When I first went to Istanbul, I was taken to tea at Pierre Loti’s by Necati. We have been back there many times since and each time, it is assumed that I must know of Pierre Loti because he is such an important writer. Well, that may not be quite the case. I think the significance of m. Loti and the preservation of his home on the hillside overlooking the grave of Necati’s father, is less a matter of literary genius and more because he supported the Kemalists and earned the patronage of Atatürk.
Personally, I find it a bit sad that this man is lauded in Istanbul to the exclusion of another man like Edward Lear who drew at least two pictures of the Pierre Loti graveyard even before Loti had built his wooden house there. It is these pictures that we have tried to emulate in our own work and that are posted below. Here, meanwhile, is my copy of one of the Lear drawings:
Loti is nevertheless an interesting if odd man. A French navy man through and through, he found his way to the far east, and began writing, publishing books about Polynesia, Tahiti, Senegal and Breton fishermen. A novel in 1887 called “Madam Chrysanthème” is essentially “Madam Butterfly” and is acknowledged (together with claims by John Luther Long, a Philadelphia lawyer, who wrote a story on something he claimed had happened to “his sister”) as one of the sources for both Puccini (1904) and Messager (1893). Loti himself had a temporary Japanese wife so the story is fairly autobiographical and Pierre is just as unthinking as Pinkerton. Later Loti wrote an impassioned paper against the British Raj called “L’inde” and was involved in quashing the Boxer rebellion in China in 1900.
His praise for Atatürk and support of the “Kurtuluş Savaşı” or Turkish war of Independence (which took in disputes with Greece, Armenia and the Ottoman throne and that really lasted from 1908-1923 but was sealed by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and the abolition of the Sultinate, the abdication and exile of Mehmed VI on the British warship Malaya which went to Malta) is qualified by a fairly blistering attack on Turkey towards the end of his life. But the people of Istanbul love the cafe so Pierre Loti, like El Cid, I recall, has moved out of history and into some sort of mythology. No one reads his novels, but we all drink his tea.
Here are pictures of the graveyard that surrounds the Pierre Loti cafe:
And here is a picture of Pierre Loti dressed in a Turkish fez (presumably just before Atatürk outlawed it in 1925 with the “hat law”)
Finally, here is one of the most bizarre pictures, called an “academic image” but I cannot see why.
One of our projects is a cartoon version of figaro. Here is a version of the storyboard for Bartolo’s aria with music arranged by David Watson. None of the sketches are entirely “on model” and they were completed over a period of some years as the project has developed, but I think they show the energy and demonstrate that it is possible to re-think this opera in terms of a universe inhabited solely by cartoon characters. During the overture, Bartolo demonstrates an interest in Arson, and we also see Marchellina leave her home in Bath to take a train to Castle Almaviva. She is followed by Bartolo which explains his appearance here. She also spies on Figaro, though not until the next scene, on Susanna. The film was designed some years before Downton Abbey captured our tv viewing, but I suppose would be exactly that period and image.
This is a caricature that we did for the little animated film, “How to be Boss”.
Today, the little boy in the background is the Supreme leader of the Democratic People’s republic of Korea. The son of Kim Jong-il and grandson of the founder of modern North Korea, Kim il-Sung. He had been designated premier by the Soviet controllers and called “great leader”. One of his first plans as leader was to invade South Korea which the Soviets anyway regarded as his territory. With Chinese acquiescence, Kim went on to seize Seoul capturing most of the peninsular except for the “Pusan Perimeter”. The US landed in Incheon and mounted a vigorous counter-offensive together with troops from South Korea. Within a month, Seoul had been retaken and then Kim was forced into a major retreat and refuge in China. This led to a Chinese offensive in aid of the North Koreans and the retaking of Seoul in January 1951. The UN counter-attacked in March retaking Seoul. The war lingered on until 1953 with the loss of over 1.2 million lives. Kim resented China’s increasing control of the war as indeed he resented anyone with a strong alliance to any number of people with Chinese connections. The most bizarre of these was Enver Hoxha, the leader of Albania who had openly defied Russia and set up his own Sino-Albanian pact.
Enver Hoxha and “Following Edward Lear”
I remember seeing Hoxha’s pyramidal tomb in Tirana. We have been to Albania a few times for the Lear project. Edward Lear was there in 1848 at the end of his journey from Istanbul. As part of our Edward Lear film, we have drawn a view of the Albanian town of Elbassan.
one of Lear’s views of Elbassan
view of Elbassan from the hills
the cypress grove, what belongs of it
Today, the view that Lear sketched is dominated by a huge Chinese-built factory which is really the only physical result of the Sino-Albanian pact, Hoxha’s alliance with Mao Zedong. Hoxha may not have been a nice man, and his secret police, the Sigurimi has a grim reputation, but he is impressive in the way that he stood up to Russia and lived to tell the tale. In truth, he was defending the indefensible- denouncing reforms by Khrushchev and the demolition of the Stalin cult. He was also, incidentally anxious about meetings that had taken place between the Russian president and Greek politicians who had been campaigning for an independent Northern Epirus. Khrushchev is supposed to have said of Hoxha: “He bared his fangs at us even more menacingly than the Chinese themselves.” To this comment went the response from a Spanish delegate at the conference to the effect that Hoxha is a dog that bites the hand that feeds it. Russian economic aid stopped but was replaced by considerable aid from China. In 1979, Hoxha responded to the resentment oozing out of North Korea. He said, “In Pyongyang, I believe that even Tito will be astonished at the proportions of the cult of his host, which has reached a level unheard of anywhere else, either in past or present times, let alone in a country which calls itself socialist.”
There is a rather funny video doing the rounds on Youtube. You can find it here-
We are slowly getting on with the animation of our short film based on “the Music hall”. “Burlington Bertie” is one of two films, both of which feature a song by the first world war composer William Hargreaves in arrangements by David Watson of Kanon. Bertie is odd though because all the references in the song are to Queen Victoria and the “Prince of Wales,” Edward VII who had died by the time the song was even first performed by Hargreaves’ wife, Ella Shields in 1915. It was then later done by Julie Andrews in the film “Star”. When she comes off stage after singing the song for the first time as a pregnant understudy, one of the other actresses standing in the wings asks “how was that?” she says, “It was marvellous!” and that rather seals her fate- sacrificing a private life to the demands of her theatre-public (1968) The film, sadly- some of which was shot in the Hackney Empire where we are setting our own film- was not a great success but it has some great scenes in it! Well worth watching. The final number “Jenny” has an irritatingly repetitive lyric but Dame Julie is as game and joyous as ever. According to her memoirs (the very readable “Home”), she had been offered the part of “Lady in the Dark” early on in her own Broadway career but turned it down. I think she was worried about comparison to Gerty Lawrence, so it is ironic that she went on to do a bio-pic of her life.
Here is a colour snippet from our version of “Bertie”:
Now, this is the reason for the out-dated references: The “Bertie” song by Hargreaves is actually a pastiche of a much older song by Harry B Norris which was famously sung from 1900 onwards by Vesta Tilley, the darling of the lesbian set. The original song is fairly patriotic too with a great chorus that is well-worth repeating. Here is the end of the last verse and the end of the final chorus. Suddenly, reading this, you can see how the bunting would go flying and why Vesta Tilly earned such a reputation during the First World War!
Altho’ absent minded, he does not forget That Englishmen always must pay off a debt. He drops all his pleasures, the polo, the hunt And just like the rest, he is off to the front; Altho’ he’s a johnny, he’ll fight in the ruck, He’s wealthy and foolish, but if you want pluck – …
What price Burlington Bertie, the boy with the Hyde Park drawl, What price Burlington Bertie, the boy with the Bond Street crawl? He’ll fight and he’ll die like an Englishman. Forgive all his folly we can; Says old John Bull ‘I plainly see These Burlington boys are the boys for me!’
There are a few dodgy lyrics though here- I hate the laziness, for example, of “always must” * but the rest is priceless! (*The inversion is clumsy- It’s almost as lazy as the lyric: “I just called to say I loved you”- the word “just” has no purpose there at all. It is included for the scansion alone.) The Bertie here is a Gent down on his “uppers”. He’s not from Bow, he’s from South Ken!
The Hargreaves’ version plays around with patriotism, too, and we will certainly make use of this in our animation- but it focuses much more on the idea that his Bertie, in contrast, is a “down and out” pretending to be a toff. There is alot of pride in this “tramp” too: The same stock character/characters, in effect, turn up in “Easter Parade” with a song by Irving Berlin. Check out Judy Garland’s “Little Titch” shoes here…a tremendous tribute to the music hall/vaudeville!
And for the potency of the tramp character in music hall, look no further than Chaplin!
and frankly, it is the same idea that we find in “Hello Dolly” when Cornelius Hackl, Barnaby Tucker and co elect to walk to Harmonia Gardens “because it is more elegant”. There’s a charming version of this song here:
The Lady Diana at the end of the Hargreaves’ song would be Lady Diana Cooper, not of course Diana Spencer. Bertie comes from Bow which makes him a genuine Cockney. He is idle, drunk and smokes too much- he enjoys hobnobbing with the idle rich in the West End. This is a slightly different character to the one in the Norris song. In the original song “He rents a swell flat somewhere Kensington way” and has frittered away his inheritance on “Brandy and Soda”. But his biggest failing seems to be that he is always ready to help. When a girl wants a present she wonders “who can I touch” and along comes the rousing chorus,
What price Burlington Bertie, the boy with the Hyde Park drawl, What price Burlington Bertie, the boy with the Bond Street crawl? A nice little supper at the Savoy, Oh! What a duck of a boy, ‘So free’ says she, ‘with L.s.d., Burlington Bertie’s the boy for me.’
The LSD line gets a new meaning I suppose after the 60s.
Below is a recording of the Hargreaves song with some very elementary movements and then follows a line test of the coloured version at the top of this post. I am afraid there is a long way to go…. I will add some updates soon and some images of the backdrops which are also coming along nicely!
(I am not sure how Bertie’s pose is actually “ironical”- I suppose because he is picking up fag ends from the strand and strutting around wearing a monocle. Maybe there is more to it than that? I welcome any observations!)
Here are some pictures showing progress on a scene we are finishing for the Edward lear film. This shows the Fatih gate which is that part of the wall that first gave way to the Turkish assault of 1453. Next to the fountains here is a museum with an astonishing diorama showing the actual bombardment of the city by the Turks. Here is a copy of the picture that Edward Lear painted. This is unusual among the Istanbul collection because it is in colour, so probably worked up by Lear a few years later.
Here is the completed picture we have just finished.
and here is the companion piece showing the walls a little further down.
In 1972 I wrote to Richard Williams and was invited to visit his studio. I think I also sent him some artwork. It would have been about this time that a kind lady was also trying to arrange an exhibition for me I learnt recently, so I imagine I was doing fairly well as a little 11 year old draughtsman and impressing more people than I realised. Certainly, it took years to get back to the dynamism and accuracy of those early days partly because I was consistently bullied by the art teacher at school. I was called names by this man, had my work ripped up by him, and was consistently slapped down with words like “slick” and “easy” which I understood then to be criticisms but which today I would accept as some sort of defiant badge of honour. Anyway, this is not meant to be a whine, but more an…
There was a dark side to Disney. There! I have said it. It is hard to imagine when the charm of the man exudes from “Saving Mr Banks” and when every outing of a Disney cartoon reaffirms his near-Divinity, lying just south of Father Christmas and in the company of St Francis of Assisi, the Doctor Doolittle of Paradise. To add to the sense of triumphant hagiography, Disney acquired his own Mother Goddess in the form of Julie Andrews, descending from a cloud to right the wrongs in London and returning there when things, to the echoing strains of that Sherman Brothers’ hymn “Let’s go fly a kite”, are just about right. To cement the deal of course, her name was Mary.
Later on, Mary affirmed her Catholicism, attended a convent and looked after a large family of Austrian refugees. Disney, meanwhile, died and was survived by his wholesome legacy, a global institution to rival the Vatican, and his surrogate son, Mickey Mouse who never aged and, though temped to perform magic to music in “Fantasia”, never did any real wrong. All this looks suspiciously religious!
This picture is from “How to be Boss” which you can see here on Youtube:
Disney and the Nine old men:
But the dark myths about Disney lurk in the recesses of the Internet and in glorious books like “King Rat” and Marc Eliot’s “Hollywood’s dark prince”. The sins seem to fall into three areas- the first is his alleged anti-semitism, the second, his labour relations and his record as an employer and the third is his interest in surviving death. As a film maker, and moreover, an animator, the way Disney managed his empire is of great significance to me. If he made mistakes, then I would want to avoid them and if he did things right that it makes sense to emulate him. For the most part, I resent the endless stories in what are marketed as serious books about animation going on endlessly about who put the cat in the cupboard. When it comes to animation, it is important to learn the trade from the masters- how to convince an audience that a 2d drawing is alive and more than that, has feelings. So I have little interest in the private lives of the 9 old men. I met one of them some years ago- frankly, I have no recollection which one it was, though I think maybe Marc Davis. He talked endlessly about the Disney theme parks and pooh-poohed the use of cinemascope in “Sleeping Beauty”.
However, the life of Disney represents something different because it was Disney who held together, developed and maybe exploited his various artists to such remarkable and lasting effect. Unlike Richard Williams, Disney was no great Draughtsman, nor indeed a gifted animator, but he had an instinct for story-telling and was clearly ready to listen to and implement advice about marketing. It is the marketing that has made the movies from the appearance of Mickey mouse memorabilia within a year of the release of “Steamboat Willie” to all the party frocks for little girls that accompanied the release of “Frozen”. I remember having a much-loved carpet of “Mary Poppins”. A carpet, note and not a carpet-bag.It was pink, peopled with penguins and a tortoise or two while in the centre, Mary Poppins herself floated in serenity. I also had jigsaw puzzles. Indeed, my father was so frustrated by my devotion to Mary that he twice fired his shotgun out of the bedroom window claiming to have “got the damn woman”. Somehow, I knew that my father, despite the tweed suit, was not quite the crack-shot he claimed to be, and that Mary Poppins would survive as indeed she did. Like the birds, she may have lost a few feathers, but “spit spot” on she flew.
Uncle walt and the myths
Today, people want to believe the worst of their heroes. American articles have appeared in recent years suggesting that Disney was a hard-drinking drug user, an FBI stouge or spy, and even a secret Nazi attending meetings of the American Nazi groups. His public image as attested in “Saving Mr Banks” was avuncular. “Call me Uncle Walt!” Karen Dotrice, the girl from Guernsey who played Jane in “Mary Poppins” certainly did just this and made three films for her beloved uncle. There are endless postings on the internet about what appear to be sexual imagery in the films of the late 80’s renaissance: the 2 frames of nudity in “the Rescuers”, some (intentionally) suggestive stuff in “Roger Rabbit”, the phallic tower on the cover of “Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin”, the Bishop’s apparent arousal, the word sex in the stars in “Lion King” and the suggestion that the relationship between Scar and his brother hints that Jesus and satan were siblings; There is generally an innocent explanation. The animator who drew the Bishop in “the Little Mermaid”, Tom Sito, says that what appears to be naughty is in fact the cleric’s knee: “He’s standing on a box that his long robes cover.” There were complaints that the opening verse in the first song of “Aladdin” was racist and that the “Pocahontas” film covered up her subsequent conversion to Christianity. Perhaps the most impressive of these claims, and one that might stick to Disney himself were it credible, is that in 1937, Donald Duck is supposed to have said “Fuck you” to a clock spring that simply would not stay in place. Frankly, it is possible to read any interpretation into some of the duck rants and I doubt that this expression would have been that common in the mid 30s. The film is on Youtube, so listen to it: I could not locate these words but there was an AFA condemnation registered in 1996: “Disney blasted for using the F word in Donald Duck cartoon”!
The Disney in “Mr Banks” seems to know he is not perfect. When he stubs out a cigarette, he says, “I’d hate to set a bad example for the kids.”
is their any evidence?
Many of the spurious tales come from the Eliot book, “Hollywood’s dark prince”, especially the idea that Disney was a spy, flying to New York to attend left-wing meetings and later to file reports for the FBI. Much of Eliot’s material comes from a disgruntled Disney employee who was barely at the studio for 6 months. Indeed, much of the bile in general comes from the poor handling of a strike in 1941 that lingered on for 4 months. Disney was convinced that communist agents had stirred up trouble with the Screen Cartoonists’ guild. Disney detested the strikers and they him. It is hardly surprising that rumours began. Certainly it is true that Disney was registered as an FBI SAC Contact in 1955 and I suppose in the climate the allegations that he shopped suspected communists to the government may well be true; he was called to testify in 1947 and his testimony is fairly damning but naive: “Well, I think Sorrell is sure tied up with them. If he isn’t a Communist, he sure should be one.” His testimony certainly damaged the careers of some people in the industry and I think he must be held responsible for some of the blacklisting that went on. That he joined an organisation called “the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals” is quite true and this had explicit aims of getting rid of Hollywood’s communists. Some of the members were known anti-semites: Jack warner and Louis B Mayer did not join the organisation because of the anti-semitic bias, but that does not prove Disney was an anti-semite (despite the stereotypes in “three Little Pigs” and “the Opry House”). There seems little truth, equally, in claims that he was a Nazi and some of the war propaganda suggests he was firmly against Hitler though he certainly is recorded by Art Babbitt as meeting Leni Reifenstahl in 1938 She claimed Disney“told her he admired her work”; if he was a racist then he was a man of his time, but any charge that he was an anti-semite seems to be confounded hy his employment of people like Maurice Rapf, who also had a left-wing, probably communist background.
A serious issue
What is perhaps wrong and deeply so is that Disney implied that his workers would get a bonus for what they did on the early features and this never happened. Also, Disney hired women only to ink and paint the animation cels. He paid them a pittance. I have done this work and it is soul-destroying. Any corrections that the painter makes to sloppy animation go unrewarded and unrecognised. But such corrections are essential and part of the expected vigilance of the painter. The detail and discipline of the cel painting during the early Disney period- indeed, until “Sleeping Beauty” is astonishing.
Cryrogenics
There is one myth I have not touched on and that is Disney’s immortality: was he frozen? It always seemed a bit creepy. Would this have been done some time after his death or at some point when his body was still warm? The creepiness continues with stories that it was just his head that was frozen and that his body is kept somewhere under Disneyland for resurrection…It all sounds a bit biblical. But I believe his ashes are buried in Forest lawn memorial park in Glendale and that the story is false and probably dependent on a biography by Robert Mosley in 1986. But there was an initial report about freezing in a French Magazine, “Ici Paris” in 1969.
What can be stated with confidence is that there was secrecy about Disney’s final illness and that his brother was encouraged by Walt to keep everything quiet. This probably explains why the announcement of the death was delayed. Also, after having serious cancer surgery and the removal of his left lung, Disney returned to work in his office for about 10 days prior to his death. His daughter Diane is supposed to have said that her father hated funerals and insisted, “When I’m dead I don’t want a funeral. I want people to remember me alive”. That is a statement that alone might well have given rise to all the cryronic stories. It just depends how you interpret the words!
There are some Disney pluses, again not all of them belong to the man, but they certainly seem to be in line with his legacy. Top of the list must be the continued brilliance of the marketing department. Then comes the equal opportunities employment of gay people, provision for their partners and the recognition that Michael Eisner notes that “40% of Disney’s 63000 employees are homosexual”. That seems to redress the balance in a way.
Here is an icon of Photios, sometimes called Photius in the West and Saint Photios the Great in Orthodoxy.
We have just finished a new educational film about the 6 texts used in the Bible to condemn homosexuality.Because it is only 40 minutes long (it is divided into 3 parts on youtube) Below are parts 1 and 2:
I am afraid there are a number of glosses that i have made and which I will try to correct here over a number of blogs. I am aware that I have not really done justice (slight pun) to the text by Photios that is the lynch-pin of the main argument in the film. The issue I am discussing here occurs in the third part on youtube and the link to that part is here.
What Photios says
I have provided the Greek text of what Photios writes on the film, though it is on-screen fleetingly so here it is again:
Photios was very interested in the way Greek changes over the years from the various forms of Ancient /Attic Greek used by Homer to the Greek of the Septuagint and then the koine used in the New Testament. Photios was familiar on a day-by-day basis with the Byzantine Greek of the Imperial court and the Church but there was probably yet another more colloquial version of that in the streets of “the city”, H Polis.
Colwell’s rule
So his greatest work is probably his lexicon, which has helped scholars today to work out how words have changed their meanings and how Greek grammar has evolved. This is particularly important if you want to avoid the nonsense of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who wrongly ascribe at best an Attic grammar to the New Testament and at worst some inexperienced mumbo-jumbo. I met a man today who was sitting by the canal reading a bible. I asked which version and he said “the New World Translation”. I could not get away fast enough! There are endless errors in this Jehovah’s witness text, some simply bizarre- like the use of “torture stake” for “cross” because the Jehovah’s witnesses do not accept that Jesus died on a cross and the refusal to translate any words for hell because they do not believe in hell either. Anyway, the crucial passage is John 1:1 (in every manuscript except Codex L which has ὁ Θεός ἦν ὁ Λόγος)- here is the correct version: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεός ἦν ὁ Λόγος the last phrase of which is in Greek a form of Yoda-speak: “And God the word he was” or some such “Star wars” jabber. But it should be translated: “the word was God” but is translated by the Jehovah’s witnesses as “the word was a god”. Origin thinks that John omits the article because he refers to Jesus as God and not to the Father and Origin argues, “the true God is Ho Theos” (Commentary on John Book 2, chapter 2) which comes close to the Jehovah’s witness position of denying the Trinity, but not quite. Later scholars absolutely reject this: Bultmann, for example, is incandescent at the thought that the omitted definite article means only or merely “divine”: Denn man kann doch nicht verstehen: er war ein Gott, ein Gottwesen, als ob θεός ein Gattungsbegriff wäre- (he thinks, instead, that the word THEOS has some special grammatical rules of its own) but there is another solution. Here it is: In koine greek, though not in Attic greek, there was an increasing temptation to omit the article when a definite noun (a name) precedes the verb or when a noun should be identified as the predicate. This is often called “Colwell’s rule” and other instances can be found in Mark 15:39 and Matthew 27:42- βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ ἐστιν. The rule can be adjusted slightly because the “anthrous” noun, that is a noun without a definite article, can sometimes (as maybe here) simply be a way of establishing importance or prominence. The purpose of this paragraph is not so much to rebutt the Jehovah’s witness but to demonstrate that Greek was at the time when the New Testament was written in a state of flux and that Photios understood this.
In his commentary, therefore, on Romans 2, Photios considers Paul’s use of words very carefully and concludes that Paul was being specific about a particular part of the law/ the Torah.
Tracking down the fragment
Only a fragment of this commentary exists today and is found in a collection of fragments so it is itself a bit obscure. I managed to track down the text but struggled with the translation and called on an old friend in Athens who sent me off to see a man he called Bill who turned out to be the same man who had first “discovered” the text and published a small article on it in the early part of this century. When looking at obscure texts, the chances are that you are dealing with just a handful of people who know about them, translate them and use them. So, I had a fruitful and entertaining correspondence with Professor Bill Berg, the very man responsible for digging up this brilliant little gem. For my part, I was struggling with elements of the paragraph which seemed to me to be deeply anti-semitic and he agreed. So that was that. They are not important to the argument but they suggest that the man who was writing was doing so quickly and with alot of passion. It is not really surprising that this was the man who single-handedly fractured the Church. Many Catholics today dismiss the “filioque” dispute as a linguistic quibble and I remember having a long debate about this over a few weeks in the letters page of the Athens News, but the Greeks and Russians still regard the issues in the filioque as central to their decision to perpetuate the schism. For Photios and the modern Orthodox one of the central issues of the filioque is its origin in the writings of Augustine and this itself taints the theology of Augustine for the Orthodox.certainly. I think this is why there is a slightly different understanding of “original sin” in the East.
Romans 2: 26-27:
Back to Romans. The verse Photios is considering is Chapter 2. 26-27. This is what it looks like in Greek: ἐὰν οὖν ἡ ἀκροβυστία τὰ δικαιώματα τοῦ νόμου φυλάσσῃ, [a]οὐχ ἡ ἀκροβυστία αὐτοῦ εἰς περιτομὴν λογισθήσεται; καὶ κρινεῖ ἡ ἐκ φύσεως ἀκροβυστία τὸν νόμον τελοῦσα σὲ τὸν διὰ γράμματος καὶ περιτομῆς παραβάτην νόμου.
Ands this is the standard English translation: So, if a man who is uncircumcised keeps the precepts of the law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? Then those who are physically uncircumcised but keep the law will condemn you who have the written code and circumcision but break the law.
Photios says about this: (Photios’ words in brackets here) “for the Jews, (them) Paul (he) talks about the Torah (the law); for the uncircumcised, he talks about the ‘justices of the law’ not the whole law but only a specific part.” Photios has not quite gone all the way but it can be demonstrated by statements in, for instance, the beginning of Luke when Luke describes Zacharia and his wife keeping “all the jobs and justices of the law” that there are two different parts to the Torah and that these two parts were acknowledged as such at the time of Christ. Things change when the Temple falls in AD 70- and Judaism redefines itself as rabbinic or Pharisaic Judaism so this may explain why such a distinction gets lost.
The Golden Rule is the King’s Law
“The Golden Rule” (to love one another), broadly speaking, is that part of the Torah which is endorsed by Paul as central to the Christian life and is also flagged up by Jesus. Let me explain!! The measure of our relationship with God is to be found in our relationship with one another. This is defined by Christ in the Golden Rule, (Mtt 7:12: Πάντα οὖν ὅσα [a]ἐὰν θέλητε ἵνα ποιῶσιν ὑμῖν οἱ ἄνθρωποι, οὕτως καὶ ὑμεῖς ποιεῖτε αὐτοῖς· οὗτος γάρ ἐστιν ὁ νόμος καὶ οἱ προφῆται.) but it is also found in Hillel (Shabbat 31a: What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn) and is embedded in Lev xix 18. In the epistle of James, this is called “the Kingly law”: james 2:8: Εἰ μέντοι νόμον τελεῖτε βασιλικὸν κατὰ τὴν γραφήν Ἀγαπήσεις τὸν πλησίον σου ὡς σεαυτόν, καλῶς ποιεῖτε· Now, a “kingly law” was regarded in the ancient world as something that took precedence over any other existing laws. An example of this can be found in Pergamum (Deissmann) but the idea is fairly straightforward. If Christ had issued the Golden rule as a “kingly law” then that takes precedence over anything else in the Torah. The Golden rule is to deal well with others. It is not about cultic practice. In other words, the Gentile might well be able to keep the “kingly law” (which sums up the whole Torah anyway) in the knowledge that he can not keep the Torah itself.
This happens at a time when elements of Pharasaic Judaism were perhaps getting out of control. People were indulging in the cultic observances as a way to make up for their failing with one another. David Wood suggests that this is the kernel of Paul’s message- that no amount of cultic obedience can erase offences to the Golden rule. That is paramount and trumps the cultic laws, because the “kingly law” is absolute.
In terms of the two types of law, and here I think the film does an adequate enough job in part 3:
Homosexuality falls into those laws defined as “cultic”: rather than into those laws that support the “Golden Rule”, what Wood calls “the Justices”. Paul might not like Homosexuality (personally) but he does not think it is something that will damn someone to eternal death, particularly if they are mindful of the Golden Rule. What is damning instead is nastiness, and spite and I suppose writing hateful things in a blog. We must be nice to Jehovah’s witnesses when they knock on the door. Be nice but do not necessarily agree with what they say.
I will stop here and write something lighter next time!
The Sandwich apparently comes from John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich. The first Earl took the name Sandwich rather than Portsmouth as a tribute to the town of Sandwich where his fleet was anchored prior to his triumphant return to England with Charles II in 1660. In other words, had the wind been blowing differently, we could have been tucking into a cheddar cheese portsmouth, with or without the trimmings. The 4th Earl not only asked for meat to be served on his bread in 1762, but also financed Captain Cook who went on to Australia, but named the Sandwich isles in Hawaii after his sponsor in 1778. The first sandwich might, however, go back to Rabbi Hillel in Palestine, around the time of Christ, who put lamb and nuts on his matzah during the Passover.
For what it’s worth, I think the Jewish link is relevant, because my sense is that Princeps, the sandwich-eater was probably possessed. Maybe, he was driven by some evil perversion of nationalism, yet one of the great Serbian Archbishops defined Nationalism itself as a heresy, so that does not get us much further…(Sukkot shares similarities with hallowe’en. There are witches in Jewish tradition going back to The witch of Endor and in one ancient text, the spirit of Lilith who appeared as Adam’s first wife. It is the red string on the cribs that ward off the influence of Lilith, who wants revenge for being thrown over in popular mythology for the more insipid Eve. In contrast to the Dybbuk, the ru’ah tezazit, a soul,ר֣וּחַ, without a body, there is the Golem, the body without a soul, the original monster of Frankenstein.)
No, I think of possession, pure and simple. It’s first appearance in the modern world is in Jewish literature really, where the play the Dybbuk achieved noteriety in the yiddish theatre. It was drawing on kabbalistic traditions going back to the 17th Century at least, but maybe, if we take the hebrew words used routinely to describe such a spirit in the Kabbalah or even in the talmud, the ruah tezazit (confusion) or evil sprit, we find the same description in the New testament again and again.
Princeps’ Sandwich:
There is a story that seems to be taken as fact today that Gavrilo Princeps was eating a sandwich, or buying a sandwich when the car carrying the Archduke and his wife passed Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen on Franz Joseph street in Sarajevo. Of course, as Necati observes, if he was eating anything it would have been burek but it is more likely that he was outside the cafe. Now, I did a bit of research and discovered that there is a source for the sandwich story in a 2003 Brazilian novel called “Twelve fingers” where the hero, Dimitri Korozec, a polydactil blessed with extreme clumsiness, meets his old friend Princeps in the cafe. At that point, Dimitri had been part of a twetve strong assassination team in Sarajevo and had himself failed to assassinate the Archduke because his 6th finger jammed in the gun. All this, and this is really the important bit, is complete fiction, the invention of Jô Soares. Later Dimitri will get caught up with Mata Hari, the invention of Spanish flu, the St Valentine’s day massacre, the attempt on the life of Franklin D Roosevelt in 1933 (he accidentally saves the President rather than shoots him) and finally the killing of Brazilian Getulio Vargas (picture above) in an attempt to stop him committing suicide in 1954. This is the man, one of the Presidents of Brazil (dictator?), whose genuine suicide note reads: “Serenely, I take my first step on the road to eternity and I leave life to enter history.” Fairly solemn stuff. Anyway, to the meeting in the cafe with princeps:
this is what was written,
It’s Gavrilo Princip. Feigning surprise, he says, “Gavrilo! It’s been such a long time! What’re you doing here?” “I’m eating a sandwich.” “I can tell that. Don’t treat me like a child.” They fall silent, while Gavrilo finishes his sandwich and takes a grimy handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his hands. When he opens his coat to put away the handkerchief, Dimitri sees a Browning pistol tucked into the waistband.
As I said earlier, this is a bit of fiction. There is no evidence anywhere before 2003 of a sandwich being eaten by Gavrilo Princeps. Another point that is interesting is that the statue I mentioned earlier that was erected in Sarajevo is not the only one! There is a mosaic being assembled in Visegrad and another statue in Tobarisevo, a little way from Belgrade.
Bizarrely as David Cameron re-shuffles his cabinet and brings more women into positions of power, no one on the BBC news has yet noted that today is the birthday of Mrs Pankhurst, she of the “Sister Suffragette” song at the beginning of “Mary Poppins”. This omission seems both rather odd and slightly sad but there we are! Andrea Leadsom is not on the list of women being elevated to high rank in the cabinet. She was being discussed a great deal today by someone from the TIMES: apparently, she has a reputation in the Party as “difficult” and a bit of a rebel. I have met her: one of the oddest things she claimed was that she would never put forward or speak in an early day motion because it was a waste of time and there was never any “resolution”. Sometimes, I think, issues nevertheless have to be aired. It can take years before a resolution is reached and I think I resent this cavalier attitude to the ordinary business of the house. That said, I note that she has actually either changed her mind or my recollection of our conversation is wrong because she has signed an EDM for renaming the Parliament tower in honour of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee after she signed an EDM proposed by Graham Evans which bemoaned the continued existence of EDM saying they “rarely have any influence on policy… and questions the value for money to the taxpayer”…Of course, she opposed the same sex marriage bill and made a great fuss in the press about her position- I don’t quite understand this bill as, other than nomenclature, it offers little that the civil partnership had not already established, but it seemed to cause so much more friction. I did a cartoon of Ms Leadsom where she stands among others who found the legislation- in her words “unacceptable” – she also added that her constituents found the idea of gay marriage to be “deeply wrong”. In the end, she lacked the guts to actually vote against the Government and simply ran into hiding during the vote. silly lady.
More interesting is Merton’s Elizabeth truss and St Hugh’s Nicky Morgan. Now Mrs Morgan also opposed the same sex legislation, but she managed to vote! I rather liked her comments in the Leicester Mercury and most specifically her “third reason” for voting against the bill. I think in time, this may be of significance –
“There were also three main reasons of my own that I voted against it.
“First, this is a very big social change. There have been plenty of little changes down the years but what’s never been changed is that the fact that marriage is between a man and a woman.
“I think that was one of the issues people, especially those who asked me to vote against, found hardest to accept and it also tied in with my own Christian faith too.
“I totally support civil partnerships and that same-sex relationships are recognised in law. But marriage, to me, is between a man and a woman.
“The second reason is that people have become a bit cynical about consultations about policy changes at national and local government level .
“And in this case, I felt the question was not whether the change should be made, but how it should be made and I think we forgot that step of asking if it should be made.
“And the third reason was legal aspects of the Bill. For instance, if we have gay marriage, should civil partnerships now also be opened up to heterosexual couples too? Or should we just get rid of civil partnerships altogether?
“Also, if same-sex marriages are to be dissolved, will that be different to heterosexual partnerships ending?
“I know there are a lot of worries for people like teachers and others in public sector roles and these are things I still feel need to be ironed out as the Bill goes through Parliament.
“I appreciate that there will be people in my constituency who will be unhappy with how I voted and I wish many of them had contacted me earlier and given me a clearer picture of what people thought.”
animate-tim.com 