Vulgarian of London on the Shroud of Turin

Why is it that the scribbling ‘community’ seems dead-set on reaching the level of their incompetence? They must belong to a cabal devoted to vindicating the Peter Principle.

Good sports writers make pronouncements on politics, only succeeding in coming across as blithering – and, worse, ideologised – idiots. Insightful political commentators sound like philistine ignoramuses when talking about art. And then they all join forces to pronounce on matters religious with the élan of Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, head of Lenin’s League of the Militant Godless.

Yet Giles Coren, an entertaining restaurant critic, topped them all by adding vulgarity, rudeness and monumental stupidity to the ignorance normally expected of atheists passing judgement on Christianity and its artifacts.

Mr Coren didn’t attempt to score a direct hit on the Christian faith. Instead, he aimed his shots at the Shroud of Turin, no doubt hoping to hit the faith by ricochet.

That Mr Coren rejects the Shroud’s authenticity isn’t objectionable in itself. Many people considerably more knowledgeable than him share this incredulity.

Yet most of such doubting Thomases have the decency, sensitivity and elementary good manners not to write about the Shroud in the gutter language chosen by Mr Coren.

He opines that “the notorious Italian J-cloth is a fake” and “an entirely random piece of crap that is not related to anything real”. He could show “that the image on the shroud, if you tilt it through 90 degrees and squint a bit under UV light, is by no means the face of the Son of God, but a mandrill’s arse.”

I’d dearly love to see Mr Coren write in such terms about anything Muslims hold sacred. If recent history is anything to go by, he’d be instantly shortened by the head, which, on this evidence, should have no adverse effect on his writing career.

To be fair to Mr Coren, he is in good company. When even brighter and more erudite men than him try to take issue with faith, they sound, to quote Chesterton, like village atheists talking to village idiots.

Now, since the Shroud was discovered in the 14th century, some scientists have disputed its authenticity. In fact, a whole branch of science, sindonology, is devoted to the study and analysis of the cloth.

I’m no expert in such arcane disciplines as biological forensics, photoimaging and radiocarbon dating to have a strong view one way or the other. I doubt Mr Coren’s recondite expertise is significantly greater than mine, but, unlike me, he doesn’t let ignorance interfere with a strong opinion.

The current scientific consensus is that there is a 95 per cent probability that the cloth dates from the Middle Ages. While bowing to that landslide victory, I can still understand those who’d rather go by the remaining five per cent.

The Church has never declared that the Shroud is definitely genuine. It is, however, genuinely iconic.

Thus Pope Pius XII cautiously stated that the Shroud is a “holy thing perhaps like nothing else”. He approved of worshipping the Shroud simply because a representation of Jesus’s face deserves devotion.

John Paul II referred to the Shroud as “the mirror of the Gospel”, which it undoubtedly is. The three synoptic Gospels agree that Jesus’s body was wrapped in a burial cloth according to the Jewish custom. And the Gospel of St John identifies the fabric as linen.

Benedict XVI also refrained from authenticating the Shroud the way a scientist might. Instead he accurately described it as “an “icon written with the blood of a whipped man, crowned with thorns, crucified and pierced on his right side.”

However, many people who believe in Jesus Christ insist that the Shroud is his authentic burial cloth. Even if scientists proved with a 100 per cent certainty that the cloth is medieval, such believers wouldn’t budge.

They would simply say that God might have had his reasons for concealing the authenticity of the shroud. Surely, if Jesus was capable of raising the dead and turning water into wine, it wouldn’t have been beyond him to fool modern radiocarbon daters.

As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter one jot or tittle whether the cloth is authentic or not. The Shroud, as the Popes explained, is iconic, and icons are worshipped not for what they are, but for what they represent.

The nature of Christ, who was not only fully divine but also fully human, removed Judaism’s injunction against producing images of God. From the moment God became man, believers have been able to depict him in graven images.

Inasmuch as the graven images aren’t worshipped as such, such depictions violate neither Biblical commandments nor common sense. Yet Protestants, especially fundamentalist Calvinists, such as English Puritans or French Huguenots, still castigated such depictions as idolatrous.

That explains headless statues or even empty niches on the facades of great cathedrals. Fanatics tend to express their brand of art criticism with sledgehammers and dynamite.

In that proclivity they converge with fanatical atheists, like those ‘enlightened’ French revolutionaries or Soviet ghouls belonging to the aforementioned League of the Militant Godless. This confirms my feeling that Protestantism is the anteroom to atheism, but that is a subject for another day.

In any case, I’d venture a guess that Mr Coren is neither an English Puritan nor a French Huguenot. He’s probably not even an atheist fanatic in the Robespierre or Yaroslavsky vein.

I’d peg him as a typical media atheist who shares most superstitions of that undereducated yet ‘cool’ class. Prime among them is the belief that expertise in one area, no matter how narrow, automatically entitles its possessor to pontificate on subjects about which, to use Mr Coren’s preferred idiom, he knows bugger-all and understands even less.

If you can stand a piece of avuncular advice, Giles, stick to grub, a subject on which you write well. When you broach more involved topics, you sound neither grown-up nor clever. Crude flippancy is a poor substitute for intellect, especially outside the smarter areas of North London.

8 thoughts on “Vulgarian of London on the Shroud of Turin”

  1. The National Catholic Register on April 19 reported: “Working with a team of other researchers, Liberato De Caro of Italy’s Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council in Bari used a ‘Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering’ method to examine the natural aging of cellulose that constitutes a sample of the famous linen cloth.

    They concluded that their peer reviewed research shows the Holy Shroud is compatible with the hypothesis that it is much older than seven centuries old — the conclusion reached in 1988 using carbon dating techniques — and is around 2,000 years old.”

    I do not expect it to convert any non-believers or to dampen their smugness even a smidge, but I do take some delight when different methods of scientific analysis produce different results. That, I suppose, is God’s way of exposing their religion.

  2. I think theists sometimes fail to appreciate how deep the well of atheism goes: Schopenhauer, Freud, Peter Zapffe, E. M. Cioran, John Gray, Thomas Ligotti- how any man of faith can read any of these thinkers and remain confident in his religious beliefs is beyond me. As to the gentleman you mention, he needs to step his game up. I suppose Lenin’s publication didn’t need to be especially persuasive, reinforced as it was by the Cheka.

    As for the Shroud I’ve never looked into it.

    1. Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, Suarez, Hooker, Kierkegaard, Barth, Chesterton, Collingwood, Florensky, Gilson, C.S. Lewis, Maritain — how any man of no faith can read any of these thinkers and remain confident in his atheism is beyond me. And we do appreciate how deep the well of atheism goes. That appreciation had been hammered into us by the first fully atheist century, the 20th, in which more people died violent deaths than in all the previous centuries of recorded history combined. We don’t even have to read proven mountebanks like Freud to grasp that.

    2. “I think theists sometimes fail to appreciate how deep the well of atheism goes”

      I tried it once and discovered that the well of atheism may be deep, but at bottom, it is nothing dry hole. Why are all these atheists rooted in formerly Christian societies? These atheists are like astronauts who can explore the nothingness only because they’re connected somehow to a working life-support system.

      1. A distinction without a difference, if you ask me. Neither type believes in God, either one has to believe that the whole complexity of life can be explained in purely materialistic terms. I can’t imagine a greater dampener on an intellectual quest.

  3. “Surely, if Jesus was capable of raising the dead and turning water into wine, it wouldn’t have been beyond him to fool modern radiocarbon daters.”

    Or create EVERYTHING for that matter.

    That facial image from the Shroud is missing the coins that were used to cover the eyes at the burial. Identified as coins from the time of the Romans and Tiberius.

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