FOILED AGAIN

Without belief, can we go on cursing our enemies - or blessing our friends?: Has the power to curse lost its meaning for modern man? Might we, in losing it, lose something precious: the power to bless? (Matthew Parris, 7/12/03, The Spectator)

What is it, or was it, to curse? Two elements are essential to the action, properly understood. A real curse is, first, more than a strong expression of antipathy; it is an attempt to harm its object, or put them in fear of harm. Second, it involves more than the curser and the cursed, for there is a third party: to curse is to invoke - or at least call upon - an external power to do the harm.

Of course much of what we call "cursing" amounts to little more than the verbal shell of what was once an inhabited belief. "Damn you" or "Go to Hell" no longer express anything but anger or rejection, but they express it through a sort of metaphor: a metaphor which would have no meaning shorn of its reference to an underworld or place of damnation. We do not, most of us, believe in Hell any longer; still less that any spell, incantation or form of words could assist another soul?s passage there. But we know what the idea means. When in the Old Testament Job curses his fate, curses life and curses God himself, the words still prickle the back of the neck. A Jewish curse against enemies - used as part of the Passover ceremony and too long to quote here - is chilling. [...]

"Bless you" still has, to me, great beauty both as a phrase and as an idea. I find some of the Christian blessings among the most moving passages in literature, as is that old Irish blessing "May the road rise to meet you," etc., which people love to quote. But if we entirely lose our sense of even the possibility of a power outside ourselves which might be called upon to help and protect those we love, then these words and phrases may one day come to seem as meaningless as the casting of bones or invocation of tree-spirits in pagan cultures: an amusing, senseless oddity.

To call upon a great external power - supernature itself - to intercede to protect or to harm another is just about the most thrilling expression of love or hate that has been available to human beings. As belief in the very existence of such a power diminishes, so does the taproot of both the blessing and the curse: different flowers on the same tree. A tree can survive for some time after its root is cut but it must wither in the end; and perhaps our age finds itself in just such a case. Curses and blessings retain their vigour for us, but the philosophical energy that created and sustained them may be drying up.

If so, I am sorry. As George Dobell drily observed, it is not an argument for the existence of a force that if we ceased to believe in it there would be adverse consequences; but a world without blessings or curses would seem a flatter, deader, greyer place.

You have to say this much: it takes away much of the satisfaction of telling someone, "F*** you", when the curse is no longer necessarily understood to be degrading, that you will dominate and humiliate them like a prison wife, but instead may be understood to be a pickup line. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 13, 2003 7:05 AM