Skip to main content

The Hammer of God


The Hammer of God is a short story by G. K. Chesterton about two brothers, Wilfred and Norman.  While Wilfred is an exceptionally devout priest, Norman is a retired colonel who finds his delight in wine and women.  Wilfred’s attempts to inject some fear of God or the divine morality into his brother’s soul are only met with ridicule from the latter.  Finally the priest kills his brother.  Worse, he tries to put the guilt on Joe, the village idiot.

The theme of Chesterton’s story is the potential devilishness of self-righteous morality.   The self-righteously religious people see themselves as superior to the normal people who have certain weaknesses like lust and gluttony.  The self-righteous people prefer to pray alone in some corner or niche of the church or the Satsang, away from the sinners.  They may even ascend some mountain in search of their superior aloofness.  Standing at a height, actual or metaphorical, they begin to see the normal people as too small.  One can only see “small things from the peak” when one looks down.  Standing on the top of the mountain, if he were to look up he would have seen infinity stretching far beyond him.  The ordinary sinners in the valley look up and see things big. The self-righteous person looks down and sees everything small.  Revulsion enters his devout soul.  The revulsion wants to destroy evil which is its perceived cause.

The irony is that the devout religious person commits much bigger crimes than the ordinary sinners whom he judges as immoral.  Terrorists and other religious extremists are motivated by this revulsion.  Women wearing the dress of their choice are thus seen as greater sinners than their murderers who commit their hideous crimes in the name of divine morality.  A young man kissing his beloved while enjoying a romantic evening in a park is a bigger criminal for the religious person who is the lovers’ potential murderer. 

This kind of divine morality will set limits to other people’s liberties.  The Wilfreds among us will decide what we can eat and drink, how we should dress, which books we may read, and so on. 

Father Brown is a priest who doubles as an amateur detective in Chesterton’s stories.  “I am a man,” says Father Brown in the story cited above,  “and therefore have all the devils in my heart.”  Father Brown is not self-righteous.  He does not see himself as separate from the normal men on the earth.  He is aware of his weaknesses, the weaknesses that haunt every human being including himself.  Just because one becomes a priest or a guru, godman, Satsangi or whatever, one does not become entitled to sit in judgment over his fellow human beings.  Religion without compassion for fellow human beings is terrorism, though of varying degrees.  Religion without compassion and understanding of fellow human beings soon ends as a hammer of god.  Wilfred had killed his brother with a hammer.  

At the end of the story, Father Brown tells Wilfred, “You tried to fix it (the murder) on the imbecile (Joe, the idiot) because you knew he could not suffer.  That was one of the gleams that it is my business to find in assassins.  And now come down into the village, and go your own way as free as the wind; for I have said my last word.”

Father Brown does not judge.  He does not condemn the sinner.  He understands.  He understands that a man who cannot accept suffering himself but can pass it on to an innocent person who won’t ever understand it can’t be redeemed.  Redemption does not lie in any religious ritual, not in prayers however devoutly they may be recited from whichever altitude, not in setting up oneself above others.  Redemption lies in the ability to feel the pain of one’s fellow beings. 

Though Father Brown refuses to reveal the truth to the police, Wilfred goes to the inspector and says, “I wish to give myself up; I have killed my brother.”



Comments

  1. In the end, story's Wilfred understands what he did was wrong, but most self-righteous people who kill and crush others in the name of a superior religious morality are blind to their own crimes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Absolutely, Sunil ji. I'm living in the middle of such people.

      Delete
  2. My God Matheikal - you have hit the proverbial nail in the head. Personally, I have always felt that very religious (not spiritual) people get so caught up in their beliefs that they close their mind to any other point of view and tend to measure/judge everyone by their religious measures. That's why I tend to run in the other direction from orthodox people because they are too narrow minded and judgmental. People with flaws, on the other hand, are delightfully human. They also tend to be kinder and forgiving because they know they themselves are flawed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm totally with you in this regard. People who are aware of their flaws are delightfully human, while the self-righteous ones are inhuman.

      Delete
  3. The whole ideology behind the concept of morality is to tame humans. Religious script is used to manipulate human behaviours for the benefit of a few.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Morality without religion would have been more effective, I think. Religion, as you suggest, is about manipulation of one sort or another.

      Delete
  4. Sir, i personally liked the way you implemented your views along with the story base. The fact that what self righteous person does to show his dominance above all is in itself pitiful and unmoral from a common point of view !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm not sure I got you entirely. A common man does not have very clear-cut views on most things. Hence he doesn't generally bother about pity or morality in matters regarding superiority. He tends to follow blindly. And the self-righteous religious people exploit that tendency.

      Delete
  5. Defining morality, passing judgement, condemning others often becomes a favorite pass time for the so called self righteous people, A live and let live philosophy would any day be better.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tolerance and self-righteousness don't go together. So live-and-let-live is an alien philosophy for these people.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

Kejriwal’s Arrest in Modi’s Kurukshetra

For some mysterious reason, Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest reminded me of Haren Pandya. Maybe, because Pandya’s 21 st death anniversary is approaching (26 March). Have you forgotten Haren Pandya? He was the Home Minister of Gujarat before Narendra Modi assumed dictatorial powers in that state. Modi chose to teach humility to Pandya by making him the Minister of State for revenue. Pandya chose not to learn humility from Modi and resigned from that post in Aug 2002. Remember Gujarat of 2002? You should. A fire engulfed a train on 27 Feb 2002 killing 58 Hindu pilgrims who were returning from Ayodhya where they had gone to discover their god, not very unlike Christopher Columbus undertaking a voyage to discover India and messing it all up. What caused the fire in the train? Lord Ram knows probably. The upshot was that there was a riot in Gujarat by Hindus against Muslims. Haren Pandya is one of the BJP leaders who gave statements in many places indicting Modi for the riots. He asser