I am at one with Frantz Fanon when he writes: “I do not trust fervor.” (in Black Skin, White Masks, 1967; originally Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, 1952)

Somehow, honest debate and discussion turns into diatribe and vindictiveness when “intense and passionate feeling” (the definition of “fervor” given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 11^th

Edition, 2006) are employed by one or more of the protagonists, instead of listening in order to understand the other.

As Fanon continues: “every time it has burst out somewhere, it has brought fire, famine, misery … And contempt for man.”

Throughout history, and in particular it can be said, the history of the Christian Church, this has been shown to be true. Even a cursory glance at the history of the Crusades, for example, can show how the Gospel of the Prince of Peace inspired such “intense and passionate feeling” that thousands of Jews, Muslims and even non-Roman Catholic Christians were massacred. This “holy war” was pursued by the Catholics with the Papal assurance: “All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested.”

Does this not have present day resonance as well? It sounds very like the promise of immediate entrance into paradise that some proponents and perpetrators of jihad use to justify their actions.

Religion is used to justify both the killing of Muslims and the killing of Christians.

Fervour leading to, in Fanon’s words, “contempt for man.”

In Andre Schartz-Bart’s novel, The last of the Just, he writes of the Rabbi Solomon Levy who is called before King Louis IX, later canonised as a Catholic Saint. The Rabbi was to be questioned by the “Saint King” about his views on the divinity of Jesus, in order that the King could decide, on the basis of the Rabbi’s answers, what sort of torture he should be subjected to.

The Rabbi gave an unanswerable answer: “If it is true that the Messiah of which our ancient prophets spoke has already come, how then do you explain the present state of the world?”

The Rabbi went on: “Noble lords, the prophets stated that when the Messiah came sobs and groans would disappear from the world – ah – did they not? That the lion and the lamb would lie down together, that the blind would be healed and that the lame would leap like – stags! And also that all the peoples would break their swords, oh, yes, and beat them into ploughshares – ah – would they not?”

The Saint went on to order the torture of the Rabbi, this same saint who, in order to finance his participation in the Seventh Crusade, confiscated all the property of Jews in Paris and expelled them from the city, in addition to publicly burning about 12 000 manuscript copies of the Talmud.

Such intolerance is the result of fervor.

After the Crusades came more fervor in the form of the Inquisition. This movement to suppress any questioning of or dissent from official Catholic teaching or doctrine was set in motion in 1184 CE by the Papal Bull entitled Ab abolendum and was aimed primarily at the Catharist movement growing in southern France at the time.

The Inquisition went on for centuries with incredibly painful results for many thousands of people caught up in its fearsome clutches. This in the name of the God of Love?

In the fervor of the Inquisition also came the amazingly popular witch hunts which were given “theological” backing by the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1486.

This iniquitous book was given Papal approval, or at least justification, by Pope Innocent VIII. A section of this bull (one is tempted to make some bad puns here!) is worthy of reading:

“It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Tréves, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-land, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many.”

The good Pope went on to say:

“Our zeal for the Faith especially incites us, lest that the provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, and territories of Germany, which We had specified, be deprived of the benefits of the Holy Office thereto assigned, by the tenor of these presents in virtue of Our Apostolic authority We decree and enjoin that the aforesaid Inquisitors be empowered to proceed to the just correction, imprisonment, and punishment of any persons, without let or hindrance, in every way as if the provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, territories, yea, even the persons and their crimes in this kind were named and particularly designated in Our letters.”

There’s that fervor again!

The “just correction, imprisonment and punishment” referred to above included most hideous tortures and great entertainment for the populace as burning at the stake. Something like the public executions still carried out now in some countries (not excluding the US?) for the amusement and “edification” of the people. Just to prevent others doing what the executed victims might, or might not, have done.

And who can say that these things are not going on even today? What was the invasion of Iraq, if not a modern day crusade? What about torture sanctioned by the Bush administration in violation of US law and the US constitution?

And what of the Iran-Iraq war, which was really a religious war between competing Muslim factions, the Sunni and the Shia? As noted in the Wikipedia article on the conflict: “The war came at a great cost in lives and economic damage - a half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers as well as civilians are believed to have died in the war with many more injured and wounded - but brought neither reparations nor change in borders.” So half a million people died essentially for nothing, except to feed someone’s fervor.

What of the attack on the World Trade Centre, usually referred to as 9/11? Again that dreadful thing called fervor leading to a complete “contempt for man,” and, quite literally, fire and misery.

And now we have the fervid Christian right pushing the idea that the election of that essentially conservative, good, upright man Mr Barack Obama brings the end time closer, because he is the anti-Christ. Dear me, Pope Innocent VIII and the writers of the Malleus Maleficarum would feel right at home with this kind of idea.

After all, the proponents of witch hunts would determine the guilt or innocence of a person (usually a woman) by throwing them into a pond and seeing if they sank and drowned or swam and survived. If the former, they were declared innocent (too bad they didn’t live to enjoy their new-found reputation!) and if they swam they were declared guilty and burned at the stake.

God save us from religious fervor and let’s find ways to know and understand each other. This is not only a moral imperative, but in the long run its cheaper! We certainly don’t need more crusades.

Understanding, empathy, is the opposite of fervor. It is employing one’s imagination and intelligence to put oneself in another’s shoes, to see things from their point of view with the intention of getting past the differences. That is the way of peace, the way of love. It is also the way of reason.

How, indeed, then do we explain the present state of the world?

Perhaps Fanon again can point us in a way which could lead us out of this morass of intolerance and misunderstanding:

“Man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of negation. If it is true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see too that this transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding. Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him.”