Heresy

Title: Heresy – Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God
Author: Catherine Nixey
Publisher: Picador, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9781529040364
Pages: 364

Christianity is the world's largest religion in the matter of mass following. Even though it is splintered into numerous sects with mutually exclusive customs and rituals, there is an underlying unity as far as scriptures are concerned. There's universal agreement on the books included in the New Testament among all major sects and it gives an impression that there is uniformity on scriptures across the entire religion. In fact, this is far from the truth. There was a violent contest between various versions of the holy scriptures and a consensus was reached only in the fourth century CE on what ought to be sanctified as holy or to be condemned as apocryphal. Such omitted works contained extraordinary narratives especially of Jesus and Mary. Some of them portrayed Jesus as having a violent mind which exacted retribution for any slights committed against him. There are others which declare Jesus to be the rightful son of Joseph. As Christianity was elevated to the status of state religion of the Roman Empire after Constantine's reign, it crushed dissenting opinion, hunted out heresy and consigned the heretical texts to flames. The magnificent religious variety that had once flourished within the Roman Empire collapsed as a consequence. In its place an intolerant and virulent form of Christianity arose which exterminated paganism and even more, the heretics within the Christian fold. The Church became the greatest organised persecuting force in human history. This book summarizes Christianity's growth in the four centuries after Christ and the different flavours of religious thought available to the public. Catherine Nixey is a journalist and author. She currently writes for The Economist. Her best-selling first book, 'The Darkening Age' which described the growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire was reviewed earlier here.

At the outset, Nixey firmly establishes the idea that contrary to feelings of uniformity in the present world, there were many versions of the Christian holy texts in the ancient world, immediately after Jesus died. Some portrayed him as meek, mild and gentle, while others depicted him fierce, such as one who blinded critics and murdering those who merely bothered him. Almost every early Christian text offers a different or alternate view of the story that is familiar today. Many of these tales were similar to existing legends in paganism. At first, Christianity harped on its tales' similarity to existing beliefs, but when once it became more confident and then aggressive, it rejected the idea that it was similar to any of these other cults. It has also been supremely successful in wiping deviant narratives off from the public mind. Earlier texts that said Mary was not a virgin or that Joseph was Jesus' biological father were discarded when Christianity dominated the West. Yet, some traces of the original version rise up here and there from obscurity which goes unrecognized. A Christmas greeting card that shows an ox and a donkey at Christ's nativity or a scene that pictures Mary in a cave have taken motivation from these long-lost tales, because the New Testament does not mention them. The rich, yet ghoulish descriptions of hell are absent in the scriptures, but was widely prevalent in apocryphal books such as the Apocalypse of Peter or the Apocalypse of Paul. The Nativity Gospel of Thomas is another such book detailed in the text.

It's a common misconception among scholars that the pagan gods were/are nothing more than myths and only the monotheistic god can be spelled with a capital G. For centuries, there was a tacit agreement that the Greek and Roman gods fell into the category of history and mythology and is the subject matter of classicists while theologians handled Christianity. But Nixey boldly brackets Christianity with other ancient religions. These portrayed a world in which the pagan religions were ripe fruits waiting for someone to pluck them out and consume. The author refutes this fake notion. Contrary to the claims of Christian theologians, she confirms that the ancient world was not waiting for a saviour. In fact, it was suffering from an overdose of such men who claimed themselves to be sons of god and born of virgins. Apollonius of Tyana was one such character whose antecedents exactly matched that of Jesus. Ancient intellectuals reacted to tales of Jesus with contempt, boredom and barely concealed mirth at the inconsistencies. They also found disgusting and revolting the Christian ritual of ceremoniously drinking the blood and eating the body of the saviour. Jesus' healing miracles were eclipsed in the ancient world with that of Asclepius, who was also a son of god and a miracle worker. He also suffered a violent death and thereafter ascended to heaven. By the first century CE, to be revived from death was such a common phenomenon that it even merited a section in one of the earliest encyclopaedias. Pliny the Elder records a host of such stories and speculates on possible explanations for how it had happened. To the majority of ancient observers, Jesus was nothing more than a magician while many others thought him to be a charlatan. Making food appear from nothing was a staple of ancient magic. The virgin birth was also a contested idea in early times.

In the ancient ages, heresy didn't have the negative attributes which it possesses today. The term 'heresy' comes from the Greek word 'haireo' which means 'I choose'. Within just fifty years of Christianity's ascendancy, choice became no longer a praiseworthy attribute, but a poison. Religious heresy was unheard of before the arrival of the messianic religion. Within a century after Jesus' death, Christian writers had begun inveighing against choice or more particularly, heresy. Early and medieval Christians were even ready to kill to stamp out heresy at any cost. Nixey points to the short Albigensian crusade to prove this point. Pope Innocent III exhorted to attack the followers of heresy 'in the name of the God of peace and love'! Thousands were massacred in the French town of Beziers. Unable to distinguish between heretic and believer, the soldiers asked for advice. The abbot asked to kill them all, 'for the Lord knows them that are his' (p. 157). Such propensity for indiscriminate slaughter stems from unalloyed religious bigotry and one example can be indicated from Mughal history as well. Akbar fought Maharana Pratap of Mewar in the Battle of Haldighati in 1576. The Mughal forces were commanded by Raja Man Singh I of Amber, who fought alongside the Mughal commander Asaf Khan. When fierce fighting began, it became incredibly difficult to distinguish between the Kachhwaha Rajputs supporting the Mughals and the Sisodia Rajputs fighting them. Abdul Qadir Badauni records in his memoir Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh that he asked Khan how the Mughal warriors were supposed to distinguish between them. Asaf Khan famously replied: “Shoot at whomsoever you like, on whichever side they may be killed, it will be a gain to Islam”.

This book provides one more angle of how Christianity grew and eclipsed all other religions. What is seen played out was that if the tolerant tolerate the intolerant, then the intolerant will wipe out the tolerant over a period of time. This is a crucial lesson of all time and a stark warning to modern secular societies which tolerate anachronistic and savage religious practises of starkly intolerant religions in the name of plurality and diversity. Roman persecution of Christians was light and ineffective because Christianity actually grew over the period. And they adopted repression only when Christians abused the Roman gods or refused to participate in civic rituals that have no underlying religious sanctity. The Christian persecution of other religions was more brutal and mindlessly cruel because the other religions went extinct as a result. Constantine ordered that many pagan temples should have their doors removed, their roof claddings taken off, their sacred idols taken away and their gilding smelted down and added to the treasury. What was very different about Constantine was not that he promoted Christianity, which was unremarkable. What was different was that he reigned for three decades while his rebellious nephew and successor Julian did for only two years. His longevity changed history. Within fifty years of Christianity's ascent, laws forbidding heresy appeared. Just to convene a meeting of heretics was punished with flogging with leaden whips and exile. Offending books were burnt.

The author very effectively illustrates how Christianity snuffed out the spirit of inquiry from the minds of the intellectuals in its growth phase. Only when the religious temper mellowed a little by the end of the Middle Ages did the quest for knowledge was rekindled from the ashes. John Chrysostom argued that there was no need of curiosity for the true Christian, because 'where there is faith, there is no need for investigation'. St. Augustine, who was one of the greatest intellectuals of all time yet Christian, condemned the quest of knowledge as 'unhealthy curiosity' which leads to all kinds of ills. Men are led to investigate the secrets of nature, which is irrelevant to their lives. They wish to gain it merely for the sake of knowing. Hence, this 'curiosity' draw man off from the one true object of contemplation, which is god. Religious comparison was common. Classical authors observed and readily admitted similarities between their religion and others. But Christian authors adopted a novel explanation that the similarity was the work of Satan to deceive ordinary men. If Asclepius or Apollonius healed people and raised the dead, it was because they were incarnations of the devil, they argued. For a long time, the world had no knowledge of the alternative scriptures, because mainstream Christianity had so completely taken them out of view. The ancient texts recovered from Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 contained many heretical texts that present alternate versions of Christian stories which are now taken at face value and without any challenge. The Catholic Church prepared a comprehensive Index of Prohibited Books in 1557 which continued to be updated till 1966.

It's always a delight to read one of Nixey's books which are appropriately researched and provide a glimpse of an entirely new vista which lay hidden in plain sight. She replaces those pages torn away from history by organized religion and helps readers evaluate concepts which were taken for granted. This book contains several interesting pictures of sculptures and paintings - some of which are very old - that corroborates the author's arguments. Nixey's paraprosdokian approach (you better look up this term in Google!) is an extremely enjoyable experience for the readers. She describes an incident and the end of the passage takes an unexpected turn which leave the readers wide-mouthed. In this book, she describes a miraculous healer who was claimed to be a god on earth and waking up a dead girl. At the end of the paragraph, this person turns out to be not Jesus, but Apollonius of Tyana. In the previous book 'The Darkening Age', she describes a group of religious zealots in Syria breaking into a temple and smashing the idols there. Everyone thinks them to be Muslim bigots of ISIS, but it was in fact early Christians destroying pagan temples in the fourth century or so.

This book is very highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Prince

Title: The Prince
Author: Niccolo Machiavelli
Translator: W. K. Marriott
Publisher: Fingerprint! Classics, 2025 (First published 1532)
ISBN: 9789354406683
Pages: 174

Please look up the meaning of 'Machiavellianism' and 'Machiavellian' in any dictionary. The specific meaning assigned to the first in Merriam-Webster is that 'the view that politics is amoral and that any means however unscrupulous can justifiably be used in achieving political power', while the second term is defined as 'marked by cunning, duplicity or bad faith'. Not an edifying principle, obviously. Even though all the states, whether old or new, practised them for survival, the moment a keen political observer put it in a language to be understood by a medieval European potentate, it became wily, unscrupulous and cunning advice! Kautilya’s Arthashastra foreshadowed this discourse by eighteen centuries and that treatise is also attributed to be heartless, manipulative and - not altogether strangely - Machiavellian! Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) was a Florentine diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Italian Renaissance. 'The Prince' is dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici in the hope of landing on a plum job. This hardback volume is a collector's item to any serious reader.

Machiavelli spent over a decade navigating the treacherous landscape of Italian city-states, observing the brutal and effective tactics of leaders like Cesare Borgia. In 1512, the fall of the Florentine Republic and the return of the Medici family led to his immediate dismissal, followed by imprisonment and torture. Forced into exile at his country estate, he pivoted to writing as a desperate attempt to remain intellectually engaged with the political world. In 1513, he composed 'The Prince' which was essentially a 'job application' intended to win back the favour of the Medici. It took a radical departure from medieval idealism, focusing instead on political realism (realpolitik). Machiavelli argued that for a ruler to maintain state stability, they must be prepared to act immorally if the specific situation demands it. By strictly separating ethics from governance, he challenged the long-held notion that a successful leader must always be a 'good man' in the religious sense. Today, Machiavelli is regarded as the father of modern political science, for his cold-eyed, unsentimental analysis. In the dedication of his work, Machiavelli declares that he has nothing of value greater than this study which contains knowledge of the actions of great men, acquired by long experience in contemporary affairs and a continual study of antiquity.

The book starts with the definition of a principality, how many types there are, how they can be acquired, how they can be kept and why they are lost. Military is not everything. Although one may be very strong in armed forces, yet in entering a province, one has need of the goodwill of the natives. If the conquered province differs in language or customs or laws, it is better the prince stays in the province and tame the people with moderation. The prince should make himself the head and defender of his less-powerful neighbours and try to weaken the more powerful amongst them. War is not to be avoided and is only deferred to one's own disadvantage. Machiavelli gives the example of Louis XII losing his possessions in Italy by contravening his principles of statecraft.

Democracy in any form was unheard of in Italy at that time. Machiavelli introduces two types of monarchic states. The first one is in which the prince is assisted by his servants functioning as ministers whom he assigns to various provinces and the other is in which the prince is assisted by barons with provincial roots who are not amenable to transfer to any other place. The empire of the Turks was of the former variety which makes it difficult to conquer, but is easy to hold once it is gained. Similar was the empire of Darius which Alexander conquered. The author identifies fortune and goodwill as two unstable things on which a prince must not count on too much. The insults or losses suffered by the nobles is a prickly issue and it is not easy to get past old wrongs. He warns the prince that one who believes that new benefits will cause great personages to forget old injuries is deceived. Unethical injunctions appear at this point. If a prince assumes power by wicked means, but if it was applied at one blow and was necessary to one's security and that are not persisted afterwards, people forget and forgive such men. Injuries ought to be inflicted all at once while benefits are to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer. When people receive goodness from a prince of whom they were expecting evil, they are bound more closely to their benefactor. Machiavelli is under no delusion about the potential of violence. The chief foundations of all states are good laws and good arms. There cannot be good laws when the state is not well-armed. He reiterates that where they are well-armed, they have good laws. The prince should be wary of mercenary troops, as they are ambitious and unfaithful. In peacetime, they rob the state. They are valiant before friends, but cowardly before enemies.

A good portion of the treatise is dedicated to advise on how the prince should handle war and should appear to the people. A prince ought to have no other thought than war and its rules and discipline, for this is the sole art that upholds his position. A prince who does not understand it cannot be respected by his soldiers. He should exercise it either by action or by study. Sometimes, if a prince follows virtue, it would lead to his ruin and if he follows vice, that would bring him security and prosperity. A prince should appear liberal and liberality should be expressed in a way to bring reputation for it. If his liberality becomes excessive, he'd have to raise taxes and he will be reproached for this. If he is able to engage in enterprises without burdening the people, they will overlook even if he is mean. As far as possible, the money he spends for liberality should not be his or his subjects', but of somebody else’s - like pillage. A prince who keeps his subjects united and loyal need not mind the reproach of cruelty. It is better than one showing too much mercy and cause disorders to arise. It is much safer for a prince to be feared than loved. Generally, people are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly and covetous, and they have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared. A prince should keep his hands off the property of his subjects because men are more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. He should avoid being hated.

As Machiavelli believes, the job of a dynamic prince is the ever-continuing persuasion of the subjects to hold him in high esteem even though he may be paying only lip-service to his principles. He proposes a detailed recipe for the prince to remain deceitful. He claims that the populace is in general bad, and will not keep faith with the prince. This makes it justifiable for the prince not to keep faith with them. But he should disguise this behaviour and appear good, thereby being a great pretender and dissembler. The prince should appear to be merciful, faithful, humane, upright and most important of all, religious. His underlying reason for this duplicity is that everyone sees what you appear to be, but few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose you against the opinion of the many. A wise prince should craftily foster some animosity against himself so that having crushed it, his renown may rise higher. The prince ought to keep wise men as advisors and to give them the liberty of speaking the truth to him, but only of those things of which he enquires. If everybody starts speaking the truth, respect for the prince abates. The vulnerability of the people should be exploited, as suggested by the Italian Kautilya. If the prince had inflicted some injury on people and if those injured are poor and scattered, they cannot and will not strike back.

The translation of the book from Italian is done by W.K. Marriott, who has done a clean job by sticking to the original archaic style as far as possible. In fact, he does it a little too well in that the focus is on producing an exact, literal rendering of the original, rather than a paraphrased version more adapted to modern notions of style, expression and narrative. In order to appreciate all of Machiavelli's points and rhetoric, the reader needs to have a good knowledge of the classics and medieval Italian history when Popes had sons and they interfered in secular authority with a fervour that was in no way inspired by the divine. As is expected, gender equality was not a concern for this medieval text. Machiavelli compares fortune to a woman the prince courts. If he wishes to keep her subservient, it was necessary to beat and ill-treat her! And, she is said to be a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent and with more audacity command her.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Life and Times of George Fernandes

Title: The Life and Times of George Fernandes
Author: Rahul Ramagundam
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2022 (First)
ISBN: 9780670092888
Pages: 533

When a lean, bespectacled trade union leader named George Mathew Isadore Fernandes followed Atal Behari Vajpayee to take the oath of office as the defence minister of India in the BJP-led government in 1998, it was the most incongruous moment for a lot of people who believed that steadfastness to an ideal is the hallmark of a politician. A firebrand organiser of workers who was in the forefront of several militant labour strikes found himself cloistered in a supposedly right-wing outfit. What caused this ‘revolutionary’ shift in his political stand? This question was a burning issue then and is still relevant today when the question of choosing the lesser evil props up in the political domain. This book gathers a comprehensive picture of India over the 80 years when George Fernandes played out his legacy. It is also interwoven with the history of the socialist movement which collapsed to irrelevance from a very promising start. The author claims that this book is the first study that goes into the microscopic details of George Fernandes' complex life and times. It was the shackled photo of him during the Emergency that prompted the author to write a book on him. Rahul Ramagundam is a professor of history at a Delhi-based university. His books are political in nature.

George Fernandes was born in 1930 at Mangalore to Konkani parents. He had a traditional religious upbringing and was enrolled in a seminary at Bengaluru to become a priest. However, the rebel in him was always alert to injustice and he had a tough time with the administrators of the seminary. He left it soon and became attracted to socialist ideals. He went to Mumbai in search of employment as most youths were doing at that time. There he was caught up in the trade union movement and rose quickly in its ranks due to his fiery speeches and bubbly enthusiasm. Aggression, commitment and dedication were the staples on which he built one success after another in the labour union movement. In 1958, he announced a 'Bombay Bandh' for a day which brought the bustling city to a standstill, which was the first of its kind in history and was called in solidarity with striking workers at the Padmini Automobiles. In his work extending to two decades, he organised port and dock workers, municipal employees, hotel and restaurant workers. While at the forefront of striking workers, it can't be denied that he was desirous of accepting positions of power. Fernandes was elected to the Bombay city corporation for the first time in 1961. On the first day when the house commenced, he protested, asking to conduct the proceedings in Marathi. He didn't obey the chair and was forcefully evicted. He was made prominent on the national scene by organising a strike by the railwaymen that eventually failed and initiated his downfall among workers. But it did some lasting changes in the movement also. Ramagundam observes that trade unionism drifted away from the pioneering adventurism by the 1980s. They had become service agencies of political parties and turned organised-labour-centric in outlook. They moved far away from the predicament of unorganised workers. As an example, he notes that the organised workers demanded uniforms made of fashionable terry cloth, without thinking about its impact on the handloom sector, which provided livelihood to millions in the unorganised sector. Their leadership went to lawyers who knew labour laws well with no comprehensive or integrated view of the society.

This book gives as much emphasis in bringing out the politician in Fernandes as in introducing the labour activist. He was really interested in politics and in assuming positions of power. He became the union minister for very important portfolios in 1977 (Desai), 1989 (V.P. Singh) and 1999, 2004 (Vajpayee) cabinets. Even when he was an MP, he listened to tales of injustice from the general populace and acted upon them. His combative instinct, spontaneous repartee, ready wit and confidence made him stand out. He was seen as one who took up cases of injustice whenever and wherever they occurred. He was on the mailing list of all civil rights activists. He was first elected to the Lok Sabha in 1967, but miserably lost in 1971 in the same constituency of Bombay South. In this election, he opposed the alliance with Jan Sangh. Also, this was the year when Indira's pro-left policies such as bank nationalization and rescission of privy purses had gained much traction among voters. He opposed the Emergency and planned subversive activities to destabilize the Indira regime. He was arrested and put in jail in shackles. He contested elections from jail, was elected and appointed as a cabinet minister. However, in a short span of three years since arriving triumphantly from Tihar jail, Fernandes found himself ‘dented, deserted and diminished’. His long years in the wilderness had begun. He was a source of great strength in troubleshooting the inter-party rivalries in Vajpayee ministry though he brought in a devastating scandal in the Tehelka episode. The author estimates that Fernandes did not have much electoral strength, but carried political weight. He was successful in bargaining for a position of advantage within the BJP-led NDA on the basis of his sheer stature. He extracted the price for his support and got it.

George Fernandes was not a stranger to jail. He was incarcerated in the trade union days as well as during the Emergencies. He was jailed in 1963 for eight months when Nehru imposed Emergency in the wake of Chinese invasion. He had invoked this draconian measure after the war was over. Police beat him up in 1970 when he led a demonstration of Adivasis in Delhi, though he was an MP then. He suffered a traumatic head injury and this might have contributed to the development of Alzheimer's Disease in his old age, which robbed him of memories. He was again captured in 1976 after living underground for many months during Indira's Emergency. He was caught in connection with the Baroda dynamite case. The motivation for writing this book is claimed to be a photo of Fernandes being taken to court in shackles after this capture. Several chapters describe his underground activities and resistance measures. He strangely had trusting liaison with several women who not always returned the trust. He was tortured in prison and two of his brothers who had no political background were also arrested and tortured. 

The most audacious episode in Fernandes' life is, expectedly, the railway strike he engineered in 1974. After the oil shock, inflation was very high and all categories of workers were suffering badly. The railwaymen demanded larger bonus and pay and became restive. Looking back with hindsight, it seems that it was not prudent to challenge the government which itself was reeling under so much international headwinds. Fernandes was militant and stepped up the rhetoric and issued open threats. He thundered that a 7-days' strike of railwaymen will cause every thermal power station to close down; A 10-days' strike would close down every steel plant that would take a year to restart; and finally, a 15-day strike would make India starve. The government prevaricated in negotiations before the strike. A meeting was cancelled at the last minute when a deputy minister's father died and he had to go to his village in Kashmir for the last rites and no alternate negotiator was arranged. Fernandes was arrested a week prior to the strike. The public opposed the strike as the railwaymen were the best organized lot in the country and enjoyed far better pay and privileges than the great majority of the population. The government did not cave in, as it was prepared to suffer the consequences and teach the striking workers a harsh lesson. The workers gave in and unconditionally withdrew the strike after 20 days. The effects of this fiasco was long-lasting. It undid the working class movement in India for a long time. The miserable failure of the strike undermined Fernandes' position in the labour movement. A week after the strike was called off, and workers were beginning to feel the pinch of the government's punitive measures, their wives surrounded Fernandes and tore his clothes, demanding restoration of wages to keep them going. AIRF, his own union of railwaymen, ejected him from its presidency. The workers shouted slogans against him. A decade later, when he became railway minister in the V.P. Singh cabinet he tried to get even by derecognising the union, but they fought back and the attempt was foiled keeping the rancour permanent.

The book is written in a fine style and nice selection of words and phrases. Ramagundam's command over the language is very impressive. Even though the book is rather big, the lilting narrative carries the readers pleasantly through the ups and downs of the protagonist's career. He had an unhappy married life and the strife is clearly visible through page after page. He once said that the day he got married was the last day he ever smiled. His powerful language is sampled in the text, and his repartee to Indira Gandhi is truly famous: "All dictators are congenital liars, but you madam, excel them all". While glimpsing on the early life of Fernandes in Mangalore, the author is particularly harsh on the Christian clergy and their faith as practised in the western coast of India and its undue preference for conversion.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star