Venerable History

The History of the English Church and People has a clear polemical and didactic purpose. Bede sets out, not just to tell the story of the English, but to advance his views on politics and religion. In political terms he is a partisan of his native Northumbria, amplifying its role in English history over and above that of Mercia, its great southern rival. He takes greater pains in describing events of the seventh century, when Northumbria was the dominant Anglo-Saxon power, than the eighth, when it was not. The only criticism he ventures of his native Northumbria comes in writing about the death of King Ecgfrith in fighting the Picts at Nechtansmere in 685.


This defeat Bede attributes God's vengeance for the Northumbrian attack on the Irish in the previous year. For while Bede is loyal to Northumbria he shows an even greater attachment to the Irish and the Irish Celtic missionaries, whom he considers to be far more effective and dedicated than their rather complacent English counterparts.


His final preoccupation is over the precise date of Easter, which he writes about at length. It is here, and only here, that he ventures some criticism of St Cuthbert and the Irish missionaries, who celebrated the event, according to Bede, at the 'wrong' time. In the end he is pleased to note that the Irish Church was saved from error by accepting the 'correct' date for Easter. And for men like Bede this was no trivial matter.

Christianity and Hate Crime

Six leading bishops together with Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, had a letter published in The Sunday Telegraph, saying that Christians are being treated with disrespect, subject to new forms of discrimination that do not affect other faiths. “In a number of cases”, they continue, “Christian beliefs on marriage, conscience and worship are simply not being upheld.”

I would go further: there are parts of this disunited kingdom where certain aspects of Christian belief are actively under attack, along with the right of free speech itself. In Scotland I read of the case on one Shawn Holes, a born again Baptist, who was arrested in Glasgow earlier this month, held in a police cell overnight, charged and subsequently fined £1000 after pleading guilty at a court appearance. What was his crime? Mr Holes believes that homosexuality is a sin. Because of some remarks he made on the subject at an open air meeting he was charged with “uttering homophobic remarks.”

Mr Holes, an American preacher from Lake Placid, in Glasgow with some colleagues, part of a Baptist group travelling around the country, when asked by a member of his audience for his views on gays replied that “Homosexuals are deserving of the wrath of God- and so are all other sinners- and they are going to a place called Hell.” His remarks were immediately reported to nearby police offices, who promptly arrested for saying that “homos are going to Hell”, to use their particular form of words.

His prosecution follows hard upon the passing of a law in the Scottish parliament allowing for the prosecution of those guilty of ‘hate crimes’ against homosexuals. In England a similar homophobic hatred law was qualified by the Waddington Clause, an amendment tabled by Lord Waddington that protects religious liberty by a free speech shield, an amendment passed, incidentally, in the face of government opposition. Scotland allows for no such liberty, no such freedom of conscience. So, in theory, Scottish Catholics, who happen to share the Baptist belief that homosexuality is sin, could face a similar prosecution to that of the unfortunate preacher if they dared, for example, to quote Leviticus 18:22 - Do not practice homosexuality; it is a detestable sin. Have I committed a hate crime even in writing these words?

I don’t happen to agree with sentiments behind Leviticus, just as I do not happen to like fire and brimstone style of preaching, but one rather expects that sort of thing from Baptists. What I do agree with is the importance of free speech and the right to hold a conviction, no matter if it conflicts with contemporary notions of political correctness and equality. For many Christians homosexuality is morally wrong, contrary to the teachings- as they interpret them - of the Bible.

The Wicker Man, the original version starring Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward, is one of my all-time favourite movies, a delightful extravaganza set among a pagan community living on an isolated Scottish island. Woodward, playing Neil Howie, a police sergeant and devoted Christian, is sent to the island supposedly to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. Shocked by open displays of pagan licentiousness he is determined to report his findings to the authorities, telling Lee, playing Lord Summerisle, the head of the community, “Sir, may I remind you that you are the subject of a Christian country.” Hmmm, I wonder if a modern Howie might find himself charged with hate crime. :-))

Pillars of the Church

History has produced a superabundance of misfits and oddities, perhaps never more so than in the saints and ascetics in the early Christian Church; perhaps never more so in the so-called pillar saints, the most renowned of whom is Saint Simeon, also known as Simon Stylites, who lived in the fourth century AD in what is now Syria. In him a tradition of self-mortification was taken to a particularly acute extreme.

There is something grossly morbid, I have to say, about this man for all of his alleged saintliness, something repellent in his obsessive mortification of the flesh; he was even expelled from the monastic community which he entered at the age of seventeen after several bouts of fasting brought him close to death.

Thereafter, in about 423, he became a stylite, from the Greek stylos, meaning pillar. That is to say he set himself on a nine foot pillar, which increased in size over the years, supposedly in order to escape from those who would interrupt his solitude and meditation, finally taking him some sixty feet from the ground. Here he remained, day and night, through all weathers and all seasons, for the last twenty years of his life.

The plinth, all that remains of the pillar, can still be seen today in the ruined Byzantine church of Saint Simeon a few miles to the north of the modern city of Aleppo. It’s surmounted by a huge boulder, which mysteriously appeared a few decades ago.

Simeon was never to attain the solitude he craved. As his fame grew, as people became aware of his pathological and morbid devotions, more and more came to see this oddity of faith, including three Byzantine emperors. Bowing to public demand, he delivered exhortations twice daily, also sitting in judgement in the fashion of Solomon on cases brought before him. Still, wedded to that tiny spot, never coming down, there seems to me to be something altogether repellent about this. It was later written that his excrement, which ran down the length of the column, looked like wax from a taper.

Simeon died on the top of his pillar on 24 July, 459, aged about seventy, but his example persisted setting a fashion, setting a trend that looks distinctly Monty Python from the perspective of the modern age. By the sixth century the Orontes Valley around Antioch was crowded with these eccentrics. In From the Holy Mountain William Dalrymple says that if one was struck by lightening- a fairy frequent occurrence- his rivals’ would all interpret this as a sign of God’s displeasure, probably indicating that the unfortunate victim was a secret heretic.

The pillar saints did move west, making it as far as Trier before the trend was eventually abandoned. Why? Well, it was too cold! Saints, like some wines, clearly do not travel well. :-)

Constantine the Great: Christianity as Political Expediency

So why did the Emperor Constantine favour Christianity? It was politics, dear boy, politics! Yes, I simplify, but in simplicity there is always a hard nugget of truth.

Victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge was not sufficient in itself; the empire had to be pacified, and one way of achieving this was to end the persecution of the increasingly important Christian community. But the Edict of Milan only extended recognition to Christianity as one of the empire's many cults, with Christ no more significant than Apollo, to whom the Emperor had already pledged his special allegiance. From a purely Christian perspective the Milan decree was just as intolerable, if not more so, than the persecutions of Diocletian.

While Constantine hoped to harness the power of the Christian God, it seems certain, his background notwithstanding, that he had an imperfect understanding of the true nature of the religion. It was his continuing need for political support that served to focus his thinking, to appreciate the power that could be conferred by a church, infinitely better organised than its pagan competitors. It was this unified and organised church that he saw as an essential base to his power, and made him all the more determined to maintain that unity after his victory over Licinius in 324. At the First Council of Nicaea, summoned to address the dangerously disruptive Arian heresy, Constantine appeared as the dominant influence, more powerful than any bishop, beginning a long tradition of Caesaropapism.

Now in the latter part of his reign, Constantine gave further signs of the special significance that Christianity had achieved in his political scheme of things by lavish patronage, in sharp contrast to his neglect of the pagan cults. But it is always well to remember that to the very end, even in the great city of Constantinople, the supreme figure, even the supreme deity, was not Christ but Constantine, which makes him not that much different to his imperial predecessors, all the way back to Augustus. Baptism only came at the very end for an Emperor who was always more mindful of earthly than heavenly power.