{n the banks, on both sides of
the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food.
Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they
will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for
them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food,
and their leaves for healing. Ezekiel 47.12
{hen the angel showed me the
river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing
from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle
of the street of the city. On either side of the river is
the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit,
producing its fruit every month; and the leaves of the
tree are for the healing of the nations. Revelation 22.1-2
{he wrongdoers shall be
sternly punished. As for those that have faith and do good
works, they shall be admitted to gardens watered by
running streams, in which, by their Lord's leave, they
shall abide for ever. Their greeting shall be: 'Peace!' Koran 14.23
{here are two networks
in the world today, each unravelling the other. One is
Judaeo-Christian and even Islamic, and based upon the quality
of mercy. The other is based upon the profit motive, upon
greed, and now takes as its sacred texts, Machiavelli's The
Prince , which it misreads, and Darwin's Origin of
the Species, which it again misreads. The English word
'kindness ' comes from that for 'nature ', English lacking
really a proper word for ' mercy', God's ' loving kindness'
for us, Hebrew's hesed. We
see this use in Julian of Norwich's Showing
of Love. When Portia, in Shakespeare's Merchant
of Venice IV.1.184-6, gave her speech, condemning Jewish
Shylock, 'The quality of mercy is not strain'd, It droppeth as
the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath ', she was
actually quoting Jewish Moses' own words about God's mercy for
us, 'My doctrine shall drop as the rain: my speech shall
distil as the dew; As the small rain upon the tender herb: and
as the showers upon the grass' (Deuteronomy 32). She was
attacking in Shylock the modern business world's, the First
World's, obsession with the profit motive. One hears it now in
the structures of religion, education and medicine, where it
does not truly belong. It is for profit only, not seeing
people as a resource. Portia is guilty of misreading the
Bible's Law and twisting to her own ends Moses' words, for all
her legal brilliance. But we need to take up her
attack/defence and plead with it for all God's Citizens, all
of us as created and coined in God's image.
Niccolò Machiavelli
was writing in a Florence that had been a Republic, dedicated to
the love of God and one's neighbour, 'l'amor di Dio e del
prossimo '; and proclaiming with that Christian ideal, the other
of the pagan Roman Republic, before its days of Empire, of
'Libertas '. But he was now sadly and bitterly and with tongue
very much in cheek writing about a Florence which had been taken
over by a tyrannical mercantile nouveau-riche family, the
Medici. It was openly said in this period, by members of the
Church like Thomas Aquinas and Girolamo Savonarola, that such
tyrant princes are 'motivated solely by the basest of instincts:
rapaciousness, lust, pride and avarice'. Such attributes in this
period clearly represented the reverse of all Judaeo-Christian
values. Machiavelli
writes in such a way that he seems to be offering 'profitable'
advice to his Prince. But he could trust his Florentine citizen
readers to understand his bitter sarcasm and satire. He is like
Dean Swift in 'A Modest Proposal'. What he is truly saying is
from the Bible, from Psalm 118.9, 'Put not your trust in
princes'. Rather than being the trusty adviser to merchant
princes, Machiavelli
is provoking tyrannicide, which at this period Church
theologians, such as Aquinas and Savonarola, were proposing even
as a justifiable act. In one paragraph in The Prince Machiavelli unravels his
entire web, stating that once a people has known the taste of
freedom, as had Florence as a Republic - of which he himself had
been Chancellor - they shall never tolerate the tyranny of a
Prince. When Elizabethan plays created a villain, he was a
'Machiavel ', a character totally lacking in all morality and to
be despised and in no way admired, one who had deliberately
placed himself outside of God's pale, outside of the Kingdom of
Heaven, in that of Hell.
JESVS
CRISTVS
REX FLORENTINI POPVLI
S.P. DECRETO ELECTVS
were the words
democratically chosen to be placed above the Palazzo del
Popolo's entry, that Christ was proclaimed King of the
Florentine People. The Medici later, on their restoration,
changed the wording from 'JESVS CRISTVS/ REX FLORENTINI
POPVLI/ S.P. DECRETO ELECTVS' to 'REX REGVM/ DOMINVS/
DOMINANTIVM', to emphasise their tyranny.
But today Machiavelli's
Prince is taught in seminars to business executives in
America and in England not as satire, but as straight and
brutally frank advice. Such teaching is dastardly. It is a
profound misreading of the text. And it damages both the rich
and the poor. The rich pay a terrible price for their wealth -
that of others' poverty and misery, and that of the loss also of
their own health. An earlier economist, David Ricardo, advocated
the brutal economics of poverty in Ireland and its population
went from six million to three million. That is genocide. My own
great grandmother and great aunt died in that Famine, nursing
the poor, though themselves rich, of typhus. Caveat emptor,
caveat lector, Beware, Buyer, Beware, Reader, this text
has a skull and crossbones clearly marked upon it, showing it to
be as poisonous - as carcinogenic - as a pack of Marlborough's
cigarettes. I took early retirement as a university professor,
loving teaching but finding the ambitiousness of the
newly-adopted corporate style policies of universities, that the
more one published, the higher one's salary would be, to be
detrimental to my health. The more I published, the more my
salary froze and the more my blood pressure rose! So, instead, I
took early retirement and I made the Vows of Poverty, Chastity
and Obedience simply to God. Only to find my colleagues of my
own age dying left, right and centre of me; those who survived
in fear of their lives from deadly problems associated with the
rich life, too much good food, too little exercise, too much
anxiety, too little soul-nourishing. My poverty is not misery,
but a different wealth; it is my health, my happiness and my
salvation. I and a contadino, a peasant, both climb a
mountain nearby, and we talk. He has been ordered by his doctor
to do so if he wishes to live. Last year he was miserable; this
year he is happy and healthy and climbs with a spring in his
step, a smile on his lips. I climb it to save bus fare and to
carry the groceries up, having no car. Join us!
Charles Darwin in The Origin of the
Species gave to Victorians not the model of the Bible, of
God creating Man at the beginning of the world, but that of
Evolution, of Man as evolving from lower forms of life, clawing
his way into 'superior' being, of ' Nature red in tooth and
claw', and the ' survival of the fittest', through competition.
That, too, my scientist colleagues told me, is actually a
misreading of Darwin's text. Yet the business world has adopted
it as its pseudo-model, both eliminating competitors and for its
marketing copying anything that is addicting: stimulants and
cigarettes, cars and petrol stations, fast food stores and
hamburgers; not understanding why these are counterproductive,
rather than evolving from them into those which are less of the
assembly line and more of the body and the soul. Maurice
Maeterlink pointed out that some species actually endanger
themselves through such pattern adoptions that are hazardous to
their bodies and their brains. We are interdependent, our
fragile and beautiful eco-sphere the astronauts saw from Space
requiring not the elimination of the competitor but co-survival
and symbiosis. We are more the delicate blue marble, the
Heavenwindow ourselves, of a Della Robbia , than we are of abloodied Dracula .
Medieval cities saw themselves as such a
balancing act, surviving off the agriculture of their
hinterland, requiring the love of God and one's neighbour, and
liberty, in order to flourish, their commerce being for
themselves but also for the common good, the 'Commonwealth', the
Res Publica. When tyrants in the Renaissance became wealthy and
powerful, to the detriment of others, there could be a creative
swirl about them of protest art, such as Michelangelo's bust of
the tyrannicide Brutus, and his magniloquent Medici Tombs, but
these princes shattered the prosperity of the many, reducing
them to misery, and walled themselves up in fortresses against
the discontent of their people. They filled their vast
slave-built halls with loot, with useless art; they lived as
though in soulless museums. But one can stand in Siena's
medieval City Hall, its Sala della Pace, and see on the
one hand the city, the Res Publica of Siena, at peace
and in prosperity, its hinterland safe and yielding a rich
harvest, its young people studying in schools and dancing in its
streets, on the other, the city ruled by vice, resulting in
criminality, poverty, famine, our Kosovos and Baghdads.
In Florence and elsewhere, during the
Middle Ages, confraternities came into being whose members would
help the deserving poor, the sick and the dying. These
confraternities still exist today. One sees the ambulances of
Florence's Misericordia parked
outside the Duomo. They are manned, and womanned as well, by
black-clad lay volunteers, a rosary about their belt, who tend
to the sick and the dying, caring for both their physical and
their spiritual needs. Seven hundred years ago their members had
laid the first stone of that cathedral. Today, at the Cena
Domini, on Maundy Thursday, the Cardinal Archbishop of Florence
washes the feet of eleven of them as they sit before him on the
altar steps.
The Good Men of St Martin, the Buon Uomini
di San Martino, another confraternity, started by a Florentine
Bishop, are to own only their simple chapel by Dante's house,
and a strong box, nothing else. Into that box is placed the
money the members will then anonymously disburse and the
requests for assistance received from the proud poor. They have
been doing so for hundreds of years.
The rich banker
father of Dante Alighieri's Beatrice Portinari founded the
hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, that still exists today. Dante
Alighieri's teacher, Brunetto Latino, in his guilt at the
cannibalism of Ugolino of his progeny in the Pisan famine the
Florentines wrought, helped with founding Orsanmichele as a
granary to feed the starving, including the enemy, in famine
tide. Florence also established the Bigallo and the Hospital
of the Holy Innocents, to take in abandoned babies and to
raise them amidst some of the greatest art the world has
produced, especially commissioned for them, paintings of the
Slaughter of the Innocents, paintings of the Nativity,
paintings of the Holy Family.
Andrea Della Robbia, Holy Innocent,
Hospital of the Holy Innocents, Florence
Even the criminals going to their execution
from the Bargello to the Porta Santa Croce, as they journeyed
along the Borgo La Croce saw this image painted in a tabernacle,
of Christ's mercy and Mary's, reaching out to them:
(The glass protecting the Tabernacle's
fresco is reflecting the building on the opposite side of the
street, creating this visionary effect.) Then, under the
influence of Cesare Beccaria's book, On Crimes and
Punishments (1764), against capital punishment as barbaric
and uncivilized, both the Grand Duke of Tuscany (1786) and the
Tsar of Russia (substituting for it, exile to Siberia) abolished
it, this square in Florence, into which Borgo la Croce opens,
now being called 'Piazza Beccaria'.
Rather than adopting the Renaissance and
Victorian anti-models of Machiavelli
and Darwin, perhaps we could adopt these medieval models of the
Florentine Misericordia
and the Buon Uomini di San Martino? Rather than bankrupting
families with the care of their ill members, or aborting babies that are unwanted, why
not establish hospitals like Santa Maria Nuova and the Hospital
of the Holy Innocents, in New York, London, Melbourne. These
confraternities and these hospitals are contemporary with Julian
and reflect her theology of the love of one's 'even-Christian'.
Julian herself, because of such charity, was enabled to write
her Showing of Love. Here, in Florence, rich and poor
come together to help poor and rich in the times of their
greatest need - and in helping others with mercy all set in
place a structure which in turn will benefit themselves in their
own time of the greatest need. But more than that, in having
helped another, each overcomes in part his own selfishness and
finds joy, each overcomes his own fear of death and finds love.
Here is a model where the city carries out its commerce, and
balances it with charity, using the one to fund the other. There
could be no better insurance. It also costs the least. This
pattern, this model, exists as well with Italian savings banks,
which are required by law to disburse a portion of their profits
for charity and for culture. Consequently the rich banks earn
the respect of the citizens because the citizens also have
benefitted from their wealth. It is not a lottery system,
redolent of the gambling casino, as set up now in England, but
an obvious and overt tax on profit for the common good. Such
banks in Italy helped fund libraries, book publication,
research, scholarly conferences, concerts, art restoration,
hospitals and ambulances with grants from their profits,
benefitting the communities culturally and medically from whom
they profit. It is a Catholic model one should love to see
adopted in Protestant England, America, Canada, and Australia as
well.
'Christ girded himself with the towel of our humanity to
minister to that which was sick'. Cyril of Jerusalem
Money is not an end in itself, only a means
to an end. Its currency is power. To hoard it up in the hands of
the few is to cause the poverty of the many - and the disease of
all. This bitter cold winter (now some winters ago) I saw young
people sleeping on the snowy pavements of London, without work,
without education, without skills, without hope. We need the
merciful commonwealth of a Florence to be understood and adopted
in other parts of the world, far more than we need misreadings
of Machiavelli and
Darwin in thought, word and deed. We could learn lessons of love
and prosperity from the Middle Ages. The Canadian economist John
Kenneth Galbraith said that the profits banks make are obscene.
It is obscene where money clusters in the hands only of the few,
blighting the lives of the many. It is not productive or
profitable in that way - except for a legacy of costly museums
to pride like Versailles. Far more profitable has been the
legacy of libraries of great learning preserved and treasured up
for use for century upon century. Books are a different economy
- and productive for the soul. People likewise are a different
economy. Educate a woman in a Third World nation, which costs
little to do, and the life expectancy rises, the infant
mortality drops, far beyond what the monetary investment could
ever have hoped to achieve. Or give a Third World family an
Oxfam donkey. At Nuremberg, the Hippocratic Oath was given this
addition: 'I will not permit consideration of race, religion,
nationality, party politics or social standing to intervene
between myself and my patient'. Balance the two webs
productively of greed and charity, cruelty and mercy. Money is a
language for power - to do ill or good. Like water and seed, it
is needed upon the parched earth that rich harvests may ensue,
harvests of learning, of beauty, of skills, of nurturing, of
caring, of joy, of love.
he quality of mercy is
not strain'd, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon
the place beneath.
Shakespeare,
The Merchant's Tale
y doctrine shall drop as
the rain: my speech shall distil as the dew; As the small rain
upon the tender herb: and as the showers upon the grass.
To donate to the restoration by Roma of Florence's formerly abandoned English Cemetery and to its Library click on our Aureo Anello Associazione's PayPal button: THANKYOU!
n the banks, on both sides of
the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food.
Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they
will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for
them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food,
and their leaves for healing. Ezekiel 47.12
hen the angel showed me the
river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing
from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle
of the street of the city. On either side of the river is
the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit,
producing its fruit every month; and the leaves of the
tree are for the healing of the nations. Revelation 22.1-2
he wrongdoers shall be
sternly punished. As for those that have faith and do good
works, they shall be admitted to gardens watered by
running streams, in which, by their Lord's leave, they
shall abide for ever. Their greeting shall be: 'Peace!' Koran 14.23 
he quality of mercy is
not strain'd, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon
the place beneath. 
y doctrine shall drop as
the rain: my speech shall distil as the dew; As the small rain
upon the tender herb: and as the showers upon the grass.
