Giles Fraser: Going for Brokenness

H. Morpurgo: Interview with Giles Fraser

It took a little over two hours to clear the tents from around St. Paul’s Cathedral in London one night at the end of February. By lunchtime the following day, behind tall metal fences, flagstones were being scoured with high-pressure hoses as “order” was finally restored. After four months, the London Occupiers may have been evicted, but according to former St. Paul’s canon chancellor Giles Fraser, “You cannot evict an idea.” Fraser resigned last October when St. Paul’s had, he feared, “chosen a path that might well issue in violence against peaceful protesters.”

The nationwide soul-searching triggered by the camp was, as elsewhere, about money, and about how meaningful political struggle might now work. But it was also, and from the start, about institutional religion and violence, a topic never far from Fraser’s mind. Amid all of the headlines and the excitement, there was a longer story about his resignation that went untold at the time.

Fraser’s willingness to intervene personally in such controversies may have been news, but it was not new. Before St. Paul’s he was the vicar of St Mary’s Putney—about five miles west along the river from central London. It was here that he welcomed Gene Robinson, the Bishop of New Hampshire and the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion, when Robinson was denied access to the church’s Lambeth Conference. If you turn up at St Mary’s Putney on a mid-week evening, you’ll find a café run by volunteers, an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and a local orchestra rehearsing. You’ll also find a permanent exhibition installed on the occasion of a meeting of politicians, historians, lawyers, and theologians held during Fraser’s time here to discuss the state of British democracy. That exhibition tells the story of the Putney Debates, which took place at St Mary’s in 1647. The Levellers, a group of radical pamphleteers (or freelance journalists), met here with Oliver Cromwell and other generals of the victorious New Model Army. They had already campaigned for the abolition of the big trading and professional monopolies. Now they presented Cromwell with An Agreement of the People, setting out a vision of universal adult male suffrage, religious tolerance and freedom of expression, and equality before the law. Sovereignty was to reside fundamentally in the people. The extent to which it did then, and does now, was the theme of the 2007 event.

Fraser is no stranger to the ways in which sacred place and radical politics can coincide and reinforce one another. If he is trendy this is trendiness with a seventeenth century pedigree—indeed, he would argue that it can be traced back at least seventeen centuries further than that. The same year of the 2007 meeting he collaborated with the literary critic Terry Eagleton on The Gospels (Verso), exploring them as revolutionary documents. Late this winter, before he returned to parish work in inner-city London, he was working with the editorial writer at the Guardian. We met outside a café around the corner from their offices on a raw February morning. At a table next to the thundering traffic, opposite the grimy brickwork of a mainline railway station, he smoked several cigarettes and talked Aquinas and Luther.

“A week before the Occupy thing started I preached at St. Paul’s about violence,” said Fraser. “I’m very exercised, and always have been, by the way the Church justifies violence to itself. My own background is Jewish—my grandfather was a rabbi in Liverpool. I do have a strong sense of the persecutor / persecuted—that dynamic. It’s there in [the French philosopher and Talmudic scholar] Emmanuel Levinas and others: for great Jewish thinkers of the late twentieth century, violence is the number one theme. That sermon is really about [the French anthropologist] René Girard. He argues that religions are sublimated forms of violence—and religion is a bad word for him. Scapegoating the one who’s different unites the community, and it’s the priest who sanctifies this, who launders society’s violence. For Girard, Jesus is the supremely anti-religious figure, because he sees the violent secret that binds people together. Above all he sees the role that religious professionals play in concealing and reinforcing it and that is why they hate him. Jesus is saying, in effect, ‘Those ones you’re telling to go home, those ones you’re pushing around, those ones you kill—they are me. That old person who natters on, the gay boy, the foreigner. The one who’s different.’ ”

For all his doubts about “religious professionals,” Fraser seems very much at home in the priestly role. His father was in the RAF, so he grew up on air bases: if something bluff, even martial, wore off on him, it has since found other employment. He does swear a lot but he listens and takes trouble to connect with you.

Fraser is drawn to thinkers riven with contradiction, as his Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge, 2002) testifies. His approach there, in very brief, was to drill down through Nietzsche the philosopher until he started finding Luther the church reformer. And about Luther he can speak with real warmth, even outdoors on the frostiest of mornings.

“He has the fiercest honesty of any great thinker and his honesty comes to be expressed at this very physical moment when he realizes that if God is just then he hates God, because if God deals with us according to our frailties and according to the sort of model of salvation that Anselm thinks is right, I do a bad thing and therefore an equal and opposite has to balance it—and that’s what justice is—that if human life is like that, then we’re all buggered.

“Luther’s an Augustinian—he has this deep sense of human frailty and I get that. I sort of share that. So from there Luther reasoned that there has to be some forgiveness at the heart of how we break the cycle of violence, of what traditional Christian theologians have spoken of as sin. Luther has par excellence that yearning, the idea that you’re not fixed by some neat theory about redemption, that God is more disruptive, more difficult, and human beings are more broken. He had this fantastically earthy worldview, you know, scatological, rude. His sense of brokenness and what can fix that brokenness, I think, is incredibly moving. And he was prepared to take on the whole of the established church for that…wow.

“The Reformation was a protest movement—it was as much about power as anything. Our question now is what do you do in a society where there seems to be a hegemony of the liberal state and market capitalism—where do you imagine a space outside of that from which to critique it? Even the Left seems to concede to the parameters of the debate—so how do you get outside that debate? People like [English philosopher] Simon Critchley—he’s an atheist, or I’m pretty sure he is—he looks to religion as a new space for the bigger ideas about who we are and what we’re for. For all its faults, I think religion has that potential, to think bigger thoughts than we’re thinking at the moment.

“Occupy is an attempt to speak outside that same established order of how the world is supposed to be. That’s why it seems an interruption. It doesn’t seem to make sense within the terms of the debate we have. It was only luck that it ended up outside St. Paul’s but that they found religious themes so conducive to their message surely indicates some potential in Christianity…There was a sense in which these people were, incredibly, speaking for the conscience of Middle England, of the whole of society. There was a pain being expressed about the society we find ourselves in. You know, we say it in St. Paul’s every bloody day—the Magnificat—putting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly, fill the hungry with good things and the rich will be sent away empty. That isn’t even the thinking of the Labour Party.”

Fraser is fully aware that most of the protesters were “not particularly religious,” and like any serious theologian he has engaged with what has certainly looked, over the past century and more, like the gradual disappearance of God from most European lives. Which brings us to Nietzsche and his crucial role in Fraser’s formation. One gets the impression that the great evangelizer for the death of God had to be answered before the Reverend Fraser could continue on his way. It was, incidentally, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (then a tutor at Oxford), that Fraser began to study the German philosopher.

For Fraser, “Nietzsche was absolutely a writer of the Reformation. He was Luther’s atheist slipstream.” Raised in the Saxon heartland of the Reformation, Nietzsche grew up in a devoutly Lutheran household. “One must have loved religion and art as mother and nurse,” he would later write, “or one cannot grow wise.” And love them both he certainly did: he was nicknamed “the little pastor” at school and won a preaching prize when he later went to study theology. It’s his intimacy with how belief really works that makes his later attack on it so devastating. “I have absolutely no knowledge of atheism as an outcome of reasoning,” Nietzsche would write. He went instead straight for what is central to most religious belief, namely redemption.

This was, as Fraser points out, exactly what Luther had done—and in Luther’s condemnation of philosophy he sees something very like Nietzsche’s disdain for the God of metaphysics. For Luther, after his visit to Rome in 1510 and the profound depression that followed, the search for salvation would lead to his, and then northern Germany’s, traumatic break with Catholicism. For Nietzsche, Christianity’s elevation of suffering and guilt as virtues and its view of salvation as self-torment, its thinly disguised ressentiment—these corrupt values and the way they had been “scored into the European imagination” demanded a further, final rupture, a rupture with God.

Lest you wonder what any of this has to do with Occupy, we come now to what Nietzsche saw as the priest’s role: the “direction-changer of ressentiment.” That is, the priest channels the blame for what has gone wrong in his society back onto whoever is suffering. “Politically, of course,” Fraser writes, “to convince others that they are responsible for their own suffering is to find a way of preserving society. And this enables the Church to make itself indispensable to the authorities, thus securing its own power.”

As for many theologians before Fraser, much of Nietzsche’s criticism seemed valid, but it was the details of Nietzsche’s “do-it-yourself salvation” that gave Fraser doubts. And as he doubted, he took a leaf out of Milan Kundera’s famous discussion of kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera calls kitsch “the absolute denial of shit,” excluding “everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.” Kundera’s example was a May Day parade in Communist Czechoslovakia in which the marchers saw themselves as “united with each other and with life.” For Kundera all kitsch has a common source “in the categorical agreement with being.” Fraser glosses this as “the intoxicating conviction that one is standing in a relationship of unity with the ultimate nature of things.”

The best known “intoxicating conviction” to find support in Nietzsche’s writings is never far away in this discussion. “There are a number of passages where Nietzsche seeks to portray the horror of the nihil,” Fraser writes. “But since then we have looked into the pit and instead of seeing emptiness we are faced with piles of bodies. Compared to that, Nietzsche’s own version of the nihil looks pale and self-obsessed.”

Nietzsche claimed that “one must be accustomed to living on mountains—to seeing the wretched ephemeral chatter of politics and national egoism beneath one.” For Fraser this is “high-brow kitsch.” “In his azure isolation, in his love of mountaintops, in his refusal of the perspective of the poor, really, I think Nietzsche in the end becomes kitsch. That’s my real criticism: his refusal of ordinary life, his refusal of politics in a way, his refusal of health care and plumbing. Nietzsche is kitsch because he’s not interested in that—he’s too big and lofty and important and romantic to do all of that.”

I’m struck, talking to Fraser, not just by his evident relish for ideas and for discussion, but by the way he has been able to test these against the “health care and the plumbing” of ordinary English life. It is parish work as well as Nietzsche that have done that for him. For all its over-involvement with the state—of which he is an eloquent critic—it is the state’s parish system that ultimately validates the Church he belongs to.

“The involvement with the state has pressed the church’s nose up against physical reality but more than that, the fact that the Church of England has a foothold, a parish, in every single community in this country, the rich ones the poor ones and so forth, is a part of its responsibility through being the nation’s church, which I think is its most attractive feature.

“It’s not a church for the people that come, it’s not just a club for the holy to turn up on a Sunday morning. It has a responsibility and like it or not a spiritual responsibility for all the people within that community. For all my differences with the Church of England, the Church of England speaks out of a very inclusive sense of who we are in this country. And I love it for that.

“Wallace Stevens puts it brilliantly in The Man with the Blue Guitar—‘the tune beyond us, yet ourselves.’ For me that ‘yet ourselves’ bit is: you have to play the tune that’s you. The ‘beyond us’ is beyond the cultural restrictions we place upon ourselves as to what you can and cannot say. Christianity allows you to say things that can’t be said in other discourses.

“I’m not the slightest bit bothered by the Graylings and the Dawkins [A.C. Grayling, a philosopher, and Richard Dawkins, a scientist, have written popular anti-religious polemics] but I am completely bothered by Westfield Shopping Centre. We’ve been bought off by stuff and that stops us having a sort of restlessness about the human condition. Marx did it a bit, Freud did it a bit, Nietzsche did it, the great masters of suspicion. But fundamentally for me Luther does it and Christianity does it. That restlessness is heresy to secular liberal capitalism and its temples like Westfield. The most atheistic word you can say is: ‘Whatever.’ That’s the word that’s in the Westfield Shopping Centre. The real thing to challenge in our society is ‘Whatever.’ ”

Horatio Morpurgo’s most recent book is Lady Chatterley’s Defendant & Other Awkward Customers (Just Press). He writes on the environment, literary themes, and British and European affairs.

Photo of Occupy London protesters gathered in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, 10/15/11, Wikimedia Commons