January 6th Three Kings’ Day

On Wednesday I was talking about pilgrimage and today is the feast of Epiphany, celebrating the visit to the infant Jesus of the wise men – or three Kings as they became in Christian legend -‘travellers from Orient lands afar’ and deserving to be the patron saint of pilgrimage. This sculptural depiction is from Autun Cathedral and perfectly illustrates the tender humanity distinctive of Romanesque art, expressing as it does the artist’s concern that travellers on a cold winter night would need to huddle up close and keep warm – something the Renaissance depictions of opulent monarchs with glorious retinues clearly forgot about.

T. S. Eliot had his magi looking back and remembering the cold (‘A cold coming we had of it’) but also still puzzling many years later about what it all meant. Our perplexity is necessarily greater if, as has been said, our time is a time without a guiding star and therefore literally a time of disaster. We, it seems, are having to pick our own way towards an unknown future with no assurance of any messianic Kingdom to come. May angels keep us warm as the air grows colder.

In the Latin Church, this Feast is called Epiphany but in some countries it’s called ‘Three Kings’ Day’, while in Russia and other Eastern Orthodox countries this is when Christ’s nativity is celebrated – so happy Epiphany, happy Three Kings’ Day, and Happy Christmas to all Russian and Orthodox friends.

January 5th

Last time was a bit long. Today, I’ll be briefer.

This afternoon I reviewed an article about Camus and religion for a Scandinavian journal. Camus himself was avowedly agnostic, but he did write a Masters thesis on Augustine and Plotinus. Both of these were, in their different ways, religious figures. Augustine is widely regarded as the fountainhead of Western theology and Plotinus is often judged to have been one of the great mystical thinkers of all time (and a big influence on Augustine). Just think of the entangled European identities in play in these few figures. Here I am, sitting in Scotland, writing for a Scandinavian journal about a French writer who, being from Algeria, could also be seen as North African – as, of course, could Augustine (like Camus, an Algerian, if we impose current national boundaries on the ancient world); Plotinus for his part came from today’s Egypt, wrote in Greek, and made his career in Italy. A short moral: Europe not only is, it always has been more than just Europe. In this part of the world, isolationism is just not on the agenda.

January 3rd 2018

I have promised to write something about relics and pilgrimages. Pilgrimages, as they say, need no introduction and are a living element in contemporary spirituality, Christian and post-Christian. The pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela is probably the best known and is used by those with a wide spectrum of motivations, as celebrated in the movie ‘The Way’. But it is only one of many. The cult of relics, on the other hand, probably seems extremely weird to those not brought up with it and even on a generous view, there is sometimes something rather disturbing about finding oneself confronted with the remains of a rotting corpse beneath a sumptuously decorated altar!

But what do relics and pilgrimages have to do with our present-day debates about Europe? I’ll try to explain.

Last weekend we drove through St Andrew’s, chiefly famous today for its University and major golf tournaments. Once, though, many hundred years before the University was founded or golf was invented, it was known for having an assortment of bones said to have belonged to St Andrew, Galilean fisherman, brother of St Peter, and crucified on a diagonal cross for his witness to Christ. In addition to Scotland, Andrew also became patron saint of Greece, Russia, Romania, and (later) Barbados as well as not a few cities and the Russian Imperial Navy. In the 14th century, other bones of the saint were discovered in Amalfi (a rather warmer seaside city).

As with many other relics, it was quite usual in the Middle Ages for different places to have different parts of a saint’s body. This can inspire cynicism, as in the old joke that there were once enough splinters of the true cross to reconstitute a forest. I have myself seen three right forearms of John the Baptist (especially popular as this is the arm with which he pointed to Jesus and declared him to be the Lamb of God).

But this also meant that people had different kinds of connections: a map of Europe built out of the pattern of saints’ relics would show very different lines of communication from those determined solely by centres of political and military power or national boundaries. These connections could even cut across religious boundaries, since the Turkish Sultan was also a keen collector of relics and visitors to the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul today can see for themselves Abraham’s cooking-pot, Joseph’s turban, and the staff with which Moses struck the Red Sea (now in a gold covering).

The same is true of pilgrim ways, often ways leading to particularly important sets of relics. In the Middle Ages the routes leading to Santiago de Compostela (home to the relics of St James) spread a complex web of roads and pathways throughout Europe. The route from the Pyrenees, today’s Camino, was just the last stage of a journey that, for some pilgrims, stretched over many hundreds of miles from northern, central, or eastern Europe.

So, and this is my point, the lines that mark the boundaries of today’s nation-states are only one possible way of defining the map of Europe and, for some people in some ages, not the most important. Europe is a place of many nations but also of many paths and roads, linking people in often unexpected ways. Europe always has been a place of movement as its peoples criss-cross natural and human boundaries, looking for work, love, knowledge, and military or religious glory. And this is just as important a part of its identity as the ‘borders’ that define its states.

January 2nd 2018

A suspicious reader could interpret what I wrote on January 1st as implying that Christianity and the European idea are identical (and, by implication, that Brexit is anti-Christian). Obviously, it’s not as simple as that. Generally, fears about Brexit are probably overdone. There is not going to be starvation or civil war. There may be some deterioration of economic life, but we will remain well above global averages in terms of comfort and life opportunities. Many Brexiteers will be active in social and charitable work, some of it Church-based. Personal goodness (or badness) is not the issue. The issue is about the deeper tendencies at work. So, going back to Christianity, I take it that whatever else it is, Christianity is an essentially internationalist and cosmopolitan movement. In the 20th century, many on the left had to address the question as to whether socialism was possible in just one country. Whatever the answer to that, Christianity is certainly not possible in just one country. Although people often see Paul as having corrupted the simple teaching of Jesus, Paul was absolutely with Jesus in realizing that the message was for anyone, everywhere. Paul’s Christianity was a transnational (Jew and Greek), trans-class (slave and free) and transgender (male and female) movement. For complicated (and not always bad) reasons, however, Christianity gradually became identified with particular social groups to the point at which it seems entirely normal to speak of a Church of England or a Russian Orthodox Church or a Danish People’s Church. But a Church – in the New Testament sense – isn’t the sort of thing that can be defined by a national tag. This is the essential truth behind calling the Church ‘Catholic’: it’s for anyone and everyone. The appeal of the gospel is an appeal to human beings simply as such and on the basis of a common humanity that overrides all local or class identities. If Christianity is going to have any social doctrine, then, it must be in the direction of helping us see the one (but gloriously varied) humanity that geo-political structures defined by nation, class, or for that matter religion inevitably obscure. Perhaps these structures are necessary for all manner of reasons, but we shouldn’t accept them as more than provisional, more than a stop-gap, until we are ready for a truly cosmopolitan human society. And the more we reinforce the role of the nation, the group, or the club, the harder it is going to be long-term to reach that goal. And, of course, a ‘European’ identity is no less at risk of turning itself into just such a group. ‘Europe’ isn’t great because Europeans are politically, culturally, intellectually or in any other way superior to others, but because the European Idea, of which the EU is the imperfect implementation, represents one of the bravest movements in many centuries to widen our horizons beyond the nation state to a larger horizon of human responsibility.
The great virtue of a blog is that you don’t have to say everything at once, so I’ll leave it there. Next time I’ll say something about pilgrimages and relics.

New Year’s Day 2018

Why am I starting this blog? And why now? Perhaps it’s a last desperate attempt to make some contribution to stopping Brexit and stopping the country of which I am a citizen from failing to seize the future it could be having. But that’s a negative way of putting it. Positively, it’s because I believe that I am indeed a ‘devout European’ and want to celebrate that. Devout? Yes, not only because I do believe in what has been called the European Idea but also because I believe that Idea to be tied up with (but not identical with) the history and heritage of Christianity. There is much to be said about that, of course, and I hope to be saying some of it. Let me say right off that, of course, much of the entanglement of Christianity and the European idea has been associated with prejudice, persecution, and war, especially when Christianity has misunderstood its own intention and attempted to impose theocracy. If Christianity has anything to offer it can only offer it in the spirit of freedom. It’s the memory of that freedom that keeps it alive, not only as it struggles with the world but also as it struggles with its own history of failure and, perhaps more often, the wrong kind of success. Probably Europe today is moving decisively away from Christianity, at least the kind of Christianity that has been dominant here for about 1500 years, but it will not and should not forget the memory of what Christianity could have been for it. It is that memory I shall be struggling with in future entries.