Farewell to Ēostre and all that with a serve of the craven Craven ...

 

The pond reserves a special contempt for the specious craven Craven, and thought a late Sunday posting might be a chance to express it, while also farewelling the pond's Ēostre reptile celebrations ... and it'll also serve as a placeholder because the pond will be slow about its business tomorrow morning... there's only so much suffering anyone can take while on Ēostre duty ...

T. S. Eliot? Okay, let's start with that one. Eliot was high Anglican, having decided that Boston Unitarianism wasn't for him.

But he never made the step over to the Papists, those devout whores of Babylon ...

...the Roman Catholic Church in England, in those days much more so than today, was - as he put it - merely a sect.

With his loathing of sectarianism and his convictions that the culture and faith of a people should be intertwined, he was drawn to the Church of England, but recognized, of course, that that body had an unsatisfactory mixture of Protestantism and Catholicism in its character and observances, being, from the viewpoint of the Catholic Church at least, not Catholic at all.

Eliot's solution was to align himself with the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England which believed that that Church was part of the universal Catholic Church from which it had been regrettably separated at the Reformation (while still retaining valid orders and sacraments - a view rejected, of course, by Rome) and to which it was aspiring to return in full Catholic communion.  (here)

Back in the day, that sort of attitude would have seen him treated as a heretic, deserving of a burning at the stake, followed by an eternity of hellfire ... with the Church never inclined to tolerate subtlety and nuance ...

It's still the official line, though the barbarity of punishments on offer to the heathens has been softened a little, as shown by this goose arguing with a straw man ...

...I look at what Jesus clearly taught in the Bible. He didn’t give us a Bible, He gave us a Church. Jesus said, for example in Matthew 18:15-18, He says–and this is instructions that are perennial till the end of time, Andre – He says, “If your brother shall offend against thee, go tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you’ve gained your brother.” If he won’t hear you, what do you do? You don’t get your Bible out and start arguing; He says, “Take one or two with you, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. If he will not even hear them, tell it to the church; and the one who fails to hear the church shall be as a heathen and a publican.”

In other words, Jesus established the Church to be His authority to speak for Him; that’s exactly what we see happen in the book of Acts – in Acts chapter 15 Andre, I’ll give you homework–when there was a heresy that threatened to tear a fledgling church apart there in Antioch in the first century, what did they do? Paul and Barnabas came in, tried to settle it; they couldn’t settle it. What did they do? They had a council, the Church declared on the matter, and the matter was settled. That’s the way the Church functioned, and my friend, as a matter of history, the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, will tell you, if you go to its entry on the Catholic Church, you will find it’s the Church started by Jesus in 33 AD.

The fact is, that’s how the Church – one, holy Catholic, and apostolic–functioned for 1,500 years until some men came along and started teaching traditions of men that contradicted the Word of God.

Splitters.

NB for any complimentary women keeping company with angry Sydney Anglicans, take particular joy in that blather about the "traditions of men", which means that the attached illustration has a hollow echo ...

The pond left the snap of Pietà, not to remember it being attacked with a hammer by Laszlo Toth while screaming he was Jesus Christ, risen from the dead - religion can have a bad effect on some people - but because it draws attention to the matter of Michelangelo ...

There are fair odds that he was gay or bisexual in the modern senses of the words, as noted here:

...both Michelangelo and Da Vinci were, beyond a reasonable doubt, gay as we know it. As Voltaire noted about Issac Newton, both men “showed no commerce for women.” Both men glorified male nudes; and both men engaged in romantic and sexual relationships with other men. This theme continued throughout their lives in private letters and notebooks.

In Florence, at this time, under the Medici regime, homosexuality was better tolerated than anywhere else. It was not publicly embraced. It was still a crime, but the elites and authorities largely turned a blind eye. Outside Florence, you could expect to spend your life in prison, even burned at the stake.

The author notes that Da Vinci never expressed shame about his sexuality, and he did face sodomy charges at one point. He was acquitted, this author concludes, largely because one of the other young men implicated belonged to an elite family. He compares Da Vinci’s openess to Michelangelo’s by noting the latter was more discreet, and that Michelangelo did express shame.

There is little doubt people knew, especially his patrons, but it seems he was less “out of the closet” than Da Vinci. They were rivals who admired each other.

You must know what's coming - here from the bigots...

The modern arguments in favor of homosexuality have thus been insufficient to overcome the evidence that homosexual behavior is against divine and natural law, as the Bible and the Church, as well as the wider circle of Jewish and Christian (not to mention Muslim) writers, have always held. The Catholic Church thus teaches:

“Basing itself on sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2357).

Off to hell with them. The pond could go on, but will move on to the next gobbet ...

That mention of the mass collaboration with the Nazis reminded the pond that a pictorial note would do the trick ...

What is truth? A contagion of lies and lickspittle fellow travelling ...and here's a couple for Franco ...

And don't get the pond started on anti-semitism and the hundreds of years long program by the Catholic church and other Xians to cultivate it.

Only the other day in The New Yorker James Carroll was asking This Easter, Is Christianity Still Promulgating Antisemitism? (paywall) and proposing The Gospel narratives of the passion and death of Jesus have, across centuries, framed how Jews are perceived. Inter alia:

An unfathomed thermal current long running below the surface of a broad culture—call it the culture of “the West”—is still being tapped, even if unconsciously. That current was first generated roughly two thousand years ago, in the way that early followers of Jesus told the story of the Crucifixion, as a crime laid at the feet of the Jews. After the Holocaust made plain that the “Christ-killer” slander was part of what prepared the way for the mass murder of Jews, the trope was repudiated by the Second Vatican Council, in the 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate. “What happened in His passion,” the fathers of the Roman Catholic council said, “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”

But there was a problem. The Gospels themselves explicitly lodge the Christ-killer charge: for example, in Matthew, which is often read at Mass on Palm Sunday, Pontius Pilate pronounces Jesus not guilty and makes an offer to release him, but an assembled crowd of Jews cries, “Let him be crucified.” Pilate then famously washes his hands, saying, “I am innocent of the blood of this just person.” At which point, the crowd replies, let “his blood be on us, and on our children.” And so it has been.

Despite Nostra Aetate, neither the council fathers nor their successors put in place an effective educational structure that would enable people to understand that the narrative was most likely written not by eyewitnesses but by followers of Jesus in the late first century. Those second-generation Christians may not have known that Pilate was a brutal tyrant, or that any benign portrayal of him as being friendly toward a troublemaking nobody was surely false. The antagonism between the remembered Jesus and “the Jews” was one of which the actual Jesus would have known nothing. Though he participated in disputations that were normal in the Jewish community of his time—such as debates over what exactly the Shabbat laws required, or what deference was due to Caesar—he was in mortal conflict not with his own people but with the Roman government.

Ah yes, the scribblers and their slaves, not necessarily able to channel the Holy Ghost. On to the next gobbet, and more about the goat herders and the tent builders ...

Speaking of the style of the gospels reminded the pond of a recent story in the Daily Beast ...How Much of the Bible Was Written by Enslaved People? (paywall)

Paul’s Letter to the Romans is widely regarded as the most theologically sophisticated and influential book in the New Testament. There’s no questioning its importance, and (unlike many books of the New Testament) no scholar has ever doubted that Paul himself wrote it. Yet this last point is remarkable precisely because it is so demonstrably untrue. Paul did not write this letter—or, at the very least, he did not write it alone. Tucked into the conclusion of the letter is a simple but striking interruption: “I, Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord” (Rom 16:22).

Who was Tertius? Almost every artistic depiction of Paul—from the carefully laid ancient murals of Ravenna to the color-saturated portraits of the Renaissance—shows Paul working alone, quill in hand, engrossed in the act of writing. In some depictions, he looks heavenward as if asking for or receiving heavenly inspiration. Paul rarely turns to another person. Yet here, in the letter itself, we find the name of another writer.

The most minimalist opinion on the subject is that Tertius was Paul’s secretary­. He was, in other words, one of the tens of thousands of erudite enslaved or formerly enslaved people who acted as stenographers, transcribed ideas, and edited the documentary output of the Roman world. With only a few exceptions, when tradition and scholarship identify Tertius they call him a “scribe,” “professional,” or “associate.” Language like this creates the impression Tertius was an educated volunteer or friend, someone who willingly lent his skills to his spiritual mentor. It ignores the fact that the people who worked as ancient secretaries were not part of an ambitious and educated middle class: they were people whose freedom had been stolen. With a name like Tertius, which simply means “Third,” the man who committed the letter to the Romans to papyrus was almost certainly enslaved....

As I show in my book God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible, Tertius is not an exception. Towards the end of his letter to the Galatians, Paul remarks on his handwriting and invites them to “see what large letters I make when I am writing with my own hand” (Gal. 6:11). The implication is that the preceding section—what amounts to almost the entirety of the letter—had been written by someone else in a smaller script. Paul makes similar statements in 1 Cor. 16:21 and Col. 4:18, suggesting that this was his standard practice. This should not surprise us. This, after all, is how most people in the first-century world “wrote.” ...

There's more, but the pond will just credit the writer for reminding the pond that portions of the bible were the work of uncredited slaves, while noting that Paul is one of the most disagreeable of the credit stealers, a misogynist at all times, as was often the habit of tent-makers and goat herders ...

Candida Moss is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, UK and an award-winning author of five books, including Bible-Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby. She is also a frequent news commentator for CBS and CNN. 

As for Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears?

Extracts from letters between Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears have gone on display at the Red House in Aldeburgh, the Suffolk home which Britten, one of Britain’s greatest composers, shared with the tenor.

Although Britten and Pears look and sound like two upper class boarding school teachers in their tweeds and tank tops, the letters reveal a different picture.

“Much much love to you dear honey,” says one letter. “I love you with my whole being, solemnly and seriously,” says another. “I live for Friday, & you. My man – my beloved man,” writes Britten. “My most beautiful of all little blue grey, mouse catching, pearly bottomed, creamy-thighed, soft-waisted mewing rat-pursuers! How are you? My beauty!” Pears writes in 1941.

The letters are part of an exhibition that is one of a number marking the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, when homosexual acts between men over 21 in England and Wales were decriminalised.

Pears was Britten’s muse, collaborator and lover for 39 years, but for most of that time it was a desperately dangerous life to live.

In public, they were not a gay couple. In private, the letters, first published last year, appear to reveal an ardent and joyful love.

“The letters are very sweet and moving,” said curator Lucy Walker. “There is this huge volume of correspondence in which they just pour out all this unbelievably lovey-dovey stuff.

“They saw each other like any other married couple. All the letters are like it, they are all ‘my darling’, ‘my love’, ‘my honeybunch’.” (More here)

Encore: "a desperately dangerous life to live."

See above. Off to hellfire with them for all eternity ... and as for John Eliot Gardiner? There's a famous quote that keeps doing the rounds ...

“Consciously, I am certainly an atheist, but I do not say it out loud, because if I look at Bach, I cannot be an atheist. Then I have to accept the way he believed. His music never stops praying. And how can I get closer if I look at him from the outside? I do not believe in the Gospels in a literal fashion, but a Bach fugue has the Crucifixion in it – as the nails are being driven in. In music, I am always looking for the hammering of the nails … That is a dual vision. My brain rejects it all. But my brain isn’t worth much.’” ― John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

His feeble brain rejects it all? Off to hellfire for all eternity for him. On to the next gobbet ...

Well you can't blame Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau for being a member of a Hitler Youth Group, he was young, unlike the conniving Church fascist fellow travellers with Franco, Hitler and Mussolini... and these days offer pleasantries as a genocide unfolds, involving mass displacement, mass punishment and famine as a weapon of war. There's your divine message of divine love in a nutshell.

Instead, having already mentioned Michelangelo, the pond suspects that the philistines are referring to Titian, rather than Titan in the next gobbet ... it being either a moon of Saturn or notorious pre-Olympian gods ruling from Mount Orthys.

In which case ...

Secret histories: sex lives of the Renaissance artists 

Titian cavorted with his models, Raphael died of sexual excess, Leonardo ran into trouble with the Florentine sex police … We delve into the passionate private lives of art's great masters and see just how raw and radical the Renaissance really was. (Graudian interactive here)

Off to hell with the lot of them ... and now please allow the pond to make a final note after the final gobbet ...

Pasolini a master? He was gay, and moreover in the school of the Prick up Your Ears man in terms of the ugliness of his death. (Graudian here)

"Want to go for a spin?" the poet and maestro of Italian cinema asked the rent boy, according to the latter's confession to the police. "Come ride with me, and I'll give you a present."

So began the events leading to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, brilliant intellectual, director and homosexual whose political vision – based on a singular entwinement of Eros, Catholicism and Marxism – foresaw Italian history after his death, and the burgeoning of global consumerism. It was a murder that, four decades later, remains shrouded in the kind of mystery and opacity Italy specialises in – un giallo, a black thriller.

The encounter occurred in the miasma of hustling around Roma Termini railway station at 10.30pm on 1 November 1975. And it marks the point of departure for a film tipped to win the Golden Lion at the Venice biennale festival this week – Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe and directed by Abel Ferrara, Bronx-born of Italian descent. The film deals with the last day of an extraordinary life. Ferrara says: "I know who killed Pasolini," but will not give a name. But in an interview with Il Fatto Quotidiano, he adds: "Pasolini is my font of inspiration."

At 1.30am, three hours after the station rendezvous, a Carabinieri squad car stopped a speeding Alfa Romeo near the scrappy coastal promenade of Idroscalo at Ostia, near Rome. The driver, Giuseppe (Pino) Pelosi, 17, sought to run, and was arrested for theft of the car, identified as belonging to Pasolini. Two hours later, the director's body was discovered – beaten, bloodied and run over by the car, beside a football pitch. Splinters of bloodied wood lay around.

Pelosi confessed: he and Pasolini had set off, and he had eaten a meal at a restaurant the director knew, the Biondo Tevere near St Paul's basilica, where he was known. Pino ate spaghetti with oil and garlic, Pasolini drank a beer. At 11.30pm they drove towards Ostia, where Pasolini "asked something I did not want" – to sodomise the boy with a wooden stick. Pelosi refused, Pasolini struck; Pelosi ran, picked up two pieces of a table, seized the stick and battered Pasolini to death. As he escaped in the car, he ran over what he thought was a bump in the road. "I killed Pasolini," he told his cellmate, and the police.

A helluva way for a talented film-maker to die, but no matter, off to hell with him ...

And finally, just for the heck of it, there's a whole bunch of atheist cartoons here ... a couple will set the mood and wrap up the pond's Ēostre celebrations...