Giordano Bruno, Dominican monk and rationalist philosopher, was burnt at the stake in Rome's Campo dei Fiori on 17 February 1600. Bruno's beliefs and writings were considered heretical by the Catholic Church which had lost millions of its members to the whirlwind Reformation, and was thus not in an expansive mood. Investigated and tortured by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and incarcerated for seven years in Rome's worst prison, Bruno was given the opportunity to recant but chose instead to die for his beliefs.
Four hundred years later, Morris West brought back to life Bruno's story in The Last Confession. Morris West himself had joined the Order of the Christian Brothers and spent eight years as a teaching monk. In 1941, aged twenty-six, he decided against taken final vows and left the Order. He wrote more than twenty-five novels, including The Shoes of the Fisherman and The Devil's Advocate. The novel The Last Confession was his last book. He died during its final stages in October 1999.
I have had my own brush with the same religious Order that burnt Bruno: in 1997, at the end of a very successful and financially rewarding business career, when I found myself at a crossroads of what to do with my life, the Order called on me to rescue their bankrupt university college from certain collapse. Feeling my age and wanting to "give something back", I abandoned my thriving accountancy practice and computer consultancy to devote myself to the all-absorbing and seemingly impossible task of keeping the college afloat. And I agreed to do so on an almost pro bono basis in the belief - mistaken, as it turned out - that the Order could not afford to pay me a proper fee as they had cried poor all along.
The expression "24/7" had not yet become common usage. If it had, it could scarcely have sufficed to describe the total dedication required to carry out the task, and I even moved into the college to "live on the job". Twelve months later the college's operations were back in the black, and two years later it had repaid the millions of dollars it owed to the Order who had kept it financially afloat for many years. When I left at the end of the third year, it was totally debt-free, had half a million dollars in the bank, and was more profitable than at any time in its thirty-year history.
The realisation came far too late to me of just how much the Order had played on my ego in wanting to show them that I could do the impossible. Those withered old men had been great manipulators but shown very little concern and appreciation for anything outside their introspective and intrigue-ridden little world of ritual and dogma. The college's motto was "VERITAS VI VERITATIS". Perhaps it will.
I may be a fool to have taken on so thankless a task but thank God I am still an atheist!
Anyway, I quite like the riddle of Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
