Bernard Shaw: On the Prospects of Christianity

The short:

The preface to Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion is a recommended read for anyone not terribly familiar with the Bible.  Shaw’s exegesis is funny, dry, and sociohistorically illuminating — and still relevant.  Plus, the play’s pretty funny, too; mewonders if Shaw cast Androcles as a prancing fairy.

The long:

My father was raised Methodist by a man who had his own local Sunday morning radio sermon on all manners of, from what I gather, what not to drink and what not to say and how to shoot your arrow ever-narrower, ever-straighter; my mom was Buddhist.  That meant us four kids were the town heathens. By the time I hit sixth grade, the “burn in Hell” proselytizing was so 1981 — and generally, promulgated by the kids most likely to drink, smoke, fornicate, and not read so good — that I began to fly my atheism flag proudly.

My smug pride in my disbelief didn’t help me navigate sophomore English class, though, with East of Eden on the syllabus and knowledge of All Things Bible assumed.  Cain and who?  David and what?

If only I’d read Bernard Shaw’s exegesis of Mr. Jesus!  Then perhaps my A in sophomore English would’ve been a bit easier to come by.

Here are some notes from Bernard Shaw’s On the Prospects of Christianity, his preface to Androcles and The Lion.  The thoughts were written in London, December 1915 (which is an important socio-historical grounding).

Like the late Samuel Butler, he [Jesus] regards disease as a department of sin, and on curing a lame man, says “Thy sins are forgiven” instead of “Arise and walk,” subsequently maintaining, when the Scribes reproach him for assuming power to forgive sin as well as to cure disease, that the two come to the same thing.

From Matthew – The Savage John and the Civilized Jesus

(Or, why folks in my hometown said that my sister’s disease was because of that “miscegenation” my parents got up to.)

Then there’s this little tidbit in Matthew – The Teachings of Jesus that reminds me a little bit of Buddhism:

[Jesus] advocates communism, the widening of the private family with its cramping ties into the great family of mankind under the fatherhood of God, the abandonment of revenge and punishment, the counteracting of evil by good instead of by a hostile evil, and an organic conception of society in which you are not an independent individual but a member of society, your neighbor being another member, and each of you members one of another, as two fingers on a hand, the obvious conclusion being that unless you love your neighbor as yourself and he reciprocates you will both be the worse for it.

And in Matthew – The Miracles, I realized Bernard Shaw was a funny dude, and that even in the olden days (A&TL was first produced in 1913) not everyone was chanting a chorus of burn in Hells:

Jesus’s teaching has nothing to do with miracles. If his mission had been simply to demonstrate a new method of restoring lost eyesight, the miracle of curing the blind would have been entirely relevant. But to say “You should love your enemies; and to convince you of this I will now proceed to cure this gentleman of cataract” would have been, to a man of Jesus’s intelligence, the proposition of an idiot.

Never mind Shaw’s blatant intelligence-ism; this last sentence sounds like something I would think.  And thus, me like Bernard Shaw long time.

From John – Credibility of the Gospels, I hear notes similar to Russian authors’ explorations of the irrational (au courant, given the rise of the Men of Reason (see: What Is To Be Done?) in decades preceding A&tL):

… credibility is a subjective condition… Belief is not dependent on evidence and reason… Belief is literally a matter of taste.

He continues in John – Fashions in Belief:

… matters of taste are mostly also matters of fashion.

Which then builds into John – Shall he who Makes, Own?

We are bewildered by an absurdly unpractical notion that in some way a man’s income should be given to him, not to enable him to live, but as a sort of Sunday School Prize for good behavior. And this folly is complicated by a less ridiculous but quite as unpractical belief that it is possible to assign to each person the exact portion of the national income that he or she has produced.

And in John – Labor Time:

How much is a worker’s labor time worth?

When that question came up, the only answer was “as little as he can be starved into accepting,” with the ridiculous results already mentioned, and the additional anomaly that the largest share went to the people who did not work at all, and the least to those who worked hardest.  In England nine-tenths of the wealth goes into the pockets of one-tenth of the population.

And if you hadn’t yet fallen in love with him, he really makes this modern girl swoon in John – The Dream of Distribution according to Merit:

Against this comes the protest of the Sunday School theorists “Why not distribute according to merit?” Here one imagines Jesus, whose smile has been broadening down the ages as attempt after attempt to escape from his teaching has led to deeper and deeper disaster, laughing outright. Was ever so idiotic a project mooted as the estimation of virtue in money? The London School of Economics is, we must suppose, to set examination papers with such questions as “Taking the money value of the virtues of Jesus as 100, and of Judas Iscariot as zero, give the correct figures for, respectively, Pontius Pilate, the proprietor of the Gadarene swine, the widow who put her mite in the poor-box, Mr Horatio Bottomley, Shakespear, Mr Jack Johnson, Sir Isaac Newton, Palestrina, Offenbach, Sir Thomas Lipton, Mr Paul Cinquevalli, your family doctor, Florence Nightingale, Mrs Siddons, your chairwoman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the common hangman.”

No doubt there’s a free-marketeer out there who reads this and thinks, “Why, yes, exactly; each participant in a market economy determines the value of each other participant, to them, and the participants who in aggregate are deemed the most valuable by other participants de facto receive the highest sum of monies.”

Which, of course, is entirely missing the point, which is — how can one estimate virtue via money? Here’s how: by being a boor!

And speaking on boors, Shaw continues in John – Vital Distribution:

They corrupt culture and statecraft instead of contributing to them.

And on the normative bias of fucking, in John – The Political and Biological Objections to Inequality:

Worst of all, marriage becomes a class affair: the infinite variety of choice which nature offers to the young in search of a mate is narrowed to a handful of persons of similar income; and beauty and health become the dreams of artists and the advertisements of quacks instead of the normal conditions of life.

I don’t know.  Call me crazy, but Shaw’s perspective on social issues still seem relevant today.

And if he’s summarized the Bible correctly, then, I totally want to make out with Luke (from Luke – Luke the Literary Artist):

Before you have read twenty lines of Luke’s gospel you are aware that you have passed from the chronicler writing for the sake of recording important facts, to the artist, telling the story for the sake of telling it.

Swoon!

Ye Olde Gutenberg Bible