A Letter to Rome

One morning the priest's housekeeper mentioned as she gathered up
the breakfast things, that Mike Mulhare had refused to let his
daughter Catherine marry James Murdoch until he had earned the
price of a pig.

"This is bad news," said the priest, and he laid down the
newspaper.

"And he waited for her all the summer! Wasn't it in February last
that he came out of the poor-house? And the fine cabin he has
built for her! He'll be that lonesome, he'll be going to America."

"To America!" said the priest.

"Maybe it will be going back to the poor-house he'll be, for he'll
never earn the price of his passage at the relief works."

The priest looked at her for a moment as if he did not catch her
meaning, and then a knock came at the door, and he said:--

"The inspector is here, and there are people waiting for me."

And while he was distributing the clothes he had received from
Manchester, he argued with the inspector as to the direction the
new road should take; and when he came back from the relief works,
there was his dinner. He was busy writing letters all the
afternoon; it was not until he had handed them to the post-
mistress that his mind was free to think of poor James Murdoch,
who had built a cabin at the end of one of the famine roads in a
hollow out of the way of the wind. From a long way off the priest
could see him digging his patch of bog.

And when he caught sight of the priest he stuck his spade in the
ground and came to meet him. He wore a pair of torn corduroy
trousers out of which two long naked feet appeared; and there was
a shirt, but it was torn, the wind thrilled in a naked breast, and
the priest thought his housekeeper was right, that James must go
back to the poor-house. There was a wild look in his eyes, and he
seemed to the priest like some lonely animal just come out of its
burrow. His mud cabin was full of peat smoke, there were pools of
green water about it, but it had been dry, he said, all the
summer; and he had intended to make a drain.

"It's hard luck, your reverence, and after building this house for
her. There's a bit of smoke in the house now, but if I got
Catherine I wouldn't be long making a chimney. I told Mike he
should give Catherine a pig for her fortune, but he said he would
give her a calf when I bought the pig, and I said, 'Haven't I
built a fine house and wouldn't it be a fine one to rear him in.'"

And they walked through the bog, James talking to the priest all
the way, for it was seldom he had anyone to talk to.

"Now I must not take you any further from your digging."

"Sure there's time enough," said James, "amn't I there all day."

"I'll go and see Mike Mulhare myself," said the priest.

"Long life to your reverence."

"And I will try to get you the price of the pig."

"Ah,'tis your reverence that's good to us."

The priest stood looking after him, wondering if he would give up
life as a bad job and go back to the poor-house. But while
thinking of James Murdoch, he was conscious of an idea; it was
still dim and distant, but every moment it emerged, it was taking
shape.

Ireland was passing away. In five-and-twenty years, if some great
change did not take place, Ireland would be a Protestant country.
"There is no one in this parish except myself who has a decent
house to live in," he murmured; and then an idea broke suddenly in
his mind. The Greek priests were married. They had been allowed to
retain their wives in order to avoid a schism. Rome had always
known how to adapt herself to circumstances, and there was no
doubt that if Rome knew Ireland's need of children Rome would
consider the revocation of the decree--the clergy must marry.

He walked very slowly, and looking through the peat stacks he saw
St. Peter's rising above a rim of pearl-coloured mountains, and
before he was aware of it he had begun to consider how he might
write a letter to Rome. Was it not a fact that celibacy had only
been made obligatory in Ireland in the twelfth century?

When he returned home, his housekeeper was anxious to hear about
James Murdoch, but the priest sat possessed by the thought of
Ireland becoming a Protestant country; and he had not moved out of
his chair when the servant came in with his tea. He drank his tea
mechanically, and walked up and down the room, and it was a long
time before he took up his knitting. But that evening he could not
knit, and he laid the stocking aside so that he might think.

Of what good would his letter be? A letter from a poor parish
priest asking that one of the most ancient decrees should be
revoked! The Pope's secretary would pitch his letter into the
waste paper basket. The Pope would be only told of its contents!
The cardinals are men whose thoughts move up and down certain
narrow ways, clever men no doubt, but clever men are often the
dupes of conventions. All men who live in the world accept the
conventions as truths. And the idea of this change in
ecclesiastical law had come to him because he lived in a waste
bog.

But was he going to write the letter? He could not answer the
question! Yes, he knew that sooner or later he must write this
letter. "Instinct," he said, "is a surer guide than logic. My
letter to Rome was a sudden revelation." The idea had fallen as it
were out of the air, and now as he sat knitting by his own
fireside it seemed to come out of the corners of the room.

"When you were at Rathowen," his idea said, "you heard the clergy
lament that the people were leaving the country. You heard the
Bishop and many eloquent men speak on the subject, but their words
meant little, but on the bog road the remedy was revealed to you.

"The remedy lies with the priesthood. If each priest were to take
a wife about four thousand children would be born within the year,
forty thousand children would be added to the birth-rate in ten
years. Ireland would be saved by her priesthood!"

The truth of this estimate seemed beyond question, nevertheless,
Father MacTurnan found it difficult to reconcile himself to the
idea of a married clergy. One is always the dupe of prejudice. He
knew that and went on thinking. The priests live in the best
houses, eat the best food, wear the best clothes; they are indeed
the flower of the nation, and would produce magnificent sons and
daughters. And who could bring up their children according to the
teaching of our holy church as well as priests?

So did his idea speak to him, unfolding itself in rich variety
every evening. Very soon he realised that other advantages would
accrue, beyond the addition of forty thousand children to the
birth-rate, and one advantage that seemed to him to exceed the
original advantage would be the nationalisation of religion, the
formation of an Irish Catholicism suited to the ideas and needs of
the Irish people.

In the beginning of the century the Irish lost their language, in
the middle of the century the characteristic aspects of their
religion. He remembered that it was Cardinal Cuilen who had
denationalised religion in Ireland. But everyone recognised his
mistake, and how could a church be nationalised better than by the
rescission of the decree? Wives and the begetting of children
would attach the priests to the soil of Ireland. It could not be
said that anyone loved his country who did not contribute to its
maintenance. He remembered that the priests leave Ireland on
foreign missions, and he said: "Every Catholic who leaves Ireland
helps to bring about the very thing that Ireland has been
struggling against for centuries--Protestantism."

This idea talked to him, and, one evening, it said, "Religion,
like everything else, must be national," and it led him to
contrast cosmopolitanism with parochialism. "Religion, like art,
came out of parishes," he said. Some great force was behind him.
He must write! He must write... .

He dropped the ink over the table and over the paper, he jotted
down his ideas in the first words that came to him until midnight;
he could see his letter in all its different parts, and when he
slept it floated through his sleep.

"I must have a clear copy of it before I begin the Latin
translation."

He had written the English text thinking of the Latin that would
come after, and very conscious of the fact that he had written no
Latin since he had left Maynooth, and that a bad translation would
discredit his ideas in the eyes of the Pope's secretary, who was
doubtless a great Latin scholar. "The Irish priests have always
been good Latinists," he murmured as he hunted through the
dictionary.

The table was littered with books, for he had found it necessary
to create a Latin atmosphere before beginning his translation. He
worked principally at night, and one morning about three he
finished his translation, and getting up from his chair he walked
to the whitening window. His eyes pained him, and he decided he
would postpone reading over what he had written till morning.

His illusions regarding his Latin were broken. He had laid his
manuscript on a table by his bedside, and on awakening he had
reached out his hand for it, but he had not read a page when he
dropped it; and the manuscript lay on the floor while he dressed.
He went into his breakfast, and when he had eaten his breakfast
his nerve failed him. He could not bring himself to fetch the
manuscript, and it was his housekeeper who brought it to him.

"Ah," he said, "it is tasteless as the gruel that poor James
Murdoch is eating." And taking a volume from the table--"St.
Augustine's Confessions"--he said, "what diet there is here!"

He stood reading. There was no idiom, he had used Latin words
instead of English. At last he was interrupted by the wheels of a
car stopping at his door. Father Meehan! Meehan could revise his
Latin! None had written such good Latin at Maynooth as Meehan.

"My dear Meehan, this is indeed a pleasant surprise."

"I thought I'd like to see you. I drove over. But--I am not
disturbing you.... You've taken to reading again. St. Augustine!
And you're writing in Latin!"

Father James's face grew red, and he took the manuscript out of
his friend's hand.

"No, you mustn't look at that."

And then the temptation to ask him to overlook certain passages
made him change his mind.

"I was never much of a Latin scholar."

"And you want me to overlook your Latin for you. But why are you
writing Latin?"

"Because I am writing to the Pope. I was at first a little
doubtful, but the more I thought of this letter the more necessary
it seemed to me."

"And what are you writing to the Pope about?"

"You see Ireland is going to become a Protestant country."

"Is it?" said Father Meehan, and he listened a little while. Then,
interrupting his friend, he said:--

"I've heard enough. Now, I strongly advise you not to send this
letter. We have known each other all our lives. Now my dear
MacTurnan--"

Father Michael talked eagerly, and Father MacTurnan sat listening.
At last Father Meehan saw that his arguments were producing no
effect, and he said:--

"You don't agree with me."

"It isn't that I don't agree with you. You have spoken admirably
from your point of view, but our points of view are different."

"Take your papers away, burn them!"

Then, thinking his words were harsh, he laid his hand on his
friend's shoulder and said:--

"My dear MacTurnan, I beg of you not to send this letter."

Father James did not answer; the silence grew painful, and Father
Michael asked Father James to show him the relief works that the
Government had ordered.

They walked to where the poor people were working, but important
as these works were the letter to Rome seemed more important to
Father Michael, and he said:--

"My good friend, there isn't a girl that would marry us; now is
there? There isn't a girl in Ireland who would touch us with a
forty foot pole. Would you have the Pope release the nuns from
their vows?"

"I think exceptions should be made in favour of those in orders.
But I think it would be for the good of Ireland if the secular
clergy were married."

"That's not my point. My point is that even if the decree were
rescinded we should not be able to get wives. You've been looking
too long in the waste, my dear friend. You've lost yourself in a
dream. We shouldn't get a penny. Our parishioners would say, 'Why
should we support that fellow and his family?' That's what they'd
say."

"We should be poor, no doubt," said Father James. "But not so poor
as our parishioners. My parishioners eat yellow meal, and I eat
eggs and live in a good house."

"We are educated men, and should live in better houses."

"The greatest saints lived in deserts."

And so the argument went on until the time came to say good-bye,
and then Father James said:--

"I shall be glad if you will give me a lift on your car. I want to
go to the post-office."

"To post your letter?"

"The idea came to me--it came swiftly like a lightning flash, and
I can't believe that it was an accident. If it had fallen into
your mind with the suddenness that it fell into mine, you would
believe that it was an inspiration."

"It would take a great deal to make me believe I was inspired,"
said Father Michael, and he watched Father James go into the post-
office to register his letter.

As he went home Father James met a long string of peasants
returning from their work. The last was Norah Flynn, and the
priest blushed deeply. It was the first time he had looked on one
of his parishioners in the light of a possible spouse; he entered
his house frightened, and when he looked round his parlour he
asked himself if the day would come when he should see Norah Flynn
sitting opposite to him in his armchair. And his face flushed
deeper when he looked towards the bedroom door, and he fell on his
knees and prayed that God's will might be made known to him.

During the night he awoke many times, and the dream that had
awakened him continued when he had left his bed, and he wandered
round and round the room in the darkness, seeking a way. At last
he reached the window and drew the curtain, and saw the dim dawn
opening out over the bog.

"Thank God," he said, "it was only a dream--only a dream."

And lying down he fell asleep, but immediately another dream as
horrible as the first appeared, and his housekeeper heard him
beating on the walls.

"Only a dream, only a dream," he said.

He lay awake, not daring to sleep lest he might dream. And it was
about seven o'clock when he heard his housekeeper telling him that
the inspector had come to tell him they must decide what direction
the new road should take. In the inspector's opinion it should run
parallel with the old road. To continue the old road two miles
further would involve extra labour; the people would have to go
further to their work, and the stones would have to be drawn
further. The priest held that the extra labour was of secondary
importance. He said that to make two roads running parallel with
each other would be a wanton humiliation to the people.

But the inspector could not appreciate the priest's arguments. He
held that the people were thinking only how they might earn enough
money to fill their bellies.

"I don't agree with you, I don't agree with you," said the priest.
"Better go in the opposite direction and make a road to the sea."

"Well, your reverence, the Government do not wish to engage upon
any work that will benefit any special class. These are my
instructions."

"A road to the sea will benefit no one.... I see you are thinking
of the landlord. But there is no harbour; no boat ever comes into
that flat, waste sea."

"Well, your reverence, one of these days a harbour may be made,
whereas an arch would look well in the middle of the bog, and the
people would not have to go far to their work."

"No, no. A road to the sea will be quite useless; but its futility
will not be apparent--at least, not so apparent--and the people's
hearts will not be broken."

The inspector seemed a little doubtful, but the priest assured him
that the futility of the road would satisfy English ministers.

"And yet these English ministers," the priest reflected, "are not
stupid men; they are merely men blinded by theory and prejudice,
as all men are who live in the world. Their folly will be apparent
to the next generation, and so on and so on for ever and ever,
world without end."

"And the worst of it is," the priest said, "while the people are
earning their living on these roads their fields will be lying
idle, and there will be no crops next year."

Father MacTurnan began to think of the cardinals and the
transaction of business in the Vatican; cardinals and ministers
alike are the dupes of convention. Only those who are estranged
from habits and customs can think straightforward.

"If, instead of insisting on these absurd roads, the Government
would give me the money, I should be able to feed the people at a
cost of about a penny a day, and they would be able to sow their
potatoes. And if only the cardinals would consider the rescission
of the decree on its merits Ireland would be saved from
Protestantism."

Some cardinal was preparing an answer--an answer might be even in
the post. Rome might not think his letter worthy of an answer.

A few days afterwards the inspector called to show him a letter he
had just received from the Board of Works, and Father James had to
write many letters and had to go to Dublin, and in the excitement
of these philanthropic activities the emigration question was
forgotten. He was talking to the inspector about the possibility
of obtaining a harbour when the postman handed him a letter.

"This is a letter from Father Moran. The Bishop wishes to see me.
We will continue the conversation to-morrow. It is eight miles to
Rathowen, and how much further is the Palace?"

"A good seven," said the inspector. "You're not going to walk it,
your reverence?"

"Why not? In four hours I shall be there." He looked at his boots
first, and hoped they would hold together; and then he looked at
the sky, and hoped it would not rain.

The sky was dim; all the light seemed to be upon the earth; a
soft, vague sunlight floated over the bog. Now and again a yellow-
hammer rose above the tufts of coarse grass and flew a little way.
A line of pearl-coloured mountains showed above the low horizon,
and he had walked eight miles before he saw a pine-wood. Some
hundred yards further on there was a green field, but under the
green sod there was peat, and a man and a boy were cutting it. The
heather appeared again, and he had walked ten miles before he was
clear of whins and heather.

He walked on, thinking of his interview with the Bishop, and was
nearly at the end of his journey when he noticed that one of his
shoes had come unsewn, and he stopped at a cabin; and while the
woman was looking for a needle and thread he mopped his face with
a great red handkerchief that he kept in the pocket of his
threadbare coat--a coat that had once been black, but had grown
green with age and weather. He had out-walked himself, and feeling
he would be tired, and not well able to answer the points that the
Bishop would raise, he decided to rest awhile. The woman had found
some beeswax, and he stopped half an hour stitching his shoe under
the hawthorn that grew beside the cabin.

He was still two miles from the Palace, and this last two miles
proved very long. He arrived footsore and covered with dust, and
he was so tired that he could hardly get up from his chair to
receive Father Moran when he came into the parlour.

"You seem to have walked a long way, Father MacTurnan."

"About fifteen miles. I shall be all right presently. I suppose
his Grace does not want to see me at once."

"Well, that's just it. His Grace sent me to say he would see you
at once. He expected you earlier."

"I started the moment I received his Grace's letter. I suppose his
Grace wishes to see me regarding my letter to Rome."

The secretary hesitated, coughed, and Father MacTurnan wondered
why Father Moran looked at him so intently. He returned in a few
minutes, saying that his Grace was sorry that Father MacTurnan had
had so long a walk. He hoped that he would rest awhile and partake
of some refreshment.... The servant brought in some wine and
sandwiches, and the secretary returned in half an hour. His Grace
was now ready to receive him. Father Moran opened the library
door, and Father MacTurnan saw the Bishop--a short, alert man,
about fifty-five, with a sharp nose and grey eyes and bushy
eyebrows. He popped about the room and gave his secretary many
orders. Father MacTurnan wondered if the Bishop would ever finish
talking to his secretary. He seemed to have finished, but a
thought suddenly struck him, and he followed his secretary to the
door, and Father MacTurnan began to fear that the Pope had not
decided to place the Irish clergy on the same footing as the Greek
clergy. If he had, the Bishop's interest in these many various
matters would have subsided; his mind would be engrossed by the
larger issue. On returning from the door his Grace passed Father
MacTurnan without speaking to him, and going to his writing table
he began to search amid his papers. At last Father MacTurnan
said:--

"Maybe your Grace is looking for my letter to Rome?"

"Yes," said his Grace, "do you see it?"

"It's under your Grace's hand, those blue papers."

"Ah, yes," and his Grace leaned back in his arm-chair, leaving
Father MacTurnan standing.

"Won't you sit down, Father MacTurnan?" he said casually. "You've
been writing to Rome, I see, advocating the revocation of the
decree of celibacy. There's no doubt the emigration of Catholics
is a very serious question. So far you have got the sympathy of
Rome, and, I may say of myself; but am I to understand that it was
your fear for the religious safety of Ireland that prompted you to
write this letter?"

"What other reason could there be?"

Nothing was said for a long while, and then the Bishop's meaning
began to break in his mind; his face flushed, and he grew
confused. "I hope your grace doesn't think for a moment that--"

"I only want to know if there is anyone--if your eyes ever went in
a certain direction, if your thoughts ever said, 'Well, if the
decree is revoked--'"

"No, your Grace, no. Celibacy has been no burden to me--far from
it. Sometimes I feared that it was celibacy that attracted me to
the priesthood. Celibacy was a gratification rather than a
sacrifice."

"I am glad," said the Bishop, and he spoke slowly and
emphatically, "that this letter was prompted by such impersonal
motives."

"Surely, your Grace, His Holiness did not suspect--"

The Bishop murmured an euphonious Italian name, and Father
MacTurnan understood that he was speaking of one of the Pope's
secretaries.

"More than once," said Father MacTurnan, "I feared that if the
decree were revoked, I should not have had sufficient courage to
comply with it."

And then he told the Bishop how he had met Norah Flynn on the
road. An amused expression stole into the Bishop's face, and his
voice changed.

"I presume you do not contemplate making marriage obligatory; you
do not contemplate the suspension of the faculties of those who do
not take wives?"

"It seems to me that exception should be made in favour of those
in orders, and, of course, in favour of those who have reached a
certain age like your Grace."

The Bishop coughed, and pretended to look for some paper which he
had mislaid.

"This was one of the many points that I discussed with Father
Michael Meehan."

"Oh, so you consulted Father Meehan," the Bishop said, looking up.

"He came in one day I was reading over my Latin translation before
posting it. I'm afraid the ideas that I submitted to the
consideration of His Holiness have been degraded by my very poor
Latin. I should have wished Father Meehan to overlook my Latin,
but he refused. He begged of me not to send the letter."

"Father Meehan," said his Grace, "is a great friend of yours. Yet
nothing he could say could shake your resolution to write to
Rome?"

"Nothing," said Father MacTurnan. "The call I received was too
distinct and too clear for me to hesitate."

"Tell me about this call."

Father MacTurnan told the Bishop that the poor man had come out of
the work-house because he wanted to be married, and that Mike
Mulhare would not give him his daughter until he had earned the
price of a pig. "And as I was talking to him I heard my conscience
say, 'No man can afford to marry in Ireland but the clergy.' We
all live better than our parishioners."

And then, forgetting the Bishop, and talking as if he were alone
with his God, he described how the conviction had taken possession
of him--that Ireland would become a Protestant country if the
Catholic emigration did not cease. And he told how this conviction
had left him little peace until he had written his letter.

The priest talked on until he was interrupted by Father Moran.

"I have some business to transact with Father Moran now," the
Bishop said, "but you must stay to dinner. You have walked a long
way, and you are tired and hungry."

"But, your Grace, if I don't start now, I shall not get home until
nightfall."

"A car will take you back, Father MacTurnan. I will see to that. I
must have some exact information about your poor people. We must
do something for them."

Father MacTurnan and the Bishop were talking together when the car
came to take Father MacTurnan home, and the Bishop said:--

"Father MacTurnan, you have borne the loneliness of your parish a
long while."

"Loneliness is only a matter of habit. I think, your Grace, I'm
better suited to the place than I am for any other. I don't wish
any change, if your Grace is satisfied with me."

"No one will look after the poor people better than yourself,
Father MacTurnan. But," he said, "it seems to me there is one
thing we have forgotten. You haven't told me if you succeeded in
getting the money to buy the pig."

Father MacTurnan grew very red.... "I had forgotten it. The
relief works--"

"It's not too late. Here's five pounds, and this will buy him a
pig."

"It will indeed," said the priest, "it will buy him two!"

He had left the Palace without having asked the Bishop how his
letter had been received at Rome, and he stopped the car, and was
about to tell the driver to go back. But no matter, he would hear
about his letter some other time. He was bringing happiness to two
poor people, and he could not persuade himself to delay their
happiness by one minute. He was not bringing one pig, but two
pigs, and now Mike Mulhare would have to give him Norah and a
calf; and the priest remembered that James Murdoch had said, "What
a fine house this will be to rear them in." There were many who
thought that human beings and animals should not live together;
but after all, what did it matter if they were happy? And the
priest forgot his letter to Rome in the thought of the happiness
he was bringing to two poor people. He could not see Norah Mulhare
that night; but he drove down to the famine road, and he and the
driver called till they awoke James Murdoch. The poor man came
stumbling across the bog, and the priest told him the news.


- George Moore, 'A letter to Rome', The Untilled Field, 1903

The World St Francis Found

The modern innovation which has substituted journalism for history, or for that tradition that is the gossip of history, has had at least one definite effect. It has insured that everybody should only hear the end of every story. Journalists are in the habit of printing above the very last chapters of their serial stories (when the hero and the heroine are just about to embrace in the last chapter, as only an unfathomable perversity prevented them from doing so in the first) the rather misleading words, "You can only begin this story here." But even this is not a complete parallel; for the journals do give some sort of a summary of the story, while they never give anything remotely resembling a summary of the history. Newspapers not only deal with news, but they deal with everything as if it were entirely new. It is exactly in the same fashion that we read that Admiral Bangs has been shot, which is the first intimation we have that he has ever been born.

There is something singularly significant in the use which journalism makes of its stores of biography. It never thinks of publishing the life until it is publishing the death. As it deals with individuals it deals with institutions and ideas. After the Great War our public began to be told of all sorts of nations being emancipated. It had never been told a word about their being enslaved. We were called upon to judge of the justice of settlements, when we had never been allowed to hear of the very existence of the quarrels. People would think it pedantic to talk about the Serbian epics and they prefer to talk about the Yugo-Slavonic international new diplomacy; and they are quite excited about something they call Czecho-Slovakia without apparently having ever heard about Bohemia. Things that are as old as Europe are regarded as more recent than the very latest claims pegged out on the prairies of America. It is very exciting; like the last act of a play to people who have only come into the theatre just before the curtain falls. But it does not conduce exactly to knowing what it is all about. To those content with the mere fact of a pistol-shot or a passionate embrace, such a leisurely manner of patronising the drama may be recommended. To those tormented by a mere intellectual curiosity about who is kissing or killing whom, it is unsatisfactory.

Most modern history, especially in England, suffers from the same imperfection as journalism. At best it only tells half the story of Christendom; and that the second half without the first half. Men for whom reason begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete account of anything, for they have to start with institutions whose origin they can never explain, or generally even imagine. Just as we hear of the admiral being shot but have never heard of his being born, so we all heard a great deal about the dissolution of the monasteries, but we heard next to nothing about the creation of the monasteries. Now this sort of history would be hopelessly insufficient, even for an intelligent man who hated the monasteries. It is hopelessly insufficient in connection with institutions that many intelligent men do in a quite healthy spirit hate. For instance, it is possible that some of us have occasionally seen some mention, by our learned leader-writers, of an obscure institution called the Spanish Inquisition. Well, it really is an obscure institution, according to them and the histories they read. It is obscure because its origin is obscure. Protestant history simply begins with the horrible thing in possession, as the pantomine begins with the demon king in the goblin kitchen. It is likely enough that it was, especially towards the end, a horrible thing that might be haunted by demons; but if we say this was so, we have no notion why it was so. To understand the Spanish Inquisition it would be necessary to discover two things that we have never dreamed of bothering about; what Spain was and what an Inquisition was. The former would bring in the whole great question about the Crusade against the Moors; and by what heroic chivalry a European nation freed itself of an alien domination from Africa. The latter would bring in the whole business of the other Crusade against the Albigensians, and why men loved and hated that nihilistic vision from Asia. Unless we understand that there was in these things originally the rush and romance of a Crusade, we cannot understand how they came to deceive men or drag them on towards evil. The Crusaders doubtless abused their victory, but there was a victory to abuse. And where there is victory there is valour in the field and popularity in the forum. There is some sort of enthusiasm that encourages excesses or covers faults. For instance, I for one have maintained from very early days the responsibility of the English for their atrocious treatment of the Irish. But it would be quite unfair to describe even the devilry of '98 and leave out altogether all mention of the war with Napoleon. It would be unjust to suggest that the English mind was bent on nothing but the death of Emmett, when it was more probably full of the glory of the death of Nelson. Unfortunately '98 was very far from being the last date of such dirty work; and only a few years ago our politicians started trying to rule by random robbing and killing, while gently remonstrating with the Irish for their memory of old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago. But however badly we may think of the Black-and tan business, it would be unjust to forget that most of us were not thinking of Black-and-Tan but of khaki; and that khaki had just then a noble and national connotation covering many things. To write of the war with Ireland and leave out the war against Prussia, and the English sincerity about it, would be unjust to the English. So to talk about the torture-engine as if it had been a hideous toy is unjust to the Spanish. It does not tell sensibly from the start the story of what the Spaniards did, and why. We may concede to our contempories that in any case it is not a story that ends well. We do not insist that in their version it should begin well. What we complain of is that in their version it does not begin at all. They are only in at the death; or even, like Lord Tom Noddy, to late for the hanging. It is quite true that it was more horrible than any hanging; but they only gather, so to speak, the very ashes of the ashes; the fag-end of the faggot.

The case of the Inquisition is here taken at random, for it is one among any number illustrating the same thing; and not because it is especially connected with St. Francis, in whatever sense it may have been connected with St Dominic. It may well be suggested later indeed that St. Francis is unintelligible, just as St. Dominic is unintelligible, unless we do understand something of what the thirteenth century meant by heresy and a crusade. But for the moment I use it as a lesser example for a much larger purpose. It is to point out that to begin the story of St. Francis with the birth of St Francis would be to miss the whole point of the story, or rather not to tell the story at all. And it is to suggest that the modern tail-foremost type of journalistic history perpetually fails us. We learn about reformers without knowing what they had to reform, about rebels without knowing what they rebelled against, of memorials that are not connected with any memory and restorations of things that apparently never existed before. Even at the expense of this chapter appearing disproportionate, it is necessary to say something about the great movements that led up to the entrance of the founder of the Franciscans. It may seem to mean describing a world, or even a universe to describe a man. It will inevitably mean that the world or the universe will be described with a few desperate generalisations in a few abrupt sentences. But so far from its meaning that we shall see a very small figure under so large a sky, it will mean that we must measure the sky before we can begin to measure the towering stature of the man.

And this phrase alone brings me to the preliminary suggestions that seem necessary before even a slight sketch of the life of St. Francis. It is necessary to realise, in however rude and elementary a fashion, into what sort of a world St. Francis entered and what had been the history of that world, at least in so far as it affected him. It is necessary to have, if only in a few sentences, a sort of preface in the form of an Outline of History, if we may borrow the phrase of Mr. Wells. in the case of Mr. Wells himself, it is evident that the distinguished novelist suffered the same disadvantage as if he had been obliged to write a novel of which he hated the hero. To write history and hate Rome, both pagan and papal, is to hate everything that has happened. It comes very nearly to hating humanity on purely humanitarian grounds. To dislike both the priest and the soldier, both the laurels of the warrior and the lilies of the saint, is to suffer a division from the mass of mankind for which not all the dexterities of the finest and most flexible of modern intelligences can compensate. A much wider sympathy is needed for the historical setting of St. Francis, himself both a soldier and a saint. I will therefore conclude this chapter with a few generalisations about the world St. Francis found.

Men will not believe because they will not broaden their minds. As a matter of individual belief, I should of course express it by saying they are not sufficiently catholic to be Catholic. But I am not going to discuss here the doctrinal truths of Christianity, but simply the broad historical fact of Christianity, as it might appear to a really enlightened and imaginative person even if he were not a Christian. What I mean at the moment is that the majority of doubts are made out of details. In the course of random reading a man comes across a pagan custom that strikes him as picturesque or a Christian action that strikes him as cruel; but he does not enlarge his mind sufficiently to see the main truth about pagan custom or the Christian reaction against it. Until we understand, not necessarily in detail, but in their big bulk and proportion that pagan progress and that Christian reaction, we cannot really understand the point of history at which St. Francis appears or what his great popular mission was all about.

Now everybody knows, I imagine, that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were an awakening of the world. They were a fresh flowering of culture and the creative arts after a long spell of much sterner and even more sterile experience which we call the Dark Ages. They may be called an emancipation; they were certainly an end; an end of what may at least seem a harsher and more inhuman time. But what was it that was ended? From what was it that men were emancipated? That is where there is a real collision and point at issue between the different philosophies of history. On the merely external and secular side, it has been truly said that men awoke from a sleep; but there had been dreams in that sleep of a mystical and sometimes of a monstrous kind. In that rationalistic routine into which most modern historians have fallen, it is considered enough to say that they were emancipated from mere savage superstition and advanced towards mere civilised enlightenment. Now this is the big blunder that stands as a stumbling-block at the very beginning of our story. Anybody who supposes that the Dark Ages were plain darkness and nothing else, and that the dawn of the thirteenth century was plain daylight and nothing else, will not be able to make head or tail of the human story of St. Francis of Assisi. The truth is that the joy of St. Francis and his Jongleurs de Dieu was not merely an awakening. It was something which cannot be understood without understanding their own mystical creed. The end of the Dark Ages was not merely the end of a sleep. It was certainly not merely the end of a superstitious enslavement. It was the end of something belonging to a quite definite but quite different order of ideas.

It was the end of a penance; or, if it be preferred, a purgation. It marked the moment when a certain spiritual expiation had been finally worked out and certain spiritual diseases had been finally expelled from the system. They had been expelled by an era of asceticism, which was the only thing that could have expelled them. Christianity had entered the world to cure the world; and she cured it in the only way in which it could be cured. Viewed merely in an external and experimental fashion, the whole of the high civilisation of antiquity had ended in the learning of a certain lesson; that is, in its conversion to Christianity. But that lesson was a psychological fact as well as a theological faith. That pagan civilization had indeed been a very high civilisation. It would not weaken our thesis, it might even strengthen it, to say that it was the highest that humanity ever reached. It had discovered its still unrivalled arts of poetry and plastic representation; it had discovered its own permanent political ideals; it had discovered its own clear system of logic and language. But above all, it had discovered its own mistake. That mistake was too deep to be ideally defined; the short-hand of it is to call it the mistake of nature-worship. It might almost as truly be called the mistake of being natural; and it was a very natural mistake. The Greeks, the great guides and pioneers of pagan antiquity, started out with the idea of something splendidly obvious and direct; the idea that if a man walked straight ahead on the high road of reason and nature, he would come to no harm; especially if he was, as the Greek was, eminently enlightened and intelligent. we might be so flippant as to say that man was simply to follow his nose, so long as it was a Greek nose. And the case of the Greeks themselves is alone enough to illustrate the strange but certain fatality that attends upon this fallacy. No sooner did the Greeks themselves begin to follow their own noses and their own notion of being natural, than the queerest thing in history seems to have happened to them. It was much too queer to be an easy matter to discuss. It may be remarked that our more repulsive realists never give us the benefit of their realism. Their studies of unsavoury subjects never take note of the testimony they bear to the truths of traditional morality. But if we had the taste for such things, we could cite thousands of such things as part of the case for Christian morals. And an instance of this is found in the fact that nobody has written, in this sense, a real moral history of the Greeks. Nobody has seen the scale or the strangeness of the story. The wisest men in the world set out to be natural; and the most unnatural thing in the world was the very first thing they did. The immediate effect of saluting the sun and the sunny sanity of nature was a perversion spreading like a pestilence. The greatest and even the purest philosophers could not apparently avoid this low sort of lunacy. Why? It would seem simple enough for the people whose poets had conceived Helen of Troy, whose sculptors had carved the Venus of Milo, to remain healthy on the point. The truth is people who worship health cannot remain healthy on the point. When Man goes straight he goes crooked. When he follows his nose he manages somehow to put his nose out of joint, or even to cut off his nose to spite his face; and that in accordance with something much deeper in human nature than nature-worshippers could ever understand. It was the discovery of that deeper thing, humanly speaking, that constituted the conversion to Christianity. There is a bias in a man like the bias on a bowl; and Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias and therefore hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the saying; but it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.

Rome rose at the expense of her Greek teachers largely because she did not entirely consent to be taught these tricks. She had a much more decent tradition; but she ultimately suffered from the same fallacy in her religious tradition; which was necessarily in no small degree the heathen tradition of nature worship. What was the matter with the whole heathen civilisation was that there nothing for the mass of men in the way of mysticism, except that concerned with the mystery of the nameless forces of nature, such as sex and growth and death. In the Roman Empire also, long before the end, we find nature-worship inevitably producing things that are against nature. Cases like that of Nero have passed into a proverb when Sadism sat on a throne brazen in the broad daylight. But the truth I mean is something much more subtle and universal than a conventional catalogue of atrocities. What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions. Thus the effect of treating sex as only one innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural thing became soaked and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a mere equality among elementary emotions or experiences like eating and sleeping. The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant. There is something dangerous and disproportionate in its place in human nature, for whatever reason; and it does really need a special purification and dedication. The modern talk about sex being free like any other sense, about the body being beautiful like any tree or flower, is either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of thoroughly bad psychology, of which the world grew weary two thousand years ago.

This is not to be confused with mere self-righteous sensationalism about the wickedness of the pagan world. It was not so much that the pagan world was wicked as that it was good enough to realise that its paganism was becoming wicked, or rather it was on the logical high road to wickedness. I mean that there was no future for "natural magic"; to deepen it was only to darken it into black magic. There was no future for it; because in the past it had only been innocent because it was young. We might say it had only been innocent because it was shallow. Pagans were wiser that paganism; that is why the pagans became Christians. Thousands of them had philosophy and family virtues and military honour to hold them up; but by this time the purely popular thing called religion was certainly dragging them down. When this reaction against the evil is allowed for, it is true to repeat that it was an evil that was everywhere. In another and more literal sense its name was Pan.

It was no metaphor to say that these people needed a new heaven and a new earth; for they had really defiled their own earth and even their own heaven. How could their case be met by looking at the sky, when erotic legends were scrawled in stars across it; how could they learn anything from the love of birds and flowers after the sort of love stories that were told of them? It is impossible here to multiply evidences, and one small example may stand for the rest. We know what sort of sentimental associations are called up to us by the phrase "a garden"; and how we think mostly of the memory of melancholy and innocent romances, or quite as often of some gracious maiden lady or kindly old person pottering under a yew hedge, perhaps in sight of a village spire. Then, let anyone who knows a little Latin poetry recall suddenly what would have once stood in place of the sun-dial or the fountain, obscene and monstrous in the sun; and of what sort was the god of their gardens.

Nothing could purge this obsession but a religion that was literally unearthly. It was no good telling such people to have a natural religion full of stars and flowers; there was not a flower or even a star that had not been stained. They had to go into the desert where they could find no flowers or even into the cavern where they could see no stars. Into that desert and that cavern the highest human intellect entered for some four centuries; and it was the very wisest thing it could do. Nothing but the stark supernatural stood up for its salvation; if God could not save it, certainly the gods could not. The early Church called the gods of paganism devils; and the Early Church was perfectly right. Whatever natural religion may have had to do with their beginnings, nothing but fiends now inhabited those hollow shrines. Pan was nothing but panic. Venus was nothing but venereal vice. I do not mean for a moment, of course, that all the individual pagans were of this character even to the end; but it was as individuals that they differed from it. Nothing distinguishes paganism from Christianity so clearly as the fact that the individual thing called philosophy had little or nothing to do with the social thing called religion. Anyhow it was no good to preach natural religion to people to whom nature had grown as unnatural as any religion. They knew much better than we do what was the matter with them and what sort of demons at once tempted and tormented them; and they wrote across that great space of history the text; "This sort goeth not out but by prayer and fasting."

Now the historical importance of St. Francis and the transition from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, lies in the fact that they marked the end of this expiation. Men at the close of the dark Ages may have been rude and unlettered and unlearned in everything but wars with heathen tribes, more barbarous than themselves, but they were clean. They were like children; the first beginnings of their rude arts have all the clean pleasure of children. We have to conceive them in Europe as a whole living under little local governments, feudal in so far as they were a survival of fierce wars with the barbarians, often monastic and carrying a far more friendly and fatherly character, still faintly imperial as far as Rome still ruled as a great legend. But in Italy something had survived more typical of the finer spirit of antiquity; the republic, Italy, was dotted with little states, largely democratic in their ideals, and often filled with real citizens. But the city no longer lay open as under the Roman peace, but was pent in high walls for defence against feudal war and all the citizens had to be soldiers. One of these stood in a steep and striking position on the wooded hills of Umbria; and its name was Assisi. Out of its deep gate under its high turrets was to come the message that was the gospel of the hour, "Your warfare is accomplished, your iniquity is pardoned." But it was out of all these fragmentary things of feudalism and freedom and remains of Roman Law that there were to rise, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, vast and almost universal, the mighty civilisation of the Middle Ages.

It is an exaggeration to attribute it entirely to the inspiration of any one man, even the most original genius of the thirteenth century. Its elementary ethics of fraternity and fair play had never been entirely extinct and Christendom had never been anything less than Christian. The great truisms about justice and pity can be found in the rudest monastic records of the barbaric transition or the stiffest maxims of the Byzantine decline. And early in the eleventh and twelfth centuries a larger moral movement had clearly begun. but what may fairly be said of it is this, that over all those first movements there was still something of that ancient austerity that came from the long penitentiary period. it was the twilight of the morning; but it was still a grey twilight. This may be illustrated by the mere mention of two or three of these reforms before the Franciscan reform. The monastic institution itself, of course, was far older than all these things; indeed it was undoubtedly almost as old as Christianity. Its counsels of perfection had always taken the form of vows of chastity and poverty and obedience. With these unworldly aims it had long ago civilised a great part of the world. The monks had taught people to plough and sow as well as to read and write; indeed they had taught the people nearly everything the people knew. But it may truly be said that the monks were severely practical, in the sense that they not only practical but also severe; though they were generally severe with themselves and practical for other people. All this early monastic movement had long ago settled down and doubtless often deteriorated; but when we come to the first medieval movements this sterner character is still apparent. Three examples may be taken to illustrate the point.

First, the ancient social mould of slavery was already beginning to melt. Not only was the slave turning into a serf, who was practically free as regards his own farm and family life, but many lords were freeing slaves and serfs altogether. This was done under the pressure of the priests; but especially it was done in the spirit of a penance. In one sense, of course, any Catholic society must have an atmosphere of penance; but I am speaking of that sterner spirit of penance which had expiated the excesses of paganism. There was about such restitutions the atmosphere of the death-bed; as many of them were doubtless were examples of death-bed repentance. A very honest atheist with whom I once debated made use of the expression, "Men have only been kept in slavery by the fear of hell." As I pointed out to him, if he had said that men had only been freed from slavery by the fear of hell, he would have at least have been referring to an unquestionable historical fact.

Another example was the sweeping reform of Church discipline by Pope Gregory the Seventh. It really was a reform, undertaken from the highest motives and having the healthiest results; it conducted a searching inquisition against simony or the financial corruption of the clergy; it insisted on a more serious and self-sacrificing ideal for the life of the parish priest. But the very fact that this largely took the form of making universal the obligation of celibacy will strike the note of something which, however noble, would seem to many to be vaguely negative. The third example is in one sense the strongest of all. For the third example was a war; a heroic war and for many of us a holy war; but still having all the stark and terrible responsibilities of war. There is no space here to say all that should be said about the true nature of the Crusades. Everybody knows that in the very darkest hour of the Dark Ages a sort of heresy had sprung up in Arabia and become a new religion of a military but nomadic sort; invoking the name of Mahomet. Intrinsically it had a character found in many heresies from the Moslem to the Monist. It seemed to the heretic a sane simplification of religion; while it seems to a Catholic an insane simplification of religion, because it simplifies all to a single idea and so loses the breadth and balance of Catholicism. Anyhow its objective character was that of a military danger to Christendom and Christendom had struck at the very heart of it, in seeking to reconquer the Holy Places. The great Duke Godfrey and the first Christians who stormed Jerusalem were heroes if there were any in the world; but they were the heroes of a tragedy.

Now I have taken these two or three examples of the earlier medieval movements in order to note about them one general character, which refers back to the penance that followed paganism. There is something in all these movements that is bracing even while it is still bleak, like a wind blowing between the clefts of the mountains. That wind, austere and pure, of which the poet speaks, is really the spirit of the time, for it is the wind of a world that has at last been purified. To anyone who can appreciate atmospheres there is something clear and clean about the atmosphere of this crude and often harsh society. Its very lusts are clean; for they no have longer any smell of perversion. Its very cruelties are clean; they are not the luxurious cruelties of the amphitheatre. They come either of a very simple horror at blasphemy or a very simple fury at an insult. Gradually against this grey background beauty begins to appear, as something really fresh and delicate and above all surprising. Love returning is no longer what was once called platonic but what is still called chivalric love. The flowers and stars are have recovered their first innocence. Fire and water are felt to be worthy to be the brother and sister of a saint. The purge of paganism is complete at last.

For water itself has been washed. Fire itself has been purified as by fire. Water is no longer the water into which slaves were flung to feed the fishes. Fire is no longer that fire through which children were passed to Moloch. Flowers smell no more of the forgotten garlands gathered in the garden of Priapus; stars stand no more as signs of the far frigidity of gods as cold as those cold fires. They are like all new things newly made and awaiting new names, from one who shall come to name them. Neither the universe nor the earth have now any longer the old sinister significance of the world. They await a new reconciliation with man, but they are already capable of being reconciled. Man has stripped from his soul the last rag of nature worship, and can return to nature.

While it was yet twilight a figure appeared silently and suddenly on a little hill above the city, dark against the fading darkness. For it was the end of a long and stern night, a night of vigil, not unvisited by stars. He stood with his hands lifted, as in so many statues and pictures, and about him was a burst of birds singing; and behind him was the break of day.

G.K. Chesterton, St Francis of Assisi, Chapter II

The God Delusion: David Quinn debates Richard Dawkins

Ryan Tubridy: Richard, good morning to you

Richard Dawkins: Good morning.

Tubridy: It’s nice to talk to you again. We spoke before once on the similar subject matter. David Quinn is also with us here. David Quinn is a columnist with the Irish Independent. David, a very good morning to you.

David Quinn: Good morning.

Tubridy: So Richard Dawkins here you go again, up to your old tricks. In your most recent book, The God Delusion. Let’s just talk about the word if you don’t mind, the word delusion, so put it into context. Why did you pick that word?

Dawkins: Well the word delusion means a falsehood which is widely believed, and I think that is true of religion. It is remarkably widely believed, it’s as though almost all of the population or a substantial proportion of the population believed that they had been abducted by aliens in flying saucers. You’d call that a delusion. I think God is a similar delusion.

Tubridy: And would it be fair to say you equate God with say, the imaginary friend, the bogeyman, or the fairies at the end of the garden?

Dawkins: Well I think He’s just as probable to exist, yes, and I do discuss all those things especially the imaginary friend which I think is an interesting psychological phenomenon in childhood and that may possibly have something to do with the appeal of religion.

Tubridy: So take us through that little bit about the imaginary friend factor.

Dawkins: Many young children have an imaginary friend. Christopher Robin had Binker. A little girl who wrote to me had a little purple man. And the girl with the little purple man actually saw him. She seemed to hallucinate him. He appeared with a little tinkling bell. And, he was very, very real to her although in a sense she knew he wasn’t real. I suspect that something like that is going on with people who claim to have heard God or seen God or hear the voice of God.

Tubridy: And we’re back to delusion again. Do you think that anyone who believes in God, anyone of any religion, is deluded? Is that the bottom line with your argument Richard?

Dawkins: Well there is a sophisticated form of religion which, well one form of it is Einstein’s which wasn’t really a religion at all. Einstein used the word God a great deal, but he didn’t mean a personal God. He didn’t mean a being who could listen to your prayers or forgive your sins. He just meant it as a kind of poetic way of describing the deep unknowns, the deep uncertainties at the root of the universe. Then there are deists who believe in a kind of God, a kind of personal God who set the universe going, a sort of physicist God, but then did no more and certainly doesn’t listen to your thoughts. He has no personal interest in humans at all. I don’t think that I would use a word like delusions for, certainly not for Einstein, no I don’t think I would for a deist either. I think I would reserve the word delusion for real theists who actually think they talk to God and think God talks to them.

Tubridy: You have a very interesting description in The God Delusion of the Old Testament God. Do you want to give us that description or will I give it to you back?

Dawkins: Have you got it in front of you?

Tubridy: Yes I have.

Dawkins: Well why don’t you read it out then.

Tubridy: Why not. You describe God as a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Dawkins: That seems fair enough to me, yes.

Tubridy: Okay. There are those who would think that’s a little over the top.

Dawkins: Read your Old Testament, if you think that. Just read it. Read Leviticus, read Deuteronomy, read Judges, read Numbers, read Exodus.

Tubridy: And do you, is it your contention, that these elements of the God as described by yourself are what has not helped matters in terms of, say, global religion and the wars that go with it?

Dawkins: Well, not really because no serious theologian takes the Old Testament literally anymore, so it isn’t quite like that. An awful lot of people think they take the Bible literally but that can only be because they’ve never read it. If they ever read it they couldn’t possibly take it literally, but I do think that people are a bit confused about where they get their morality from. A lot of people think they get their morality from the Bible because they can find a few good verses. Parts of the Ten Commandments are okay, parts of the Sermon on the Mount are okay. So they think they get their morality from the Bible. But actually of course nobody gets their morality from the Bible, we get it from somewhere else and to the extent that we can find good bits in the Bible we cherry pick them. We pick and choose them. We choose the good verses in the Bible and we reject the bad. Whatever criterion we use to choose the good verses and throw out the bad, that criterion is available to us anyway whether we are religious or not. Why bother to pick verses? Why not just go straight for the morality?

Tubridy: Do you think the people who believe in God and in religion generally who you think that have, you use the analogy of the imaginary friend, do you think that the people who believe in God and religion are a little bit dim?

Dawkins: No, because many of them clearly are highly educated and score highly on IQ tests and things so…

Tubridy: Why do you think they believe in something you think doesn’t exist?

Dawkins: Well I think that people are sometimes remarkably adept at compartmentalizing their mind, at separating their mind into two separate parts. There are some people who even manage to combine being apparently perfectly good working scientists with believing that the book of Genesis is literally true and that the world is only 6000 years old. If you can perform that level of doublethink then you could do anything.

Tubridy: But they might say that they pity you because you don’t believe in what they think is fundamentally true.

Dawkins: Well they might and we’ll have to argue it out by looking at the evidence. The great thing is to argue it by looking at evidence, not just to say “Oh well, this is my faith. There’s no argument to be had. You can’t argue with faith.”

Tubridy: David Quinn, columnist with the Irish Independent, show us some evidence please.

Quinn: Well I mean the first thing I would say is that Richard Dawkins is doing what he commonly does which is he’s setting up straw men so he puts God in the same, he puts believing in God, in the same category as believing in fairies. Well you know children stop believing in fairies when they stop being children, but they usually don’t’ stop believing in God because belief in God to my mind is a much more rational proposition than believing in fairies and Santa Claus.

Tubridy: Do we have more proof that God exists than we do for fairies?

Quinn: I will come to that in a second. I mean the second thing is about compartmentalizing yourself when he uses examples of… well you’ve got intelligent people who somehow or other also believe the world is only 6000 years old and we have a young Earth and they don’t believe in evolution… but again… I mean that’s too stark an either or… I mean there are many people who believe in God but also believe in evolution and believe the universe is 20 billion years old and believe fully in Darwinian evolution or whatever the case may be… Now I mean in all arguments about the existence or nonexistence of God often these things don’t even get off the launch pad because the two people debating can’t even agree on where the burden of proof rests. Does it rest with those who are trying to prove the existence of God or with does it rest with those who are trying to disprove the existence of God? But I suppose you know if I bring this on to Richard Dawkins’ turf and we talk about the theory of evolution…The theory of evolution explains how matter — which we are all made from — organized itself into for example highly complex beings like Richard Dawkins and Ryan Tubridy and other human beings but what it doesn’t explain just to give one example is how matter came into being in the first place. That, in scientific terms, is a question that cannot be answered and can only be answered, if it can be answered fully at all, by philosophers and theologians. But it certainly cannot be answered by science and the question of whether God exists or not cannot be answered fully by science either and a common mistake that people can believe is the scientist who speaks about evolution with all the authority of science can also speak about the existence of God with all the authority of science and of course he can’t. The scientist speaking about the existence of God is actually engaging in philosophy or theology but he certainly isn’t bringing to it the authority of science per se.

Tubridy: Back to the original question, have you any evidence for me?

Quinn: Well I will say the existence of matter itself. I will say the existence of morality. Myself and Richard Dawkins have a clearly different understanding of the origins of morality. I would say free will. If you’re an atheist, if you’re an atheist logically speaking you cannot believe in objective morality. You cannot believe in free will. These are two things that the vast majority of humankind implicitly believe in. We believe for example that if a person carries out a bad action, we can call that person bad because we believe that they are freely choosing those actions. … And just quickly an atheist believes we are controlled completely by our genes and make no free actions at all.

Tubridy: What evidence do you have, Richard Dawkins, that you’re right?

Dawkins: I certainly don’t believe a word of that. I do not believe we are controlled wholly by our genes. Let me go back to the really important thing that Mr. Quinn said.

Quinn: How are we independent of our genes by your reckoning? What allows us to be independent of our genes? Where is this coming from?

Dawkins: Environment for a start.

Quinn: Well hang on but that also is a product of if you like of matter. Okay?

Dawkins: Yes but it’s not genes.

Quinn: What part of us allows us to have free will?

Dawkins: Free will is a very difficult philosophical question and it’s not one that has anything to do with religion, contrary to what Mr. Quinn says…but…

Quinn: It has an awful lot to do with religion because if there is no God there’s no free will because we are completely phenomena of matter.

Dawkins: Who says there’s not free will if there is no God? That’s a ridiculous thing to say.

Quinn: William Provine for one who you quote in your book. I mean I have a quote here from him. “Other scientists, as well, believe the same thing… that everything that goes on in our heads is a product of genes and as you say environment and chemical reactions. That there is no room for free will.” And Richard if you haven’t got to grips with that you seriously need to because many of your colleagues have and they deny outright the existence of free will and they are hardened materialists like yourself.

Tubridy: Okay. Richard Dawkins, rebut to that as you wish.

Dawkins: I’m not interested in free will what I am interested in is the ridiculous suggestion that if science can’t say where the origin of matter comes from theology can. The origin of matter… the origin of the whole universe, is a very, very difficult question. It’s one that scientists are working on. It’s one that they hope eventually to solve. Just as before Darwin, biology was a mystery. Darwin solved that. Now cosmology is a mystery. The origin of the universe is a mystery; it’s a mystery to everyone. Physicists are working on it. They have theories. But if science can’t answer that question then as sure as hell theology can’t either.

Quinn: If I can come in there, it is a perfectly reasonable proposition to ask yourself where does matter come from? And it is perfectly reasonable as well to posit the answer, God created matter. Many reasonable people believe this and by the way… I mean look it is quite a different category to say look we will study matter and we will ask how

Dawkins: But if science can’t answer that question, then it’s sure as hell theology can’t either.

Tubridy: Richard, if ...

Quinn: Sorry — if I can come in there — It’s a perfectly reasonable proposition to ask oneself where does matter come from. And it’s perfectly reasonable as well to posit the answer God created matter. Many reasonable people believe this.

Dawkins: It’s not reasonable.

Quinn: It’s quite a different category to say “Look, we will study matter and we will ask how matter organizes itself into particular forms,” and come up with the answer “evolution.” It is quite another question to ask “Where does matter come from to begin with?” And if you like you must go outside of matter to answer that question. And then you’re into philosophical categories.

Dawkins: How could it possibly be another category and be allowed to say God did it since you can’t explain where God came from?

Quinn: Because you must have an uncaused cause for anything at all to exist. Now, I see in your book you come up with an argument against this that I frankly find to be bogus. You come up with the idea of a mathematical infinite regress but this does not apply to the argument of uncaused causes and unmoved movers because we are not talking about maths we’re talking about existence and existentially nothing exists unless you have an uncaused cause. And that uncaused cause and that unmoved mover is, by definition, God.

Tubridy: OK. I’m going to move...

Dawkins: You just defined God as that! You just defined a problematic existence. That’s no solution to the problem. You just evaded it.

Quinn: You can’t answer the question where matter comes from! You, as an atheist —

Dawkins: I can’t, but science is working on it. You can’t answer it either.

Quinn: It won’t come up with an answer, and you invoked a mystery argument that you accuse religious believers of doing all the time. You invoke a very first and most fundamental question about reality. You do not know where matter came from.

Dawkins: I don’t know. Science is working on it. Science is a progressive thing that’s working on it. You don’t know but you claim that you do.

Quinn: I claim to know the probable answer.

Tubridy: Can I suggest that the next question is quite appropriate. The role of religion in wars. When you think of the difficulty that it brings up on a local level. Richard Dawkins, do you believe the world would be a safer place without religion?

Dawkins: Yes, I do. I don’t think that religion is the only cause of wars. Very far from it. Neither the second World War nor the first World War were caused by religion, but I do think that religion is a major exacerbater, and especially in the world today, as a matter of fact.

Tubridy: OK. Explain yourself.

Dawkins: Well, it’s pretty obvious. I mean that if you look at the Middle East, if you look at India and Pakistan, if you look at Northern Ireland, there are many, many places where the only basis for hostility that exists between rival factions who kill each other is religion.

Tubridy: Why do you take it upon yourself to preach, if you like, atheism and there’s an interesting choice of words in some ways — that you’ve been accused of being something like a fundamental atheist. If you like, the “High Priest” of atheism. Why go about your business in such a way that that’s kind of ...trying to disprove these things. Why don’t you just believe in it privately, for example?

Dawkins: Well, fundamentalist is not quite the right word. A fundamentalist is one who believes in a holy book and thinks that everything in that holy book is true. I am passionate about what I believe because I think there’s evidence for it. And I think it’s very different being passionate about evidence from being passionate about a holy book. So I do it because I care passionately about the truth. I really, really believe it’s a big question. It’s an important question, whether there is a God at the root of the universe. I think it’s a question that matters, and I think that we need to discuss it, and that’s what I do.

Quinn: Ryan if I could just say...

Tubridy: Go ahead.

Quinn: Richard has come up with a definition of fundamentalism that obviously suits him. He thinks a fundamentalist has to be somebody who believes in a holy book. A fundamentalist is somebody who firmly believes that they have got the truth and holds that to an extreme extent and become intolerant of those who hold to a different truth. And Richard Dawkins has just outlined what he thinks the truth to be and that makes him intolerant of those who have religious beliefs.

Now, in terms of the effect of religion upon the world, I mean, at least Richard has rightly acknowledged that there are many causes of war and strife and ill will in the world, and he mentions World War I and World War II. In his book he tries to get Nietzsche off the hook of having atheism blamed for example, the atrocities carried out by Josef Stalin, and saying that these have nothing particularly to do with atheism.

But Stalin and many Communists who were explicitly atheistic took the view that religion was precisely the sort of malign and evil force that Richard Dawkins thinks it is. And they set out from that premise to, if you like, inflict upon religion sort of their own version of a “final solution.” They set to eradicate from the earth true violence and also true education that was explicitly anti-religious. And under the Soviet Union, and in China, and under Pol Pot in Cambodia explicit and violent efforts were made to suppress religion on the grounds that religion was a wicked force; and we have the truth, and our truth would not admit religion into the picture at all because we believe religion to be an untruth. So atheism also can lead to fundamentalist violence and did so in the last century. And atheists…

Tubridy: We’ll allow Richard in there.

Dawkins: Stalin was a very, very bad man and his persecution of religion was a very, very bad thing. End of story. It’s nothing to do with the fact that he was an atheist. We can’t just compile lists of bad people who were atheists and lists of bad people who were religious. I am afraid there were plenty on both sides.

Quinn: Yes, but Richard you are always compiling lists of bad religious people. I mean you do it continually in all your books, and then you devote a paragraph to basically trying to absolve atheism of all blame for any atrocity throughout history. You cannot have it both ways! You cannot…

Dawkins: I deny that.

Quinn: But of course you do it. Every time you are on a program talking about religion, you bring up the atrocities committed in the name of religion. And then you try to minimize the atrocities committed by atheists because they were so anti-religious and because they regarded it as a malign force in much the same way you do. You are trying to have it both ways.

Dawkins: Well, I simply deny that. I do think that there is some evil in faith because faith is belief in something without evidence.

Quinn: But, you see, that is not what faith is. You see, that is a caricature and a straw man and is so typical. That is not what faith is! You have faith that God doesn’t…

Dawkins: What is faith? What is faith!?

Quinn: Wait a second! You have faith that doesn’t exist. You are a man of faith as well.

Dawkins: I do not! I have looked at the evidence!

Quinn: Well, I have looked — I have looked at the evidence too!

Dawkins: If somebody comes up with evidence that goes the other way, I will be the first to change my mind.

Quinn: Well, I think the very existence of matter is evidence that God exists. And by the way, remember, you are the man who has problems believing in free will, which you try to, very conveniently, shunt to one side.

Dawkins: I’m just not interested in free will. It’s not a big question for me.

Quinn: It’s a vast question because we cannot be considered morally responsible beings unless we have free will. We do everything because we are controlled by our genes or our environment. It’s a vital question.

Tubridy: We are returning to the point at which we kind of pretty much began, which is probably an appropriate time to end the debate. Richard Dawkins, good to talk to you again. Thank you for your time. And to you, David Quinn, columnist at The Irish Independent, thank you very much indeed for that. The God Delusion, by the way, throws up many, many interesting questions. It’s written by Richard Dawkins and is published by Bantam Press. We’ll put details, as always on our website, www.rte.ie If you want to exercise your free will to contact us, please do so.

- Ryan Tubridy. "The God Delusion: David Quinn debates Richard Dawkins." The Ryan Tubridy Show (October 9, 2006)

- Listen here.

Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that i can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder .

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)

4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers.* The jargon peculiar to

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*An interesting illustration of this is the way in which English flower names were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, Snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.

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Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in

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† Example: Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness . . .Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bittersweet of resignation." (Poetry Quarterly)

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the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena" -- would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry -- when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech -- it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash -- as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip -- alien for akin -- making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has something new to say -- and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence*, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases

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*One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

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and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style." On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

- George Orwell, 'Politics and the English Language', 1946