The Malta Independent on Sunday
Man against the forces of destiny
Valletta: Malta’s Hospitaller City and Other Essays
Author: Victor Mallia-Milanes’ • Publisher: Midsea Books, 2019 • Extent: 203 pp
The seventh essay in Victor Mallia-Milanes’ book is “a semi-autobiographical rhapsody” (p. vi). At least, that’s how its author classified its form. Whereas a rhapsody is an effusively enthusiastic or ecstatic expression of feeling, he says that this essay is “no exuberant flow of lyricism”, “no ecstatic moment of romantic inspiration” (p. 162). This contradiction is already a first sign that this essay is “psychological” (p. 174): the author psychoanalyses himself, perhaps even unconsciously. The beautifully poetic passages (particularly in the opening paragraphs) mask a philosophical quest the author didn’t bring completely to the surface. For this reason I decided to devote the second half of the review (the first half appeared last week) entirely to this essay.
“The past becomes the present,” writes the author in the most poetic passage of the entire book. “[C]enturies, long centuries, begin to unfold leisurely as the clap, clatter, and rattle of oars beating the water, ever so still and yet in perpetual movement... grow more audible” (p. 161). History and Venice. History and the Order of Malta. These are the twin sparks of this essay’s engine.
“History isn’t kind to men who play God,” James Bond tells the villain in No Time To Die, the 007 film you’ll be watching at the cinema come April. By which we presume he means that things don’t turn out well for those who play God. You wouldn’t expect Bond to regale you with philosophy of history or theology nuggets, but that’s cinema for you.
“Playing God” is an archetypal theme. You find it in the Tower of Babel story, say: a thirteen-verse poem that in Hebrew looks like a ziggurat. In the first six verses Man aspires to be (like) God by building the tower; in the seventh verse God gets angry; in the last six verses, God cuts Man down to size. There’s also a play on the sound of words: “to build” is L-B-N; when God gets angry He says, “nābelā” – “let us confuse” (by pulling down the tower): N-B-L.
Why am I quoting the Tower story? Because Victor Mallia-Milanes’ seventh essay centres round the pulling down of a church on St Mark’s Square in Venice by somebody who, in the Professor’s view, played God.
Now, I don’t have all the column space that I’d like and I don’t think the editor will allow me a Part 3, either... So I have to say all I want to say in some 1,800 words, which is not easy. Because in this seventh essay, Professor Mallia-Milanes has raised so many issues that one really cannot do justice to it here. We’ll have to content ourselves with a short review; reading this book, you’ll understand why I find myself in this predicament.
In the first six essays, the author emphasised his adherence to the French École des Annales, which prefers the broad sweep of historical development to the narrative of the “great” man. In the seventh essay, he delves into the philosophy of the “great” man thesis, to attack it, not in overt philosophical terms but almost poetically. He refers to somebody many historians consider a demigod or an idol, by presenting him as a sort of demon, who even demolished a church on St Mark’s Square to build a ballroom in its stead.
I am baffled by this essay, because it seems that whereas the author is philosophically against “historical demigods”, he’s not against their opposite, namely semi-demons, for indeed he presents this historical character as if he were a semi-fiend.
The argument seems almost a disputation with Machiavelli’s implied premise in The Prince, that a “great” man has to free Italy from foreign domination. Professor MalliaMilanes is arguing that this is a wrong approach to history: long-term changes take place not through the actions of some “great” man, or “great” warrior, but on account of structural changes which we might call “forces of destiny” (see p. 175 in particular for the author’s endorsement of this Braudelian outlook).
But in its crudest form, Professor Mallia-Milanes’ underlying argument seems to be: (A) “All history is the result of structural forces” as opposed to “All history is the result of great men’s actions”. But, (B) as we have seen in the third essay, say (p. 73 in particular), “Some history is the result of forces” and “Some history is the result of great men’s actions”. Whereas this seems contradictory, the argument is thus resolved in the seventh essay: (C) “History is the result of forces and of great men’s actions” (both sub-contraries being true). The question the seventh essay raises – making it so compelling – is this: is it also the case that “History is the result of forces and little men’s actions?” Should “great” and “little” actually form part of the proposition?
In this case, the “little” man is... Napoleon Bonaparte!
Here I have to make a clarification. Among other things Peter Serracino Inglott said when paying homage to my father upon his death, was this: “Although he was a fan of Bonaparte with the sort of enthusiasm that my contemporaries had for the Beatles, it flickered into nothing when the Corsican crowned himself Emperor Napoleon. The strongly egalitarian Maltese novelist did not appreciate that kind of joke played upon the French Revolutionaries.” I was brought up in this environment, viewing revolutionary Bonaparte as a “great” man, but not Emperor Napoleon. So when I read the seventh essay, I could contrast my father’s “great” Bonaparte with Professor Mallia-Milanes’ “little” Napoleon. I personally see Napoleon Bonaparte as neither great nor little, but as the embodiment of the “cunning of reason” (minus the teleological element).
In this essay, Victor Mallia-Milanes is angry at Napoleon Bonaparte mostly for having subdued Venice, demolished the San Geminiano church on St Mark’s Square, and evicted the Hospital from Malta. The essay accuses the Corsican warrior of being “obsessed with grand larceny and extortion to enrich and embellish his country of adoption”, of “systemically demolish[ing] churches, dissolv[ing] monasteries and convents, confiscat[ing], pillag[ing], and... dismantl[ing] charitable confraternities” (p. 164). Here I have to disagree with the author’s views. The French sought to export their Revolution, and they did this through war. The law of war allowed expropriation of enemy property (I wrote about this in Id-Dritt Law Journal a couple of years back). The Revolution in France – myopically, I will hasten to add – sought to dismantle the Church, both institutionally and physically (consider the almost-complete demolition of Cluny Abbey, seen as one of the excesses of the Ancien Régime). “Myopically” because Revolutionary France soon realised it didn’t have the wherewithal to take over the Church’s philanthropic activities. Being that as it may, the seventh essay is weak in this sense, because it forgets that the Venetians themselves demolished buildings on Cyprus, and that, essentially, every new regime demolishes buildings representing its predecessor. On Malta, the British demolished an Auberge to build the Anglican Cathedral, and a Grand Master demolished Melqart’s temple in Marsa...
This doesn’t mean I’m condoning the demolition of Venice’s San Geminiano. I’m just saying that it was war.
Earlier I mentioned the “cunning of reason”, a complex idea proffered by the German philosopher Hegel, who, according to Jung, was “not even a proper philosopher but a misfired psychologist”. Anyway. The “cunning of reason” is when somebody believes they’re following their passions, their instinct, their intellect, whereas in reality they’re simply carrying out the mission reserved for them by history for the liberation of the spirit. The idea that history is a progressive march toward a goal is “teleology”. Hegel’s ideas were teleological: history/the Spirit leads humanity toward a higher goal.
Hegel once saw Napoleon in person and wrote about it: “I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”
And here lies the beauty of the seventh essay. Wittingly or unwittingly, Victor MalliaMilanes is Hegelian in his approach while disagreeing with Hegel’s view on the Emperor! Professor Mallia-Milanes himself acknowledges the greatness of Napoleon when he enacted the great Code that bears his name (p. 177) and later spread throughout Europe. In reality, the Code Napoléon didn’t spread thanks to French bayonets, but because the other European nations saw in it the spirit of the times, that it was the perfect vehicle for the liberal ideas then circulating, as an ideological-legal framework within which nascent capitalism could grow. The boat of the Code’s success was pushed by the winds of Destiny, despite not thanks to Napoleon being at the helm.
Interestingly, Professor Mallia-Milanes is Hegelian mostly when it comes to the Hospital. Hegel’s thought is, as Jung pointed out, more psychological than philosophical. It’s probably archetypal. It has been captured, I think, by one of our greater poets, Achille Mizzi, in these verses: “What liberation seeks the bean/ as it frees itself from its husk in the ground?/ What freedom seeks the shedding skin in cave?” The search for freedom is the ultimate goal (the teleology) of history, Hegel says and Mizzi implies. But Victor MalliaMilanes too (unwittingly?) accepts this Hegelian awareness.
He argues, rightly, that the Hospital was the enemy of egalitarian Revolutionary France, because it represented the Ancien Régime’s notions on privilege – “there was no French military siege of Malta in 1798,” writes the author. “The island was seized by Republican France after a long and protracted economic and political siege” that had lasted at least six years (p. 172). But – and here comes in the Hegelian theme – “in the long term... the change proved necessary, remarkable, and reinvigorating” for the Order as, “denuded of its stale privileges... the Hospital [... was r]ebaptised with the true spirit of evangelical love [and] it could now affectionately focus entirely on extending... a tenderly helping hand to marginalised humanity” (p. 173). In his book I Giovanniti: La Storia dei Cavalieri di Malta, my (pro-Bonaparte but antiNapoleon) father said the same thing: “The Order’s current activities are no longer within the political sphere, but in other fields such as helping the sick and the suffering, as it had been at the Order’s origins” (p. 12, my translation).
The apparent defeat through Bonaparte was for the Order the historical moment in which it freed itself from its stale past and embraced a liberating return to its truly religious raison d’être. This remarkable Hegelian conclusion closes the essay as it had opened: “the past becomes the present”.
I’d like to thank Andrew Sciberras for Peter Serracino Inglott’s translation of Achille Mizzi’s verses.
Part 1 was published last Sunday