AFTERTHOUGHT
JOHN WELLS
Canon Hugh Montefiore's suggestion last week that Christ may have been a homosexual seems to have caused only a slight flutter in the ecclesiastical hen loft. No one called for more faggots to be heaped about the heretic's feet, and the canon remained unfired. He was, it is true, made to feel the kiss of Peter Simple's satirical riding-crop—Christ was not only a homosexual, but also a lesbian lady novelist and a victim of Rhodesian fascism—but whatever excellent positive attitude may have been im- plicit in that attack, official Christian reaction, as voiced by the archbishop, was that dear Hugh Montefiore was being just a little bit naughty, because Christ was, after all, Perfect Man.
The popular image of Perfect God revealed in Perfect Man probably could do with a bit of sensitive cleaning. It remains that of a tall, good-looking, bearded person, always dressed in Persil-white if faintly exotic robes, but perfectly acceptable, like a well-scrubbed Paramount Chief at a Buckingham Palace garden party, at any decent Rotary Club lunch. He may, as we are told, have associated with prostitutes and sinners, but only in the way that the Queen associates with sailors when opening a new hostel in the docks, and His accent remains in the Church of England mind as the impeccable upper-middle-class English of the BBC Home Service.
But cleaning the picture does not necessarily mean that the craftsman should add false eyelashes or an exquisite touch of shocking pink to the lips. To see just how the icon has been distorted by this tasteful impromptu decoration it may be necessary to pursue the canon's line of speculation a little further. What if Christ was, for the sake of argument, a dwarf? Imperfect man, rolling on stunted legs through the evil-smelling alleys of Palestine, looking up at His disciples with His over- sized head cocked on one side, strutting about as He preached on eye level with the seated multitude? Those of less than average height, like the canon's homosexuals and Peter Simple's lesbian lady novelists, might be expected to draw a sudden draught of comfort and self- confidence from the revelation that the Founder of the Christian Church was after all one of them. Those of average height, on the other hand, might well find it more difficult to recog- nise the Godhead in that particular form.
Not that homosexuality, even in such a con- servative society as Peter Simple's Dailytele- graphland, could ever be seen as such a grave handicap as being physically deformed: but like the randy attachment to Mary Magdalene envisaged by another progressive theologian, quoted in Tuesday's Daily Mirror, it could only be regarded as a handicap spiritually. Any par- ticular sexual preference inevitably restricts the purity and general application of Divine Love. The symbolic figure of Christ, Love Incarnate, is ,delicately poised in the Gospels beyond any physical commitment, between the woman washing His feet and drying them with her hair, and the beloved disciple leaning ,on His
breast at the Last Supper. Beside this infinitely subtle poetry Canon Montefiore's prosaic speculations about the average marrying age for men in first century Palestine can seem only narrow and rather banal.
Attributing effeminate leanings to Jesus is anyway tantamount to suggesting, without any textual evidence to support it, that James Bond was secretly an Anglo-Catholic. All men, all women and all children being capable of love, just as they are all capable of greed and violence, the incarnation of love, like the incar- nation of greed and violence, must be pure and simple enough to contain all their aspirations.
It is for this reason that within the manifest limitations of the human frame Christ has been presented by Canon Montefiore's predecessors simply as perfect man, so devoted to the ful- filment of His spiritual mission that physical attachments were renounced in favour of that single ambition.
The canon's predecessors in the Christian tradition also realised the need of the homo- sexuals, dwarfs, and promiscuous hetero- sexuals in their congregations for acceptance by a God whose spiritual standards were based on absolute perfection. Whatever physical handicaps they might have which prevented them from attaining spiritual purity and peace beyond the imperfect hurly-burly of physical reality, these handicaps could hardly compare with those of having the hands and feet nailed to a piece of wood and an iron-tipped spear pushed in under the ribs. Contemplating this degradation, all the greater because of the pristine purity of the victim, the devout could once again identify absolutely with suffering so simple and universal that it united every kind and degree of human suffering in itself.
Having contemplated the. Perfect Life and the Perfect Death, the faithful could then muse on the Perfect After-Life. The post-resurrection Christ, having overcome death itself, repre- sented the final reassurance that the spiritual life paid off. A grace-assisted struggle r-gainst the pull of every homosexual or heterosexual attraction, against the limitations of physical disability, would be rewarded with an eternity of timeless bliss where all struggles ceased in the worship and contemplation of Perfect Love,
where there was no marrying or giving in marriage, and where all bodies, like that of Christ, were restored perfect and incorruptible. Everyone being of the same sex, like the angels, the homosexuals, too, would presumably be in their element, and at peace.
What leads me to try to teach the good canon to suck theological eggs is a considerable aesthetic concern at seeing a man, wearing the uniform of the Church and presumably being paid money to preserve its beneficial tradi- tions, wantonly monkeying with what is, at least, the most perfect work of art in the world. If his remarks had been made by some world- weary old poof in a flowered dhoti and a string of beads they would rightly have been dismissed as a bit of dull old blasphemous camp. Be- cause they come from a man in a clerical collar who occupies a relatively exalted position in the organisation, such daring quips, like dirty jokes over the cocoa, may be expected to enhance his reputation as a sensitive, socially conscious High Church progressive. If he can only appeal to his disciples by dressing up in cut-down vestments looted from the Church he is employed to preserve, would he not be better advised to set up on his own as an independent guru? Even on private means I suspect, the Guru Montefiore might have a fairly thin time.
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