Blasphemy

Blasphemy is the contemptuous use of religious symbols or names, either by swearing or abuse. A distinction is often made between blasphemy and profanity on the grounds that blasphemy is intentional, whereas profanity is more habitual. Thus the rituals of black magic would fall under blasphemy, whereas most swearing would be categorized as profanity. The distinction, though valuable, is not absolute. The seriousness of blasphemy as an offense has declined with the secularization of Western society.

The root notion is linguistic, lying in Greek blasphemia , meaning “profane speech or evil slander.” First recorded ca. 1200 in the Ancrene Riwle (“Rule for Nuns”) in Middle English, it meant “to utter impious or profane words” and was usually followed by against , as in John Wycliffe’s anticlerical comment that “freres by gabbings [gabbling] blaspheme upon Christ.” From considerable overuse in the religious divisions of the sixteenth century, it became generalized to mean simply “abuse.” However, Dr. Johnson defined it (1755) as “strictly and properly, an offering of some indignity, or injury, unto God himself, either by words or writing.”

The category in English Law of Blasphemous Libel refers to the crime committed if a person insults, offends, or vilifies the deity, Christ, or the Christian religion. In earlier times, when Christianity was considered to be part of the law itself, blasphemy was construed as subversion, thus incurring numerous prosecutions. Christopher Marlowe (1564–1592) allegedly propagated various heretical views, one “that Christ was the bedfellow of John the Baptist and used him after the manner of Sodom,” although the allegations were never proved (Gill 1989, x). His play The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus (ca. 1590) certainly proved the most daring


and illuminating dramatic text on black magic, also called necromancy, Satanism, and devil worship, involving the use of spells and the blasphemous exploitation of Holy Writ. Faustus calls up the devil Mephostophilis onstage in an explicit conjuring ritual including a magic circle:

Within this circle is Jehovah’s name
Forward and backward anagrammatised
Th’abbreviated names of holy saints
(I iii 8-10)

The powers Faustus invokes are infernal (“Belzbub, monarch of burning hell”) and sacred (“the holy water which I now sprinkle and the sign of the cross”). The invocation is in Latin, the language of the Church and of scholarship, showing his sacrilegious abuse of his knowledge. He persists in his necromancy, saying: “I’ll conjure, though I die therefore” and signs with his own blood the formal contract or pact with the devil: (“I, John Faustus, by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer.”). During twenty-four years of limited power and pleasure, he at one point “fetches the Pope a box of the ear,” provoking the papal curse “Damned be this soul for ever for this deed” and the enactment of the whole ritual of the anathema.

Blasphemy could attract the most severe punishments. Up to 1677 it was punishable by burning at the stake, and the death penalty remained in force in Scotland until 1825. Over the past two centuries the blasphemy law has been invoked only at irregular intervals. Thus Shelley’s joint publication of a notorious pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), did not lead to a prosecution, although he was sent down from Oxford. The same happened to Mark Boxer, editor of the Cambridge literary magazine Granta , for publishing in 1952 a poem beginning “God, God, the silly sod.” However, a case was brought by the Crown in 1882 for the publication of comic cartoons ridiculing Christianity.

There have been two controversial cases in recent times. The first was the private prosecution (the first for fifty years in the United Kingdom) brought in 1977 by Mrs. Mary Whitehouse, a moral crusader, against the editor of Gay News for the publication of a poem (“The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name”) by Professor James Kirkup, in which a Roman centurion enjoys sexual fantasies about the crucified Christ, who, it is implied, was a promiscuous homosexual. She won the case, which was tried at the Old Bailey: the editor was fined £500 and given a prison sentence of eighteen months, suspended for nine months, and the poem may not be printed in the United Kingdom. The advocate John Mortimer, who conducted the defense, subsequently observed: “At the trial it was ruled that we could call no evidence on the poem’s literary merit (so blasphemers are treated far more harshly than pornographers)” ( Spectator April 21, 1990, 7).

In 1989 an attempt to invoke the law against Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses failed on the grounds that the blasphemy law covers only Christianity, its personages, and articles of belief. This led to two opposed initiatives, one to extend the law to include other religions; the other to abolish it entirely. In April 1989 a bill for abolition introduced in the House of Commons fell without debate. However, The Satanic Verses was immediately banned in India and South Africa on the grounds of blasphemy against Islam and was burned on the streets of Bradford, Yorkshire. In February 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian spiritual leader, issued a fatwa , or death sen-tence, against Rushdie, his publishers, and translators. This led to attacks and even murders.

In the United States religious tolerance is endorsed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, stipulating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion … or abridging the freedom of speech or the press.”