Category Archives: Art and Ideas

Political Zionism Is Esau

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Back to Esau and Jacob.

ISIS IS ESAU?

Recently, famed Johns Hopkins neuro-surgeon Dr. Ben Carson has come out with the risible statement that the rationale for Isis is to be found in Genesis, in the tale of Esau and Jacob.

Indeed it is, only not in the way Dr. Carson intends it.

Anyone who has studied the matter with any integrity will immediately identify Esau in today’s world, because no less than the Jewish Encyclopedia has made the identification explicitly.

EDOM IS IN JEWRY

It admits that Esau (under the name of Edom, which means Red) is in Jewry.

That is to say, by the time of Jesus, the descendants of Esau were living as Judeans and Judahites, even though they were neither Jews nor Israelites by birth.

JEWS VERSUS JUDEANS VERSUS JUDAHITES

The word Jew when used to refer to a single ethno-religious community is a coinage from the nineteenth century.

There were no Jews, as we know them, before that time.

When the word Jew is inserted into the Bible, it is an anachronism.

At the time of Jesus, there were only Judahites (those who belonged to the tribes of Judah, one of the twelve tribes descended from Jacob’s twelve sons) and Judeans, people who lived in the kingdom of Judea.

Judea was the southern Israelite kingdom, which had split from its northern half and had gone into and captivity and returned, like its northern sister.

The word Judean does not identify a race any more than the word New Yorker identifies a race.

A New Yorker may be Chinese or African or Italian in ethnic origin. He gets his name from where he lives, not from his racial identity.

So also, the term Judean included people of all kinds of racial make-up, including many who had nothing to do with the original Israelites or Judahites and who were often sworn enemies of them.

ESAU’S HEIRS – THE IDUMEANS (EDOMITES)

One such enemy was Idumea, which is the Greek rendering of the word Edom.

Edom/Idumea is the region where the descendants of Esau lived and dominated  – a strong-hold in the mountains that includes the great city of Petra in Jordan.

As a nation, the Idumeans of Biblical times were the vicious and unrepentant enemies of the sons of Jacob, sacking, looting and attacking them at every turn.

ESAU VERSUS JACOB

God had given foreknowledge of this generational enmity to Rebecca, when Esau and Jacob were still twins in her womb.

He had let her know that the two would engender nations that would struggle with each other and that her second-born would eventually rule over her first-born.

This was prophetic knowledge, however, not predetermination, as Calvinists teach. God in no way forced Esau to play this unfortunate role.

EDOM  – THE RED HUNTER

From birth, Esau was marked for his carnal role.

He was covered with hair all over and reddish (Edom).

He was a hunter, fond of venison, fleshly in appetite, and careless of family tradition and piety.

From the New Testament, we learn that he was also sexually immoral and idolatrous.

From the Book of Jasher, an apocryphal text quoted by Jewish authorities, we learn that Esau was so great a hunter that he killed King Nimrod of Babylon and seized from him the garments that God wove for Adam and Eve when they found themselves naked.

These magical vestments had been passed down from the first family, through Seth, to Noah, to Ham, Cush and then to Nimrod and they bestowed the power of conquest on their possessor.

ESAU, NIMROD, AND ANTI-CHRIST

In Genesis, Nimrod is the legendary warrior-king of Babylon who seeks to challenge the heavens with his mighty tower of Babel.

He is a type of anti-Christ and thus of Satan.

[I will explain in another post why I think the equation with Esau and Satan/Serpent is misleading and dangerous and is one often made by people who have a racist agenda – either against Gentiles (if they are Jews) or against Jews/non-whites (if they are Aryan supremacist) or against whites (if they are black supremacists).

Each of the groups I’ve mentioned likes to equate Esau with whichever group they want to claim is genetically Satanic.

But Esau is not descended from Satan (however he is conceived and with whatever validity).

All of mankind today is descended from Noah, who was considered perfect by God, drunkenness and all.

Esau is  DELUDED by Satan, which is quite a different thing.]

Thus, by association and by the possession of the magic garments, Esau becomes an anti-Christ type (repeat, TYPE) as well.

[Note: The notion that there is a single “anti-Christ” who will oppose God at the end is not even in the Bible, which mentions the anti-Christ spirit, and also, Satan, a red dragon, a beast (two, actually) and a whore (of Babylon), but really doesn’t posit a figure called Anti-Christ, in the modern sense.]

HITTITES, CANAANITES, AND ISHMAELITES

According to the Book of Jasher – which, keep in mind, is apocryphal and part of Rabbinical lore and not canonic – it is after the slaying of Nimrod that Esau sells his birthright for the red pottage (lentils), because, believing absolute power to be in his grasp, he has no use for the mere birth-right.

Not knowing (or caring) that the birth-right includes the honor of siring the Messiah, he chooses instead worldly power and his belly, proving himself unworthy, as God had predicted to Rebecca.

Genesis tells us that Esau disobeyed God’s covenant with his forefathers and intermarried with Hittite women. [The Hittites were the descendants of Heth.]

Esau also intermarried  with the family of Ishmael and with the Canaanites, who practiced such vile customs as child sacrifice and ritual prostitution.

Genesis mentions how much sorrow Esau’s disobedience and his foreign wives caused Isaac and Rebecca. They did not want all they had striven for to be dissipated and lost in the houses of inimical in-laws.

This is no doubt the reason the anxious mother used such wiles to deprive her unworthy first-born of the primogeniture.

JACOB TO ISRA-EL

Jacob, her second-born, was no saint, of course.

He allowed his mother to manipulate him into cheating his father and then engaged in trickery himself against her brother, Laban, also a wily man.

But Jacob, who is described as a “mild” man, was true to his father’s traditions and to the Abrahamic covenant.

He didn’t practice idolatry or intermarry with the vicious Canaanites. So God was able to shape him to his destiny and eventually make him Isra-el – a prince (Isra) of God (El), or by virtue of God.

JACOB AND TRUE ISRAEL

The story of Jacob and Esau is used by St Paul to reprimand Jews who did not want to admit Gentiles into the company of believers in Jesus.

Jacob, he said, was a type of the Gentile believer. Esau was a type of the Jewish unbeliever.

Just as the Jews had the law and racial descent on their side, Esau had the law of primogeniture on his. Yet, Esau was indifferent to his privilege, just as unbelieving Jews were indifferent to the privilege of birthing the Messiah.

Thus, God had given salvation to the “second-born” – the Gentiles, as he had given the birth-right to the second-born, Jacob.

THE CONVERSION OF THE IDUMEANS

But, in a more literal way too, Esau is in Jewry.

By the first and second century before Christ, the Edomites/Idumeans had been forcibly converted to Judaism from their Canaanitish ways.

Many had been circumcised and were indistinguishable from Jews by external appearance.

However,  they were not true Israel, either by tribal descent, nor in their hybrid customs.

They worshiped “they know not what,” as Jesus put it, preferring their own customs and “traditions of men” over the true teachings of Torah.

Many of the Pharisees and Sadducees who attacked Jesus were not Jews by birth, as he himself noted.

JESUS: LEVITE AND JUDAHITE

Remarkably, Jesus was not a Judahite either.

[I have corrected this statement below]

Jesus was a Levite (a descendant of Jacob’s son Levi) on his mother’s side  (since Mary was the cousin of Elizabeth, wife of Zacharaiah, the Levitical priest).

And he was grafted onto the house of Judah (the most famous of Jacob’s twelve sons) on his father’s side.

Thus, he was an Israelite by descent on both accounts.

[Added: Researching this a bit more, I find that the two genealogies – in Mark and in Luke – are taken to be genealogies of Mary, not Joseph, even though Joseph’s name is inserted into them.

This is because Joseph was adopted by Mary’s father, Heli, since he had no sons to inherit his property.

This makes Jesus descend from BOTH the Levitical line (the priestly line) and the Judahite (the kingly line).]

On the other hand, was Jesus NOT a Judean. He lived in Galilee, not Judea.

[Added: However, the Gospels note that he was born in Bethlehem of Judea, which is connected to David and the messianic prophecy.]

IMPORTANT CORRECTION (added 10/8/2015): The House of Judah (as opposed to the tribe of Judah) included Judah, Levi, and Benjamin, so that Jesus DOES belong to both the priestly and the ruling line of Israel, through his mother, which is the descent that makes him a Jew legally.]

THE END OF THE OLD COVENANT

Jesus’s unclear parentage and his residence in Nazareth and Galilee were the reasons why many Judeans did not see Jesus as the Jewish messiah.

Ironically, these skeptics were often not Judahites or Israelites themselves.

They were often Samaritans, Idumeans, and Canaanites.

For instance, the Herodians and Zealots were Idumeans with Idumea’s violent, revolutionary spirit.

It was these Edomite-Jewish rebels who, in the century after Jesus’ crucifixion, provoked Rome into crushing the Jews and destroying the Temple of Jerusalem (Herod’s temple) in 70 AD.

With the end of Temple worship, the Old Testament Jewish world was destroyed once and for all.

This was the judgment of the last days (of the Old Covenant) that Jesus predicted so accurately.

PSEUDO-ISRAEL

The descendants of these pseudo-Jewish Edomites are arguably a major (or substantial) part of the modern Talmudic/Rabbinal tradition that is now regarded, erroneously, as the rebirth of Biblical Israel.

This being the case, since the Idumeans do not descend from Jacob, contemporary Ashkenazy Jews at least cannot be direct genetic descendants of ancient Israel.

Of course, genetics is beside the point.

BIBLICAL ISRAEL

Biblical Israel was always a nation of “promise” and “faith,” first and foremost.

In so far as modern Zionists are either Kabbalists/Talmudists who reject Jesus as a blasphemer and reprobate or communists who consider religion a fraud they cannot by definition be true “Israel,” even if they were descended directly from Abraham.

CHILDREN OF THE SERPENT

Jesus made that very point to his enemies when he called them children of the Serpent.

[This term has had its own malign legacy.

Christian Identity and some other groups have taken this to mean that contemporary Jews – a mixed-race of  Euro-Turco-Mongolic people with genetic affinity to the Idumeans – are descended from Satan/the Serpent, which is surely a thoroughly racist and dangerous notion.

But, as I will show in other posts, the imprecations Jesus pronounced on his critics had NOTHING  to do with racial/genetic descent.

They had to do with the absence of faith in the unseen/spiritual kingdom to which he was trying to lead them. 

By accusing them of descent from “their father, the devil,” he was accusing them of moral affinity/moral descent, not a blood-line connection.

It was a moral pronouncement, not a thesis on DNA.

Esau, after all  was a child of Abraham. What did that get him?]

In short, contemporary “Israel” with its blood-line claim is a religious imposter, credible only to people who choose to ignore the very texts from which “Israel” claims authority.

ZIONISM IS ESAU

Zionist Anglo-Israel and the Sanhedrin that has orchestrated her rise to world dominion are Esau incarnate.

They are his spiritual (and likely, genetic) descendants.

They are heirs only in name and not in truth to the religion whose mantle they ostentatiously wear.

Nonetheless, because Isaac did in the end give Esau one blessing, their charade has been allowed its moment in history.

It will collapse soon.

Just as that ancient blessing that Esau cadged was an empty one because its substance had already been taken by the one who knew its worth, Jacob, so also political Zion is an empty spectacle.

The kingdom it seeks today has already met its true ruler…. two thousand years ago.

 

 

“Esau Have I Hated” Is Hyperbole

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Back to Esau and Jacob.

As I said in my post on the subject a day ago,  Jacob is not a particularly attractive figure as he is presented in most commentaries on Genesis and – to the superficial eye – in the text itself.

There are also the great passages in Malachi and Obadiah, written centuries after Esau and Jacob lived, in which we are told that God “hates” Esau and “loves” Jacob.

We are told by apologists that these statements refer to the house of Jacob and to the house of Esau and not to the individuals.

Even if that were so, it doesn’t make the problem go away.

Such eternal “hatred” – from God – stands in flat contradiction to Jesus’ teaching to us to love our enemies, in imitation of God, who is perfect.

Can this be the same God who “hates” Esau?

One problem with the texts about “hating” lies in our anachronistic literalism.

The Bible is filled with hyperbolic, poetic statements that we foolishly take as literal.

Jesus asks us to turn the other cheek.

This doesn’t mean we should let ourselves be beaten black and blue, without running away, resisting, or calling for help. The Sermon on the Mount is not a counsel to masochism or pathological submissiveness, as Jesus’ own behavior with the money-changers shows.

Jesus tells us that it would be good to become eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

This doesn’t mean that we should castrate ourselves, as one Church father, Origen, unfortunately did.

Jesus tells us that we are unworthy of him unless we “hate” our fathers and mothers.

Surely, he did not intend for us to break the commandments and loathe our parents, as some of his Pharisaic critics accused him of doing.

Such statement are hyperbole typical of the time and culture. They are poetry. Artistic license. A way of arousing and purifying the emotions, rather than simply presenting faith as an abstraction:

Dr. William Lane Craig at www.reasonablefaith.org:

“[This phrase is] religious hyperbole expressing God’s hatred of evil and the wicked acts people commit. It would be a hermeneutical mistake to press them literally as statements of Christian doctrine.

Drawing hyperbolic, black-and-white dichotomies was a common semitic idiom. For example, “I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau” (Malachi 1.2-3; cf. Romans 9.13) is a way of saying that God has chosen Jacob and not Esau. When Jesus says, ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14.26), he means that if one prioritizes even one’s most cherished loved ones above Jesus, one’s discipleship is incomplete—a claim which is radical enough without taking it literally!”

In the Scriptures, Isaac blesses Jacob (who he thought was Esau) and then never offered a blessing to the son who had been tricked out of his blessing?

So why didn’t Isaac bless both sons?

Whenever we are reading a part of the Bible that is more historical remember that it is descriptive rather than prescriptive. For example, letters from Paul to the churches are prescriptive – guidelines for what to do in their context, so we can apply the same principles in our context.

In this historical book, the author is describing what happened not necessarily what should have happened.

Just because Isaac only blessed one son doesn’t mean that is what we should do. Just because Rebekah had a favorite and helped deceive her husband doesn’t mean that’s what we should do. In fact, part of the beauty of the Scriptures is that we can see the consequences of good and bad decision-making.

Rebekah knew that God was going to do something special for her youngest so she made sure it happened. Now, I believe it could have still happened without her manipulating her husband.

Isaac and Rebekah could have blessed both their children. In fact, later Jacob did bless all his sons.”

What is also true is that the Bible tells us that Jacob was cheated by Laban in exactly the same way as he cheated Esau, when Laban presented him with Leah as his bride, although it was Rachel for whom he had contracted.

Thus Jacob was forced to work an additional 7 years for the woman he wanted to marry.

Not only that, Jacob didn’t receive one penny of the the physical wealth that should have gone to him as the recipient of his father’s blessing, because he fled from his home in terror that Esau was going to kill him.

Rather than inheriting the bulk of his father’s wealth or taking on the responsibilities of the priesthood, as might be expected as the recipient of the birthright, Jacob was forced to  slave for Laban for 14 years, constantly cheated of his proper wage.

Thus God actually punished him more than he deserved, considering that his deception of Esau, at the instigation of his mother, took place when he was in his teens.

 

Jacob and Esau

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Of all the Old Testament patriarchs, Jacob has always been the hardest one for me to like.

Although Jacob was renamed Isra-el or Prince of God by Jahweh himself, he has never appealed to me.

But there must be something wrong in my response, for Jesus honored the same deity who honored Jacob. So can Jacob be as bad as he seems to be?

Not that the other Patriarchs haven’t caused me problems.

Take Abraham. Abraham advertised his wife (and half-sister) Sara as his sister, hoping that this deception would stop the Egyptians from murdering him him, should they desire her.

As it turns out, the Egyptians were far more decent than he thought. They were actually aghast at Abraham’s lie, which might have made adulterers out of them unwittingly.

Then there’s King David, whom I actually like, much against my better judgment.

True, it was fairly standard in those days for kings to grab any good-looking woman in the vicinity for themselves.

But David not only grabbed Bathsheba (then in her teens) but sent her husband, poor Uriah the Hittite, to his death. Why did he need to do that?

I haven’t found a good enough excuse for David yet.

Perhaps, by killing Uriah he was protecting Bathsheba from being cast off by society.

That’s a  possibility.

But surely murder is a bit worse than dishonor, especially dishonor justly earned.

Yet, David’s sins don’t bother me half as much as Jacob’s.

Jacob was the son of Isaac and the father of the 12 tribes of Israel. Jacob is the man who is supposed to have wrestled with God.

I say “supposed to,” because I’ve always understood from the Bible that no one can see the face of Jahweh and live.

But Jacob did. So how could he have wrestled with God?

Then again, it was night when Jacob wrestled with the “angel” and maybe Jacob never really saw his celestial antagonist’s face.

Be that as it may, it’s not this encounter that bothers me about the Patriarch.

It’s Jacob’s infamous theft of his older brother Esau’s birthright and blessing.

Everyone knows the story.

Esau comes home exhausted and hungry from hunting and Jacob cleverly makes use of the moment to entice him to sell his birthright (as the oldest son) for a “mess of pottage.”

So says Genesis.

Later, Jacob’s mother Rebecca conspires with her favorite son to deceive the aging and blind Isaac into giving his blessing mistakenly to the younger son.

No amount of white-washing of this episode has ever been able to make me think well of Jacob.

How on earth could he have been chosen as the father of the elect priesthood of people into whom Jesus Christ, the “light of the world,” would be born?

Was I missing some crucial element?

This summer, after thumbing through Genesis repeatedly, I found the answer.

Jacob was not a common cheat by any means.
Esau was not blameless.

To understand the full story, you need to pay close attention to the Biblical text, as well as to what is written about the two in other parts of the Bible and outside the Bible.

This is no ordinary religious story, after all. It pays to think about it deeply, if we intend to understand all the passions and preconceptions at work in the Middle East, the heart of the world’s problems.

Jacob/Israel is the ancestor of Jesus Christ, who is accepted as Divinity Incarnate by billions of Christians all over the world.

Over the identity of Jacob/Israel and his descendants rivers of blood have been shed in this century and through the ages.

The greatest revanchist claim for land was staked on the basis of promises made to Jacob/Israel.

Surely we need to know why this man was chosen for such a momentous place in history.

Surely he was not the confidence man he seems to be in the Genesis story.

(To be continued)

The First Indian Catholic Saint

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Sister Alphonsa, a Clarist nun at Bharananganam, in India, who was canonized in 2008, was the first purely Indian Catholic to be canonized. [In 2014, two more saints of purely Indian lineage were added.]

After deforming herself in a clumsy attempt to avoid marriage, she entered a convent, devoting herself to teaching, and, after she fell sick, solely to prayer.

After her death, she was credited with hundreds of miracles – usually, the healing of children with deformities of the feet like hers.

Vivek Sharma describes reactions to her canonization in India:

As far as atheists and rationalists, particularly in India, are concerned, all faith is irrational and all talk of miracles is regressive and befits acceptance only by illiterate and gullible folks living in India’s villages. Many Westernised and educated Indians, specially Hindus, living in the cities do not have the courage to openly accept their Gods and beliefs while continuing to follow them, eyes wide open. How often can one see such people swearing that astrology is nothing but superstition while sporting astrologically prescribed gem stones on their fingers. How often can one find them questioning the very existence of Ram, Hanuman, Shiva, Krishna and Durga, to name just a few Hindu Gods, while privately worshipping them, particularly when in trouble! Such doubters are there in and of other religions too, but they are afraid of openly voicing their skepticism out of fear of serious reprisals by powerful religious leaders.

All religions are based on miracles and faith. Faith works for only those who believe. Keep giving as many scientific and psychological spins as you like to this phenomenon. Those who connect to the world beyond, as real as the one here, and are touched by it, cannot be fooled by all the so-called rationalizations given by science handicapped by serious limitations at its present level of development. They know what they know and are not going to pick fights with the ignorant who don’t and won’t.

The recognition by the Pope of St Alphonsa’s curative powers that emanate from her tomb has strangely silenced a lot of people. One has not heard of Sanal Edamaruku shouting, as he usually does, that the belief that disease can be healed by praying at a tomb is an impossibility, and that what the Pope has done is nothing more than propagation of “andh vishwas”. Similarly, some other modern Indian luminaries who otherwise all but mock with an air of superiority at those who visit dargahs and other such places where miracles have been experienced by many, have either said nothing or have outwardly spoken approvingly of the recognition given to miracles by the Pope in declaring Alphonsa India’s first native saint. That is the hold that the power of the West has over their voices and pens.

The remaining millions of us in India who believe, reverentially welcome St Alphonsa to the pantheon of not just Christian saints but of saints of all faiths who have enriched India and blessed its people of all religions with their miracles. We understand that faith is a very powerful emotion as it has always been throughout history. And with real reason.

Rather than arrogantly and ignorantly dismiss it as superstition or ‘andh vishwas’, this is an opportunity for some of us to realise that faith has to be recognised and respected, whether we believe in it ourselves or not. This elementary understanding will go a long way towards generating respectful sensitivity to the beliefs of all those who have experienced the miracles of God and his creation, no matter which religion or sect they follow.

Once all of us do that, the congenial atmosphere much needed for ensuring the communal harmony that this country badly needs will prevail. Is that not what every Indian wants?”

The Mathematical Visions Of Sreenivas Ramanujan

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From HinduNet.org, a brief life of Ramanujan, a supernal genius of mathematics who was also a devout follower of Goddess Namagiri (Lakshmi) to whom he attributed his achievements.

Namagiri/Lakshmi is the female consort of Narashimha, who is the leonine form of Vishnu the second part of the Hindu Trinity.  His equivalent in the Christian tradition is Christ as the Lion of Judah and in the Old Testament he is Jehovah Sabaoth:

“He died on his bed after scribbling down
revolutionary mathematical formulas that bloomed in his mind like ethereal flowers — gifts, he said, from a Hindu Goddess.

He was 32 the same age that the advaitan advocate Adi Shankara died. Shankara, born in 788, left earth in 820. Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in 1887. He died in 1920 — an anonymous Vaishnavite
brahmin who became the first Indian mathematics
Fellow at Cambridge University. Both Shankara and Ramanujan possessed supernatural intelligence, a well of genius that leaves even brilliant men dumb-founded. Ramanujan was a meteor in the
mathematics world of the World War I era. Quiet, with dharmic sensibilities, yet his mind blazed with such intuitive improvisation that British colleagues at Cambridge — the best math brains in
England — could not even guess where his ideas originated. It irked them a bit that Ramanujan told friends the Hindu Goddess Namagiri whispered equations into his ear. Today’s mathematicians —
armed with supercomputers — are still
star-struck, and unable to solve many theorems the
young man from India proved quickly by pencil and
paper.

Ramanujan spawned a zoo of mathematical creatures
that delight, confound and humble his peers. They
call them “beautiful,” “humble,” “transcendent,”
and marvel how he reduced very complex terrain to
simple shapes.

In his day these equations were mainly pure
mathematics, abstract computations that math sages
often feel describe God’s precise design for the
cosmos. While much of Ramanujan’s work remains
abstract, many of his theorems are now the
mathematical power behind several 1990’s
disciplines in astrophysics, artificial
intelligence and gas physics. According to his
wife — Janaki, who still lives outside Madras —
her husband predicted “his mathematics would be
useful to mathematicians for more than a
century.” Yet, before sailing to England,
Ramanujan was largely ignorant of the prevailing
highest-level math. He flunked out of college in
India. Like Albert Einstein, who toiled as a
clerk in a Swiss patent office while evolving his
Special Theory of Relativity at odd hours,
Ramanujan worked as a clerk at a port authority in
Madras, spending every spare moment contemplating
the mathematical face of God. It was here in
these sea-smelling, paper-pushing offices that he
was gently pushed into destiny — a plan that has
all the earmarks of divine design.

Ramanujan was born in Erode, a small, rustic town
in Tamil Nadu, India. His father worked as a
clerk in a cloth merchant’s shop. his namesake is
that of another medieval philosophical giant —
Ramanuja — a Vaishnavite who postulated the
Vedanta system known as “qualified monism.” the
math prodigy grew up in the overlapping
atmospheres of religious observances and ambitious
academics. He wasn’t spiritually preoccupied, but
he was steeped in the reality and beneficence of
the Deities, especially the Goddess Namagiri.

Math, of course, was his intellectual and
spiritual touchstone. No one really knows how
early in life Ramanujan awakened to the psychic
visitations of Namagiri, much less how the
interpenetration of his mind and the Goddess’
worked. By age twelve he had mastered
trigonometry so completely that he was inventing
sophisticated theorems that astonished teachers.

In fact his first theorems unwittingly duplicated
those of a great mathematician of a hundred years
earlier. This feat came after sifting once
through a trigonometry book. he was disappointed
that his “discovery” has already been found. then
for four years there was numerical silence. At
sixteen a copy of an out-of-date math book from
Cambridge University came into his hands. It
listed 5,000 theorems with sparse, short-cut
proofs. Even initiates in the arcane language of
mathematics could get lost in this work.

Ramanujan entered it with the giddy ambition and
verve of an astronaut leaping onto the moon. It
subconsciously triggered a love of numbers that
completely saturated his mind. He could envision
strange mathematical concepts like ordinary people
see the waves of an ocean.

Ironically, his focus on math became his academic
undoing. he outpaced his teachers in numbers
theory, but neglected all other subjects. He
could speak adequate English, but failed in it and
history and other science courses. He lost a
scholarship, dropped out, attempted a return but
fell ill and quit a second time. By this time he
was married to Janaki, a young teenager, and was
supporting his mother. Often all night he
continued his personal excursions into the math
universe – being fed rice balls by his wife as he
wrote lying belly-down on a cot. During the day
he factored relatively mundane accounts at the
post office for 20 pounds a year. He managed to
publish one math paper.

As mathematicians would say, one branch of
potential reality could have gone with Ramanujan
squandering his life at the port. But with one
nudge from the invisible universe, Namagiri sent
him Westward. A manager at the office admire the
young man’s work and sensed significance. He
talked him into writing to British mathematicians
who might sponsor him. Ramanujan wrote a simple
letter to the renowned G. W. Hardy at Cambridge,
hinting humbly at his breakthroughs and describing
his vegetarian diet and spartan needs if he should
come to the university. He enclosed one hundred
of his theorem equations.

Hardy was the brightest mathematician in England.
Yet, as he knew and would write later at the
conclusion of his life, he had done no original,
mind-bending work. At Cambridge he collaborated
with an odd man named Littlewood, who was so
publicly retiring that people joked Hardy made him
up. The two, though living within a hundred yards
of each other, communicated by exchange of terse,
math-laden letters. Ramanujan’s letter and
equations fell to them like a broadcast from alien
worlds. AT first they dismissed it as a
curiosity. Then, they suddenly became intrigued
by the Indian’s musings. Hardy later wrote: “A
single look at them is enough to show that they
could only be written down by a mathematician of
the highest class. They must be true, for if they
were not true, no one would have the imagination
to invent them.”

Hardy sensed an extremely rare opportunity, a
“discovery,” and quickly arranged a scholarship
for the then 26-year-old Ramanujan. The
invitation came to India and landed like a bomb in
Ramanujan’s family and community circle. His
mother was horrified that he would lose caste by
traveling to foreign shores. She refused to let
him go unless it was sanctioned by the Goddess.
According to one version of the story, the aged
mother then dreamt of the blessing from Namagiri.

But Janaki says her husband himself went to the
namagiri temple for guidance and was told to make
the voyage. Ramanujan consulted the astrological
data for his journey. He sent is mother and wife
to another town so they wouldn’t see him with his
long brahmin’s hair and bun trimmed to British
short style and his Indian shirt and wrapcloth
swapped for European fashion. He left India as a
slightly plump man with apple-round cheeks and
eyes like bright zeroes.

Arriving in 1914 on the eve of World War I,
Ramanujan experienced severe culture shock at
Cambridge. he had to cook for himself and
insisted on going bare foot Hindu style on the
cold floors. But Hardy, a man without airs or
inflated ego, made him feel comfortable amidst the
stuffy Cambridge tradition. Hardy and Littlewood
both served as his mentors for it took two
teachers to keep pace with his advances. Soon, as
Hardy recounts, it was Ramanujan who was teaching
them, in fact leaving them in the wake of
incandescent genius.

Within a few months war broke out. Cambridge
became a military college. vegetable and fruit
shortages plagued Ramanujan’s already slim diet.
The war took away Littlewood to artillery
research, and Ramanujan and Hardy were left to
retreat into some of the most recondite math
possible. One of the stunning examples of this
endeavor is a process called partitioning,
figuring out how many different ways a whole
number can be expressed as the sum of other whole
numbers. Example: 4 is partitioned 5 ways (4
itself, 3+1, 2+2, 2+1+1, 1+1+1+1), expressed as
p(4)=5. The higher the number, the more the
partitions. Thus p(7)=15. Deceptively though,
even a marginally larger number creates
astronomical partitions. p(200)=397,999,029,388.
Ramanujan — with Hardy offering technical checks
— invented a tight, twisting formula that
computes the partitions exactly. To check the
theorem a fellow Cambridge mathematician tallied
by hand the partitions for 200. It took one
month. Ramanujan’s equation was precisely
correct. U.S. mathematician George Andrews, who
in the late 1960’s rediscovered a “lost notebook”
of Ramanujan’s and became a lifetime devotee,
describes his accuracy as unthinkable to even
attempt. Ramanujan’s partition equation helped
later physicists determine the number of electron
orbit jumps in the “shell” model of atoms.

ANother anecdote demonstrates his mental
landscape. By 1917, Ramanujan had fallen
seriously ill and was convalescing in a country
house. Hardy took a taxi to visit him. As math
masters like to do he noted the taxi’s number —
1729 — to see if it yielded any interesting
permutations. To him it didn’t and he thought to
himself as he went up the steps to the door that
it was a rather dull number and hoped it was not
an inauspicious sign. He mentioned 1729 to
Ramanujan who immediately countered, “Actually, it
is a very interesting number. It is the smallest
number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two
different ways.”

Ramanujan deteriorated so quickly that he was
forced to return to India — emaciated — leaving
his math notebooks at Cambridge. He spent his
final year face down on a cot furiously writing
out pages and pages of theorems as if a storm of
number concepts swept through his brain. Many
remain beyond today’s best math minds.

Debate still lingers as to the origins of
Ramanujan’s edifice of unique ideas.
Mathematicians eagerly acknowledge surprise states
of intuition as the real breakthroughs, not
logical deduction. There is reticence to accept
mystical overtones, though, like Andrews, many can
appreciate intuition *in the guise* of a Goddess.

But we have Ramanujan’s own testimony of feminine
whisperings from a Devi and there is the sheer
power of his achievements. Hindus cognize this
reality. As an epilogue to this story, a seance
held in 1934 claimed to have contacted Ramanujan
in the astral planes. Asked if he was continuing
his work, he replied, “No, all interest in
mathematics dropped out after crossing over.”

The Imagination As The Vehicle of Grace

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From the journal, Communique,  a perceptive article on the imagination and the arts as God’s ordained channels of grace:

The Truth of the Imagination

Thus far I have spoken of how the Bible endorses artistic creativity and encourages us to believe that artistic form and beauty have value in themselves as gifts from God. We might view this as the nonutilitarian side of the artistic imagination. But the imagination is useful as well as delightful. This brings us to the question of truth in art, or the imagination as a vehicle for expressing truth. This, too, is a value of the arts. The imagination can express truth in its own unique way for the glory of God and the edification of people. Before I defend that statement, I need to delineate what this unique way of expressing truth is. The imagination images forth its subject matter. It does not work primarily by abstractions and propositions but by concrete images and experiences and sensations. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “Imagination demands an image” (37). The arts take concrete human experience rather than abstract information as their subject.

How can we be certain that the imagination can express truth? We can look at the example of the Bible. The Bible is overwhelmingly literary in its form. The one thing that it is not is what we so often picture it as being–a theological outline with proof texts attached. When asked to define “neighbor,” Jesus told a story. He constantly spoke in images and metaphors: “I am the light of the world;” “you are the salt of the earth.” The Bible repeatedly appeals to the intelligence through the imagination. Its most customary way of expressing God’s truth is not the sermon or theological outline but the story, the poem, the vision, and the letter, all of them literary forms and products of the imagination.

Think of how much biblical truth has been incarnated in character and event. Then recall the poetry of the Bible, including the heavy incidence of image and metaphor in the prose of the New Testament. The point is not simply that the Bible allows for the imagination as a form of communication. It is rather that the biblical writers and Jesus found it impossible to communicate the truth of God without using the resources of the imagination. The Bible does more than sanction the arts. It shows how indispensable they are.

Earlier I noted the prominence of music and visual art in the worship described in the Bible. If we doubt that truth can be embodied in visual, nonpropositional form, we need only look at the Christian sacraments. They use physical images that enable us to experience spiritual realities.

We know that the imagination is a vehicle of truth from sources other than the Bible. Recent brain research shows that the two hemispheres of the human brain respond to stimuli and assimilate reality in different ways. The left hemisphere is active in logical thinking, grasping abstract propositions, and dealing with language. The right hemisphere is dominant in processing visual and other sensory experiences, in seeing whole-part relationships, in grasping metaphor and humor, and in experiencing emotion. The arts and the imagination are essentially right-brain media. We need to express and receive God’s truth with the right brain as well as the left.

The tendency of our evangelical subculture is overwhelming to assume that truth is conceptual and propositional only. But the arts, with their emphasis on imagination, remind us that there is a whole other type of truth, or at least a whole other way by which people assimilate and know the truth. Just compare the experiences of listening to a Christmas sermon on the theological meaning of the incarnation and listening to a performance of Handel’s Messiah. We need both approaches to the truths of our faith.

We erroneously think that our world view consists only of ideas. It is a world picture as well as a world view, that is, set of ideas. It includes images that may govern our behavior even more than ideas do. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith propositionally as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This is one way by which we can know the truth about faith–the way of theological abstraction. But our understanding of faith is also based on images of the characters and stories of faith that Hebrews 11 proceeds to evoke.

A Christian world view consists of the doctrines of the Apostles’ Creed, but equally important is the Christian world picture that guides our life. We are influenced in our Christian lives by pictures of Cain and Abel, Mary and Martha, Ruth and Boaz, as well as doctrines of providence and justice. The Westminster Confession of Faith defines providence thus: “God the Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence.” That is one way to grasp providence. Psalm 23 fills our imaginations with the images that comprise the daily routine of a shepherd and his sheep. That is another way by which we grasp providence.”

Another View Of The Olivet Discourse

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The end-time prophecies of Jesus –  in the passages (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21)  referred to as the Olivet Discourse – are very controversial.

Even noted Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis have felt constrained to admit that Jesus must have made an error when he promised his disciples that he was going to return in judgment before “this generation” had passed away.

Preterists get around the problem by arguing that much of the Olivet Discourse was actually fulfilled with the destruction of Jerusalem some 40 years after Jesus’ death.

Full Preterists believe that everything Jesus predicted has already happened, but they are heretical.

I subscribe to a version of partial Preterism (which is orthodox), but an article I came across recently obviates even the need for Preterism to defend Jesus’ words.

It analyzes Jesus’ language in the Olivet Discourse and concludes that the phrase “this generation,” as it is written in the original Greek, does not necessarily have to mean the life-spans of the people He was addressing – his disciples.

It can also mean “variety” or “type” or “species” or “off-spring.”

All those interpretations would leave a much broader time-span for the fulfillment of Jesus’ words, for “this generation” can now refer to the off-spring of the believers or even to the species of humanity, the Jews, that will not pass away until Christ returns.

Things to come.org:

“Genea  hautey can mean “this offspring,” “this generation I just mentioned,” “this generation I am talking to,” or “this contemporaneous generation,” depending on the context. It is not other contexts, but the context of Matthew 24:34 that should be the determining factor as to what Jesus meant by the word genea. The context of the Olivet Discourse leads us to believe that Jesus was speaking either of the offspring of Jacob (the Jews), the generation of God’s children, or of a future generation among us he had just addressed.

[Lila: It could also straight-forwardly refer to “the generation which sees the “abomination of desolation.” And that, just there, proves that the Muslim “Dome of the Rock” cannot be the “abomination of desolation,” as Zionists like to claim. First, it is not built on the ruins of the Temple of Herod (the Second Temple), but on the ruins of the Roman Fort Antonia, so there is no abomination involved; second, the generation that saw its building (in the 7th century) has long passed away and will not be around to see the Second Coming, however you conceptualize it.]

Alternatively, genetai may be translated “begin to happen” in Matthew 24 34.

Therefore, we are not forced into difficult aspects of the Partial Preterist view, which allegorize and spiritualize important portions of the Olivet Discourse. Nor must we resort, as Full Preterists do, to asserting that the Second Coming and the Resurrection must have happened invisibly in 70 AD, when it is plain to everyone that church history records none of these events, and the bodies of all men who have died, except that of our Lord Jesus (and possibly those mentioned in Mt 27:53), remain within the earth. Nor need we despair at finding a solution, as CS Lewis did. Despite his remarkable intellect and his usual able defenses of the Christian faith, he was quite wrong in thinking that the facts force us to admit Jesus made an embarrassing error.

Instead, we find not just one, but four reasonable, scriptural, and orthodox alternatives to the assertion of critics of the Christian faith that Jesus was referring to the contemporaneous generation in Matthew 24:34. All four permit us to confidently accept the full import of the other words of Jesus in the Olivet Discourse!”

 

J.S. Bach: Lutheran Prophet

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From Faith Alone.org:

I. Prelude

J.S.B.

The initials “J.S.B.” are some of the greatest in all musical history, and certainly in the top two or three in great Christian music. The J is for Johann, German for John. The S is for Sebastian (pronounced ze-BAH-styahn), the name of a Roman soldier who became a martyr by being “darted” to death by his company for being a Christian.1 The B is for Bach, German for creek or brook.
Were it not for Bach’s ancestor’s loyalty to the Reformation, it is likely that such a scripturally oriented musician would never have lived. Some time before 1597, a baker named Veit Bach left Hungary for his native Germany to protect his Lutheran heritage against the re-establishment of Roman Catholicism in his area. He again became a baker, and, more important, the forefather of a host of German musicians by the name of Bach, including the greatest, Johann Sebastian.

 

S.D.G.

In the Latin Bible at Romans 16:27 and Jude 25 we find the words “Soli Deo Gloria”—”to the only God be glory.” This was to become J.S.B.’s motto. He would sign his works—whether sacred, such as “The St. Matthew Passion,” or “secular,” such as the light-hearted “Coffee Cantata,” with these letters: S.D.G.

Actually, to Bach there was no difference between sacred and secular. All works, he maintained, should be to the glory of God.

 

Libretto by Luther

It has been well said that Bach is one of the greatest interpreters of Luther. Both came from the same part of Germany. Both loved music. Both loved and fathered large families (Bach: 20 children by two excellent wives—his first wife died). Both loved orthodox Protestant doctrine. Later in life, Bach clung to Lutheran orthodoxy when it was becoming less fashionable. He also had a strong “pietistic” flavor to his Evangelical Lutheranism: he stressed a warm, personal faith in God through his Savior.

 

Music Rooted in Luther

The types of music approved and practiced by the Lutheran congregations of Bach’s time are deeply rooted in the great Reformer himself. Wohlfarth’s words are worth quoting at some length:

The Protestant cantorship was a creation of Martin Luther and his musical collaborator, Johann Walter, near the beginning of the sixteenth century. Luther loved music: “Youth should always be familiarized with this art, for it makes for fine and capable persons. I give musica the next place after theologia, and the highest honor.” For Luther, music was intrinsic to education: “Whoever has no desire or love for it and is not moved by such lovely wonders must surely be an uncouth clod, who does not deserve to hear beautiful music!” In worship music appeared to him as an indispensable means for proclaiming the divine good tidings. Here he differed significantly from the representatives of the Swiss Reformation, Zwingli and Calvin, who perceived sensual danger in the arts.

For I am not of the opinion that all the arts should be struck down by the gospel and perish, as some spurious spiritualists would gladly see happen. Rather I would see all the arts, but especially music, in the service of Him who created and bestowed them.”

Besides simple hymns for congregational singing, of which he himself wrote many, Luther most loved and marveled at the exalted art of polyphony. He fervently encouraged its nurture among the cantors of the larger churches. What especially filled him with astonishment was the so-called Tenorsatz, that is, the art of joining other contrapuntal voices to a given melody. Indeed, such art actually appeared to him as a proof of the divine origin and nature of music:

But where natural music is refined and polished by art, there one first sees and recognizes the great and perfect wisdom of God in his miraculous work of music. The most rare and marvelous musical creation of all occurs when a simple melody or tenor (as the musicians call it) is joined by three or four or five other voices, joyfully playing and skipping around it, decorating and adorning that simple, ordinary melody most wonderfully in various ways, with various sounds, as if in some heavenly roundelay of dance.

Such frankly ecstatic musical enthusiasm as Luther’s upon hearing polyphonic chorale motets had not been uttered since the Confessions of St. Augustine. With what joy would Luther have eavesdropped on the chorale cantatas created from his own melodies by Bach, two hundred years later!2

Bach’s Consecration

Not only did our musician consecrate all his works of a Christian nature “to the only God’s glory” (S.D.G.), but he also believed everything should be ad gloriam Dei3 (to God’s glory).

When a Frenchman writes favorably of a German, as André Pirro does of Bach’s religion, we do well to listen closely:

Bach . . . dreamed of consecrating ad gloriam Dei all forms of magnificence, even those born outside the church. A semi-Pietist by his personal fervor, mystic reading matter and feeling for Scripture, Bach was, nevertheless, strongly attached to Lutheran orthodoxy. Furthermore, what savored of Pietism in the religion of his choice came to him far less from its innovators than from his nature which was so profoundly German. His predilections, the emotions of his soul enamored of the Divine, his affectionate and almost fraternal worship of Christ were manifestations of that great current of pious familiarity which has so often flowed through Teutonic Christianity.4

II. An Evangelical Musical Genius A Great Family Man

Hollywood would be hard pressed to write an even mildly accurate script of Bach’s life that would please today’s “trash-TV”-oriented audiences. There were no moral or financial scandals, murders, or alcoholic excess in Bach’s immediate family. (Even his large extended family was respectable.)

Bach was a happily married, faithful husband and father. By his first wife, Barbara, he fathered three children. A year and a half after her death he married the 16-year younger Anna Magdalena, who bore him seventeen more! Both wives were not only sweet, “1 Peter 3” type women, but also talented singers and musicians.

Like Luther and his wife and children, Bach and all his family had musical evenings of great vivacity, talent, and enjoyment. They were not a rich family (20 young mouths to feed!), but they were richly endowed by their parents’ Christian faith, love, hard work, and tremendous musical talents.

 

A Great Teacher

J. S. B. should please both the traditional schoolers and the home schoolers. Bach practiced both. At the St. Thomas Church School he taught many subjects, excelling in Latin and, of course, music. He taught the boy students to sing as he also had sung in choirs as a boy. At home he taught music to all his own children, boys and girls.

Bach was the first to teach the use of all five fingers on the keyboard, which we now take for granted. He had respect for his pupils’ desires and made his musical lessons and drills interesting. He made compositions of an easier nature for those with competent but less-than-genius abilities, including his second wife. She has the honor of having the famous, still widely-used Anna Magdalena’s Notebook named after her.5 

Regarding his family, Bach said:

They [Bach’s children] are all born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already form a concert, both vocal and instrumental, of my own family, particularly as my present wife sings a very clear soprano, and my eldest daughter joins in bravely.6 

It is not surprising that four of the Bach boys went on to become successful professional composers and performers—even rivaling their father at times.

 

A Great Organist

In his own time Bach was better known as a great organist than as a composer. He still is renowned for his marvelous organ works, which unfortunately we can’t hear him play himself.

Go to any organ recital (except those that are avant garde only) and the chances are excellent there will be a work by Bach on the program. Recitals of Bach’s works only are not a thing of the past either.

 

A Great Composer

Sad to say, soon after his death, Bach’s compositions fell into disuse. They were thought to be old-fashioned and too complex by many.

Fortunately, in 1829 the German composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy revived the “St. Matthew Passion.” From then on Bach increasingly began to be rightly appreciated for his genius. His “St. Matthew Passion” and “St. John Passion” use the text of Luther’s Bible with soloists singing the parts of Jesus, the Evangelist, Judas, and others. These are interspersed with beautiful choral works which the congregation joins in. For example, the tune of “O Sacred Head Once Wounded”—arranged, not written by Bach—was so appealing to the composer that he used it several times with different words.

Bach’s setting of Mary’s “Magnificat” (Luke 1:46-55) is in Latin, yet it is exciting and truly magnificent.

For the last 27 years of his life Bach wrote cantatas for the regular Sunday and holiday services at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. All are worthy, some are wonderful.

In the “secular” realm (though J.S.B. didn’t believe in such a division—everything was “S.D.G.”!) “The Brandenburg Concertos” and “The Goldberg Variations” are noteworthy.

Strong Protestants may wonder when they see “Ave Maria” and the “Mass in B Minor” in the repertoire. Actually, Bach wrote the melody now labeled “Ave Maria” in honor of the Heavenly Father and a French Roman Catholic composer arranged it for Mary. (Is there a theological lesson here?)

The word mass as a term for musical composition was retained to some extent in Lutheran circles,7 and Bach wrote this work as a courtesy to a ruler of a Catholic subdivision of Germany.8

 

III. Finale

In some liturgies, there is a prayer for the blessing of a happy death. Whether J.S.B. ever prayed such a prayer we don’t know, but the Lord definitely granted His servant the sort of homegoing that fit his life of glorifying the one true God and His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

In 1749 Bach became seriously ill and finally blind. The Leipzig city council immediately gave another musician an audition “for the future appointment as cantor of St. Thomas, in case capellmeister and cantor Mr. Sebastian Bach should die.”9

J.S.B. was not yet quite ready to depart! In his darkened room he dictated to Johann Christoph Altnikol his last thoughts:

The night shines deeper, to penetrate more deeply,
But yet within there glows bright light.
For completing of the greatest work,
One soul for a thousand suffices.10

As the musical genius felt the imminence of his passing, he dictated line by line—note by note—a last organ chorale. Most appropriately it is called “Before Thy Throne Herewith I Come.”

On July 10, 1750, Bach had a stroke. He died ten days later, “a little after a quarter to nine in the evening, in the sixty-sixth year of his life, he quietly and peacefully, by the merit of his Redeemer, departed this life,” as the wording of his obituary so nicely put it.11

 

IV. Postlude

J.S.B. has been long in glory. His music, ever glorious, which Mendelssohn revived from 1829 onward, is still being widely played and sung. As I write these words I have my Bach CDs set to play—each with a mixture of “sacred” and “secular.”

 

An Enemy Testimonial

We can find many glowing tributes to J.S.B. from those who love classical music, especially conservative Christians who actually believe that the words being sung are not only beautiful, but true! When, however, we can find a tribute from someone who has known and rejected Christian truth, the testimonial is all the more powerful.

And so we include a word from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.12 In 1870 Nietzsche heard Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. This was Bach’s great (Wohlfarth calls it “miraculous”) confessional masterpiece and was performed only once during the composer’s lifetime. He had planned a second performance but the city council refused to support it financially. Nearly a century later, Mendelssohn directed the second performance. The rest is history. When Nietzsche heard it, he paid it this tribute: “One who has completely forgotten Christianity truly hears it here as Gospel.”13

 

Two Friendly Questions

Ray Keck, in his fine article on Bach’s legacy, asks the following two questions, which he feels, “alas, have no answer”:

Did he know, as some critics have suggested, that he was a genius trapped in the service of parochial, foolish men? Did he suspect that he was one of music’s greatest and most lasting lights, that his compositions would forever stand as one of the most noble creative efforts of our kind? Or was he, as some have insisted, a Lutheran of extraordinary spiritual resources, humble before God and sustained by a great faith? He did study theology throughout his life, read theological works for pleasure, and finished his compositions on music paper that contained the watermark “Jesu, juva!” Jesus, help!14 

Regarding the first question, one suspects the answer is “yes,” though Bach credited his work at least partly (in good Germanic style) to hard work. And yes, he did indeed suffer at the hands of many unappreciative officials and petty critics.

Regarding the second question, an Evangelical can well answer with a confident “Yes!” After all, what mere religionist would put S.D.G. on all his works? Or have “Jesus, help!” watermarked (not visible) into his composition paper?

The LSE: Training Ground Of New World Order

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I blogged earlier about the dangers (physical and otherwise) of attending Yale, perhaps the leading training ground in the US of the elite that controls media, respectable opinion, academics, and publishing.

In Britain, a counterpart to Yale can be found in the London School of Economics, founded by the liberal imperialist, Viscount Haldane, a close friend of Fabian socialists, Beatrice and Sidney Webb.

Fabian socialism, or socialism by stealth, was the preferred mode of government encouraged by the ruling powers in their former colonies.

The Fabian Society took its name from the Roman general Fabius Maximus:

The Fabian Society, which favoured gradual change rather than revolutionary change, was named – at the suggestion of Frank Podmore – in honour of the Roman general Fabius Maximus (nicknamed “Cunctator”, meaning “the Delayer”). His Fabian strategy advocated tactics of harassment and attrition rather than head-on battles against the Carthaginian army under the renowned general Hannibal.

An explanatory note appearing on the title page of the group’s first pamphlet declared:

“For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.”[7

The education in socialist philosophy and economics of the leading men of the former colonies (men like V.K. Krishna Menon and via Menon, Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, via her advisors B.K. Nehru and P.N.Haskar) was ostensibly  one of many gifts of civilization bestowed by the British empire in its graceful withdrawal from the Indian sub-continent after centuries of enlightened rule.

Such is the received wisdom on the subject.

My earlier post on the number and intensity of the famines in British India, the precipitous decline in average Indian income, the vast expropriation of the earnings of the Indian peasantry, the punitive levels of taxation and tribute, the mass starvation of tens of millions, and the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of millions of Indians under Anglo-Jewish rule, proves the absurdity of this received wisdom.

Indeed, it exposes it as pernicious propaganda.

That granted, the importance of the LSE (London School of Empire one might call it) is easy to see.

LSE was the training ground where the first generation of native rulers would be set on a course that would weaken and destroy their countries, while convinced they were building them up.

A follower of the German philosopher Hegel,  Viscount Haldane, like his mentor, believed in the necessary supremacy of the state to fulfill the inherent workings of reason in history. Thus Haldane’s emphasis on national efficiency and thus his devotion to the training of the apparatchiks of state, the bureaucrats.

The   leaders of the newly “independent” colonies were to be gradually accustomed to the notion of a socialist world state, into which they would eventually merge, while nominally preserving their independence.

The merging is misleadingly called “neo-liberalism,“ thereby damning the free-market and the private property regime, whereas it is nothing more than state-sponsored acquiescence in the hegemony of  transnational bureaucracies backed by an octopus of national and international policing and surveillance mechanisms that enable and enforce Anglo-Western patronage and domination.

This recolonization – nearing completion today-  is apparent only to careful observers and it has only become  apparent to anyone when it is now all but irreversible.

 

 

 

Somervell Of Everest: Another Kind Of Missionary

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Theodore Howard Somervell’s family recalls their modest father,  an exceptional athlete and mountaineer and  a successful painter and musician, who spent decades of his life in India as a missionary

The achievements of Theodore Howard Somervell, surgeon, artist and missionary, were many and varied – but even his family were amazed to discover that he had an Olympic medal.

“I didn’t know it existed until we went through his belongings after his death,” his son David Somervell says. “I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, what’s in this box?'” The medal is inscribed “Paris 1924” and on its rim three scratched initials can just be made out: THS.

It is one of 21 awarded to members of the first full expedition to Everest in 1922, in an era when mountaineering was included as an Olympic sport. Another medal, which belonged to medic Arthur Wakefield, is now at Everest base camp. Mountain guide Kenton Cool hopes to take that one to the summit this week, fulfilling a pledge made 88 years ago.

Somervell was a polymath of exceptional talents whose life echoes that of another Olympic gold medallist from 1924, the sprinter Eric Liddell, joint subject of the film Chariots of Fire. Like Liddell, Somervell was a committed Christian who joined the London Missionary Society. He worked as a surgeon at a hospital in Neyyoor in the modern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Unlike Liddell’s, Somervell’s Olympic triumph was completely forgotten.

David Somervell, now in his 80s, is a retired doctor who also worked as a missionary in India. “The trouble with my father,” he says, “was that he was a very good surgeon, a very good artist, a fine musician and also a very spiritual man. His saving grace was that he had a good sense of humour.”

Somervell’s work as a surgeon in the Royal Army Medical Corps during WW I turned him into a pacifist.  In 1922 and then 1924, he was part of expeditions to climb Mt. Everest, an effort for which he won an Olympic gold later on.

Somervell could have stayed on in England and had a successful career as a consultant doctor and professional artist, but the loss of seven Sherpas on the expedition in 1924 changed his focus; his evangelical Christianity drew him to a more otherworldly career choice:

After Everest, Howard Somervell gave up the promise of a career in London at University College Hospital to work in India. “It’s extraordinary in a way,” David Somervell says, “but it’s very human. You see suffering and you want to do something about it. I think he thought that London already had plenty of doctors.”

Somervell annoyed fellow missionaries by dancing and playing cards on the boat out to India and he wasn’t interested in proselytising. The old ideas of medical missions as “a bait to catch the unwary”, he denounced as “un-Christian” and “wrong”. Yet he stayed 22 years, helping to transform the hospital, and later wrote – and illustrated – a textbook on abdominal surgery.”

In India, his memory is still kept alive in the many institutions he created and his innumerable students (including some of my family members) and colleagues, not least because his Christian witness was completely different from that of most missionaries:

Somervell (1890-1975) set up an X-ray unit in the Neyyoor hospital, introduced radium treatment for cancer, a first-of-its-kind in the country, performed hundreds of surgeries in a month, travelled to every village when cholera and malaria broke out in South Travancore.

He was also instrumental in setting up an exclusive hospital for the treatment of leprosy patients in Colachel in Kanyakumari district.

Tamil writer Jayamohan has written a short-story Olaisiluvai (The Palm Leaf Crucifix) based on the real-life incidents of Somervell. Malayalam poet Vyloppilli Sreedhara Menon has a poem on how the surgeon played the flute to give some soothing moments to a patient after a surgery.

The first portion of Olaisiluvai tells an incident about the missionary-surgeon converting the son of a palmyrah tapper to Christianity to deliver him from abject poverty, though Mr. Jayamohan ends the story with the surgeon handing over a portrait of Lord Guruvayurappan to a woman who had lost all her children to cholera.

“I wrote my story based on an incident narrated to me,” said Jayamohan. But, the autobiography of Dr. Somervell gives a different perspective, as he disapproved of conversion.

[Lila: As I do too, unless it is completely initiated by the one who converts.]

“The old idea of medical missions as a bait to catch the unwary and then proceed to proselytize him is obviously not merely out of date, but definitely wrong and unchristian,” he had argued in the book “After Everest: The Experiences of a Mountaineer and Medical Missionary.” Dr Somervell’s paintings of the Everest adorn the walls of the Royal Geographical Society’s House.

Francis Younghusband, a British Army Officer, in his foreword to the book, has recalled Dr Somervell as saying, “It is no part of our work as Christians to destroy Hinduism. Nor to go out to India with any feeling of racial and religious superiority, but to serve India in the spirit of Christ Himself – to be servants of Mankind.”

Dr. Somervell first came to Neyyoor in 1922, accepting an invitation from Dr Pugh, who was already working in the hospital, “in a tropical climate of continual damp heat, with a body which was far from physically fit.”

Later writing about his decision to work in Neyyoor, Dr. Somervell said: “Had I not then gone to India at the call of suffering, I could never have dared to look God in the face nor to say prayers to him again.”

Amid his back-breaking schedule, Dr. Somervell spent two hours a day learning Tamil so that he could communicate effectively with his patients.

He was fascinated by Indian music, describing Nagaswaram as “a very beautiful and striking instrument and mridangam, in skilled hands, a marvellous maker of rhythum”, but he regretted that the he could not succeed in his attempt to use these instruments at the church at Neyyoor.

After over two decades of service, he retired in 1945. He again came to Neyyoor in 1948. In 1949, he went to Vellore to pass on his surgical knowledge to Indian medical students and produce qualified Christian doctors. He worked again in Neyyoor (1950-51) and Vellore (1952-53). He also acknowledged the contribution of the Travancore Maharajas to his medical mission and also hailed a 1936 royal edict allowing all castes to enter Hindu temples.

A thorough-going English Christian, Dr. Somervell was critical of the caste system in India, regretting that “centuries of Hinduism, in spite of their great mystics, have never given untouchables a chance.”

He also said “caste is firmly embedded in the Indian mind, so much so that many Indian Christians take several generations to throw it off,” while narrating how his cook was not allowed to conduct his marriage in a church next door because he belonged to a different caste.

While arguing that Christianity gave the untouchables an opportunity for social uplift, he was not ready to blame Hinduism, saying, “It is not that Hinduism is bad in itself.”

“Some of the greatest sages of the world have been Hindus. Some of the stories of Hindu mythology are finer far than many of those in Old Testament. Rama is a finer character than Jacob and Sita and Savitiri have few peers in ancient Jewish literature,” he said.

However, for Dr. Somervell, all other religions are incomplete. “It is only in the New Testament that we find that part of our faith which satisfies and uplifts and gives us peace and power.”