When we think of the sixth of June, we think of a great fleet and a landing in Normandy. And we may possibly remember that something similar had taken place thousands of years before when the Greeks in their thousand ships came to Troy to take back Helen from her kidnappers.
There is hardly a line of English poetry more familiar than ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships’ and it goes on ‘And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ The line comes from ‘Doctor Faustus’, a play by Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe. A man of such sensibility as to write of a beautiful woman in this way must surely have been something of an angel himself, surely? Not a bit of it. He was, we are told, a street-brawler, a secret agent with an ear for the music of words. Ben Jonson referred to ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ and reminds us of Shakespeare’s debt to a man who altered the course of England’s literature. Without Marlowe there would have been no Shakespeare.
Marlowe, a Cambridge-educated playwright, brings us along with him and with a shudder as he plumbs the depth of Faustus’s pact with Mephistophelis. It is plain that great gifts can be found in violent personalities the violent personality in this case being Christopher Marlowe, pavement artist, author of extravagant lines such as ‘O, thou art fairer than the evening air/Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars’.
It is a common enough phenomenon A man or woman can be a great painter or cello-player, a great novelist or jockey and at the same time fail as a role-model for younger women and men.
Here we bump into problems that arise when we simply divide human beings into born and born again. Brilliant achievements are not confined to the elect. We need brilliant minds wherever they are to be found. Once it was in the Muslim states of North Africa and the Middle East. Today it is likely to be India, Indonesia or the Philippines.
This is a call for magnanimity. It is a call Christians must enjoy heeding.
LIBERTY SHIPS
Eighteen USA shipyards produced 2,710 Liberty ships during WW2, a record number of same-type vessels.
242 RESIDENTS
Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic has 242 residents. There are two churches – St Joseph’s Roman Catholic and St Mary’s, Anglican.
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