FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Man into Beast

Rant Number 372 18 November 2009

When Odysseus’ ship reached the island of Aiaia, Homer tells us, the hero did not know it was inhabited by a sorceress. So he let his companions go ashore. In a dell, they come upon a stately house. A beautiful woman sings within, in a sweet voice. Circe, the terrible one, then invites them in. Offers them drink and rich food. Alas, the meal is spiked with a magic potion. No soon have the men eaten, lo and behold, they sprout pigs’ heads, grunt and grovel, turned into hogs all over.

Triumphant, Circe shuts them into a pigsty and throws them acorns to feed on. Only Eurylochus, who had not swallowed the bait, is left to tell the tale.

Once informed, crafty Odysseus sets out to the rescue. But the magician is powerful - how can he, a mere man, beat her? Well, thanks to divine advice. The god Hermes, whom he meets on the way, arms him with both antidote and instructions, so that Odysseus may tackle Circe all right. Immune to the drug, he draws his sword and forces the witch to restore his men to human shape. Afterwards the Greek spends a whole year with her in uxorious pleasure and enjoyment – she even gives him a son. Huh! It pays to have a god for a friend.

Human beings made into swine – nasty. But I guess Circe could have done worse and turned Odysseus’ mariners into wolves and jackals. Like the feral youths in Harry Brown, director Daniel Barber’s just released movie. To call it a portrayal of a broken society is an understatement. Set in South London’s hellish estates, it conjures up Thomas Hobbes’ vision of a fearful world prior to the civilising social contract. A state of nature where life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’ and ‘homo est homini lupus’. A grim universe of run-down tower blocks, sin-bin public housing, graffiti-defaced walls and dirty, rubbish-strewn landings and alleyways. Where stabbings, robberies, assaults, rapes, shootings, drug-dealing are a matter of course. And where the old, the weak and the vulnerable crouch in their poky flats in daily fear. Places with names like Peckham, Streatham, Brixton, New Cross, Hackney, Bethnal Green and many others. A jungle our wonderful parliamentary liberal democracy has created.

Hope exists, however. When geriatric ex-marine Harry Brown (played by seemingly immortal cockney Michael Caine), whom an unkind fate dumped on the estate, has his mate murdered by a gang, he doesn’t run away to an old people’s home. Instead, he gets himself a gun and goes on an unlikely rampage of revenge. Shades of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish, I couldn’t help thinking.

Harry Brown’s solution to the problem of urban violence, youth crime, drugs and degeneration won’t do. It is not so much that vigilantism is wrong. As a method for dealing with endemic violence, it is ineffective. It would take a whole army of superannuated avengers hobbling on their Zimmer frames to handle the multiplying wolf-like creatures causing the trouble. That is no job for individuals, but for the State. Unfortunately not a State like the British one, which hears nothing, sees nothing and does nothing. Thomas Hobbes put his trust on an all-powerful law-enforcer - there is no chance of that. (Naturally, that ghastly materialist discounted the possibility of the miscreants’ redemption.) In the midst of an economic crisis, the State can’t even get greedy bankers and stockbrokers to give up their ill-gotten gains and bonuses. And the police are impotent. Maybe the god Hermes could help, who knows?

Not all of my beloved London is filled with beasts of prey, praise God. Nor does the poor priest espy wolves and jackals living close by. When it comes to pigs, however, I am not sure. Perhaps this is trivial but evidence of swinish behaviour abounds. E.g., people eating copiously in the Underground. As a regular traveller on the London Tube, increasingly I see people around having a full meal, untroubled by passengers’ discomfort. Visiting friends from across the pond also have remarked on this strange, disagreeably new British habit. Result: carriages get filthy, smelly and unhygienic. Further, more and more people – the young, especially - consume food while walking about in public. At all times of the day, they much away. Like piglets. I wonder. Are they so hungry? Can’t be a working people’s necessity – it happens at week-ends and leisure times as well. Hmmm...Funny how in the Middle East I have never seen anyone eating in the public like that. Possibly Arabs have an edge in good manners over Europeans here.

In Jesus’ timeless parable of the Prodigal Son (St Luke 15:15) it a measure of the degradation into which the erring young man has fallen that he hires himself out to a stranger, feeding pigs. It would have been worse for him to have become a pig. And here is the point. As the sharp exegetes of the Alexandrian school of hermeneutics pointed out, the Homer’s story of men turned into swine can be read as more than a poetic tale. It could be about what happens when human beings renounce the higher, divine element in their nature – their reason. They then sink to the level of irrational beings and become sub-human – like wolves or pigs. And maybe it is not at all coincidental that in many of the cases of Satanic possession on record the unfortunates fallen under the sway of malign influences often grunt, growl and squeal like animals. That man’s eternal enemy should wish to drag down creatures made in God’s image to the level of brute beasts would make perfect, chilling sense.

In the Odyssey, the archetypal Western hero saves his friends from sorcery, bringing them back to their God-given shape and nature. Is the reverse happening? Is European man today now sliding back into an irrational substratum?

Naturally, animals belong in the divine plan. Unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity does not consider any non-human creature as ritually unclean. They simply follow, as all beasts, the dictates of their instincts and are morally innocent. Human nature, on the hand, is not restricted to its animal layer. ‘Fatti non foste a viver come bruti ma per seguir virtute a conoscenza’, as Dante makes Odysseus say in the Inferno. Knowledge, wisdom, worship of the Creator – these are what human beings are truly for.

The rest is sub-human.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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