Creativity House
Exeter
Education Sunday, 12 February 2006

Dear Beverley,

I flew to Malta on New Year's day and stayed for a week in Zurrieq as the guest of Joseph S. Ellul who is fourteen years older than me and so seven years older than Pope Benedict XVI. Like me, he was very interested in that Australian newspaper article you sent me about Steffie.

I don't remember whether or not I have already posted you a copy of John Ankerberg & John Weldon's The Facts on Jehovah's Witnesses? Because both Joe and I have met and spoken with several Jehovah's Witnesses in the past, we read this book with interest and then discussed it in some detail. Although both authors rightly give great importance to the actual words of the Bible, like many Christian fundamentalists they seem to neglect what is written in James 1:22-27; 2:14-26 Therefore, neither Joe nor I completely agree with what these authors write on pp. 25-27 about "Salvation" in relation to personal merit, good works, grace and faith. In particular, Joe and I believe that the words they quote from John 5:24 and 6:47, properly understood, do not contradict what James teaches so clearly and strongly.

I don't know whether all they say about the Jehovah's Witnesses is true or not. Perhaps you can tell me? But Joe tells me that all Witnesses who have spoken with him in Zurrieq have, he thinks foolishly, denied that Jesus is G-d. Joe's "explanation" may even amuse you.

He asks the visitor:
"Do you know why you are a human and not a monkey?"
"Because both your parents were humans, and not monkeys."
He also claims that this explains why Jesus neither married nor had children -
"A mule, being a hybrid, is sterile and cannot bear offspring. Similarly, Jesus being half-divine (because his Father is G-d) and half-human (because Mary, his Mother, is human), cannot have children..."

In my opinion that "explanation", although not "unreasonable", cannot possibly be correct, since for 2,000 years now most Christians have believed Jesus is 100% G-d and 100% man, not just 50% of each... However, since he is much older than me and has, moreover, never studied either philosophy or theology, even though he used to teach religion in secondary school and his Uncle Father Peter Saydon translated the entire Bible out of the original languages into Maltese, I think it would take quite a long time to explain to him clearly and sincerely what I understand to be the Catholic teaching about Jesus Christ being two natures in one person, and the Holy Trinity being Three Persons in One Nature. However, since I shall be in Malta again soon, staying in a small family-hotel near Mellieha from 21 February until 7 March, we may be able to make at least a little headway.

According to Hebrews 2:14-18 - "Since all the children share the same blood and flesh, Jesus too shared equally in it, so that by his death he could take away all the power of the devil... For it was not the angels that he took to himself; he took to himself descent from Abraham. It was essential that he should in this way become completely like his brothers so that he could be a compassionate and trustworthy high priest of G-d's religion, able to atone for human sins..."

In any case, Joe's "explanation" is not easily integrated either with Matthew 1:1 or with the significantly different emphasis of Luke 3:38. He was, I believe, doing his best to put across an important truth in a way that was short, sweet and to the point - but in this instance, too short to take all relevant factors into account.

I possibly have a tendency to go to the opposite extreme, and so at present I am, with great interest and enjoyment, not only reading an English translation by Willard R. Trask of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis - The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 1953, 2003), but I am also encouraging both Ruth Kelly and Ben Bradshaw (as well as, of course, your good self) to do the same.. The original of this masterpiece was written in Istanbul between May 1942 and April 1945 and first published in Switzerland in 1946. Now, sixty years later, it is still widely admired and carefully studied. The new English-language edition includes quite a long introduction about this book's importance by Edward W. Said, and also an additional never before translated into English essay in which Auerbach, who died in 1957, replied to various criticisms that had been made when the work was first published.

I know Joseph and, I suspect, you haven't yet read anything by Auerbach, and so I am concluding this short letter with a quotation from the last page of his book: "... We cannot but see to what an extent - below the surface conflicts - the differences between men's ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened. The strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled... Beneath the conflicts, and also through them, an economic and cultural levelling process is taking place. It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible. And it is most concretely visible now in the unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation of the random moment in the lives of different people..."

Joseph Ellul and I, as well as discussing various biblical texts and translations and also several aspects of Maltese prehistory and archæology in considerable detail, have much more often talked about Freemasonry than about Jehovah's Witnesses, and John Ankerberg & John Weldon are also the authors of another book, The Facts on the Masonic Lodge (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishing, 1989), which he and I read and discussed together only last month.

To be fair, you would, I think, before arriving at any definite conclusions of your own, need to read several other books about Freemasonry and related subjects, but Michæl Johnstone's new coffee-table book, The Freemasons - The Illustrated Book of an Ancient Brotherhood (London: Arcturus, 2005), offers an enjoyable general introduction. Freemasonry - A Celebration of the Craft, edited by John Hamill and Robert Gilbert, with a Foreword by H.R.H. The Duke of Kent (Greenwich Editions, 1998) is better, but out of print - and, of course, neither The Illustrated Book nor A Celebration makes any claim to be "a history"...

Which, unless I am very much mistaken, brings us back to Erich Auerbach and his The Representation of Reality, with its fascinating and detailed discussion not of "authors" - but of a selection of partly biblical but for the most part non-biblical "texts" (reproduced both in their original language and in English translation) by Homer, Petronius, Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus, St. Jerome, St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Gregory of Tours, Chrétien de Troyes, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Francis of Assisi, Dante, Benvenuto da Imola, Boccaccio, Antoine de la Sale, Rabelais, Michel de Montaigne, Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, La Bruyère, Molière, Boileau, Corneille, Racine, Bossuet, the Abbé Prévost, Voltaire, Saint-Simon, Schiller, Gœthe, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Edmond & Jules de Goncourt, Émile Zola, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, together with extracts from the Acta Sanctorum, the Chanson de Roland, the Chanson d'Alexis, the Mystère d'Adam, the fablel Du prestre qui ot mere a force and the Quinze Joyes de Mariage.

In what degree and to what extent Auerbach and his chosen "authors" were anticipating what Jean Houston and others have since identified as a “socially catalytic and individually kairotic homoeokinetic polyphrenic process” is really not for me to say!

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