Lies in a Mirror LIES IN A MIRROR

Lies in a Mirror: An Essay on Evil and Deceit

By

Peter Charleton

(The following lecture on the theme of the book is added as an explaination)

THE PROBLEM OF BALANCE

When I was in college, there was a tort case that was used as an illustration for what negligence is as a matter of law. Here are the facts, as given by Lord Denning, which were read out to us:

On July 10, 1957, the plaintiff was on holiday in Cornwall. She was staying at a hotel and thought she would sunbathe on a piece of grass where cars were parked. While she was lying there, the defendant came into the car park driving his Jaguar motorcar. He did not see her. The car went over her legs and she was injured.

On hearing this, there was a collective snigger from the law students in my class, as if this was funny. It illustrates the gap between knowledge and sympathy. Compassion is a necessary quality in a practicing lawyer. It also helps, but is less necessary, when you are studying law in abstract. When you are in law school you are inclined to laugh at the absurdities of tort cases, but when you are in practice you meet the people whose legs have been run over, who have been raped, or whose relatives have been murdered. Then you discover that the world does not work by rules, but rather that there are few prescriptions for human ills and that evil and goodness are the dynamic poles which define events. This lecture is about neither the very good nor the very bad, but about how the fullness of human expression is most often found in those who are flawed and who recognise their lack of perfection. A law student who grows up to a better reflection of human nature may be an example of that. However, the startling problems of our time demand more. But what? If you want to look for wholeness in people, it is most likely to be found in someone who has made mistakes and not in an ideology that promises Paradise or in a leader who claims universal wisdom.

For every situation in life, there may well be several responses. For every fundamental human relationship, such as marriage or motherhood, there is a positive and a negative aspect. Lawyers are familiar with these situations in the negative; how a choice can lead down a dark path that occludes progressively any possibility of good. As well, there are startling examples of how human conduct repeats itself but not because someone has made a choice, rather apparently because a situation calls forth a response that no one would rationally choose. This makes us wonder about the influence of the unconscious mind where people are faced with those situations in life that confront us with a gateway through which we must pass. You then notice that people are not illustrations of rules stated in a law book, but living, dynamic creatures driven by influences far from the need to ascertain and obey legal rules. I will just mention three patterns that I have noticed.

When someone dies unexpectedly in a family, it is startlingly often the case that their relatives will jump to the conclusion that they have been murdered. This even happens with those who are old, who have been clearly killed by an accident or who have been very sick. It most often happens where there is any possibility of ambiguous interpretation. There must be an unconscious influence in this context, as in many other situations. With sensible people, they can be persuaded of the truth. Even those most sane among us, however, can be trapped into a kind of thinking that is far from real. There are also many who find themselves caught in a web of misunderstanding though no fault of their own. Fault lines can very suddenly develop over the contents of a will and who gets what out of the estate. Even the best families can find themselves at loggerheads with each other, and in the worst cases bitterness, and litigation, can proceed for years. People can be happily married or unhappily married; we all know that. Marriages end, and when they do what profit is there in pursuing the disharmony that destroyed it beyond its termination? It is a rare case where people separate amicably and discuss their financial affairs and the custody of their children in a sensible way. You may ask: “why should they?” After all, the fact that their marriage breaks up betokens a certain amount of bitterness. In those cases, however, it is the lack of proportion that is startling. Lawyers are used as battering rams against an unfortunate husband, or rarely, an unfortunate wife, and years after the relationship is finished, motions about property, about children, about maintenance and about behaviour are brought before the court. The pie that needs to be divided up between a cold and separated couple is trampled underfoot and reduced to nothing. A once happy relationship is replaced by what I can only see as a mutual desire to destroy. As in all the other circumstances where destruction is the norm, balance is absent. Unconscious influences bent on misery become dominant instead. These things recur so often that one is driven to the conclusion that there are such influences deep in our minds and that they form patterns in our lives.

According to Carl Jung, every archetypal experience has two aspects. I see typical situations as giving rise to the potential for typical kinds of behaviour, some of which only lawyers are aware of. I see the possibility of positive and negative approaches to deeply felt situations. In the world of myth, you can see the snake as healing or as representing deception and evil doing. The shape of the snake represents the fundamental reptilian nervous system which we share, from which we have evolved. This can be a source of healing and a source of spiritual enlightenment and it is for this reason, perhaps, that it is a symbol of medicine and that patriarchs of the Eastern Church carry a staff entwined with two snakes. Clint Eastwood’s film ‘Letters from Iwo Jima’ reminds us, among other things, the universal experience of those in battle where men who are dying call out for their mother. A mother, apart from being the source of life, can smother life if she takes over the independence of her children and forces them to live her unlived life. Religion is a dominant over all societies. I say that because I just happen to see it as differently expressed, perhaps as nationalism or liberalism. What, after all, is Richard Dawkins, but a prophet of atheism, a priest of the orthodoxy of scientific rationalism and an acclaimed scourge of any heretics who dare challenge his view that something came out of nothing. He even travels around the world having filmed encounters with people chosen to be irrational, irritating and aggressive, who can foam at the mouth so as to illustrate clear cases of possession by the demon of irrationality that has benighted the world. And what are his books and TV series, but holy writ? How does anyone explain his total lack of self-awareness except that the archetype of the priest-prophet has taken over his life from within his unconscious contents and dominated his life? Can we not see that all of this has been seen before, with flowering robes or with sack cloth, ashes and strident calls of “repent, repent!”

Religion as ideology suppresses thought; it replaces the vibrancy of life with rules that deny nature; it controls individual beings by coercing them into guilt; it replaces the choice of those who lead and serve us on the basis of competence with those who merely believe; it creates a strangle-hold on society by demanding adherence to a collective consciousness. In its sway, those who pretend observance can stand at the front of the temple claiming they are chosen by heaven, and through it society can be tortured by any means into the establishment under its prophets of Paradise on earth. That description fits fascist regimes, certain medieval societies and some current religiously-minded nations. Religion as faith is its opposite: it consoles those who are distressed with the promise that eternity and time intersect so that death has been conquered; it demands charity; it condemns selfishness; it requires that we look into ourselves knowing that sin never departs, and in the invariable words of any orthodox Christian liturgy, that anyone honestly approaching God must realise, like the man at the back of the temple, that he is “first among sinners”. It has created art in music and image that is beyond comprehension and it sets believers the task of the personal attainment of peace whereby, as Saint Seraphim of Sarov said, others may be saved not through coercion but by the abundance of divine grace. So, there are two sides to everything and it is up to us to choose. Basically, the one that reflects truth is a force for good. The one that makes a person believe they are apart from humanity is a disaster.

Yes, all very obvious, it might be said, but the quality that is most hidden is your very self. It becomes apparent when you are really tested and, for a lawyer, the fundamental test is one of honesty. So what would you make of this? In 1983, I defended a man called M.W. on a charge of having unlawful carnal knowledge of a feeble-minded woman, contrary to section 4 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1935. This section was very badly drafted. It stated:

Any person who, in circumstances which do not amount to rape, unlawfully and carnally knows or attempts to have unlawful carnal knowledge of any woman or girl who is an idiot, or an imbecile, or is feeble-minded, shall, if the circumstances prove that such person knew at the time of such knowledge or attempt that the woman or girl was then an idiot or an imbecile or feeble-minded (as the case may be), be guilty of a misdemeanour and shall be liable on conviction thereof to imprisonment for any term not exceeding two years.

You only need to look at the legislation to see its obvious defects. The offence was limited to sexual intercourse, not other forms of penetration or sexual assault; it provided no assistance to persons who were mentally ill because they were subject to the general law that a witness can only give evidence on oath; rape was a defence to the charge; and the categorisation of the victim in these terms was offensive. M.W., who was really not a very likable person, did not give evidence at his trial. However, the evidence of the unfortunate girl who was, it was claimed, his victim was necessary. She could under no rational analysis be considered as strong enough in personality to take part in the kind of battle of wits on which sexual encounters between young men and women. Why had he chosen her for sexual encounters? On no rational or moral analysis could that be explained. But law is not morality and nor is it necessarily moral. Her evidence was given under a clear mental handicap; furthermore, it was contradictory as to whether consensual intercourse had taken place in a car, or whether she was forced into it. At the end of the case, having done my duty, quite politely I hope, I applied that the charge should not go to the jury but that they should be directed to acquit the accused without consideration of the evidence. My argument was that as the girl had given evidence on oath, having shown sufficient understanding and intelligence for the oath to be administered to her, she could not come within the terms of the section as a person requiring to be protected from a willing sexual encounter. There was no real answer, given the wording of the crime. Judge Frank Martin, therefore, gave a direction that this count had to be withdrawn from the jury at the close of the prosecution case. Even if he had not had the charge dismissed against him, all the accused had to do, at that point, was get into the witness box and say, “I raped her”, and he was entitled to be immediately acquitted. The law was ludicrous. Committing one offence, that of rape, was a defence to a charge of having sexual intercourse with “an idiot or an imbecile [or a feeble-minded woman]”. The accused was entitled to two trials, one on each aspect of the charge. This was because he was entitled, as a matter of law, to exploit the defence of the commission of one crime as an answer to the other. The first trial ended because the girl was unsure in her evidence as to whether it was rape, which was the charge first tried. The second trial put the prosecution in the position that if the girl understood the nature of the oath then she could not, by definition, be “an idiot or an imbecile or . . . feeble-minded”.

Is there an archetype of being a brilliant lawyer? I do not know, but certainly it would be a pleasant state of existence wrapped up in a cocoon of self-congratulation. All I know is that between the two trials and doing my duty to the court without misstating the law or misrepresenting the facts, I secured the acquittal of M.W. on what I regarded as a completely unjust basis. I felt dreadful about it. I did not enjoy it when it came to shaking the hand of the accused. In those days, people at the Bar did not congratulate each other until they came back to the Law Library because they had a proper realisation of the offence which this might cause to those disappointed in recourse to the law, the law being an abstract means of attempting to do justice, and one that might fail. To ease my discomfort, I wrote about the case, exercising due discretion. My article on sexual offences with mentally handicapped women came to the notice of the Law Reform Commission. Section 27 of the Criminal Evidence Act 1992, resulted. This provided that a person under fourteen years of age might give evidence other than on oath or affirmation if the court was satisfied that he or she was capable of giving “an intelligible account of events which are relevant to those proceedings”. As to a person over fourteen years of age, that same section applied where the witness suffered from a mental handicap. The Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 1993, recast the sexual offences against mentally impaired persons in more modern and practical terms. It is an offence to have sexual intercourse with a person who is mentally impaired, which means someone who is suffering from a disorder of the mind “whether through mental handicap or mental illness, which is of such a nature or degree as to render a person incapable of living an independent life or of guarding against serious exploitation”. There were other ways, however, of reacting to the M.W. case. Many of my colleagues to whom I have spoken have told me of occasions where they put an argument before a jury which was accepted and the murderer, or the rapist, or the robber, walked free. They, too, felt absolutely dreadful. Or, you could grin about it. Using the law as an instrument of its own silliness is another aspect of this process and normally there is a rule in construing any written law that a ludicrous interpretation should not prevail, but sometimes the ludicrousness is there in black and white and it has to be submitted to. Balance is part of the law and while I do not ascribe feelings to the law, individual lawyers certainly have them. Judge Martin’s decision cannot be criticised. He was clearly correct.

You can enjoy a feeling of triumph in cases like M.W.. Then, what about lawyers who offer their congratulations on the basis that one of their colleagues has bested a ten-year old girl in cross-examination, or has achieved a result like that in the M.W. case? If you could admit such feelings to yourself, you would be a courageous person but how would you then begin to see yourself? When I went, in 1986, to Carl Jung’s summer retreat in Bolingen in Switzerland, I was shown around Jung’s tower by the lake. Some of the structure had been built by him and on many of the surfaces he had pursued his interest in stone carving, depicting archetypal figures that he saw as the personification of human qualities, or tracing the ancestry of his family. On the part of the main building facing away from the water, he had carved a figure in stone relief of a grinning and laughing but jowly and unpleasant man. This was his depiction of the trickster figure, the personification of someone who embodies the desire to make mischief and to laugh at misfortune. Like other archetypal qualities, the mischief maker has roots in normal behaviour and so it is expressed in both good and bad ways. Small children are full of fun. They love to play tricks. Adults do as well. Science calls them experiments and certainly in the early days of science, toying around with materials, trying out how various combinations might work on a solution and trial and error were, and still are, approaches to research. That also goes for law. Playing around with rules is a necessary component of the intellectual reasoning out of the effect of decisions. You can use tricks, however, to promote darkness. Mischief is then an aspect of the shadow where, as Jung put it, “everything goes wrong and nothing intelligent happens except by mistake at the last moment”. Some claim that mischief-makers are naturally to be found in journalism and politics. That is a bit smug. They are all over the internet now, sending out viruses, better and ever better ones that take amazing ingenuity to devise. And what about Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, where people are prematurely announcing the deaths of the famous or claiming that before their fortune was made that they eked out a living “eating household pets in carnivals”, etc. If we imagine, however, that the law is immune from human nature and that we are all involved in as lawyers is the pure pursuit of justice, then we are in a state of delusion. As Jung puts it:

The so-called civilised man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilised, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated.

The law must have rules. These rules must make sense, because otherwise it is inevitable that ordinary people, who base their lives on commonsense, will lose faith in them. Secondly, every legal system has to strive to know the truth. It cannot make a fetish out of a rule so that it stands in the way of an enquiry that leads to the truth. You cannot have justice on any foundation other than reality. Rules which demand the automatic exclusion of probative evidence are an affront to that principle. The truth is no more or less than reality, as correctly reflected in the mind; that to which nothing is added and from which nothing may be taken. Rules which split up trials so that, to use a favourite example of mine, five juries try a case of sexual abuse complained of by five different victims, none of them ever knowing that the accused in the particular trial they are dealing with is accused by four other people, are operating in the kind of vacuum of sense and reality that undermines the law.

Literature can show the way to identifying the mischief-maker in everyday life, and it may tell us about ourselves. Tom Keefer in Herman Wouk’s novel ‘The Caine Mutiny’ points up his features. Commander Philip Queeg captain of the minesweeping destroyer Caine, pursuing essentially second-line duties in the Second World War, is a liar, is money-centred, is incompetent, and can never admit to error. The book turns on the decision of his second-in-command Steve Maryk to relieve him of his captaincy during a typhoon where his insistence on running with the tide threatens to scupper his ship. Over a series of incidents, the officers of the Caine have begun to believe that Queeg is mad. For every one of these, Keefer is there to drone on about the captain being “yellow” following an incident that left a landing party without proper cover, to speak about his paranoia in searching for a non-existent key that will explain the theft of some strawberries and to hammer home the pointlessness of martinet discipline. The Navy Regulations provide for a commander to be relieved of duty when he is unfit but provide that this should be done by an application to higher authority, unless the circumstances make that impossible. Despite driving the engine that says that Queeg is unfit, Keefer is the one who backs out when a party of the ship’s officers attempts to see the admiral of the fleet and present a case of unfitness. Like a catalyst in chemistry he acts on others rather than acting himself; his influence is essentially hidden. He is not the one to relieve Captain Queeg of command, rather it is the conscientious underling Maryk inspired by his jokey malice. The elements of the trickster are all there: he inspires others to misfortune, he does not act himself; he stands aside as a spectator when malice has been given its head through his efforts; and he presents himself as the fountainhead of wisdom, when he is in fact no more than the conjurer up of ill-feeling. From the point of view of lawyers, when it comes to the trial for mutiny, Barney Greenwald has the unenviable task of saving the mutineers, who do not include Keefer, from hanging. He does his job by a persistent cross examination that needles Queeg into displaying the worst side of his character, eventually appearing as insane in the witness box. Greenwald hates what he has had to do. After the acquittal, he attacks the crew over their cowardice in not seeing that Queeg was a broken man and failing to offer him their friendship instead of despising him. A natural reaction, if you are not a mischief-maker yourself. Feelings run high after cases as well as during them. While they are running you might be able to maintain a dispassionate zeal, but after them your guard may slip and it is as well to stay away from clients, perhaps especially those who have not, as we say, “had the presumption of innocence displaced.”

Justice deals with people and people have feelings and an instinct for truth. We must never forget that people like M.W. are on the receiving end of laws, rules and rulings. What is it like to be a person who has been sexually abused? Well, I think I discovered some sense of that arising out a case in 1995. I am going to place this case in Birr, county Offaly, for the sake of confidentiality. There was a man in Birr who was a builder. To operate in that trade, one is no use on one’s own. One assembles a number of companions who can do plumbing, plasterwork, carpentry and other trades. At the time, involvement in the building trade was not the profitable career path that it has been in recent times. Builders were obliged to save and to watch carefully even what they ate for their lunch. So, the father of this family of three girls habitually had one particular carpenter staying in his house; it saved them both money. It was a relatively small, semi-detached house, in a suburban estate. One by one, this man who, during the middle of the working week, slept on a couch in the sitting room abused each of these daughters sexually. In addition to this, the daughters sometimes had friends over to stay. This was apparently a fairly open household, normally a sign of a good home. These friends were abused, so that the number of victims became seven. The trial was not split up into individual little pieces and so the accused really had no option but to plead guilty. This he did and sentencing was put back to the following morning. I met with the victims late one evening in the Four Courts, and, to put it mildly, they were furious. They wanted to know was the accused going to be locked up for life; they wanted me to know that their lives were ruined; and, they wanted me to know that they regarded the law as being a very poor substitute in terms of justice for what they had suffered. Their rage was understandable, and as the desire for revenge is something that is deep within the human soul, it is as well that we keep that in mind in dealing with penal policy. To mollify them, I agreed to speak to them one after the other, alone, in a room downstairs. I did, but now as no one trusts anyone else, that would be regarded as folly.

There was nothing I could say to them. I hope, however, that I listened. I had come across a Hungarian folk-saying that you either have a happy childhood or a happy old age, and told them this, on the basis that as they had had such a miserable childhood, it might be that there were many happy things for them to look forward to. That did not help them. All of them, one after the other, when speaking about the perpetrator, mentioned one thing; “he was nothing”, “he was not worth bothering about”, “he was just a fool who nobody would look at outside because he was so low”, and other things. It made me think. Looking at other accounts, and thinking in particular of Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Gulag Archipelago’, where he describes the worst of torturers in Soviet system as not occupying space because where they stood there was nothing but blackness, an absence of occupied space, I noticed that the victims of criminals very often refer to those who have wronged them in this way. Why? The abuse of human rights through sexual crime is a denial of common humanity and an assault on the fundamental reality that all people have individual inviolability. The more you follow this pattern of abuse, the more you deny that reality, the more you collapse into yourself and become less and less in terms of liveliness, personality and humour. Speaking with a friend later on that year about another case of a paedophile, which caused a massive amount of public turmoil (the archetype of the trickster, again) the issue of self-control came up. I wondered about the cunning that evaded detection for so long and that had and the compulsion that drove paedophilia. The issue of intent and free will came up. He said to me that maybe the first time one of these people abused a child, they intended it, or the second time, or the third time, but eventually it became such a hunger that they were acting virtually automatically.

Frankly, I thought this opinion was ridiculous. Over time, that view dissolved. I noticed the pattern of descent into nothingness and it was something that forced itself upon me as an idea the more I dealt with these people. Is the notion, therefore, of intention being submerged inside possession by a drive to commit crime or obsessions with the satisfying of perverted desires, one that might be correct? I think it is. Carl Jung said that when someone becomes possessed of an archetype, that this unconscious influence can determine their fate, right down to the last detail. While I think that this may be an exaggeration, I also believe that he had strong reasons for saying that. Those who have been inside the effects of this kind of behaviour describe it as a kind of possession. When you are on the receiving end of criminal behaviour, you experience the terror of looking evil in the face. Not absolute evil, perhaps, though some instances come very close. Then, your opinion is more than mere abstract reasoning.

Ukraine has had a grim history, sandwiched between Poland, Austria, Hungary and Russia. In the 20th Century it was under the Hapsburg Empire, which respected many human rights; it was invaded from two sides during the First World War; in 1918, it became embroiled in the Polish-Ukrainian Civil War; then it came under Polish and Soviet rule as a divided country. The worst aspect of the civil war was the lack of order which led to revenge killings running unhindered because there was no army to establish enforce even basic law. In this context, the later support by some figures of a native Waffen SS for Ukraine becomes more understandable when a vacuum was feared to unleash mayhem as the Germans retreated after the Second World War. In 1939, it was divided between Hitler and Stalin, experiencing fascism under two guises. In 1941, it was overrun by the Germans. In 1944, it came under the Soviet yoke again, before attaining some independence and unity in the 1990s. Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, as the head of the Byzantine-rite church, so despised by both the Russians and the Poles, lived through both periods. When the Soviets invaded in 1939, clergy were murdered or imprisoned, churches were closed. His feelings ran high. On two occasions, he asked to be designated by the Pope to die for the Faith. The evil being done by the Soviet invasion, of which he was well aware through personal experience and reports, was to him entirely explicable. We might not agree with him. As with Jung, unseen forces were at work. In a letter to the Holy See, he wrote:

This regime can only be explained by diabolic possession en masse. I dare to request or humbly propose to His Holiness to be pleased to recommend to all the contemplative orders (the Carmelites, the Trappists, the Carthusians, and the Camaldo-lese) to exorcise Soviet Russia by the cooperation of all the priests in all the monasteries. The exorcisms of the Church are above space and can be done at a distance.

When the Nazis invaded, the situation was even worse. At first the Metropolitan saw it as liberation. A central committee was formed of Ukrainian nationalists to administer the newly-freed, as it was thought, country in cooperation with the Germans. The Nazis shut down the committee straight away. Their plan was to turn Ukraine into a vassal province and to use its fertile land to feed Germans to the exclusion of the native population who were planned to die in their millions. Vicious attacks were made against the Jewish community, which comprised a large proportion of the population of Lvov.

It was intolerable to Metropolitan Sheptytsky that Ukrainians were being indoctrinated in Nazi ideology, and their simple nature abused so as to turn it to savagery and use it against people of another religion. In November, 1942, the Metropolitan wrote to his people reminding them that murder carried an automatic punishment whereby God would make their lives miserable and whereby Satan would torture them in the next life. In this assertion, he drew deliberately on the Torah, the Old Testament. It is the subject of intention that particularly draws my focus. The Metropolitan wrote:

The act of murder inflicts irreparable damage on the children, wife, and elderly parents of the victim. Deprived of their breadwinner, they have been left to starve and suffer. A murderer takes the life, not only of his victim, but also robs his own soul of the prospect of eternal life and God’s grace, thereby leading it to an abyss from which there is no escape. The curse of the shedding of innocent blood stirs to life the demons of greed in his soul, who, from now on, goad him to seek gratification of his desires in the suffering and torment of his fellow man. The sight of spilt blood arouses in him the lust associated with cruelty, which can be satisfied only through the agonies of the victim and his death. Bloodthirstiness can become transformed into lust which will derive pleasure from tormenting the victim and his death. A murderer who attains this level of bloodthirstiness and who takes sadistic pleasure from torments, torture and death, unquestionably becomes a danger to his fellow man. For him, crime becomes a necessity. Without crime, he suffers and undergoes unceasing torments, just as a man deprived of food and drink suffers hunger and thirst. Those forced to live in close proximity to such a person must be constantly on guard. Children might disappear and crimes might be committed and often it proves impossible to uncover the perpetrators. Responsible public bodies will have to go to the greatest lengths to denounce such a depraved person who has forsaken all humanity, and bring him to justice.

The idea of people negating their personality so that they become almost nothing, and in thrall to their obsession, is, perhaps, understandable and I have said enough about that. What is difficult to comprehend in anyone is a lack of conscience in murder. The Metropolitan made it clear that a political motive did not change the character of murder. But, we have often been deceived.

During the 1990s, I kept in close touch with some colleagues north of the Border. They were defending and prosecuting the worst kinds of murderers; those inspired by ideology. There is no point in going through the facts of these cases. If you want to know the type of crime, and here I am not identifying any specific offender, ‘The Shankill Butchers’ by Martin Dillon. The book describes the killing of nineteen completely uninvolved people over a period of fifteen months, will give you an idea of the kind of crimes involved. People were abducted walking along the street, they were brought to garage or lock-up premises, they were tortured and they had their throats slit. Two colleagues dealt with a number of these cases. One friend remarked that not an ounce of remorse was shown by any of the perpetrators. By ideological crime, I meant that which is perpetrated to further an ideal. It is an aspect of the negative side of religion: ideology. As Patriarch Kyrill, in another context, has commented:

They want us to believe that morality is relative… The communists said that good is what is good for the working class. That was relative morality -- and 60 million people were exterminated. Hitler claimed that what is good is what is good for greater Germany. That too cost millions of lives. Morality is either absolute or it doesn't exist at all.

You may think of an ideal as being a shining goal for which people should strive. That is both its attraction and its danger. An ideal can become untouchable, transcendent, beautiful and undefiled. It is an aspect of the archetype of the self, of the god archetype. To reach it, we are capable of turning evil on its head and pretending that it is good. Something in the mind allows this. The Mountbatten murder in 1979 caught a local boy in the death trap that was prepared for the retired soldier, on no better basis than having relations in the British Royal Family. Years afterwards, the father of that boy commented that he hoped that the killer at some stage might feel some flicker of remorse at the taking of an innocent life. All the lives taken were innocent. This complete lack of affect characterises ideological crimes. The constant question running through Solzhenitsyn’s work on the Soviet murder and attrition camps is: how can this happen? Well, the Russian author says that past writers had gotten the problem of evil wrong. They had depicted evildoers as born to do harm and without a trace of goodness. He criticises past authors for painting evildoers with the blackest shades, claiming that this made them farcical. It is as if, he thinks, people are born to hate. Certainly, some people are born without effect and this is identified as the condition of sociopathy. The reality that he saw was that people can be turned, quite ordinary, normal people, as many Ukrainians were turned by the Nazis and their ideology. To see it as some people being born evil was wrong:

But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honours. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonisers by civilisation; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late) by equality, brotherhood , and the happiness of future generations.
Thanks to ideology, the 20th Century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied nor passed over, nor suppressed.

Beyond saying that in ideology, the bad becomes the good and vice versa, there is no easy answer. What is certain for me, however, is that there is some portion of the mind that represents its entirety and that it is, like an ideal, transcendent. Where the ideal requires the sacrifice of the self, meeting that sacrifice proves that there are values beyond that of individual life. People will commit suicide to promote a cause. Since September 2001, this has been seen as an appalling problem. Where, as in the Chernobyl disaster, members of the community are prepared to sacrifice themselves by running repeated missions over a nuclear reactor in meltdown in order to neutralise it by dropping cement from helicopters, we rightly call them heroes. Where, in warfare, soldiers die on behalf of their comrades and risk their lives for their country, we believe it is all to the good. I do not comment on any of this. What seems to me to be obvious is that there is within us a capacity to embrace an ideal and to regard that ideal as more important than our continued existence. Jung calls the centre of the psyche the archetypal self, or the god-image. Experienced in a dream, this centre point of our very selves exudes a divine harmony beyond our understanding. Many of the great buildings of the world, express qualities of order, structure, awe and immaculate loveliness. Works of art that exude a transcendental perfection, such as the Book of Kells or the Ardagh Chalice move us in that way too. These appeal to us because there is something within our mind to which it can appeal. You can call it perfection, but any word is inadequate. Pádraig Pearse looked on his attempt to free Ireland as a kind of martyrdom. That, as Yeats later put it in his poem ‘The Rose Tree’, the soil needed to be watered with his blood for freedom to bloom. As a poet himself Pearse put it even better, in words that mingled longing unto death for an ideal that had become personified in beauty with awesome distance from an ultimate, but still human, value:

Fornocht do chonac thú, A áille na háille,
Is dhallas mo shúil, Ar eagla go stánfainn.

Do chualas do cheol, A bhinne na binne,
Is do dhúnas mo chluas Ar eagla go gclisfinn.

Do bhlaiseas do bhéal, A mhilse na miles,
Is chruas mo chroí, Ar eagla mo mhillte.

Do dhalas mo shúil, Is mo chluas do dhúnas,
Do chruas mo chroí, Is mo mhian do mhúchas;

Do thugas mo chúl ar an aisling a chumas,
‘S ar an ród seo romham M’aghaidh do thugas.

Do thugas mo ghnúis ar an ród seo romham,
Ar an ngníomh do-chím, ‘s ar an mbás do-gheobhad.

Our problem, as people, is that instead of seeing this as a reflection of the order of the universe, we steal that which is universal property and claim it for ourselves because we have joined a movement, or a religion, that claims to create a paradise on earth. Perhaps we are capable of reflecting paradise, as in a great building, but we are never capable of attaining it. The unbalance that this conceit induces destroys our fundamental rationality so that we are left as beings who are all puffed up, and who see others as being miserable, conceited and deceitful. Jung, in his work on psychological types, collects fragments of Heraclitus as an expression of the opposites, therefore the lack of perfection, which defines life:

It is the opposite which is good for us. Men do not know what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.The bow is called life, but its work is death.Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life. For souls, it is death to become water, for water, death to become earth. But from earth comes water, and from water, souls.All things are an exchange for fire, and fire, for all things, like goods for gold and gold for goods. The way up and the way down are the same.

The practical effect of self-elevation is disaster. A fair sign is that some group, Jews or homosexuals are favourites but every society has its targets, are attacked. In every mass homicidal campaign against another group, the assailants are always characterised by a self-regard which goes beyond human failing and which sets them on a higher plain. The Nazis calling the Czech nation, which had produced Smetana, Dvorak and Janáček, “a Pygmy race” is an obvious example. Their self-regard was boundless. Their projection onto their leader of that self-regard amounted to a blasphemous claim of god-like status. One can find a similar pattern with the Hutu-power movement in Rwanda in 1994, with those who campaigned against the Armenians during the First World War and at the time of Abdul Hamit and in the campaigns waged in the Americas against native people. If someone comes along and tells you, in the course of your everyday life, that they are so amazing in terms of their abilities and qualities, that they are superior to everyone else, you recoil in horror. Closed groups, those which set up boundaries around themselves on the basis of their self-regard, can engage in this kind of narcissistic thinking. Its dangerousness is beyond question. The practical effect of self-elevation is disaster. Even in the most mundane matter, that lack of balance becomes apparent in the harm it causes within any community. There are a couple of schools in Dublin where the pupils are encouraged to believe in themselves as the leaders of the future and as possessing talents which lead, together with hard work, to them assuming prominent positions in society at higher remuneration. What is wrong with that? Well, people at various stages of their life can be at various stages of maturity. Societies can be at various stages of maturity, or they can be shaken to a lower stage of maturity when their king or president is shot, when their national parliament or royal palace is burned down, or where an invasion appears to occur from outside. Young people find it difficult to realise, as my mother used to reiterate that, “in life, there are no guarantees”. These communities have a problem with bullying. Deep in the minds of these children, they know that. Anyone who is different, who is less likely to succeed, who reminds them of what they are themselves, is likely to be, at the least, excluded, which is a passive form of inhuman behaviour. When it comes to societies at a mature level, history teaches us that the gross inflation of self causes the shadow that is within us to be seen in its monstrous form. People should live in friendly benevolence with themselves. That is a part of balance; religion as an ideology is dangerous. Religion as a means of examining oneself on a human level, of living, perhaps, with one’s own faults, or at least with the knowledge of them, is an antidote to this attitude. Jung puts it this way:

Did not Nietzsche announce that God was dead and that his Heir was the Superman, that doomed rope-bouncer and fool? It is an immutable psychological law that when a projection has come to an end, it always returns to its origin.”So, when somebody hits on the singular idea that God is dead, or does not exist at all, the psychic God-image, which is a dynamic part of the psyche’s structure, finds its way back into the subject and produces a condition of “God-Almightiness”, that is to say, all those qualities which are peculiar to fools and madmen and therefore lead to catastrophe.

One of the fundamental problems in our society is that we are a people that do not realise our own faults. For a person, that is a disaster. No healing can take place until the conscious mind activates its capacity for conscience. When the world was split, prior to 1979, into communist and capitalist camps, there was no realisation on either side of the contortions of reality that underpinned each system. When communism ended, history did not end. The drive towards conflict will always remain while the mind, and society is but a reflection of many minds, resists wholeness. And so now we have had the split with the Islamic world. Where are the people reaching out to understand each side’s point of view? Is the world divided into the “realm of war” and the “realm of peace”? Can we in the West believe that we are somehow chosen to bring our system of democracy at any cost to every society: is this not a conceit of superiority? Artists recognise what the rest of us take time to catch up on: that self-righteousness is a painful and dangerous arrogance.

‘Father Sergius’ is a late story by Leo Tolstoy. He worked on it for many years, an indication of its importance to him. Many of the obsessions of the author’s last years are there. The organised Church is depicted as lacking charity and divine grace. Celibacy, of which the author was an advocate in his later years, is depicted as a titanic struggle against human nature. Sergius pursues a conventional religious route to ordination. After ministry in the city, he retires solitary prayer. Because he is young and strong, his desires are a torment to him. As a joke, a group of society people visit him when he has withdrawn from life and lives as a hermit in the forest. One of them tries to seduce him but he wounds himself physically rather than succumb. She, in any event, is put off from her mischievous plan by the kind nature of the man which she meets. She then has a complete conversion. Because of this incident, the official Church takes Father Sergius and makes him into an object of pilgrimage. The priest eventually falls from grace when another silly girl is allowed to stay with him. Perhaps Tolstoy saw this as both a denial of human nature and an expression of the way people in religion can believe that reality, by which I mean the reality of human sexuality, should be ignored. Conscious of his own guilt, Sergius wanders from place to place, and from Church to Church, praying. This was a traditional way of life, and still is, in Russia. These wanderers for God make an appearance in ‘War and Peace’ when Princess Maria dreams of becoming one, hiding away a set of humble clothing and dreaming that she may one day become a pilgrim wanderer. She does not tell her brother, and her father has made it plain that he finds any notion to do with religion ridiculous. Most of those wandering are humble people because those in higher society can find other ways to express their religious belief, for instance, through charity. It is only in the very last pages of Tolstoy’s story that we get any sense that Father Sergius has attained completeness. Another of the constant themes in Tolstoy’s stories is of the silliness and wastefulness of most people, who flit from one event to another, like butterflies. One day, on the roadway, a group of these people encounter Sergius. He has long given up any sign of his vocation and lives hand to mouth. A glance from his eyes reveals to one of the party that here is a true starets.

I suppose, what Tolstoy had in mind was that goodness is not available on tap. It is hubris to imagine that joining in an ideology gives you a right to despise others. If you read the life of Padre Pio, his clairvoyant powers emerge, together with his human failings and his strong beliefs. His relationship to his brothers was one of kindness as John Cornwell discovered when he visited the monastery where he spent his life. There, a monk who knew him well tells him about his personal warmth and kindness. Yet, at the same time, Padre Pio seems to have been haunted. He wrestled with the Devil and, according to reports from those who lived with him, furniture in his room shook and terrible shouting was heard. Chasing a penitent out of a confession box in a church is difficult to grasp as a saintly response, but it does show spirit. Missing an appointment with a patient deliberately and going sailing is bad enough for a psychotherapist, but why not hold a disciplinary enquiry against Carl Jung, as certainly we would do nowadays, because when the patient hired a motor launch and came after him he shouted: “Go away! You bore me.”

Imagine a situation where you must suppress your desire to gossip, where you must judge every action on the basis that the good must be chosen over the bad, and where, hardest of all, you must make every effort to judge no-one in this world except yourself. The psychological effects are likely to be that pressure will build up. This seems to me to be especially so if you have chosen this as a way of life without first having lived in the world and made mistakes in consequence of which you may wish to turn to the Almighty. I have not studied the lives of saints, but Jung believes that this kind of choice will manifest itself physically. Many people believe that Saint Paul suffered from epilepsy. Jung notes that in his letters, he refers to the occasions when he “shakes”. He thought this to be the price for the complete reversal of direction that was always a potential Saul and which manifested itself when he met Christ on the road to Damascus. Other very good people seem to have been afflicted by illness before breaking through to a state of buoyant health and one may speculate that bearing that burden somehow assists completeness. One does not want to take this too far and certainly not beyond the example that follows.

John Cornwell, who has, perhaps, done too much wrestling with the problem of religious faith, and whose book on Pope Pius XII is not attractive or accurate, met Sister Briege McKenna while he was searching to restore the faith that he once had while being a seminarian in his youth. Sister Briege attracted him because she had powers of healing in which he had been reluctant to believe. He describes her as being “both deeply mature and yet extraordinarily child-like”. She made it plain to him that she was nothing, and that if she got a headache she took an aspirin. This is his account of her life:

It all began, she went on, with a dramatic healing of her own body. When Briege was twelve, her mother had died of a cerebral haemorrhage. In 1962, at fifteen, she had left behind her tenant-farmer father and four brothers to enter a strictly enclosed convent in Newry, County Armagh. Her father was heartbroken, but he told her, ‘if that’s what you want, go ahead, and if it’s not what you want, you’ll know it’. Two years later, she developed crippling rheumatoid arthritis in her feet and hands. She remembers the Sisters had to put plaster boots on her feet to prevent deformity; ‘I used to faint with the pain’. She was transferred to a community in Tampa, Florida, but the humid climate only made things worse; ‘by 1968, I was a cripple, on high doses of cortisone. My feet were completely twisted and I had sores’. During this period, she was suffering problems with her religious vocation and sat for many hours in the chapel, close to despair. ‘One morning, I felt a hand on my head. I opened my eyes and no one was there, but I felt a power going through my body. I looked down. My fingers were limber, the sores were gone and my feet were no longer deformed. I jumped up, screaming, ‘Jesus! You’re right here!’

Those who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, a force for healing throughout the world, were alcoholics. They went through ruining their own lives and those of their families and then had the dynamism to bring others to right. How would they have had it without that journey? When it comes to treatment centres for drug addicts, an essential component is to have either a director who has passed through addiction or counsellors who, because of that history, can really talk to addicts. There is no conventional training that can set you up for this because it is what you are, and not what you say, that can touch people. Take the case of Norma Hotaling, a major force against the prostitution of women. Herself a prostitute for twenty-one years, she found the strength to come off drugs by insisting that she be jailed where the trauma of withdrawal almost killed her. In 1992, she founded ‘Standing Against Global Exploitation’ in San Francisco to offer women in prostitution a way out. In collaboration with the police officer who had charged her dozens of times with soliciting, she developed an offender programme for men charged with sex buying. The programme offered offenders the chance for the prosecution to drop the case if they paid a fee and attended a course of sessions, some run by former prostitutes, on what the reality of prostitution really is. Very few men reoffended. Where did she get the courage? This is what she said about her feelings before running the first course: “I was scared. I knew they would hate me. I never thought in my wildest dreams they would get anything out of it. At the end of the programme they were all crying.” So, what are we to do: write these people off, or admit that their experience may give them qualities that are a resource for society? Maybe alcoholism, addiction and prostitution are acceptable in our politically correct days as a background, maybe politicians who in their past have done wrong are not.

It is characteristic of a person who has integrity that they remain human. That means that they remain capable of making mistakes. You may have noticed that of those chosen as apostles, it is hard to find the self-righteous perfect specimen of the Pharisee. What is revolting about the way that people like Hitler were treated is that their followers ascribed to them qualities that admitted of no error, no lack of wisdom, no reflection and no foible. Every person who is genuine is capable of being led astray by a mad fanatic who believes his own lies. Ghandi was certainly the apostle of change through non-violence, but one contemporary interview published as an extra with the DVD of Attenborough’s film, showed an interview where he seems to make a veiled reference to what might happen if that strategy is not proven to be successful. What did he mean? It is dangerous to start judging people. Certainly, our current media obsession with taking a public figure and finding out all the wrong that they have done in their lives, according to their standards, and destroying them reflects the lack of balance within us since we take this seriously. It is a grave danger. If you take any figure you can find bad mistakes. Through them people grow, one hopes at not too much cost to others. It is what people do when faced with ultimate questions that matters. Pope John XXIII, as apostolic nuncio during the Second World War, offered the Jews of Bulgaria the ceremony of baptism in order to save them from the Nazis. He managed to persuade King Boris that surrendering his Jewish subjects would lead to his eternal punishment in hellfire and damnation. Well before that, in Italy in 1924, two days before the general election, he wrote to his sisters:

In my conscience as a priest and as a Christian, I don’t feel I can vote for the Facists . . . of one thing I am certain: the salvation of Italy cannot come from Mussolini even though he may be talented. His goals may, perhaps, be good and correct, but the means he takes to realise them are wicked and contrary to the Gospel.

Nowadays, people would protest against an opinion that any object of Mussolini might be good in any way. The divided nature of people and of our society makes us long to see the all good and the all bad. Many people, correctly I think, see the start of the madness that led to Hitler as beginning with the invasion by Italy of Ethiopia in 1936. It was allowed to happen, maybe because of European racism towards Africans. Some had sympathy. Reading the explorer Wilfred Thesiger’s autobiography, brings alive the savagery of this contest where the Italians used chemical attacks against an army equipped with the mentality and many of the weapons of the Middle Ages and who were without proper uniforms, equipment and who went barefoot. Nonetheless, and without seeing this side of the picture, Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope, wrote this about the ‘success’ of Mussolini;

Makes it seem that a hidden force is guiding him and protecting Italy. Perhaps it is a reward for having made peace with the Church, perhaps it is an invitation from providence always to live better. People say there is precious little liberty in Italy. But what happens in the countries where liberty triumphs - socialism and communism as in Spain, Russia, Mexico and now France?

However, when the Italian community in Istanbul, where the future Pope was the nuncio, wanted him to sing a Te Deum to celebrate the victory he refused. How do we expect, and by what means, a person, priest or not, to understand everything and to make the right decisions always? For me, the most striking example of this comes from the life of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky as recorded in the memoirs of Rabbi David Kahane ‘The Lvov Ghetto Diary’.

When a fact is removed from its context, it lacks wholeness. When Ukraine was invaded in 1941 by Hitler, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky welcomed it, thinking that it was going to be liberation from Soviet tyranny. Many other people felt the same way. Seeing the possibility of nationhood after hundreds of years, a solemn declaration of independence was made. This was ignored by the Germans. Any political structure that existed could be used for their ends, which was essentially parasitic. In 1945, Soviet propagandists took this fact as the basis for a deceitful pamphlet ‘The Cross and the Sword’ which presented the Metropolitan as a demon. They did not disclose that when the Red Army had invaded Ukraine in 1939, that they captured the Sheptytsky family residence, abused his brother and sister-in-law, made them dig their own graves and then shot them. Their supposed crime was of being landowners. Apart from the other abuses against the Church, this would be enough for any person to believe that anything, even the Nazis, as an alternative might be better. We do not know if the letter ascribed to the Metropolitan and written to Hitler on the invasion is forged or not. In the context of what he had experienced, it is an understandable error. He is supposed to have written this, but note that Gravchuk, not alone among serious historians, considers what follows a forgery,:

In your person, we see the invincible leader of the incomparable and glorious Garman Army. The aim of destroying and rooting out Bolshevism which you, as Führer of the Great German Reich, have made the target of this campaign, wins your Excellency the gratitude of the entire Christian world.

Many Ukrainians anticipated better on the German invasion. A committee was set up to cooperate with the Nazis in the hope of establishing nationhood. As soon as the declaration of independence was made, the Metropolitan warned the politicians that their rule should be based on law and guaranteeing that there should be no discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin, nationality or religion. This was a clear reference to the Jewish people. When the Nazi policies unfolded, he wrote to Himmler protesting at the murder of Jewish people and the drafting into this vicious task of what he saw as simple and easily led Ukrainians. The Nazi who delivered Himmler's response bluntly told the Metropolitan that if it were not for his age, he would have been shot for meddling in matters that should not concern him. As the abuses against the Jewish people escalated from the murder of smaller groups, to ghettoisation to mass murder, two rabbis turned to him for assistance. Chief Rabbi Lewin asked that he should hide the scrolls of Torah. The Metropolitan saved them from desecration. Rabbi Lewin felt that the fate of his people was his own, and he shared death with him. His son, Kurt, however, was sheltered by the Metropolitan. Rabbi David Kahane, his wife and daughter, were put into hiding by the Metropolitan. It was easier to save Jewish children than adults and many were hidden in various monasteries and orphanages. Of course, not enough was done and of course, many either did not share the enlightened views of the Metropolitan or did not choose to put themselves in the way of harm. In one monastery, a search was anticipated. In order that the entire community should not be murdered by the Nazis, should the Jews be found, the Igumen asked for a volunteer who would accept personal responsibility, thus shielding the rest of the community. Every monk volunteered. Other monasteries simply refused to help. Rabbi Kahane’s family was split up between three locations and where they were sheltered often changed. One awful scene that his wife witnessed happened when a priest was hiding her in his house with his wife and family, Byzantine-rite priests are generally married, in the countryside near a railway line. It illustrates the dilemma faced by those under the Nazi occupation. Several naked people jumped out of train transports on the way to a death camp. Some turned up to the priest’s door and begged for help. He did not admit them but quickly brought clothes and food and asked them to go on their way. It is clear from the narrative that if the priest had brought the innocent fugitives into hiding in his home that the family and Rabbi Kahane’s wife would be in immediate peril. When the monastery that was Rabbi Kahane’s hiding place became subject to a series of searches, he was returned in the robes of a monk to the residence of the Metropolitan in Lviv. All day long, people were coming and going, the Germans frequently visiting on particular forms of business and on the receipt of information from traders who suspected what was afoot, thoroughly searching the residence. The rabbi was given work in order to calm his mind, in the library, and an ingenious hiding place was created behind book stacks for these occasions.

Rabbi Kahane was deeply troubled by the suffering of his people. It is clear from his memoirs that at times he was close to madness. His faith was that the Jewish people were in a covenant with God. This is everywhere in the Old Testament and is expressed by the Prophet Ezekiel in this way:

As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day. And I will bring them out from the people and gather them from the countries, and will bring them to their land and feed them upon the mountains of Israel, by the rivers, and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them in a good pasture, and upon the high mountains of Israel shall their fold be: there shall they lie in a good fold, and in a fat pasture shall they feed upon the mountains of Israel. I will feed my flock and I will cause them to lie down, sayeth the Lord God. And I will bring that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick: but I will destroy the fat and the strong; I will feed them with judgment.

Years later, writing his memoir of that terrible time, Rabbi Kahane speculated that the abuses inflicted on his people could be a punishment from God in response to their assimilation. It was also possible, he thought, that from time to time God veiled his face so that he did not see and did not respond to injustice.

Out of a sense of misplaced kindness, while hiding in the library of the palace of the Metropolitan, a priest brought him some books that were written after the Ukrainians had made their first official pilgrimage in 1903 to the Holy Land. One of them contained anti-Zionist comments, comparing the Jews praying at the Western Wall with those who were merchants at home. The author called this part of the Temple Mount by the offensive term “the Wailing Wall.” He wrote that “forever you will weep and will not stop; the walls will never be rebuilt”. One night, the rabbi asked the Metropolitan about this. Did it mean that if an independent Jewish community ever established a nation in Israel, the Christian Church would refuse to recognise the state? The memoir continues:

The Metropolitan thought for a moment before answering and then began: ‘I would like to place your question in the context of the present situation of the people of Israel. You must know that the Church displays a humane and friendly attitude towards the Jewish people. The official Church harshly and sternly denounces attacks on Jews. We are opposed to the atrocities of the Nazis and we shall do our utmost to denounce them as inhuman and sacrilegious. The Pastoral Letter of the German Cardinal, Faulhaber, as well as my own Pastoral Letter of November 1942, provide unmistakeable evidence of the stance of the Church towards Nazism and its position on the Jewish question. Publication of my Pastoral Letter was beset with difficulties and it had to run through several trials of censorship. Recently, an official delegation from the German Foreign Ministry paid me a visit. I openly denounced their deeds and lodged a protest against the brutal and cruel treatment of the Jews. As human beings, we are obliged to voice our opposition to this and condemn in the strongest terms the persecution of Jews and all forms of racial discrimination. I am aware that over the centuries, Christendom committed sins against the Jews. I am aggrieved by this, deeply aggrieved, and I do as much as I can to forestall the grave sin of persecution of Jews. This much I stress in my letter to Himmler. As for the book on the pilgrimage, there are a number of theological postulations of a dogmatic nature which requires to take certain exceptions to the Zionist political aspirations concerning an independent Jewish state in Palestine’. The Metropolitan fell silent for a moment and continued: ‘Have you ever thought about it and asked yourself, what is the source of the hatred and savage persecution of the Jewish people from ancient times until the present? What is their origin?’ He pointed at the bookshelves, asked me to find the New Testament in Hebrew translation and locate chapter 27, verse 25, in the Gospel according to Matthew: ‘It says there, ‘and the whole people answered and said His blood will be on us and on our children.’ In other places, Jesus says explicitly that not a stone will be left standing of the Temple and the glory of Jerusalem. If you ponder this, and take into consideration the relevant chapters of the New Testament, you will understand the comments of the author of the book on our pilgrimage.’

One can only imagine what the thoughts of the rabbi were at hearing this. The Metropolitan was expressing a doctrinal view. His actions proved that his human attitudes transcended any temptation to exclusion, much less to hatred. We do not know where the heart of the Metropolitan led his thoughts that night. He was a great scholar and he had described in a letter to a friend how when an understanding of sacred scripture came to him, it was like a literal illumination. Perhaps he remembered the horrible drama that led to Christ’s death unfolded among people of the Jewish faith, many of whom were related to Him, followed Him, or believed in Him and very few of whom could have wished for the death of an innocent man. Political manipulation distorted their minds. As an antidote to what was standard thinking, and that certainly never made it right, the Metropolitan had seen at first hand how a small clique in Germany had manipulated a talented people to the point of causing many millions of deaths by murder and war. The Soviet example of power, under which he, his family, his church, and his people had suffered, was not different. Now his people were manipulated, despite all his efforts, into murder. The Gospel account of the betrayal of Christ, the distortions of his trial and the distortion of the natural goodness of the people, which all evangelists make clear, so that the people were drawn into calling for His death are hardly different. Manipulations and distortions occur in every era and being led by them is part of human nature.

On the morning, the rabbi was informed that the Metropolitan wished to see him that evening. The conversation was deferred for safety until after nightfall when all of his guests, including Nazi spies, would be gone. That evening, the rabbi was ushered into the Metropolitan’s study. He was invited to sit next to him. Then he spoke:

Our conversation yesterday did not let me sleep. I am remorseful and sorry about the content of our conversation. I shouldn’t have spoken as I did. In the ongoing ordeal when the Jewish people bleed to death and sacrifice hundreds of thousands of innocent victims, I should have known better than to touch upon this subject. I knew that such a conversation aggrieved you greatly. I ask you to forgive me. After all, I am mortal and for a moment I let myself be distracted. He reached out his hand and warmly shook mine. His eyes and face were more eloquent than his words in asking for forgiveness. If I still harboured any doubts about the purpose of his rescue undertakings, his candid words issuing straight from the heart, dispelled them completely. It was such extraordinary, thoroughly humane persons that our sages had in mind when they wrote: ‘The righteous of the nations of the world have a portion in the world to come’.

It is unpleasant to think about one’s own guilt. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Jung attempted to explain what had occurred in his essay ‘After the Catastrophe’. Is his conclusion correct that going wrong is a necessary part of self-knowledge, and so human wholeness? Here it is:

It is indeed no small matter to know of one’s own guilt and one’s own evil, and there is certainly nothing to be gained by losing sight of one’s shadow. When we are conscious of our guilt, we are in a more favourable position - we can, at least, hope to change and improve ourselves. As we know, anything that remains in the unconscious is incorrigible; psychological corrections can be made only in consciousness. Consciousness of guilt can therefore act as a powerful moral stimulus. In every treatment of neurosis, the discovery of the shadow is indispensable, otherwise nothing changes. In this respect, I rely on those parts of the German body- politic which have remained sound, to draw conclusions from the facts. Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon. Was it not Meister Eckhart who said: ‘For this reason, God is willing to bear the brunt of sins and often winks at them, mostly sending to people for whom he has prepared some high destiny. See! Who was dearer to our Lord or more intimate with him than his apostles? Not one of them but fell into mortal sin, and all were mortal sinners’. Where sin is great ‘grace doth much more abound.’

I would have my doubts. He is probably right as to small matters, but as to the kind of thing that the courts sometimes see, I wonder. Sometimes guilt can be so great that its realisation overwhelms a person. Perhaps the two deaths that I mention as examples of this burden in ‘Lies in a Mirror’ are not enough to establish a principle. The dynamic was fairly clear in those cases, I believe anyway. In the example from history, Franz Stangl died from heart failure on being gently manoeuvred by his interlocutor Gitta Sereny into admitting that as Kommandant of a death camp that he bore responsibility for mass murder. Can you imagine that collapsing on top of you? Just as hard, maybe, is it to envision a situation where a pillar of the community is a revolting sex abuser who has hidden that pattern away not just from those who see him as decent but from himself. Well, on that illusion being stripped from his life, my client M.D. also died, like Stangl, from heart failure. There are times in life when group therapy is not enough; where it is no answer to life’s problems that others have failed in their humanity as well. Solzhenitsyn describes it too when he speaks of the situations where a Nazi accused in a war crime stands and admits his shame asking to take no further part in the trial. For those who feel their own wrong, immensely and in the full weight of affective feelings, connecting with the pain of their victims, previously seen as a source of pleasure or never considered, is a crippling burden. Redemption, in the supernatural sense, may over time offer transformation, as in Jung’s concept of the transcendent function. Such a realization is forced on people: often that is what the criminal process is about. It should be asked why our minds and our bodies are so connected to what we see ourselves as and what we eventually we realize we are. Metropolitan Sheptytsky offered even the murderer the prospect of rehabilitation over time, but in the meanwhile the Irish system of boycott was to be applied to him by all his neighbours so that he might come to see himself truly. That is why criminal gangs - be they fascists, terrorists or profiteers - form: each member can hold up a false mirror to the other. They never have to see each other. The system goes a step further when inspired by totalitarian desires an entire society is made to think the same way, hating Jews or Tutsi and submerging themselves in a value system of false absolutes. I return to the notion of ideological absolution. How is it possible? All that I know is that here, again, you are dealing with absolutes, with the part of the mind that governs our belief-systems. It must be at least as important as the entire life that a person has led, because when it goes, the vacuum that it leaves can suffocate a believer. In Doris Lessing’s autobiography, she tells of the time when she held Communist beliefs. She frankly admits to her feelings of superiority in her ideological self-satisfaction and the concomitant of despising the heretic other:

Firstly, that, within ten years, well fifteen then, the whole world would be Communist, from free choice, because of the manifest superiorities of Communism. There would be no race prejudice, oppression of women, exploitation of labour – no snobbishness or contempt for others. This paradise would follow a brief period of resistance by reactionaries, only a minority, after all, because by then ‘the State would have withered away’…Paradise, then, was on the world’s agenda, and soon. Who would lead the world thither? Why, we would, people like us, Communists, the vanguard of the working class, destined by History for the role. Exactly the same mind-set as my parents, who believed they represented God’s will, working by agency of the British Empire, for the good of the world…Secondly, that there was no way to paradise but by the Revolution. We despised anyone who did not believe in Revolution – that is, with a few exceptions…It was morally superior to believe in the Revolution, and those who did not were, at the least, cowardly. We were united with each other by superiority of character, because we were revolutionaries and good. Our opponents were bad. People who did not believe in socialism were not credited with good intentions: a set of mind that continues to this day. It is satisfying to believe in the moral inferiority of opponents.

The proof that apparent political opinion went beyond just a rational choice emerges in what she says about those who refused to believe. The centre of their being collapsed. If you will kill for it, it can kill you when it vaporises into nothing. It illustrates that there is a core to our beings, the God-image or archetype of the self if you would like to call it, but something more important than our being. Like Franz Stangl and the client I wrote about in ‘Lies in a Mirror’, this happened:

But I was never committed with all of myself to Communism. I know this by comparing myself with some who were. The tragic figures were those very poor boys and girls who found in Communism a hope, a way of life, a family, a university – a future. Some came out of the poor families of London’s East End, and joined the Young Communist League. For them Communism was everything, and when they lost their faith they were being deprived of everything that was best in life. Some died. Some had serious breakdowns. They were – but really – never the same again.

When it comes to the human mind we are feeling our way in darkness. I believe, however, that shunning the pretence that we are righteous, and keeping in mind all of our fallibility, enables us to function at least somewhat better in the context of the problems that life throws at us. Throughout uninterrupted centuries, the Church always taught that a believer was not different to a pagan, in that both could easily fall into serious wrong. The icon of the ‘Ladder of Divine Ascent’ expresses this. As the monks proceed up the thirty rungs of the ladder towards the awaiting Christ, no matter how high they go, demons pluck them off, pull them down and bring them to be swallowed up in hell. Perhaps the worst heresy is the notion that once we have joined a faith, we thereby become pure and somehow immune from our human nature. This is impossibility.

It is a popular belief in some Christian communities in America that once one has been saved, further serious wrong is impossible. Does this mean that one can bomb a city, for instance, and act fairly and correctly simply because one thinks of Christ as a personal saviour? Rather, I believe that everyone has to work out an honest relationship with their own dark side. The alternative is arrogance. The danger is that in suppressing knowledge of what is bad within ourselves, a demon will manifest itself as a person we hate or a group that we are driven to eliminate. That has been seen a lot, and always in the throes of that dynamic.



Peter Charleton
March, 2009




This book is about individual murder and mass murder.

What does a murderer, a rapist or a fraudster see when he looks in the mirror? Whatever he sees, it is not a true image of himself. If he did, could he live with himself?

This book is about hatred and how it transforms the way we see the world. “Behind every lie there is a crime”, writes the author but what does he mean? Lies disarm people of their wariness against those who intend hurting them. Criminals lie so as to get in to the house of the elderly man and rob him, or to charm the parents of the child they want to abuse or to make sure their victim does not defend himself. Criminals also live out a lie. People who have committed the worst crimes rarely see themselves as being in the wrong. They cannot admit to evil. If they do, that admission is liable to destroy them.

The author was inspired to write this extended essay on the nature of human evil by an obscure case that he dealt with as a barrister some years ago. A respected educator was caught abusing children and, immediately after his trial and sentence, died of heart failure. Underneath his life as a pillar of the community he was a paedophile. He lived out a myth about himself. When his denial was shattered, his heart failed. Do other criminals live out a myth? That is what the author claims. There are those who murder because their enormous, but fragile, self-regard is shattered by the break down of a relationship, those who kill because they are bested in a business deal and there are the gangland killers who liquidate their rivals “more for reasons of ego than the fact of a double cross”.

According to the author, myth is a living part of how people are inspired to act. Myths are good and bad. They are true and false. Our ancestors recited true myths to their children to warn them how the world works; to make them wary of mischief-makers and false heroes. The legends of Oisín and stories of the brothers Grimm can still illuminate our minds. When mass murder happens, other myths are in the air. According to the author it is then the negative power of false myths that drive on violence. False myths are the trap our mind can fall into: with disastrous consequences. The criminal who sees himself as a victim may kill a few people, but the ideological drive of God-like superiority of a movement like the Hutu-Power clique in Rwanda can kill a million over six weeks. What drives them?

In part, the answer is a shattered mind. It is what the mirror is made to see. Both the individual killer and the mass murderer have one thing in common: they see themselves in unreal terms. They can be people with a mission to transform the world, who will not worry that ‘paradise on earth’ can only be bought with the death of many thousands, or they can be otherwise insignificant people trapped by divine leaders into hating a group that they want eradicated. It is all very well to speak about the harm that is generated by looking at people as sub-humans, but what about the other side of that coin: how the killers see themselves? It is the myth of human superiority that leads to mass hatred of the outsider; the heretic and the group that mocks our unreal self-image. How can you trap people into hatred? Deceit, according to the author, is the instrument that leads people astray. But, of itself, it is not enough. It is when lies marry themselves to a living myth that hatred can run out of all control. When unreal expectations are shattered, the person living out that myth turns to violence, or inspires those who follow him, in an angry attempt to protect the lie through which he lives his life. On the level of mass murder, the myths of superiority pushed on the mass murderers from ancient times to the present; and it was that lie that made all their opponents seem to be sneaky, loathsome and incorrigible. There was a compellingly convenient answer when the warm illusion of myth struck against the hard edge of reality: to destroy the truth, to kill.

The author writes about his experiences with the murder cases that have often arisen from robberies in the isolated homes of elderly people in rural Ireland. The victims were defenceless, yet they were killed by being beaten to death. Why has that repeatedly happened? They had no weapons. The confession statements of those who witnessed these horrors record that the victims cried out for mercy. Yet, they got no mercy at all. In this book the author argues that having someone in your total power brings out the devil inside us: we do not respond with sympathy to those who plead but with aggression. And then there are those who are not responsible, according to themselves. They are outside the door, listening but distancing themselves. Why are they different to the train drivers of the Holocaust or the death camp commander who pleads that he was merely an administrator?

Every life experience has a negative and a positive side. The snake is the symbol of evil; it is also the symbol of healing in medical science. The mother can both nurture her children through her love and smother them with a fear of life. Killers, the author believes, are unnaturally onesided and it is this that makes them prone to violent reaction. This is why they look to the false myths of ideology allied to personal and group superiority.

The author tries, over 10 chapters, to establish the connection between myth as deceit and the perpetration of evil.

Chapter 1: The Origin of Evil – explores the parallels between mass murder and the cases of both ideological and domestic crime that the author has dealt with in court.

Chapter 2: Myths and Theories – looks at how Fromm, Jung, Solzhenitsyn and others have attempted to explain human destructiveness. The chapter suggests that other answers to this problem are also possible.

Chapter 3: Inverted Thinking, Mythical Thinking – analyses how myths spring naturally out of events that are too strong in their emotional impact for people to deal with rationally. One of the strongest of the myths justifying aggression is that of the criminal as victim, a pattern common to mass murder and domestic violence.

Chapter 4: Patterns of Destruction – takes recurring patterns of mass violence (such leader-genocide, rape in warfare, the feeling of being a victim and the murder of children) and debates if these patterns are rational or are myth based.

Chapter 5: The Divine Leader – asks how people could be mad enough to surrender all responsibility to leaders who think that they are gifted by Providence with a divine mission and endowed with super-human talents.

Chapter 6: The Paramount Idea – is concerned with how people can put their duty to an ideology not only above the rights of other people but also their own life. Martyrdom in a secular cause is understandable when seen as an expression of the defining aspect of how people see themselves.

Chapter 7: Spared by a Killer – presents several cases of people who have been spared from certain death by a gang of mass murders, in Bosnia, Iraq, Yemen, Nazi-occupied Europe, Rwanda and Armenia. Those who have escaped death have usually been spared because someone from the killer group has spoken out for the victim, thus bringing the idea of the mirror into focus: the killers see themselves through the responses only of their own kind.

Chapter 8: Closing the Circle of Hate – argues that human beings need to be locked in to a myth of hatred if mass murder is to succeed. This is not easy to achieve, argues the author: it requires “sheer low criminal cunning.” Instances of this are drawn principally from Rwanda, Nazi-occupied Europe and Armenia.

Chapter 9: I Was Not Responsible – discusses the murder of elderly people in rural areas, how the killers split into specialities of watchers and burglars in order to rob, but how degrading the victim to get him to reveal his mythical riches causes inhuman rage to boil over. Those merely watching can then deny culpability. This same pattern of denial of responsibility recurs in the commission of mass murder where a lot of people organise it but few individuals actually kill and all seem to end up shunning any admission of fault.

Chapter 10: The Trap of Myth – poses the central questions around deceit and the eruption of violence: is it about diminishing the self so that the negative side of human potential takes over? Many people, alcoholics are but one example, have transcended their problems through truth. Truth enables astonishing transformations in the human personality. Does deceit have an opposite effect of dis-integration, opening up the violent side of human nature?

The author bases his thoughts on a criminal practice as an advocate spanning twenty-five years. Initials and other forms of disguise are used to protect the privacy of those involved. All of the facts cited are those that were stated publicly in court but, as the author writes, no confidence is repeated and the right of people to try to forget is respected.

Peter Charleton is a barrister. He graduated in law from Trinity College Dublin in 1980 where he also lectured in criminal law. His previous books are: Controlled Drugs and the Criminal Law (Dublin, 1986); Irish Criminal Law, Cases and Materials (Dublin, 1991); Offences Against the Person (Dublin, 1991); and Criminal Law (Dublin, 1999, with P A McDermott and M Bolger).


Publication: Wednesday, 31 May 2006.

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