Odium theologicum

Peter Mullen, Cornhill's sage, said this in a recent sermon:

Augustine lived at the time of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire when the debauched people were entertained and consoled by the bread and circuses, the gladiatorial contests, public displays of great cruelty and lewdness. Today we inhabit the techno-digital version of something very similar. The nauseating voyeurism of Big Brother and the mindless culture of celebs. The narcissistic obsession with the mobile phone. Facebook and Twitter. A people shall speak drivel unto a people from generation to generation. The head-banging sub-culture of binge-drinking. It is as if aimless people with nothing in their lives are saying, I’m a nobody: get me out of here.

One wouldn't mind this sort of outburst, indeed we expect it of the man who proposed that gays should be tatooed, and it might be viewed as entertaining, until you remember that Dr Mullen made his comments about gays on his blog, that he puts many of his sermons up on St Michael's website, that he constantly writes to the newspapers, and was only yesterday sounding off in the Northern Echo (and still claiming to be the Chaplain of the Stock Exchange, who swiftly disowned him and his comments last October) about the Labour Goverment: "Labour is always ideological, doctrinaire and bureaucratic with a penchant for the politics of envy." It seems to be Dr Mullen who uses the very media he is so ready to criticize to set out his thoughts on many subjects - and most of his thoughts are dark and critcal of anyone except Peter Mullen and what he stands for (I am not exaggerating; just go and read his sermons on the St Michael's Cornhill website) - on the basis that he does not speak and write drivel and is not narcissistic. Peter Mullen also lacks humour which made his defence that his comments about gays were humorous and satirical particularly absurd.

So why should I bother about him? Because I find that he reads the same books and starts often from the same position that I would adopt, we go along together for a bit, with me agreeing with what he says, and then we diverge dramatically. Of course, on some issues we don't come anywhere near each other right from the outset. And I use this blog, and Facebook, and Twitter, and BarbicanTalk, and much of what I write is undoubtedly trivial. But we can look at it another way. Answering Facebook's question "What's on your mind?" or Twitter's "What are you doing?" requires a degree of reflection. My answer to the latter might often be "Wasting my time"; if I seriously considered the answer to the former I would have to write a long piece. As it is I send electronic postcards rather than letters and I have begun to think of the blog as a form of letter-writing.

The postcards keep me in touch with acquaintances, new friends, people I don't see very often. They show that the communication channel is open; it is ready for something more important. The letters involve more serious thought. During Lent I have read quite a few letters by Petrarch and Erasmus. Both used letters as a means of expressing important ideas. Petrarch even wrote letters to famous figures of the past and when he found gaps in his letter collection he wrote an extra one to fill the space and continue the train of thought. Erasmus wrote and wrote and wrote, letters, dialogues, major works of theology and literature. Now I don't think I come anywhere near the intellectual strength, capacity and ability of those two great figures, though I have discovered that I share a number of their weaknesses, but I don't think that I speak and write drivel. I enjoy dialogue and I don't mind being corrected when I'm wrong - but I'm never wrong, so correction is never necessary. (I wrote it before you thought it!) I value a more public forum where ideas can be set out and I don't see why others shouldn't use it too for less serious thoughts. We don't have to read what they write, look at their pictures, watch Celebrity Television. We are free to ignore them. It is too easy to say that this is a time of decline and fall equal to that of the declining Roman Empire. It isn't. It is as unlike it as it is possible to be. And when I look at my two sons - one 20, the product of St John's, Leatherhead, Birmingham University and the Royal Military Academy, and the other 14, nearly 15, and at the City of London Academy (Southwark) - when I look at them and their friends, I am not disheaterned and I do not see impending disaster.