Fucking A Huge Silver Cross: Rationalism and Historiography in Michael Moorcock’s “Behold the Man” and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Patreon)

“Acne. Washing. Lonely. Rationalism. Fucking a huge silver cross.”

— Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man.

In Michael Moorcock’s bleak classic novella Behold the Man, time traveler Karl Glogauer travels to Judea of 28 AD to find the historical Jesus Christ. Plagued by religious trauma, repressed queerness, and a pathological craving to conclusively tell his girlfriend that she’s wrong, Karl soon falls into the footsteps of the Messiah, accepting tutelage by John the Baptist as he steps into Christ’s sandals while attempting to ensure that the Christ narrative remains part of history. He succeeds — at the cost of assuming Christ’s role and being crucified on Golgotha, ululating an agonized final cry of “it’s a lie - it’s a lie - it’s a lie...”, which ostensibly get later mistranscribed as Christ’s Aramaic epitaph “eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani?” Ruined by religious trauma and a messianic need to keep the hegemony of history in order, Glogauer sacrifices himself on the altar of iconography, destroying himself in the name of pathological technical correctness.

Glogauer’s slavish relationship with historiography is as much a product of a desire to establish some control over his miserable existence as an extension of his drive to be a rationalist, colonialist steward of culture and history. Believing himself to be effectively impotent as a result of his experiences with women, the church, and his gay affairs, he sets out to find the apotheosis of masculine individualism. Glogauer’s time traveling reveals the futility of looking for that mythical phenomenon, as in one of the book’s nastier and more dated moments he discovers the historical Jesus of Nazareth is a hunchbacked, psychologically disabled son of a promiscuous “virgin” Mary. Moorcock’s dark humor veers into edge lord territory in this sequence and throughout the book. There’s a tense dichotomy between criticism of rationalism and an adherence to it, as there often is in leftist works of fiction. Moorcock has a critique of rationalist solutions, but his paradoxical ending where Glogauer fulfills the Christ myth still postulates that religious doctrine creates its own dead ends. While that assertion may not be wholly incorrect, it’s also cynical and ardently materialistic in a way that precludes deeper conversation about the nature of doctrine and belief. It suggests other conversations, like how Glogauer’s quest is fundamentally one of Christian atheism, or that religious trauma is catalytic to acts of self-destructive toxic masculinity, or how a gratuitous need and it makes Behold the Man a genuinely chilling novella, but the critiques Moorcock waves around fall into the trap of not quite getting the point.

Nonetheless, Moorcock’s body of half-realized critiques in Behold the Man make it a fascinating lens on how a generation of fiction authors viewed Christian doctrine in mid-century British spec-fic. While ostensibly breaking from doctrinalism, a cabal of white guys largely recommitted to it by rejecting Christian dogma without abjuring chauvinistic imperialist rationalism. Their break with dogmatism was strictly formal, rather than a radical interrogation of Christian reactionism. The most notorious iteration of this fiction subgenre is the bibliography of Richard Dawkins, but if Dawkins has a rival, it’s Monty Python’s classic bridge-burner Life of Brian. Life of Brian has a bone to pick with virtually all ideology. Of course, this is an ideology in its own right — positioning one’s self above The Nonsense of Politics is a highly ideological choice. The virtue of rationality is a religion in its own right. Life of Brian, which is stridently not a diatribe against faith, operates within a Western Christian purview of history. Its jokes are targeted to middle-class white Brits: this is funny because we know better than this lot, don’t we? The spectacle of silly political and religious radicals and authoritarians is tailor-made for the supposedly impartial viewer. Python’s narrative of history, while clever and funny and packing some legitimate materialistic heft, is essentially Whiggish historiography.

The most intriguing component of Python’s historiography is that while it lampoons fundamentalist doctrine, it largely functions within its parameters. Christ is depicted as He is in the Gospels: the glorious, wise, blessed Son of God. This is done largely to make the jokes about religious sectarianism work, and the trick works: there’s some ingenious historical comedy in Life of Brian. Yet Python runs into the same problem as Moorcock: fiction about Jesus almost always tends towards the extremely conservative. Even The Last Temptation of Christ only goes so far with its iconoclasm. Moorcock and Python pillory fundamentalism, yet they’re ultimately trapped within a rationalist paradigm where they unknowingly pay lip service to it. They’re probably by some margins the 20th century’s finest fictions written about Jesus and early Christianity, but I suspect the radical inversion of doctrine Python in particular was aiming for lies outside the realm of new wave science fiction and British comedy.