Roasted on a gridiron for the sake of Green pseudo-conscience
It is an indictment of our society that, despite huge scientific advances in the last century, particularly in the production of food, millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, do not get enough to eat. The principal culprit is the Green movement, in its many species or fanaticisms. The Prince of Wales, who might be described as the most prominent Green man, has recently drawn attention to the destructive power of his ideology by attacking the growing of genetically modified crops, perhaps the largest step forward ever taken by mankind to reduce the cost of basic foodstuffs, and to increase their production and worldwide availability. I imagine if the Greens had lived in the 18th century they would have attacked the innovators who launched the agricultural revolution in England, which preceded the industrial one later in the century, and prevented mass starvation and chronic famine when the population rose sharply at the same time.
I can just see Green polemicists, for whom their blind faith is a substitute for genuine religion, going for Jethro Tull, author of HorseHoeing Husbandry, Thomas Coke and his sheep-shearings, Andrew Meikle, who introduced the threshing machine, Salmon of Woburn and his hay-tossing, and the clay drainage pipes of Thomas Scruggy (what splendid names they had in those days). It is the Greens, with their successful opposition to nuclear power plants in the 1960s, who are responsible for the devastating rise in the cost of fuel, and the Greens again, by bullying governments into giving subsidies for biofuels (the most inefficient way of producing power ever conceived), are responsible for the present food shortage. The rise in fuel and food prices has hit the very poorest groups all over the world. Undernourishment and starvation have followed. If the Greens get their way on their fantasy of man-made global warming, which will mean wrecking the most efficient industrial economies, then the consequences for the poor will be even more horrific. The Green road leads directly to a Malthusian catastrophe. On 10 August this year I witnessed a hailstorm in West Somerset. What price global warming? Actually, hail in August is a not uncommon English event. In 1816, ‘the year without a summer’, Byron was staying on Lake Geneva with, among others, the 18-year-old Mary Shelley. The torrential rain they witnessed, and the electric storm raging over the Alps across the lake, gave her the idea for her novel Frankenstein, the man-made monster galvanised into life by lightning. Byron used to say: ‘An English sum mer begins on 31 July and ends on 1 August.’ He added: ‘This year the Swiss have gone even further, and eliminated summer altogether.’ That date, 10 August, is oddly enough the feast day of St Lawrence, saint and martyr, best known for being done to death in AD 258 under the Roman Emperor Valerian, by being roasted alive on a gridiron. Lawrence was an interesting saint, very much a man of our times. The great problem, in the mid-third century AD, was poverty, especially in the big cities like Rome. Agriculture was very inefficient and old-fashioned — the kind the Greens approved of, in fact — because it was the official policy of the Roman government to resist innovation. The authorities did nothing about poverty, except to put on free gladiatorial shows and similar brutal amusements. The only large organisation which tried to distribute cheap or free food among the poor was the Christian church. Thanks to its origins in Judaism, it had inherited the old Jewish prototype of the welfare state, which embodied all the Corporal Virtues — caring for widows, visiting the sick, visiting the imprisoned, burying the dead, but above all feeding the poor. The ability of the Christian clergy to organise these charitable activities on a large scale, and to raise the money to pay for them, was one reason it spread rapidly in the third century, and at the end of it was poised to convert the Roman state.
Lawrence was a clever, energetic young man, spotted by Pope Sixtus II, who made him a deacon and put him in charge of the diaconate which ran the welfare activities. He was highly efficient in running soup kitchens and bread-distribution centres in the poorer districts of Rome, especially in the insulae or skyscraper slums, where hundreds of poor families were crowded together in multi-storey hovels, of the type built by Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s. He was also ingenious in raising the cash, and it would be interesting to know how he did it — Prudentius, our principal authority for his life, does not say. I suspect that much of it came from women — wives of wealthy merchants and landlords, rich widows and young women who sacrificed their dowries. Christianity advanced principally through its appeal to affluent women, as Jesus Christ was the first to spot. Lawrence’s activities both as friend of the poor and fundraiser, were noted by the Roman authorities, the first attracting their suspicions, the second their cupidity. Valerian needed cash urgently to pay his troops, and he instructed the Prefect of Rome to get it. He began a money-raising persecution of the Church, which began with the execution by beheading of Sixtus II. Then he arrested Lawrence, and demanded ‘the treasures of the Church’. According to Prudentius, Lawrence replied: ‘I will produce our treasures, but you must give me a little time to get them together.’ He was granted three days, and during this time he and his assistants assembled all the poor of Rome. Many of course were sick, on stretchers and crutches, and the sight of this immense assemblage of the destitute, desperate and diseased infuriated the Prefect when he arrived to collect the cash. ‘These are the treasures of the Church,’ said Lawrence, who appears to have specialised in a kind of saturnine humour most uncommon in those times. The Prefect swore by the Nine Gods that Lawrence would suffer for his insult to the Emperor. He said: ‘I will give you a soup kitchen fire all to yourself. I will protract your tortures, that your death will be the most bitter as it shall be slower. You shall die by degrees.’ So Lawrence was stripped, and bound with chains to a huge gridiron with red-hot coal under it. The Christians, dragged to watch his agony, said he appeared to be illuminated by an extraordinary light, and that his body broiled slowly to emit a sweet and agreeable smell. St Ambrose, in his account of the martyrdom, said he was protected from the intense pain by the fire of divine love which burned more fiercely within his breast than the embers which roasted his flesh. And his saturnine sense of humour burst out again: ‘Let my body now be turned,’ he said to the executives-in-chief, with a smile. ‘One side is broiled enough. And when the other is done too, you may eat.’ Shortly afterwards, he gave up the ghost. Several senators, who had come to watch him die, were converted to Christianity on the spot.
Prudentius said that this spectacular martyrdom was the death of idolatry in Rome, which now moved forwards inexorably to Christianity. The senators themselves carried the scorched body to the spot, outside the walls on the road to Tivoli, to be buried, on which the great basilica of St Lawrence now stands. There is no such saint these days to speak up for the poor and undernourished, and to give his life for their cause. The Greens, perhaps the most powerful lobby in the world today, are recruited entirely from the affluent middle classes, who can afford expensive ‘organic’ food, and who have never known what it is to be chronically hungry in their entire lives. St Lawrence was a godsend to the painters of the Renaissance and the Baroque. I wish there were a painter today able to show his martyrdom in a contemporary setting and point the moral.
Previous page
