The wholeheartedness of the conversion of at least a nucleus of the converts to Roman Catholic Christianity in Japan was attested by the survival of a “faithful remnant” underground for 231 years (A.D. 1637-1868) during which the penalty for detection was death.
An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956
The difficulty of persuading a sophisticated audience to give a hearing to an outlandish gospel would be great [...] in any case; and the apostles to “the high-brows” would have deprived themselves in advance of all prospect of success if they had gone out of their way to antagonize their shy spiritual quarry at the outset by wantonly making the form of their creed as rébarbatif as the substance of it could hardly fail to seem to an aesthetically sensitive Hellenically-cultivated mind (“si quando … prophetam legere coepissem, sermo horrebat incultus” [“whenever [...] I began to read the prophets, their language seemed to me uncouth”] – Saint Jerome, Ep. xxii ad Eustochium, chap. 30). These diplomatic considerations, however, were not the Fathers’ only motive, and indeed not even their strongest one, for resorting to the use of a cultural instrument which their church had officially condemned as frivolous at its best and, at its worst, pernicious. The evangelists of a cultivated pagan society were moved to address this audience in its own idiom chiefly because these evangelists themselves were mostly converts from these very pagan circles. Their conversion to an alien proletarian religion had not availed to break the spell of a pagan cultural heritage that was their birthright; and, when they used their pagan literary equipment for a religious missionary purpose, they were acting, not on calculation in cold blood, but spontaneously, con amore.
The abiding value of a pagan culture for Christian converts from a cultivated pagan milieu was demonstrated by the severity of the blow which Julian succeeded in dealing to the Christian community in the Hellenic World of his day by his shrewdly malicious stroke of making a professing Christian ineligible, ex officio religionis, for holding a teacher’s official licence [...]. The Christian victims of this sly manoeuvre in a “cold” religious war were so hard hit by their exclusion from a pagan field of cultural activity, and were at the same time so well versed in a literature which was the common heirloom of both parties, that, according to the story (as told by Gibbon, Edward: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, xxiii, following Sozomen), Christian men of letters “had recourse to the expedient of composing books for their own schools. Within a few months Apollinaris produced his Christian imitations of Homer (a sacred history in twenty-four books), Pindar, Euripides, and Menander; and Sozomen is satisfied that they equalled, or excelled, the originals”.
Julian’s stroke was a shrewd one because the Christians’ unwillingness to dispense with a pagan cultural instrument not only laid them open to a public exposure as hypocrites but also secretly vexed their own consciences and continued to vex them even when Julian was no longer there to taunt them with their inconsistency. At a time when Julian was dead and his Hellenic paganism was moribund, a Saint Jerome suffered the same inward spiritual discomfort from a tension between a Christianity to which he had dedicated himself and a pagan cultural heritage which he had failed to pluck out and cast from him (“bibliothecâ … carere non poteram” [“I was not able to be without the [...] library”] – Saint Jerome, ibid.) as a Father Maffeus [sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit humanist] was to suffer, in his day, from a corresponding tension between a Humanism to which he had dedicated himself and a Christianity from which he had found himself unable to break loose. Jerome’s psychological conflict came to the surface of his consciousness in the celebrated dream in which he fancied that he was hailed before the heavenly tribunal of Christ; was convicted by his divine judge of being still a Ciceronian and no Christian; and was reprieved only thanks to the intercession of the consistory and in consideration of an oath which he swore by Christ’s name, binding himself never to read any profane literature any more: “si legero, te negavi” [“If I read, I reject you”] (Hieronymus [Jerome]: Epistulae, No. xxii ad Eustochium, chap. 30). Paganism had to become not merely moribund but extinct before the Christian heirs of a pagan Hellenic culture could play their part as Hellenism’s literary executors with an easy conscience.
[...]
Subbing point: last Jerome citation is presented inconsistently.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
The Augustinian version of a Judaic view of history was taken for granted by Western Christian thinkers throughout the first millennium (circa A.D. 675-1675) of the Western Civilization’s life and was reformulated – to incorporate the additions made to Western knowledge since the fifteenth century of the Christian Era by an Italian renaissance of Hellenism and an Iberian conquest of the Ocean – in a Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle published in A.D. 1681 by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (vivebat A.D. 1627-1704). The Eagle of Meaux’s majestic variation on a traditional Judaic theme was, however, the last serious Western performance of this spiritual masterpiece; for, while Bossuet was in the act of writing his classic discourse, a spiritual revolution was taking place around him in his world. Within the brief span of the last few decades of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, a Western World that was exorcizing a stalking ghost of Hellenism was at the same time liquidating its own ancestral Judaic Weltanschauung.
Apropos the stalking ghost, we have earlier (referring to literary culture perhaps too much in isolation):
The Humanists’ revival of the art of writing quantitative Latin and Greek verse in a correct Hellenic style was followed, not by an eclipse of a native Western literature that was flying its own proper colours unabashed, but by a fresh outburst of it in a blaze which effectively took the shine out of the Humanists’ frigid academic exercises.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
A belief that the whole life of the Universe was governed by “the Law of God” was the qiblah of a Judaic Weltanschauung that was the common heritage of the Orthodox Christian, the Western Christian, the Arabic Muslim, and the Iranic Muslim societies; and a theocentric philosophy of history derived from the intuitions or inspirations of the Prophets of Israel and Judah and the Iranian Prophet Zarathustra was bequeathed to Western Christendom in Saint Augustine’s De Civitate Dei and to the Arab Muslim World in Ibn Khaldūn’s Prolegomena to his History of the Berbers – two works of spiritual genius which unmistakably reflect one single common outlook and whose mutual affinity can only be accounted for by their indebtedness to a common source, since Ibn Khaldūn was as ignorant of his Christian predecessor and fellow Maghribī’s theodicy as Augustine was of Muqaddamāt that did not see the light till more than nine hundred years after the Christian North African Father’s death.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
The evils of religious fanaticism in a seventeenth-century Western Christendom were, naturally, felt the most sharply and detested the most heartily by the people who suffered from them the most severely. These were the religious refugees (especially the Huguenot refugees from France after the revocation in A.D. 1685 of the Edict of Nantes) and the religious minorities which were allowed to remain in their homes at the price of political and social penalization (e.g. the Nonconformists in England after A.D. 1662). The penalty of political disfranchisement forcibly prevented the English Nonconformists from putting any of their treasure into the worship of an idolized parochial state, and so constrained them to put into Economics, Technology, and Science all of their treasure that did not go into their Free Churches. Thus it was no accident that the father of the eighteenth-century Western anti-religious philosophical Enlightenment should have been a seventeenth-century French Huguenot refugee in Holland, Pierre Bayle, or that the pioneers of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution in England should have been the eighteenth-century English Nonconformists.
Which may be true, but needs more examples.
1598-1685. The Edict of Nantes, issued on April 13 1598, by Henry IV, granted the Calvinist Protestants of France (Huguenots) substantial rights. It was revoked by Louis XIV (reigned 1643-1715) in 1685 in the Edict of Fontainebleau.
1685-1787. The stringency of policies outlawing Protestants was relaxed under Louis XV (reigned 1715-74) and was opposed by the Catholic (quasi-Calvinist) Jansenists. Prominent thinkers, including Turgot, argued in favour of religious tolerance. On November 7 1787, Louis XVI (reigned 1774-92) signed the Edict of Versailles, the pre-revolutionary Edict of Tolerance, which was registered in the parlement. This gave followers of all faiths – Calvinist Huguenots, Lutherans, Jews – civil and legal recognition and the right to form congregations. The Edict of Nantes had referred only to Protestants (including Lutherans?). Had any other edict governed Jews? Full religious freedom came with enactment of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Once Revolutionary armies got to other European countries, they followed a consistent policy of emancipating persecuted or discriminated religious communities (Catholic in some countries, Protestant in others, Jews in virtually all).
1662-1828. The 1662 measure against Nonconformists (non-Anglican Protestants) was the Act of Uniformity. (Puritans and Presbyterians who violated the 1549, 1552 and 1559 Acts of Uniformity may retrospectively be considered Nonconformists.) The term “dissenter” came into use particularly after the Act of Toleration of 1689, which exempted Nonconformists who had taken the oaths of allegiance and supremacy from penalties for non-attendance at services of the Church of England. In England, Nonconformists were restricted from many spheres of public life until the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828. The Roman Catholic Relief Act followed in 1829. What was the position of substantially-Nonconformist Wales under each of these measures?
An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956 (footnote)
According to Max Fisher, The Washington Post, as corrected in their comments, with their places of birth:
1) Saint Peter: Bethsaida, modern-day Israel or Syria (33-64)
2) Pope Saint Evaristus: Bethlehem, modern-day West Bank (97-105)
3) Pope Saint Anicetus: Emesa (today known as Homs), Syria (155-66)
4) Pope Saint Victor I: Leptis Magna, modern-day Libya (189-99)
5) Pope Saint Miltiades: somewhere in North Africa (311-14)
6) Pope Saint Gelasius I: perhaps North Africa, in any case Berber (492-96)
7) Pope Theodore I: Jerusalem, modern-day Israel and West Bank (642-49)
8) Pope John V: Antioch, then Syria but today part of Turkey (685-86)
9) Pope Sisinnius: Syria (708)
10) Pope Constantine: Syria (708-15)
11) Pope Gregory III: Syria (731-41)
Now number 12, born Argentina, but ethnically Italian. Link.
Some of the Levantine popes must have been at least partly Greek. Sergius I was a Syrian (687-701) from Byzantine Palermo. Were there other Syrians born in Europe?
There have been French, German, Greek, Portuguese and Spanish popes. And one Dutch, one English and one Polish pope. Most of the Greeks were not born in Greece.
The last non-Italian before John Paul II (1978-2005) was Adrian VI: Prince-Bishopric of Utrecht (1522-23).
The most recent Italian has been John Paul I (1978).
Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII, in fighting the brigand-nobles of the former Ducatus Romanus, embarked on a worldly and political course which ended, in his war with the Holy Roman Empire, with a betrayal of the Church’s spiritual purposes.
The inward moral character of his acts [was at first] difficult indeed to divine. At his last hour, forty years after, the answer to the riddle was already less obscure; for in A.D. 1085, when he was dying as a Pope in exile at Salerno, the more venerable city that was his see lay prostrate under the weight of an overwhelming calamity which her bishop’s policy had brought upon her only the year before. In 1085 Rome had just been looted and burnt by the Normans – more ferocious brigands than any native Roman breed – whom the Pope had called in to assist him in a military struggle which had gradually spread from the steps of Saint Peter’s altar, where it had started forty years before, until it had engulfed the whole of Western Christendom.
The climax of the physical conflict between Hildebrand and Henry IV gave a foretaste of the deadlier and more devastating struggle which was to be fought out à outrance between Innocent IV and Frederick II; and by the time when we come to the pontificate of Innocent IV our doubts will be at an end. Sinibaldo Fieschi bears witness against Ildebrando Aldobrandeschi that, in choosing the alternative of meeting force by force, Hildebrand was setting the Hildebrandine Church upon a course which was to end in the victory of his adversaries the World, the Flesh, and the Devil over the City of God which he was seeking to bring down to Earth.
No Politick admitteth nor did ever admit
the teacher [Christ] into confidence: nay ev’n the Church,
with hierarchy in conclave compassing to install
Saint Peter in Caesar’s chair, and thereby win for men
the promises for which they had loved and worship’d Christ,
relax’d his heavenly code to stretch her temporal rule.
[Footnote: Bridges, Robert: The Testament of Beauty (Oxford 1929, Clarendon Press), Book IV, ll. 259-64.]
A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939
1,700 years ago: February 313. The edict, if there was a formal one, followed the conversion of Constantine (Battle of the Milvian Bridge) in 312. It would be followed at the end of the century, after the interlude of Julian, by the proscription of paganism: Edict of Thessalonica, February 380, under Theodosius I.
So perhaps the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Scola, will be pope in 2013. The other Italian “front-runner”, Cardinal Ravasi, is less likely. Cardinal Ouellet, a Canadian, is possible and knows Latin America. But, as a friend of mind points out, Canadians are too normal. Cardinal Schoenborn, Archbishop of Vienna, who looks like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, would be a natural successor to Benedict XVI. An American pope, in the shape of Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, or anyone else, is somehow unthinkable. One hears so much secular piety from Americans, and religion from lay Americans, that it would be too much.
Aren’t the other non-Europeans – Cardinal Scherer, Archbishop of São Paulo; Cardinal Sandri, an Argentinian; Cardinal Turkson, a Ghanaian; Cardinal Tagle, Archbishop of Manila; Cardinal Braz de Aviz, the other Brazilian – less likely than the Europeans and Canadian? But if anyone from this group, perhaps the Ghanaian is the most likely.
The words “Extra omnes” remind one of the days of I’m All Right, Jack.
The other symmetry with 313 would be to have an African pope, Cardinal Turkson, since the pope when the Edict of Milan was proclaimed was “African”: Pope Miltiades. The other two Africans have been Victor I (late second century) and Gelasius I (late fifth).
According to the Athonite tradition, Mary was sailing, accompanied by St John the Evangelist, from Jaffa to Cyprus to visit Lazarus, when her ship was blown off-course, forcing her to stop there. From that moment the mountain was consecrated as the garden of the Mother of God and was out of bounds to all other women.
Monks have been in the Athos peninsula since the fourth century, possibly since the third. After the Islamic conquest of Egypt, many monks fled there from the Egyptian desert.
Athos has had self-governing privileges since the reign of Basil I, the founder of the Macedonian dynasty, at the end of the ninth century. Its links with Russia are almost as old as Russian Christianity (Christianisation of Kiev late 980s). It remained under Turkish control until the First Balkan War (1912), when the Turks were forced out by the Greek Navy. It was assigned to Greece at the Treaty of London, May 30 1913.
The twenty monasteries in their order in the Athonite hierarchy:
- Great Lavra (Μεγίστη Λαύρα, Megísti Lávra)
- Vatopedi (Βατοπέδι, Βατοπαίδι)
- Iviron (Ιβήρων, ივერთა მონასტერი, Iverta Monasteri), built by Georgians
- Helandariou (Χιλανδαρίου, Chilandariou, Хиландар), Serbian Orthodox
- Dionysiou (Διονυσίου)
- Koutloumousiou (Κουτλουμούσι)
- Pantokratoros (Παντοκράτορος, Pantokratoros)
- Xiropotamou (Ξηροποτάμου)
- Zografou (Ζωγράφου, Зограф), Bulgarian Orthodox
- Dochiariou (Δοχειαρίου)
- Karakalou (Καρακάλλου)
- Filotheou (Φιλοθέου)
- Simonos Petras (Σίμωνος Πέτρα, Σιμωνόπετρα)
- Agiou Pavlou (Αγίου Παύλου, Agiou Pavlou, Saint Paul’s)
- Stavronikita (Σταυρονικήτα)
- Xenophontos (Ξενοφώντος)
- Osiou Grigoriou (Οσίου Γρηγορίου, Venerable Gregory)
- Esphigmenou (Εσφιγμένου)
- Agiou Panteleimonos (Αγίου Παντελεήμονος, Saint Pantelemon, Пантелеймонов, Ρωσικόν, Rossikon), Russian Orthodox
- Konstamonitou (Κωνσταμονίτου)
Do most or all of these monasteries follow the Order of St Basil?
There are also twelve sketes, communities of Christian hermits following a monastic rule, allowing a blend of hermetic and communal life.
I don’t think one should sneer at the casket containing the Marian belt in the last post even when it is carried by a corrupt abbot. The important thing is the notion of the holy, not the doubtful belt.
The three fingers of the Chalcidicean peninsula in the modern Greek region of Central Macedonia; the autonomous area of Mount Athos is part of the peninsula, but not of the region; click to enlarge
Constantine’s motive for becoming a convert to Christianity was ethically much inferior to Ashoka’s motive for becoming a convert to Buddhism. Ashoka’s motive had been repentance for his crime of having waged an aggressive war, and he had never gone to war again. Constantine’s motive was gratitude for his victories in three successive civil wars.
Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous
When his first adherent, Bernard of Quintavalle, asked Francis to allow him to join Francis in leading a life of poverty, Francis rejoiced, because he believed that the Christlike way was the right way for human beings to live. But Francis had also espoused humility. He had no thought of criticizing the Papacy, even implicitly, or of starting an anti-Papal movement or of becoming the Minister General of a new religious order. To follow Christ was the aim to which Francis was totally dedicated. However, this might not have saved Francis from sharing the Cathars’ and the Waldensians’ fate, for his espousal of poverty was a practical criticism of the Papacy which was the more damaging for having been inadvertent. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) and his great-nephew and second successor Cardinal Ugolino (Pope Gregory IX, 1227-41) [and the intervening Pope Honorius III] recognized that Francis’s single-minded imitation of Christ had put the Curia in a quandary. They were painfully aware of the swelling chorus of satirical voices that was assailing the Curia from all quarters of Christendom. They decided to enlist St. Francis instead of blasting him. This decision did credit to their intelligence, though the motive was not disinterested.
St. Francis himself would have been saved acute spiritual agony if he had been martyred at his first encounter with the Curia, instead of living to receive the stigmata and also to see the Franciscan Order take a shape, in Cardinal Ugolino’s and Brother Elias’s hands, that was no longer in tune with Francis’s own conception of the Christlike way of life. However, Francis espoused suffering, both spiritual and physical, as well as poverty and humility, and, if Ugolino and Elias had not cut him to the heart by their worldly-wise interventions, the Franciscan spirit might not have outlived St. Francis himself, whereas it is still alive today, nearly three-quarters of a millennium after the date of his death, constricted, but not stultified, by its institutional container, the Order of Friars Minor.
Institutionalization is the price of durability. This is one of the blemishes of the social facet of human life, but the institutionalization of something that has great spiritual value for posterity is a lesser evil than the total loss of the volatile spiritual treasure. St. Francis did not recognize this hard truth. Ugolino and Elias understood it and took the responsibility for acting in the light of it. They salvaged an alloy of Francis’s treasure at the price of bringing odium on themselves.
St. Francis’s Castilian contemporary St. Dominic (Domingo de Guzman, 1170-1221), the founder of the Order of Friars Preachers, had an easier passage. He made the same commitment to poverty; the two saints were both combating greed. But St. Dominic’s spirit could be reconciled to institutionalization more readily than St. Francis’s. The rising cities of Western Christendom were enriched spiritually by Franciscan as well as by Dominican houses, libraries, and lecture-rooms, though, for St. Francis, masonry and books were anathema, because he saw in them perilous impediments to the leading of a Christian life. Brother Elias never forfeited St. Francis’s confidence; yet assuredly St. Francis would have been excruciated if he could have foreseen Brother Elias’s virtuosity as a fund-raiser for building a church at Assisi in St. Francis’s honour. The beauty of the architecture and of Giotto’s paintings would not have reconciled St. Francis to this outrage against the poverty and the humility with which he had been in love.
Giotto di Bondone, Confirmation of the Rule of St Francis by Innocent III, Basilica of St Francis, Assisi
Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous
Kateri of the Mohawks. [Catholic saint: see Robert Greaves’s comment.]
In the Oriental provinces of the Roman Empire the fifth century saw the Nestorian and Monophysite mass-movements against the “Melchite” adherents of the Imperial Catholic Church. These movements, however, were endeavours, not so much to free the Church from the domination of the Temporal Power, as to free the still submerged portion of the Syriac World from the Hellenic ascendancy to which it had been subject since the days of Alexander the Great. [...]
A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)
I asked a Thai in Dubai whether he enjoyed living there. His answer, “Can not, can not”, reminded me of Blake.
A Pope whose predecessors had been content to style themselves “Vicar of Peter” assumed the style of “Vicar of Christ”. [Footnote: “Soon after he ascended the Papal Throne, Innocent III began to use the phrase ‘Vicar of Christ’ in connexion with his office. It had not been used before his time; and the implication that the successors of Peter were not his deputies, but received their commission, as he did, immediately from Christ, is significant of the conviction upon which the policy of Innocent was founded. ... The assertions of Innocent III went far to establish the Papacy in the possession of semi-divine honours.” – Thompson, A. H., in The Cambridge Medieval History, vol vi (Cambridge 1929, University Press), p. 644. [...] ] This was an ominous departure from the humility of a Gregory the Great, who had taken the title of Servus Servorum Dei when his colleague John the Faster at Constantinople had proclaimed himself “Oecumenical” Patriarch. In the year of Innocent’s death John’s “Oecumenical” successor was a refugee at Nicaea from a Patriarchal See that was under the heel of Innocent’s truant crusaders.
A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939
“The barefooted fryars … singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter” [...]. [Footnote: The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, edited by Murray, J. (London 1896, Murray), p. 302 [...].]
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
“If a man consider the originall of this great Ecclesiasticall Dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the Ghost of the deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof; for so did the Papacy start up on a Sudden out of the Ruines of that Heathen Power.” [Footnote: Hobbes, Th.: Leviathan, Part IV, chap. 47.]
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
In [the modern] post-Christian Odyssey there was more than one passage to be negotiated and more than one kind of ordeal to be faced.
The two spiritual dilemmas, the “straits” Toynbee told us we needed to negotiate in 1952 – he imagines Greek sailors negotiating the straits of Messina and of Gibraltar – can be restated in modern terms, with some realignment of metaphors.
Following in Odysseus’ wake, these Phocaean seafarers would have first to negotiate the straits between Sicily and Italy without approaching either an Italian shore where they would be pounced upon by the monster Scylla or a Sicilian shore where they would be engulfed by the whirlpool Charybdis [...].
[But] if they were to reach the boundless waters of a globe-encompassing Ocean, these voyagers must put to sea again [and] make for the Straits of Gibraltar between the Pillars of Hercules, where this pair of menacing mountains, towering above the African and the European shore and threatening, from either flank, to fall upon any ship audacious enough to run the gauntlet without their leave [...].
In the interpretation of this parable in terms of the Western Civilization’s prospects, the finding of a passage between Scylla and Charybdis signified the negotiation of the Western World’s immediate problem of finding some way of avoiding self-destruction without falling into self-stultification. Mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era the Western Society was in imminent danger of destroying itself by failing to stop making War now that a demonic drive had been put into War by the progress of a Western physical science; and it was in hardly less imminent danger of stultifying itself by seeking asylum from War and Class-Conflict in Circe’s pig-sty. [...]
“Avoiding self-destruction without falling into self-stultification” is the nuclear and ecological strait.
And how can people become richer without losing some of their humanity? Scylla threatens to pounce on you for romanticising poverty. Charybdis wants to suck you into a global Dubai.
In this spiritual ordeal the forbidding Pillars of Hercules were a pair of rival authoritarian and dogmatic faiths, both of which alike were offering to the storm-tossed voyager an everlasting Nirvāna in their stony bosoms and were threatening him with the eternal punishment that had been inflicted on the Flying Dutchman if he were to be so impious and so fool-hardy as to reject their offer and sail on past them out into the blue. From the one shore this ultimatum was being delivered to Western souls by a Christian heresy in which the stone of Communism had been substituted for the bread [footnote: Matt. vii. 9; Luke xi. 11.] of the Gospel, and from the other shore by a Christian Orthodoxy in which the body of Christ, [footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 27; Eph. iv. 12.] who had “come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly”, [footnote: John x. 10.] had been petrified into a pillar of salt [footnote: Gen. xix. 26.] by a backward-looking ecclesiastical tradition. To dare the passage between these two frowning Pillars of Hercules was a venture that might daunt even a mariner whose moral had been fortified by a previous success in making his way safely between Scylla and Charybdis.
The new Pillars of Hercules are, on one side, convinced post-communist atheists and, on the other, religious men of “passionate intensity”.
When I was in my twenties, most of my contemporaries professed “agnosticism” when asked about religion. They lacked “all conviction”. Today, their nominally if that Christian equivalents in the UK – partly because of the recent example of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, partly because encouraged by Dawkinses and Goldacres – are confident enough to profess outright atheism.
Plus ultra!
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
In A.D. 1952 [...] the feat that had to be performed by Western navigators on the face of the waters of History was to pilot their vessel, without disaster, through perilous straits in the hope of making their way into more open waters beyond; and in this post-Christian Odyssey there was more than one passage to be negotiated and more than one kind of ordeal to be faced.
To paraphrase and anticipate, sailing between Scylla and Charybdis: abjuring war without sinking into consumerism.
Sailing between the Pillars of Hercules: negotiating a spiritual passage between a Christian heresy, Communism, on one shore and a backward-looking Christian orthodoxy on the other.
In terms of our Mediterranean maritime simile, we may compare the social and spiritual enterprise to which these Western adventurers were committed in the twentieth century of the Christian Era with the navigational task confronting Hellenic mariners in the sixth century B.C. who had bidden farewell to their Ionian homeland and had set sail westward rather than submit to the alien dominion of un-Hellenic-minded Achaemenidae. Following in Odysseus’ wake, these Phocaean seafarers would have first to negotiate the straits between Sicily and Italy without approaching either an Italian shore where they would be pounced upon by the monster Scylla or a Sicilian shore where they would be engulfed by the whirlpool Charybdis; but, if, by managing to steer their course along the narrow fairway through this first danger-zone, they should succeed in making the friendly port of Marseilles, they would not there find themselves at rest in the haven where they would be; [footnote: Ps. cvii. 30.] for their bold and skilful negotiation of the Straits of Messina would merely have carried them from the inner basin into the outer basin of the Mediterranean, without having liberated them from the imprisoning shores of their landlocked native sea.
I’m not sure why the open waters of the Atlantic would have been a haven for them. Nor did the Persians reach the outer basin. But the speculation is half-fanciful. Rather than submit to Persian rule, the Phocaeans, or some of them, had abandoned Ionia. Where did they sail to, in fact? Some, perhaps, to Chios, some to Phocaean colonies on Corsica and elsewhere. Massalia or Massilia, Marseille (Marseilles, the English sometimes call it), was an existing Phocaean colony: it was an independent Greek city from 600 BC until Caesar conquered it in 49 BC. Some became the founders of Elea, or Velia, in Campania. Some eventually returned to Phocaea.
What were the actual political dangers of Scylla and Charybdis? The straits were controlled by Greeks (Messenians, at least on the Calabrian side), not Carthaginians.
If they were to reach the boundless waters of a globe-encompassing Ocean, these voyagers must put to sea again from the sheltering harbour of their mother country’s daughter city in order to make for the Straits of Gibraltar between the Pillars of Hercules, where this pair of menacing mountains, towering above the African and the European shore and threatening, from either flank, to fall upon any ship audacious enough to run the gauntlet without their leave, were visible embodiments of Imperial Carthage’s decree that no Hellenic vessel was ever to sail on through this golden gate leading out from the landlocked waters into the main.
Since Carthage controlled both sides of the straits, such a decree would not be surprising, but what source tells us that it was made? Were the Carthaginians in part protecting access to Madeira, the Canaries, Cape Verde, the Azores? Some of these islands must have lain behind the tradition of the Hesperides, which Hercules had visited.
A Phoenician fleet had circumnavigated Africa by about 600 BC in the other direction. Herodotus describes how the Pharaoh Necho II sent out an expedition manned by Phoenician sailors. They sailed out of the Red Sea, rounded the Cape, and headed north to the Mediterranean. They paused on the African coast in two successive years to sow and harvest grain, and reached Egypt in the course of the third year.
A Carthaginian, Hanno, probably early in the 5th century BC, sailed to the Bight of Bonny, probably as far as Sherbro Island off Sierra Leone or Cape Palmas off Liberia. An account of his periplus was engraved in Punic on a bronze tablet set up in the temple of Baal at Carthage. It was translated into Greek. The translation survives, and is the only piece of Carthaginian literature we have. His account was used by Ptolemy and remained the standard guide for seafarers until the Portuguese explorations of the 15th century.
We have fragmentary evidence that a certain Euthymenes of Massalia sailed down the west coast of Africa as far as a river which was infested with crocodiles and whose waters were driven back by strong sea breezes. He thought that this river was the Nile. It may have been the Senegal River. We are not sure what century Euthymenes lived in, but there is a statue of him on the façade of the Marseille bourse.
Pytheas sailed from Massalia past the Pillars of Hercules to northern Europe, including Britain, c 325 BC. (The odd thing is that Queen Elizabeth II has never visited Greece.)
Polybius passed them after Carthage had been destroyed. Pliny the Elder tells us that he sailed down the west coast of Africa c 146 BC in ships lent to him by the destroyer, Scipio Aemilianus. He may have seen Mount Kakulima in Guinea.
So the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks and presumably Persians were aware that Africa was surrounded by sea except where it was connected to Asia. Bartolomeu Dias sailed round the Cape in 1488. Vasco da Gama sailed round most of Africa in 1497-98 on his way to India.
And here woe betide the Hellenic mariner who allowed himself [if he wanted to reach his haven] to be intimidated by his adversary’s veto into following the Theban Pindar’s poor-spirited advice to his Agrigentine patron Thêrôn.
“And now Thêrôn’s achievements have carried him to the limit: they have brought him to the Pillars of Hercules on his long voyage from home; and what lies beyond this terminus is out of bounds (ἂβατον) for all men, wise or witless. I will not pursue this venture. I should deserve to lose my senses if I did this senseless thing!” [Footnote: Pindar: Odes in Honour of Victors in the Olympic Games, Ode iii, ll. 43-45.]
Theron had reached a metaphorical Pillars of Hercules by his unsurpassable excellence in the Olympic chariot race in 476 BC.
Ne plus ultra! These were the very words that a forbidding Carthaginian statesmanship had been intending to extort from defeatist Hellenic lips; and, so long as this self-imposed Hellenic psychological inhibition held, no Hellenic explorer would ever sail on to test the truth of a later poet’s intuition that the untried passage of the Ocean would prove to be the avenue to a New World. [Footnote: Seneca: Medea, ll. 364-79 [...].] More than two thousand years were to pass before Columbus’s victorious defiance of the veto once imposed by a jealous Carthage was to be commemorated, in the device of “the dollar sign”, by the first sovereign on whose globe-encircling dominions the Sun could never set. On coins minted for Charles V out of American bullion, the antistrophic words Plus ultra! were triumphantly inscribed on a scroll displayed behind the minatory pair of pillars; and the moral was one which a twentieth-century Odysseus ought to take to heart if this series of episodes in the history of the art of navigation was an apt parable of the spiritual voyage on which his sails were set.
According to a Renaissance tradition, the pillars had been inscribed with the words Ne plus ultra as a warning to sailors and navigators to go no further. There is no version of the phrase in Greek.
Luigi Marliano, doctor and advisor to the young King of Spain, proposed Plus Oultre for his motto as an encouragement to ignore the ancient warnings, take risks. (The OED can find no example of the phrase Ne plus ultra from before 1637, but that means in English sources.)
Plus ultra is on the present Spanish coat of arms as an inscription on a banner linking two pillars. Its history between Charles V and now includes use thus on the Spanish dollar (current in the Spanish Empire 1497-19th century; the main currency within Spain was the real). The Spanish dollar was contemporary with the German Thaler and was the basis of the American dollar.
The wrapped pillars do not appear on US dollars, but may be the origin of the US dollar sign.
Future post: global histories of anna, cent, centime, crown, cruzado, cruzeiro, denarius, dinar, dollar, drachma, escudo, florin, franc, Groschen, guinea, gulden, Kreuzer, krone, lira, livre, Mark, penny, peseta, peso, pfennig, piastre, pound, real, rial, ruble, rupee, Schilling, shekel, shilling, solidus, sovereign, talent, Thaler, zloty.
In the interpretation of this parable in terms of the Western Civilization’s prospects, the finding of a passage between Scylla and Charybdis signified the negotiation of the Western World’s immediate problem of finding some way of avoiding self-destruction without falling into self-stultification. Mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era the Western Society was in imminent danger of destroying itself by failing to stop making War now that a demonic drive had been put into War by the progress of a Western physical science; and it was in hardly less imminent danger of stultifying itself by seeking asylum from War and Class-Conflict in Circe’s pig-sty. If post-Christian Western souls did succeed in threading their way between these two immediate perils, they would owe their happy issue out of this affliction to an inspiration to take Religion as the mark on which they were once more to set their course; but an impulse to return to Religion would not in itself suffice to bring the Western pilgrims’ ships out of inland waters into open sea; for the call of Religion was being uttered in diverse tongues; [footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 28.] and the questions to which the agnostic Western pioneer in search of a Christian oracle would have, at his own peril, to find an answer for himself, were:
“Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? … Have all the gifts of healing? … Do all interpret?” [Footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 29-30.]
In this spiritual ordeal the forbidding Pillars of Hercules were a pair of rival authoritarian and dogmatic faiths, both of which alike were offering to the storm-tossed voyager an everlasting Nirvāna in their stony bosoms and were threatening him with the eternal punishment that had been inflicted on the Flying Dutchman if he were to be so impious and so fool-hardy as to reject their offer and sail on past them out into the blue. From the one shore this ultimatum was being delivered to Western souls by a Christian heresy in which the stone of Communism had been substituted for the bread [footnote: Matt. vii. 9; Luke xi. 11.] of the Gospel, and from the other shore by a Christian Orthodoxy in which the body of Christ, [footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 27; Eph. iv. 12.] who had “come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly”, [footnote: John x. 10.] had been petrified into a pillar of salt [footnote: Gen. xix. 26.] by a backward-looking ecclesiastical tradition. To dare the passage between these two frowning Pillars of Hercules was a venture that might daunt even a mariner whose moral had been fortified by a previous success in making his way safely between Scylla and Charybdis. But, if, at this supremely critical point in his voyage, the pilgrim were to feel his heart failing, he might recover his courage and initiative by taking his oracle from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians:
“Covet earnestly the best gifts; and yet show I unto you a more excellent way.” [Footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 31.]
OED defines petrify as “turn (an organic body) into a stony concretion by gradually replacing its original substance with a calcareous, siliceous, or other mineral deposit”, which I suppose makes “petrify into a pillar of salt” not quite a mixed metaphor.
If a contrite humility was the first of the Christian virtues that were necessary for the Western pilgrim’s salvation, an indomitable endurance was the second. What was required of him at this hour was to hold on his course and to trust in God’s grace; and, if he prayed God to grant him a pilot for the perilous passage, he would find the bodhisattva [in the Mahayana, an enlightened being who has voluntarily delayed his entry into Nirvana in order to help his suffering fellow-beings] psychopompus [conductor of souls through the underworld] whom he was seeking in a Francesco Bernardone of Assisi, who was the most god-like soul that had been born into the Western World so far. A disciple of Saint Francis who followed faithfully enough in the saint’s footsteps to participate in the saint’s gift of receiving Christ’s stigmata would know, with the knowledge that comes only through suffering, that his sacrifice had been accepted by the Lord. [Footnote: Gen. iv. 3-7.] Asperges me hyssopo et mundabor. [Footnote: Ps. l. 9, in the Vulgate Latin text, Ps. li. 7, in the English Authorized Version.]
Seville Town Hall (Ayuntamiento), reign of Charles V
A footnote after “minatory pair of pillars” advises us to
See Raymond, Wayte: The Silver Dollars of North and South America (New York 1939, Wayte Raymond, Inc.) for photographs of dollars coined for the Spanish Crown, over a series of reigns ranging from Charles V’s (regnabat A.D. 1516-56) to the break-up of the Spanish Empire of the Indies in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, which display the pair of pillars with the motto Plus ultra. On 46 of the 67 specimens (not counting “necessity coins” [small mintings of little value]) of “pillar type” coins here reproduced, including the earliest in the series, Charles V’s coin from Santo Domingo (p. 18, No. 1), the two words are inscribed on a single scroll linking the pillars (and passing behind an heraldic shield inserted between the pillars on coins of this type minted for the Bourbons). On fifteen specimens, each of the two pillars is wreathed in a separate scroll of its own, with “Plus” inscribed on the left-hand scroll and “Ultra” on the right-hand scroll. On six specimens, including Philip II’s dollar minted in Peru (reproduced in Supplement, p. 3, No. A 1), the motto is inscribed behind or above the pillars without being mounted on a scroll.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954
The Christian Church is indebted for its very name to the technical term employed, in the city-state of Athens, to denote the general assembly of the citizen-body when it was meeting to transact political, as distinct from judicial, business; but, in thus borrowing the word ecclesia (ἐκκλησία), the Church gave it a dual meaning which was no part of the original Attic usage but was the reflection of a new political order, in which Athens and all other surviving city-states of a disintegrating Hellenic World had been incorporated into the Roman Empire without losing their identities as units of local government and life on the municipal level. In Christian usage, ecclesia came to mean both a local Christian community [footnote: When the “outdoor” Hellenic Civilization gave place to the “indoor” Orthodox and Western Christian civilizations, the word ecclesia, in its local meaning, came to be applied, not only to the local Christian community, but to the parochial building in which it assembled for congregational worship.] and the church universal.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The “clergy” took its name from a Greek word (κλῆρος) [klēros] whose general meaning of “lot” had been specialized in a juridical sense to mean an allotted share of an inherited estate, and in a political sense to mean an allotted share of a conquered territory. This political usage, which had been borrowed from Spartan conquerors in the Peloponnese by Athenian conquerors in the Archipelago and Macedonian conquerors in Egypt and South-Western Asia, had given the word a rather unfortunate connotation by the time when the Christian Church began to work out its ecclesiastical organization. The Church adopted the word, nevertheless, to mean the portion of the Christian community that God had allotted to Himself to serve Him as His professional priesthood.
A footnote here quotes
Lightfoot, Bishop J. B., in his edition of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, 7th ed. (London 1882, Macmillan)
on
“the sequence of meanings by which the word κλῆρος arrived at this peculiar sense: (i) the lot by which the office was assigned [as in Acts i. 26]; (ii) the office thus assigned by lot [as in Acts i. 17]; (iii) the body of persons holding the office” [...].
The square brackets referring to Acts are Toynbee summarising Lightfoot.
Acts i. 26 is about the election of the apostle Matthias. He was chosen, as it happens, by lot. Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ and then (according to the Gospel of Matthew) committed suicide in guilt before Christ’s resurrection. Between the ascension of Christ and the day of Pentecost, the remaining apostles elected a new twelfth apostle by casting lots, a traditional Jewish way of determining the will of God.
Acts i. 17 uses the word when it says that Judas had been part of the apostles’ ministry (he was not chosen by lot).
Lightfoot’s point is that “the sense ‘clerical appointment or office’ chronologically precedes the sense ‘clergy’”. Since, as he admits, the election of Matthias by lot is unique, to have both (i) and (ii) in the “sequence of meanings” seems unnecessary. And did Judas and Matthias have “offices”?
[These usages] cannot be traced back to the Old Testament; for, though, according to Num. xviii. 20, God is the κληρονομία [kléronomia] of Aaron, and, according to Deut. xviii. 2, He is the κλῆρος of the Levites, “the Jewish priesthood is never described conversely as the special ‘clerus’ of Jehovah, while on the other hand the metaphor thus inverted is more than once applied to the whole Israelite people” (Lightfoot, op. cit. [...]).
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The Christian Church’s sacred book – taken over from the Jews and eventually augmented by the addition of an exclusively Christian “New Testament” to supplement and retrospectively reinterpret “the Old Testament” of Jewish origin – was presented by the Church as its credentials in the belief that this was the authentic Word of God Himself. In so far as the Bible was not referred to as “the Books” (τα βιβλία) [ta biblia] par excellence, it was designated by a term long since current in the vocabulary of the Roman inland revenue. In the fiscal terminology of a post-Hannibalic Roman Commonwealth the word scriptura signified the tax payable for the right to graze cattle on the public lands in the devastated areas in the South of Italy, because an entry in the official register, certifying that a would-be grazier had duly paid his tax, was the warrant that authorized him to make use of the public pasturelands. The Greek equivalent of the Latin scriptura was (γραφή) [graphē], and in a latter-day Kingdom of Greece at the time of writing there was a district in the Southern Pindus, between the plains of Thessaly and the west coast, which was still known as the Agrapha [unwritten] because the agents of an Ottoman inland revenue – and an East Roman inland revenue in an earlier age – had never succeeded even in inscribing in their registers, not to speak of actually collecting, the taxes due from the wild highlanders in this mountain fastness.
The Pindus range is in northwestern Greece and southern Albania.
Spring in Agrafa
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The two “testaments” of which the Christian scriptures consisted [...] were called διαθήκαι [diathekai, covenants] in Greek and testamenta in Latin because they were thought of as being the equivalents of legal instruments in which God had declared to Mankind, in two instalments, His “will and testament” for the ordering of Human Life on Earth.
The Greek word is translated as either “covenant” or “testament”. The meaning is probably closer to testament or disposition, but the meaning of diatheke is complex.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
When the originally informal proceedings at the periodic meetings of each of the local Christian communities crystallized into a hard-and-fast ritual, this religious “public service” (λειτουργία) [leitourgía] took its name from the nominally voluntary corvées which, in a democratic Athenian Commonwealth in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., had been euphemistically known by that name in order to gloze over the truth that they were virtual surtaxes under the guise of “benevolences”.
What about the Mass? Wikipedia: “The term ‘Mass’ is derived from the Late Latin word missa (dismissal), a word used in the concluding formula of the Mass in Latin: ‘Ite, missa est’ (‘Go, it is the dismissal’).” Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): “It may seem strange that this unessential detail should have given its name to the whole service.” Though Catholics are not quite comfortable with the word “service”.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
When these solitaries (μοναχοί) [hermits, anchorites; monachós, singular] had the courage to [subject] themselves to the spiritual discipline of leading a common life together without surrendering the spiritual freedom won by withdrawal from the rest of the World, this creative contradiction in terms – a society of solitaries – took its Latin name from a word which, in its previous secular use, had combined the two meanings of a quarter sessions and a chamber of commerce. [Footnote: The provinces into which the Roman Commonwealth had organized its subject territories had been mapped out into districts corresponding to the principal cities which each province contained; and it had been customary for the provincial governor to go on circuit round these “county towns”, to transact judicial and other public business. During his stay in each “county town” he expected the leading Roman citizens, resident in that district, to hold a rendezvous with him there to serve as his assessors in court and to assist and advise him in other ways. This rendezvous was known as a conventus, and the name came thence to be applied both to the standing organization of Roman residents in each district and to the geographical area itself.]
Wikipedia: “A convent is either a community of priests, religious brothers, religious sisters, or nuns, or the building used by the community, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion. In modern English usage, ‘convent’ [...] almost invariably refers to a community of women, while ‘monastery’, ‘priory’ or ‘friary’ is used for men; but in historical usage they are often interchangeable.”
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
When, in the fourth century, training to be an anchorite (ἀναχωρητής) [anakhōrētēs] took the place of training to be a martyr in the psychological warfare of a Christian Church which had now made its peace with the Roman Imperial Government, the action of this new-model Christian athlete, whose ordeal was to endure the solitude of the desert instead of facing the publicity of the criminal court, came to be designated by a Greek term taken from the technical administrative vocabulary of the country that bred the pioneer Christian hermits. In Augustan Egypt “anachôrêsis” (ἀναχώρησις) had meant withdrawal from productive economic activities in protest against the exactions of the taxation authorities; [footnote: “So early as A.D. 20 we hear of the flight (anachôrêsis) of tax-payers” (Bell, H. I.: Egypt from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest (Oxford 1948, Clarendon Press), p. 77).] in Diocletianic Egypt the same word came to mean withdrawal from the World in protest against mundane human wickedness. [Footnote: We have observed in an earlier context [...] that this withdrawal of the anchorites was not anti-social either in intention or in effect. The anchorites influenced, aided, and, in great emergencies, sometimes actually governed a tottering Hellenic World with a moral authority which they would never have commanded if they had not proved the sincerity of their disinterestedness by insulating themselves physically from their fellow men.]
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The “training” (ἄσκησις) [áskēsis, whence ascetic] to which a spiritually ambitious élite in the Early Christian Church subjected itself took its name from the physical training of athletes for the Olympian and other international athletic contests that were one of the characteristic expressions of the Hellenic culture [...].
But there never been a proper bridge in Christianity, like yoga, between the two types of training.
Nineteenth-century Muscular Christianity (of the kind associated with Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes; the phrase first appears in an anonymous review in The Eclectic Review of a book of lectures by Alexandre Vinet in December 1852; the Wikipedia article has a list of the Biblical verses to which the movement liked to refer) and the spirit of ora et labora or laborare est orare in the Rule of St Benedict (which does not contain either phrase) aren’t that; St Ignatius’s Exercises don’t have a physical component; the Vatican has been critical of New Age.
Wikipedia: “The explicit advocacy of sport and exercise in Christianity did not appear until 1762, when Rousseau’s Émile described physical education as important for the formation of moral character.”
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The “orders” (ordines) of clergy in the Christian ecclesiastical hierarchy [...] took their name from the politically privileged classes in the Roman body politic, which were known as ordines both collectively and severally (ordo senatorius, ordo equestris), to distinguish them from the common run of Roman citizens.
According to the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the orders of clergy, in ascending order, are porter, reader or lector, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon and priest. The first four are the Minor Orders, the last three Major or Holy Orders. (Tonsure was a prerequisite for receiving all orders until 1972, though sometimes only a small amount of hair was cut.)
Within the priesthood are ordinary priests, bishops, archbishops, patriarchs and the Supreme Pontiff.
A cardinal can be cardinal bishop, cardinal priest or cardinal deacon. Nowadays even cardinal deacons must at least be priests, most cardinal priests are bishops or higher, and cardinal bishops are bishops only of the suburbicarian dioceses near Rome (Ostia, Velletri-Segni, Porto-Santa Rufina, Frascati, Palestrina, Albano, Sabina-Poggio Mirteto).
The passage just quoted is referring, however, not to the seven orders, but to the threefold ordering of episcopate, presbyterate (ordinary priests) and diaconate.
The members of the highest order in the Christian hierarchy came to be known as “Overseers” (ἐπισκόποι) [episkopoi], and the initial preposition, as well as the literal meaning, of this compound Greek word are likewise to be found in the title (ἔφοροι) [ephoroi] which had been given in the Spartan body politic to the members of a board of supreme executive officers who were appointed by election but were constitutional despots during their term of office.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
One of the features of the Christian liturgy was a recurrence of its ritual in both annual and weekly cycles. The Christian liturgical week was modelled on a Jewish prototype; and, though the Christian copy had been differentiated from the Jewish original by making the first day of the week the holy day instead of the seventh, the Christian adaptation still followed the pristine Jewish dispensation in retaining the Jewish name for the eve of the Sabbath. In the Greek Christian vocabulary, Friday continued to be called “the preparation” (Παρασκευή) [Paraskevi, which is still the word in modern Greek] – in accordance with a Jewish usage in which this elliptical term explained itself. In the psychological atmosphere of a post-Exilic Judaism, in which a stateless diasporà maintained its esprit de corps by a common devotion to the keeping of the Mosaic Law, “the preparation” sans phrase could mean nothing but “the preparation for the Sabbath”.
Whereas,
in the psychological atmosphere of a pre-Alexandrine Athenian sovereign city-state whose citizens worshipped their own then still potent corporate political power under the name of Athena Poliûchus [Athena Protector],
the word had had a merely political connotation.
In the usage of Thucydides, writing for an Athenian public for whom politics were the breath of life, and whose political-mindedness was being accentuated in the historian’s generation by the military ordeal of the Great Atheno-Peloponnesian War, the word Παρασκευὴ could be used as elliptically as it was afterwards to be used in the Septuagint [Greek Old Testament] to convey, just as unmistakably, an entirely different meaning. Thucydides uses the word to signify what a generation of Englishmen, overtaken unawares by a world war in the year A.D. 1914, learnt ruefully to take to heart as “preparedness” when they found themselves within an ace of defeat owing to their pre-war neglect to emulate the Germans in building up a stock of armaments to stand them in good stead in a fight for their national existence.
Is he referring to the 1915 shell crisis? Britain is considered to have won the naval arms race.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The Greek word σωτὴρ [soter] [came] to mean a saviour, not of Society, but of the Soul.
Thus, previously, Antiochus I Soter, Attalus I Soter, Demetrius I Soter, Diodotus I Soter, Menander I Soter, Ptolemy I Soter, Ptolemy IX Soter, Rabbel II Soter, Seleucus III Soter or Seleucus Ceraunus, Strato I Soter, Strato II Soter, Strato III Soter, doubtless others.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The Greek word πνεῦμα [pneuma], with its Latin equivalent “spiritus”, [came] to mean “spirit” instead of “breath”.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
Edification (aedificatio) [came] to mean the figurative “building up” of virtue in the Soul in place of its original meaning of the construction of a material edifice in brick or stone.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The “transgression” (παράβασις) [parabasis] which had been a term of art in the Attic “Old Comedy”, in the physical meaning of a parade of the chorus from one side of the theatre to the other, [came] to mean, in Christian language, a figurative “side-step” in the spiritual sense of a sin.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The customary preparation for the congregational performance of the Christian liturgy was, in a Western Christian town or village, the ringing of a bell; and in a pagan Hellenic walled city this had likewise been a familiar sound with a well-established mental association. Yet a citizen of an Hellenic city-state – if his ghost could walk in some latter-day Western town on a Sunday morning – would never suspect that the sound that was filling the air was a summons to religious worship; for, to his mind, the ringing of a bell would conjure up the utterly different mental vision of a military patrol going its rounds along the city wall to inspect the sentries.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The “laity” of the Christian Church was suggestively designated by an archaic Greek word (λαός) [laos] which denoted the people as distinct from those in authority over them, with a connotation of amenability to the word of command. In the vocabulary of the Homeric Epic the word had been used of the naïvely loyal comitatus of a barbarian war-lord; in a post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic history it had been revived to serve as a technical term for the naïvely submissive labour force on one of the large-scale agricultural estates which the Hellenic conquerors of the Achaemenian Empire had taken over from a dispossessed Persian landed aristocracy. The ambivalency in the nuance, half-heroic and half-servile, which the word had thus come to acquire by the date of the beginning of the Christian Era, aptly fitted the “laity” of a church which, on its own spiritual plane, was both militant and authoritarian.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
The Holy Communion which [the] common participation in the Christian sacrament consummated took its name from a word which, in the previous mundane usage of both its Greek original (κοινωνία) [koinonia] and its Latin translation (communio), had signified “participation” of any kind, but, first and foremost, participation in the membership of a political community, for which the current term was coined, in both languages, out of the same verbal metal (in Greek κοινόν [koinon]; in Latin commune).
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
In the Christian liturgy the crucial rite was a Holy Communion in which the worshippers achieved a living experience of their fellowship in and with Christ by partaking together of the “sacrament” (sacramentum) of eating bread and drinking wine. This Christian “sacrament” took its name from a pagan Roman rite in which a new recruit was “sworn in” to the fellowship of the Roman Army. [Footnote: In the Latin-speaking Church the word sacramentum was used from the beginning in the two meanings of sacrament and military oath, according to Harnack, A.: Militia Christi (Tübingen 1905, Mohr), pp. 33-34.]
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
Love has [...] become the axle-tree of the vehicle of the Mahāyāna; and its conquest of Buddhism is more surprising than its outburst in Christianity; for the Christian religion of Love is in conscious and deliberate revolt against the Stoic philosophy of Detachment, whereas the Mahayanian religion of Love purports to be fulfilling the Hinayanian law and not destroying it – though, in Hinayanian eyes, the Mahayanian Bodhisattva is a Hinayanian arhat manqué [...]. The Bodhisattva is in fact an arhat who, at the moment when his age-long efforts to attain Detachment have brought him at last to the brink of Nirvāna, refrains from immediately entering into his rest through taking the final step that would precipitate him into the bliss of self-annihilation, and decides, instead, to postpone the consummation of his own spiritual career – and this, may be, for countless ages more – in order to devote himself to the self-imposed task of helping other beings, by communicating to them some of the light of his own enlightenment [...] (see Thomas, E. J.: The History of Buddhist Thought (London 1933, Kegan Paul), pp. 169-72). A follower of Christ will agree with the follower of the Mahāyāna that the Bodhisattva who, for love of his fellows, forbears to drink of the liberating elixir of Lethe when the cup is at his lips, is overcoming the Self in a far profounder sense than the arhat who exercises his duly earned right to consummate his own self-annihilation without being deterred by any pity for a groaning and travailing creation. The labour of Love to which the Bodhisattva dedicates himself is not unworthy to be compared with the self-sacrifice of Christ [...]. [...]
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939 (footnote)
Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, Faber and Faber, 1967
The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, The Journal of Roman Studies 61, 1971
The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750, Thames and Hudson, 1971
The Making of Late Antiquity, Carl Newell Jackson lectures, Harvard University, April 1976, Harvard University Press, 1978
The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Haskell Lectures, University of Chicago, April 1978, University of Chicago Press, 1981
Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, essays, Faber and Faber, 1982
Late Antiquity in Paul Veyne, editor, A History of Private Life: 1. From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, Harvard University Press, 1987
The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Columbia University Press, 1988
Power and Persuasion: Towards a Christian Empire, Curti Lectures for 1988, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1992
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World, Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Cambridge University, November 1993, Cambridge University Press, 1995
The Rise of Western Christendom, AD 200-1000, Blackwell, 1996
Chapters 21 and 22 in The Cambridge Ancient History, Volume XIII, The Late Empire, A.D. 337-425, Cambridge University Press, 1998
Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, Menahem Stern Jerusalem lectures, Jerusalem, May 2000, Brandeis University Press, 2001
A Life of Learning, Charles Homer Haskins Lecture delivered at ACLS Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, 2003, American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper no 55, 2003
First editions. Some have been revised. Why nothing recent? Wikipedia: “His current research focuses on wealth and poverty in late antiquity, especially in Christian writers.”
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If I had to name the greatest living historian, I’d name Brown. Possibly I am missing a better candidate. He writes about the religious transformation of Greco-Roman society. The fourth, fifth and sixth centuries are the heart of his interests, but his work isn’t just patristics. It leads us into not the beleaguered afterlife or dusty aftermath of classical civilisation, but a luminous, spacious world explored for its own sake, and full of sensual realities. His books can appeal to anyone, learned or not, but they won’t appeal to the masses. He won’t write a bestseller. Wikipedia, edited:
“Brown, who reads at least fifteen languages, established himself at the age of 32 with his biography of Augustine of Hippo. Currently, Brown is arguably [why arguably?] the most prominent historian of late antiquity. Brown has been instrumental in popularizing late antiquity, the figure of the ‘holy man’ and the study of the cult of the saints.
“In his book The World of Late Antiquity (1971), he put forward a new interpretation of the period between the third and eighth centuries CE. The traditional interpretation of this period was centered around the idea of decadence from a ‘golden age’, classical civilization, after the famous work of Edward Gibbon The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1779). On the contrary, Brown proposed to look at this period in positive terms, arguing that Late Antiquity was a period of immense cultural innovation.
“Brown was influenced in his early works by the French Annales School, and specifically the figure of Fernand Braudel. Following this school, Brown analyzed culture and religion as social phenomena and as part of a wider context of historical change and transformation. The Annales influence in Brown’s work can also be seen in his reliance on anthropology and sociology as interpretative tools for historical analysis. Specifically, Brown received the influence of contemporary Anglo-American anthropology.
“His research has been devoted chiefly to religious transformation in the late Roman world. His most celebrated early contribution on this subject concerned the figure of the ‘holy man’. According to Brown, the charismatic, Christian ascetics (holy men) were particularly prominent in the late Roman empire and the early Byzantine world as mediators between local communities and the divine. This relationship expressed the importance of patronage in the Roman social system, which was taken over by the Christian ascetics. But more importantly, Brown argues, the rise of the holy man was the result of a deeper religious change that affected not only Christianity but also other religions of the late antique period – namely the needs for a more personal access to the divine. [The word access begs some questions.]
“His views slightly shifted in the eighties. In articles and new editions Brown said that his earlier work, which had deconstructed many of the religious aspects of his field of study, needed to be reassessed. His later work shows a deeper appreciation for the specifically Christian layers of his subjects of study. His book The Body and Society (1988) offered an innovative approach to the study of early Christian practices, showing the influence of Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality.”
Brown was born into a Scots-Irish Protestant family in Dublin.
1953-56: Modern History at New College
Then Merton and All Souls
1975-78: Professor of Modern History, Royal Holloway College, University of London
1978-86: Professor of Classics and History, University of California, Berkeley
From 1986: Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Princeton University (now Rollins Professor Emeritus)
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There was a historian called Sir Samuel Dill (1844-1924) who took the fifth century seriously, but he dealt mainly with the western empire, ie Gaul and the world of Sidonius. His book was Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, Macmillan, 1898. I enjoyed it and have it. (He went backwards in another book in 1904, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, and forwards again in a posthumous book published in 1924, Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age.) Is he viewed as a groundbreaker now? He doesn’t have a Wikipedia article. Gooch writes in History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, Longmans, 1913 (1920 edition): “Professor Dill’s volumes on Roman Society have enriched the conception of history.” I think they did. Dill dealt with “society” in the way later historians would. Dictionary of Ulster Biography: “These books are less histories of a period than studies of the life of societies in dissolution or in spiritual crisis or decay, and reveal his moral and religious sympathies.” What does Peter Brown think about Samuel Dill? Dill was also an Irish Protestant and sometime Oxford man.
The historian who began to take Byzantium seriously in England was JB Bury (1861-1927) – whose only real pupil, Steven Runciman, died in 2000. Toynbee owed a debt to Bury. He would have had no excuse not to read Brown’s first two books, and he had rejected Gibbon’s shallow view of Christianity. But when you turn to him from Brown, you are reminded what a generalist he was much of the time, and needed to be. He was a specialist on aspects of the Greco-Roman world, but his most specialised writing is technical, its style lugubrious and pedantic. He would not have been capable, at this close range, of the supple and subtle narrations of Brown.
1959. CBC source. Russell’s essay Why I Am Not a Christian had been published in 1927 and had originally been a talk given on March 6 that year at Battersea Town Hall under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society.
One Sunday morning (I’m told), when I was a young boy, and at about the time of this interview, my parents pointed out to me, as he walked on the edge of Richmond Green, a “very famous person”.
A few feet away was a godson of John Stuart Mill and a man whose grandfather, the prime minister, had visited Napoleon on Elba and whose maternal grandmother had been a friend of the widow of the Young Pretender.
(Now it sounds like a law firm.) Tom Holland’s reply to Glen Bowersock in the Guardian. I mentioned Holland’s new book about the Romano-Persian endgame and the origins of Islam a couple of weeks ago.
Both articles are worth reading, but severe limitations of space mean that they are skirting around questions about early Islam that really demand 7,000-word articles in the New York Review of Books, not a few inches in a daily. The arguments deserve to be outside scholarly journals, but as presented here are hardly comprehensible to ordinary readers. I don’t know who is right, but I had wondered about a few things in Bowersock’s “dyspeptic” piece. His superior phrase “with the publisher” about some early Qurʿanic manuscripts found in Sanaʿa: could there therefore already be a consensus about what they meant? His insistence that QRSh means only to congeal or clot, not to gather people: some language-instinct made me wonder whether that was so. But Bowersock is a major scholar. I just wish this discussion could be aired properly.
There is some simple background in this blog:
Since the domestication of the Arabian camel, nearly 2,000 years before Muhammad’s day, Arabia had been traversible, and ideas and institutions had been seeping into the peninsula from the Fertile Crescent that adjoins it on the north. The effect of this infiltration had been cumulative, and, by Muhammad’s time, the accumulated charge of spiritual force in Arabia was ready to explode.
Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous
[The] epiphany of the ruler of a universal state as the one shepherd whose oecumenical monarchy makes one fold for all Mankind [footnote: John x. 16.] appeals to one of the Human Soul’s deepest longings, as, in Dostoyevski’s fable, the Grand Inquisitor reminds a subversive Christ.
In The Grand Inquisitor, a parable in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan imagines Christ returning to Earth and meeting a leader of the Spanish Inquisition in Seville.
“Thou mightest have taken … the sword of Caesar. Why didst Thou reject that last gift? Hadst Thou accepted that last counsel of the mighty spirit, Thou wouldst have accomplished all that Man seeks on Earth – that is, someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap; for the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union. The great conquerors – Timurs and Chingis Khans – whirled like hurricanes over the face of the Earth, striving to subdue its people, and they too were but the unconscious expression of the same craving for universal unity. Hadst Thou taken the World and Caesar’s purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands?” [Footnote: Dostoyevski, F.: The Brothers Karamazov, Part II, Book V, chap. 5: “The Grand Inquisitor”.]
The translator is not stated, but is Constance Garnett, as one would expect.
Dostoyevsky had encountered the figure of the Grand Inquisitor in Schiller’s Don Carlos.
The Spanish Inquisition lasted from 1480 to 1834. List of Grand Inquisitors.
Postscript: El Greco and Modernism, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf runs until August 12.
A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954
