Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 24 of 217 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  One of the most innovative and daring Jewish attempts to spiritualize the secular was developed by Rabbi Abraham Yitzak Kook (1865–1935), who also migrated to Palestine in 1904 to become the rabbi of the new settler communities. It was an odd appointment. Unlike most of the Orthodox, Kook had been deeply stirred by the Zionist movement, but he had been horrified to hear that the delegates to the Second Zionist Congress in Basel in 1898 had issued the statement: “Zionism has nothing to do with religion.”57 He condemned this remark in the strongest terms. It “spreads the terrible, black wings of death over our tender, lovely young national movement, by cutting it off from the source of its very life and the light of its splendor.” It was an “abomination and perverse;” a “poison” that was corrupting Zionism, causing it to “putrify and be covered in worms.” It could only turn Zionism “into an empty vessel … filled with a spirit of destructiveness and strife.”58 Kook often spoke like one of the ancient prophets, but many elements in his thought were modern. He was one of the first religious people who perceived, long before the First World War, that nationalism could become lethal and that, without a sense of the sacred, politics could become demonic. He pointed to the example of the French Revolution, which had begun with such high ideals but had degenerated into an orgy of bloodshed and cruelty. A purely secularist ideology could trample on the divine image in men and women; if it made the state its supreme value, there was nothing to stop a ruler from exterminating subjects who, in his view, obstructed the good of the nation. “When nationalism alone takes root among the people,” he warned, “it is as likely to debase and dehumanize their spirit as elevate it.”59

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  same Anna as a wife, but this deal went ahead: Basil’s throne was secured, thanks to his bodyguards from Rus’.10 The Byzantines continued to recruit elite warriors from the north, not merely from Rus’ but directly from far-off Scandinavia; from the end of the tenth century, they referred to them as ‘Varangians’. The name has often been wrongly back-projected on the first troublesome Norsemen who negotiated their way into Byzantine Christianity. The source of the confusion is the twelfth-century writer of the Kievan Primary Chronicle, who with little more to work on than a set of princely names from the remote past constructed much of the story of the first Rurikid princes, in an effort to tidy up the story of his people’s reception of Christianity two centuries before his own time.11 Prince Vladimir was not going to let the remarkable and unprecedented gift of a Byzantine princess slip from him, and in 988, to reinforce his new alliance with the Emperor, he abruptly ordered the conversion of his people to Christianity, himself taking the baptismal name Basil (Vasilii in Russian) in allusion to his new brother-in-law. There is a well-known anecdote embedded in the Primary Chronicle that Vladimir hesitated not merely between adopting a Latin or a Greek form of Christianity, but between Islam and Judaism too, and that his envoys to Constantinople swayed the decision by reporting their awe and astonishment on entering the Great Church of Hagia Sophia: ‘We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or earth.’ Given the political circumstances, it is unlikely that Vladimir had any real hesitation in his Orthodox baptism, but it is a satisfying story for Orthodox Russia, rather reminiscent of the self- congratulatory foundation tale which the Anglo-Saxons told about Pope Gregory the Great and his English slave-boys (see p. 336). And it does sum up two truths: Byzantine Christian culture had created the single most magnificent building in the European and West Asian world, and Kiev was now enthralled by Byzantine Christian culture. The feeling was not then reciprocated; Byzantine chroniclers are notably silent about the conversion of Vladimir and his imperial marriage, which they probably regarded as deeply demeaning for the dynasty.12 Once Vladimir had secured his bride from a distinctly reluctant Emperor Basil and brought her in triumph to Kiev, he provided her with a setting worthy of her heritage. Kiev soon boasted a stone-built palace complex and the beginnings of a proliferation of stone churches amid its fleet of wooden buildings, remaking the city in a Christian mould. Byzantine in style were the monumental architecture, mosaics and frescoes – naturally no statues – together with the liturgy which they sheltered, but individual features took on a local life of their own. The churches of Kiev and its imitators sprouted multiple domes or cupolas in a fashion which went beyond their more sober Byzantine models, perhaps because

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  preference, but also transformed the nature of the art which the Eastern Church produced. The special nature of Orthodox icons was emphasized by the growth of a notion, much encouraged by these bitter disputes, that there was one quite exceptional class of art: acheiropoieta, images of Jesus not made by human hands, the archetype of which was the now-mysterious Mandylion given by Christ himself to King Abgar of Edessa (see pp. 180–81) – the developed form of the Mandylion legend probably dates from the years of iconoclastic controversy. Such objects certainly defeated the iconoclast argument that icons had not received a specific blessing by the Church: a specifically divine creation trumped any such cavils.60 One modern commentator crisply sums up what had happened during the iconoclast controversy: ‘In the course of almost 180 years of debate, Greek theologians produced a radical change in the language with which they framed the icon. In so doing, they raised the status of the work of art to that of theology and the status of the artists to that of the theologian.’61 Art had become not a means of individual human creative expression, but an acclamation of the corporate experience of the Church. It was something to be approached with meditation and an acute sense of tradition. A technical change furthered this. The earliest icons, for instance, two majestic sixth-century portraits of Christ and St Peter preserved in St Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai – from one point of view, fine examples of late Roman naturalistic art – are executed in encaustic fashion, paint employing hot wax. By its nature, this technique encourages speed, an almost impressionistic technique, before the wax becomes unworkable, and in these works naturalism is an ally of individualistic talent. Quick decisions, boldness are at a premium. Later icons are executed in tempera, the mixing of colours in egg yolk. The technique encourages tiny strokes, meticulously applied with care and thought: a highly appropriate medium for meditation and careful attention to detail. The artist in tempera could rely on increasingly formal conventions for representation of the holy, turning all his individual skill to illuminate an increasingly elaborate set of conventions which carried choreographed theological messages. Not all monks had opposed the destruction of images, but the leading figures in campaigning for their restoration apart from the empresses had been monks like Theodore the Stoudite. They were also energetic in placing the restoration in a wider context: the renewal and enriching of worship and its music in Constantinople. It was done just at the time when the Carolingians and their bishops were greatly enriching the liturgy of Francia, but with a different reference point, Rome. In a parallel fashion, Byzantium looked eastwards: the ninth-century renewal of the city’s liturgical tradition drew inspiration from a

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  My mother had a special and secret relationship with words, taken for granted as language because it was always there. I did not speak until I was four. When I was three, the dazzling world of strange lights and fascinating shapes which I inhabited resolved itself in mundane definitions, and I learned another nature of things as seen through eyeglasses. This perception of things was less colorful and confusing but much more comfortable than the one native to my nearsighted and unevenly focused eyes. I remember trundling along Lenox Avenue with my mother, on our way to school to pick up Phyllis and Helen for lunch. It was late spring because my legs felt light and real, unencumbered by bulky snowpants. I dawdled along the fence around the public playground, inside of which grew one stunted plane tree. Enthralled, I stared up at the sudden revelation of each single and particular leaf of green, precisely shaped and laced about with unmixed light. Before my glasses, I had known trees as tall brown pillars ending in fat puffy swirls of paling greens, much like the pictures of them I perused in my sisters’ storybooks from which I learned so much of my visual world. But out of my mother’s mouth a world of comment came cascading when she felt at ease or in her element, full of picaresque constructions and surreal scenes. We were never dressed too lightly, but rather “in next kin to nothing.” Neck skin to nothing? Impassable and impossible distances were measured by the distance “from Hog to Kick ’em Jenny.” Hog? Kick ’em Jenny? Who knew until I was sane and grown a poet with a mouthful of stars, that these were two little reefs in the Grenadines, between Grenada and Carriacou. The euphemisms of body were equally puzzling, if no less colorful. A mild reprimand was accompanied not by a slap on the behind, but a “smack on the backass,” or on the “bamsy.” You sat on your “bam-bam,” but anything between your hipbones and upper thighs was consigned to the “lower-region,” a word I always imagined to have french origins, as in “Don’t forget to wash your l ’ oregión before you go to bed.” For more clinical and precise descriptions, there was always “between your legs”—whispered. The sensual content of life was masked and cryptic, but attended in well-coded phrases. Somehow all the cousins knew that Uncle Cyril couldn’t lift heavy things because of his “bam-bam-coo,” and the lowered voice in which this hernia was spoken of warned us that it had something to do with “down there.” And on the infrequent but magical occasions when mother performed her delicious laying on of hands for a crick in the neck or a pulled muscle, she didn’t massage your backbone, she “raised your zandalee.” I never caught cold, but “got co-hum, co-hum,” and then everything turned “cro-bo-so,” topsy-turvy, or at least, a bit askew.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  (1492–1799) IN 1492 the Jews had been one of the first casualties of the new order that was slowly coming to birth in the West. The other victims of that momentous year had been the Muslims of Spain, who had lost their last foothold in Europe. But Islam was by no means a spent force. During the sixteenth century it was still the greatest global power. Even though the Sung dynasty (960–1260) had raised China to a far higher degree of social complexity and might than Islamdom, and the Italian Renaissance had initiated a cultural florescence that would eventually enable the West to pull ahead, the Muslims were at first easily able to contain these challenges and they remained at a political and economic peak. Muslims comprised only about a third of the planet’s population, but they were so widely and strategically located throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa that at this moment, Islamdom could be seen as a microcosm of world history, expressing the preoccupations of most areas of the civilized world in the early modern period. This was also an exciting and innovative time for Muslims; three new Islamic empires were founded during the early sixteenth century: the Ottoman empire in Asia Minor, Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, and North Africa; the Safavid empire in Iran; and the Moghul empire in the Indian subcontinent. Each reflected a different facet of Islamic spirituality. The Moghul empire represented the tolerant, universalist philosophical rationalism known as Falsafah; the Safavid shahs made Shiism, hitherto the faith of an elite minority, the religion of their state; and the Ottoman Turks, who remained fiercely loyal to Sunni Islam, created a polity based on the Shariah, sacred Muslim law. These three empires were a new departure. All three were early modern institutions, governed systematically and with bureaucratic and rational precision. In its early years, the Ottoman state was far more efficient and powerful than any kingdom in Europe. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), it reached its apogee. Suleiman expanded westward, through Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary, and his advance into Europe was checked only by his failure to take Vienna in 1529. In Safavid Iran, the shahs built roads and caravansaries, rationalized the economy, and put the country in the forefront of international trade. All three empires enjoyed a cultural renewal on a par with the Italian Renaissance. The sixteenth century was the great period of Ottoman architecture, Safavid painting, and the Taj Mahal.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  People must have the courage to throw off their dependence upon teachers, churches, and authorities and seek the truth for themselves. “Enlightenment is man’s exodus from his self-incurred tutelage,” he wrote. “Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his own understanding, without direction from another.” 23 But on the other hand, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant argued that it was impossible to be certain that the order we think we discern in nature bore any relation at all to external reality. This “order” was simply the creation of our own minds; even the so-called scientific laws of Newton probably tell us more about human psychology than about the cosmos. When the mind receives information about the physical world outside itself through the senses, it has to reorganize this data according to its own internal structures in order to make any sense of it. Kant was wholly confident of the mind’s capacity to devise a viable rational vision for itself, but by showing that it was really impossible for human beings to escape from their own psychology, he also made it clear that there was no such thing as absolute truth. All our ideas were essentially subjective and interpretive. Where Descartes had seen the human mind as the sole, lonely denizen of a dead universe, Kant severed the link between humanity and the world altogether and shut us up within our own heads. 24 At the same time as he had liberated humanity from tutelage, he had enclosed it in a new prison. As so often, modernity took with one hand what it gave with the other. Reason was enlightening and emancipating, but it could also estrange men and women from the world they were learning to control so effectively. If there was no absolute truth, what became of God? Unlike the other deists, Kant believed that it was impossible to prove God’s existence, since the deity was beyond the reach of the senses and, therefore, inaccessible to the human mind. 25 Faced with the ultimate, reason alone had nothing to say. The only comfort that Kant could offer was that it was, by the same token, impossible to disprove God’s existence either. Kant was himself a devout man, and did not regard his ideas as hostile to religion. They would, he thought, liberate faith from a wholly inappropriate reliance upon reason. He was utterly convinced, he wrote at the end of his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), of the moral law inscribed within each human being, which, like the grandeur of the heavens, filled him with awe and wonder. But the only rational grounds he could find for the deist God was the quite dubious argument that without such a Deity and the possibility of an afterlife, it was hard to see why we should act morally. This again, as a proof, is highly unsatisfactory. 26 Kant’s God was simply an afterthought, tacked onto the human condition.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Khomeini was convinced that the Revolution had been a rebellion against the rational pragmatism of the modern world. The people had shown that they were willing to die in order to achieve a polity with transcendent goals. “Could anyone wish his child to be martyred in order to obtain a good home?” he asked an audience of craftsmen in December 1979. “This is not the issue. The issue is another world. Martyrdom is meant for another world. This is the martyrdom sought by all God’s saints and prophets … the people want this meaning.”18 Scientific rationalism could not answer questions about the ultimate meaning of life; that had always been the preserve of myth. In the West, the abandonment of mythology had led, in some quarters, to the perceived void, which Sartre had described as a God-shaped hole. Many Iranians had been disoriented by the sudden lack of inwardness in their daily and political life. Khomeini was convinced that people were three-dimensional beings; they had spiritual as well as material needs, and in showing that they were willing to die for a state that made religion central to its identity, they had been trying to regain their full humanity.19 Khomeini himself rarely forgot the transcendent aspect of politics, even during a crisis. When the Iran-Iraq war broke out, Bani Sadr suggested that it might be useful to release the former shah’s military personnel from prison to direct operations. Khomeini refused. The Revolution, he said, had not been about economic prosperity or territorial integrity. He cited a story about Imam Ali during his struggle in Syria with Muawiyyah, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty, who was challenging his rule. Just before the army went into battle, Ali delivered a sermon to the soldiers about the divine unity (tawhid). When his officers asked if this homily had been appropriate at such a time, Ali replied: “This is the reason we are fighting Muawiyyah, not for any worldly gain.”20 The battle was to preserve the unity of the ummah, which must reflect the unity of God. The Muslims were fighting for tawhid, not for the conquest of Syria.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  JK: You have been remarkably prolific as an author since leaving the convent. What is your writing life like? KA: I work alone here in my house in London, I work at the library, and I write all the time. I write longhand and then I type the manuscript. It slows down the writing but I think it’s a good thing to write more slowly. I am not just a Luddite, forsaking all machinery—I am an epileptic due to a birth injury, and I am worried about the effects of sitting in front of a computer screen all day long. But I am finally getting a computer because the fact is that they are not making typewriters anymore, and soon the only place you’ll find them is in antique shops. When I’m not writing, I also do a little lecturing and a bit of teaching at the Leo Baeck College in London, but that’s a tiny part of my year. I teach Christianity, but there’s a Dominican priest at the college who thinks I’m not Christian enough to teach the whole course. JK: Your books range from biographies of St. Paul (The First Christian) and Muhammad (Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet) and Buddha (Buddha) to studies of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (A History of God and Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths). The Battle for God, for example, focuses on fundamentalism in all three Bible-based religions. What interests you in the study of so many different and disparate faiths? KA: It was the different expressions of faith that drew me back to religion. After I came out of the convent, I was sick to death of religion and I thought that I had completely finished with it. I’d had a bad experience of religion, and I was literally nauseated by it. It’s like a bad sexual experience at an early age that can skew you forever. My early books were written in a spirit of great skepticism. Then I made a trip to Jerusalem to make a documentary on St. Paul, and there I encountered Judaism and Islam as living faiths, vibrant and independent, and yet interconnected with my own. I was intrigued and enthralled, and I realized I had to look into it. The study of Judaism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity showed me that there was a lot in the monotheistic tradition that I had never encountered and could really relate to, and it drew me back to a greater appreciation of what my own religion was trying to do. I always tried to present the monotheistic religions in a triple vision by trying to see them all as valid ways to God. JK: Do you still regard yourself as a Catholic? KA: No, I would call myself a freelance monotheist. My main source of spirituality is study. When I immerse myself in the sacred texts, whatever they happen to be, I live moments of awe and wonder and transcendence.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  cult centre for any celebrated saint. Instead they looked to a shrine on the furthest south-western frontier of Catholic Christendom, in the city of Compostela on the Atlantic coast of north-west Spain. From the ninth century Compostela Cathedral had claimed that it housed the body of one of the original twelve Apostles: James, in Spanish Santiago. From all over Europe, devout people now sought to make the long and difficult journey to the remote Iberian city, and Cluny, strategically placed in Burgundy, began organizing these crowds along the roads of Europe; its priories were agencies and way stations for the journey. The Compostela pilgrimage was only the flagship in a great industry of travel to holy places in Europe which blossomed during the eleventh century. Most of the greatest surviving churches of the period were built as stages or goals on pilgrimage tracks, and their architectural patterns took their cue from Cluny. Entering the main entrance of St Etheldreda’s Ely Cathedral, Mary Magdalene’s Vézelay Abbey, the church of St-Sernin in Toulouse on the Compostela route, or Compostela Cathedral itself, is to see something of what the lost church of Cluny was like. The nave is a long, cavernously vaulted road taking the pilgrim on a journey to the high altar in the far distance, with around the altar a passageway (ambulatory) completing a circuit of the whole church building. The entrances of such churches are commonly topped by relief sculptures of Christ in majesty or God the Father judging all creation, a powerful reminder of the object of any pilgrimage: the distant goal of Heaven. They are among the greatest and most moving specimens of medieval sculptural art. The expansion of pilgrimage was only one symptom of profound changes in Church and society which Cluny Abbey embodied. What happened in the eleventh century was a Reformation, but unlike the more familiar Reformation of the sixteenth century, it was not a rebellion in the ranks but directed from the top, resulting in the most magnificent single structure of government which Christianity has known. Whether we approve of this achievement or not, it deserves the title of Reformation as much as the actions of Martin Luther and John Calvin, and we will not do it justice to see it, as later Protestants did, as a deliberate conspiracy by selfish clergy. The Church in the West was reacting creatively to change in the nature of power and wealth in the society to which it ministered. In the early medieval period, the chief way of gathering wealth was by warfare, yielding plunder and slaves; as we have seen, as late as the Carolingian period kings survived by giving handouts to their warlords (see p. 349). By the eleventh century this system was coming to an end. The change was symbolized by the collapse of Carolingian central authority in much of Europe over the previous century, which, whatever short-term disruptions it caused, was to lead to a new settled order in Western society. That was also encouraged by a

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Both thinkers emphasized the role of the unconscious, which they depicted as a state existing between the realm of sense perceptions and that of intellectual abstractions. Previously, Sufi philosophers had called this psychic region the alam al-mithal , the world of pure images. It was a realm of visions, proceeding from what we would call the subconscious, which rise to the conscious level of the mind in dreams and hypnogogic imagery, but which can also be accessed by some of the exercises and intuitive disciplines of the mystics. Mir Dimad and Mulla Sadra both insisted that these visions were not just subjective fantasies but had objective reality, even if they remained impervious to logical analysis. 48 Instead of discounting them as “imaginary” and, therefore, unreal, as a modern rationalist might do, we should attend to this dimension of our existence. It lies too deep for conscious formulation but has a profound effect upon our behavior and our perceptions. Our dreams are real; they tell us something; in our dreams we experience what is imaginary. Mythology was an attempt to organize the experiences of the unconscious into imagery which enabled men and women to relate to these fundamental regions of their own being. Today, people resort to psychoanalysis to gain similar insight into the working of the unconscious mind. The mystical school of Isfahan, spearheaded by Mir Dimad and Mulla Sadra, insisted that truth was not simply that which was logically, publicly, and legally perceived, but had an interior dimension that could not be apprehended by our normal waking consciousness. This inevitably brought them into conflict with the new hard-line Shiism of some of the ulema , who drove Mulla Sadra out of Isfahan. For ten years he was forced to live in a small village near Qum. During this period of solitude, he realized that despite his devotion to mystical philosophy, his approach to religion had still been too cerebral. The study of jurisprudence (fiqh) or extrinsic theology could only give us information about religion; it could not yield the illumination and personal transformation that is the ultimate goal of the religious quest. It was only when he began seriously to practice the mystical techniques of concentration and descended deeply into the alam al-mithal within himself that his heart “caught fire” and “the light of the divine world shone forth upon me … and I was able to unravel mysteries that I had not previously understood,” he explained later in his great work al-Asfar al-Arbaah 49 (The Four Journeys of the Soul). Sadra’s mystical experiences convinced him that human beings could achieve perfection in this world.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  ‘filth’.49 There was much criticism of this theology of grace at the time, and it has alternately repelled and fascinated both Catholic and Protestant down to the present day. One of Augustine’s modern admirers and biographers, having wrestled with the man for a lifetime, is prepared bluntly to say that ‘Augustinian predestination is not the doctrine of the Church but only the opinion of a distinguished Catholic theologian.’50 Western theologians, Catholic and Protestant, would do well to ponder that. Eastern theologians, so influenced by the Eastern monastic tradition of spiritual endeavour which encompasses both Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians, have never found Augustine’s approach to grace congenial. Contemporary opponents, in particular the clever and outspoken Pelagian aristocrat Julian, Bishop of Eclanum, pointed to Augustine’s personal history and his involvement with the Manichees, with their dualist belief in the eternal struggle between equally balanced forces of good and evil.51 Such critics said that this was the origin of both Augustine’s pessimistic view of human nature and his emphasis on the role of sexual reproduction in transmitting the Fall. It would probably do more justice to Augustine to say that he was heir to the world-denying impulses of Platonists and Stoics. Augustine’s early grounding in Neoplatonism undoubtedly stayed with him; references to the heritage of Plato (of whose actual works he had in fact read little), and Platonic modes of thought, shape much of his writing. Amid many approving references to Plato in The City of God, he can assert at length that Platonists are near-Christians; ‘that is why we rate the Platonists above the rest of the philosophers’.52 This helps explain why Plato remained close to the heart of Christian thinking through the medieval period, even when Christian thinkers began to be excited by their rediscovery of many lost works of Aristotle during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (see pp. 398–9). Augustine did nothing to discourage Christians seeing God through Neoplatonic eyes. God in Platonic mode was transcendent, other, remote. When his image appeared in mosaic or painting, characteristically as the resurrected Christ the Judge of the Last Days, dominating a church building from the ceiling of the apse behind the altar in front of congregation and clergy, it was as a monarch whose stern gaze transfixed the viewer in awe, just as an earthly emperor would do on formal occasions. That created all the more need for the Church to recognize a myriad of courtiers who could intercede with their imperial Saviour for ordinary humans seeking salvation or help in their everyday lives. These were the saints. Their ranks were increasingly extended beyond the ranks of the martyrs from persecution times, who had been honoured since the second century in pilgrimage centres such as that of St Peter in Rome. Now the martyrs were

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  bones. Celtic Christian culture made a great deal of such sacred objects in its devotion. The inquisitive and gossipy historian Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century made special mention of this emphasis, saying that in Scotland, Ireland and Wales people were more afraid of breaking oaths taken on bells, crosiers and the like than they were of breaking oaths taken on Gospel books.20 Spiritually, Celtic monastic life was as intense as anything in the deserts of Egypt or the Middle East. Half-starved monks crouched against the gales high in the rocky cliffs of the Skellig Islands, and the terrifying beauty of the waters in front of them made them see the sun dance for joy over the Atlantic Ocean, as it celebrated the Lord’s Resurrection on Easter Day (see Plate 8). They were actually capable of having contacts with Syrian or Egyptian Christians, at least through books which had started life at the furthest margins of the Byzantine Empire and had been brought west. It has been plausibly proposed that the astonishing intricacy of figural paintings to be found in such Celtic sacred manuscripts as the Gospel text known as The Book of Durrow (see Plate 23), and similar figures in Celtic sculpture of the same period, derive from the travels to Scotland and Ireland of a long-lost copy of a Syriac manuscript of the Gospel Harmony called the Diatessaron. Before these late-sixth-century artworks, there was very little attempt in Celtic art to portray the human figure; the sudden appearance suggests some external stimulus. Another copy of this same Diatessaron text, illuminated in the Syrian monastic enclave of Tūr ‘Abdīn, has ended up in Florence, and despite dating from several centuries later than The Book of Durrow, it has a series of figures posed in precisely the same idiosyncratic way as some of Durrow‘s key illustrations. Other features of Celtic Christian art, even that most emblematic of motifs the Celtic cross, can be shown to have precedents in the art of Coptic Christianity.21 These unpredictable links between the Middle East and furthest western Europe produced a Celtic theology which resonated at whatever distance with the tradition of Origen and Evagrius. Celtic monasteries took the same line as their fellow monks John Cassian and Vincent of Lérins in the struggle against Augustine of Hippo over grace (see pp. 315–17): they wanted to emphasize the importance of humans striving as best they could towards perfection. One Irish commentator writing in the margin of his manuscript of Jerome’s Preface to the Psalms summed up the optimism behind their spiritual battles in those bleak windswept cells: ‘It is in the nature of every man to do good and to avoid doing evil’.22 Out of this theology of moral struggle came a distinctive Irish devotional practice which was to become a major feature of the whole Western Church. The Irish clergy developed a series of ‘tariff books’ for their own use. These were based on the idea not only that sin could be atoned for through penance, but that

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As we leave the shores of Christian western man behind, only a dark and turbulent sea of despair stretches endlessly ahead … unless we fight . 113 Like Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, American Protestants also felt that their backs were to the wall and that they would have to fight in order to survive. Just as Sayyid Qutb’s description of a modern jahili city was difficult for liberal Muslims to recognize, the vision of America that Protestant fundamentalists were evolving was radically different from that of the liberal mainstream. Fundamentalists were convinced that the United States was God’s own country, but did not seem to share the values that were so prized and lauded by other Americans. When they wrote about American history, nearly all looked back nostalgically to the Puritan Pilgrim Fathers, but praised those traits in them that were least attractive to liberals. What kind of society had the Puritans tried to establish in New England? asked Rus Walton, founder of the Plymouth Rock Foundation. “A democracy? Not on your life! The early Americans brought no such idea to this new world,” he noted approvingly. 114 Nor had the Puritans had any time for liberty; they were more interested in “right government in church and state” which would “compel other men to walk in the right way.” 115 Similarly, the Revolution was not regarded as “democratic.” American Protestant fundamentalists could regard democracy with as much suspicion as their Jewish and Muslim counterparts, and for the same reason. The Founding Fathers of the American Republic, according to Pat Robertson, were inspired by Calvinist, biblical ideals. This saved the American Revolution from going the same way as the French and Russian revolutions. The American revolutionaries had wanted nothing to do with mass rule; they wanted to establish a republic in which the will of the majority and all egalitarian tendencies would be controlled by biblical law. 116 The Founding Fathers certainly did not want a “pure, direct democracy in which the majority can do as it pleases.” 117 They were as appalled as any Muslim fundamentalist by the idea of a government implementing its own laws: the Constitution was “not endowed with ability to create laws apart from the higher law [of God] but only to administer fundamental law as man is able to grasp and approximate it.” 118 This version of the American past is very different from that of the liberal establishment. Fundamentalist history was the creation of a counterculture determined to put the United States back onto the right path. All saw a falling-off and a decline from America’s godly beginnings: the Supreme Court rulings, the social innovations, and legalization of abortion had promoted secularization in the name of “freedom.” But by the end of the 1970s, fundamentalists were beginning to realize that they themselves must accept some of the blame.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  glory of Christianity’s enemies. Even though Rome was no longer in any real sense his capital, Constantine gave the Church in the city a set of Christian buildings which in some important respects set patterns for the future of Christian architecture, and in others remained deeply idiosyncratic. In any case, their splendour formed a major element in the fascination which Rome came to exercise for Western Christians, and it is worth considering in some detail these buildings which so seized the imagination of generation on generation of pilgrims. First, the property inheritance of Constantine’s wife, Fausta, enabled him to build one monumental church inside the city boundaries: a basilica dedicated to the Saviour which became and remains the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome, and was rededicated much later as St John Lateran. Many basilicas in centuries to come followed its plan and architectural forms at various levels of magnificence or modesty, but at the time this church was not on a prominent or especially visible site compared with the city’s ancient architectural wonders, and the Emperor’s other major Christian building projects had to be beyond the city walls.2 The sense of something radically new happening to Christianity in these other architectural gifts is accentuated by the fact that, in terms of Christian architecture, they were not much imitated. The gruesomely martyred deacon St Lawrence, who had won his martyr’s crown in the mid-third century by being roasted alive, was honoured with a monumental building of U-shaped plan like a truncated Roman circus, forming a large covered cemetery for those wishing to benefit in death through burial close to this very popular saint.3 The handful of circus-shaped churches of Constantine in Rome seemed to have been designed also just like the circuses of old Roman society as meeting places for great numbers of Christian believers, not just during the time of service. Perhaps they also provided a deliberate, triumphant reminiscence of the use to which circuses had occasionally been put: to torture and murder Christians before the new dispensation. The new regime was not shy of reminding Rome of the tally of past Christian martyrs, and their numbers were destined to swell a good deal in legend beyond those who had actually died. Curiously, and surely significantly, Constantine seems to have done little for the martyred St Paul, at best modestly rehousing the saint at his rural shrine, but he gave sudden promotion to the cult of Peter far beyond the Apostle to the Gentiles, through a massive investment in what became the largest church in Rome. It was to survive until the sixteenth century, when its rebuilding had a momentous consequence (see pp. 608–9).4 Like Constantine’s work at St Lawrence’s shrine, the Emperor’s gift to Peter was not a conventional basilica or a congregational church or cathedral, but a huge structure intended for burials,

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the local bishop. Their role in the Syrian Church continued for several centuries alongside developed monasticism.31 In Egypt there is a similar ambiguity about the first monastic institutions. It is worth noting that the richest modern find of gnostic literature, from Nag Hammadi, came from a Christian monastic community of fourth-century date. Egypt was peculiarly suited to a Christian withdrawal from the world because of its distinctive geography: its narrow fertile strip along the Nile, backed by great stretches of desert, means that it is easy literally to walk out of civilization into wilderness. It was here towards the end of the third century that the monastic movement first securely tied itself into the developed Church of the bishops and left a continuous history in conventional Christian sources, through the lives of two powerful personalities who could be presented as founder-figures: Antony and Pachomius, representatives respectively of two different forms of monastic life, that of the hermit and that of the community. The reality was more complicated. Much of this story of origins was an effort by Egyptian monks to claim priority for themselves in the monastic movement, in the face of their competitors and probable predecessors in Syria. Yet without such founding myths, it might have been less easy to integrate the new movement into the Church. In fact the biography of Antony written by the great fourth-century Bishop of Alexandria Athanasius makes it clear that he was not the first Christian hermit; from his boyhood in the 250s and 260s, Antony was already seeking out in fascination individual Christians in neighbouring villages who had taken to a solitary life or practised an ascetic discipline.32 Eventually his desire to live a Christian life out of touch with anyone else led him into the desert or wilderness: from the Greek for wilderness, erēmos, comes the word ‘hermit’. After twenty years of solitude, Antony was faced with a new problem: hordes of people were coming out to join him in the desert. Diocletian’s persecution of Christians and the sheer burden of taxation in ordinary society were powerful incentives to flee into the wilderness. As persecution ceased, not everyone wanted to go to such an extreme. So the community life already in existence in Syria found its parallel in Egypt, where groups of people withdrew from the world in the middle of the world, founding what were in effect specialized new villages in the fertile river zone: the first monasteries. They owed their existence principally to Pachomius, a soldier who converted to Christianity during the Great Persecution, impressed by Christians’ ready support for suffering fellow Christians even if they had not previously known them. Life in the army was self-selecting and communal, with clear boundaries and conventions, and it may be that the ex-soldier Pachomius drew on that

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  challenge of engineering buildings which would reach to Heaven with an audacity not swiftly followed by their ignominious collapse. This was the style which ungrateful Italians of the fifteenth-century Renaissance christened ‘Gothic’, connecting it to barbarian peoples who by the age of the cathedrals had of course long vanished among the Catholic faithful.29 Nothing could be further from the Dark Ages than a Gothic cathedral: it is suffused with light, which is designed to speak of the light of Christian truth to all who enter it. Abbot Suger of St-Denis, one of the pioneering patrons of this new style in the early twelfth century, had been seized by enthusiasm for the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, mistaking that carefully obscured Eastern mystic for the martyred Gallo-Roman St Denis, patron of his own abbey. On the bronze doors of his lavish new enlargement of his abbey church, Suger arranged for an inscription of verses which encapsulated the way in which the anonymous Syriac Miaphysite associated the quality of physical light with the experience of spiritual enlightenment. A church of stone could be transformed: Bright is the noble work; but being nobly bright, the work Should brighten the minds so that they may travel, Through the true lights, to the True Light where Christ is the true door.30 Light in the churches of the Gothic architectural tradition was filtered through windows which were increasingly themselves huge sequences of pictures in stained glass, telling the divine story from Old and New Testament and beyond into the history of the Church. Stained glass became one of the most compelling though also one of the most vulnerable media for conveying the doctrine of the Western Church (see Plate 30). It has never played such an important role in Orthodoxy or the non-Chalcedonian Churches, whose church architecture never aspired to become a framework for windows in the fashion of the Gothic churches of the Latin West. Gothic windows grew ever greater in expanse and therefore posed ever greater problems for the engineer of a vast bulky building. Intricate schemes of stone buttressing like permanent open scaffolding for walls and ribs for stone-vaulted roofs were devised to take the stresses safely from ceiling, tower and spire to the ground. The semicircular arches of Romanesque architecture gave way (sometimes, all too literally) to arches composed of two arcs meeting at an apex in a point, so that the thrust could be absorbed more efficiently at the point, and arcades and windows could soar ever higher. Above all were the church towers and pointed steeples which rose triumphantly higher than any other man-made structure in Catholic Europe;

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  specialized form of denying the world. Behind its Syrian origins lurked a Greek archetype from before the coming of Christianity: Diogenes of Sinope (see pp. 29–30). The first well-known reviver of Diogenes’s deliberate attempt to flout all convention was Simeon, who came to be known in Syrian as Salus (‘foolish’). Simeon outdid Diogenes in active rudeness: when he arrived in the city of Emesa (now Homs in Syria), he dragged a dead dog around, threw nuts at women during church services and gleefully rushed naked into the women’s section of the city bathhouse (‘as if for the glory of God’, his biographer optimistically commented). Not unnaturally he caused considerable offence, then somewhat illogically himself took offence at a group of girls who mocked him, miraculously leaving a number of them permanently cross-eyed. His affectionate chronicler a century later was Leontius, a Cypriot bishop. Bishops are not normally associated with antisocial behaviour; perhaps Leontius was writing in the same satirical spirit as Dean Swift. Certainly Diogenes ‘the dog’ lurked in some of Leontius’s literary allusions – not least in the dead dog hanging from Simeon’s belt. The Holy Fool was destined to have a long history in the Orthodox tradition (although for some reason the Serbs never took to him). His extrovert craziness is an interesting counterpoint or safety valve to the ethos of prayerful silence and traditional solemnity which is so much part of Orthodox identity. Not all Orthodox theologians have been very comfortable with that contrast.45 One of the most extraordinary practices adopted by some ascetics in Syria was to spend years on end exposed on top of a specially built stone column, living on a wicker platform which resembled the basket of a modern hot-air balloon. This form of devotion was pioneered in the early fifth century by another Simeon, therefore nicknamed the Stylite (‘pillar-dweller’). Once established on his column, he reputedly never descended from it before his death. Since the column was successively extended in height to some sixty feet, special arrangements were presumably made for the alterations; while detailed investigation has solved one obvious practical question by revealing evidence that this and subsequent pillars were en suite. Otherwise, Simeon’s frugal needs were met by an eager entourage of admirers who hoisted food up to him from the ground. His pillar survives in part, surrounded by a massive ruined basilica in the Syrian hill country beyond Aleppo, within sight of the modern border with Turkey. The column has literally been eaten away by its devotees, who over centuries chipped off small portions which they then ground to powder and swallowed for healing purposes. The remnant, now whittled down to man height from its original sixty feet, resembles a well-sucked lollipop (see Plate 3). Over the next seven centuries, around 120 people imitated Simeon’s initiative

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  councils was a brilliant Greek, a scholar named Theodore who, like the Apostle Paul, came from Tarsus. Maybe Pope Vitalian had sent him to England because he was worried that Theodore might be disruptive in Rome, but it was still a remarkable reminder that England’s links to a wider world were overwhelmingly thanks to the Church. One of Theodore’s most important and energetic colleagues was the Abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, Hadrian, sent to England by the Pope more or less to keep an eye on the archbishop; Hadrian was just as exotic as Theodore, since he was a refugee from the now beleaguered Church in North Africa.41 No one could accuse the English Church of being provincial. Because it maintained a loyalty to Rome untypical in the rest of Europe, that sense of difference enhanced a precocious belief among the English in their special destiny among their neighbours, both in the same islands and among the people of Europe. Thanks to Bede, and to the leadership of Archbishop Theodore, they could see themselves as a covenanted people like ancient Israel, a beacon for the Christian world. Though Bede never explicitly made the connection, it would not be difficult to conceive of a single political unit called England as well as a religious entity. Israel was most at one with God in its covenanted status when it was united, and at its most glorious when that unity was under single monarchs, David and Solomon. Bede caused the English to meditate on Solomon in another of his works beside his History. For centuries his extended allegorical commentary on Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem enjoyed more popularity, and he might have been surprised and a little put out to learn that it is his History which is now chiefly remembered. Why was Solomon’s Temple so important to Bede? Because it stood for him as one image in a pair of opposites, the other being the Tower of Babel. The Tower represented human pride, and pride led to a confusion of tongues. The Temple represented obedience to God’s will, and it led to the healing of the terrible divisions of Babel. It foreshadowed the unity of tongues which Bede cheerfully anticipated coming very soon in history, in the Church of the Resurrection: that cosmic unity at the end of time might first be foreshadowed in England.42 Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Christians between them made the Atlantic Isles in the seventh and eighth centuries a prodigious powerhouse of Christian activity. Their energies flowed together in the islands themselves, in the founding of a network of new churches and monasteries, but they also followed the sea routes which Columbanus had pioneered into mainland Europe, conscious that they had received Christianity by mission and were determined to do the same for others. Their activities coincided with and were aided by an expansion of Frankish power north and east, into what are now the Low Countries and the territories of

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  have a special destiny in Christian history, as we will discover. So Christian life in Constantinople straight away became based on a rhythm of ‘stational’ visits to individual churches at special times, the clergy linking them by processions which became a characteristic feature of worship in the city. To live in Constantinople was to be in the middle of a perpetual pilgrimage.14 Constantine’s vigorous annexation of the Christian past for imperial purposes in Rome and Byzantium also bore fruit in a remarkable enterprise which was a huge boost to the growing Christian urge to visit sacred places: the recreation of a Christian Holy Land centred on Jerusalem.15 Palestine had been a backwater of the empire since its miserable century of rebellion and destruction from 66 CE. The former Jerusalem was a small city with a Roman name, Aelia Capitolina, some evocative ruins on the former Temple site, and a modest number of Christians who had unobtrusively returned to live around the area. In the middle years of Constantine’s reign its provincial tranquillity began to be interrupted, much to the delight of its ambitious bishop, Macarius, who was pressing for appropriate honour to be done to the true home of Christianity. The bishop clearly attracted the Emperor’s attention by some skilled self-promotion at the great Council of Nicaea in 325. He returned home armed with instructions to start an expensive programme of church-building, the preparations for which revealed a sensational double find beneath the stately imperial Capitoline temple built by Hadrian (see p. 107). What emerged was the exact site of Christ’s crucifixion and the tomb in which the Saviour had been laid. It is possible that there had been a continuous Christian tradition as to the whereabouts of these sites and that therefore there was not much revealing to be done.16 Less plausibly, it was not long before the Jerusalem Church was announcing that the actual wood of the Cross had also been rediscovered, and within a quarter- century another enterprising Bishop of Jerusalem, named Cyril, was linking that discovery to an undoubted historic event: a state visit to the Holy City in 327 by Constantine’s mother, the dowager Empress Helena. Helena may not have found the wood of the Cross (certainly no one at the time said that she did), but her presence was important enough – important from the imperial family’s point of view, in demonstrating their Christian piety in the wake of the unfortunate and unexplained recent sudden deaths of the Emperor’s wife and eldest son, and vital to the Church in Jerusalem as a direct imperial endorsement of a new centre of world pilgrimage. It took nearly a century for pilgrimage to Jerusalem to gather momentum, partly because of the expense, but partly because not everyone was enthusiastic either for pilgrimage or for this particular destination. Eusebius’s comments on developments in Jerusalem are reserved, including the lofty remark in his later years that ‘to think that the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  and made it part of the empire in the 240s, but before that its kings had let Christianity flourish. Later Syrian Christians celebrated this in the legend of King Abgar V of Osrhoene, who back in the first century was supposed to have received a portrait of Jesus Christ from the Saviour himself and to have corresponded with him. The fourth-century Greek historian Eusebius took a great interest in Abgar, preserving the supposed correspondence, although apparently as yet unaware of the portrait, and the elaborated legend gained an extraordinary popularity westwards far beyond Syria. Partly this was because it remedied an embarrassing deficiency in the story of early Christianity, a lack of an intimate connection with any monarchy. That was probably why Eusebius discussed Abgar, exultant chronicler as he was of the Emperor Constantine I’s new alliance with the Church, and in general a writer little excited by the Church on the eastern fringe of the empire.56 Equally, as the cult of relics gathered pace in the fourth and fifth centuries, there was sheer fascination for many devout Christians in the idea of a relic provided by Christ himself. In an elaborated version of the story, this portrait became the first of many Christian displays of a miraculous imprint of an image on cloth, which naturally possessed impressive powers as a result. Later, in 944, now known as the Mandylion (towel) of Edessa, the healing cloth was taken to Constantinople. Later still, taking the story even further west, it was linked to another mysterious expanse of cloth now preserved in Turin Cathedral as the shroud of Christ, despite the likelihood that this admittedly remarkable object was created in medieval Europe.57 The most bizarre outcrop of the Abgar legend was its redeployment in the interest of medieval and Tudor monarchs far away in England. Under his Latin name Lucius, King in Britium, the Latin name for the fortress-hill looming over the city of Edessa, Abgar became by creative misunderstanding King Lucius of Britannia, welcoming early Christian missionaries to what would become England’s green and pleasant land. Although the heroic error seems in the beginning to have been the fault of an author in the entourage of a sixth-century pope in Rome, the story became much beloved by early English Protestants when they were looking for an origin for the English Church which did not involve the annoying intervention of Augustine of Canterbury’s mission from Pope Gregory I (see pp. 334–9), but the Abgar legend was more generally pressed into polemical service by a remarkable variety of combative clergy in the English Reformation.58 This was a far cry from its original purpose as a self- serving story for the Syriac Church, designed to testify to its early and royal origins. That story probably reached its full elaboration at a time when Syriac bishops and local leaders were hoping to curry favour with or impress late Roman emperors in Constantinople. The legend’s back-dating to the first century