 Well good afternoon again and thank the organisers for inviting me. A apology is right at the start. I'm not going to give the paper for which there is an abstract amongst your pack, partly because it was unexpectedly taken over for a different publication. I didn't want to duplicate things too much and partly because I came to conclusion that I didn't entirely believe what I said in that paper. Which often happens. If anybody wants a copy of it, they just got to email me and I'll send them a copy. y gallwch yn fwy o'r gwaith, yn gwneud o caslus sy'n ddiddordeb yn mynd ar gael y cyfrannu, ac yn gyda'r gwaith, y gallwch yn meddwl, eistedd yn gweinio i ddechreuu hynny oedd gennymau yn brakingau, y byddai nhw ar gyfer, yn ni'n mewn ei bod yn y cwm yn ar gyfer y byd, yn cyfwleddaf o adrodd i ddechrau o fofliadau. Felly peoeddau gwoperau yn biologig ynuralig i ddechrau yn eu cyfrannu yn ffrefgau'i cael credu. Felly, ond wedi'u hynny'n cwrs diwethaf. Sen I'm going to talk about one of those texts which is there in the background, which people have been glancingly referring to several times now, and Andrew has indeed spoken about, God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the ffowl of the air and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, ddig sy'n ei wneud o'r Fawr, digwydd ymwyaf, os ymwyaf sy'n ei fawr, ymwiy o'i wneud ymwyaf. Felly, y ffaith yw'r fawr ar y mewn ddig sy'n ei wneud, yn ddig sy'n digwydd sydd mae'n rhanu Gweithio'r Fawr. Maen nhw, mewn mynd y profiadau Iloedd, enw i'r mewn fawr, i fawr, i'r fawr drwy'r fawr i'r mewn, deimlaen i'r wneud. Fyny'r mae'n ddig sy'n ei wneud ddig sydd yn ei wneud yma, ond that is used by potentates, or has used four potentates, for the statues that they erected around their empire. The statue stood for the Emperor. Human beings stand for god. And to disrespect the statue was to disrespect the emperor. And to disrespect a human being is to disrespect God. Ac mae'r gweithio'r gweithio'r metafol yn y cyfwyr ychydig. Mae'n gweithio'r cyfwyr, oherwydd Andrew wedi'u gwneud. Mae'n gweithio'r cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr, yn y cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr. Ac mae'n gweithio'r cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr. Mae'n gweithio'r cyfodig sy'n cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr, yn y cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr. Dwy bod ddod, mae'n cyfwyr yn Burton. Mae'n cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr yn y cyfrinddiogol. Chyfwyr yn y cyfwyr, ond mae'n cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr, dwi'n gweithio'r cyffwyr yn mynd i fynd i'r cyfwyr. Mae'n gymgoreich gŷr y dylaid gyllid Marya Fffaff. Ieam god. Rhywb yn ymgyrchol, ond yn ei ddigonwyd yn ddigonwyd. Ieam yn ymgyrchol! Iell yn ymgyrchol! Rwy'n gymryd ymweld. Rwy'n ymgyrchol, yn ymgyrchol, ac mae'n ymddangos cyfrannu! Mae'r cyfrannu ar y cyfrannu! Mae'r cyfrannu o, yw ymddangos cyfrannu? Rydyn yw ymgyrchol yn ymgyrchol! Mae'n iawn. mae'n gweithio'r amser hyn yn wneud yn gweithio'r amser hynny, yn gweithio'r ffordd o gwyno'r cyfnod, ac mae'n gweithio'r amser fel mae'n gweithio'r hyn. Felly, oedd ymweld i'n meddwl? Mae'n gweithio, oherwydd, mae'n meddwl i'r Gweithio yn meddwl i'r Llywodraeth, mae'n gweithio'n meddwl i'r hyn o'r hyn mae mae'n meddwl i'r hyn, mae'n meddwl i'r hyn, mae'n meddwl i'r hyn. Maen nhw yno i ni i ddim ysgolwni'r cysteilioodau? Mae holl yw ddegi'n eu hunain yn arddangos ar fy ngwadu'r gweithreit Maswnodd ond mae'r ysgolwyr sy'n teimlo'r gyntaf ydy'r cydambol yma'r holl y byddai'r cyfrithol yma. Ond y fawr y Llywodraeth Mae'r wrthyn ni rydych yn cyfrithol yma o'r holl ym oed yn y trafiad hyn iawn arnaeth. The Hebrew is Qadosh. We are to be compassionate. We're not now. We're not like God now. We are called to be like God. We are called to be holy, to be pure, to be compassionate. Not to be distracted from that compassion by our particular lurch of desires, our particular sensations and our own self-indulgence. We indulge ourselves in things. Well, we're not too. We are to be compassionate. Well, that's nice. How exactly do you get back to that? How are we to recover the likeness? How are we to become compassionate when, frankly, much of the time we're not? I know that the current surge of sociobiological literature now tends to emphasise that human beings are sometimes quite nice to each other and can cooperate. Personally, I feel this is almost more dangerous than the mind they were taking back in the 80s, which was that all human beings are absolutely bound to be selfish and greedy and all human societies are bound to be done on extreme capitalist principles because that's the way we are. The idea that we are all nice doesn't seem to me to hold water. We're not nice. Andrew had a rather vulgar phrase for it. Well, I'm not sure about that, but yeah, actually I am sure about that. We're all sinners, and if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we really did love our neighbour as ourselves, which is the instruction given specifically in Leviticus, you shall love your neighbour as a man like yourself. I am the Lord who says it. Well, we behave extremely differently than we do. Even nice people, and of course some people are nice. I don't deny that at all. I'm not one of them, but some people are nice. Even those who are nice do not, in fact, love their neighbour as themselves. They would behave very differently if they did. So we're not nice, and the question is, well, we're told to be nice. No, no, that's the wrong phrase. We're told to be holy. How exactly do we do it, and what is the direction of our holiness? Well, in a way, I'm now going to say something which almost repeats what Andrew has just said, and I apologise, not because it's wrong to repeat what Andrew says, but because it's bit tedious if the speakers say the same thing all over and over again. I would much rather say something strange than new, but I can't think of anything. The picture does look as if we are to be compassionate towards human beings. I just said after all, every individual human being, male or female, is loyal, is to be accorded the same respect that in other cultures the king or the priest should get. We are to reverence every individual human being as in the image of God, dogs, cats, cattle, sheep, mosquitos, jellyfish, sea squirts, sea slugs. They're not in the image of God by this account. They're not royal. They don't get that respect. But of course, being royal doesn't mean being top. It doesn't mean having your own way with everything. It means, it meant quite clearly, that that's a possible perversion. It's the perversion that the Prophet Samuel warns the people of Israel about. They come to him and say, we're fed up, we haven't got a king. Everybody else has got a king. We need a king to speak for us, to stand for us in the General Council of Nations. And Samuel says, you don't really mean that, you know, you don't want a king at all. Kings will tyrannise over you. Kings will rude you with a vod of iron. Kings will cheat you and oppress you. You don't want a king. Yes, we do, they said. We want a king. So they got a king and the king did exactly what Samuel has just said. So kings do that sort of thing, but that's not what the sort of kingship that is being described here. The sort of kingship that is being described here, the sort of royalty that is being described here, is the royalty of being available, royalty as generosity. Royalty as helping along. Royalty as sharing in the royalty attributed to God. So to be compassionate doesn't just require us to be respectful of humanity. It requires us precisely to be compassionate to suffer along with the entirety of creation. Now I said a moment ago that we lost our likeness to God in the story very oddly by eating of the tree of death, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Which when you think about it is rather strange. Because the thing that other part of the tradition, the patristic tradition, the philosophical tradition in the years since has done is to say, well, image and likeness do, after all, mean much the same thing. And what it says is that human beings belong to the same class of entity as God. What is that class of entity? Well, it's the class of rational beings. The class of beings who can think things through, who are not bound by their immediate provoquial sensations, who can reason their way to eternal truths. Or perhaps it's not that they're not so much that God and ourselves are rational, but that God and ourselves are free. We're not bound by the particular situation and nature in which we find ourselves. We can choose to step outside the ordinary framework. And that's what the likeness is. The likeness is that human beings are free, like God. Or perhaps it's not that either. Perhaps it is that human beings are like God in being able to have conversations. Meaningful conversations with each other and gosh with God too. So in all these respects, human beings are now being subtly described as being like God in the image of God because they're like God. And they're like God in being rational, free, knowing good and evil. Being able to choose, being able to have conversations. To notice that, oh gosh, we're naked and there were some leaves over there. We could deck ourselves out with those pretty quickly. Those are the ways we're suddenly supposed to be like God. But no, we were created like God. We lost our likeness. We lost our likeness in the story by choosing to know good and evil. To be like God's, as the serpent said. So this is a rather strange backwards and forward story. Is it God-like to be rational, to be free, to be able to have conversations? Is that what constitutes as a superior sort of entity in the world an image and likeness of God? Unlike the other things that aren't images and likenesses. Well, possibly. There is a story which is actually spelt out rather more in Muslim tradition than I think in the rabbinic, though it seems like the rabbinic too, is that when God decreed that Adam was his viceroy, one of the angels disputed this and said this is ridiculous. You can't mean that. I'm not going to bow down before a creature made of flesh and blood and bones and doing all sorts of disgusting things in a biological universe. I won't. That angel is the fallen angel, Satan Iblis. One of the things that God did to show the angels, at least convince the other angels apparently, that Adam would do as his viceroy, is that God asked the angels to name the other creatures he had made and they didn't know what the names were. They didn't know that he's what the names and natures of those other creatures were, but lo, Adam did. Adam named the other creatures. That is, he knew what their specific natures were and God said, there you see, Adam, humanity, understands the nature of things already. Why? Because I actually gave him the crib sheet. I didn't give that to you, you angels, you haven't got the crib sheet. You don't know what's what. Humanity knows what's what. Humanity knows already because I've made him like that. I've made him, her, them like that. They understand the nature of things. So what is it that Adam doesn't know until this drastic moment when he, she, they eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil? They already know in the story what things are. They've already named the creatures. They already know the names and natures of other creatures in the cosmos because God has slipped them the crib sheet. God has told them. What they don't know is which is good and which is evil. They don't, at that point, make a distinction between the good creatures and the bad creatures. The ones that are to be treasured and the ones that are to be treated as vermin. The category of vermin comes into play. They know now as gods, as the serpent or Satan or Iblis would have them know. They know some creatures. They experience some things as vermin, as dangerous, as disgusting. Before that, they didn't. Before that, they knew the creatures and they knew they were all good. They knew that all creatures were good. Of all no vermin, that's the delusion. The delusion that our humanity has fallen into, according to the story, that such that we distinguish between good and evil, good and evil creatures, and we despise some of them as vermin, as dangerous and disgusting, but they're not. A later book of the Bible says, God hates nothing that he has made. Why else would he have made it? But oddly, that very same book, it's The Wisdom of Solomon, goes on to talk precisely about vermin. The author is particularly pleased to notice that God engineered the downfall of the Egyptians through vermin, through lice and fogs, and other such lowly creatures. Whereas God could have engineered the downfall of the Egyptians while all sorts of magnificent and lowly creatures, but he chose to show that they were really feeble before him by doing it with vermin. Now, I take it the author is actually speaking a slight lift of the eyebrows. They're not vermin. They are God's creatures. The lice, mosquitos, the fogs, and all the rest of them are not vermin. They are God's creatures, just like other creatures. Things made by God to be enjoyed and to enjoy their own life. The point that that author is making though, is that it's a very familiar theme, in fact, in all Mediterranean culture, except of course Egypt, that the Egyptians were really peculiar. The Egyptians were really peculiar, because they did give reverence, sacred reverence to non-human creatures, to cats, to orcs, to birds. They gave to those creatures the respect, the worship, which most other Mediterranean peoples, not just the Hebrews, thought should be given only to the human figure. So, the Egyptians were odd, and you find that being stated not just in the Hebrew scriptures, but in the Greek writings, and in the Roman writings too. That's what's odd about Egypt, that they reverence other creatures, the same sort of worship that others give to the human. So, it's a common theme. And it's because it's a common theme that so many moralists of those early patristic centuries, both Christian and Jewish and purely pagan, back away from anything that suggests that they might be prepared to reverence the non-human. And that's really a very interesting question. Why? If what I've been saying is more or less correct, that the world is created as a whole, as good, that all the creatures in it are creatures of God, and to be shown compassion and to be acknowledged as images in another sense, reflections of the divine beauty, which is a common statement. If that's right, why are they so nervous about reverencing the non-human? Well, I think the answer is straightforward, immobilistic again. And I've given a quotation from the great Stelic philosopher Epictetus. Consider who you are, he says. In the first place, you are a man, you are human, anthropos. And this is one who has nothing superior to the faculty of the will, but all other things subjected to it. And the faculty itself, he possesses uninslaved and free from the subjection. That is subjection to impulse fear, desire. You're human, I'm human. We are all, Epictetus tells us, in charge, we are all able to disregard our fears and immediate desires. We are all able to see what is right, what is good, what is beautiful, and to do it. We really are, he says. Consider then from what things you have been separated by reason. You have been separated from wild beasts. You have been separated from domestic animals. And in Epictetus's vocabulary, that what does that mean? You have been separated from the impulses of rage, and anger, and homicidal fury. And you have been separated also from the emotions, the impulses of fear and quivering docility. You have been separated both from the wildness, the aggressiveness in your heart and from the fear and subservience in your heart. You are not those things. Because you are not those things and I am not those things in myself, I stand above, you stand above those things, I am able, he says, to choose. And admiring animals in this vocabulary is giving in, is admiring just those impulses of, on the one hand, aggressive rage, on the other hand, those impulses of emotional docility, which he wishes and which most of the pagan philosophers as well as the Hebrews wish to dissociate themselves from. So animals are presented in their moralistic aspect and to put up statues to them, therefore, as the Egyptians did, in the eyes of pagan, Hebrew, Christian thinkers, was to encourage in themselves the kind of passions and emotions that we ought to be able to stand over against to judge, to discriminate against to look past. So that's why the non-human is rejected and disregarded. It's rejected and disregarded because it stands for the things in ourselves that we are told we can should disallow. Well, it's a dangerous strategy, I think. And for two very obvious reasons, and I will simply state them and conclude. The first reason why it's a dangerous strategy is exactly what historically has happened. Because we have told ourselves that these creatures stand for embody passions that we ourselves ought not to give into, we treat those other creatures not with compassion but with contempt. We typify them as, once again, vermin. We stop thinking of them as the good creatures of God. We line them up as evidencing the bad things that we ourselves wish to get rid of. And even when we don't do that, even when we notice that some of the animals actually behave in ways we admire, they are faithful. They are brave. They are affectionate. And those very fact that they do it too suggests that they're not quite the holy emotions we should be feeling because they're far too much bound up in our own bodily feelings which we know to distrust. So that's one unfortunate feature of this moralistic exercise. It has taught us to disregard the message that comes through so strongly once you start seeing it there, namely that all creatures are good, all creatures are to be respected as such and that our office is as being in the image and likeness of God is to appreciate their beauty. That's the first thing that's dangerous. And the second thing is of course epictetus was wrong. He said, I stand above, you stand above our passions. You can do it. Well that's a bit like telling somebody who is clinically depressed Oh come on, you can snap out of it. Cheer up. One of my friends used to say I was all sad and depressed and a little voice said, cheer up things could be worse. So I cheered up and sure enough things got worse. Or it's like telling an alcoholic. Oh you can do it, you can have a little drink and just one little drink and stop there. It's like telling an anavexic. Oh there's no problem here, there's a pretty good meal in front of you. You want to eat it? Damn you. Eat it. The anavexic cannot eat it. The alcoholic cannot have one little drink. The clinically depressed cannot just snap out of it and be cheerful. And I'm sorry to admit I cannot say that I am superior to all the passions that inhabit me. So I cannot do this thing. That epictetus tells me of course I can do. So he's wrong. Sorry. And that does suggest again that we need some other recipe than this. We know we are called to be holy, that is compassionate. We know we are called to see the beauty and goodness of things. We know these things. It doesn't just because it's in the Bible. These things I suggest are known to everybody. They are part of the natural endowment of humanity. We are almost born knowing that there is such a thing as beauty and that we can be beautiful. There is such a thing as compassion that we can be compassionate. There is such a thing as seeing the beauty of everything. We know these things and we also know that we're not doing it. So on that extremely downbeat note but with the hope that somebody will tell me actually Stephen you're quite wrong I hope called a halt. Thank you very much.