Change & Decay In All Around I See

Thursday 11 December 2008, 11:54PM

‘Christian Voice’ and the Areopagus

Goya, 'Inquisition Scene'

The indefatigable - and rather loathsome - fundamentalist group Christian Voice have emerged again in the past couple of weeks, this time trying to censor publication of a collection of poems. The book, Darkness Is Where The Stars Are by Patrick Jones, includes a poem speculating - in vivid terms - about the nature of Christ’s relationship with Mary Magdalene.

Were they an item? It’s a hoary old chestnut, a weary, irresolvable debate in which Christians have been engaged since the time of the Church Fathers. For all I know there might be some truth in the stubborn, ancient traditions that Jesus was married. There’s no way of knowing, and I don’t think Christians need spend much time worrying about it. There are surely more interesting and important things about Jesus than that.

For Christian Voice, though, it matters, and it matters so much that they don’t want anyone to have the option to think differently on the subject than they do. Pressure exerted by the group led to the cancellation of an event at a Welsh branch of Waterstones where the writer was due to sign copies (pretty spineless behaviour on the part of Waterstones). Now Christian Voice are trying to get the book removed for sale from all branches. They find it blasphemous, and that’s an end to it.

Now I don’t know whether the offending collection has artistic merit or not: I haven’t been able to find extracts online. It doesn’t matter what I think, or what Christian Voice think. The book seeks to represent and preserve for posterity the essence of somebody’s thoughts. In that regard it is precious, and deserves our respect.

Reading about this brought to mind another event this week, the 400th anniversary of John Milton’s birth, and in particular, a series the BBC has been running in commemoration, which has included several discussions of Milton’s 1644 polemic against censorship, Areopagitica (named after the Areopagus - the ‘Hill of Mars’ in Athens where citizens met in ancient times to debate freely). It’s a magnificent work that recognises, addresses, and destroys our temptation to censor what we don’t like. It’s worth quoting at least one passage in full:

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. ‘Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

And later, another passage that fundamentalist groups of every stripe should note (but won’t) in regard to addressing seriously worldviews other than their own:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.