Living Wittily

The Christian Theologian, Nuclear Weapons, Strange Love, Original Sin, and the Sermon on the Mount

I still remember the chill and existential angst as an impressionable if more than a little rebellious teenager watching Dr Strangelove. Two years after the Cuban crisis, and one year after the assassination of President Kennedy, the film dropped into a cultural worldview already distorted by fear, suspicion and the growing insanity of language that spoke of MAD, as mutual assured destruction. The mad antics and the terrifyingly implausibly plausible script did nothing to reassure, nor wat it meant to.

I came across this clip here the other day and watched it with scared fascination. It isn't only the content, it's the jaunty optimism of the narrator describing the triumph of Britain dropping its first hydrogen bomb to explode in the atmosphere in 1957. At the time the fear was an icy terror, a remorselessly spreading glacial fear dubbed the cold war. Perhaps the upbeat BBC commentator was expressing relief that Britain was no longer defenceless against an evil and ambitious Russia. At the very least we could destroy cities of the perceived enemy in retaliation for any attack on our cities. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a million for a million, it's the same principle. It's called deterrence.

 

There has not been a nuclear exchange in the 56 years since that first successful atmospheric detonation of city killing bombs. Supporters of deterrence would say that's because deterrence works. Maybe. Opponents will argue that nuclear weapons are morally unjustifiable and pose an extinction level threat to human life, and indeed to the future of the planet. I don't know that the argument can be settled - by definition the proof would either never be forthcoming (in which case it worked, maybe) or there will be a catastrophic exchange in which case the argument becomes academic in a nihilistic sort of way.

What's your point Jim? It isn't a global politicised point. I am not an expert in global security, military mind games, or defence strategy and policy. As a Christian theologian I have other concerns, a different perspective, alternative intellectual tools to think through the meaning of human existence and what makes for human flourishing. I watched the clip with a profound and solemn awareness that amongst the crucial components of a Christian worldview is an adequate doctrine of sin. The hydrogen bomb as it was then known carried a mushroom shaped shadow of ultimate menace for humanity's future - and the clip celebrates the success of British efforts to obtain this instrument of mass destruction. I use instrument deliberately - in the background of the clip it would have been entirely appropriate to play Holst's brutal and relentless Mars the Bringer of War to trumpet and announce the newly acquired capacity for orchestrated death on a symphonic scale.

Celebrating the success of such a creation as nuclear weapon capacity is according to the late Lord Macleod, blasphemy, the original sin of creating from the foundation blocks of God's Creation, an instrument capable of global annihilation. I do not see that theological pronouncement as an overstatement. It is one of the most important prophetic denunciations of military and political power in the history of Scottish theology; theology, not politics. But it is theology effectively used to critique all intellectual accommodations to nuclear weapons as an option for the Christian mind. Of course not everyone agreed with Macleod; and not all will agree with what I'm writing here. But go back and look at the clip, listen to the narrative, and then read the Sermon on the Mount. How do the two inhabit the same moral, theological and political universe? 

One further thought - the bomb lauded in the 1950's clip is a mere firework when compared with the destructive payload of current contemporary capacity. I recall Jesus argument from the lesser to the greater...how much more...?

Dag Hammarskjold - the United Nations and the Road to Holiness.

In conversation with Jason the Forsythian when we met in Scotland he was guilty of shameless name-dropping:) He had been in the company of Archbishop Rowan Williams no less, a Christian thinker whose writing is often complex enough to both frustrate and satisfy; frustrating because you know he is saying something important and profound, satisfying because he never short changes the reader by dumbing down, cutting corners, or pretending all the jig saw pieces are even there. His return to academia will I hope mean he will begin to draw together much of his thought into a substantial vision of God enriched from important influences of Eastern and Western theology. 

But anyway, Williams mentioned to Jason the new biography of Dag Hammarskjold, and commended it warmly. His blurb is on the dust jacket:

"And admirably judicious and comprehensive - and long overdue - study of one of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, whose presence remains both spiritually and politically significant for an age of violently confused international relations."

Another former Archbishop, this time K G Hammar of the Church of Sweden, also commends the volume:

"A great book about a great man who must not be forgotten in a time which more than ever needs to see the footprints of Dag Hammarskjold - the combination of wholehearted engagement in the world and familiarity with the spiritual journey inwards."

My own debt to Hammarskjold goes back to the first reading of Markings, and how many people have to say that. It is a quite extraordinary book, a reservoir of wisdom, deep, fresh, reflecting shimmering sunshine, some blue sky but also clouds and the shadow of mountains. Maybe it would be better described as a Scottish loch then. But the maxims and reflections, the prayers and the psalms, the confessions and thanksgivings, the self critique and the compassionate outwardness, and through it all the sense of the reality of a power that is transcendent, suffusing life with mercy and hopefulness, - through it all, the sense of God.

I've often wondered what a book club would make of it, filled as it is with the heart and the mind of a great human being, part of whose greatness was his own sense of mortality, fallibility and the urgency of what we do with the gift of our life. One of his best known maxims remains true as a reminder to the Church of what its life is about, what its mission is to be:

"In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action."

Yes, and yes again. Lipsey's aim in this biography is to explore the importance of Hammarskjold's inner life as the engine and energy of his outward activities as an humanitarian, diplomat and man of faith caught up in the world of politics, power and international tensions. That small book of markings, found on his bedside table after his death, remains a classic of spiritual honesty, moral striving and the felt tension between disciplined duty and enabling grace from beyond ourselves. 

The Boston Marathon and an Alternative to the Futility of Violence

I haven't been in many American cities, but I have been in Boston three times. My good friends Bob and Becky live in New England, and as their guests we have enjoyed the hospitality, warm love for all things Scottish, and the intellectual and cultural experiences of New England people. And from a blugerass concert to Shaker heritage, to Boston and its important place in the history of Baptist thought and practice, even visiting the Quaker assembly which Elton trueblood attended.

I guess not many now know the name Elton Trueblood. Philosopher and cultural critic, radical Christian practitioner and intellectually generous follower of Jesus, a man whose wisdom and deep love for God illumines much of what he wrote, lived and said. His sermons The Yoke of Christ, his numerous books on Christian engagement with society in the 1950's and 60's, and his reputation as a thinker deeply plunged in the contemplative foundations of Christian theology and prayer, made that brief glimpse of the place where this man lived out his later life a kind of low key pilgrimage. I owe much to Trueblood's thought.

His book Alternative to Futility was born in class discussions about war and peace, violence and dialogue, conflict and reconciliation. In the 50's the Cold War was fuelled by runaway fear and suspicion, and the futility of a world divided along lines of terror, hostility and the idolatry of explosive power. The idolatry of explosive power from bullets to missiles, smart bombs to IED's, and yes nuclear weapons and drone delivered death, is now an established and largely unchallenged recourse to the explosion of energy for the damage of other human beings.

And I guess my overwhelming response to the explosions at the Boston marathan, immediate and so far largely unreflective as it is, is one of deep sadness at the futility of such acts of violence and hatred of other human beings. The death of an 8 year old boy, there to celebrate his father's finishing the race is, well futile. The reduction of human life to fuel for publicity of any cause or none fulfils no meaningful purpose I can discern. Trueblood's thesis still requires adequate refutation - whatever the motives for the use of explosive power to the damage of another human being, it will always be invalidated in any hieracrchy of values that sees human hurt and human killing as a means to an immensely lesser end. I realise more can be said. And on reflection I may wish I'd said more, or less. But the sense of sadness, and the refusal to give in to the temptations of despair and cynicism that grow out of a sense of futility, will not make me want to be less hopeful, more committed to an alternative view of the world, more thoughtful in my prayers for a world like ours.

One of the great visions of the Hebrew Bible is children making the noise of play and excitement in city streets. Whatever else the death of that young boy means, it is a reminder of what I hope for in human fulfilment, and what I pray against in the actions and thinking of those who settle for futility.

Kyrie Eleison

Christe Eleison

Kyrie Elieson

Margaret Thatcher, St Francis of Assisi, Money and Social Security.

My family going back several generations were Lanarkshire miners. By the time Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister most of the deep mines in Scotland were either closed or closing. My children were born into a country in which we struggled with the three day week, power cuts, the oil crisis with prices going beyond what any of us thought would ever be affordable again, inflational spirals, and then the Winter of Discontent. That so apt Shakespearean phrase was filled with all the constrained but difficult to contain energy of resentment, an anger charged lightning that had to find a point of discharge.

The debate surrounding whether Margaret Thatcher ruined the country or saved it was always going to rage after her death. Indeed, rage is perhaps a word that encapsulates the emotional and visceral responses generated by the policies of successive Thatcher Governments. Either the rage and outrage of those who opposed monetarism, privatisation, the forefronting of nuclear threat, the dismantling of heavy and manufacturing industries replaced with financial and service industries, or the rage of those who thought Union power, Nationalised industry, the threat of Russia and Communism, and other social or socialist policies were forcing the country into recession or social regression.

No wonder feelings are once again raw with hatred or admiration, resentment or gratitude. It is interesting that those who speak most volubly and positively of the Thatcher legacy mostly do so from positions of power, wealth and social security - the phrase is deliberate. Note, Social Security is a positive idea, Benefit System is much less affirming and supportive of human need. I mention the point because amongst the most influential changes Margaret Thatcher brought to British politics was not only political divisiveness but a discourse and rhetoric that made a virtue of polarisation rather than negotiation, that edefaulted to compulsion over consensus, and that placed in the political lexicon the threefold No! No! No! as the term of choice when defending self-interest.

The creation and validation of greed as a social virtue, the morally naive claim that creation of wealth is not wrong (The Sermon on the Mound) and that it is the use of wealth that raise the significant ethical questions, lacked, as all political ideologies do, an adequate doctrine of hamartiology. Hamartiology is the area of theology that deals with human sinfulness, fallibility, and the creative genius of the human mind to create and worship our own idols. In recent decades the phrase structural sin has come to refer to our ability to build into social structures of power and policy, those same self-interested drives that underlie greed, dishonesty, matter of fact bottom line thinking that delibedrately leaves out the human cost because that is a subjective skewing of what needs to be an objective assessment in order to get value for money, the cheapest price, the most for the least output, cost or effort.

Successive Governments after Margaret Thatcher's fall in 1990, have built on that legacy, with a financial free for all that became financial freefall, and now an austerity programme justified by blaming others, and fuelled by that same resentment against those who benefit from our ( note, our - not the Government's) Social Security system and our ( note, OUR ) National Health Service.We still lack an Hamartiology adequate to our economic ambitions, mistakes and inhumanity.

All that said - an elderly woman has died and certain humane customs ought rightly to follow. The scale and cost was always going to be problematic, if only because of security, settling of scores, and what she herself called 'the oxygen of publicity', even more important and immediate in a culture used to surveillance, digital technology and the uniquitous hand held camera options. I hope her funeral takes place with dignity, honesty, and the proper summing up of a human life, believing as I do a truer, sterner judgement, and a more generous mercy and justice than mine, will prevail and speak the final words.

At the beginning of her Premiership, Margaret Thatcher quoted the prayer of St Francis of Assisi, including the words "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony". Perhaps instead of taking ideological sides, or insisting that her impact on our personal life story is the decisive factor in the debate about her achievements, the whole of that prayer, in its more familiar text, should be set against her political career, her life, and her legacy.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.


O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

.

 

The Amritsar massacre - Some Lenten reflections on Empire

The Amritsar massacre in 1919 was "a deeply shameful event in British history" said our Prime Minister yesterday.

The events of that day were described in 1920 by Winston Churchill as "monstrous", and in political realities Churchill was not averse to the brutal use of force.

In 1997 the Queen described the event as a "distressing" example of the "moments of sadness" in the history between Britain and India.

In 1982 Ben Kingsley played the role of Ghandi in a film which I think is still the high point in his career. In that film, directed by Sir Richard Attenborough, the Armitsar massacre was portrayed as the logistical and inevitable consequence of blind loyalty to Empire, equipped by military capability and fuelled by racist brutality and unexamined claims of moral right founded on power and might.

I still remember the sickening dread of those scenes as the British Army moved into position, blocked exits, and opened fire. I was sure this was an outrageous distortion of history, a Hollywoodisation which falsified truth and exaggerated fact as a technique of audience control, a deliberate black contrast to the saintly non-violent Ghandi.

But we know it was nothing of the kind. The argument about whether the casualties reached 379 or 1,000 is obscenely irrelevant. Amritsar remains a crime against humanity on any arithmetic. And if soldiers fired until they ran out of ammunition, and the crowd were trapped in a square, assuming professional competence even skill in the soldiers ( and perhaps for some, such revolt at the murderous order that they aimed high or wide), the numbers can at least remain contested with the likeliehood of revision upwards.

I mention all this during Lent. A season of creative self-criticism, a time to examine our story and our history and ask life-encouraging questions about what is good and to be striven for, and what is wrong and to be renounced. That Britain through its Parliament, Prime Ministers, and Monarchs including Queen Elizabeth II, has never named its shame, has never apologised to the Indian people for that particular event.

The opportunity to do so seems once again to have gone. Ironically the British Prime Minister is now visiting an independent India seeking to build trade relations with a country that was once an Imperial subject, its goods plundered by bthe occupying power. And its people at times brutally suppressed for daring to wish their freedom.

I accept that what I've written is one viewpoint. That values have changed, and I can be accused of moral anachronism by overlooking the realities of Imperial history, and not mentioning the enormous economic and geo-political benefits from which Britain still benefits. It was still a crime against humanity. It remains one for which we have not formally and genuinely accepted responsibility, apologised and sought reconciliation. That saddens me, and shames me. The nemesis of such violence was a small man spinning cotton by hand, and winning the heart of a people. The acknowledging such violence as an atrocity for which we apologis, would require an equally humane human being.

. 

Anne Frank, - The Prophetic Voice of a Teenage Diary

While in Amsterdam for those few days on my Van Gogh pilgrimage, I also visited the Anne Frank House. I had tried to book online before leaving to avoid the long queue, but it was booked a week in advance. However long queue or no long queue, I had already decided such a visit was a must.

So we arrived not long after opening at 9.00, and the queue was already long and slow moving. Now I'm not the most patient or contented queuer, but there are times when inconvenience, delay and anticipation are more significant than cramming every unforgiving minute with value for money tourism. We got talking to the couple behind us who had just flown over from Bitmingham, and who were also making a pilgrimage to this place of  humane and humanising memory of a young girl whose honest goodness and innocent intelligence defied and triumphed over the inhuman bureaucracy of the genocidal imagination.

Then once we got in, after an hour's waiting, we made our slow way through the house, with the sound of the Kerk bells from nearby, the same bells she heard sounding when in hiding. And the slowness of those in front of us allowed time to see, to think, to pay attention, and so to imagine. One of the greatest moral challenges of our age is the safeguarding of the moral imagination, the developed capacity to anticipate, and have symathy with, and realise in thought and vision the cost and consequences of the intractably human lust for power, power over others, exerted for ends other than humane. 

Anne Frank's Diary is one of the most astonishing achievements of World War II. Not just the transparent goodness and hopefulness of the entries; and more than the faithful recording of the experience of what it is like to be afraid, and hated by the powerful and ruthless; and more too than the exposing of political malignity observed and critiqued by a young woman wo was naive, but wise, and whose own future would be foreclosed by the lethal consistency of the racist mindset. The Diary is first hand evidence of human resilience, of spiritual awareness, of life loved as gift and mystery, and of that instinctive will to live and to live well, that occasionally illuminates the historical landscape, and gives us all hope and a much needed reminder of the glory of a human life whose music cannot be silenced.

Then near the end of the exhibit, time to look at the faces of those who hid in the hiding place, blqck and white photographs, and behind the face of Anne Frank, another queue, at the arrival station of Auschwitz, and then images of the Shoah and the Camp liberations. I was overwhelmed by then, having just stood in a slow moving queue to enter this house, and to pay respects to this story of one girl amongst 6 million of her people, and one girl amongst countless more people across continents, whose deaths are the fearful mathematics of state generated hatred linked to military ambition. 

It is one of the sanitising statistics worth pondering, that all day every day, this house is open, and the queues are constant. And if everyone who comes to this place comes respectful and goes away subdued by a wondering sadness but a renewed commitment to the nourishing of humane values, then there is hope for us. The Hebrew Bible has the prophetic observation, "a child shall lead them". And so she did, and does.

37 years on, Small is [still] Beautiful

"Call a thing immoral or ugly,

soul destroying or a degradation of man,

a peril to the peace of the world

or to the wellbeing of future generations;

as long as you have not shown it to be 'uneconomic'

you have not really questioned its right to exist,

grow, and prosper."

That was E F Schumacher in 1973, in one of the great tracts of the 20th Century. Small is Beautiful fell like a benediction on a planet slowly awakening to the dangers of greed, extravagance, exploitation, over-fishing, acid rain, deforestation, habitat destruction, over-consumption and the long term toxicity of the myth of sustainable growth. But a benediction often unheard, and as often unwanted and unwelcome. And the consequences are piling up decade after decade. In the realm of religious economics, the word 'uneconomic' is the definition of sin, and economic growth the terminology of sanctity. The economy is divinely ordered and the quest for economic production, and market growth equates to the search for the good life. And the irony is that our pursuit of economic growth is ruining life, suffocating life, extinguishing, eliminating, crowding out, diminishing, devaluing and finally buying and selling the means of life in a crazy festival of waste. Read Schumacher again  - and ask what is beautiful, moral, peaceful and future preserving about the economic policies of the developed, and yes the rapidly developing world.

And pray, "Lord have mercy".

Vince Cable redefines the discourse of trust, trust me on this!

When is a pledge a promise? When is a promise binding? What is a promise worth if it can be unilaterally broken? Is a public pledge merely a statement of intent, or does it have moral force? The questions are important because on the trust of our promises, and the dependability of our words, depends the social fabric of a liberal democracy. Note, a member of which could be called a liberal democrat, which is a somewhat different creature from the members of the political party "Liberal Democrat".

Which raises intriguing and disturbing dilemmas. Because there is no doubt that the Liberal Democrat Party signed a pledge committing them to oppose a rise in student fees. And now Vince Cable, mouthpiece of the coalition on such matters, not only wants to renege on the pledge, promise and commitment, but wants to redefine the discourse of trust. You can read the whole sorry episode of linguistic gymnastics and ethical obfuscation here.  

What is particularly troubling is that Mr Cable seems to genuinely believe, or disingenuously say he believes, that breaking a promise does not reflect badly on the Party's trustworthiness. That can easily be tested. Ask how many students will now trust the Lib Dems. Are our politicians so inept at ethics that they do not recognise trustworthiness is the characteristic of those who have shown themselves worthy of trust? Are they so out of touch with their ethical side they don't understand that trust is a judgement conferred not a virtue claimed? So entirely otherworldly (intersting word for the culture of realpolitik and discourse revision) that they missed the rather critical point that a pledge, or a promise, or a commitment - he uses all three words synonymously - is only as trustworthy as the person who makes it proves to be?

There are problems for all of us when public discourse is so malleable to political justification that reshaping of truth to Party expediency can be carried out with such sincere conviction and palpable evasiveness. If to "honour" the commitments made within the coalition require the breaking of promises in order to maintain the coalition, then either uphold the promise at the price of coalition partnership, or admit that you broke the promise and can't be trusted in your election pledges. It really doesn't work any other way. The only thing worse than breaking a promise is to insist you did nothing wrong, would do it again, refuse to apologise and insist that you are trustworthy and are working hard to honour commitments.

I realise it may be simplistic, and is near culpable proof-texting - but Jesus did say "Let your yes be yes, and your no be no". Mind you, he was no great politician either - and he had little use for coalitions of self-interest.

Christian witness - bespeaking hopefulness to a culture mired in its own despair

Hope. To look to the future as open and replete with new possibility. To see our past and our present circumstances without conceding they determine who we will be, and what is now possible.

If there's one disposition, one emotion, one word for which our times are sick with hunger, it's hopefulness.

 Are any of us immune to that darkness and heaviness of soul that occasionally descends as we glimpse our own shallowness, sense the superficial transcience of a life lived too rapidly, and long for something more permanent, durable, worth giving our lives to?

How to bear witness to Jesus who brings freedom in a culture suffering an advanced case of creeping exhaustion through trying to keep the creaking economic machinery going through the cycle of sustainable economic growth, global recession, and economic recovery. Remorselessness engenders hopelessness, and it's no accident that a theology of hope has an umbilical connection to liberation theology.

And alongside the search for meaning and identity through our capacity to participate in a consumer culture, isn't there something existentially significant about the contemporary pursuit of belonging, identity and connectedness through Facebook, Twitter and yes the blog? 

One way or another we each try to locate our own living in the excitement and sameness, the creativity and the mess, the valuable and the trivial, the enduring and the disposable, the worthwhile and the wasteful, the optimism and the despair,  that is the cultural flux of our times.

So I think of some of the great words that bespeak hopefulness. Bespeak - that is speak and make be. Speak into existence. Talk up. Not in the silly sense of make-believe, but in the prophetic sense of re-imagining a world in which hope and not cynicism is the default posture of our forward thinking. For example:

Amos 9.13, at the end of a doom laden sermon or two:

The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.

Isaiah 55.12, as a promise that simply denies to the status quo its claims to permanence and determinism

You shall go out with joy, and be led forth in peace, and the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Revelation 22.1-2, one of those texts that Hollywood would need CGI's to do justice, a vision of life and movement, of growth and fulfillment, of international healing and peace. 

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. on either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

And the lines from Browning's Paracelsus, Victorian rhetoric and human longing for a future drawn forwardt by the sense that in the murk and darkness we might be a bit like Moses sometimes, and have to draw near to the thick darkness in which god dwells.....

If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time. I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day.

God is love. God is light. But a Christian understanding of God, standing this side of resurrection, manages to look at a tired, scared, fragmented world, buckling under the strain of human activity, and pray, The God of hope fill you with all hope. It is God who bespeaks the future, not us. Thank goodness, and thank God!

Faith then, is  both defiant and imaginative - refusing to concede that how things are is how they must be. Instead faith sends out trajectories of hope towards a future differently imagined. Not because we can simply wish fulfil the future - but because wherever our human future takes us, God is already there, and there as eternally creative love, reconciling our shattered cosmos, and bringing to completion our own brokenness through that same reconciling love.

The Colossian Christ, the image of the invisible God, the one in whom all things hold together, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell - there is the core of any theology that claims to be Christian and relevant to a culture mired in its own despair, and apparently hell-bent on foreclosing on its own future. To bear witness to a different future, and live towards that future by a life of peace-making and conciliatory love, and to embody these in actions of generous, gentle, costly healing of whatever is hurting around us, - that is to bespeak hopefulness, is to be the Body of Christ, broken for the nourishment of the world.

In Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.

(The painting is Hope in a Prison of Despair, Evelyn De Morgan, Pre-Raphaelite)

(The space image above can be found here )

Guernica - the novel and the painting

Guernica, Dave Boling, (Picador)

This is a carefully researched novel about Basque village life in the 30's seen through the eyes of three generations, culminating in the atrocity that was Guernica. Picasso's presence is woven throughout, and the novelist  makes him neither hero nor villain, but simply what he is; an artist who lives with the ambiguity of his own life story and the politics of his time. His painting of the raids on Guernica (which is brilliantly repulsive in conception and creation) is an example of art as moral outrage and political protest - and of how the representation of human anguish when it is well done as in Picasso's Guernica, is potent not by its power to attract, but by its power to repel. The medium conveys exactly human recoil from the evil the painting depicts.

 

It’s an interesting thought, that art, so naturally identified with the creation of beauty, grace and human loveliness, is equally potent in depicting ugliness, violence and human suffering. There are some paintings that are hideous both in their content and in their execution, and that makes them great art because they compel attention to the human experience of that which dehumanises, degrades and violates. In class last year when looking at artistic representations of Jesus on the cross, there were several images which students found repulsive, even upsetting, there was “no beauty that we should desire him”. Crucifixion is utter unremitting cruelty, and some artists refuse to surround such inhumane infliction with light or hope or theological concessions. Likewise, Picasso in his painting of the atrocity of Guernica, was unsparing of the sensitivities of the public viewers of his art. There are times when art speaks truth, the representation of a subject contributes to its reality, the medium successfully conveys the message, the viewer is forcibly confronted with what we would rather not see and think, and thus moral judgement is demanded by the stark uncompromising portrayal of moral evil.

There is no comfortable distance from which to view Picasso’s Guernica. It is an offence, searingly effective, and the depth of negative reaction to its images and overall composition is precisely the intent – a jolt in the nerve centre of our moral perceptions and political complacency. This novel doesn’t operate at this kind of level, at least not self-consciously. But by giving human face and character to the villagers, by drawing us into the family life of the Basque people, and by making us care for the outcomes in the stories of their lives, such personal and moral reactions are inevitably evoked. Near the end, there is a beautifully conceived insight into how human beings deal with loss and love. It comes as a comment on how two men coped with the violent deaths of their wives and children in the bombing raid:

"...if you lose someone you love, you need to redistribute your feelings rather than surrender them. You give them to whoever is left, and the rest you turn towards something that will keep you moving forward."

So the novel is a romance and a lament, a celebration of human courage and consolation, an affirmation of the love that humans have for each other and the finite miracle of love that survives brutal death; but all this set against the chronic capacity of human beings to hate, or worse, to not care about the consequences for other human beings of military action and political violence. And Picasso's painting, now an iconic image, an artistic monument of 25 feet by 12 feet, ensures that the name of a the small historic town of Guernica is not forgotten. And Picasso's poignant image of the dove flying over broken weapons of war is also a necessary and urgent reminder that human creatvity, industry and reason, can also be persuaders and builders of peace. This is a fine novel, about a remarkable painting, a flawed artistic genius, and an act of human barbarity that changed the nature of war.

The book ends with the following few lines. It isn't a spoiler to quote it. The opposite in fact, it's an invitation to read the book, and enter with moral imagination the experience that inspired a masterpiece of poltical protest, moral outrage and symbolic resistance to war.

Picasso is sitting in his favourite cafe in Paris. He is approached by a German officer.

"One officer who considered himself culturally advanced approached the artist as he sipped his coffee at a table beneath the green pavement awninga. The officer held a reproduction of the mural Guernica, barely larger than a postcard size.

'Pardon me', he said, holding the card out. 'You did this didn't you?'

Picasso put his cup delicately on its saucer, turned to the picture, then to the officer, and responded, 'No. You did.'