Donald Trump yet again demonstrated his innate taste, further honed at Atlantic City casinos. To celebrate the forthcoming opening of the conclave assembled to appoint a new pontiff, Trump posted an AI photograph of himself as Pope.
Many commentators screamed ‘blasphemy’ and ‘mockery’, while the Republicans Against Trump website wrote: “Trump just posted a photo of himself as the pope. It’s full-on lunacy at this point.”
All those comments are correct. Trump’s idea of a joke is indeed blasphemous and mocking, and I too have wondered for quite a while whether the Donald is certifiable.
I’m no shrink, just a reasonably well-read layman, but to my eye Trump’s behaviour is increasingly bizarre. Most lamentable lack of self-awareness, huge mood swings, unrestrained narcissism, the tendency to mouth mutually exclusive things within days, sometimes hours, of one another – all these are symptoms of a personality disorder, and I’ll leave it for professionals to diagnose it accurately.
Whether or not he is going insane, Trump is still eminently capable of looking out for Number One, meaning himself and his family. As Dominic Lawson pointed out in yesterday’s article, the Trumps control a cryptocurrency business called World Liberty Financial.
He promotes it on Truth Social, a platform managed by Donald Jr. I don’t know whether the family takes advantage of the numerous possibilities for corruption the cryptocurrency offers, but the platform itself is quite lucrative.
Trump uses it, rather than official White House channels, to announce his changes of heart on tariffs, which are as regular as they are market-sensitive. Hence market traders feel they have to subscribe to the platform to stay half a step ahead. This boosts the family’s profits at the time when those same U-turns are beggaring millions of Americans.
Trump is also offering wealthy businessmen the pleasure of his company at a Mar-a-Lago dinner for a modest fee of up to $5 million. To quote Mr Lawson: “As one of Trump’s political opponents pointed out on the floor of the Senate, ‘If you were mayor of a medium-sized town and it was reported that you were selling meetings for, like, $200, you would be arrested’.”
But getting back to Trump’s witty photographic joke, the first word that came to my mind when I saw it this morning was neither ‘blasphemous’ nor ‘mocking’, although they do apply.
The picture was unspeakably vulgar, and it belongs in the encyclopaedia to illustrate the entry for Vulgarity, n. On second thoughts, any other snapshot of Trump would do as well, for vulgarity is the dominant trait of his personality.
However, when vulgarity has Christianity in its sights, it’s a deadly weapon, more so in my view than even blasphemy and mockery. It’s a steady imposition of vulgarity on Christian worship that’s largely responsible for Christianity’s demise as a dynamic social and cultural force.
As far as I’m concerned, Trump is no Christian, despite all his entreaties for God to bless America, which is de rigueur for any US politician. Britons tend to regard that sort of thing as tawdry, and I for one can’t imagine a British PM ending a speech with “God bless the United Kingdom”. If he tried, he’d be laughed out of Westminster.
Trump was raised as a Presbyterian, but back in 2020 declared himself to be non-denominational, whatever that means. Here I must admit to a weakness: for me, there exist two kinds of Christianity I readily recognise as such: Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.
On everything else, including all Protestant denominations, I agree with Hilaire Belloc who regarded them as heresies. Some of my friends, who are kinder than me, and perhaps also better Christians, talk about all those sectarians, denominational or otherwise, as ‘brothers in Christ’.
Yes, and Cain was Abel’s brother. Then, come to think of it, Arians, Gnostics, Chiliasts, Pelagians also believed in Christ, after a fashion. However, if their fashion had prevailed, Christianity would only be remembered, if at all, as an attempt to reform Judaism in the early days of the Roman Empire. Looking at what’s happening to Christianity today, it’s hard not to see Protestantism as the anteroom of atheism.
To paraphrase Wilde, all sects and heresies are vulgar, although the mainstream churches are doing their best to keep up. Just compare these two excerpts from Matthew 1:25, the first one from the King James Version, the second from the NRSV. Both talk about Mary, Joseph and the Virgin Birth.
KJV: “… and knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son.”
NRSV: “… but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son.”
What tone-deaf vulgarian thought that the new line was an improvement on the old one? How could any genuine believer introduce the ugly euphemistic locution ‘marital relations’ into a scriptural text?
If to Dostoyevsky beauty could save the world, vulgarity can destroy it. That’s why it pains me to see at the helm in the West’s most powerful nation a man whose salient traits Dominic Lawson describes, alliteratively, as “vanity, viciousness, venality and vulgarity”.
Oh well, as long as Trump doesn’t turn to translating the Bible in his retirement.
Scattered thoughts again:
1. I’ve said before that Mr Trump is no more vulgar than his opponents. I stand by that, because I suspect that the likes of Mr Biden and Mrs Pelosi have been sharing images of themselves as Popes in private and chortling over them in a vulgar manner: the difference is that Mr Trump is not only vulgar but also the kind of weirdo who habitually exposes his vulgarity to public ridicule.
2. The mighty John Milton and my beloved George MacDonald were both Non-Denominational Christians – and MacDonald was so thoroughly Non-Denominational that he couldn’t find a Non-Denominational congregation that would tolerate him as its pastor – but I fear that Mr Trump is Non-Denominational in the loose sense of Non-Believing.
3. Protestants are indeed heretics in so far as they’re Iconoclasts. But in some other respects they seem to me to be erroneous in exactly the same way as the Church of Rome. You may say that it’s the Orthodox who are in error, and it’s possible that you’re right, but it’s a fact that, where we disagree, you often agree with Luther and sometimes even with Calvin, who seem to me to be largely in agreement with Anselm and Aquinas. We’re not going to solve the Protestant problem until we solve the East-West-Schism problem, and we’re not going to solve that until the Church of Rome acknowledges paternity of its idiot bastard sons.
4. The use of the Hebraic euphemism “to know” is present in St Matthew’s Greek text, in which such Hebraisms are common, so the modern translation is not only ugly but also inaccurate. In the NRSV and similar distorted translations, I fear that such inaccuracies are often intentional.
5. Leo I was a good Pope. Leo III and Leo XIII were bad Popes. There are ten Leos of whom I remember nothing either good or bad, but my best hope is that Leo XIV will resemble them, because my worst fear is that he’ll resemble Leo XIII, and make even the vulgarian Pope Donald I seem preferable.
Unlike Wycliffe, Tyndale translated the OT from its original Hebrew, not Vulgate. And of course he used the original Greek for the NT. He felt those languages went more naturally into English than into Latin, specifically the English he wished to write: direct, laconic, free of too many subordinate clauses, rhythmic, simple yet elegant. His translation made up some 80 per cent of KJV and did much to form our understanding of what constitutes good English prose. He would have a coronary if he saw ‘marital relations’. Tyndale’s timing wasn’t good though. He was burned at the stake for translating the Bible two years before Thomas Cromwell made it obligatory for every church to use the vernacular version, preferably Tyndale’s.
Tyndale, however, was a fire-eating Protestant, whose basically anticlerical, or rather anti-ecclesiastical, theology is as alien to me as his language is appealing. Luther and especially Calvin preached the same theology, which is why I regard Protestantism as both a heresy and the anteroom of atheism. My problems with Eastern Orthodoxy, on the other hand, are mostly not theological but cultural.
Excessive Latinism is a fault not only of the Wycliffite Bible but also, sadly, of Douai-Rheims. Therefore monoglot English-speaking Roman Catholics have a problem, because the Confraternity Bible is ghastly, Ronald Knox is periphrastic, and the Jerusalem Bible, although sometimes quite elegant, was translated not even from Latin but from French. And the few Orthodox translations I’ve seen are abysmal.
So we have to use Protestant Bibles if we want accuracy and elegance. The fire-breathing Protestantism that disfigures Tyndale’s version was gradually reduced in the Great Bible, the Bishops’ Bible (which was good enough for Shakespeare) and the AV. The AV lasted long enough to be the Bible of Cosin, Laud, Ken, Law, Johnson, Keble, Pusey and Newman, which makes it good enough for me (But the Psalms are more singable and therefore more beautiful and therefore better\ in Coverdale’s version.)
I share your cultural objections to the Orthodox Liturgy. Western-Rite Orthodoxy is my ideal, with the words as close as possible to the words of Tyndale, Coverdale and Cranmer and the music largely provided (with some adjustment of the words) by Palestrina and Bach. But I have the same, or greater, cultural objections to what goes in post-Vatican-II RC churches. Don’t you?
But of course. However, even as it’s still possible to find 1666 Anglican churches, one can still find Latin Mass churches, at least in London. Vatican II was an abomination, but there are still ways around it. For how long, I’ve no idea. But my Bible is the KJV. By the way, the French translation is awful too.
Which French translation? I’m not keen on Segond, but Ostervald is often pleasing.
“L’Éternal est mon berger: je ne manquerai de rien. Il me fait reposer dans de verts pâturages. Il me dirige près des eaux paisibles.” – Segond (1910)
“L’Éternal est mon berger, je n’aurai point de disette. Il me fait reposer dans des parcs heureux, et il me conduit le long des eaux tranquilles.” – Ostervald (1724)
Real French confronts Republican French!
I’m not sure which translation it is. It’s just that, whenever I’m at Mass in France, I make a mental note how flat the words are.
If it’s read during a Vatican-II Mass, it’s probably worse than either of the Huguenot translations I quoted. But isn’t “le long des eaux tranquilles” brilliant? It could easily be sung in an opera by Rameau. And “des parcs heureux” is even better!
My battered but complete Ostervald was printed in Strasbourg in 1868, and I paid about two quid for it in a charity shop. The print is tiny but so clear that even my elderly eyes can read it. But like most good things, Ostervald’s Bible is hard to find nowadays.
I don’t need to tell you that Luther’s German Bible is as good as the Authorised Version, because you’ve heard some of it set to music by Bach.
Within minutes I discover that I’m wrong. Ostervald’s Bible isn’t hard to find, because it’s on the Internet.
https://www.biblestudytools.com/ost/
“Au commencement, Dieu créa les cieux et la terre. Or la terre était informe et vide, et les ténèbres étaient à la surface de l’abîme, et l’Esprit de Dieu se mouvait sur les eaux. Et Dieu dit: Que la lumière soit; et la lumière fut. Et Dieu vit que la lumière était bonne; et Dieu sépara la lumière d’avec les ténèbres. Et Dieu nomma la lumière, jour; et il nomma les ténèbres, nuit. Et il y eut un soir, et il y eut un matin; ce fut le premier jour.”
Very elegant, tolerably accurate, and nothing remotely resembling “marital relations” to be seen!
Unfortunately, my German isn’t good enough to appreciate the quality of Luther’s translation.