Ludwig’s clues to the answers we long for

Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, we will be rewarded.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

Two TV characters, a man and a woman, stand in front of a crossword cover walls of a room.

Anna Maxwell Martin, David Mitchell.

BBC.

The BBC have scored a bingeable hit with new comedy-drama Ludwig, starring David Mitchell as a maladroit puzzle-setter who is roped into a rather fabulous whodunnit. It involves his missing twin, a police detective whom he must impersonate in order to chase the trail of the disappearance. While on the case he solves a few other conundrums, giving the show many intriguing, if knotty, narrative threads.

It is not the first-time crossword setting and detective work have gone hand in hand. One of the very first cryptic crossword setters - the ‘grandfather’ of the genre - was Edward Powys Mathers, who also dashed off a mystery thriller, Cain’s Jawbone in 1934. The novel was provided to readers in the wrong order, with the simple but infuriating challenge to reconstruct the right sequence of pages based on maddeningly subtle internal clues. Despite offers of a cash prize, virtually no solutions were submitted.

Such is the dilemma of a cryptic crossword setter - when is clever too clever? Puzzles can appeal so much to our pride; our desire to be part of an ‘in-group’ which understands the highbrow references to opera, Latin oratory, and cricket slang. Those who can outwit them are part of an elite rank. The Telegraph crossword of 13th January 1942 was used as an exercise to recruit for the ENIGMA codebreaking unit. Indeed, when Mathers all but invented the idea of a fully cryptic crossword in the Saturday Westminster Gazette in 1924, his challenges bore the banner ‘Crosswords for Supermen’.

There is fundamental connectedness behind the world, and working on the presumption of such a unity allowed him to collect ideas and references from across the globe and throughout all history to form his tricksy clues.

I’ve often started out on a cryptic crossword, hoping to discover that I am one such genius, only to bitterly give up shortly afterwards, irritated that I don’t have that instant ability to see the solutions. I stare at the riddle, wanting to be one of those people who can naturally recall information, connect ideas, or see what has been hidden in the tortuous clue. Surely the appeal of a show like Ludwig is that it gives us an aspirational glimpse at the peak of human mental prowess, even if Mitchell’s wannabe inspector is a little socially awkward. He still possesses a penetrating gaze that looks through the surface of things, to see what no one else can. He is one of those ‘supermen’ - beholden to no one, able to uniquely see the way things are all by himself.

And yet, when Edward Powys Mathers died in 1939, he was referred to in his Observer obituary not as a kind of lone snobby genius, but “the gentlest of men… a saint”. It’s appropriate, as crosswords have long been a curiously churchy phenomenon: in the small list of great UK cryptic writers, two have been Anglican priests (Revd John Graham, known as Acaucaria, and Revd Canon A. F. Ritchie, or Afrit). Even Mathers’ fondness for Biblical allusions in his clues “led many to endow him with ecclesiastical rank” as Roger Millington’s book on Crosswords put it. Christian faith, because it is a religion built on the idea that God is with us in flesh, invites us to pay attention to the world around us. The world is not something to escape from, but is rather the place that, in Jesus Christ, God has come to meet us in. It makes you want to understand time, place, and culture, to better understand the God who has spoken through them, and given them meaning and destiny. In reference to this way of seeing things, Mathers was spoken of as a ‘catholic’ thinker in his obituary. This did not mean his church affiliation, but rather an instinct for seeing how everything is part of a greater whole. There is fundamental connectedness behind the world, and working on the presumption of such a unity allowed him to collect ideas and references from across the globe and throughout all history to form his tricksy clues.

There is also a negative hint in this obituary clue, ‘catholic’. Crossworders work under a nom de plume (David Mitchell’s character John for instance, who goes by ‘Ludwig’). And while Mathers was indeed a generous, open-minded man, he sealed his reputation for difficulty by adopting the pseudonym ‘Torquemada’, in reference to a former Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. So, if Christians are alive to the interconnectedness of all things, we also have a reputation for the institutional guarding of those very mysteries. History shows believers have tortured those who do not come to their idea of what the answer is; indeed, they have set the questions for too long, in the eyes of many hostile to the faith.

Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, and learn a new way of seeing, and of paying attention, we will be rewarded.

But this is the tension that crosswords offer us - a very authentically Christian way to think about the way God spells things out for us which does not rely on a stark binary of ‘true’ or ‘false’. He reveals things like a puzzle; slowly, and cryptically. Some might fairly object to this comparison, on the grounds this would make God too ‘out there’ - far away from the intimate father that Jesus bids us address so familiarly. Does it make God too remote and enigmatic to say he is setting riddles for us? But actually, a puzzle does not deceive us, like a mask does. Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, and learn a new way of seeing, and of paying attention, we will be rewarded. The answer is there, reaching out to us, if we only commit ourselves humbly to receiving it. It may cost us much effort and time. It may require us to learn things afresh. But this is part of the joy of trying to see, as St Paul puts it, "the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things”.

Jesus himself spoke in parables, very much like cryptic clues. But this was no elitism, designed to cut out those without the high IQ of David Mitchell’s ‘Ludwig’. Arrogant intellect or love of one’s own status is, for Jesus, just as much a bar to those seeking a solution, because to find the answer requires a certain submission - a discipline - to see things as the puzzle-setter sees them. If we proceed only to do things our way, we remain blind: seeing we do not see, and hearing we do not hear, nor do we understand.

Review

America

Culture

Film & TV

19 April 2024

5 min read

Cutting America to the bone

Civil War warns against worshipping civic and political violence.

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

An explosion occurs at the Lincoln Memorail

Civil War's finale in Washington DC.

A24.

The president of the United States is dead. The film Civil War culminates with soldiers of the Western Forces (a fictional secessionist group composed of California and Texas) posing for pictures with a presidential corpse just minutes after executing him. It’s a chilling climax, with optics reminiscent of American soldiers capturing deposed president of Iraq Saddam Hussein in 2003. The film ends with a warning. No democratic country, no matter the perceived strength of its institutions, is immune from tyranny, civil violence, and the bloody process of state failure. Collapse follows when states lose the capacity to provide solutions to the linchpin challenges negatively affecting their citizens.

A strength of Civil War is the way it articulates a universal political message without defiling itself with the toxic hyper-partisanship asphyxiating real-world American society.

It features a number of loyalist and secessionist geopolitical groups each motivated by a distinctive combination of social, economic, and political interests and goals. These groups include the Western Forces, Florida Alliance, New People’s Army, and Loyalist States.

The film’s storyline prioritises a violently unfolding near future civil war in a United States whose president bucked constitutional tradition by remaining in office for a third term. The president, whose character is modelled after Donald Trump, is the villain of the film, despite being supported by over half of the 50 American states. The Western Forces function as the film's hero group. Unlike the mercilessly murderous and viciously xenophobic soldiers affiliated with the Loyalist States, the soldiers of the Western Forces treat an eclectic team of journalists and war photographers (the film’s main protagonists) with kindness and respect, allowing them to accompany them during the final stages of their assault on the White House and entrance into the belly of the beast, the Oval Office.

The film includes shocking scenes that would make the most patriotic Americans shudder. Shortly after it begins, a suicide bomber associated with the Loyalist States, proudly carrying a large American flag, sprints into the centre of a group of vulnerable people, pleading with agents charged with guarding a water tanker, and detonates a bomb. Dozens of people including children are killed, many of whom were non-White Americans. This scene's power is that it bring home the threats Americans associate with foreign lands. Suddenly the menaces Americans instinctively link with states like Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, and Venezuela exist in cities like Charlottesville, New York, and Washington DC. America is no longer safe, and the threats have come from within instead of from abroad.

The message of Christ applies to theocracies and secular states alike. Every state, regardless of its attitudes toward religion, has an interest in its people living together peacefully.

As an American watching this film from a cozy cinema in Oxford, I thought about how the violence, polarisation, and civic rage depicted in the film already exists in many forms in the country I love from a distance. Shootings, many of them mass in nature, happen every day in an America whose citizens are comfortable with violence but afraid of each other. The United States suffers from an embarrassingly high association with mass shootings, far more than whichever county manages to claim an ignominious second place. Whilst it is unlikely tanks and attack helicopters will surround the White House anytime soon, the casual spirit of violence that has overtaken American society already fosters a level of violence far above the threshold any twenty first century democratic state should tolerate.

I watched this film as a proud American and as a committed Christian, a faith I share with many of my fellow American citizens. My Bible, and theirs, does say we are “citizens of heaven” destined to enjoy an eternal posterity in a New Creation marked by perfect peace and prosperity. However, until Christ returns, and God remakes the cosmos, Christians do have a vital role to play in their everyday civic communities. Whilst Civil War offers a grim view of America’s immediate political future, that message of Christ contains the content needed to cure the gravest challenges bedevilling the United States. I remain optimistic.

Not all Americans identify as Christians or even with organised religion; nevertheless, twentieth century history confirms that states that altogether ignore God will soon wither into an ecosystemic abyss of state-sponsored moral relativism that endorses the use of violence for an increasing, arbitrary range of unsuitable, injudicious, and illegitimate purposes. The message of Christ applies to theocracies and secular states alike. Every state, regardless of its attitudes toward religion, has an interest in its people living together peacefully. Humans need a moral system to provide them (as well as their societies at large) with at least a perceived sense of moral structure. Christ’s message articulates a concept of civic love that challenges the existing worship of civic and political violence. Christ argues that violence in moments of disagreement or dismay is never the appropriate option; the mark of genuine Christian devotion is revealed in the avoidance of violent action even when the use of violence would not categorically be condemned by observers.

Civil War explains how multiple, competing Americas exist. These Americas have different cultures, economic capacities, and sociopolitical ideologies. It teaches that America’s main problem is Americans only love other Americans like them. A number of enclaves exist across American society. Cut off from each other, the development of these enclaves has led to the emergence of micro-Americas so distinctive from each other that some of them no longer view formal geopolitical ties with other micro-Americas as in their best interest.

The same enclavisation portrayed in Civil War exists in the nonfictional, real-life America. However, unlike in the America depicted in the film, the real-life America still has time to solve its sociopolitical troubles and stop the American state from collapsing. I recommend Civil War to anyone interested in being entertained and warned by what a dystopian, worst-case-scenario of near-future American political activity might actually look like.