Michelangelo, who was twenty years younger than Leonardo and outlived him by forty-five years, made Jesus heroic at any age and in all media. In Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Madonna and child now in a church in Bruges, the boy Jesus is already a little tower of strength, and in the famous drawings of the dead Christ rising from the tomb, the figure that floats upwards is no wraith, but the sublime expression of a warrior. In the most famous Michelangelo Pietà, when the dead son lies across the knees of his mother, he is indeed the wreck of man, but it is a man who has been wrecked. Again, it’s a matter for argument whether Michelangelo believed in the heaven he painted around the body of God at the centre of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but there can be no doubt that the personal force of Jesus was the focus of all his attention.
The supernatural visitor had been humanized. It was one of the things that humanism did. When the early painters of the Renaissance began painting religious figures as people instead of icons, a new kind of belief had begun. The centre of attention was switching from the next world to this one, according to the revolutionary conviction that the life that really matters happens between birth and death. The Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, did all they could to fight back, and they were especially fierce on art. The Catholic counterreformation was partly an attempt to pull the artists back into the service of dogma, and in England the Protestant image-breakers weren’t just out to nail idolatry. They wanted to wipe out all suggestions that religion could be reduced to the level of mere humanity.
The Churches survived, they are still here, and there are many people who still believe, in the old sense. But everything the Churches had ever taught came in for half a millennium of questioning, until finally only one thing was left unquestioned. Paradoxically, the humanists, who had begun the process of undermining Christian belief, had reinforced the importance of the personality at its centre.
I know that my redeemer liveth. Well, I doubt if he can redeem me. I wish he could. But I do have faith that he lives on, as an ideal. All the Christian religions are lucky to have him, and those of us who have ceased to be Christians in the old way are lucky to have him too. In these weeks, in all the days of Advent until Christmas Day and from then on until Twelfth Night – the season wherein his birth is celebrated – have been giving him, and will yet give him, much thought. For me, he didn’t need to be crucified in order to prove his capacity for sacrifice. He proved that when he faced the crowd who wanted to stone to death the woman taken in adultery.
It was a turning point in history, because nothing quite like that had ever been recorded before. Since the same crowd of fanatics might very well have stoned him for interrupting their dreadful ceremony, clearly he was brave beyond the imagination of most of us. But it was the generosity of his intervention that set a new mark. He met the same mark again when he promised a place near him in heaven to the whore who had washed his feet. Imagine the whispering abuse he earned for that. Imagine the shouted abuse.
I first heard about these things in Bible class when I was very young, and I can’t think of how the same permanently necessary message about tolerance could have been transmitted in any other way. No matter how intolerant the Churches got in all their years of power, not even when they were burning people by the thousand, they never managed to wipe out the impression of his understanding spirit. Those moments in the Gospel would alone be enough to prove the importance of keeping alive all we can about his story.
We can debate the difficult points of interpretation, hit each other over the head about the truth of what he said here and what he did there, but the essence of his personality still deserves to be cherished as a salvation, a redemption. It won’t, I think, redeem our sins or save our souls for heaven. But it will give us a measure for how we should lead our lives on earth, even if we are bound to fail. I notice that even my friend Christopher Hitchens, who has lately become famous all over again for declaring that religious belief is inimical to human reason and a threat to justice, would still rather like to maintain some of the traditions. Writing beautifully himself, he knows that much of the beauty of the English language has the Bible as its fountain, and that an education without a Bible education is no education.
How the traditions can be maintained without the religious institutions being maintained as well is a question he will no doubt tackle in the course of time, but for now it surely can be said that we should cherish any of the Christian remnants that do not conflict with the merciful and all-comprehending nature of the man whose life on earth was the beginning of it all. Some of the remnants are in ruins, but still too beautiful to lose, like Leonardo’s Last Supper, still being restored even though there is almost nothing left of it to restore except restorations. Other remnants are trying to be ruins, and it takes money to repair them. Ely Cathedral would still be a miracle even if it were to be reduced to the condition of Tintern Abbey, with grass growing in the nave and the sky for a roof. But we would lose the magnificent ceiling, and how can we not find the money to protect that, if we can find the money to lay more runways for more airports to take more people in search of a paradise on earth?
Other remnants are trivial, but vital all the same. During the days of Advent, when our granddaughter came to visit, she would search for a chocolate in one of the pockets of Tommasina, our Advent doll. Made of rag, Tommasina is a lot taller than our granddaughter and has many pockets. For now, the hidden chocolate that somehow always got into one of the many pockets of Tommasina is a sufficient mystery. But the Christmas will come when our granddaughter will want to know more about just whose birthday Christmas is, and an important part of her upbringing will begin. Her parents are both believers in the classic sense, but it might be that their daughter will one day become an unbeliever, as I did. She might not believe that Jesus is still alive, in heaven. But there is one important thing that even I will be able to tell her, which is that Jesus, the first great man to be a champion of women, believed in her, and that alone would be sufficient cause to bless every night and day of the season wherein his birth is celebrated. The bird of morning will never sing all night long, but nor, if we are wise, will the memory of that man ever die.
Postscript
Greatly daring, the BBC still allowed the odd mention of Jesus during the Christmas period, although there was always the chance that somebody, if sufficiently provoked, would put in a planning application to turn the lobby of Broadcasting House into a mosque. There is no religion that I believe in, but I have a different way of not believing in Christianity than of not believing in, say, Islam. This doesn’t mean that I am a Christian agnostic, but it does mean that I am not an atheist along the lines of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. That I am an atheist goes without saying, and on the whole I would rather not say it, because as a position it holds scarcely any interest in itself. More interesting, to me at any rate, is that I am an ex-Christian atheist whose unbelief is consciously informed by the Christian heritage. So really the question of proselytizing for my irreligious convictions never comes up, because I would rather that other people, should they arrive at the same state, did so under their own steam. It’s a case of self-persuasion being the only kind of persuasion that matters.
When Dr Johnson said that it was not the act of a gentleman to shake someone in his faith, he missed the opportunity to say that it was the act of a bore. Via YouTube I watched my friend Hitchens preaching his godless creed many times, and it was the only theme on which he was ever less than thrilling. As for Dawkins, it is remarkable how a man so brilliant can be content to sound so trite. The contention that a God who might intervene in human affairs does not exist is so manifestly irrefutable that it scarcely bears saying even once. But sometimes clever people get bitten by a bug. They become worried that a truth which has come to them like a revelation might not have struck you with sufficient force, even though you, too, profess to agree with it. Thus I once spent a delightful hour at the dinner table with David Hockney. The dessert was
finished but the coffee was still being brought around for unlimited refills, and in those days smoking at the table was still permitted. A world-champion smoker, Hockney was pleased to meet a contender for the title. Nothing could injure the easy conviviality, but I’m bound to say that it would have been even more perfect if Hockney had accepted my agreement to his proposition that Picasso was a great painter. Yes, I assured him, I knew that. ‘No,’ said Hockney, in a kind of evangelistic desperation, ‘Picasso was a great painter.’ He thought I didn’t really get it.
In the same way, the otherwise scintillating Dawkins is likely to suspect that we have not really taken in the news about the non-existence of God. Dawkins should be given credit, though, for his integrity. Once, in conversation with him on stage in Edinburgh, I argued that the mass of believers in the various religions might conceivably behave worse if they were deprived of a deity to believe in. Dawkins pointed out that he didn’t proclaim the non-existence of God in order to make the world better. He proclaimed it because it was true. Hard to argue with that, except to say that it might be where the argument starts. I hasten to add that it was he, and not I, who wrote The Blind Watchmaker, and that we should be slow to award ourselves prizes when we detect a quirk in the head of a genius. Newton was utterly batty on the subject of chronology, but on the whole it’s wiser to note that he said useful things about celestial mechanics.
NEW YEAR PREDICTION
Dates of show: 2 and 4 January 2009
This is my last broadcast until my next spell and I’m in a summing-up mood. I have no New Year resolutions apart from the usual one about tidying my office in case the body of my missing cleaner is lying mummified under that pile of magazines. But I do feel like making a New Year prediction. I want to put down a marker that proves I have a grip on world events. The best way to prove this is to make a prediction that everybody knows has already come true, but that few people are yet ready to admit.
I hereby predict that from now on, starting today, nobody will look good who gets rich quick. I can predict more than that, in fact. Even getting rich slowly is going to look silly, if getting rich is the only aim in mind. Getting rich for its own sake will look as stupid as bodybuilding does at that point when the neck gets thicker than the head and the thighs and biceps look like four plastic kit-bags full of tofu. And on the men it looks even worse.
Just before Christmas, as if the collapse of some of the world’s relatively honest financial institutions had not already been unsettling enough, a hustler called Bernard Madoff was caught swindling the world’s smartest investors out of a grand total of fifty billion dollars. How, it was asked, could the world’s smartest investors have fallen for this character? The answer, surely, is that they were all like him. They thought they had found a way of making money out of nothing. Unfortunately for them, the ineffable Madoff knew he had found a way of making money out of nothing. All he had to do was tell them he had invented something called ‘a split-conversion strategy’ and they handed him their money.
But most of them had got their money the same way, by promising vast returns on money from other people who were trying to make money out of nothing. Many profound articles were written by the financial experts to explain how the whole mad Madoff cycle had been generated, but the question that was never asked is the one that bears most closely on my theme. What was he going to do with fifty billion dollars?
Back at the start of this series I raised the issue of what the multibillionaires who owned yachts were hoping to achieve. At best, their ridiculous unarmed battleships, permanently parked in the teeming marina of the sort of city where the world’s well-dressed dimwits gather to gamble at the casino, were described as floating palaces. What kind of numbskull wants a palace that floats, when he could just have a palace, out of whose front door he could stride with some confidence that he would not plunge face-first into the harbour? I was really asking a question about what you can do with too much money, and the answer was obvious: never enough.
How much money is too much? It’s too much when you’ve already got all you could possibly need, and there’s nothing to do with any more except count it. There have been some encouraging signs that this elementary realization has at last begun to dawn. Bill Gates saw the light early. Bill Gates, who invented the software which has just given me a picture of Donatella Versace after I pressed the wrong button – wait a second, I certainly don’t want to see any more of that – Bill Gates got to the point where he started to look for useful ways of giving some of his money away.
It was good news for Africa, which needs the kind of well-researched, well-targeted and well-protected money that will go into things like roads and seed, and not the kind of money that will go into the bank accounts of black leaders even more greedily aimless than the kind of white dolts who buy yachts as big as the USS Nimitz. If there is a tragedy anywhere in the uproarious comedy of the Madoff madness, it lies in the fact that some people who were trying to do what Gates did – assemble a fund that would help the world’s poor – handed the fund to someone who promised to make the fund bigger by handing it to Madoff, so that he could apply his magic split-conversion double downdraft fiscal disappearance strategy.
So good money vanished that could have helped to build a road that would have carried the equipment to the right spot to build a well that would have watered a field that might have grown the grain that might feed the sort of people who are currently eating their own carpets in Zimbabwe. The first thing Zimbabwe will need, of course, after Mr Mugabe finally gets sent off into exile to live in a suite at the top of some nut-job Gulf hotel with an uninterrupted view of ten thousand square miles of desert, is honest government, which is based not only on real elections, but on double-entry bookkeeping.
Worldwide, the mundane but crucial concept of balancing the account books with earned income against genuine expenditure is more likely to become implanted now that all the split-conversion doubletalk is suddenly no longer fashionable. The upmarket weekend papers have been full of canvassed opinions about what good might come out of the recession but the right answer is already in. The recession isn’t just a wake-up call telling us to get real. We’ve got real. The Good Housekeeping seal of approval has returned to power. It’s the end of an era of silly money.
The actor George Clooney gives some of his time to good causes. He’s famous for it. You could say that all the publicity he gets for doing it helps to make him even more famous than he is already and that therefore charity is to his advantage, but it would be a mean view. He couldn’t make all those interesting little movies we admire him for so much if he didn’t make all those uninteresting big movies for which we admire him a little less, so we should forgive him the huge salary.
But already, because of the new mood, it’s getting harder to forgive him for advertising coffee. If the coffee commercials make him the extra money that he gives away, that must leave the huge salary intact. Well, yes, he might say, but he has a lot of people on his payroll. Ladies, I like him too, so I want to believe that it all checks out. But one thing doesn’t. He isn’t credible when he tries to sell me coffee. I just don’t believe that a brand of coffee tastes better because George Clooney drinks it. He looks silly.
I advertised something myself once. I made a set of commercials for an Australian telephone company. The commercials were beautifully shot but the campaign was a total failure, because the competing telephone company was selling a better product cheaper, so nobody believed what I was saying. I could still use that kind of money even now, but if I tried to get it that way I would expect to be told that I looked silly.
Matthew McConaughey is doing commercials for a certain fragrance. I’m sure the extra money he is making is going to a good cause but there are two questions that I ask automatically whenever I see those commercials. The first question is: who wants to smell like Matthew McConaughey? And the second question is, doesn’t he look silly?
Life is harder and shorter for female film stars
than it is for male film stars and I’m sure there are good reasons for Charlize Theron to be the face of a certain fragrance. She might even sincerely believe in the stuff if it gives her the confidence to wear nothing else except a pair of high heels as she sways away down the corridor into the bedroom, the bare behind of a certain fragrance trailing a subtle cloud of bliss, but I can only ask: couldn’t she have just sold her Oscar? And doesn’t she look silly?
For Nicole Kidman, also, life might be tougher than we think. A beautiful woman reduced to starring in a film like Australia when she could have negotiated a year’s work painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge with a nailbrush and made a greater dramatic impact might well need extra income, but her commercials for another certain fragrance ask us to believe that it must smell good because she’s wearing it. If I could be assured that the certain fragrance doesn’t make Nicole Kidman smell different, but instead smells exactly like Nicole Kidman, I would buy a bottle and drink it. But otherwise I’m convinced of nothing except that she looks exactly as if she’s hustling for a buck she doesn’t need. Even if she does, is this the way to get it? Doesn’t she look silly?
In the old days, the actors did commercials offshore. Harrison Ford advertised products in Japan on the understanding that the commercials would never be screened in the US. He was following the example of Laurence Olivier, who advertised cameras in the US on the understanding that the commercials would never be screened in the UK. It was agreed, back in the day, that serious artists should not look like hucksters. Now it is assumed that serious artists look even more serious if they do look like hucksters. They look bigger, more corporate, more influential. Or they did until yesterday. But now it’s today, and it suddenly looks like a fast buck. It looks off. Madoff off. And it looks silly.
We’ve reached a turning point. A madness has gone out of fashion: the madness of behaving as if only too much can be enough. There will always be another madness, but not that one. From now on a man will have to be as dumb as a petrodollar potentate to think that anyone will respect him for sitting on a gold toilet in a private jumbo jet. Excess wealth is gone like the codpiece. The free market will continue, but any respect for the idea of free money is all over. If you’ve got it, flaunt it by all means, but if you haven’t earned it, forget about it. There isn’t going to be a change of consciousness, there’s already been one, which is why I can be so confident when I predict it. Until next time.