Benedict and the Wolves

TIred and emotional

In his very first sermon as Pope, Benedict XVI asked the faithful to pray for their new shepherd “that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.” The wolves, it would seem, have proved too numerous and too strong. He has become the first Pope to step down from the throne of Saint Peter since Gregory XII in 1415.


Who are the wolves, you might wonder? The first thing anyone looking at Vatican politics should be aware of is that it is the last Byzantine Court in Europe, surviving all others by several centuries. It combines, as did its long dead predecessors, an outward and divinely sanctioned autocracy with internal politics of bewildering complexity.

The resignation of Benedict, which a great many are refusing to accept at face value, namely that it was for health reasons, has led to levels of speculation and conspiracy theories that even Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, could would find implausible and fanciful. I’m no wiser than anyone else but I think it reasonable to suggest that the Pope’s loss of vocation, if that’s the right word, has as much to do with the back-stabbing politics of the Curia as anything else. If he wasn’t exhausted already the poison here would certainly have seriously weakened his system.

If one really wants to understand the Curia then one could do no better to turn to John Cornwall, an expert on papal history and author of the controversial Hitler’s Pope, who aptly described it as a “palace of gossipy eunuchs.” I would simply add treachery and back-stabbing to the gossip, the speciality of eunuchs throughout history.

Apparently Benedict is suffering from a terminal illness; either that or the head injury he suffered on a visit to Mexico last March convinced him it was time to abdicate. The fact that it took him almost a year to make up his mind suggests that it also reduced his decision-making process to glacial slowness. Then there is the Renaissance-style drama: he is being forced out after a recent acrimonious exchange with senior cardinals, or he faces disgrace over the shady dealings of the Vatican Bank. Add to that even more venomous accusations: his fall is attributable to past cover ups over paedophile priests.

There is a lot of tut-tutting disapproval among some of the faithful. In his blog, Marco Ventura, professor of law and religion at Siena University, wrote that “The theologian who held relativism as the worst foe of the church will be the pope who relativised the papacy.” That’s nothing. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the late John Paul II’s secretary, is a wolf closer to home. According him “one does not come down from the cross”, a rather interesting interpretation of the papal office. Ignore this; the words were taken ‘out of context’, the Vatican later said, the usual thing when the context, and the intent, is blindingly obvious. Anyway, it seems only fair to note that there is a wider ‘context’ that the Cardinal appears to have forgotten: John Paul twice prepared letters of resignation in case he became incapable. The Pope may be the Vicar of Christ but he is still only human.

I’m not a Catholic; I’m not even a Christian, so why do I feel the need to speak out here? Why? Simply because I hate to see this occasion being turned in to a cudgel with which to beat Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. I may not be a Christian but I grew up in the time-worn Anglo-Catholic tradition, one for which I still retain considerable respect. What I hate with a passion, as I wrote elsewhere, is ignorance and prejudice and ignorance born of prejudice. I fully agree with John O’Sullivan, who wrote in this weeks Spectator;

...Benedict dealt with the problems he inherited with courage, honesty and surprising dispatch, but often in the face of resistance. That was especially true of the child sex abuse scandals. After an investigation that left him horrified, Benedict not only offered victims and their families sincere apologies; he strengthened canon law to compel Church authorities to inform the police of abuse accusations; and he investigated and condemned powerful figures who had managed to escape censure. But though his zeal never weakened, his energy and ability to pursue crime and the criminals through the ecclesiastical machine did.

Ah, yes, the machine, the Curia, the Court, the Bureaucracy, worse than anything ever faced by a Byzantine Emperor. In his Ash Wednesday mass in Saint Peter’s Benedict appealed to the Church to move beyond “individualism and rivalry.” Aye, there’s the rub.

There is no reason to suppose that Benedict’s resignation was not brought on by declining powers; and there is no reason to suppose that the powers made the decline all the more inevitable. Last year’s revelations by Pablo Gabriele, the Pope’s former butler, showed a culture of vicious infighting and character assassination. You see: it’s all those gossipy eunuchs.

Benedict never wanted to be Pope; he was his predecessor’s choice-in-waiting. His talents are those of the scholar and the theologian, not the politician. Benedict is no Borgia. Come to think of it, perhaps that what the Vatican needs, a Borgia for the twenty-first century, one who can master the Curia and ensure the continuing relevance of the Church in an ever more complex and fractious world.

It seems to me that the Vatican has returned to the Middle Ages, the time when Popes were the playthings of the Roman nobility, when pontiffs like John XVIII and Benedict IX were forced to resign by a mixture of political intimidation and personal bullying. The nobility is long gone. No, it has not. Families like the Crescentii have long gone; in their place has come the College of Cardinals, the new aristocracy, as treacherous and often as self-serving as the old. Benedict retired simply because his health was no longer equal to the politics. The wolves ate him alive.

Papal Bull

The Pope has written a book.  There is probably nothing unusual in that.  I feel sure lots of past popes have written books, and the present pontiff is noted for his love of the pen, along with just a soupcon of theological controversy.

I rather thought Catholicism was all dogma.  “Oh, don’t be so dogmatic”, I can hear Pope Benedict say in my mind’s ear, “there is always room for a little flexibility in faith.”  There seems to be more than a little room when it comes to aspects of the Nativity. 

Christmas approaches with alarming speed.  But Christmas may not be Christmas at all, at least according to Jesus of Nazareth: the Infancy Narratives, a new addition to the Papal back catalogue published last week.  Never mind the season, never mind the month, never mind the day: Jesus was born years earlier than is commonly supposed.  The accepted date was based on a miscalculation by Dionysus Exiguus – also known as Dennis the Small –, a sixth century Eastern European monk. 

Dionysus is now best known for the concept of Anno Domini (AD) – in the year of our Lord.  I remember once in a religious studies class, after we had already established what BC meant, we were asked if any of us would care to hazard a guess at AD.  Without pause for thought I replied “After Death.”  “I’ll give you after death”, the teacher said.  I was a bit of a minx, you see. 

According to Benny, Dennis was a bit of a menace when it came to dating. We do not know how he calculated the year of Christ’s birth but he got it wrong, perhaps by as many as several years.  Jesus, you see, was born BC; born, in other words, before Christ!  The contention isn’t new; other scholars have made such a claim, now weighted with a papal imprimatur. 

My goodness, here is the head of the Catholic Church dealing in doubt.  What next, I wonder?  I’ll tell you what next: the Infancy Narratives has no room in the inn for cattle and donkeys.  The ox and ass did not keep time as the drummer boy played because they were not there.  It’s all a myth, the Pope says.  “There is no mention of animals in the Gospels”, he writes, in what is the third and last part of his biography of Jesus.  The inclusion of domestic animals in the Nativity scene was most likely inspired by pre-Christian traditions. 

Not to worry, boys and girls; there will be no Papal Bull ejecting the menagerie, even that set up every year in Saint Peter’s Square.  Even so, it’s as well to remember that it’s just a lot of bull.  So, too, apparently is the singing heavenly host greeting the birth of Christ.  His Holiness writes that the angels did not sing Hark!; they only spoke the words.  Maybe they were crooning. 

But when it comes to the really important stuff, when it comes to the Virgin Birth, there is no room for doubt or papal equivocation: this is the literal truth, the dogma upon which the faith stands or falls.  The Pope is insisting on the word of the Gospels and only the Gospels, which ironically aligns him with seventeenth century English Puritans, who, in their own literal way, literally dispensed with Christmas altogether, a pagan festival unsanctioned by scripture.

It seems to me that there is a kind of naïve purity or theological blindness here in an argument that is too subtle by half, and that half concerns the element of myth from which all belief takes succour.  When one removes the myth one removes the magic.  It is the need for this sort of primitive reassurance that moves mountains, not Papal monographs.  

Diabolical!

Bishops' Nightmare!

 A new spectre is haunting Poland…the spectre of spectres!  Alas, no sooner had the country got rid of communism than an even greater danger has appeared - Halloween.  Polish bishops recently urged worshippers to ignore the festival because it “promotes harmful and diabolical behaviour.”

The poor old prelates face a more dreadful challenge.  The battle against communism was easy: there are no laughs in communism; there is no fun.  There is lots of fun and laughs in Halloween, which makes the danger all the more diabolical.  The archbishop of Warsaw, Kazimierz Nycz, said the festival went against the Church's teaching by promoting "the occult and magic". 

The truth is that Halloween, which has become increasingly popular in Poland in recent years, undermines the authority of a church that is becoming as literal-minded and humourless as the old communist oligarchy.

No word from the Vatican itself this year, silence perhaps being the best policy.  A few years ago the Holy See was warning parents not to allow their children to dress up, dismissing the festival as a celebration of ‘terror, fear and death.’ So, they are a bit worried then! The message went out in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper, in a piece headed Halloween’s Dangerous Message.

So, what, one asks, is this ‘dangerous message’? Is Halloween not just about having fun and maintaining traditions, ancient traditions? No, it’s not; it’s riddled with a dark current of occultism and is “absolutely anti-Christian.”

Aldo Bonaiuto of the Church’s anti-occult and sect unit said that the event could spurn Satanic sects without scruples. “Halloween”, he continued “pushes new generations towards a mentality of esoteric magic and attacks sacred and spiritual values through a devious initiation to the art and images of the occult. At best it gives a helping hand to consumerism and materialism.”

Let me get this straight: Halloween initiates people into the occult and encourages materialism. So it seems to cover all angles!

No, I don’t take this silliness seriously from an organisation that not so long ago condemned the Harry Potter books and then in its fallibly infallible way changed its mind. Let’s strip away the Satanic nonsense.  Halloween or Samhain is simply an ancient Celtic festival marking the passage of the seasons, one celebrated in Christian and pre-Christian times. It has nothing to do with ‘trick or treat’ or Satanic cults and everything to do with casting light on a dark season.

But the desperation of the Church is understandable because it is largely of its own devising. It’s part of an ancient investment, it might be said, now bearing unexpected dividends. For, you see, I cannot think of a single Christian festival, major or minor, that was not based on the Church’s early usurpation of an older pagan holiday, from Ostara to Yule/Saturnalia. Even St Valentine’s Day was created around the festival of Lupercalia. Christmas Day itself is no more than the old Roman festival of Sol Invictus, the Sun God, whose birthday was celebrated on 25 December.

The simple truth is that as Christian faith falls away these old holidays re-emerge, have been re-emerging for years, partially in their original form, material and celebratory rather than spiritual and introspective.  So remember this when you see yet another jeremiad, as you inevitably will, bemoaning the ‘materialisation’ of Christmas. 

I have no idea how Polish Catholics received this latest piece of nonsense, but I rather suspect most will simply ignore it. People will continue to enjoy themselves, to have fun on Samhain or Saturnalia, without fear of the Archbishop of Warsaw, the Pope…or of Satan.

I had a good one.  I hope you did too.  

 ...Burn to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels! 

Drink to me, for I love you! I love you!
I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset;
I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky...

The King of King's Code

Mr and Mrs Jesus

You know it all already, don’t you?  You know that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, having penetrated the code and read the gospel according to Da Brown, or at least seen the movie of the gospel of the code of the book.  Even so, it might interest to know that a far older code has been discovered proving the same point…or proving that Dan Brown is a lot older than he pretends!

I fragment of papyrus has been discovered, an ancient Da Vinci Code, which makes the ‘explosive suggestion’ (that’s Daily Mail, not Ana speak) that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were man and wife.  The report I read in the Mail pompously declares that the discovery “undermines centuries of Church dogma by suggesting that the Christian Messiah was not celibate.” 

Au contraire, monsieur le Mail; this undercurrent has been around for centuries, part of a Gnostic tradition, text that did not make it into the official text, Satanic Verses, if you like.  The Gospel of Philip promoted the marriage claim centuries before Dan Brown.  But the Gospel of Philip, along with that of Thomas and Mary Magdalene herself, is among the scriptural also rans.  In other words Christian dogma trumps the other dogma; the Nicene Creed trumps the Gnostic heresy!  

Anyway, this in the cryptic script, translated from ancient Coptic, the language of Biblical Egypt;

…not [to] me.  My mother gave me li[fe]…

The disciples said to Jesus,

deny.  Mary was worthy of it

Jesus said to them, My wife

she will be able to be my disciple

Let wicked people swell up

As for me, I dwell with her in order to

an image.

An image?  What image!  Hmm, yes, well, you can make of that what you wish. What Karen King, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University, wants to make of it is quite a lot.  She recently told the Smithsonian Magazine that the fragment casts doubt “on the whole Catholic claim of a celibate priesthood based on Jesus’ celibacy.”  Oh, really, more so than the far more complete Gospel of Philip?  In time to come we may have the Gospel of Karen to add to the unofficial canon, or a new cracking bestseller – The Da King Code.

Hey, let’s get our feet back on the ground and look at the picture a little more soberly. To begin with, Jesus was a practicing Jew, a rabbi.  There is nothing in Jewish tradition and law that would proscribe marriage for such a person.  More than that, an unmarried rabbi is likely to have been considered as a bit of an oddity. 

The other thing is that the Catholic Church itself did not always insist on priestly celibacy.  That came later, when the performance of sacred duties was felt to be incompatible with carnal marriage.  When the Church decided on the purity of the priesthood it was easy to fall back on the canonically accepted Jesus as the avatar of perfection. 

There was no problem in this.  Scripture is completely silent on Jesus’ marital status, pointing neither one way nor the other.  But the whole point of Christianity is its novelty – it took a rabbi and prophet and turned him into the Messiah and the Son of God.  The Son of God as a carnal being? – never in a month of sexless Sundays! 

I always find it amusing when an academic advances a bridge too far, when making a mark rather than scholarly probity and caution becomes the important thing.  It’s like the silly fuss over the ‘discovery’ of the remains of Richard III in the archaeological dig at Leicester, a conclusion trumpeted before the facts have been fully established.  Wait and see, always wait and see.  

Professor King does not wait.  She goes that much further.  Never mind dead bones; she has the living text!  There she is, a more fatal Martin Luther, ready to shake the Catholic Church to its foundations with an enigma that is no enigma, a revelation that is no revelation!  It’s such a pity that Philip and Dan got there first.  It makes her dramatic dénouement look just a tad derivative and oh so passé.  

Stop Press!

There have been developments.  This ‘explosive’ evidence has been systematically rubbished by other specialists since I wrote this story at breakfast time this morning.  Now the King herself, in the light of this, is backtracking, at least to a point. 

With the stable doors creaking and groaning in the wind she says: “We still have some work to do, testing the ink and so on and so forth, but what is exciting about this fragment is that it's the first case we have of Christians claiming that Jesus had a wife.”  To this she adds that the papyrus itself provides no evidence (what?!) that Jesus was married, merely that ‘some Christians’ believed he was two hundred years after his death. 

Yes, and would ‘some Christians’ go by the name of Philip; would some Christians be considered as Gnostics?  She has also revealed – what a surprise – that the unnamed owner wants to sell it. 

"There are all sorts of really dodgy things about this,' said David Gill, professor of archaeological heritage at University Campus Suffolk.  "This looks to me as if any sensible, responsible academic would keep their distance from it.”  Ouch!  Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first turn into the Hollis Professor of Divinity. 

Christian Winter

This is an article I had published on Broowaha on Easter Sunday under a different title.  I want to preserve it here also. 

It’s Easter Sunday, late in the evening. I’m in Paris for the weekend, looking out over the city of lights. It’s been a wonderful few days. I’m not in the habit of writing on vacation, especially when I’m on a romantic interlude in the most romantic city on earth!

I could have held this article over until Monday evening, when I’ll be back in London but, as I say, this is Easter Sunday. There is no better time to draw your attention to the plight of the ancient Christian communities in the Middle East, now in serious danger of extinction.

These are the original Christians, people whose forebears were settled in the area several centuries before the Muslims arrived. For them the Arab Spring has not brought liberation but persecution and fear, all caused by the upsurge of militant and murderously intolerant forms of Islam.

Most of you will be aware of Hilary Clinton’s attempt to have a UN resolution passed, condemning the government of Bashar al-Assad for the violent assault of the Syrian army on the rebel-held city of Homs. What you may not be aware of is that Islamists in the city have carried out a ‘religious cleansing’, forcing 50,000 Christians to flee from their homes in terror, a fact reported by Douglas Davis in the latest issue of the Spectator.

It’s not an isolated event. Christians in other Syrian cities have come under attack. Bishop Antonine Audo of Aleppo, where a car bomb was exploded in the Christian quarter last month, says that the people are very afraid – “The Christians don’t know what their future will hold.”

Left-liberals are much given to gnashing of teeth over the plight of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis. There are no laments at all over the persecution of Palestinians…by other Palestinians. The threat even extends to Bethlehem, the literal and metaphorical cradle of Christianity.

As Davis mentions in his article (Out of the east), thirty years ago three quarters of the people living in the West Bank town were Christian. A reign of terror by Islamic extremists, involving land theft, intimidation and beatings, has reduced that figure to an estimated ten per cent.

The violence extends to Hamas-controlled Gaza, where half of the Christian

population have left their homes since the terrorist organisation took control of the area in 2007. Hardly surprising when one learns that there have been calls for people to slaughter their Christian neighbours, a chilling fact that seems to have escaped the likes of Alice Walker and all of the other 'useful idiots' who would succor Hamas.

I was in Egypt last November, when I made friends among the local Coptic community, people whose ancestors were in the country in the days of the pharaohs. The email correspondence I receive confirms the reports of growing apprehension in the face of the victory of the Islamist parties in the parliamentary elections. There have been killings and church burnings from Luxor in the south to Alexandria in the north. Last year no fewer than 200,000 people were forced to leave their homes under threat of further violence.

The greatest tragedy of all, though, has to be the fate of the Christians of Iraq, whose exodus from the country in the wake of George Bush’s ill-conceived invasion of 2003 has reached biblical proportions. Before the invasion there were 1.4million. Now only 400,000 are left.

Since 2003 nine hundred and fifty Iraqi Christians have been murdered and over sixty churches bombed. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom warned recently that “the end of Christianity in Iraq” was approaching. Most of those who are left are the elderly, people who exhausted their savings helping their children leave.

Amidst this unprecedented tragedy there is one bright spot for Arab Christians – Israel, a state that guarantees freedom of worship to all faiths. There the community has increased by an estimated 2000 per cent. In highlighting this fact, West goes on to make the following observations;

Never mind the ‘Israeli apartheid’ myths that flourish on Britain’s university Campuses. What intrigues me is why Britain’s political and media classes, normally so sensitive to humanitarian issues, turn away in the face of very real apartheid-style oppression that persists on the Arab world; why they remain silent as Christians are persecuted and the UN Human Rights Council, which last month endorsed the human rights record of Libya’s late Mummar Gaddafi, peddles its bizarre nonsense.

I’m guessing the position here is the same in the States, at least judging by the attitude of Hilary Clinton. I would urge you all, Christian or not, to spare a thought for an ancient community facing annihilation, even if she does not.

Athos and the Third Rome

I had never heard of the Theocratic Republic of Athos until recently. If you have never heard of it either it’s to be found on the easternmost prong of the trident-like peninsula that projects from northern Greece into the Aegean Sea.

Oh, I knew that Athos was the host to a community of Orthodox monasteries, Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian as well as Greek. I also knew that is a place closed to women. What I was unaware of was its unique political status as a self-governing though not independent entity. But what makes it of particular and topical interest is that it now stands at the centre of a religious struggle, one that largely seems to have escaped attention in the non-Orthodox World, a struggle that opens the door to the ghosts of vanished empires.

In an article in the April edition of the BBC History Magazine, David Keys says that Athos, the Holy Mountain, as the Greeks refer to it, might be considered as the last surviving remnant of the Roman Empire. It was given its status by the Byzantine emperor Basil I in 885, as a monastic territory within the Empire. This unique identity was preserved through the long centuries of Ottoman occupation.

Although the monks finally accepted the sovereignty of the emerging Greek state, Athos was formally recognised in the national constitution of 1926 as a self-governing theocratic republic, officially known as the Autonomous Monastic State of the Holy Mountain. On spiritual matters the territory comes under the supervision of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, long resident in Turkish Istanbul.

If you think that things can’t get any more complicated they do! Just as Greece is struggling for its political soul with Germany, there is a struggle for the Orthodox soul with Russia. Remember Athos is an international community representing the whole of the Orthodox world. There were points during the last century when the majority of monks were Russian, though the Greek government has since restricted a non-Greek presence.

So far so nothing, and Athos might have continued to slumber in spiritual isolation, but for one thing…some of the monks are getting a bit bolshie! Recently two of the peninsula’s twenty monasteries have been in trouble with the police. Why? Because they are refusing to pray for the Patriarch. The implication here is that he has no spiritual authority over them, a violation not only of church hierarchy but also a violation of the 1926 constitution.

Things have been taken to the point where the police have been trying to expel the monks of the tenth century Esphigmenou monastery. In another case Abbot Ephraim of the tenth century Vatopedi monastery has been arrested as part of a corruption scandal. But the dissidents have a champion. Turn now and look to the Third Rome. Abbot Ephraim has become an icon in Moscow!

It was after the fall of Constantinople, the second Rome, to the Turks in 1453 that the title began to settle on Muscovy, with the clear implication that Russia was now the centre of the Orthodox world. “Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. There will be no forth.”

The Third Rome did fall, or rather was eclipsed for decades by the communists. But the demise of the Soviet Union has seen a remarkable revival of the Orthodox Church. In the years since Gorbachev’s Christmas Day farewell 25000 new churches have been built. Today some seventy per cent of the world’s Orthodox community live in Russia and the Ukraine. A new vibrancy has brought with it a new assertiveness, with Moscow seeking primacy over Constantinople.

Ephraim is particularly prized. Last year he allowed a textile belt said to have been worn by the Virgin Mary, one of Athos’ most sacred relics, to leave Greece for the first time ever. It went with him on a tour of Russia, where it was seen by an estimated three million people, some of whom queued for twenty hours. By sheer coincidence (of course it was) Ephraim was arrested soon after his return with the belt, something that could not have happened, as Keys writes, without the tacit neutrality or agreement of the Constantinople Patriarch.

Actually the ramifications here are even wider. The whole question has been caught up in a new cold war between Russia and America. Unbeknown to me, Washington regards support for the Patriarch as an important part of its foreign policy. Over the past few years he has been visited in Istanbul by Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, just to bolster the old chap over his Moscow rival. The Greeks, increasingly worried about their own identity, are no less anxious to secure this ancient link and their pre-eminence in the Orthodox universe.

The trouble is, given his position in a Muslim country, the Constantinople Patriarch, once as powerful as the Pope in Rome, is an isolated figure. Successive patriarchs were really only able to preserve a primacy paradoxically thanks to the persecution the Russian Orthodox suffered at the hands of the communists. Now the Russian Church wants to give proper meaning to the concept of the Third Rome, many seeing Moscow as the rightful successor to the Byzantine patriarchy.

How did the Autonomous Republic get caught up in this, you may wonder? Simply this: it’s a traditionally conservative community and many of the monks, not just in the foundations I’ve mentioned, are openly critical of the Constantinople patriarchate, which they see as too ecumenical and too liberal. Alienation from Constantinople has entailed admiration of Moscow and the renaissance of Russian Orthodoxy.

To complicate things one stage further (yes, I know, I know!) the Republic is also in conflict with the European Parliament, which is calling for the thousand-year-old ban on the entry of women into the celibate community to be ended. Just how much ‘autonomy’ the Autonomous Republic truly has is clearly open to question. Come to that, just how much autonomy any of us have, religious or not, is also open to question. Turkey swallows the Patriarch; Greece swallows Athos; Europe swallows Greece. Perhaps the only independence left is to be found in the Third Rome. What a depressing thought to conclude with.

The Price of Freedom

I’ve been keeping a close eye on political events in Egypt, an interest spurred by my visit to the country last November. Some news I get via email from people I met while I was there, people with hopes of a better future, mired ever deeper in doubt, especially now that the Islamists have come out of the parliamentary elections as the dominant force, commanding two-thirds of the representation.

A presidential election is scheduled for sometime this year but in the meantime the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) remains in control. The generals may eventually slip into the background, but I don’t think the military will ever relinquish power; I don’t think it will ever give up its role as king maker, one that it has held ever since Nasser’s coup in 1952.

On the streets, still punctuated with violent discontent, the word is that the very models of modern major generals have struck up a clandestine deal with the Islamists. In parliament the liberals, those with the confidence of the street protesters, are fighting a kind of gallant rear guard action. Legislation has been proposed that that would exclude the army from oversight of any future elections. I guess it’s unlikely to succeed, unless the Freedom and Justice Party, the main Islamist force, decide to break their links with the soldiers

The real victim here in the complex game of political poker is Egypt’s ancient but vulnerable minority of Coptic Christians. Incidents of sectarian violence, in part encouraged by the military, have been steadily increasing since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak last year. Under attack from the extremist Salifist movement, with the army offering intermittent protection at best, the community is going through one of the most apprehensive stages of its history. There is little doubt that they are being singled out as a scapegoat. Thousands have left the country; millions have no choice but to remain.

Freedom is not for free, said one of the banners held up in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year. How ironic it is that the secularist dictatorships, the regimes of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak and Bashar al-Assad, the last still holding on, offered the greatest protection to the Christians of the Middle East. Now the Copts are indeed discovering that freedom is not for free. It has a price, one being negotiated at their expense.

Jubilant Jubilee

We do not run away from history. We know what the present crisis of capitalism demands of us...we are in the death-throes of late capitalism, which threatens to inflict even greater violence on mankind than it has done before, we must make our stand with the oppressed, with the movement for liberation throughout the world.

Who do you think wrote that? The content and the tone might give you a clue. Could it possibly be Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, something from The German Ideology or The Communist Manifesto perhaps? It has all the passion of those early works, the eagerness and the anticipation, the determination to surf on history's next big wave.

Actually, it was not the old bearded prophets of communism: it was Archbishop Rowan Williams, the bearded prophet of all sorts of nonsense, from socialism to Sharia. Yes, he co-authored this manifesto in 1974 with one John Seward, a Catholic priest, sitting anticipating the future in an Oxford pub, all dewy of eye and iron of pen. As soon as this pub closes, they sang together, the revolution starts.

Though never published, it was written for the Jubilee Group, a left-wing Christian organisation, which Williams helped found during his student days at Oxford. Alas, the other members, though broadly sympathetic to the view expressed in the Commie Christian Manifesto, declined to accept it, feeling, in the words the Reverend Dr Ken Leech, that it was "a bit of a rant."

Ranting was something Williams did rather well in his distant student days. In the original group manifesto, which was adopted, he said that capitalism "could inflict even greater violence on mankind than it has before". Than it has before what? Perhaps before Jacobinism, socialism and communism came into the world to show how violence was done properly.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, as the Sunday Telegraph reported yesterday, Williams was a leading member of the Jubilee Group’s executive committee, alongside Tony Benn, now something of a political dinosaur, one Eric Heffer, then an MP, and Reverend Alan Ecclestone, a Communist priest. I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that the jubilant Jubilees were to be found where the cause needed them, condemning the campaign to free the Falkland Islands from Argentinean generals who were not fascist. No, it was Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister, and the Tory Party who were guilty of "racism and creeping fascism." The Poll Tax was also a big no no, as was the US base at Greenham Common.

Christianity, too, was a bit of a no no, at least as far as the fascist Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan were concerned. In 1989 Williams gave a speech at Edinburgh University, where he talked of the "alarming religiosity of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher." Yes, it must have been absolutely terrifying to hear them talk of God.

Given his subversive activities it's not at all surprising to discover that Little Red Ranting Hood was put on a watch list by the intelligence services. He came to the attention of MI5 soon after the foundation of the Jubilee Group, principally because of his involvement with Marxist, Trotskyite and socialist campaigners of the usual fifty-seven varieties of the loopy left.

The Jubilee Group itself was identified as a "problem" neo-Marxist organisation in intelligence documents drawn up an MI5 officer named Charles Elwell. Elwell, who died in 2008, had a high profile in the intelligence community. Known as the Witchfinder General, he was the man who cracked the Portland spy ring, identifying the traitor in the Royal Navy who was passing secrets to the Soviets. He specifically highlighted the activities of Williams in a 1989 paper called British Briefing, circulated in secret to a panel of leading politicians, including Lady Thatcher. Soon after she was to say that the Jubilee people were "the most subversive group within the religious community in England.” A newspaper at the time referred to them as "a bunch of neo-Marxist trendy clerics."

Perhaps in years to come I shall feel ashamed of some of the things I say and write at this point in my life, my mid-twenties, my late salad days, when I am still green, actually blue, in judgement. It's not fair, perhaps, to hold one hostage to one’s youth. But that's the thing - Williams is still hostage to his youth, to a whole set of risible ideas; he is still the trendy Marxist priest, ready to attack the government at the drop of a manifesto, who now just happens, by the grace of Blair, another trendy of the day, to occupy the most important clerical office in the land. Dr Leech, his old jubilant comrade, recently said of him "I would not want to commit Rowan to the language of 1974, but it does really show the heart of the theological focus of the man and this has not changed."

I'm still torn between treating the Red Archbishop as a bit of a joke or a serious danger. On balance I think him more comic than serious, though his presence in the Church of England may be part of a deeply laid plan to infiltrate moles, thereby undermining it from within. Given the damage being done to the institution under Williams’ guidance his shadowy handlers must be well pleased. I might even go so far as to say that they must be jubilant.

Apocalypse postponed

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

It’s Sunday evening. I’m still here. If you are reading this you are obviously still here. Yesterday was not Judgement Day – only Saturday. Saturday: excellent and fair. Yes, there was no Rapture; Jesus did not come; the righteous - actually more the deluded and self-righteous – were not lifted bodily into heaven, leaving behind little piles of clothing, here, there and everywhere for the rest of us. The end, after all, was not nigh.

The Book of Matthew warns against false prophets in the form of ravening wolves. Actually I think stupid prophets are far more of a danger; prophets like Harold Camping, who runs a network called Family Radio Worldwide, which he used to broadcast the coming Apocalypse, an announcement supplemented by a billboard blitz. “We learn from the Bible”, his website says, “that Holy God plans to rescue about 200 million people. On the first Day of Judgement (i.e. yesterday) they will be raptured into Heaven because God had great mercy for them.”

I imagine Camping assumed he would be first upon whom Holy God would bestow his mercy, the first to shuffle off his mortal threads, because that same Holy God seemingly granted him, and him alone, access to the divine Mind. One begins to appreciate the concern of the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation that the Bible in the wrong hands was full of potential pitfalls; that a subtle message was capable of being misread and misinterpreted, capable of misuse by all sorts of charlatans. But Camping is not a ravening wolf; just as silly ass preaching to a lot of deluded sheep.

We’ve been here before; we’ve seen this kind of silliness to which American fundamentalists in particular seem to be prone. One of my earliest articles was a piece I called Christian Whackos and Mooning Messiahs. This concerned one Christine Darg, another American evangelist, who was convinced that Jesus would make his reappearance on earth at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem. Certain of the time and the date, she even set up a webcam to record this earth-shattering event. Time passed. Jesus did not come. No Jesus, just lots of profane mooners, anxious to record their arses for posterity. It was the appearance of everyone but Jesus, all those bare backsides, which caused the camera to be removed just as quickly as it was put up.

Yes, it’s funny; people like Darg and Camping are beyond ridiculous, a parody of faith, literal-minded to a numbingly stupid degree. Derision is the best way of dealing with them, and the poor fools who are taken in by their pretensions, pretensions which verge on the comically sacrilegious.

One other way, of course, was to be smart enough to see a potential business opportunity, to be as smart as the atheist in New Hampshire who set up Eternal Earth-bound Pets. Apparently he has more than 250 clients, convinced that they were off to heaven, who paid up to $135 (£83) to have their pets picked up and cared for after the vanishing. “They would be disappointed twice”, he told the Wall Street Journal, “once because they weren’t raptured and again because I don’t do refunds.”

I can only laugh.

Kings and Carols

Right, hold tight: I’m about to explode a cherished seasonal myth: Wenceslas was not a king; he was not even called Wenceslas! He was Václav, duke of Bohemia. It was the Emperor Otto I who extended the regal dignity to him posthumously. This was a purely personal honour, one that only serves to confuse, especially as the real King Wenceslas I of Bohemia finally stood up in the thirteenth century!

In a recent brief article I read on Wenceslas, not the first, the original, Jonathan Pollard asks if he was good, as the carol alleges. Well, he was declared a saint and all saints have to be good! But really it’s all a question of party politics, the parties in question being Pagan and Christian. Václav was a Christian, which seems to have been the only measure of his ‘goodness.‘ He was brought up by Saint Ludmila, another goody, eventually strangled on the orders of Drahomira, Václav’s mater, a Pagan, and therefore a bad person, although there is not a trace of evidence to suggest that she was - a Pagan, that is!

The fact is the saint came from a back-stabbing, power-mad family. His mother had his grandmother murdered and he was murdered in his turn by Boleslaw, his brother, who wanted the throne for himself. Which party did Boleslaw belong to? You've already guessed, I suspect - he was a Pagan! That’s how the hagiography goes, though Boleslaw seems to have been somewhat relaxed when it came to matters of personal faith, encouraging the growth of Christianity while he was duke and asking the Pope to make Prague a bishopric, rather odd behaviour, I feel sure you will agree, for a Pagan. It gets even odder when one remembers that Mlada, his daughter, became a nun and his son of the same name was so pious that he was to be known as Boleslaw the Pious!

The murder, as Pollard says, probably had nothing to do with Václav’s Christianity or his goodness and everything to do with his pro-Holy Roman politics, which was in danger of turning Bohemia into just another province of the Empire. His retrospective kingship shows how valued he was by the imperial court, just as Boleslav’s decision to go to war soon after his succession shows that he was the true defender of Czech liberties, not his brother, rather ironic considering that it was Václav who went on to become the nation’s patron saint.

Never mind the history; you are still left with the carol, the much loved classic with words by John Mason Neale. Incidentally I made up my own version of that, one my set used to sing at school, which opens like this;

Good King Stephen last looked out
On the feast of Wenc-lass,
When a snowball came in sight
And nearly knocked him senseless.
Oh, the stars he saw that night,
And his head was cruel,
Oh, the stars he saw that night,
And his head was cru –ooo –el.

I was a bad girl, a Pagan, clearly, not a Christian. :-)

Yes, a super song, just so seasonal. There is just one tincy-wincy thing. The tune to which Neale set his lyrics is Tempus Adest Floridum (It is time for flowering), a thirteenth century carol celebrating spring. So, you see, nothing really is as it seems.

A song of songs

I love the English language; I love its beauty, its directness and its simplicity. There are wells of our language, sources where words and expressions were first drawn that people continue to use, often unconscious of their origin. The work of William Shakespeare is one of the most important; the other is the Authorised Version of the Bible, the King James Bible, the translation of which was completed in 1611, almost four hundred years ago.

So far as I am concerned the King James Bible is the Bible, though I have never known it used in worship: the Church of England has long favoured the modern translation. But I grew up in a literate household, one where I was introduced to a range of influences from an early age, including the translation of 1611, based on the earlier Bishop’s Bible of 1568 and William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1525.

There is a marvel to it, a sacred marvel, if you like, lost in modern translation, a marvel that was to have a huge impact on the subsequent course of English literature. I am tempted to say that in abandoning the King James Bible the Church of England abandoned sacred language altogether, the beginning of a process of secularisation, disengagement and decline.

I suppose the argument was that it was too difficult, too archaic, too remote from common understanding and contemporary concerns. If so, it’s rubbish. An editorial in the Times made reference to Politics and the English Language, my favourite essay by George Orwell, where he offers his own up to date translation of one of the most moving passages in Ecclesiastes, of good usage into the worst usage imaginable. Ecclesiastes proceeds as follows;

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

The imagery, the cadence, the simple poetry of these words is intense. Now consider the version suggested by Orwell;

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

It’s awful; it’s meant to be awful. Orwell admits it’s a parody, though not, as he says, a gross one. This essay was written over sixty years ago. If anything the problem has got worse since then, as meaningful, direct words are increasingly obscured in fog of abstraction. I’m ever mindful that the abuse of language and the abuse of meaning was part of the political horror that overtook humanity in the course of the last hundred years. There is nothing at all obscure or difficult in Ecclesiastes, nothing that could not be easily grasped and understood

So, as we approach the four hundredth anniversary, it’s time to think again about the importance of the King James Bible, time to restore it in its full cultural significance. I leave you with my favourite passage from The Song of Solomon, my favourite book of the Old Testament, a sublime hymn to love and renewal.

My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.

My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.

Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

A Turbulent Priest

I mentioned in a blog that I wrote last month that I grew up in the Church of England and have a lingering respect for its rituals and its institutions, for the important part that it played in the history of this nation. In the course of this I said;

If I did not feel affection, a lingering sense of respect, I could look upon the pronouncements of Rowan Williams, the muddle-headed Archbishop of Canterbury, with equanimity; but I cannot: he retains the power to madden me with some of his more outrageous statements.

Well he has done it again, this hopeless, pseudo-intellectual, much given to ‘thinking out loud’ as a substitute for thinking at all. Much given, I have to say, to the most vacuous speculations. Now it seems that Henry VIII, the man who has a singular responsibility in the formation of the independent English Church, the man to whom Williams owes his unique position, might just be in Hell. There again he might not for “If Henry VIII is saved (an open question, perhaps) it will be at the prayers of John Haughton.”

Please note the ‘an open question, perhaps’, the kind of slippery evasiveness, get out of trouble quick card, that we have come to expect from Rowan ‘Sharia’ Williams. Anyway, the prayers he will depend on if he is in Hell, an open question, perhaps, are those of Haughton and his fellow Carthusians, executed in 1535 as traitors for refusing to accept the Act of Supremacy, thus recognising the King as head of the English Church. Houghton himself was declared a saint by the Pope in 1970.

I’m not going to say anything about the theology here as Williams is the expert, not I, and he surely knows that no amount of prayer or intervention will be enough to release the denizens of Hell; a closed question, definitely. No matter; Williams went on to say that “In many ages and many places authorities more appalling than Henry VIII have believed that they could abolish God and the cross of God; and they have had to discover that while they may vanquish, they cannot destroy.”

What can I say? Should I agree with Christopher Howse writing in The Telegraph that Williams, in a service aimed at healing the ancient divisions between Catholics and Protestants, should be able to speak freely without being taken amiss? Am I to take it that Henry VIII is to be ranged with modern tyrants like Stalin as one of those who attempted to abolish God?

Poor Henry, a man far more orthodox in his beliefs that Archbishop Williams, a man who believed that while he was a schismatic he was certainly not a heretic and most certainly not an enemy of God. He died, by the lights of his own beliefs, a true Catholic, one who just happened to release the chains binding the national church to the cause of a foreign prince, far more secular at the time than spiritual, a prince whose adherents were at that time and in those circumstances objectively speaking traitors to the English crown. To suggest that he might now be in Hell is an unusual proposition for an Archbishop of Canterbury but not one a fair-minded person would dismiss out of hand, so said Andrew Brown in his Guardian blog.

Well, I dismiss it out of hand, though I confess that I’m not at all fair-minded when it comes to such matters. I could say that Archbishop Williams has even less understanding of Hell than he does of Henry, of the politics and theology of the day. I could say that I do not believe this man fit to be the leading prelate of the English Church; I could say that he himself might very well appear to some as a heretic as well as a schismatic. I will say none of these things because I do not believe in Hell or any kind of afterlife. After all, it’s an open question, perhaps, that if I did that I might end up in the same place as Williams for all eternity, which for me is an open question, perhaps just a little too far.

Norwich and the Blood Libel

So far as the great currents of European anti-Semitism are concerned England, I believed, always stood apart. Yes, there were incidents like the Massacre at York during the reign of Richard I followed by the final expulsion of an impoverished community a hundred years later, though there were few of the wholesale pogroms that were a part of Medieval life in the rest of Western Europe from the First Crusade onwards. Put another way, I believed that England added nothing that could be defined as unique to the experience of Jewish persecution. I now know that not to be true: England added one of the most enduring anti-Jewish myths – that of the blood libel.

The latest edition of History Today carries an article by Miri Rubin, entitled Making of a Martyr: William of Norwich and the Jews. This concerns the case of a twelve year old boy who was found dead in 1144 close to his home town of Norwich in the east of England. At that time the town had a small but flourishing Jewish community which enjoyed the protection of the crown. The circumstances of William’s death are not at all clear, though six years after the event Thomas of Monmouth, a monk of the Norwich Cathedral Priory, wrote The Life and Passion of Saint William of Norwich, a determined attempt to prove that he was martyred by the local Jews, killed as part of a ritual sacrifice.

Thomas’s motives are not entirely clear. There was, of course, an abiding tradition of religious anti-Judaism in the church. There was some resentment over the role of the local sheriff in giving protection to the Jewish community, a particular source of anger among the peasants, compounded, perhaps, by church teaching. It also has to be said that talking up the cult of Saint William was good for business, if I can put it like that, as possession of relics attracted pilgrims and pilgrims, the tourists of the day, brought wealth.

The story was already in wide circulation when Thomas arrived in Norwich. Popular opinion was firm in the belief that the Jews were responsible, a view rejected by royal officials for lack of proof. William was also held to be responsible for a number of miracles, leading to the creation of a local cult, something generally discouraged by the church, which preferred more ‘international’ saints.

It was after Thomas made it his business to investigate the story that it acquired more than a purely local significance. The fact that the authorities in the person of Sheriff John de Chesney had rejected the unfounded accusations, and given the Jewish community protection in Norwich Castle, is explained away as the result of bribery. The malevolence of the Jews stands in contrast to the purity of William; in exchange for their evil came his good. The blood libel, the notion that Jews deliberately used Christian children in ritual sacrifice, had entered history. To this day it has never gone away.

The following century William was joined by Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, an even more celebrated case, mentioned by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. On the Continent they were joined by such figures as Simon of Trent, Christopher of Toledo and others. The latter case is particularly important in that it had a clear political purpose, facilitating the final expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

With the emergence of the secular age the blood liable simply underwent a metamorphosis, taking on modern racist and anti-Semitic forms. In Russia in 1913 one Menahem Mendel Beilis was put on trail on a charge of ritual murder, a particularly notorious case the facts of which Bernhard Malamud was later to use in his novel The Fixer. The post-war Kielce Pogrom in Poland is directly attributable to the blood libel. It continues, even so far as the present day, part of an ever-present anti-Jewish narrative arising from the cloisters of Medieval Norwich.

Dark Light

At the beginning of time, according to Jewish tradition, some angels visited Earth, there falling in love with mortal women. In consequence they taught their lovers all sorts of magical arts, revealing all sorts of divine secrets. God, in his anger, banished them from heaven. These rebel spirits, homeless and bitter, turned malevolent, associating themselves with witchcraft and the blacker arts. Now they were to be described in some sources as demons. These dangerous spirits included Azazel, Samael, and one described as the Son of the Morning Star. He is better known as Lucifer.

The Fallen Angels, Lucifer included, entered into Christian tradition, where the story continued to evolve, taking on new forms. In Jewish tradition they were sinners, punished for their transgression against divine law in much the same way that Prometheus was punished in Greek tradition. But the Christians added a new twist: Lucifer and his party were expelled from Heaven because of their pride, because they believed that they were at least equal or even superior to God. They were, in other words, the first rebels.

Cast into Hell the rebels brooded and plotted revenge. Because of their associations with women, because many of the demons were believed to have human mothers, medieval witch hunters, including the notorious Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammerer of the Witches), believed that women in general were more susceptible to devilish temptations than men, especially those of Lucifer, by this time more commonly referred to as the Devil, the horned God, who seems to be an amalgam of the Greek Pan and the Jewish Bringer of Light. Here again we are seeing a corruption of earlier tradition; for beauty has become ugly and light has become dark.

By the earliest accounts the Light Bringer was depicted as beautiful, not ugly and certainly not horned. The early Christians make no distinction between him and the other angels, except that he is always portrayed as falling. But by the fourth century AD Lucifer began to emerge as the Adversary, drawing on another Biblical concept, that of Ha-Satan, who acts in Jewish tradition as a kind of prosecutor in the underworld, judging the souls of the dead, a fearful figure, yes, but still relatively neutral. The Christians transformed him into a monster, in part a weapon in their ongoing struggle with the remnants of pagan worship, where the horned god was a benevolent, life-enhancing spirit.

There is no description of Lucifer or Satan in the New Testament. He was simply given the attributes of the pagan nature god by the Church, suitably demonised along with the earth worship that the old traditions entailed. Nature itself, the realm of the Horned One, was distanced as something wild and dangerous. There was an implicit dualism here: all spiritual entities were either on the side of good or of evil, on the side of God or of Lucifer.

It was during the time of Pope Gregory the Great in the seventh century that Lucifer took on his final form, that of a hunchbacked, goat-skinned man with cloven-hooves, horns and an evil stench. He was also said to carry a stick. either used to punish people or because he was lame, a disability he received when he was cast out of Heaven.

There is the most wonderful process of confusion and syncretism in this. For the Church, Satan - he and Lucifer are now interchangeable -, the limping devil, is clearly linked to various pagan deities and heroes, including Hephasteus, the god of the smiths (Satan is often said to have the skills of a blacksmith), Dionysus, Oedipus, Achilles and Hermes with his one sandal and his shepherd’s crook.

I think it accurate to say that Lucifer or Satan or the Devil is the greatest of the Christian scapegoats, a necessary evil, if you will, a weapon with which to attack pagans and non-believers, an excuse for every misfortune. It is here that Christianity can and does fall into forms of Manichean dualism, a world perceived as a struggle between light and dark, though paradoxically dualism itself was condemned, like witchcraft, as a heresy. But Lucifer, the greatest of the rebels, travelled on his path, finally achieving a kind of resurrection, a heroic transcendence, in Milton's Paradise Lost.

Fidei defensor

I grew up in the Church of England and while I no longer attend, apart from family days and holidays, and even then only to please my parents, I still retain a considerable affection for the institution, for the part that it has played in the history of this nation. If I did not feel affection, a lingering sense of respect, I could look upon the pronouncements of Rowan Williams, the muddle-headed Archbishop of Canterbury, with equanimity; but I cannot; he retains the power to madden me with some of his more outrageous statements.

So, yes, I value the Church of England just as I value Christianity, as I value spirituality in general. Even so I can respect atheism, those who have no place in their personal life for God our any form of spiritual insight; those whose horizons are purely (I was tempted to write bleakly) material. What I loath is the atheist proselytisers, those who would discard one set of absolutes only to promote another, bringing to the debate the worst forms of intellectual intolerance. God is dead; Richard Dawkins is alive. The new faith is totalitarian secularism, worse in ever way than the old faith of ritual and transcendence.

I understand in his latest Papal Bull Dawkins has said that the real abuse by Roman Catholic priests may not be the ‘groping of child bodies’ but the ‘subversion of child minds.’ Saint Richard would have it otherwise; he would chase Christianity to the margins of superstition and darkness in the creation of the kind of an earthly paradise, outlined by John Lennon in Imagine, a song with a message I cannot listen to without a compete sense of loathing. There is no earthly paradise. More particularly, as we should know from the history of the past hundred years, the attempt to create one always ends in hell.

The recent attacks on the Catholic Church, the disgraceful insult that the apparatchiks in the Foreign Office offered to the Pope, and through him to all Catholics, shows that the faith, Christianity in general, needs a defender. It could ask for no better one than Peter Hitchens, one of my favourite polemicists, who has recently published The Rage Against God, an exploration of his own journey from Marxism and atheism to belief.

In this he brings to bear his lucidity and acidy wit against the aggressive secularism taking hold of a society that has no longer and clear idea of itself. One only has to look at the progress of Mad Hattie Harperson’s equality legislation, which effectively tried to dictate what people thought of homosexuality. We are dealing her with new forms of state corruption, of the subversion of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech; of the subversion of moral choice itself. Though qualified in England, similar legislation in Scotland saw a fine of £1000 being levied against a Baptist preacher for saying that homosexuality was contrary to the teachings of the Bible.

Hitchens compares what is happening in our morally debased society with what happened to organised religion in Soviet Russia when faced with the aggressive atheism promoted by the state. The parallels not too extreme, at least I do not believe so. There has been a long process of secularisation at work, but it has taken more pervasive forms in our recent history, with the likes of Harperson and Dawkins occupying the high ground, sitting on judgement on all below. Who would ever have believed that Christianity would have been on defensive in the land of Augustine? It’s time to fight back; time for a spiritual renaissance. The alternative is grim beyond measure; the alternative is barrenness; the alternative is Dawkins.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Black Mass

I first came across a full description of the Black Mass on reading The Damned, a novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, a ninetieth century French novelist, though I heard of it prior to this. The whole thing struck me as laughably silly, like some kind of grotesque pantomime. It is, of course, both a Christian heresy and a Christian fantasy, conceived by priests and practiced by apostates; it has nothing at all to do with witchcraft or paganism.

Performance of the inverted rite be traced no further back than the reign of Louis XIV, and seems to have been constructed on the kind of information that the Inquisition had obtained in earlier ‘confessions’. Literary mention of it is also made by the Marquis de Sade in Justine, in which it is performed by an evil monk. It’s best to take that as a measure of how bizarre and fantastic the whole thing is, what an inversion of reality. It seems only proper that it was de Sade who first gave this practice literary life, for his whole life was a kind of pantomime, a kind of living Black Mass.

Jesus of the Muslims

There is a rather interesting article in the most recent issue of the New Statesman by Medhi Hasan headed Jesus: the Muslim Prophet, based on an appreciation of The Muslim Jesus, a book by Tarif Khalidi, the former Cambridge professor of Arabic and Islamic studies. Khalidi’s book would certainly seem to be an impressive piece of scholarship, drawing together all of the sources about Jesus to be found in the Muslim tradition. These all paint a picture of a man broadly similar to that of the Gospels-a patron saint of asceticism, the lord of nature, a miracle worker, a healer, a moral, spiritual and social role model.

The big difference is that Jesus, known as Isa in the Arabic, is conceived of as a prophet, not as the Son of God. Even so he is given the singular honour of being referred to not only as a Prophet or a Messenger but also as the ‘Word’ or the ‘Spirit’ of God, a designation conferred on no other in the Quran, not even Muhammad himself. Of all of the prophets recognised by Islam, which includes the Jewish figures of the Old Testament, Jesus is considered to be second only to Muhammad, the precursor of the Prophet of Islam.

By the lights of Islamic theology it was Jesus’ task not to bring a new revealed law but introduce a new path or way based upon the love of God, quite different from a Jewish tradition based more upon reverence for the law and fear of God. It’s because of this that he is referred to in the mystic tradition advanced by the Sufis as ‘the prophet of the soul’, which I personally think both profound and rather lovely. I was also fascinated to discover that Muslims also believe in a second coming of Jesus, that he will appear before the end of the world to do battle with the Antichrist, referred to as Dajjal.

Mary, known as Maryam, also has a special place of reverence in Islam, considered to hold the most exalted position among women. Indeed, she is the only woman mentioned by name in the Quran, even having a chapter named after her. According to tradition, Muhammad is said to have described her as one of the one of only four women in history who achieved perfection. Islam also endorses the Christian belief in the Virgin Birth.

I agree with the point made by Hasan that so much more could be made of this common tradition to improve the understanding between Christian and Muslim communities across Europe, especially in times like these, especially when there is so much ignorance, prejudice and fear around, as if a whole faith community were best represented by a few ignorant fanatics.

The chief point about the Muslim Jesus is that he is a historical figure, much like Muhammad himself, the kind of figure who would have been recognised by the early Christian sects like the Ebionites and the Nazarenes, with the later man-made Christology, introduced by Saint Paul and others, stripped away. Again it’s worthy of note that American evangelicals like Franklin Graham are prepared to describe Islam as a ‘wicked religion’ while identifying with Judaism which allows no place for Jesus at all.

Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, an imam in Leicester and the assistant general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, has urged Muslims to engage in the public and outward celebrations of Jesus, his birth in particular. He is entirely scathing of those absurdist politically correct councils like Birmingham, who attempted to substitute ‘Winterval’ (ugh!) for Christmas. “It’s a ridiculous suggestion to change the name of Christmas”, he said, “Britain is great when it comes to celebrating diverse religious festivals of our various faith communities. They should remain as they are, and we should celebrate them all.”

Anyway, Kahlidi’s book sounds completely fascinating. I’m happy to report that it’s now on my Christmas list. :-)

Tertullian and the Nature of Heresy

For Tertullian, an early Christian apologist, the Church alone bore the apostolic rule of faith, revered the canon of Scriptures, and bore through its ecclesiastical hierarchy the sanction of apostolic succession. Heretics were those who challenged any of these precepts. They were people who refused to accept the rule of faith, as others did. Instead they challenged people to raise theological questions to which there was no answer, "...being ready to say, and sincerely of certain points of their belief, 'That is not so' and 'I take this in a different sense' and 'I do not admit that'".

Tertullian has it that all such unnecessary questioning automatically leads to heresy-"This rule was raised by Christ, and raises among ourselves no other questions than those which the heresies introduce and which make men heretics!" Heretics, moreover, are those who do not restrict themselves to the Scriptures, but bring in other writings or challenge orthodox interpretations. Heretics are, quitesimply, rebels, in theological and in practical terms.

The answer was to believe and never question. It seems clear what practcal form this kind of thinking would take, to the fires of the Middle Ages and beyond.

The Rise of the Christian Witch

I was going through some old history journals last term, looking for material for a seminar paper, when I was sidetracked by a really interesting piece in History Today, volume 50, no 11, November 2000. It’s The Emergence of the Christian Witch by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, an expert on the subject and the translator of my edition of the Malleus Maleficarum

Let me just highlight the main argument for future reference. Christianity, at the point that it began to acquire ever greater influence in the Roman world, faced two specific challenges: heretical deviations for orthodox teachings and the continuing belief in the power of magic among ordinary people. Indeed, converts were attracted into the church in part because of its own claim to magical practices. The early Christian fathers went that one step further, claiming a unique power. Indeed we have here, in essence, the cult of the saints, of the miraculous transformations achieved by preternatural intervention and the possession of ‘magical’ relics.

The problem remained how to convince a wavering pagan audience that the miracles of Christ and the Apostles were genuine, whereas those of people like Simon Magus or Apollonius of Tyre were fraudulent. This was tied up with increasingly pejorative interpretations of the old religions. Daimones, the old spiritual intermediaries between this world and the next, were reinterpreted as demons, all under the command of Satan. There was an interesting process at work because Christianity itself came dangerously close to Manichaeism, a particular persistent heresy, in which the world is divided between the light and the dark, a constant battle-ground between good and evil.

In the end all magic, all magic that was not Christian that is, was condemned as potentially dangerous and heretical. The Theodosian Code of 428AD identified what was considered to be maleficium or harmful magic. The Church itself continued to work towards a solution to the perceived problem in a series of councils held between the fourth and the eighth centuries. Amongst other things women were forbidden to keep watch at cemeteries, presumably in case they invoked the spirits of the dead.

Even so, there was no systematic view of the dangers of witchcraft as a whole, as opposed to an activity carried on by isolated individuals. Bit by bit, though, a new preoccupation with the significance e of heresy began to emerge. Paganism and the practitioners of magic were, by this measure, viewed as an organised group, answerable to and inspired by Satan himself.

In 1437 Pope Eugenius IV issued a bull addressed to all inquisitors, deploring the fact that so many were practicing various forms of magic, worshipping evil spirits and making pacts with them. Witchcraft was now tied up with more general forms of apostasy, with the first known depiction of a witch on a broomstick appearing in Martin le Franc’s Champion des Dames in 1440, were she is described as Vaudoise, a Waldensian heretic.

The various elements now began to coalesce: the practice of magic, intercourse with evil spirits, the attendance at the sabbat, the pact with Satan himself. The fifteenth century theologian Pedro Ciruelo summed it up thus:

Anyone who maintains a treaty of friendship with the Devil commits a very grave sin because he is breaking the first commandment and sinning against God, committing the crime of treason and lese majestie. His action is also contrary to the religious vow he made when he was baptized. He has become an apostate to Christ, and an idolater who renders service to the enemy of God, the Devil.

The Christian Witch had been born.

The Danse Macabre-a Legacy of Christian Terror

Death, death; O amiable lovely death!
Thou odouriferous stench! sound rottenness!
Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,
Thou hate and terror to prosperity,
And I will kiss thy detestable bones
And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows
And ring these fingers with thy household worms
And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust
And be a carrion monster like thyself:
Come, grin on me, and I will think thou smilest
And buss thee as thy wife. Misery's love,
O, come to me!
King John, Act III, Scene 4

I had breakfast this morning pouring over a fascinating journal piece on Death and the Danse Macabre. There is a development in the perceptions of death, in the manner in which death related to life. In the Pagan World death is a presence, yes, but one quite different from that of Christian Middle Ages. The Romans, for example, accepted Homer’s identification of Death as the elder brother of Sleep, and the two are often depicted together as winged genii on funeral monuments. The Egyptians, according to Herodotus, were in the habit of introducing a sarcophagus to the festive table as a reminder of the fragility of life;

Behold this image of what you yourself will be; eat and drink therefore and be happy.

Plutarch later took up this notion, though in his account a skeleton was displayed. This was another custom adopted by the Romans, as can be seen in Petronius’ Dinner of Trimalchio, though here a jointed puppet takes the place of the skeleton.

The point to all this was not that death was to be feared: it was no more than the implacable will of the gods. In essence it was a spur aimed at redoubling carnal pleasures in the midst of a transitory existence. It was an invitation, if you like, to even greater sin.

Then, like the ghost of Banqo, Christianity arrived at the feast, with a dead and deadening hand. Now an eternity of suffering was the promised ‘reward’ of carnal sin. Death was thus reborn as a figure of terror, the gatekeeper to a world of even greater terrors. Thus was born the Danse Macabre.

Now the skeleton reappears in paintings and frescos across Europe, leading the living in a gruesome dance. The pageant begins in earnest in the fourteenth century, the age of the Black Death, and continues beyond. The skeleton takes the hand of all, from Emperor to Peasant, leading them onwards in an irresistible caper, often in procession, with the partners walking hand-in hand. Death is not at the end of life; he is there forcing his presence on every scene of pleasure, or of love, or of simple family intimacy. He takes at will; he takes the child from the mother, the wife from the husband; he separates lovers, forcing his own intimate embraces on the one or the other.

Fear of death, even in an age when the Danse Macabre has been consigned to the edges of consciousness, is arguably the most lasting Christian legacy