Donkey tale-pieces

This Sunday you particularly enjoy celebrating the Liturgy because in Tarxien, next to the temple of the Mother Goddess where you celebrate, you preside over a procession which is led by an altar boy on a donkey. There is a legend that it was the same animal that was in the stable at Bethlehem at the birth of Jesus. Thus the donkey in a way helps to link the birth of Christ to His death. This is a theme you developed in a talk that you recently gave to the Rotary Club on the philosophical, theological and political significance of the donkey. On Palm Sunday the religious implications are clear, but in these post-election days the question comes naturally to mind, what are the political implications?

The most obvious do not relate to the local scene, but to the US where the donkey is the symbol of the Democratic Party while the elephant is the symbol of the Republicans.

However, I will not dwell upon that, but rather upon a distant connection with the recent Maltese elections. The donkey ridden by Christ into Jerusalem has a political significance because Christ was obviously parodying the triumphant entries into defeated cities by the victors on horseback, while He rides a donkey as a vehicle of peace in contrast to the war horse.

But at the Nativity, the donkey is supposed to have been present because of the words of the Prophet Isaiah that the donkey, like the ox, recognises its Master while human beings did not recognise Him.

Isaiah was no doubt thinking of the ass of the Prophet Balaam who saw a messenger from God whom the Prophet did not see. Because of this, the donkey was often used by Christian theologians and philosophers as a symbol of the fact that our knowledge of God can only be negative or analogical at any rate dark or asinine.

About God there can only be at best "learned ignorance". The greatest exponent of this view was Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar who was burnt in Rome in 1600 at Campo dei Fiori in close proximity to where Caravaggio then lived. Bruno is a central figure in Alfred Sant's Magnum Opus, the last novel that he has published, called 'Without Beginning, Without End', presumably because he sees the pattern of human behaviour and of history that he describes four centuries ago as essentially the same as the religious and political experiences of today, in Malta as in the rest of the world.

Is there any explicit allusion to the asinine?

The conversations which Sant attributes to Bruno and the Knight of Malta who takes the risk of visiting him in prison in Rome may perhaps contain reference to the sonnet To the Mercurial Donkey by Bruno.

It begins with a Gospel quotation and contains this apostrophe: "Display your head: very well sized it is/ Your judgment is as discerning as your nostrils are wide/ Sound echoes in your ears as in royal palaces".

But I am just as reluctant to reproduce the concluding tercet on the donkey's hormones as the donkey is described by Bruno to be reluctant to budge from any position it has once set its hooves firmly upon.

Both Bruno and Sant are masters of irony, both conscious and unconscious I hope that Sant's relative retirement from the political hurly-burly will allow him to enrich the literature of Malta even more abundantly than he has already done with the devotion that has marked all his activities.

Does the donkey suggest to you any other post-election reflections?

One of the happiest results of the election is that it seems to have made the Prime Minister give real and not just notional assent to the urgent need for constitutional reform. I hope he did not have in mind only the electoral process when he acknowledged this need in his first post-electoral telecast.

The result has highlighted the need to open up other ways than those so far established, in full accord with democratic principles, in order to allow the rendering of public service by people with exceptional resources. An inclusive society should mean giving maximum space not only to the disadvantaged but also to those with rich talent and experience.

For instance, I think that the temptation should be resisted to write political obituaries for Louis Galea. Unfortunately, our country cannot afford to allow him to choose either unemployment or a private job at the age of 60. He may wish merely to tinkle a few notes up and down the keyboard of his re-opened piano. In fact, I recall among the most enjoyable times of my life the hours I spent with him going from one organ concert to another in New York many years ago.

But, at the present time, surely there are tasks like those of constitutional reform that Louis is eminently if not possibly uniquely equipped to facilitate. To fail to engage him in some such way would deserve to be called "asinine" in the popular sense of the word, although the Prophet Isaiah was more accurate in his estimate of donkey intelligence as compared to human.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti