“A Portrait of the Artist”, Evil and Institutional Evil

Lying on its battered side, a 1960 edition of James Joyce’s autobiographical “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” came into view. One or two penciled notes inside indicated that it must have been mine for ‘O’ level GCE. I don’t know how much I really appreciated it then but as I thumbed through it, towards the end, I found just one place where I had marked something in ink: “… and if Jesus suffered the children to come why does the church send them all to hell if they die unbaptized? Why is that?

Anyway that helped me to decide to re-read it and in doing so it has re-awakened issues related to my own upbringing as a Roman Catholic brought up in an Anglo-Irish Protestant environment.

Before I relate how the book was evocative of my own education at the hands of the Benedictine monks at Ealing Abbey, I will just tuck to one side the deeply divisive effect created within Joyce’s own family (and elsewhere) by the descent into “disgrace” of that political colossus of the nineteenth century, Charles Stewart Parnell. His monument today stands proudly at the north end of O’Connell Street in Dublin. Another monument in O’Connell Street used to be Nelson’s Pillar, which was blown up in 1966 by the IRA, and at the other end stands the emancipator Daniel O’Connell. There was always a certain irony that Ireland had these three adulterers standing up on high pedestals in view of one another in the main street of “catholic” Ireland’s capital city.

The Liberal leader H. H. Asquith called Parnell one of the three or four greatest men of the 19th century, while Lord Haldane described him as the strongest man the House of Commons had seen in 150 years. The thing that destroyed this Irish political colossus (for Land Reform and for Irish Home Rule) was because of a long-standing relationship with Kitty O’Shea with whom he had fallen in love at first sight and fathered three children. Quite cynically her husband Captain William O’Shea would not grant a divorce because his wife had expectations of coming into a legacy but eventually he changed his mind after Parnell and he clashed over a by-election in Galway and after the rich aunt of his wife died but left her money in trust. Once the affair became public Parnell was ‘shot to pieces’ by the Church and every like-minded sanctimonious individual and institution. It truly was the beginning of the end for him and even two of his own children were placed in the custody of Captain O’Shea!

The news of Parnell’s death in Joyce’s own home is recaptured in the following scene. “At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage: – Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend! – The door slammed behind her. Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain. – Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king! – He sobbed loudly and bitterly. Stephen, raising his terror-stricken face, saw that his father’s eyes were full of tears.

At that time, of course, and for many years afterwards the “church” wielded enormous influence in Ireland but how things have changed now following the overt hypocrisy that lay behind the ‘adulterous affair’ (for want of a better term for a prolonged sexual relationship between a proclaimed celibate and a divorcée) of Bishop Casey of Galway and later-on the cover-up of paedophile priests right up to Ireland’s most senior Catholic cleric Cardinal Sean Brady. One thing that particularly blackened Bishop Casey in many peoples’ eyes was that he had a son that at first he wished to be adopted and then later, when the whole business became public, he was reluctant to even acknowledge. The French are right to keep Church and State as separate as possible. Both can do harm, of course, but the almost boundless harm done when they can act in unison is perhaps now best seen in those Islamic States that aim to keep the Mosque and the State (or Caliphate) as one.

Adultery at that time was enough to finish a man (or woman) and of course it remains, in many parts of the Muslim world, a capital offense. Not only is it a capital offense that can be carried out by stoning but to increase the penalty they may use small stones to make the death even slower. Barbaric and cynical are the words that come to mind. I hope that Islam can move as far as Ireland has in the last century, though it would seem to be unlikely that they could move as far as to become a country that could legalise same-sex marriage. Such an act could only realistically happen in a country that can make a distinction between church and state and very many people around the world were astonished when “catholic” Ireland became the first county to do this by a popular mandate in a referendum.

I have a Roman Catholic background for sure and there have been times, for one reason or another, that I have flirted with the idea of re-establishing better contact. On the last two occasions that I was tempted to go spontaneously to mass on my own, the priest from the pulpit turned me away again. On the first occasion the congregation were admonished for not singing properly ‘as they do in Protestant churches’, etc, etc, and the second occasion was just before the same-sex marriage referendum and I leave it to your imagination just what the oratory was like.

It interests me that Pope Francis is a Jesuit. James Joyce was educated by Jesuits. First at Clongowes and later at Belvedere. Re-reading his memories was just so, so, so, evocative of my own experiences at the hands of the Benedictines. He and I both experienced the corporal punishment that was prevalent in such a system. He and I both experienced the terror, the humiliation and the pain of its execution. He and I both experienced the additional hurt of it being inflicted in an arbitrary way and when no offense had actually been committed. At the age of 13, I simply walked out of the school and would not return. There was never any apology of course. He, at about the same age and at a boarding school, had the guts to go the “head” (the rector) to complain but the rector simply made some measly excuse and didn’t have the guts or the inclination to correct things. It is so often easier to do nothing than to correct a wrong but such inaction is also very wrong.

Another Irish literary giant, George Bernard Shaw, in typical hyperbolic style, made the point that: “If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.

I don’t intend to speak in any depth about my own faith at this moment-in-time though the establishment would, I am sure, consider me a “lapsed catholic”. What I will say is that my drift away from the mainstream kick-started when I suddenly realised that I had been saying the creed (verbatim and without any thought) for far too many years. What appalled me at that moment was that I had been so indoctrinated as to say something (about belief of all things) that I had never, at any time, been encouraged to think about myself and thereby make my own. The words had just been slipped into my mind; a sleight of hand; a neat conjuring trick.

The next rather extended, but still evocative, passage from “A Portrait” was all to do with an “Easter retreat” peppered with its associated hell-fire sermons, confession and absolution. Oh! such relief and purity that could be engendered now that one had been made acceptable to God. The grim reaper could now come to call.

Everything about such a system is brutal and lacks humanity, humility and even wisdom. I would go as far as to say that it is actually wicked and probably evil. Just as evil as the indoctrination going on with the modern ‘islamofascist’ movements and particularly the mind-games and rote-learning that is forced into those children’s minds.

Of course that begs the question: “What is evil?” I have thought about this a lot and so, keeping semantics out of it, I think that a simple, self-evident approach has merit. I think the majority of people know what is and what is not evil. People and institutions may of course become implicated in evil and attempt to justify what they are doing. The Nazis, when the war was lost, rushed to try to hide what they had been up to and notable members committed suicide. They knew very well and had realised for sure that what had been going-on was pure evil. No rationalisation could help them now they were to be exposed.

I have come to the conclusion that although a cast-iron definition of evil may be impossible I do however think that all evil only comes about when people attempt to coerce others to do their will. Let me be clear that I do not think that all acts of coercion are evil but I do think that one should always take a step back and think carefully when one desires others to do as one would have them do. If there is any concept of the goodness of God versus the evil of the Devil that helps embellish this, it is the concept of the gift of Free Will on the one hand and the coercive and intentional seduction that things must be done “my way” on the other.

Traveling in a car once with my Uncle Wynne, I raised this topic with him. He agreed with me but he made his point that it was even more evil when evil was institutionalised. It was a good point because often individuals can hide within their club or their party or their tribe or their religion or their employer or their whatever and somehow thus justify their own complicity – however blinkered they had become.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is described as a Christian martyr. He was indeed a remarkable man, though I personally do not warm to him or anyone who is imbued with evangelical zeal. Where he was a giant was that he continued to speak out against evil – and in particular the evil of Hitler’s rise to power – and this despite deprivation and imprisonment and then leading finally to his murder just before the end of the war. That he did this as an individual is particularly worthy of note.

There were “institutions” and “states” that were unbelievably silent during those terrible times and in that respect much of humanity must share some of the culpability for not having been much more outspoken. Certainly it was known in many high circles that such acts of evil were being perpetrated. The clichéd expression of uncertain origin runs: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing“. Bonhoeffer put it much more strongly: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” To say that “not to speak is to speak” must, I think be tempered by the situation. It takes one sort of courage for an individual to speak out against wrong-doing in the face of violent opposition and another for an organisation to stay silent when it has very little to lose by speaking out.

Many others than the Jews were persecuted in the “Holocaust” but unfortunately the roots of antisemitism go down deep and no institution is more culpable of this than the Catholic Church. The roots of empire are also very long and its own chauvinism has often played its part in the more rotten affairs of mankind.

In the end, evil involves brutality of one sort or another and results in both physical and mental pain. There is an additional aspect of brutality that needs careful thought. The brutalised tend to become brutalisers themselves. I believe that the evidence shows that the abused are the most likely to become abusers. Paedophiles so often were victims of their own (commonly incestuous) childhood rape; the bullied learn to become bullies, when it’s their turn; the beaten foe wants revenge and not to turn the other cheek. That seems to be the way of the world far too often and it is a circle or cycle of violence that tends to perpetuate itself. The old testament book of Esther has much in it about the futility of revenge. I have a recurrent dream, where a black-garbed Benedictine monk turns into a spider, whose legs I pull off one by one. I will never forget that school, which all but finished my proper formal education, and the revenge I desire is to see is that the system itself is turned into legless and impotent dust.

Spare the rod and spoil the child was once a common catchphrase but I believe that the free use of the rod did far more harm than good. Thank goodness there has at last been a reformation, a modern enlightenment, of education in “the West”. Youth always did have and always will have “problems” but I believe there is more hope for us all when the brutality and evil of coercive education is minimised or abolished. I also believe there is more hope for humanity when the clerics learn more to lead by example and not by their rhetoric from the pulpit or the minaret.

Joyce, I salute you. I salute your unique style and intellect. Finnegan’s wake still largely alludes me but everything else you wrote is full of perception, observation and wit that I do understand. Your self-exile from Ireland is a sad fact yet it was laudable and the literary world is much enriched by those who persevered to see your work published against the wishes of many of the establishment. Any evil was in their attempted coercion to silence you and not in the way you lived, observed and worked.


 

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