern, decent Lutheran household, even conceived what some folks may get up to. When bad Dr Freud wrote of infantile sexuality as intrinsically ‘perverse and polymorphous’, he was gesturing towards dark drives in human nature that are not just childish prerogatives. The annals of the average police station are full of them and they do not make pleasant reading. The Church was quite sensible in warning people off them.

Fifth, to be unashamedly ad hominem. I read in Ronald Hayman’s Nietzsche that one close friend thought our Fred ‘remained a virgin throughout his life.’ His infatuation for that odd female, Lou Salome, was only ‘spiritual’. (Yee gods!) It is likely Nietzsche’s Eros was ‘abnormally low’. Nonetheless, he did propose marriage once, and was turned down. Was then his dislike of romance sour grapes? About a happiness he could never attain? If so, it would only be…human, all too human.

Slumdog Millionaire pleases because it is a moving, entertaining love affair. About a boy and a girl who find each other against all odds. Jamal and Latika are therefore everyman and everywoman. True, the ending is impossibly, incredibly, absurdly optimistic. But that’s because it is also a fairy tale. And fairy tales are never true.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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