The Burning World 2

People are flawed animals. One of life's paradoxes is that redemption for us sometimes comes when we acknowledge how irredeemable some of our instincts and wishes are. Martin Luther King was right, when he acknowledged this, and noted that hate would never drive out hate, and darkness could never conquer dark; only love and light could do that.

I find my affirmation of love, and of light, in a religion born of a combination of classical Hellenism and Jewish monotheism which grew around the decaying scaffolding of the Roman Empire. This reading of the roots of Christianity is of course one that plays around the current Pope's published works. It seems to inform his view of how Europe and the sociological structure of faith could dissolve, too. Even given all that, I acknowledge the message and example of Jesus Christ as evidenced by his Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. I do that knowing that I am as flawed as it is.

Others embrace another Imperial religion--Islam, which was similarly born but suffused in a different sort of violence. Christianity's early history was of persecution, Islam's of persecuting. Its prophet almost acknowledges this. You can see this by his promotion of tolerance whilst under threat in this letter to the monks of St Catharine's monastery. Plenty of intelligent Muslims over the years from scientists to shop owners have too. There's precious little mileage in pointing all of this out, though. We all have our stock of sins that we can trade if we want to depreciate our selves.

But so much killing has been done in the name of Christ. I often refer to the story of Constantine missing the point of a self-limited God's sacrifice for love on a cross, at the hands of a fascist power like Rome. But in truth, I could have looked to the excuse a partial interpretation of religion offered to the madness of 1914, or the fourth crusade, or any of the sorry, bloody adventures whose activities polluted Christian rhetoric.

So when I think of the horror in the Congo at the minute, and look at a Christian warlord there who seems determined to press a great war to secure his righteousness, I see the spirit of Stonewall Jackson, of Oliver Cromwell and Thibaut of Champagne and all the others who drew blood for a blooded God hung as a sign of salvation on a tree.

The Congo war is not, of course, a spiritual war of any sort. It represents a short term struggle over vast resources in part inspired by the 'African Bismarck and Busy Ally' Museveni years ago, in part by the unspent horrors of Rwanda, from which criminals escaped, and in part by Belgium's rape and holocaust of the country.

At the minute, a sort of anarchy seems to have descended. Shamefully, until recently you could find as many references to the Apes as to the people who suffered in the wars.

I think of how 25 armies were involved for decades in Angola, and how people that war would never end there too, before it did, and that gives me some small hope. Equally, the inadequate attentions of David Milliband and more importantly many other western and world diplomats seems to be turned there in order to try and prevent a disaster--that makes me hopeful too.

Is it that Africa will never function so long as its present borders exist, and so long as national governance trumps supernational structures of control?

There is, in the Cote D'Ivoire, a vast copy of St Peter's Basilica. It is administered by the Pallotine fathers, and is a monument to the folly of Houphouet-Boigny. It was consecrated by the Pope.

Sometimes I think of what a future archaeologist might think of it. Would they construct some complicated, Angkor-Wat type chronology of a vast, vanished civilisation; or would they, nearer the point, suspect that sometimes, straining to reach the appearance of civilisation can disguise societies and cultures that are so corrupted and without law, so awash in resources that their riches accelerate their corruption and they perish?

I have no answers or suggestions for central Africa's agony. My opinion doesn't matter anyway. But I hope to God that one great horror can be averted there; and that people who mention God's name in war as a justification understand how wrong they could be, as Lincoln did.

The picture accompanying this blog is from Cole's Course of Empire series, and depicts destruction.