Efficacious prayer
NOT since news of the fall of the Berlin Wall was posted on the message board of the convent where I was following a silent retreat has the flavour of revolutionary times so invaded the quiet progress (or lack of it) in my spiritual life.
Ten, and almost six years on from 9/11 and 7/7 respectively, I, together presumably with many others, find my morning prayers focusing involuntarily on the situation in Egypt and across the Middle East. Never before has the injunction to pray with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper (or BBC iPad-app) in the other seemed so apposite.
And what to pray for exactly? Well, peace, of course. But not the kind of peace that Tacitus’s Caractacus, noble barbarian adversary of a sterile Pax Romana, claims is really a wilderness — a place in which all life, and possibility of life, has been eradicated. This definition remains current, surely, when one notes the long-term effect of life under an authoritarian regime of whichever colour.
So is it, more precisely, the expansion of democracy into this sphere which should be the goal of our prayers? It is, after all, the supposed explanation for the long-term occupation, at the vast expense of human lives and costly resources,
of two of the region’s countries, Afghanistan and Iraq. Be careful — you often get what you pray for.
Democratic power
IT IS a dream satirical storyline — the possible connection between the present instability of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and the fraudulent claim to police by the Italian Premier, Silvio Berlusconi, that a 17-year-old exotic dancer of his acquaintance, known as Ruby, was Mr Mubarak’s niece.
From the ridiculous to the sublime. Who cannot thrill at the extraordinary Egyptian “people power” recently on display, and the prospect of something that might actually approach representative democracy for them? Who cannot be nauseated by the ability of the richest man in Italy to manipulate the media (which he owns and/or controls) to keep his popularity high enough to make probable another electoral victory, even after the proof of this direct abuse of his power?
Conclusion: it seems more important to want real democracy than to have it. Cue Professor Michael Sandel and his measured, at times almost passionless, Harvard lectures on “Justice”, now showing on the BBC after their YouTube success. I admire someone who can establish himself as a TV icon while limiting himself to the smallest variations in verbal delivery, and an impassivity of facial expression that is almost monumental. (I gasped when he donned some, albeit rather old- fashioned, sunglasses for a stroll around Athens).
But I admire more someone who can popularise proper philosophy. Professor Sandel’s well-known critique of Bentham, Kant, and Aristotle, conducted in the deceptively simple question-and-answer fashion that is grandly termed Socratic method, points to the ways in which governmental democracy works best as the natural outcome of deeper, commonly held moral foundations: the exaltation of public service and engagement with a political life as constituents of virtue; an exceptionally high value placed on every human life; aesthetics based on more than what pleases most people.
Mischievous commentators have suggested that Professor Sandel is visually and audibly the model for the character Montgomery Burns in The Simpsons. Among the creators of the show there were, it appears, students who had passed through Professor Sandel’s Harvard philosophy programme, but they deny any such influence. It is tempting to think that such denials might be in the same mode as Mr Berlusconi’s insistence that he had only Ruby’s best interests at heart, just as her father might — or should that be uncle?
Wake-up call
I WAS taught philosophy by, among others, Dr Ralph Walker, who retires as Vice-President of Magdalen College, Oxford, later this year. Ralph’s teaching resembles that of Professor Sandel, in at least as much as it lacks flashiness, and has a clipped delivery that hints at both his Scottish origins and his partly Canadian education.
His research has also focused on Kant and Aristotle, although his avowed interest in theological philosophy might be something of an extra mile from Professor Sandel’s communitarianism.
I awoke one Easter morning to an early broadcast of a vigil of readings and music from Magdalen, only to hear Ralph’s unmistakable voice reading from Isaiah 55: “For my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts.”
Half-awake as I was, it was without hesitation that I thought to myself, “There’s no arguing about that. . . Ralph’s thoughts are undoub-tedly higher than mine.” I turned over and slept until needed for the early mass.
The Ven. Jonathan Boardman is the Archdeacon of Italy and Malta, and Chaplain of All Saints’, Rome.
Out of the Question