If This is a Man and human suffering

Can we write about human suffering in a way that does not reduce it to the poverty of an indulgence? Do words exist with a tensile strength that can hold the pain of one soul, let alone six million souls? Does the creative imagination have the nerve to view the open wounds of another human being? Or is silence the only response before the charnel house of human misery? Is not our every inadequate attempt to say something meaningful, an insult to those who suffer?

Over the summer, I read Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and The Truce. They are witness statements to the industrial genocide of the Nazi Holocaust. Levi, an Italian-Jew and chemist, was arrested on 13 December 1943 for being a member of the anti-fascist resistance movement “Justice and Liberty”. On 21 February 1944, he and 124 people were transported to Auschwitz. On his arrival, his arm was tattooed with the number 174517. When the camp was liberated at the beginning of 1945, only Levi and two others from this group had survived the hell of this concentration camp.

These books have, in the words of Philip Roth, a “moral stamina” and it is this which charges them with the creative daring to describe the horrors of the death camps. Levi trains his attention on the molecular makeup of each sadistic act of degradation and, ever the chemist, distils this violence through a prose so precise and diamond cut that it produces a purifying quality. His language exhibits none of the splintered rhetoric of pathos or revenge. This is prose cleansed of exaggeration and literary effect. With the care of a laboratory technician, Levi handles his words, potentially volatile words, with such reverence that they would, as he put it, “assume the calm, sober language of the witness”

In Levi’s writing, the evil of the Shoah is revealed in its proper moral context as the absence of good. For Levi, his experience of Auschwitz is primarily a moral one. There he witnessed man in his most demoralised state, where people freely chose to mutilate their moral natures by butchering their goodness so that they could perpetrate acts of barbarism. But Auschwitz was also the place where Levi saw how when man is stripped of every physical and emotional dignity, he still retains his moral grandeur, his personhood, because that cannot be taken from him by violence or force. Primo Levi could never have become a number. The soul of man rebels against that violence which aims to violate the truth of the human person and in doing so, what is true and good about man asserts itself with greater urgency. Levi writes:

...after only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness completely disappeared in me. I wander aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly see Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude torso, scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) but great energy. Steinlauf sees me and greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why I do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I please someone more? Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a shorter time because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and warmth...We will all die, we are all about to die...Steinlauf interrupts me. He has finished washing and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket which he was holding before wrapped up between his knees and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he administers me a complete lesson...This was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization...We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.

Primo Levi was well versed in the periodic table of the material world. But he also came to an understanding that there exists a periodic table of the moral world. Here, elemental virtues, essential to the makeup of man, are to be discovered and even when man is most debased, these cannot be destroyed. The man of sorrows remains a man. We are made to be moral beings and living as such we find in our suffering a redemptive power.

Philip Roth has described If This is a Man and The Truce as “one of the century’s truly necessary books”. It is. This is a book that moved me to tears but it also fired my conviction that we can and must write about suffering, that this is an imperative if we are to continue to believe in a moral universe.

If This is a Man and The Truce, Primo Levi, Penguin Books, 1979

On true feeling: Lucian Freud and Anton Chekhov

On the 28 November 2003 at 6.30 pm, the art critic, Martin Gayford, sat in a low leather chair and fixed a pose. He would hold this same pose at dozens of sittings over the next seven months. He had agreed to have his portrait painted by the great figurative painter, Lucian Freud (1922-2011).

Gayford kept a diary of the sittings, reflecting on the long gestation period of the painting and his deepening relationship with the artist. The intense experience of being an object of Freud’s penetrating gaze is told in a beautifully illustrated book, Man with a Blue Scarf:On sitting for a portrait with Lucian Freud.

Gayford’s vivid account is a reminder that all great art sets out to achieve just one, difficult thing: to map the ridges and contours of the human condition in as accurate a fashion as the imagination will allow. To achieve this, the artist refuses to subdue our complexities and ambiguities into a cliché or formulaic style. Abjuring sentimentality or rhetorical flourishes, serious art reveals the grandeur of the human person with a crystalline clarity.

By paying close attention to the atomic makeup of our humanity, the artist serves to increase our stature. The artist hones in on a previously ill defined aspect of our humanity and, through the lens of his imagination, brings it into focus by a true, rather than counterfeit light. An oblique, unspoken knowledge of what makes us human is thus expressed, given form and definition, and provokes in us a sense of recognition and wonder. Then, we are ready to confess, behold the man.

When we encounter art that possesses this quality of imagination, the cataracts of delusion and narcissism that distort our vision are momentarily mended. We catch, some entirely surprising, potentially transformative, truth about what it is to be human. For me, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, T.S.Eliot,among others, possess this fierce, irresistible power.

Every detail, every fastidious worm and gob of oil paint, in a Freud painting exists to guard his work from artifice and rhetorical filigree. He, like his friend, the artist, Francis Bacon, was interested only in “the brutality of fact”. Gayford writes:

LF (Lucian Freud) leans forward sometimes, shading his eyes like a sailor in search of land. His demeanour when painting is that of an explorer or hunter in some dark forest. He peers at me, holding his palette in his hand, with the brushes he is not using held between his little finger and the next, protruding like arrows in a quiver. His attitude is a combination of audacity with caution: an intense determination to get the thing exactly right.

Most human beings do not possess this determination. We are prone to live slapdash, bodge-job lives, to accept the superficial, the makeshift and prefabricated over the discipline and effort of getting the thing exactly right.

Great artists do not live in this way. They possess a highly developed self-critical awareness. They do not bear false witness. Their faith is that there is a truth to be discovered about the human person and creation. It is their vocation to look very, very hard for this truth. Their gaze is simultaneously interrogative and contemplative.

A familiar criticism of the artist is that they are fleeing reality by an aesthetic route into some arty la-la land that is divorced from reality. Freud’s work challenged that criticism. He abhorred false feeling and superficial representations of reality. His lifetime’s project was to make reality present to us through the faculty of the imagination – to see ourselves and things as they really are. Discussing his dislike of drug use with Gayford, Freud articulates this central, motivating belief:

People say such things as, “Oh, they make me see such marvellous colours”- which to my mind is a horrible idea. I don’t want to see marvellous colours. I want to see the same colours,and that is hard enough. Then they say that they are taken out of this world, but I don’t want to be out of this world, I want to be absolutely in it,all of the time.

After I had finished reading Man with a Blue Scarf, I immediately picked up a collection of Anton Chekhov short stories. I read The Lady with the Little Dog(1899),one of his finest stories. It exhibits the same qualities of honesty and true feeling that I would argue all great art must have. I want to end this post in a tangential way with a quotation from this story,one which requires no comment but is, I think, complete in itself and a good example of true feeling. In my view, Chekhov and Lucian Freud inhabit the same aesthetic order.

The Lady with the Little Dog concerns a serial adulterer, Dmitry Gurov, who treats women as his “inferior breed” – there simply to pander to his emotional and sexual needs. He sets his predatory sights on the newest woman in town, Anna Sergeyevna,and begins an affair with her. With time, however, this casual liaison turns into something more substantial. Gurov begins to fall in love with Anna and she with him. In a remarkable paragraph,alive with insight and psychological truth, Chekov writes:

He (Gurov) was leading a double life:one was undisguised, plain for all to see and known to everyone who needed to know, full of conventional truths and conventional deception, identical to the lives of his friends and acquaintances;and another which went on in secret. And by some strange, possibly fortuitous chain of circumstances, everything that was important, interesting and necessary for him, where he behaved sincerely and did not deceive himself and which was the very essence of his life – that was conducted in absolute secrecy; whereas all that was false about him, the front behind which he hid in order to conceal the truth – for instance, his work at the bank, those quarrelsat the club, his notion of an “inferior breed”, his attending anniversary celebrations with his wife – that was plain for all to see. And he judged others by himself, disbelieving what he saw, invariably assuming that everyone’s true, most interesting life was carried on under the cloak of secrecy, under the cover of night,as it were. The private, personal life of everyone is grounded in secrecy and this perhaps partly explains why civilized man fusses so neurotically over having this personal secrecy respected.

Man with a Blue Scarf:on sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud, Martin Gayford, Thames & Hudson, 2010

The Lady with the Little Dog in The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904,Anton Chekhov, trans. Ronald Wilks, Penguin Books

Posh, toffs and the class system

Almost everyone goes to university these days. We all eat hummus and have sun tans. We are a nation of homeowners. We live in a meritocracy. If you get on your bike, you can make it. Even young royalty wear baseball caps and mimic street patois. We’re all middle class and if we’re not, then we’re chavs, members of a Yahoo, pariah underclass. Class is a thing of the past - it’s a glass of Chardonnay in front of Downtown Abbey on a Sunday night, rather than a recognisable reality. But is this, in fact, correct? Has class become the thing that dare not speak its name?

Laura Wade’s play, Posh, suggests that class – far from being extinct - has been forced to go underground or has acquired a politically correct face. The upper class still believe that they are entitled (by birth) to positions of economic and social superiority. They continue to operate through intricate networks of public schools, universities and dining clubs. The masonic rituals of privilege and preferment protect the upper class from the worries and struggles of the majority.

A private room in a gastro pub in the back end of the Oxfordshire countryside is the setting for Wade’s play. Here, the Riot Club, a gang of nine young toffs and their feckless president, gather for a meal. These people hold one thing in common: they have rich, old money parents and they believe that this economic fact gives them the liberty to trash each other and their surroundings in a night of destructive debauchery and violence. The members of The Riot Club are bound together by an allegiance to their birthright superiority and their barely-concealed contempt of the middle classes who by sheer force of numbers have eroded their aristocratic power base.

As the Riot Club members get bladdered on fine wines, their supposed good-breeding and patrician manners disappear and we are exposed to their venal, bigoted and finally, violent natures. The most vituperative Riot Club member, Alistair Ryle, rails against the levelling forces at work in contemporary Britain. Small businessmen, like the pub landlord “thinks he can have anything if he works hard enough...thinks his daughter’s getting a useful education at Crapsville College...thinking they’re cultured cause they read a big newspaper and eat asparagus and pretend not to be racist...I am sick to f***ing death of poor people.”

Posh is savagely funny, thought provoking and entertaining. Wade’s characters are so deftly drawn that one never feels she is indulging in crude agitprop or cheap pops at Lord Snootys. Although they may be dressed in flashy waistcoats, her characters and their ugly attitudes are disturbingly recognizable. Their preoccupation with wealth, sex and status is not so different to the characters in The Only Way is Essex. The political difference, Wade contends, is that her characters have power and influence and look like David Cameron. Discuss.

Posh by Laura Wade is on at the Duke of York's theatre, London

The Raid: the cult film of 2012

All the familiar motifs of the gangland thriller are apparent in The Raid: bent cops, badass thugs, a sadistic gangland boss, a sleazy urban background (in this case Jakarta in Indonesia) and a good, handsome cop who is going to do some serious kickboxing damage. The Welsh director, Gareth Evans, marries Indonesian pencack silat martial arts with Western genre conventions, referencing most obviously John Carpenter’s influential movie, Assault on Precinct 13. The Raid could have been a culturally muddled, clichéd mess. Instead it is a breathless, butt-kicking, pulse-pounding, skull-smashing two hours thrill ride like no other.

The action takes place in an architecturally brutal, decaying fifteen storey tenement. The top floor is occupied by a megalomaniac gangland boss, Tama, with the lower floors run by his thuggish minions. This block of flats is not a good advertisement for the utopian visions of high-rised, communal living.

A swat team, largely made up of rookie, inexperienced cops, arrives to clear the building floor by floor. When Tama gets wind of their presence, he orders a lockdown, sending in his own heavies and the building’s tenants to fight off this “infestation”. But it becomes clear that corrupt police and venal politicians also have a vested interest in maintaining these gangs. “We don’t kill cops, we buy them,” Tama points out.

At this point, the story takes flight into a kick ass orgy but one that is executed with real imagination and sly wit. The action is relentless - one bone-crunching set piece hurtling into the next, every sweaty scene building into fresh crescendos of carnage. The audience is grabbed by the lapels and thrown around by each increasingly outrageous fight scene. Evans’ kinetic editing and edgy, unpredictable camera work masterfully controls the material so that it does not slip into slapstick mayhem or macho camp. Every scene, every death blow is perfectly choreographed for a cathartic release and adrenalin rush. The audience audibly winces and groans with every decapitation and body blow. In Evans’ hands, the logarithms of violence become attitudes of elegance.

No one will remember The Raid for the character development or narrative subtleties or fizzing dialogue. They won’t remember The Raid for these things because they don’t exist. The Raid is not a sophisticated film which prevents it from being a great film. But what you will remember this film for are set pieces of such physical dynamism and visceral artistry that you are left breathless. The Raid is a lean, mean, muscular fighting machine without an ounce of visual fat.

The Raid is quickly turning into a word of mouth cult film. It will be interesting to see if Gareth Evans can now move from the periphery of film making and establish a more mainstream position without losing those qualities that make The Raid such vivid and riveting entertainment. If he does, then the action movie has a future.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

I am trying to work out if my friend is an extrovert or an introvert. According to Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking: “We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal – the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favours quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups.”

My friend is ticking all the extrovert boxes. Yet, he assures me that he is, in fact, an introvert. He has done the Myers-Briggs personality test twice and on both occasions he was confirmed as an introvert. “It’s not about the outward persona you put on, but where you get your emotional energy from,” he tells me. I’m sceptical. So what is he? An extrovert or an introvert? What, for that matter, am I?

Susan Cain’s thesis is that we are living in an increasingly narcissistic, look-at-me, look-at-what-I- am doing-and-thinking world as exemplified by Facebook (and blogs!). If you hate networking and speaking in public then you are destined to be ignored by an attention deficit world. The introvert is marginalised and regarded as a psychological pariah. Cain maintains that over the past century in the United States there has been a move from the “culture of character” to the “culture of personality”, where people are admired less for the virtues they embody than for the superficial decoration that manages to get them noticed. In such a culture even Jesus is imagined by some evangelical believers to be the model of extroversion. “We’ve turned it (Extroversion) into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform,” she writes.

It is presently the survival of the loudest and the slickest that dominates our attention. The introvert is overlooked and their considerable talents are wasted in the process. Introverts “tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive...They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions – sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy and fear.” Rosa Parks, Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Steve Wozniak and JK Rowling have all described themselves as introvert, at best when they are solitary.

Cain amasses statistics, research data and neuro-physiological studies to support her thesis. But what becomes clear is that all this information and anecdotal evidence makes the case for there not being any convincing division between extroversion and introversion – in fact, there is no consensus as to what they actually are and if they exist. Cain wants us to believe that extroversion/introversion are binary divisions on a par with male/female, alive/dead. They are not.

Cain stretches her argument so far that it begins to undermine her thesis. It’s hard to believe that every introvert is a would-be Marcel Proust or Albert Einstein or that every extrovert is a loudmouth, chest thumping cretin.

There are important insights in Quiet, but they are devalued by Cain’s dualistic tendency to read everything in terms of the categories of extroversion or introversion. Do attention seekers exist? Yes. Are they boring? Oh, yes. Are there people who are tongue-tied nerds? Yes and yes, they are boring. But, thankfully, most people are more complex, subtle, mutable and interesting than this. Cain ignores this fact because it does not fit her thesis.

So, is my friend an extrovert or an introvert? After reading Quiet, Cain has unwittingly persuaded me that I’m asking the wrong question.



Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain, Viking 2012

Misterman and religious psychopathology

The mental labyrinth of religious psychopathology makes for an unsettling night in the theatre. Using the device of a dramatic monologue, Enda Walsh’s latest play, Misterman, draws the audience into the disturbed mind of Thomas Magill, played with fierce physical and emotional conviction by Cillian Murphy.

Thomas acts out the events that take place during a single day in the life of his hometown of Inishfree, a place twinned in his mind with Sodom and Gomorrah. He believes his divinely ordained mission is to expose the sinful behaviour of the town’s inhabitants and bring them to their knees in an act of communal penance.

On first evidence, Thomas appears to be a young man buzzing with energetic, evangelical zeal. With a breezy desire to do God’s will, he would make a prize catch for many a vocations director. But as his story unfolds, disturbing theological attitudes leak out and clues about his personality begin to emerge. The intensity of his religious experience and the conviction that he is surrounded by human filth and depravity begin to sound menacing notes. The sins of the pelvic region become the especial focus of his disgust.

Thomas’s story is gripping, but it is one that intends to grip you by the throat and squeeze the life out of you. His final, chilling revelation does just that.

Cillian Murphy plays Thomas and all the characters of Inishfree against the setting of a disused warehouse of sputtering neon strips and loose wires. Scattered among the junk and debris are Krapp’s last tape machines - huge spools of sound effects (a dog barking, a door closing) and the voice of Thomas’s beloved “mammy” mithering him for jammy dodger biscuits. Thomas venerates his mammy, although it is a veneration infected with the tapeworm of resentment. The dilapidated, multi levelled set is a perfectly imagined visual metaphor for Thomas’s collapsing, disconnected mind and a life being played out in an infernal loop of feverish missionary activity.

Thomas’s language has a biblical vitality and poetry. His talk oscillates between lofty visions of the transcendent and an unforgiving view of the weaknesses of the human flesh. Theologically, he seesaws between grace and the cataclysmic effects of Original sin, between heaven and hell. There is no middle, theologically nuanced way. He is John Calvin with an Irish accent.

Into this distorted metaphysical world view, steps an angel. The beautiful Adele. She cuts through Thomas’s dualistic interpretation of life and appears to offer him the hope of gentleness and love. Cillian Murphy makes real Thomas’s desperate longing for this hope. It is this desperation that proves his tragic undoing. In Cillian Murphy’s sensitive hands, Thomas never becomes a caricature of the “religious nut,” but is a soul damaged by his past and circumstances, a man seeking healing and certainty in religious belief.

Misterman is a sobering reminder of how our personalities are bound up with particular expressions of religious belief. These can take the form of a psychological reaction to, aversion of and flight from experiences that we have found personally disturbing, painful or challenging.

Religious belief can contain these experiences in an interpretative framework. On the one hand, this can contribute to the development of a healthy, mature understanding of our personal relationship with the God who is love and of his relationship to us. However, there is always a danger that, when cut loose from love, religious belief can become severe and fearsome, a hell where, whether we recognise it or not, the fallen angels of self-loathing and hatred of others reign.

God's Jury: the Inquisition and the making of the modern world

"We know you're wishing that we'd go away,
But the Inquisition's here and it's here to stay."

Mel Brooks, History of the World: Part 1, 1981

On Holy Saturday, the headline in The Irish Examiner was “Nobody expected the return of the Inquisition”. The article concerned the recent investigation of writings by Fr Tony Flannery, a Redemptorist priest, by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Others will express their views about this particular case, but I am interested in how the shorthand use of the historical term “the Inquisition” retains the power to stir up in the cultural imagination ideas of surveillance, intolerance, interrogation, censorship, torture, murder, injustice or just Monty Python. Why is this?

Cullen Murphy, the editor of Vanity Fair, tackles this question in his latest book, God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World. He argues that “the Inquisition” remains such a potent, terrifying concept because the mind-set (what he calls “the Inquisitorial impulse”) and the bureaucratic machinery of the Inquisition were inherited by the modern, secular world. They would appear again in Stalin’s Russia, in the totalitarian juntas of Latin America and, following 9/11, in the dubious interrogation practices (such as “waterboarding”) and unlimited detention used in Guantánamo Bay. “The Inquisition” remains stubbornly alive in religious and secular circles, he suggests, because it continues to provide a practical arsenal for those who exercise any form of authority.

Cullen reminds the reader that there was no such thing as “the Inquisition,” an organized event with a singular purpose and that, in fact, over a period of some seven hundred years, there were a number of inquisitions each with distinctive features, goals and exhibiting different degrees of efficiency and severity.

In 1998, Pope John Paul II opened the so-called Archivio Segreto which houses a significant store of the Vatican’s records of the Inquisition. At the time, the opening of the Archivio was marked by two academic congresses of Inquisition scholars and, with access to new source material, renewed academic interest in the Inquisition has flourished. Two years later, from the altar of St Peter’s Basilica, an ailing Pope John Paul II made a sweeping apology for the sins of the past, including the Inquisition. The Pope pleaded for a future that would not repeat the mistakes or abusive practices of the past. “Never again,” he said.

Cullen Murphy’s book provides an erudite, witty and stimulating guide to the Inquisition. Although, he weakens his argument, by tending to be overly suspicious of those in authority and by relativising Truth, so that all views appear to hold the same moral and rational weight. Nevertheless, God’s Jury is a useful primer to the Inquisition and makes thought-provoking parallels with contemporary attitudes, such as the burning of The Satanic Verses.



1231 marks the beginning of what is commonly known as the Medieval Inquisition when Pope Gregory IX appointed the first “inquisitors of heretical depravity”. The “heretical depravity” that was of most concern to the Church was Catharism which existed in pockets of southwestern France. Cathars were dualists (the oldest and most virulent form of heresy), believing that the created world (with its disease, famine, violence and suffering) had to have been created by the forces of darkness and that God only had a hand in the pure world of the spirit.

Next to nothing remains of Cathar documentary sources because they were destroyed along with leading figures in this theological movement. But what does remain are the detailed transcripts of interrogations, manuals and the development under Gratian of a code of canon law. Unlike previous forms of persecution, the Inquisition created an organized bureaucracy that formalized in law clear procedures to be enforced by an institutional power. With this administrative infrastructure, “questionable beliefs could be examined against codified standards,” Cullen Murphy contends, “Casual remarks could be sorted into pre-existing categories of nonconformity.” Bureaucracy was the novel and distinguishing feature of the Inquisition.

The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions lasted for some 350 years. Their main focus was the potential threat posed by conversos – people who had converted from Judaism to Christianity and who were suspected of “judaizing” – reverting to their Jewish faith. These conversos were not only seen as a danger to the Church but also to the power of the monarchy.

It was men like Tomás de Torquemada who were inspired by the task of rooting out heresy and “judaizing” influences. They were prepared to use excessive, sometimes, brutal practices in order to achieve this. “Full of pitiless zeal,” writes the historian Henry Charles Lea of Torquemada, “he developed the nascent institution with unwearied assiduity. Rigid and unbending, he would listen to no compromise of what he deemed to be his duty, and in his sphere he personified the union of the spiritual and temporal swords which was the ideal of all true churchmen.” Secret proceedings, accusations from unnamed sources; confessions extracted by torture; and defense lawyers unable to access crucial evidence became common features of the show trials that men like Torquemada conducted.

The Roman Inquisition was established in 1542, by Pope Paul III. It was this Inquisition that created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum – the Index of Forbidden Books. Attempts to control the spread of ideas that were considered harmful to the faith led to book burnings and extreme forms of censorship. And finally, there were the Inquisitions that took place in the New World, Asia and Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries which tailoured the principles of the European Inquisitions to meet the challenges of new cultural situations.

“Moral certainty ignites every inquisition and then feeds it with oxygen,” writes Cullen Murphy. This is not an argument for abandoning moral certainty and the quest for truth, but a reminder that such a quest must always be done with humility and a great reverence for others. Humility, Cullen Murphy reminds us, protects us from our baser natures and actions. Humility is a guard against triumphalism, orthodoxies rigidly construed and a sclerotic certitude that can maim, disfigure and do violence to other human beings. Humility saps the Inquisitorial impulse of its violent power and allows the truth to be spoken in love.

God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World, Cullen Murphy, Allen Lane, 2012