“Malta is lulling its conscience to sleep by frequently boasting that it is ‘nobilissima e cattolicissima’ (most noble and most catholic). But it would be better for us that, rather than uttering these two words thoughtlessly, we were to consider discarding them altogether because with them we are putting the conscience of the Maltese nation to sleep so that when what is bad is presented as good, it begins to believe this.”
We can no longer blame a colonial power for our sins- Mario Vella
Now, there is no doubt at all that Ġużè Aquilina (1911-1997), the author of the above passage from his well known 1945 essay Il-Polz ta’ Malta, had no intention of belittling the Catholic Church when he advised the Maltese against anaesthesising their consciousness with mantras affirming their religious identity and zeal.
The Gozo-born Aquilina was as dedicated to the Maltese language – he was the first professor of Maltese at the then Royal University of Malta from 1937 to his retirement in 1976 – as he was to his Catholic faith.
This is, of course, well known to all who knew him personally but it is also well documented in his writings, from early essays such as Is-Saltna ta’ l-Ispirtu (also of 1945) to later texts such as Armoniji ta’ Ħsieb u Fidi (1995).
His technical achievements as a linguist apart, one need not endorse all that Aquilina wrote and said in other fields – his world view was limited by the narrow social, cultural and political horizons of the context within which he lived – to appreciate his passionate disdain for the mediocrity of the powerful in Malta.
Read his brief Il-Bibbja, Letteratura u Reliġjon, an angry text written in 1946 to lament the continued absence, then, of an authoritative Maltese translation of the whole bible and to castigate those that were unwilling to entrust the difficult task to qualified scholars like P.P. Saydon.
Translating the scriptures into Maltese was seen as something that Maltese who defected to the Protestant cause did or who sold themselves out to Protestant churches. Vassalli was reviled for his translations for the Church Missionary Society, an organisation founded in 1799 working with the Anglican Communion and Protestant churches generally.
Aquilina – courageously for one whose position at the University could have been jeopardised if the Curia really put its foot down, regardless of where the Palace’s sympathies lay – praises the quality of Vassalli’s translations of the New Testament and the Acts of the Apostles published in London (1829) and locally (1847), suggests that God alone be the judge of Vassalli’s soul and reserves his scorn for the “authorities of that time and the others behind them, who could have translated the bible themselves before the Protestants, and have failed to do so until today”.
For a brief factual history of bible translations into Maltese, see Karm Sant’s (1921-1992) introduction to the Biblical Society’s translation (1984).
Back to Aquilina. He concludes his piece on Saydon, Vassalli and the vernacular bible with a harsh but sober judgement: “... pomp and mediocrity dominate in every branch of our national life.”
Aquilina is ambiguous in his attempt to explain the all-pervasive mediocrity he sees around him. On the one hand, he suggests that it is an element of the “national psychology” of the Maltese, going as far as indicating environmental causes (“As a people we are lazy. The sun burns too intensely”).
Aquilina’s recourse to ideas that were already intellectually discredited (in Il-Polz ta’ Malta he quotes “the well known criminologist” Cesare Lombroso approvingly!) is one of the limitations I mentioned above.
On the other hand, although Aquilina cannot be said to have been up to date in psychology, anthropology, sociology, political thought and philosophy, he was certainly not politically naive. Read him closely and you will have to recognise that he understands very well that the answer to questions about the mediocrity dominating “in every branch of our national life” was to be found in the way Maltese society was structured, especially in the way it was dominated by the powerful (“and the others behind them”). Hence, he speaks of both “pomp and mediocrity”, because mediocre “pomp” is the style of the traditionally powerful in Maltese society. He was intensely aware that the mediocrity of the pompous percolates down to the base of “every branch of our national life” and becomes a way of life.
The texts I quoted were written in the 1940s. He wrote Il-Polz as the National Assembly was meeting to draft a Constitution.
Aquilina does not question our colonial status and does not write for the attention of the colonial power. He writes for the Maltese who aspired to power. In the last paragraph, he practically addresses the delegates of the Assembly, warning them not to “revive those buried issues that, like a powerful dose of anaesthetic, never allowed the people from seeing the poverty and the ignorance in which they lived and to demand laws to cure society of them”. He was clearly referring to the language question.
Is Aquilina relevant today? Although his world view had certainly its limitations, which limitations can partly be explained by his milieu, his disdain for the “pomp and mediocrity” of the powerful in this country – and he was not referring only to political power – is as justifiable today as it was yesterday. Perhaps it is even more relevant today, 48 years after Independence.
We can no longer blame a colonial power for our sins.
Dr Vella blogs at http://watersbroken.wordpress.com .