The death of the Moors murderer Ian Brady hasn’t brought out the best in us, has it? “Monster of the Moors is Dead” is the Daily Mail headline. “Burn in Hell, Brady”, the Mirror has it. “Monster Brady is Dead,” The Sun says.
Faced with evil incarnate, we derive palpable satisfaction from a good online and print lynching as a substitute for a physical one. It’s an instinct and a spectacle as ugly as it is human, and diminishes those caught up in it. For Christians, the thing is different: the Moors murderer has gone to the God who made us all, and who hates nothing that he has made.
I still feel quite the same way as the lynchers. Merely to look at the Brady/Hindley victims, aged from 10 to 17, makes the heart bleed. The policeman who, at the time, observed that, when he heard a tape of Brady’s victim’s screams he felt he could gladly kill him with his bare hands, was speaking for me; probably for lots of us. Ian Brady didn’t even have Myra Hindley’s redemptive aspects – not that they did her much good – for he didn’t repent, didn’t show remorse and didn’t identify the grave of one of his victims, Keith Bennett, whose grieving mother has just died.
Indeed, it’s not the only time I feel there would be an almost physical sense of gratification in exacting punishment on a sadist. Whenever I read about the atrocities perpetrated by ISIS – the crucifixions, the throat-cutting of Christians, the child rape of Yazidis, tossing gay people from tall buildings – it brings on fantasies of the perpetrators suffering just the same fate.
Which is where Christianity comes in. The requirement to forgive sinners is not contingent on them being repentant. Christ on the Cross forgave those who did not repent of what they had done; so did Stephen, before being stoned to death – rather an ISIS-style punishment, really.
The requirement of forgiveness, the insistence that though your sins be red as scarlet they will be washed white as snow, is easy until they’re applied to real people. I cannot imagine how any of the parents of Ian Brady’s five victims can say the Lord’s Prayer – the bit about “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. But it’s one thing to forgive those who harm us; another to forgive those who torture your child to death.
We talk lightly about forgiveness, too lightly. Before we praise its therapeutic effects, imagine we’re talking to the parents of a child the Brady-Hindley duo killed. That should make us realise just how heavy is the burden of the Christian imperative to forgive. I don’t know if I could do it. I know I should try.
One more thing about Brady: the author Colin Wilson, who corresponded with him, observes that before meeting Myra Hindley, Brady spent his evenings reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (about an amoral murderer) and the Marquis de Sade.
Nowadays, we see the Marquis as the man who gave his name to the kind of sexual practices popularised in Fifty Shades of Grey. But the books, which contrive to be both depraved and boring, are also fixated with inflicting suffering on the good and innocent, including children being tortured for fun. Now the Church has rarely got much credit for its impulse to ban bad books, and we’d be ill-advised to try it on Dostoyevsky (though I could never bear to read Crime and Punishment through to the end). But Brady’s reading is a reminder that bad books may indeed deprave and corrupt us. And what was true for books is true, in spades, for online depravity.
Please, please read Thomas Dilworth’s wonderful biography of David Jones, reviewed in this magazine last week by Gerald Russello. He was, as the subtitle has it, Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet. He was also someone who wrote with extraordinary insight about culture and its connection with religion – as well, I think, as did TS Eliot, his friend.
As a Catholic convert, he found in the Church a reflection of his own preoccupations with man as maker under God. He also, as an artist, appreciated the aesthetic symbolism of the liturgy, “the highest achievement of the human spirit”. Which meant that 20th-century liturgical reforms depressed him; he couldn’t, for instance, see the point of having Communion at the end of the Good Friday service, something that baffles me, and abandoning the hymn Vexilla Regis. The liturgical reforms, says Dilworth, were the most painful event of his later years. A visitor once asked him if he enjoyed going to Mass. “I used to look forward to going all week,” he said. “But no longer.”
Melanie McDonagh is comment editor of the London Evening Standard
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