"Heresy" by Catherine Nixey

Christians claim theirs is the true faith but “In the beginning there was not ... one single Christian message.” (Introduction). The form of Christianity we have inherited persecuted all other forms out of existence. The word 'heresy' means choice and the pagan philosophers believed that it was good to choose, rationally, who and how one would worship. But "within the first century of the birth of this new religion, ‘choice’ for Christians had become no longer a praiseworthy attribute but a ‘poison’.” (Introduction)

In this scholarly but always entertaining book, Nixey continues what she had started in her best-seller The Darkening Age which chronicled the violent persecution of the pagans unleashed as soon as Christianity became the officially endorsed religion of the Roman Empire. Now she shows how most of the manifold versions of Christianity which existed in those first few centuries were branded heretical and had their exponents criminalised and killed and their books burned. Nevertheless, some vestiges of them survived. The ox and the ass of the nativity scene only appear in a banned gospel. 

On the journey, we learn about alternative sons of god, born of a mortal virgin woman who healed the sick and even raised the dead, such as Apollonius of Tyana.

We learn that the three 'wise men' should properly be translated as magicians and that Jesus could be seen as a magician too: “In Greek and Roman texts, wands had long been associated with magicians: Circe held a wand when she transformed Odysseus’s men into pigs; Mercury held a wand when he led the dead back to life. ... In early Christian art, Jesus holds a wand when he is performing miracles. In one fifth-century wooden panel, he holds one when he is changing water into wine and when he performs the miracle to multiply loaves; in a third-century image from the catacombs, he holds one when he raises Lazarus from the two ... While the sign of the cross is almost entirely absent from early Western Christian art, wands are widely seen.” (Ch 4)

We learn that our image of Jesus is one of many originals: “In the early years and centuries of this religion ... Sometimes he appears as a bearded old man, at others as a beardless young one; in some images he is shown bare-chested and as macho as a Greek god, while at other times he is depicted as far more sexually ambiguous" (Ch 6)

Our images of Hell are not found in the canonical gospels but in pagan authors and non-canonical writings such as the Apocalypse of Peter  and the Apocalypse of Paul (Ch 7)

We are told that all these non-canonical versions (not 'apocryphal' because they were rarely hidden and were often the most popular accounts) should not be regarded as not important because they can be unbelievable: "that is to miss the point. Such texts matter not because they are believable - but because they were believed and read by Christians for centuries. It is understandable that some Christian historians may have wished to ignore them - but it is intellectually indefensible to do so. Do so and you are not writing history, but theology with dates.” (109)

This is an immensely readable and important book. 

Selected quotes:

• “Most people do not require being a flogged with leaden weights to abandon their ideas; for most, the fear that they might lose their job, or that they might merely lose a friend, is enough to make them change their beliefs - or at least stop talking about them." (Introduction)
• “Things first become unwritable, then unsayable and finally unthinkable.” (Introduction)
• “A great deal of all ancient religion was a little more than healthcare with a halo.” (Ch 2)
• “For all the brilliance of Greek and Roman medicine, doctors nonetheless struggled to identify the difference between the seemingly obvious conditions of ‘being dead’ and ‘being alive’.” (Ch 2)
• “There were spells in the Greek magical papyri that offered a far larger menu than Jesus managed ... not only loaves and fishes but side orders too.” (Ch 4)
• “A Roman gladiator had better odds of surviving a fight than an emperor did of enjoying a peaceful conclusion to his reign.” (Ch 12))
• "Bishops had been consolidating their power for centuries ... Bishops started to command that everything in a church must go through them: baptism without a bishop did not, or so bishops argued, count; Eucharist without a bishop did not count either. Prayers, bishops argued, worked better with a bishop present.” (Ch 15)
• “It was perfectly clear to numerous ancient observers that religions were less separate entities, virgin-born and pristine, than variations on a theme ... The names were different perhaps, but the deities were fundamentally the same.” (Ch 16)
• “It was a common complaint that the church persecuted less from a love of righteousness than from a love of real estate.” (Ch 18)
• “Books are not being burned maybe to bring about controlled today: they are being burned for posterity; they are being burned to control the memory of the future.” (Ch 19)
• “The past is not merely today in togas; it is far odder and more eccentric than we often expect.” (Ch 19)

May 2025; 279 pages

Published by Picador in 2004

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Angels" by Peter Stanford

Stanford traces the origins of our modern idea of angels, from their origin in Zoroastrian and Egyptian religion, through their developments in the Old Testament and, subsequently, in Christian and Moslem thought, and later through the Kabbalah, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Despite the thoroughness of the survey, my interest hardly ever waned, and the book ended up strewn with marker-stickers. A fascinating study of a bizarre aspect of mainstream religious thought.

Selected quotes:

“My mother had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis just before she found she was pregnant with me. By the time I could walk, she couldn't.” (Prelude)
“Both Homer and Hesiod also refer to daimons, lesser deities, somewhere between humans and the gods, who act as benign guiding spirits, and sometimes have wings or winged sandals, though often they cannot be seen at all.” (Ch 1)
“one of the things that united them [the sages of the Axial Age] was impatience with the doctrinal codes, rules, prescriptions and carefully plotted hierarchies that we nowadays tend to associate with organised religion.” (Ch 1) 
“The bodhisattvas of Buddhism , guides to meaningful spiritual life, mythical, awesome in power, radiance and wisdom, but simultaneously as ordinary as your next-door neighbour.” (Ch 1)
“Later, what were purported to be relics of the Archangel Michael ... became popular. Since officially angels did not have tangible bodies, it was in purely theological terms a strange outbreak of piety.” (Ch 7)

May 2022; 305 pages

Also by Peter Stanford and recommended by this blog:

• Judas

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan

 

This quiet spot off the River Ouse in Bedford was where John Bunyan baptised people.

This classic allegory is one of the best-selling books ever. It was written in 1678 by John Bunyan, a tinker who had been a soldier with the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War,  while he was in Bedford prison for being an unlicensed preacher during the religious repressions following the restoration of the English monarchy. 

It is presented as a series of dreams. The characters are, as was the fashion of the time, named for the characteristics: thus Christian, Mr Valiant-for-Truth, Mr Standfast, Mercy and so on. In the first part Christian travels through hardships such as the Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of Death and encounters temptations such as Vanity Fair and monsters such as Apollyon before fording the River of Death. In the second part, Christian's wife Christiana and his four sons form the nucleus of a party making a second pilgrimage in his by-now-famous footsteps. 

The prose is inevitably old-fashioned. There are no chapters but there are marginal annotations which describe which part of the story you are in. Poems, presumably hymns, are interspersed through the narrative.

Some of it is rather tedious theologising - it is, after all, a sermon - but the picaresque story, despite the inevitability of the happy ending, still has its charm.

The book has been hugely  influential, not least to other writers such as George Eliot (for example in Silas Marner). Some of the quotations below have reached the status of proverbs. And, of course, it contains 'Bunyan's hymn': 

"Who would true valour see,Let him come hither;One here will constant be,Come wind, come weather;There's no discouragementShall make him once relentHis first avowed intentTo be a pilgrim.

"Who so beset him roundWith dismal stories,Do but themselves confound—His strength the more is.No lion can him fright;He'll with a giant fight;But he will have a rightTo be a pilgrim.

"Hobgoblin nor foul fiendCan daunt his spirit;He knows he at the endShall life inherit.Then fancies fly away,He'll fear not what men say;He'll labour night and dayTo be a pilgrim."
It has been rated best in the Guardian's top 100 novels of all time.

Selected quotations:

Part One

• "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream." (First line)
• "there is a company of these crazy-headed coxcombs, that, when they take a fancy by the end, are wiser in their own eyes than seven men that can render a reason."
• "He is, by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them."
• "What you will. I will talk of things heavenly, or things earthly; things moral, or things evangelical; things sacred, or things worldly; things past, or things to come; things foreign, or things at home; things more essential, or things circumstantial, provided that all be done to our profit."
• "at this fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not."
• "to tell you the truth, I am become a gentleman of good quality, yet my great-grandfather was but a waterman, looking one way and rowing another, and I got most of my estate by the same occupation."
• "we are always most zealous when religion goes in his silver slippers; we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines, and the people applaud him."
• "Sin was very sweet to my flesh, and I was loath to leave it."

Part Two

• "Now the seal was the contents and sum of the passover which the children of Israel did eat when they came out from the land of Egypt, and the mark was set between their eyes." 
• "Why doth the pelican pierce her own breast with her bill? ... To nourish her young ones with her blood, and thereby to show that Christ the blessed so loveth his young, his people, as to save them from death by his blood." 
• "the way is the way, and there's an end."
• "I know thou art a cock of the right kind, for thou hast said the truth."
• "Mr. Fearing was one that played upon this bass; he and his fellows sound the sackbut, whose notes are more doleful than the notes of other music are; though, indeed, some say the bass is the ground of music. ... The first string that the musician usually touches is the bass, when he intends to put all in tune."
• "When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went he said, 'Death, where is thy sting?' And as he went down deeper, he said, 'Grave, where is thy victory?' So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

April 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"God Drives a Flying Saucer" by R L Dione

I love books like this. I love the warped and twisted logic. I love way rhetoric is deployed in place of rationality. And I admire the authors for being able to get a publishing deal for such transparent lunacy.

R L Dione offends scholarly standards of evidence in so many ways:

• The references that he gives for his claims are (deliberately?) uncheckable; for example: 
• “An ancient papyrus from Egypt” (Ch 1)
• “Research at Cornell University has established that ... electromagnetic radiation bypasses the auditory system, directly stimulating the brain, producing a buzzing sensation.” (Ch 4)
• “From recent flying-saucer reports it appears that saucerians can also glow and appear luminous - probably by means of a sterilizing device built into their uniforms.” (Ch 6)
• "Consider, for example, the two satellites of Mars, which many astronomers believe to be artificial.” (Ch 10)
• Sometimes the evidence he offers is completely absence, such as: 
• “UFOs appear and disappear by the simple expediency of adjusting their luminosity and color to blend with the luminosity and color of the background.” (Ch 2)
• “Remarkable heating effects characterize many UFO encounters.” (Ch 4)
• He uses the trope of 'things we don't yet know or understand': "UFOs operate on some electromagnetic principle not yet known to mankind - an electromagnetic principle which perhaps can create and control its own gravitational field.” (Ch 3)
• Alternatively, he uses the argument that 'since you can't prove me wrong I must be right': “theory can be neither proved nor disproved, and since its verification would explain all the flight characteristics of UFOs, thus eliminating the necessity for accusing millions of witnesses of having mass hallucinations or of lying, I can see no justification for assuming that it is in error.” (Ch 3)
• He claims certainty for things that are debatable: (my highlights)
• “Another established fact is that UFOs while in flight sometimes emit a tangible substance that drifts down to the ground." (Ch 4)
• “If the Lady can predict great disasters why can she not predict whether her people will obey? ... It seems obvious, therefore, that she is not supernatural.” (Ch 6) 
• “Surely he’s describing nothing else than a flying saucer” (Ch 7)
• He offers a limited set of alternatives and then dismisses the straw men he has set up, forcing us to choose his favoured alternative without considering the many other possibilities. For example, when discussing the truth or otherwise of miracles, he says that the alternatives are:
• “We can deny the truth of the Bible ...” (Ch 7)
• “We can accept it as true ... claiming supernatural powers are responsible.” (Ch 7)
• “We can accept it as true and explain it as a manifestation of supertechnological devices.” (Ch 7)
• He attacks those he doesn't like ad hominem while credulously believing in that trope of UFOlogists, the 'reliable witness': “Philosophers, other intellectuals and clergyman have bumbled, and continue to bumble, with the idea that the essence of man is a strange mixture of a physical and spiritual being. They bumble, because such a view is inconsistent with reason" (Ch 8)

This book is also distinguished by the author's errors in simple Physics, such as when he confuses mass and weight, so deciding that the "neutralization" of Earth's gravitational field would make a spaceship's inertial mass zero (Ch 3) or when he describes momentum as “the force which throws drivers against windshields in car accidents” (Ch 3)

Other selected quotes:

•  "No system of logic yet devised can resolve the inconsistencies and paradoxes inherent in the belief that man is inhabited by a mystical supernatural and immortal something called a soul.” (Ch 8) 
• “Aristotle was on the right track when he said, ‘ if the eye were a body, Vision would be its soul.’ in other words, the soul is the function of the body: the thoughts, the acts and all the emotions ... but ... the existence of spiritual characteristics, such as emotions, does not validate the dualistic view that man is both spiritual and physical. If it did, then by the same reasoning we could prove that a car or a radio or any other inanimate object is both spiritual and physical.” (Ch 8)
• “Most of us believe that God wants us to live a good life and to believe in Him, for which He will in the end reward us with life everlasting. ... The question is, What does God get out of it?” (Ch 10)
• "God ... brags, He cajoles, and He even threatens us in an attempt to win our faith in Him and our love for Him. ... If the father of a family on earth were to demand love a respect the way that God does of His family, he would be considered a psychopath.” (Ch 10)

Entertaining nonsense. April 2022; 131 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Reflections on the Psalms" by C S Lewis

The Psalms are a mixture of poems in the Bible. They contains praises, laments, and curses. C S Lewis provides a series of non-scholarly reflections on them. As usual, there are moments where he makes contentious statements without backing them up (because the only evidence he needs is what is for him self-evidence: that his version of Christianity is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth) but in this volume they are more than balanced by the very real insights he gives.

He points out that the Psalmists concept of God as Judge is different from that of nowadays: a modern Christian tends to see himself as the defendant in a criminal court being judged for his sins whereas the Psalmists see themselves as self-righteous plaintiffs in a civil case, calling on God to judge in their favour: “The Psalmist is the indignant plaintiff. He is quite sure, apparently, that his own hands are clean. He never did to others the horrid things that others are doing to him.” (C 2)

Many Psalms involve curses. For example, Psalm 137 which starts with the lament “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and wept; when we thought about Zion” goes on in verse 9 to say to the Babylonians “Happy be they, who shall take hold of thy little children; and hurtle them against a stone”. Lewis points out that the writers of the Psalms are “much more vindictive and vitriolic than the Pagans” (C 3) and explains this by suggesting that the Psalmists feel more deeply and are thus morally ‘higher’: “It is great men, potential saints, not little men, who become merciless fanatics.” (C 3) It seems to me that this argument not only endeavours to excuse hatred but to do so by expressing contempt for (a) ordinary people and (b) pagans.

He points out that the Psalmists accepted death as the end, in stark contrast to many of the religions around them, eg the Egyptians who saw life as a preparation for the afterlife.

When he list the many times when the Psalmists tell their listeners to shun wickedness, Lewis points out an interesting moral conundrum: "How ought we to behave in the presence of ... very bad people who are powerful, prosperous and impenitent. If they are outcasts, poor and miserable, whose wickedness obviously has not ‘paid’, then ... Christ with the woman taken in adultery ... is our example.” (C 7)

Finally he asks whether God's demands that we should praise him reveal a weak character: “We all despise the man who demands the continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of people round every dictator, every millionaire, every celebrity, who gratify that demand.” (C 8). He points out that “The world rings with praise - lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game - praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars.” (C 8) He concludes that praise adds to our pleasure: “I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.” (C 8) So God commands us to praise him because he wants us to enjoy him to the full. “In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.” (C 8)

This is a thought-provoking book ... but it hasn't converted me from atheism.

Special moments:

• “Our generation was brought up to eat everything on the plate; and it was the sound principle of nursery gastronomy to polish off the nasty things first and leave the titbits to the end.” (C 1)
• “The humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least. The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works.” (C 8)

July 2021; 115 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

CS Lewis was also the author of: these books reviewed in this blog:

His science fiction trilogy

• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength

Theology:

• The Great Divorce
• God in the Dock

Literary criticism:

• The Discarded Image

Autobiography:

• Surprised by Joy

Of course he wrote the Narnia children's books as well.

Biographis of C S Lewis reviewed in this blog:

• Jack: C S Lewis and his times by George Sayer
• C.S.Lewis: a biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper

"The Problem of Pain" by C S Lewis

In Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, the hero Yossarian gets angry at the thought of a God who has created a world in which there is pain: "Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who found it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when he robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain? ... Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead? Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't he?”

In this book C S Lewis attempts to show why pain is not only necessary but good, from a theological point of view. He argues that God uses pain to shake us out of our complacency. When we are happy and content, we tend not to think of God. But when we are suffering, we seek God as a comfort. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” (Ch 6)

Fundamentally CSL believes that the ultimate human happiness lies in submission to God. He uses the analogy of a man with a pet dog: “The association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man’s sake: he tames the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it may love him, and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it ...man interferes with the dog ... In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man’s love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem ... to cast grave doubts on the ‘goodness’ of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog ... would have no such doubts.” (Ch 3)

Another analogy, often used in Christianity, is of God as father. But CSL's ideal father is fundamnetally authoritarian: “Love between father and son ... means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make his son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be.” (Ch 3)

Pain is therefore the way God whips us into obedience, using the pretext that it is good for us in the long run. This sounds like a classic justification for tyranny. 

CSL is aware of this: “These Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration.” (Ch 3)

On the whole this is not the sort of God one would choose, if one had a choice. 

But presumably to a man like CSL, an Oxbridge don, cocooned in multiple privileges, this is the perfect God because he is the perfect excuse for authority, the authority of the master over the slave, the man over the dog, the father over the child, the husband over the wife, the boss over the worker. Pain and suffering can be justified because it props up the status quo. The only true sin is rebellion.

It wouldn't be so bad if I could feel that CSL's arguments were unanswerable. After all, he was regarded as an expert in three fields: theology, fiction, and mediaeval literature. So it is shocking to discover how clumsy his arguments are.

He has a habit of introducing hypotheses as if they were fact. For example, he states: “Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator” (Ch 6) This statement is unevidenced. But he never makes clear that it is an assumption that could be challenged. He then bases his arguments upon this statement. But there are alternatives! You could instead say: ‘The proper good of a creature is to fulfil its potential’. This would lead to radically different conclusions. Such a use of unacknowledged hypotheses suggests either that he is insufficiently imaginative to conceive of alternative points of view, or that he is using rhetoric in place of reason.

He also enjoys offering dichotomies. This is another rhetorical technique which allows a propagandist to bolster a weak argument. For example, he describes Jesus and says “only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way.” (Ch 1) Which is an absurd statement. There are lots and lots of middle ways. Jesus might have been sincere but mistaken, for example. He is deliberately narrowing down the reader's choices to two alternatives so that by demolishing one, you are forced to accept the other. And notice how the work of demolition is packaged into the choice by his description 'unusually abominable'. 

In another example he says that our experience of the Numinous (eg dread as opposed to fear) can be explained in only two ways: “either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function ... or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural.” (Ch 1). Of course this is not the only choice. And again, he blackens the path he dislikes, with the adjective 'mere' and the qualifier 'nothing objective and serving no biological function'. (I would argue that dreams are natural but potentially numinous and that dread and wonder could easily have a biological function, as does curiosity.)

There are some thought-provoking moments:

• I liked his limitation of omnipotence to "all that is intrinsically possible” but not to intrinsic impossibilities such as self-contradictory concepts: “All things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities.” (Ch 2)
• “Our prehistoric ancestors made all the useful discoveries, except that of chloroform, which have ever been made. To them we owe language, the family, clothing, the use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry and agriculture.” (Ch 5) I'm not sure I agree, however.
• Adam and Eve “wanted ... to ‘call their souls their own’. But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe where they could say to God, ‘This is our business, not yours’. But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.” (Ch 5) Accept your subservience. Do not rebel.
• “We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.” (Ch 6)
• “The terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. ... Let him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over - I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed.” (Ch 6) 
  
• “If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it.” (Ch 8)
• “The intrinsic evil of the animal world lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other.” (Ch 9) He is saying that animals are fundamentally evil because some of them are predators.
• “If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the  Church Triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note." (Ch 10)

But overall I was appalled at the attitudes revealed in this book and even more shocked at the lack of academic rigour in the arguments. At least it was short.

February 2021; 123 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

CS Lewis was also the author of these books reviewed in this blog:

His science fiction trilogy

• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength

Theology:

• The Great Divorce
• God in the Dock
• The Problem of Pain

Literary criticism:

• The Discarded Image

Autobiography:

• Surprised by Joy

Of course he wrote the Narnia children's books as well.

"Making Beds in Brothels" by Adam Brock

Following a horrendous childhood, in which he was regularly beaten and possibly sexually abused by his father, a man who exhibited symptoms of mental illness, Adam was raped as a young teenager in a gay bar in Manchester. He became a child prostitute before working as a rent boy in brothels in Amsterdam and London. Somehow he survived. 

In this memoir, Adam reserves his strongest condemnation not for the clients who hired him. “I dislike categorising all those who pay for sex as somehow predatory or deviant; they are drawn from as wide a pool as any other group of humanity.” (C 17) He has compassion even for Mitchell, a long-time friend, who stole from him: “what kind of person steals the crutches from a man with a broken back?” (C 23). He feels that, as a child, he was repeatedly failed by the system. “Three times I went to the austere police station in the centre of Mobberley and reported that my father was abusing me. Three times nothing was done. No social workers were called, no review or check by the police, not a single investigation. All that happened was that each time I was returned to my father, and later received the beatings of my life as a result.” (C 5)

The youth leaders of his gay teenager group encouraged them to go to the bar where he was raped and, later, rented. A teacher refused to discuss his sexuality with him (it was illegal at the time for teachers to 'encourage' homosexuality under section 28 of the Local Government Act). Still well underage, he plied his trade unchallenged: “I regularly worked on the streets, between the age of fourteen and seventeen, and was never once stopped and asked what I was doing by a police officer, not a single time. And I was doing it in broad daylight, in a public area for the entire world to see, often under high spec surveillance cameras.” (C 9) “After escaping my father and moving to Manchester, aged fourteen, I was placed in local authority care with ‘Mad Anne’. Anne had a different man home every other night. Then, at sixteen, there was the city homeless shelter at Downing Street, a square red brick building with dormer roof, long demolished. I was a small, vulnerable kid living with city down and outs; the insane, the hopeless. My abiding memory of that place was simply how scary it was.” (C 13)

Many memoirs suffer from their 'one thing after another' structure (as opposed to novels in which the novelist is able to shape the narrative so that it grows and swells and creates meaning). I didn't notice it so much with this book, perhaps because of the shocking nature of the subject. It isn't strong on the detail of the sex, perhaps because Adam has become a born-again Christian; if you want to know about what goes on between a rentboy and his client I recommend Street Kid by Ned Williams. Both Adam and 'Steven' were sexually abused by their fathers; both identify as gay. Adam has a considerably longer career as a sex worker than 'Steven', perhaps because he spends most of his time in the more controlled environment of the brothel. But he ends up more damaged; 'Steven' starts his narrative with a nostalgic return to the streets and bars where he plied his trade.

The last part of the book describes Adam finding God. It makes interesting reading if you are concerned about the Problem of Evil, the idea that God cannot be both omnipotent and good because people suffer: 

• “There seems no need for a fiery hell elsewhere anyway, because many of us already dwell in it” (C 24)
• “there is a causality between God and sinfulness. Not that God inspires sin, but rather that we are of God and the world is of God, and sin happens through the sinner’s own freewill.” (C 24)
• “Sometimes my relationship with God seems to mirror my relationship with my father. Why does the omnipresent Deity, who ultimately oversees everything, allow me to suffer so much? If I deserve it and I’m being punished, are the words we are fed about a compassionate God who is radically forgiving, meaningless, empty promises meant simply to placate us? Presumably you can’t be both loving and drive someone into an early grave.” (C 27)
• “God says, I oversaw your abuse, you inevitably strayed due to the damage and de-normalisation of childhood trauma, now I’m going to punish you, perhaps till the strain becomes too much. But this is okay, this is the way to your redemption.” (C 27)
• “If hell is redemptive, as someone once told me, then it’s a bitter cup for all of us who have already suffered it.” (C 27)

Selected quotes:

• “Mobberley struggles along the bottom of a narrow valley, the town clawing unsuccessfully up the sides of the Pennines. The terrain halts the spread of development and the town remains low, dense and grey” (C 2)
• “It was a tough, unattractive place, hard on the lungs. You tasted the toxins in air, which gave the atmosphere a soupy, viscous quality that caught in the nostrils.” (C 2)
• “he grinds his strong white teeth into my face, pushing my head hard against them.” (C 3)
• “We didn’t learn the normal ways of regulating anger that children do. We didn’t throw tantrums or disobey in the normal way, everything was suppressed for fear of retribution.” (C 3)
• “for all the religion in that house there was an absolute absence of God.” (C 4)
• “He claimed that during the time he spent at his grandparents, he was aware of the dead that his grandmother invoked and that they tormented him in the dark.” (C 4)
• “Sometimes she forgot to fry the eggs, the yolks floating in viscous clear whites on your plate, frying the peas instead and boiling the chips.” (C 7)
• “Why did I keep going back after he had done so much? Because I was lonely. Because there was security in our familiarity. If I’m honest, I had no one else.” (C 7)
• “It may seem unlikely but If you want to know about good and bad people, ask prostitutes. A prostitute who doesn’t develop a nose for people’s hidden character – for what they are not telling you, or what they actually want as opposed to what they are saying they want – isn’t going to survive very long.” (C 10)
• “I once knew a man, a regular in the Old Reform bar in Manchester, who told me he purposefully supplied his lovers with drugs till they eventually become addicted, and then took pleasure in watching their lives fall apart. What he did was promote behaviour that might lead to these young men’s death; playing with their lives. He justified himself by saying that the men deserved it in some way: that they were using him and this was his means of revenge.” (C 10)
• “Both of us had been handed the sticky end of the lollipop and felt the world owed us something but we owed it nothing.” (C 10)
• “The Earl’s Court of my recollection smells of dust, the stink of the cars. Dust clings heavy to the buildings, trees, streets with the tenacity of lint, like static adhered to laundry.” (C 13)
• “Every surface is covered with thrift store tat” (C 13)
• “Her perfume is her most memorable feature. It is mixture of patchouli, cannabis, stale sweat and the yeasty scent of body parts best not thought of; your nose knows of her presence long before your eyes” (C 13)
• “Would I know if I was dead? How do we know which of us are restless spirits that seek to undo what has been done, to untangle the Gordian knot of our lives?” (C 13)
• “One day you are young, the party is in full swing, then you blink, and everyone has left, and you are forty-nine, working reception in a doss house.” (C 13)
• “This was a business where not taking care of the product, in other words ourselves, was counterproductive. If I was going to survive and thrive, I had to take self-care seriously.” (C 15)
• “Commodification of the individual makes it possible to regard ourselves as any other product that is influenced by supply, demand or quantity.” (C 16)
• “I objectified myself as a means of meeting market requirements; I adjusted my appearance and persona.” (C 16)
• “A good scenario could reduce the time of the ‘massage’ considerably, the customer often becoming overwhelmed by the excitement.” (C 16)
• “We were the equivalent of a gourmet hot dog. Street enough to make the men feel as if they were buying into the ghetto fantasy, but without the risk of developing salmonella.” (C 16)
• “When you were in the sex-worker bubble, you ... lived, slept, socialised and worked in a very small area, so it was easier sometimes just to stay in character. The risk is, that you inevitably lose yourself to a greater or lesser degree, when you live a lie over an extended period of time.” (C 16)
• “There is a click and the room is suddenly brightly lit. The glass door in front of us, which initially looked like smoked glass, becomes an impenetrable mirror, through which we can see nothing other than our selves reflected back. In the darkness of the hallway, however, the customer can see each of us clearly under the bright spot-lights. We pull in our stomachs, pout our lips, predicating the duck face of the ubiquitous selfie by decades, as we try to make ourselves irresistible. A few moments pass. There is a sharp tap on the window, and the lights go out.” (C 17)
• “Being the first is almost talismanic, for it means you can relax – anything else will be gravy. Once you have that first client out of the way, everything will be all right. The anxiety is always that you won’t work that day.” (C 17)
• “There is an old saying about prostitutes, two great years, two okay years and two shit years.” ( 21)
• “My needs were always immediate. The immediate need for accommodation, for money or food. I needed drink and drugs to suppress the inevitable anxiety.” (C 21)
• “I needed to polish off entire bottles of neat whiskey to bring myself down from the drugs long enough for a few hours’ sleep.” (C 23)
• “That morning, suffering from drug-induced psychosis and under the impression I was under attack from demons waiting outside my door, that something that I could hear laughing and cajoling me with murderous intent in their voices was about to enter the room and consume me, I defenestrated myself, in spectacular fashion, hurtling myself out of the third story window, and falling in a shower of broken glass. I felt no fear as I flew through the air, toppling towards the concrete below.” (C 23)
• “I was surrounded by voices of the dead who screamed into my ears, arguing whether I should live or die. I swear that, at that point, I felt as if I was overhearing a conversation taking place around me. That these spirits and others would decide my fate.” (C 23)
• “The most painful lesson you will ever learn is to understand that it is you yourself who is often the chief architect of your own misery.” (C 24)
• “Perhaps death has a quota that needs to be met, and my chance survival has put me on death’s list of escapees.” (C 24)
• “for years I had socialised with those who contributed to my exploitation. I saw these men walking down the street and rather than rushing over to them and screaming in their faces, striking them with my fists, I did nothing. I would sit next to them in a bar, and even nod acknowledgement to them. This normalisation now strikes me as perverse and it’s that normalisation that allows it to continue.” (C 25)
• “when you are hopeless you cling to any possibility that life will improve.” (C 27) Except he didn't. At one stage he tried to kill himself.

Mesmerising reading. December 2020

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Early Church" by Henry Chadwick

 A classic authoritative account of the history of the Christian church from c 35 CE (immediately after the crucifixion of Jesus) up to the late 500s CE. 

I was seeking some information on the doctrinal disputes of the early church: I wanted to understand the theological bases for heresies and orthodoxies; this wish was not well satisfied. Although Chadwick does spend some time explicating the theologies, he is much more interested in the power struggles. These could get tedious.

The final chapter summarises the overall historical trends and, for my money, could well have come first to structure the narrative. Chadwick suggests that the priorities for the first century was to move away from the apostolic tradition, with its availability of actual witnesses, towards a written tradition: this was a period in which the development of some sort of authorised canon was important. Simultaneously, the church was endeavouring to develop its organisation from a few local cells, each of a few believers, to an empire-wide religion; the speed with which Christianity spread surprised even the faithful. Once Christianity became a state sponsored religion, there were tussles for power and influence between the head honchos of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch and other places; these were at about the same time as the Roman Empire was splitting into two, or three, or four, and warring claimants were trying to unify the empire (under themselves). 

A thorough account of a turbulent time, but I have found it difficult to develop a clear overview.

Some interesting moments:

• “Paul perceived that the doctrine of the imminent end of the world was a liability rather than an asset in evangelizing the Greek world where the dominant speculative interest was in the beginning of things." (C 1)
• "The Ophites (i.e. serpent worshippers) argued that since through the serpent Adam and Eve had come to have knowledge of good and evil, he was a good power, the Leviathan encircling the cosmos with his tail in his mouth to symbolise eternity, who had out-maneuvered the inferior creator and his son Jesus.” (C 2)
• "The existence of four versions of the gospel was a troublesome puzzle in itself. Marcion ... accepted only one.” (C 2)
• “Christianity did not give political emancipation to either women or slaves, but it did much to elevate their domestic status by its doctrine that all are created in God’s image and all alike redeemed in Christ; and they must therefore be treated with sovereign respect." (C 3)
• “In Christian eyes the intense particularity of Judaism was incompatible with its own monotheistic principles: was not their God the God of the Gentiles also? (cf. Rom. iii, 29–30).” (C 3)
• “Tertullian’s conception of the Christian life is first and foremost as a battle with the devil. This led him to ... conceive of the intellectual task of the Christian thinker as a conflict with diabolical forces. ... If he could outmanoeuvre the devil by dialectical subtlety, so much the better.” (C 5)
• “Throughout the fifth century poetry and secular historical writing tended to remain in pagan hands.” (C 11)
• “Detachment from vanity fair was easier to those who expected the end of the world in the imminent future than to those who expected the historical process to roll on and who possessed some modest property to pass on to their children.” (C 12)
• “A force of peasant monks was an ideal instrument for destroying pagan temples and for conflicts with heresy.” (C 12)
• “Evagrius loved sharp, pregnant, obscure maxims.” (C 12)
• “since nature also is the good gift of the Creator. Nothing ‘natural’ can be evil. The sex instinct is only wrong when used in a way outside the limits laid down by God,” (C 15)
• “dancing did not succeed in becoming a natural and approved vehicle of religious expression, except in Ethiopia.” (C 18)
• “The representation of Christ as the Almighty Lord on his judgement throne owed something to pictures of Zeus.” (C 18)

November 2020

"God in the Dock" by C S Lewis

A set of thirteen sermons and essays by  CS Lewis in which he explains his position on a variety of tenets of the Christian faith, including whether the church should allow 'priestesses' (no) and whether a man has the right to happiness (no).

Having previously enjoyed Lewis's theological writings, I was very disappointed by this one. When defending the idea of Christianity he doesn't really ever understand the objection that it might be all a made-up myth; often he depends his point of view by presupposing the truth of Christianity. He has a weak argument from ontology when he argues in favour of belief in miracles: "even to think and act in the natural world we have to assume something beyond it” (Miracles)

He seems endlessly sceptical when it comes to historical assertions and endlessly gullible when it comes to scriptural ones: “When the Old Testament says that Sennacherib’s Invasion was stopped by angels, and Herodotus says it was stopped by a lot of mice who came and ate up all the bowstrings of his army, an open-minded man will be on the side of the angels ... there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in the existence of angels ... but mice just don’t do these things.” (Miracles). He accuses science of being dogmatic because it extrapolates observations beyond what has been observed; this is how he refutes the second law of thermodynamics, a refutation needed by him in order to justify the resurrection (surely dogmatism involves asserting things against all other evidence).

He uses the oft-repeated idea that if science cannot explain everything (as it admits) therefore his dogma MUST be true to fill the gap: “It is certainly a possible supposition that behind this mystery some mighty will and life is at work. If so, so any contrast between his acts and the laws of nature is out of the question. It is his act alone that gives the laws any events to apply to.” (The Laws of Nature) It is breathtaking how he can move from identifying a hole to filling it with "out of the question" in consecutive sentences.

• “The laws of nature explain everything except the source of events ... how there came to be space and time and matter at all.” (The Laws of Nature)
• “Either the stream of events had a beginning or it had not. If it had, then we are faced with something like creation.” (The Laws of Nature)

He is clever about reconciling Free Will with the doctrine of an omnipotent God: we have free will because God, in his wisdom, for purposes we cannot understand, permits us to have free will even though he needn't (and presumably even though his omniscience allows him to see where our exercise of freedom will end): “God has made it a rule for Himself that He won't alter people's character by Force ... He has really and truly limited his power. Sometimes we wonder why He has done so, or even wish that He hadn’t. But apparently He thinks it worth doing. He would rather have a world of free beings, with all its risks, than a world of people who did right like machines because they couldn't do anything else.”

In this book he does not tackle the Problem of Evil (how a supposedly omnipotent and good God can allow innocent people to suffer. In some ways, he embraces evil. He tells us that the Christian concept of the Incarnation (God came to earth in the body of a man) "lights up nature’s pattern of death and rebirth; and secondly, her selectiveness; and thirdly, her vicariousness.” (Death and Rebirth) This implies that he approves of 'selectiveness' (which he suggests is the antithesis of democracy, or egalitarianism: “I cannot conceive how one would get through the boredom of a world in which you never met anyone more clever, or more beautiful, or stronger than yourself.”; Death and Rebirth) and 'vicariousness': “one person profiting by the earnings of another person ... is the very centre of Christianity.” (Death and Rebirth). These doctrines may seem fine when you are an Oxford don in the Senior Common Room; they may seem less wonderful if you are poor and suffering. Inequality and capitalism are the way God has made the world.

He can be even more right wing. For me, the essence of being a good citizen is getting along with others and assisting those who are less fortunate than oneself. Not for CSL: “The vital elements of citizenship - loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principle, splendour, ceremony, continuity.” (Myth Became Fact).

He is a traditionalist in the church: “To cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the divisions between ourselves and other churches by establishing an order of priestesses in our midst, would be an almost wanton degree of imprudence.” (Priestesses in the Church?)

He is dismissive of other religions: "We all know about Adonis, and the stories of the rest of those rather tedious people” although he accepts that non-Christians can live a good life ... if they cannot believe in Christianity. But being good is not that important: “Mere morality is not the end of life.” (Man or Rabbit)

Some wonderful or interesting moments:

• “The interpretation of experience depends on preconceptions.” (Miracles)
• “It is a great step forward to realize ... that even if all external things went right, real happiness would still depend on the character of the people you have to live with.” (The Trouble with X)
• “You also have a fatal flaw in your character. ... It is no good passing this over with some vague, general admission such as ‘Of course I know I have my faults’. It is important to realise that there is some really fatal flaw in you: something which gives the others just that same feeling of despair which their flaws give you. And it is almost certainly something you don't know about ... You say ‘I admit I drank too much last Saturday’; but everyone else knows that you are habitual drunkard.” (The Trouble with X)
• “As the state grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters.” (Priestesses in the Church?)
• A right is “a claim guaranteed me by the laws, and correlative to an obligation on someone else's part.” (We have no right to Happiness)

I was very disappointed by this book for two reasons. Firstly, I find the the arguments advanced in favour of Christianity being true unconvincing. Secondly, I think that the version of Christianity outlined by CSL is fundamentally intolerant of other faiths (especially atheism, which he repeatedly confuses with Materialism), authoritarian and inegalitarian.

It isn't a difficult book to read: each short essay is a few pages and they could be read on their own. He is able to convey his views clearly and concisely. But other books are better.

CS Lewis was also the author of: these books reviewed in this blog:

• His science fiction trilogy
• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength
• Theology:
• The Great Divorce
• Literary criticism:
• The Discarded Image
• Autobiography:
• Surprised by Joy

Of course he wrote the Narnia children's books as well.

July 2020; 108 pages