Writing is not unlike singing. Referring to the latter, some would say that the more you do it, the more you believe your voice has improved. Mercifully singing is not Anton F. Attard's forte.
Mr Attard believes, though, that writing on St George is, and he sits down to prove the opposite (May 6). Confiding in the assumed brevity of readers' memory, he prattles about his immunity to his opponents' arguments, accuses those who challenge his academic competence of attacks against his person, and unilaterally modifies the arena of debate to suit his agenda and drag his respondents down his weird memes.
Let me tell Mr Attard that it may take him his lifetime and a little more, to draw me into arguments which I have no desire to enter into. I entered the present one for the stated interest that I have in the Christian mystery that the martyr saint embodies and for the love I nourish for the Catholic and Orthodox sister churches whose fragile unity is otherwise quite strong in the common veneration that they attribute to St George.
Mr Attard maintains that the liturgical veneration that Christianity gives to St George does not constitute historical proof. He makes short shrift of all scholarship, including that which confirmed St George's inclusion in the 1960s reform of the Roman calendar. He disregards all archeological evidence going back to less than 40 years after the saint's martyrdom and which is still extant. He ignores the testimony of Pope Gelasius who in AD 495 spoke of St George as a name "justly reverenced among men" although his actions were "only known to God".
On the other hand, a local synod's 17th promulgation of the cult of a saint whose existence is variously attributed to some time between the third and the seventh centuries constitutes "historical proof". His speculation that the cult of St George was introduced in Gozo "by the Aragonese" or, rather, "by the Catalonians" - Mr Attard is yet to decide - is unassailable history. That "it was centuries" after AD 533 that the cult of St George became diffused in the Byzantine world is also an incontrovertible fact, so that, according to the correspondent, the cult of St George cannot have reached the Mediterranean shores of the Maltese islands with the arrival of the Byzantines.
I repeat, as regards the cult of St George in Christian Gozo, Mr Attard is free to maintain his peculiar views which, quite happily, are not mine.
Unlike Mr Attard, however, I place no one low in my esteem. His astonishment on my trying to read his pen alongside that of Gibbon, Crachenthorp, Melankton, Tilenus, Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam - all of them detractors of the cult of St George - is indeed my mild surprise. I could have compared him with Hippolyte Delahaye, Herbert Thurston, E.A. Wallis Budge, Dante Balboni, Samantha Riches and others, not to mention a couple of excellent local scholars. But that would have been unkind. For while Gibbon et al notwithstanding their passé fallacies still make engaging reading, the latter provide sturdy hagiography. At which stage Mr Attard would have stood no chance.
It is not just writing on the saints which is not Attard's forte. Apparently it is also modesty. "I am what I am" he wrote, echoing Exodus 3,14, adding, in George Bernard Shaw fashion, that "everybody knows him". It seems that we are still learning.
More important than learning about Mr Attard is, however, addressing his interest in hagiography and researching the Christian cult of the saints given not only its role in the Catholic Church but also in the popular religiosity typical of the Maltese islands.
Currently I am working on a proposal for a course of study on the subject to be offered at the University of Malta. It is a contribution that the Faculty of Theology, possibly in collaboration with other faculties and institutes of the university, could give to scholarship in the area.