Dr Andrew Kania's commentary today is confronting. If Jesus Christ were alive today would we even recognise him, let alone treat him any differently? Andrew entitled his essay "Ecce Homo"* from those words in John's Gospel where the scourged Christ is presented to the mob. Dr Kania invites us to meditate on these words from Matthew's Gospel: "Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You who build the sepulchres of the prophets and decorate the tombs of the holy men, saying, 'We would never have joined in shedding the blood of the prophets, had we lived in our fathers' day'. So! Your own evidence tells against you! You are the sons of those who murdered the prophets! Very well then, finish off the work that your fathers began!" [Matthew 23: 29-32]

Notre Dame — heroine of Victor Hugo's novel…

Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (1831) finds itself too often translated into the English language with the incorrect and misleading title, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The central character of the novel is in fact not the novel's hunchback, nor Esmeralda, but instead the inanimate, but awe-inspiring Gothic Cathedral, which acts as the near constant backdrop for the entire novel. Notre Dame de Paris looks down on the city below, observing people in their reverie, in their joy, in their sorrow and in their depravity. Generations come and generations pass – but it is the Cathedral imperiously peering down through her enormous rosette stained-glass eye that survives the epochs, that survives the 'mere' life and death of a gypsy, or a cowardly cad, or a crazed archdeacon, or even an heroic hunchback.

Notre Dame de Paris is the heroine of the novel, for she alone survives; she is a symbol of a Truth carved into stone, a witness to a world of another reality — the sacred reaching out to the profane; a gigantic mute struggling to utter in sign language — "Asylum!".

In one major scene of the novel, Quasimodo, the disfigured bell-ringer of the Cathedral is unjustly sentenced to a public whipping. The day before, Quasimodo had been the toast of Paris, elected 'pope' for the day by a festive crowd — a reward for winning a contest based on ugliness. But now the crowd bays for Quasimodo to be harmed, to see the deaf man whince with pain. They have forgotten how they cheered for him yesterday, all they wish to see is his pain today. The crowd does not know why he is to be punished, but they do know that he will be, and that for them is what is most important.

Let Hugo paint the tragedy…

Lon Chaney as Quasimodo in the 1923 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame

"Suddenly, as the wheel revolved and offered him Quasimodo's mountainous back, Maître Pierrat raised his arm, the slender thongs hissed sharply through the air like a handful of serpents and came furiously down on the poor devil's shoulders. Quasimodo jumped where he kneltl, as if starting from sleep. He was beginning to understand. He twisted about in his bonds; a violent contraction of surprise and pain distorted the muscles of his face; but no complaint from him. He merely turned his head behind him, then swung it both right and left, like a bull stung on the flank by a horsefly. A second stroke followed the first, then a third, then another and another, and so on. The wheel did not cease from turning nor the blows from raining down. Soon the blood spurted, it could be seen running in innumerable rivulets down the hunchback's black shoulders, and the slender thongs spattered drops of it amongst the crowd as they swished through the air. (Hugo, 1978, p. 238)

A number of centuries after the historical time period of Quasimodo's agony, the French philosopher François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), would declare on being brought into Paris by carriage to the tumultuous applause of the crowd that, the same crowd would come tomorrow, but now joined by even greater numbers, to see him have his head cut off, if such became his reversal of fortune.

A stage for human enoblement also serves as the stage for inhumanity…

Paris, the city of lights, the city of fashion, romance, the city that gave the world the Sorbonne, poets, dramatists and novelists, has also quite willingly served as the stage for the public inhumanity of man. During the French Revolution, at the infamous Place de Grève, women, the elderly and children would be executed, while lunch-time crowds of women, children and elderly cheered, laughed, ate sweets, and enjoyed the decapitations. Macabre heroes would do the decapitating on one day, only to find themselves deserving to be decapitated at a later stage at the same Place, and the crowd would eagerly cheer the new scenario that was offered to them, as it had done the previous offering.

But why should Paris be singled out arbitrarily? The sanitized death of William Wallace in the Academy Award winning motion picture, Braveheart (1995), failed to capture what Matthew of Westminster, an onlooker at Wallace's execution in London in 1305, witnessed:

"He [William Wallace] was drawn [naked] through the streets of London, at the tails of horses, until he reached a gallows of unusual height … there he was suspended by a halter, but afterwards let down half-living; next his genitals were cut off and his bowels torn out and burnt in a fire; then, and not till then, his head was cut off and his trunk cut into four pieces". (Mackay, 1995, p. 265)

And from all accounts the crowd at Wallace's execution, cheered and enjoyed themselves. A couple of hundred years later, again in England, a young woman Margaret Clitherow (1556-1586), who refused to plead in the case brought against her regarding harbouring Catholic clergy in Elizabethan England, was sentenced to be laid out on a sharp rock, while a heavy door was placed on her, the weight taking fifteen minutes to expel her final breath. This execution took place, while Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare were writing 'civilized' words for 'civilized' audiences; perhaps at what could be described as the zenith of English Literature. The historian Stephen Greenblatt writes in his acclaimed biography on Shakespeare, Will in the World (2004), how the young and as yet unknown Bard, must have walked warily on London Bridge on his journey to greatness all the while greeted by ghoulish severed Catholic heads placed on the city gibbets as a warning to others.

The public lust for blood — has it been cured?

The days of public hangings and floggings are thankfully long gone from the great cities of the Western world, indicating that perhaps the disease that was once the public lust for blood has now been cured. We are far too sophisticated it seems to sentence hunchbacks to whippings and evidently too chic to pack picnic baskets and trot off with our children and find a place close enough to the gallows to watch a man or woman wriggle and writhe for life.

But as devoid as our city squares are from the block, and the scaffold, so too, millions upon millions of our citizens are all too ready to watch videos and movies depicting realistic violence, or play computer games simulating harm on others, be that harm, theft, murder or even rape. Perhaps the evolution of our societies, has not been one in which we have become more civilized, but a case that our desire to see and inflict pain on others, has been legally taken from us in the form of a public and 'real' spectacle, leaving us now only with 'second-class' options from which to seek some perverse form of satiety for our blood-lust.

Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), in an act of ethnic self-abnegation, has told us regarding such forms of violent entertainment, that it is symptomatic of a far deeper problem: "A people that goes to bullfights for its recreation and finds pleasure and variety in this primitive spectacle — from the standpoint of mentality this people is already judged". (Unamuno, 2000, p. 12)

If this be the case, that the blood-lust disease merely awaits adequate opportunity and environment to fester up in our societies, then we as a society are merely in remission; dressed in ermine, dressed in pearls, dressed in velvet — we are the truest of all noble savages — capable of texting and e-mailing in one instance, and of staging a riot in the next. Perhaps this is one of the explanations behind the rapid rise of Hitler's Germany, that the Nazi regime did nothing greater than tap into what was latent in the human psyche, and gave it a new life; a warped life, such as Shelley's Frankenstein, a life where neighbour accused neighbour, race persecuted race, where those we once called friend, sought our lives, for no other concrete reason than that it felt good to have the power to do so.

We blind ourselves to think that Christ's crucifixion could not occur again in our 'advanced' and democratic societies. Christ's crucifixion occurs continually, again and again, whenever any innocent human being is made to suffer, whenever any prisoner of conscience is tortured and incarcerated; whenever any accused individual is not given a fair trial. As for those who witness such crucifixions, in essence few of the rabble in Jerusalem knew the intricacies of Christ's court case; in reality, most of the crowd, had something to be grateful to Christ for, a miracle here, a kind word there; but the crowd swelled, spurred on by the most base of desires, to see how a man, be that as it was a good man, the greatest man who ever lived, attempted to struggle to hold on to life — and then to see how he died.

If such a spectacle was on display in our era, if Christ the man had died in the 21st Century, then to paraphrase Voltaire, perhaps the only difference would be that the attendance at the crucifixion would have been far greater, because today we do have the television media, and we don't need to risk good propriety by having anyone see us in attendance in the crowd, as part of the crowd. Today we could just sit back and watch, feet-up, drink in hand, or if we didn't have the time, video-tape the event, or maybe even wait for the DVD to come out.

*The Latin phrase issued by Pontius Pilate as he presented the bound, scourged and tortured Christ to the mob, asking them what they wanted him to do. The most frequent translation is: "Behold the Man". (John 19: 5)

Image Credits:
The image sequence and sound bite used in the headline has been sourced from the trailer to Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ", Icon Films (2004): www.iconmovies.com.

©2008 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

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