COVER -> DAY ONE
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This principle, however, does not hold in assessing figures from the past as I have just found out to my considerable cost. I have just finished reading Gary Wills' superb short book on St. Augustine which has shown me to my temporary dissatisfaction that I have been partially wrong about the good Bishop of Hippo all my adult life.
I have built a substantial edifice which I have inhabited with the comfort familiarity brings on the basis that Augustine was a misguided neo-Platonist and that Christianity has on the whole fared better since the Aristotelian St. Thomas Aquinas. This assessment has been based on four errors of analysis which I now, in the spirit of Augustine, confess.
First, I compared two figures living almost a thousand years apart without asking myself the question how else, given his time and his influences, could Augustine have thought? How well did he play his intellectual hand?
The answer to the second question is, on reflection, that he wrote some magnificent works which were largely in scope, subtlety, understanding and usefulness far ahead of contemporaries, even notables like Saints Ambrose and Jerome.
Secondly, I believed his opponents without carefully checking their credentials.
The best example of this is the widespread belief that Augustine was a libertine in youth who became obsessively anti-sex in his old age.
The first assumption ignores the evidence that he was strictly monogamous, cohabiting with the same lady from the age of 16 until he was over 30, when the pair voluntarily adopted celibacy, a common practice of Christians and pagans in the early Fifth Century.
As to the other accusation, this grew out of a heated controversy on the role of sex and marriage, triggered by one of Augustine's political enemies --- of which we only have Augustine's side with a few extracts from his opponent. He replied at length to attacks but did not initiate the debate.
Thirdly, his doctrines of Original Sin and Free Will have been grossly simplified down the ages by over zealous friends as well as foes. If you read the actual texts there are qualifications and subtleties for which Theology 101 has no time, space nor wit.
Finally, I never asked myself the question, what would the world have been like without him?
The answer is that it would have been a much worse place.
He helped to make sense for his generation of the Gothic sack of Rome in 410 AD which called into question a political settlement which Citizens of the Empire assumed would last forever.
He provided a foundation for Mediaeval theology which, for all its shortcomings, sustained the cultivated remnants of Europe for almost a thousand years until the 'rediscovery' of classicism and the Renaissance.
So I am not quite so comfortable in my intellectual habitation and will have to make some substantial alterations. On this occasion a little papering over the cracks will not do. More than three decades of biased accretion is too much to shift and I am a follower of Aristotle and a deprecator of Plato as a matter of temperament as much as intellect. I will have to tolerate a certain amount of mental untidiness before what I have learned from Wills is fully absorbed so that it has the patina of the corpus into which it has been absorbed.
So let that be a warning to us both; to me as an analyst and to you as a reader. It is too easy for writers to slip into familiar intellectual grooves and too easy for readers to be swayed by clean, elegant consistency. We both dislike intellectual untidiness.
I like to write in a familiar way and you like to read what you agree with. How infrequently do people, given a choice of editorial policy, buy a journal with which they disagree?
Putting down Wills with a mixture of admiration and discomfort, I tried to learn my lesson by applying it to the Middle East with interesting results.
Here are some points to ponder.
- First, no matter what the posturing, Egypt has a buoyant economy and wishes to be a peace maker; Jordan was almost destroyed as a state by the Palestinians; and if Syria uses its decaying armaments they will not be replaced now that Russia will not over-ride an American veto on such arms sales. So who is going to fight Israel? If Syria uses what it has then it will be unable to resist Israeli control of Lebanon.
- Secondly, which Arab state has any interest in providing help to the Palestinians if this damages their growing trade with the West and their growing dependence on the world's only superpower? Even Libya and Iraq are showing signs of recognising what their more 'moderate' neighbours already accept.
- Thirdly, what love has any Arab state ever shown Palestinians? Apart from encamping them on Israel's borders as a reproach, have they ever been thought of in the Arab world as anything other than the gypsies, the outsiders, the troublemakers?
- Fourthly, what evidence is there that Israel actually enjoys, as a democratic polity, seeing Palestinians killed?
It is all too sad and mad but; finally, in what moral or political sense is Sharon responsible for the violence of Palestinians? He walked on the Temple Mount to forestall Netanyahu's announced intention of vying for the Likud leadership but Arafat could have understood this and accepted that that political reality was rather more in his favour than Netanyahu's return.
Which all leads me to the conclusion that nobody is really interested in the kind of 'peace' solution which has been pursued by the Clinton Administration. The
Arabs don't care but would not mind a caged Palestinian people irritating Israel which, in turn, may find it more tolerable to create a laager until economic and military inevitabilities soften the admission that the Americans want Israel and that nobody wants Palestine.
After years of nail biting over summit brinkmanship, after prayers and hopes for peace, I have to abandon my old groove, my familiar mantra, and admit that I have been wrong. I have ignored large pieces of inconvenient evidence. Whatever the stripes of the new American administration, I hope it does not take the Clinton legacy in the Middle East as a given.
