The face of God…

 

The infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot set perhaps gives us a glimpse of God? The simplicity of  z = z² + c  is a hint of immortality, the merest fingerprint of divinity…

De Sade and God – one created the other in his own image!

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade should have been christened Louis Donatien Aldonse but his mama, Marie-Eléonore de Maillé de Carman was otherwise engaged after her long confinement, so sent the newborn with a pair of servants, who at the critical moment failed to remember the list of names she had told them (they could neither read nor write so there was no point in her writing them down). Hence, due to faulty memory, was our good hero christened with a list of names, which he wore with pride through his eventful, if somewhat confined life…a life greatly misunderstood, and misrepresentated by a largely uncaring posterity!

de Sade’s daddy, the Comte de Sade, Seigneur de Saumane et de la Coste, Lieutenant-Général of the provinces of Bresse, Bugey, Valromey and Gex, marechal de camp des armées du roi (he had, you may note, almost as many titles as our own Peter Mandelson), apparently “swung both ways” and was a stereotypical grand seigneur, cold, restrained, formal – a very lazy and extravagant aristocrat, his laziness matched by his wife’s incredible indolence. She, bless her, got shot of little Donatien (de Sade was, despite the cock-up at his christening, always known as Louis) to his Grandmother, to a convent, to his Uncle, passing him from pillar-to-post, out of sight and out of mind.

Little Donatien was spoiled rotten by granny who loved to indulge the aristocratic little twerp. At age five, we find our hero with his Uncle (daddy’s six brothers and sisters were, with one exception, all ecclesiastics), the Abbe Francois de Sade whose sexual life was notoriously irregular (for example he lived with two mistresses, a mother and her daughter), and who ultimately provided the model for all those lustful ecclesiastics so conspicuous by their presence in so many of de Sade’s novels.

Despite the controversy surrounding de Sade, it is not widely realised that he was extremely devout – throughout his life he was obsessed with God! Those who denigrate him by suggesting he was mad, would be more justified if they suggested his mania was religious not sexual, after all not one of his writings fails to demonstrate his preoccupation with religion, while quite a number mention sex not at all.

In his youth he speaks of religion with piety, attaching huge importance to the sacrament and demonstrating great faith in God. By 1782, however, this had changed. In this year (the third of his almost continuous imprisonment without charge) he wrote “Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man”. Here de Sade is concerned with the inadequacy of the orthodox Christian description of the Universe. It is a well reasoned piece of dialectic. And from this moment on he cannot leave God alone – God and the Catholic Church! His knowledge was encyclopedic. He appears to have the Bible off by heart. He quoted extensively from Christian apologists from the early Church Fathers via Scott, Fenelon, Pascal and contemporary theologians. All this learning he used to attack God and the Church.

The intensity of de Sade’s attacks have seldom been equaled. He used reason, ridicule, blasphemy – highlighting the Bible’s inconsistencies, the history of the Papacy (especially its corruption and abuse of power), the pre-Christian foundations of the Eucharist and the dogma of Hell. Like one demented, at every opportunity, he demonstrated his passionate idealism – he would never forgive a God who permitted such evil and misery in the world! Nor a Church whose explanations offended all reason, and whose greed knew no bounds! Time after time he returns to the inconsistency between Christian profession and practice – Religion is dangerous, he claimed, as a base on which to build morality, “for if the falseness of the foundations is recognized, the entire edifice will tumble down.”

“God is either impotent or cruel. Man has made him in his own image. Give us a God worthy of respect.” His hatred for this God (de Sade hardly mentions Protestantism)who has deceived him is rabid. In his place de Sade positions “nature”, a sort of malevolent Goddess entirely occupied in harming mankind: “nature’s” object in creation is to have the pleasure of destroying that which she created. This ogress nature proceeds by destruction and corruption. “When the seed germinates in the earth, when it fertilizes and reproduces itself is it otherwise than by corruption, and is not corruption the first of the laws of generation?”

For de Sade, man (the creation of “nature”) knows only two necessities: hunger and lust.

“Is man the master of his tastes? One should be sorry for those who have strange ones, but never insult them; their wrong is Nature’s; they were no more capable of coming into the world with different tastes than we are of being born plain or beautiful.”

With such an argument de Sade removed responsibility from man for his criminal behavior – yet more than this was the implicit and explicit criticism of the backward-looking optimism of Rousseau, Condorcet and Babeuf. It completely banished the concept of the “Noble Savage” to the cemetery of failed ideas where it belonged.

What can we learn from de Sade today in Britain? Most importantly that the detention of individuals without charge can profoundly change those individuals – transform them into radicals and revolutionaries, an obvious response when confronted by the State and its many injustices (real or imagined). The devout de Sade was transformed – by war (joined the army aged fourteen at the outbreak of the seven years war), by incarceration in a variety of bleak goals, either without charge or on the “evidence” of his personal enemies (“evidence” that has irreparably damaged his reputation for all time) – into an irreligious advocate of libertarianism and social revolution.

Relevant, too, are de Sade’s comments on war: “War is simply public and authorized murder in which hired men slaughter each other in the interests of tyrants. It proves nothing except the ambition of the people promoting it.” And “The sword is the weapon of him who is in the wrong, the commonest resource of ignorance and stupidity.” For de Sade war was “merely imperial brigandage.”

“As long as a State’s riches is counted in wealth taken from the bowels of the world…the ongoing subjugation of foreign peoples is necessary and inevitable.”

One cannot help but think of Iraq and Afganistan – one with its huge oil resources the other with its ever important oil and gas pipelines.

Ultimately, we are left with a solitary question: did de Sade make God in his own likeness? Or did God create de Sade in his own image?

The all important answer has proven to be very elusive indeed.

Thought for the day…(well, almost!)

As God once said, and I think rightly…

Margaret Thatcher

Thought for the day

I dislike blasphemy on purely rational grounds. If there is no God, blasphemy is stupid and unnecessary; if there is, then it’s damned dangerous.

Flann O’Brien

Austria & Islam

Austria has its problems, too. See here.

Will we ever learn to live in peace together? Unlikely when fanatics of every creed believe only their God is the correct one – not only that but they want to jam it down everyone else’s throat!

So share another moment of nostalgia with me and Ultravox here.

Thought for the day

When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.

Peter O’Toole