As I write this, my wife and I have just returned from a pleasantly eventful visit to historic Simon’s Town. On an outing like this, a great deal goes through one’s mind. Rosalie helped me to sift the substance from the dross!
I had been to the naval base before – and the town of Just Nuisance. I was relatively young then. Now I could see things more maturely. The sea was beguiling (as always for me) – and as it was for Just Nuisance! Something about him: The Great Dane was the only dog ever to be formally enlisted in The Royal Navy, as able seaman (sailor’s cap and all), enjoying all the privileges of a full seafarer. All this took place during the war years, 1939 to 1944. Just Nuisance also got married (there is an official wedding portrait of him and his good Adinda), and when he died he was buried at Claver Camp, with full military honours.
Thinking back on this experience of Simon’s Town, the Irish philosopher George Berkeley came to mind. Berkeley believed the only reason for the existence of a stable world is that God always “perceives” it, it being thus sustained from moment to moment. (Of course, the philosopher could not tell us why, then, our world was not always there, so that Creation was necessary!)
There are two principal books on my table as I write. One is a past conference report of the International Network of Philosophers of Education. Rosalie’s contribution concerned “the reparation potential of narrative” – a theme ever close to my heart. Her presentation points out that stories can be healing (such as those of Jesus), or destructive and ruinous (such as Verwoerd’s and Hitler’s). This may be obvious, but the point is simply that Rosalie, with her lasting interest in storytelling, is (always) the first and sharpest critic of my writing: I am delivered into her hands (!) as to whether a projected topic of mine is worth pursuing. She never fails to remind me that erudition does not necessarily throw up a worthwhile topic for conversation! Today’s theme passed the test.
So I turn to the other text on my table: Great People of Faith and Wisdom: How their Lives changed our Lives. The book begins by quoting the words of Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. The editors wisely comment that, though this is a Biblical quotation, it is “universal in its application”.
Great People speaks of women and men of profound faith and wisdom – historical personages such as Moses and Solomon; Zoroaster and Mohammed; Jesus and Augustine; Joan of Arc; Peter Abelard; Hildegard of Bingen; Martin Luther, John Bunyan, Martin de Porres, and Francis of Assissi; Mary Baker Eddy and Sören Kierkegaard. Women are unfortunately grossly under-represented, and there are significant omissions. What follows, then, are merely hints and suggestions for readers to pursue.
Following the idea of Great People, lives can be re-directed in a number of ways: by wise words like Socrates’s; or a stirring by someone’s bravery in history (Joan of Arc, for instance); or, with reference to the institutions resulting from the activities of persons like Calvin, or Luther, Mary Baker Eddy or Charles Taze Russell, by joining these and thus starting to live differently than before.
Great works of art might redirect one’s life. I think, for instance, of Vincent van Gogh’s work, and of Michelangelo’s Pietàs (the latter involving the emotion that Jesus’s dead body evokes).
Having mentioned Jesus, He is an exemplar of all of these ways. There are His words; His courage in the face of insult and injury; and (though He was not an “organiser”) His life offers suggestions for the formation, by others, of organisational “isms”, with which millions of people, the world over, connect: Roman Catholicism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, Wesleyanism, Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnessism, Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Moravianism, Quakerism…
This being the Month of Ramadaan, let us consider Mohammed (approximately 570 to 632). The man is so much in the news, historically, that a few words suffice to focus his person. In no way can he be captured by tight definition. He was firmly self-confident, believing himself to be a prophet and a moral guide for others. He treasured family-life and brotherhood. He was a preacher (as all prophets are), and had the makings of a mystic. Most importantly, his message was ‘Islam’ (denoting humility and submission). Having lived a full life of thought and adventure, he died at 62 years old.
A significant omission from my source is Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Perhaps, when written, it was too soon for her to be included. There are bound to be omissions from such a listing, anyway.
Be this as it may, we are talking about men and women who share several great values, one of which is respect for others and oneself. Their spirit is characterised by respect for all, the poorest of the poor, the rich – for all people alike. Their life is dedicated to deeply sincere service, and crudeness towards them is responded to with meaningful forgiveness and generosity. Mother Theresa is one of these.
Jesus’s dictum about turning the other cheek was a signal of strength, not weakness. And disagreement with and protest against standing notions, such as Martin Luther’s, accord with love – the love that Corinthians speaks of, without which people are just clangorous empty vessels.
On our way out from Simon’s Town, in a rather obscure little store, not a bookshop specifically, but one purveying a mishmash of goods, to my great joy I found a rare copy of the Complete Letters of Van Gogh(in three volumes), which include return letters to him, and editors’ comment – the set being quite well-preserved. Paging through, I found myself again admiring Van Gogh’s energy: how did he have time for this voluminous letter-writing, alongside his ardent labour at painting. The only answer is his love of work (and his respect for his brother Theo, who supported him all the way).
Van Gogh is included in Great People’s list. We are acquainted with his anxiety about poverty. Was his concern a matter of “socialism”? The latter is one of those tags whose meaning goes this way and that. In a rather precious preface to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, Hesketh Pearson says that: “Wilde regarded socialism merely as a means to an end; (George Bernard) Shaw considered it as an economic need, an end in itself”. Van Gogh’s orientation goes deeper than hair-splitting about “socialism”. He comes in at an angle of deeply-felt emotion, and anger against “life” or God, for destining people to “potato eaters”. In Vincent’s famous painting there is no hint of scorn (unlike with Brueghel’s depiction of peasants). There are the same kind of faces and body language, but the picture speaks of a spiritual identification with it all. There is no caricature. (In Brueghel’s case, one senses an attitude of standing-back, an observer-type of “looking down upon”.)
Van Gogh could not care about an academic definition of socialism. Such definitions were far removed from his passionate heart.
The same truth holds for all those others we are considering, who have a bearing on our lives to the point of turning us around in our thinking and doing: such people do not live “per definition”.
Oscar Wilde does say that what Jesus meant amounted to an acceptance of people as they are. Consider Jesus’s meeting with the Samaritan woman drawing water at the well, or with the adulteress who implores him as she faces the hypocrites who would stone her to death. Yet Wilde and Shaw seem tied to firm definitions for states of life – which is not helpful to discourse about profound existence.
Turning to Sören Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855): he has always been a preferred thinker of mine in the row of important philosophers. I was never drawn to the cold (bloodlessly clinical) “analytic” style of thought, and found this thinker’s emotive emphasis on subjectivity and individuality attractive. But then, thinking of how he broke his engagement with Regina Olson, I also had other thoughts about him. Surely his reasoning on this matter was spurious, in that he believed himself to be acting like an Abraham who would sacrifice his son Isaac to please God! All of this is reminiscent of Peter Abelard in the latter’s hapless relationship with Heloise.
As for Martin Luther, the man needs no “contextualisation”. His 95 Theses nailed to the church door at Wittenberg are fixed in whoever’s memory (though probably not known, by most, for their specific content). Luther was simply the great, overshadowing religious reformer of Christianity who has touched the lives of millions and millions of people over long centuries, and keeps on doing so.
All of these religious reformers tap into the life of Jesus, Who was what Kierkegaard called an individual, a spirit outside of nationality, yet totally committed to “Islam” (service to others). Wilde and Shaw’s bothers are irrelevant. Jesus’s parables illustrate this, and his death on the Cross epitomises it.
The great Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) is another omission from the list. However, so many thinkers – philosophers and poets, and indeed psychologists – have been, and remain, indebted to the thought of the “philosopher with a hammer”.
I spent good time at university contemplating Nietzsche’s ideas, contemplation being the only motive for studying at a university – without it, whatever the bag of degrees and titles you may amass, you are just wasting your time and money, doomed to spiritual nonentity.
I could not, in spite of popular conceptions, find Nietzsche a racist. After all these years, I believe that to link his name to Nazism (as often happens) is totally misguided. Despite his often boisterous language and the fiery “Sturm und Drang” titles of his writings, he was compassionate – also towards animals (like St Francis of Assissi).
There is the (urban legend?) about his crying embrace of an abused horse, calling the horse his “brother”. He wrote impressive poetry, and was soft of heart. His befriending of the musician Wagner was not misleading. His dictum that “God is dead” was designed not so much to shock as to make religious zealots have second thoughts about themselves. Finally, there is the meaningfulness of his message of “love of self”, for the man or woman who cannot love self, cannot love anybody else either.
We must not omit to mention Joan of Arc. Attachment to her manner of doing and living have instilled in many people a change of their ways. She is “a beloved saint of Roman Catholicism” (which is neither here nor there). Again, her person thwarts definition. Her life was not stayed to narrow association: she lived as if she belonged to all people, whatever their sins or saintliness, an existence open to the big wide world. In the wake of populist English agitation she was ultimately put to death, burned at the stake – this French peasant girl, the “maid of Orleans” from Domrémy, who supervised the enthronement of the strange Charles VII as new king of France, at Reims, in 1422. My hunch is that she faltered in her judgment of his character. (The atmosphere in Just Nuisance’s town facilitated wide-flung thinking!)
As far as “English agitation” against her is concerned – as Robert Ergang says in his Europe from the Renaissance to Waterloo, during the Hundred Yea rs’ War (1337 – 1453), “the English had threatened to conquer all France and add it to the English possessions. Ultimately, however, Joan of Arc had inspired the French with a fervid enthusiasm which enabled them to drive back the English…” Joan of Arc’s life informs us handsomely about part of the historical exchanges between England and France.
Finally, there is Hildegard of Bingen (thriving around the first half of the 12th century – she died in September 1179), a physically sickly girl, one for visions and voices since even before teenage. She seems to have known the work of St Augustine, among others, but preferred thinking of herself as “ignorant” to glorify God! (as she testified in her book Scivias – “Know Thyself”).
Hildegard’s avid labours in the Church made her name known internationally (given the ambit of places in her time), and she grew into an outspoken woman whose wisdom was sought by the high and mighty as by lowly people. All in all, in my book, she comes up – despite her “madness” – as admirable.
In conclusion, only this: The persons in this curtailed roll-call – however “abnormal” they might have been, untouchable by “definitions” yet paradoxically clearly stamped with greatness – are of a mystical eminence that leaves one spellbound.