LITMIR.BIZ

      On that same blustery winter morning, Michel Montvert studies the late Chilean painter Roberto Matta’s “psychoanalytic views of the mind,” his esoteric “landscapes of the soul.” Matta, a Socialist, believed art, music and poetry have the power to change the lives of people. Montvert, a humanist in an age of declining humaneness, believes that only when freed from adversity, want and suffocating ideologies will people partake of art’s enticing fruits.

      Unlike de Ravaillac, Montvert comes from a culture where the word God was never uttered -- except as a reflex expletive -- and death or the hereafter had no place at the dinner-table, either in a mystical or existential context. He was never given a religious education, nor deprived of such, and the notion of an invisible, omnipotent creator/arbiter/destroyer seemed ludicrous to him even as a boy. By the time he was old enough to contemplate the enormity of his parents’ suffering, especially during the German occupation of France, their indifference to religion had turned to embittered agnosticism -- his father’s early childhood religious upbringing and his mother’s genteel, pseudo-assimilation into a Christian mainstream notwithstanding. Struck with pancreatic cancer, his mother had endured several months of martyrdom and died convinced that religion is a travesty and a fraud. Heartbroken, his father, a physician, grieved at the fragility of the human body and railed against the staggering imperfection of medical science. He spent the rest of his days in the company of a cantankerous cat mourning his wife and perusing and annotating the Bible -- the Old Testament (he considered the New Testament a crude fantasy) -- not for inspiration or comfort, but to vilify it, to find the contradictions and highlight the aberrations, to poke a wrathful finger at God’s unfathomable cruelty, to denounce man’s limitless propensity for evil.

      Montvert and his father had often chatted long into the night about religion, not in pursuit of an ideological abode but as an exercise in pure reasoning. They agreed that the underpinnings of religion -- mysticism, the supernatural, the credo quia absurdum (I believe BECAUSE it is absurd), faith in an invisible entity, the rituals, the taboos, the hellish penalties -- had all been contrived to enslave man, not to liberate him. They acknowledged the simplistic precepts of the “Golden Rule,” or Ethic of Reciprocity, present in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (but probably of more ancient Buddhist provenance) yet pointed at man’s inclination to ignore it, even violate it, in the name of Yahweh, Theos and Allah. They quoted from Hillel the Elder, the 1^st century BCE rabbi who summed up the Torah with the command, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.” They read Luke (6:31), which teaches, “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” Last, they turned to the Koran’s lofty counsel, “No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.”

      But “others,” “neighbor” and “brother,” they knew, have a parochial meaning that, history has shown, signifies “those of our own kind -- us, not them.”

      This paradox had been astutely dissected a year earlier by CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour in God’s Warriors: The Clash Between Piety and Politics. Rebroadcast several times since its first airing, the three-part award-winning documentary offers a disturbing rendering of the three major religions’ penchant for violence in the service of deity. It also lays bare their unceasing effort to manipulate civil society through indoctrination, intimidation, civil disobedience and, all else failing, swift, copious bloodshed.

      Carried to its extremes, God’s Warriors had shown, religion is a dangerous eccentricity that will render men insane. Only religious delirium could inspire a Muslim to plot the “honor killing” of his own daughter, or to bomb a disco filled with Jewish youths. Only mystical rapture could lead a self-styled Christian to murder doctors performing legal abortions. Only a Jewish zealot could violate the Torah, slaughter Muslims gathered in prayer in their mosque, torch cars on the Sabbath or assault members of a peaceful Gay Pride parade and threaten violence if the Jerusalem police chief allowed the pageant to proceed.

      This is the bare face of religion, Montvert père et fils had concluded. This is how religion transforms societies into citadels of intolerance, incubators in which simmers the hatred of “heretics,” a one-size-fits-all label that describes those who hold different beliefs or who grant themselves the inalienable right to espouse none. Within that conflict rests the unresolved tension between the command to “love one's enemies” and the equally strong injunction to reject and eradicate any alien or divergent dogma, to the death if necessary. In the final analysis, Montvert father and son had reasoned, neither Jew, nor Christian or Muslim knows which of the two commands to follow at any given time. By attacking “heretics” as tools of Satan, religious fanatics seize the rhetorical high ground and shift the focus from embracing one’s fellow man to the escapist option of waging war against an imaginary but prescriptive source of evil.

      This catch 22 was the preeminent rationale for a succession of gruesome confrontations: the Crusades, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Inquisition, the 30-Years War, the centuries-old strife in Northern Ireland, the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts, the Hutu-Tutsi reciprocal slaughter, the Hindu-Moslem-Sikh massacres in India and Kashmir, the bloodbath in Sudan and the cyclic carnage between Shia and Sunni Muslims.

      Nor has hatred of “heresy” spared the presumptive self-proclaimed paragon of probity, the United States.

      “Behold the proliferating dynasties of Elmer Gantries who are hijacking that nation’s psyche (while rifling through its pockets),” Michel Montvert had told me more than once, “and witness the phalanx of rapt soul-robbers whose stated strategy is to infiltrate and exploit the coercive power of government.”

      Montvert was right. Despite its implied but halfhearted tradition of separating church from state, the U.S. never made an honest effort to protect against the intrusion of religion into the body politic. The recent past had seen religion woven more deeply into the fabric of governance than ever before. Although the U.S. Constitution guarantees the non-involvement of government in religion, it has spinelessly failed to hinder religion from muscling in on the affairs of state. Such laissez-faire, absent in modern France, Montvert had warned, could lead to theocratic control.

      The fundamental weakness of democracy, my old friend had often protested, is that it tolerates in its very bosom the existence and propagation of undemocratic principles. With the right checks and balances, he had argued, and unrelenting vigilance, despotic ideas could be deflected. All would be lost if those who chip away at the civil liberties that democracy grants them are the very people sworn to protect the nation, by example, against the erosion of treasured constitutional rights.

      De Ravaillac, like all the self-anointed moralizers who find a haven in Opus Dei, sees no conflict in a Golden Rule that also makes room for the persecution of “heretics.” His sadomasochism can be traced to a straitlaced upbringing. He owes his iron will -- or is it his fixation with martyrdom -- to a stoic lot, an ancient family with an emblazoned past, now governed by retired French Navy Commander Clovis Godefroy de Ravaillac, his father -- whom Hubert still calls “sir” -- and his mother, Clothilde Dieudonnée de Ravaillac, a woman of exceptional beauty in her youth, now fending off the ravages of sun and tropics with heavy makeup and triple gins and tonic. Hubert, their only offspring (more by accident than choice) quickly learns to manage the lovelessness of his upper crust milieu “like a man,” a lesson further beaten into him with his parents’ consent by Jesuit bullies at the Collège Sainte Croix, where his dormant bisexuality is awakened and indulged.

      Outside of its own doctrinaire circle of

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