Looking at Bucharest churches in the warm March sunshine

Martin Harris was without his family this weekend and as they do not share his love of looking round churches that meant it was beholden on us to look at some. It was also extremely good weather - Martin's car (clever car) said it was 21°.

When I was a boy looking at a beautiful church was the present I most wanted for birthdays and it still is. The highlight of today's tour was the church of Sfintii Apostoli, the Holy Apostles, one of the few Bucharest churches that I have visited fairly often. (It's a ten minute stroll from my flat). It was moved on rollers by the Communists and hidden behind apartment blocks; thank God a clever engineer had the idea of the rollers and thereby saved a number of fine churches. But it was the highlight because Martin pointed out 'There is Santa Claus's hand!' and there indeed was St Nicholas's mummified hand. It is not in a very  prominent place and I had previously not noticed it.

Is there a black market for stolen holy relics? If so, they should guard it carefully. Stealing holy relics sounds very mediaeval but so do lots of things that happen in this country, which, I suppose, is why I love this place.

Mihai, our cicerone, who once told me that he is not particularly religious, is quite certain that this is indeed St. Nicholas's hand and that someone tried to steal the relic from the church and died in prison on December 6, St. Nicholas's Day. I would like to believe that St Nicholas was involved in this death, and in fact can at a stretch, but I very much doubted if it really was the saint's hand and said I would look up how many of his hands are to be found in churches in Europe. Yet now I am loathe to do so. Let us leave it that it is the saint's hand indeed. But, just as many towns claimed the honour of producing Homer, so relics of St Nicholas are widely distributed - click here.

Schitul Darvari. An oasis of calm. Rebuilt 1933, beautiful frescoes from that period. Once under Mount Athos but no more.

It was my idea to go to the wonderful Radu Voda.

In dreams, unfamiliar buildings turn up in familiar landscapes and I, like many people, quite often dream of churches.  It was dreamlike when Mihai took me last year to the wonderful church of Radu Voda, as large, old and beautiful as the Patriarchal Cathedral and yet a church whose existence I had never suspected. I had even seem it a number of times from afar and convinced myself it was the cathedral.

Radu Voda, impersonating the Patriarchal Cathedral

The Bucur church, oldest church foundation in Bucharest but not the oldest church.  A christening was going on - of a girl, which meant the congregation crowded at the door making entrance impossible. With boys the immersion takes place near the sanctuary.

The Church of the Holy Apostles, founded by Matei Basarab in 1636, was closed for renovation, a word that always strikes fear. The doorway is from 1636.

The Mihai Voda church. This one was moved on rollers 300 yards to save it from demolition under Ceausescu's urban plan. 

Evelyn Waugh: 'In a more civilised age Hans Kung would have been burnt'

Hans Kung (shouldn't it be Kueng?) describes himself as the harshest critic of Pope Benedict XVI and sums up Benedict XVI's record as almost entirely negative with one significant exception:

In 2005, in one of Benedict’s few bold actions, he held an amicable four-hour conversation with me at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo in Rome.... 

For me, and indeed for the whole Catholic world, the meeting was a sign of hope. [1] But sadly Benedict’s pontificate was marked by breakdowns and bad decisions. He irritated the Protestant churches, Jews, Muslims, the Indians of Latin America, women, reform-minded theologians and all pro-reform Catholics.

Did you know that Catholic priests were allowed to talk like that about the Pope? Nowadays they are and to publish books denying dogmas such as the Virgin Birth and papal infallibility, denying Jesus's miracles and denying no end of other things. His prose in  'Why I am Still a Christian' is so turgid that I did not find out all the things that he does not believe in  but it comes to an awfully long list. (Yet I remember seeing Westminster Cathedral bookshop with a copy of one of Father Kung's books piled high in all the windows.) 

Ian Paisley, who believes in the Creed, is a much better Catholic than Father Kung. One knows why Evelyn Waugh, whose early death the Second Vatican Council caused, said that 

'In a  more civilised age Hans Kung would have been burnt.'

Father Kung seems a bitter man and notably lacks humility (in sharp contrast to the Vicar of Christ who spent four hours with him).  The Pope's most important act was meeting me! 

Irritating the Protestant churches, Jews, Muslims, women, reform-minded theologians and all pro-reform Catholics might be because Benedict XVI was thoroughly bold and unafraid to speak the truth, but it depends on what you think the truth is. It was indeed bold of the Pope to meet his former friend and characteristic of his humility and graciousness.  

Another bold move which I wish the Pope had made was to have excommunicated Father Kung. After all, Father Kung is not, by any definition, apart from his own, a Catholic. In 'Why I am Still a Christian'  he explains his reason for not leaving the Catholic Church of his own volition: the discouraging failure of people who have broken away from the church in the past. Well, since Luther's day, I suppose he meant.

Non-Catholics imagine we are still forbidden to use private judgement and required to believe what the Pope tells us. If only it were somewhat like that, though Catholics never had to agree with the Pope on everything. In practice, it is now a free for all. A low church Protestant friend of mine with whom I discussed Father Kung's book 'Why I am Still a Christian' said the title should have continued 'Even Though I No Longer Am.'

Father Kung's influence is immense and he advised British Prime Ministers James Callaghan and Tony Blair. He said a few years back that Muhammad was a true prophet but this will not endear him to Muslims because he does not believe in the Virgin Birth, which for them, as for Catholics, is de fide, an obligatory article of faith. 



_______________________________________________________________________

[1] Gosh, Kung has a good opinion of himself. This makes me think of Chesterton:

Are they clinging to their crosses,

F. E. Smith, 

Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,

Are they, Smith?

A very happy day in the West Bank

I love Israel and love Jews but it is an enormous joy today to reach the West Bank, Arabs, a good, welcoming hotel in Bethlehem, the Shepherd, and to hear the sound of the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer. There is a feeling of warm, chaotic humanity. Blessed are poor countries, certainly from my point of view as a visitor staying in a very comfortable hotel, though, actually, I did not choose this hotel and I usually prefer to put up in dives.

The Greek Orthodox monastery St. Elias on Mount Tabor, supposed site of the Transfiguration. 

I had an enchanting day which began on Mount Tabor where the Transfiguration happened, according to St Matthew. We stood outside the Greek Orthodox monastery, feeling like the souls of the dead waiting to be judged, knocked several times but received no answer. The nuns were breakfasting. Finally an elderly nun shouted to us in good Romanian, 

'Ask the Lord to give you patience' 

and after another five minutes the doors opened and we entered. Like most churches in the Holy Land it was not interesting from an architectural or historical view, but to think this is to miss the point. Location, location, location is the thing. And as well as location the monastery was pretty and it and its garden possessed an incomparable peace which comes from prayer and goodness.

A long journey into he West Bank and the Judean desert, the smallest desert in the world, then a surprise, this wonderful Orthodox monastery of Deir Hajla, near Jericho, founded in the fourth century. This monastery was ravishingly pretty indeed. It stands near the site of St. Gerasimus's cell and on the site where the Holy Family is said to have sheltered when fleeing to Egypt. Do I believe they fled to Egypt or that Herod massacred the innocents?

Orthodox monastery of Deir Hajla, near Jericho, in Judean desert.

Everyone knows the story of how St. Gerasimus tamed a lion by removing a thorn from its paw and taught it obedience. He is the patron saint of animals and one of those rather few saints who appeal to unbelievers (most saints do not and many were pretty difficult people - think of grumpy, choleric St. Jerome who is unconvincingly also said to have tamed lions).

Qumran.

Then the ruins of Qumran, the Essene centre and source of the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have all read about the Dead Sea Scrolls but I never imagined I would ever one day visit Qumran. The ruins are not interesting in themselves but the view beside the Dead Sea, overhung by mountains is dramatic. More interesting though is the Dead Sea, where I floated. I stayed in, as advised, only ten minutes but I was wonderfully relaxed.

A place that I had not visited before because it was not interesting enough is Jericho which claims, along with Damascus Aleppo and Erbil (Irbil, Arbil) in Iraq, to be the oldest city in the world. All four cities were millennia old when Rome was forest.

Then the mountain in the desert where Jesus resisted the temptations of Satan, the generic psychopath, the Father of Lies. I should do the same. Underneath a man sold overpriced but delicious pomegranate juice and another had tethered a camel, brought from some other desert, to make a little money.

Bethlehem used to be a majority Christian town thirty years ago and now alas Christians are only 27%. The Christmas decorations are up for commercial more than any other reason. Christmas is the town's principal industry.

Yesterday I saw Nazareth and the Catholic church built on the place that St. Helen, the former barmaid, decided in the early 4th century was the scene of the Annunciation. No doubt local Judeo-Christians had preserved a tradition going back to the first half of the First Century on the matter and an ancient inscription has been found saying, 'Blessed is the family'. The church was built in the totalitarian architectural style of the mid-1960s yet is more impressive than one expects from that disastrous decade. 

An Orthodox church built in 1750 on the site of the spring where a legend, current among the Orthodox, says that the Annunciation happened. The priest told me through an interpreter that 'Israelis were very good for Christians'. 

Then another church that might be built on the site of St Joseph's workshop but probably, I assume, isn't. In the crypt, however, is a ritual bath carbon dated to the first century, the oldest in the Holy Land. This church was built in 1914. The Holy Land is not a good place for old churches. Too many churches were destroyed too many times. 

The long history of religious war continues to this day. Christians made up 20% of the population of the Middle East in 1900 but now only 2%. The million Christians who lived under Saddam in Iraq, for example, have fallen to at most 300,000 today. Christians are now leaving Egypt and Syria as well as the West Bank. Christians suffer in the Middle East because they are seen as sympathetic to the West, which Muslims rightly see is another word for Christendom, when in the West the links between the public culture and Christianity are being deliberately severed. 

I spent yesterday afternoon in Tiberias, a pretty, spotlessly clean and tidy, unexciting lakeside resort. The Sea of Galilee is the thing, not the town. it was the sabbath and the place was empty which reminded me of Sunday afternoons in the seaside resort of my boyhood, also a rather Jewish place. Boring, I reminded myself, is another word for peaceful. 

Yesterday I felt a sense of listlessness as I always did on Sunday afternoons in the 1970s but today was a wonderfully happy day and tomorrow I stand outside the Church of the Nativity, for midnight Christmas Mass. This church really is old, founded by St. Helen in the early fourth century, but, standing on the supposed site of the Virgin Birth its antiquity and its beauty (it has none) are again not the point.

Psychopaths are motivated by envy

The psychopath, like everyone, is attracted to the qualities he has repressed in himself. Therefore, according to Melanie Klein, he is drawn to good people, whom he envies and wishes to embrace but also to harm, thus relieving his painful feelings of envy. In the same way, good people are sometimes attracted by evil ones, because evil people do the things good people do not dare even want to do. This is why stories about psychopaths sell more than stories about saints.

Envy is one of the psychopath's principal emotions. If the psychopath cannot possess good qualities himself he can devalue people he recognises as good, by insults or harming them, in some cases even by murder. Psychopaths envy everything, for evil is a vacuum, negation. Evil is a very real thing (read crime stories in the press or read some history) and, paradoxically, also nothing, a kind of black hole. 

Envy and pride, not greed or cruelty, are at the heart of evil.  Particularly, envy of another's spiritual good, which the Church has always considered one of the greatest of all sins, a sin against the Holy Spirit. The myth of the fall of Lucifer is accurate, understood in psychological terms.

'His [Othello's] life had a daily beauty in it which made mine ugly.' 

was the only explanation Iago gave for his crimes at the end of Othello. Some people think this a cop out on the part of Shakespeare. In fact, it is good psychology and good theology.

This is one reason why psychotherapy for psychopaths is dangerous (the psychotherapist can be in emotional and even physical danger). Another is the fact that psychotherapy may make the psychopath worse, not better, in the sense of being better able to understand himself and better able to achieve his ends. In any case, as Freud said, the patient needs a conscience for therapy to work. It only works if the subject wants to be a better person. ('How many psychotherapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to be changed.')

The evil eye, which has always been feared in traditional societies, is supposed to be motivated by envy and inflict bad luck. It is interesting that evil people, or at any rate psychopaths, do stare in a remarkably strange way.

Ira Einhorn, environmentalist, psychopath and murderer

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors murderers, who tortured and killed children

For more about the evil eye, click here.

Karl Marx writes about the Satanic urge to destroy the world

Karl Marx's apparent admiration for Satan in his juvenile poems (this link repays reading) seems revealing. Like Milton, he was of the devil's party without knowing it. Or rather perhaps, unlike Milton, he did know it very well.

Perhaps Marx was a psychopath. Someone on the net has argued the case interestingly here. Reading it one sees parallels with the young Hitler, another bohemian who also lacked the German work ethic, although Hitler was much more charming, which is another psychopathic trait. 

Lines from Marx's poems, which he puts into the mouths of demons, include:

Worlds I would destroy forever,

Since I can create no world;

Since my call they notice never …

Then I will be able to walk triumphantly,

Like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom.

Every word of mine is fire and action.My breast is equal to that of the Creator.

…Ourselves being clockwork, blindly mechanical,

Made to be the foul-calendars of Time and Space,

Having no purpose save to happen, to be ruined,

So that there shall be something to ruin …

If there is a something which devours,

I'll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins-

The world which bulks between me and the Abyss

I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.I'll throw my arms around its harsh reality:

Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away,

And then sink down to utter nothingness,

Perished, with no existence — that would be really living!

Edward Norman on modern religion

Time to repost some wonderfully good quotations from the great Edward Norman, my favourite living historian and religious commentator. I wish I had met him for more than a quarter of an hour.

"The age is described by welfare: it occupies the space for sacral values once filled by the churches. Indeed the neo-Puritanism of the times promotes welfare considerations as exclusively important."

"Extraordinarily enough, the leaders of the Church manage to identify the present welfare idealism - which is based in Humanist materialism - as fundamental Christianity, an application of the love of neighbour enjoined by Christ. But preoccupation with material welfare, whatever higher considerations may become attached to it, cultivates worldliness, and is an enemy of authentic faith."

"The Churches themselves, in fact, have rushed to acclaim the new humanism - the `caring society - as the very essence of Christianity. But it is actually quite pagan, concentrating as it does on the merely worldly needs of people in a way which is plainly contrary to the renunciations indicated in the teachings of Christ. This is not an academic matter. For when Christians identify the present secular enthusiasm for humanity as basic Christianity - the love of neighbour - they are in reality acclaiming and legitimising their own replacement."

"Through contact with liberal and Christian values the other world religions were sanitised and made acceptable to Western sensibilities: widows were no longer incinerated alive on their husbands funeral pyres, and the way was opened for that late-20th-century phenomenon, the Western idealising of Oriental religiosity, beads and mantras in Californian condominiums."

Books read and films seen this year of grace 2012

The High Window*, Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye*, Raymond Chandler
Muhammad, Karen Armstrong
Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor 
Defying Hitler, Sebastian Hafner
Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital 1939-45, Roger Moorehouse
This Business of Living: Diaries 1925-50*, Cesare Pavese
Relapse into Bondage, Alexandru Cretianu
Friends and Heroes*, Olivia Manning
Waugh in Abyssinia, Evelyn Waugh - I reviewed it here

As You Like It*, William Shakespeare
History of the Roumanians*, R.W.Seton-Watson 
A History of Romania, Kurt Treptow

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, Victor Sebestyen

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi - Geoff Dyer
In Ethiopia with a Mule, Dervla Murphy - I reviewed it here
Tippu Tip: The Story of His Career in Zanzibar and Central Africa, Heinrich Brode
First Footsteps in East Africa, Richard Burton
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, Ryszard Kapuscinski - I reviewed it here
Here is New York, E. B. White
The Psychopath's Bible*, Christopher Hyatt
Remote People, Evelyn Waugh 

The Diary of Terror: Ethiopia 1974-1991, Dawit Shifaw 
Solitude*, Anthony Storr
Pagans and Christians Robin Lane Fox - I reviewed it here
The Shadow of the Sword. Tom Holland - I reviewed it here.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon.
The Early Church*, Henry Chadwick

Bold means I loved it. An asterisk means I have read it before. 

What a masculine, middle-aged list. I am even reading military history, which is the last refuge of the middle-aged male. In fact I tried Beevor's Stalingrad on a recommendation from an aesthete friend but it bored and repelled me. Gibbon though is great.

I read Chandler for the prose style not for the plot, though he is a good storyteller. I thought when 14 that The Long Goodbye was too long and too much trying to be a proper novel. Now I absolutely loved it except the ending with the silly twist which I merely skimmed without attempting to understand it.

Karen Armstrong on Muhammad is not worth reading as she does not mention that the evidence for her subject's life is extremely late indeed (two centuries after the event).

Hafner's book, to my great surprise, an account of his uneventful life in Berlin in 1933, found among his papers and published ten years ago, is absolutely wonderful. It is beautifully written and deeply horrifying because of the sheer normality of his life as he describes it in Berlin in 1933 and the ease and rapidity with which Germans accepted Nazism and Nazi indoctrination. I hope it becomes a classic and is read in a hundred years' time as it deserves to be. People follow like sheep. I saw a somewhat faint parallel with another totalitarian ideology with a whiff of sulphur, political correctness, which has made cowards of us all in recent years. 



The Moorehouse book is not particularly well written or strikingly insightful, but it efficiently covers the ground. The story of Stella Kübler, the beautiful blonde Jewess who was used by the Nazis as bait to uncover Jews hiding in Berlin, chilled my blood. She was told that, by her collaborating, her parents would be saved, but unsurprisingly they were sent to the gas chambers anyway. She herself lived to an old age before she committed suicide. One solitary Jew was permitted to survive in the Jewish cemetery burying Jews according to Jewish practice. He was still alive when the Russians came. 

This is what a friend of mine calls Hitler porn but my excuse is that I know very little about German domestic history during the Nazi period, the subject is important and I am interested in biographies of cities, writing as I am one a book on Bucharest. 

Olivia Manning's third volume in the Balkan trilogy, set in Greece, which I reread while spending the weekend in Athens and Hydra, inclines me to think that the reason I like the first two so much is because of my love of and interest in Romania not Manning's writing. She does not create characters. Her characters are clearly drawn from life in many cases and therefore do not come alive. It is the invented ones like Yaki who live. 

Seton-Watson is magisterial and should be read by all foreigners who speak English in Romania. I am ashamed that I had only skimmed it before. I had never opened Treptow, which the author gave me in 1999, before he went inside, and had assumed it would be a facile popularisation but, despite the numerous mistakes and misspellings, it was a more vivid, condensed account than Seton-Watson and taught me rather a lot. Dennis Deletant tells me it was written by a  group of Romanian historians not by Treptow and completed very hurriedly - hence the mistakes and typos - so that Adrian Nastase, when he was Foreign Minister,  had copies to give away when he visited the USA.

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen is journalism rather than history, but very interesting.

I read Here is New York, by E. B. White, because Johann Hari tweeted that it was the best essay of all time. It is not but it is very well written and might inspire me to write about Bucharest if I am lucky. But reading Remote People by Evelyn Waugh immediately after Here is New York makes Waugh's prose seem even more dazzling than usual. White is a very good stylist whom Waugh effortlessly outdoes. Although perhaps I am biassed as I 'get' English writers so much better than American ones. Americans speak our language but do not think like we do. And they write in English but not in the setting of the English class system, which always makes reading them seem eerie.

The Psychopath's Bible is a reminder that psychopaths, though amoral or rather immoral, have values they believe in, which they cannot be argued out of - might is right, survival of the fittest, victims want to be victims, selfishness is good, the ideas of Ayn Rand. A reminder that morality, like art, is inspired by love not logic.

'Tom' Holland went to my college years after me and took a Double First in Classics and History and has many books to his credit. I try not to be jealous, but he cannot write.

I haven't decided whether I love Gibbon yet - reading a book on a kindle makes love more difficult, for some reason - but I am enjoying him, though his paganism and contempt for the early church disgust me. He is a very good historian indeed. Cardinal Newman said, "It is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon."  

Four novels, which is much better than my usual score, although I am not sure the two Raymond Chandler thrillers really count.

Films seen

Six films is also much better than my normal score, which is none. None were any good, except In A Better World. Albert Nobbs was dull, pleasant but in the end a waste of time - please read George Moore's wonderful short story instead. George Moore is an unjustly neglected genius (like me).

The Blue Dahlia (1947)*
The Brasher Doubloon (1947)
Albert Nobbs (2011)
In a Better World (2011)
Thank you for Smoking (2005)
Goodbye, Lenin (2003)

Christendom and social democracy

 “Social democracy may be defined as an arrangement under which we all largely cease to be responsible for our own behaviour and in return become responsible for everybody else’s. The temptations which this way of doing things offers to synthetic anger, fraudulent penitence, all other forms of hypocrisy and the sheer evasion of duty are infinitely too great for fallen man.”  

T.E. Utley

The  Catholic social theory of the common good is the fruit of the continental mind which is dirigiste, when in fact a small state should be near the heart of Christian social thinking. The modern anti-discrimination ideology and welfare considerations have taken the place in Western European culture formerly occupied by religion and spiritual values. 

Dr. Martin Israel, a Jew who was a leading pathologist before becoming an Anglican priest and mystical writer, goes much further. He says:

Antichrist is not a demonic figure typified in our own century by the person of a fascist or communist dictator or one of his henchmen....Antichrist reveals himself much more subtly and plausibly than this. He appears as an outwardly enlightened man of apparent good nature and well-disposed to his fellows, who takes charge of the world and usurps the place of God. He organises the world into the form of an advanced welfare state and makes everyone happy provided they bow down and worship him. All who co-operate with him live pleasant, uneventful lives, have plenty of possessions, and strive for the maintenance of their present status. Their inner eye is no longer lifted up to the Figure on the cross, who is the way, the truth and the life in God. Therefore they are not themselves transformed. They remain comfortable, complacent people, selfish and blind to the greater world, living like intelligent animals. They do not respond to the existential problems of life until they disappear, like the followers of Korah, swallowed up by the earth that splits and opens to receive their mortal bodies (Numbers 16:31). This is the way of Antichrist, that great deceiver, who promises us all the kingdoms of the world in their glory if we will only fall down and do him homage (Matthew 4:9).

In fact Antichrist assumes many guises and some limited aspects of social democracy are positive.

I do not want the poor to go to the wall or the welfare state, which in America is used as a term of abuse, abolished. The British National Health Service will probably become unworkable but it is a fine example in some ways of social democracy, because in England it really does have great popular support - it is an example of social solidarity as well as of big government. As Nigel Lawson said, it is the British religion, which is making my point for me. Its greatest achievement is to make doctors work for much less than they would under a private system and keep the costs of drugs down far below what they cost in the United States. 

However the big state requires big money, which requires a baby boom, at a time when affluence and opportunities at work for women are reducing the birth rate to disastrous levels. This will bring about a catastrophe at some point, in some form not at present foreseeable. I am reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and wonder how many centuries Western civilisation has left. At the moment, we are still where Gibbon starts, with the wise and beneficent philosopher-Emperor Marcus Aurelius and

‎"the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous." 

Or is this nonsense, on stilts? British, French, German, etc culture is strong enough to absorb almost any number of immigrants. Can civilisation carry on with different races in Europe and with a loss of religious belief by Christians or loss of belief in their tradition and culture by Europeans? Yes probably but it will be a new story, not the continuation of the old one. I trust we shall not have something like the  fall of Rome but whatever happens, like the fall of Rome, will be the end of a very old story and the start of a new one.

Hilaire Belloc said this on the subject:

I have never said that the Church was necessarily European. The Church will last for ever, and, on this earth, until the end of the world; and our remote descendants may find its chief membership to have passed to Africans or Asiatics in some civilisation yet unborn. What I have said is that the European thing is essentially a Catholic thing, and that European values would disappear with the disappearance of Catholicism. 

Battle in Gaza, 634

Less than five years after the (Byzantine) Roman Empire had won back Palestine from the Iranians, on 4 February 634, Muslim Arabs defeated the Byzantine army, commanded by the candidatus, Sergius, at the Battle of Dathin, a village near Gaza. Sergius himself was killed. The Muslim victory was celebrated by the local Jews. 

This is the moment when Islam enters history. 

The fascinating Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati, a Christian polemic against the Jews and one of the very few historical sources, records voices from an otherwise eerily silent period of Middle Eastern history:

When the candidatus was killed by the Saracens, I was at Caesarea and I set off by boat to Sykamina. People were saying "the candidatus has been killed," and we Jews were overjoyed. And they were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens, and that he was proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come. I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: "What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?" He replied, groaning deeply: "He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist. Indeed, Isaiah said that the Jews would retain a perverted and hardened heart until all the earth should be devastated. But you go, master Abraham, and find out about the prophet who has appeared." So I, Abraham, inquired and heard from those who had met him that there was no truth to be found in the so-called prophet, only the shedding of men's blood. He says also that he has the keys of paradise, which is incredible.

This seems to be the first of the very few near-contemporary references to Mohammed, leaving aside the four references to him in the Koran, though he is not named and it has been unconvincingly suggested that the reference is to some other prophet. In fact, we know very little about Mohammed. Almost everything that is thought to be known about him is myth.

Two years later, the Battle of Yarmouk marked the final defeat in Syria of the Roman Empire, which was in fact, by this time, Greek. The Middle East has remained mostly in Muslim hands ever since. 

The Christian Middle East still exists and still feels Greek, though Christians, who made up 20% of the population of the Middle East in 1900, now make up 2% and are now leaving in large numbers. The traditional Jewish Middle East existed up until 1948, when the Jews were expelled from many Arab countries. Little remains of it now.

Was Guy Fawkes set up?

Please to remember

Fifth of November

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

Tonight is Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night in England. It is the day when English fathers try their best to set off fireworks in back gardens, to celebrate the foiling of the Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament during the State Opening in 1605, a story which my generation knows from the admirable Ladybird Adventures from History series. Bonfires are lit and 'guys' (from Guy Fawkes, the leader of the plot) are burnt.

Actually, this is not quite true - more and more, because of omnipresent health and safety concerns, private fireworks are discouraged by the anxious British state. Its anti-Catholic meaning also sits uncomfortably with the syncretic and relativist spirit of our age. Hallowe'en, its religious meaning forgotten, is much more congenial to opinion formers, but even children going knocking on neighbours' doors has its dangers. One sometimes feels that the British government would really like its subjects to stay at home in the evenings and watch propaganda on television.


I once met Fr. Francis Edwards, a lovely old Jesuit, who wrote a book suggesting, on circumstantial evidence, that the Gunpowder Plot was laid by Cecil, not by the Catholics, and that half of the 'plotters' were employed by Cecil and promised that they would be set free unharmed. Instead, they were all hanged, drawn and quartered. Fr. Edwards' ideas are summarised here.



This part is chilling:

Cecil promised the conspirators they would be allowed to escape or pardoned and then broke his promise. How could he convince Catesby and co they would not be executed? There was the precedent of the “Main Plot” three years previously. The conspirators in that had reached the scaffold and were kneeling in the straw and about to put their heads on the block when a royal messenger with the king’s pardon dramatically revealed himself. Cecil could have assured the gunpowder conspirators that the same thing would happen to them.

....The other conspirators were lodged in the Tower in exceptionally comfortable conditions, which was odd, because they were supposed to be murderers and traitors of the worst kind. They had plentiful food and drink and were allowed an unlimited supply of tobacco, which was then a luxury. At their trial in Westminster Hall they looked nonchalant and unconcerned. They attempted neither to justify their conspiracy nor to beg for mercy. Such conduct is compatible with the notion that they regarded the trial as just a formality and thought they were secure from execution. Their high living must have increased their sense of security. One can imagine them going to the scaffold with the same unconcern. Until almost the last, they would have assumed they were all right.

The Church of England hierarchy in those times were men of a different stamp from the bishops of our own day, who read The Guardian in the Athenaeum and talk about global warming:

A special committee, including Anglican bishops, was set up to try to devise an especially horrible and painful form of execution to fit the nature of the crime. But the members are unable to think up anything suitable and settle for the conventional hanging, drawing and quartering.

As Evelyn Waugh said, talking about the horrible martyrdom of St. Edmund Campion, the Church of England still had some way to go before it became the institution described in the novels of Anthony Trollope. 

Divine retribution in the blogosphere

Is Hurricane Sandy 'God's revenge for the refusal of the US government to take action on the climate crisis'? Or because Mitt and Obama are 'a pro-homosexual Mormon and a pro-abortion/homosexual Muslim'? Hard to call.

Actually, I do not think it has anything to do with any of these things or any kind of punishment but I do not see why people should not think so, as they always did in the past. Dryden, for example, wrote his wonderful Annus Mirabilis to refute the idea that the Great Plague and Great Fire of London were God's judgment on Londoners and by implication on the reign of King Charles II. 

Of course, it is far-fetched and richly comic to say that God permitted the September 11th outrages because of widespread homosexuality in the USA, as Jerry Falwell did, but I was shocked that the hellfire preacher aroused such anger for saying so - everyone in America seemed furious with him and he apologised. Though, of course, why single out homosexuality not divorce or materialism or violence or a thousand other possible reasons? Mr Obama's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, thought September 11th was a punishment for racism. And so it goes. 

By contrast, in England, acts of God somehow seem to be considered, even by devout Christians, purely a term of art from the insurance industry. English Christians sometimes even refuse to believe that God causes natural disasters or illnesses, which goes along with what Jonathan Meades meant when, speaking of modern British church architecture, he referred to 'the idea of God, the awfully nice bloke.' Romanians have a much clearer idea that God is very immanent and to be feared as well as loved.

If hundreds of people die in the hurricane, presumably this might will help Mr. Romney. I suspect that some people, including American defence and tobacco company executives, who stand to gain from a Romney victory, are calculating that it might be the October surprise that decides the election.

Chiajna Monastery on the outskirts of Bucharest

I am ashamed I never heard of the Chiajna Monastery on the outskirts of Bucharest until today, when Rupert Wolfe-Murray mentioned it- it looks enchanting. I must go there and to what other places?


This wonderful picture is by Mihai Petre and won first prize in the Wiki Loves Monuments competition in December 2011.

Do we know anything about Muhammad or the origins of Islam?

I am reading Tom Holland's book In the Shadow of the Sword which I should probably not have bought had I taken the time to look through the pages and see that it is a popular history, written to make the paperback bestseller lists. But this would, on the whole, have been my loss. Some of the book's themes are important and should be widely discussed.

The book is exasperating and quite exceptionally badly and vulgarly written.  I cannot remember ever reading anything that insults the reader quite so much and yet Mr Holland has won several literary prizes, which I find completely incredible. The book contains many hundreds of sentences as bad as this one:

'He [Muhammad] had experienced history's most epochal mid-life crisis.'  

Historians are discombobulated. A sultan with halitosis can 'slay flies with a single breath'. Holland sounds like a history teacher trying to amuse his fifth form class and the whole book seems to be written for serialisation in the Daily Mail. The stories about the Empress Theodora's prepubescent sexual life, which are completely off the subject, are repeated with unnecessary detail and given undue credence. The book is, as Gerald Manley Hopkins described Locksley Hall, an ungentlemanly row, but the subject matter is fascinating.

Holland convinces me that we know virtually nothing about Muhammad, including whether or not he had a religious conversion at the age of forty. This is largely because of a lack of a written culture in the Arabia of the period. Compare what we know about fifth century Britain: we know much more simply due to Gildas and the Venerable Bede. The Koran tells us almost nothing about Muhammad. There are no more than four references to him in the Koran and two fleeting references to him by name in near-contemporary Christian writers. The Teaching of Jacob, a Greek Christian apocalyptic text written between 632 and 640, which Holland does not specifically mention, might be the oldest reference to Muhammad in existence. It does not name Muhammad, but puts the Christian case against him poignantly and pithily: 

I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: "What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?" He replied, groaning deeply: "He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist."

The hadiths, sayings attributed to Muhammad, and the biographies of him probably have no value at all as historical evidence, being written far too late. This lack of evidence should always have been obvious (Gibbon pointed it out in a footnote to the Decline and Fall) but only became reasonably widely accepted in the last thirty-odd years, though it is still fiercely disputed. We do not know, for sure, if Muhammad visited Mecca. The battles he is thought to have won, over which historians have spilt much ink, are probably as factual as the Battle of Camlann at which Mordred defeated King Arthur.

Thomas Carlyle's famous essay praising Muhammad and Sir William Muir's Life suggesting he may have been a psychopath possessed by Satan seem equally houses based on sand. The most important fact that we know for sure about the early history of Islam is that Muslims conquered half the known world in the seventh century, including the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, before being defeated at the Battle of Tours in 732. We do not know for sure if Islam enabled the Arabs to conquer so much of the world or whether Islam was a by-product of this remarkable explosion. The late Bishop Kenneth Cragg said: 

Muhammad, in expanding his empire, managed to start a religion.

However, we do not know for sure if Muhammad himself led the Muslims to victory. Some have even argued that Mohammad did not exist, as others have done about Jesus of Nazareth, of whom much more is reliably known. 

Holland is certain (perhaps too certain) that the Koran originates in the early seventh century, basing his argument on one verse, which he thinks refers to the Persian conquest of Palestine in 614. He rejects, in a couple of sentences, the idea that the Koran was composed using material from various sources, including Christian hymns, as others have asserted. This is a question that deserved much more space in a long book that includes many long and irrelevant digressions. I suspect that it is elided for fear of the reaction from Muslims.

Two scholars were allowed to examine parchment fragments of the oldest known Koranic manuscript which were found forty years ago in a mosque in Sana’a, in Yemen. One, Gerd- Rudiger Puin, decided that the Koran had evolved over time using material from various sources. The Yemeni authorities were understandably angry and no further research has been published. This is also the theory of other scholars, including Patricia Crone and 'Christoph Luxenberg' (the latter writes under a pseudonym for fear of violent reprisals).  Holland, however, agreeing with the scholarly consensus, is convinced that the variations in texts are not of great importance and their similarities point to an early origin. These scholarly disputes require a good working knowledge of Arabic and classical Syriac or Middle Aramaic. Holland, so I have read, does not have these languages.

Of course, for Christians the idea that the Koran we know today does have an early origin is rather disappointing, although they hate it when biblical scholars undermine the historicity of the Gospels. Still, there is very much that is very mysterious about the Koran. It is fascinating to learn that many hadiths insist that the punishment for adultery should be death by stoning, but the Koran stipulates 'a hundred lashes'. How does this square with the Koran being much older than the hadiths? It tells us that the scribes who copied out the Koran did not adjust the text to accord with the hadiths but also that those who wrote down the hadiths did not know the Koran in the version we have it.

The Koran is almost the only evidence that we have for the origins of Islam, yet the Koran tells us virtually nothing about history. According to Holland, we do not even know if it originates in the Arabian peninsular (Arabia) or elsewhere in the Arab world - Iraq has been suggested by Patricia Crone as an alternative site.

Some light on this mysterious period in Arabian history is also shed by this book about the Jewish kingdom of Himyar (very roughly what is now Yemen), where Jews oppressed Christians. The suppression of Himyar by the Ethiopians provides Holland with the opening chapter of his book, though it is not very relevant to the origins of the Muslim religion. My visit to Ethiopia and to the Yazidi holy place, Lalish, in Iraq have whetted my appetite to know more about this period and part of the world. I look forward to going to Sana'a, though possibly when it is a little less dangerous.



Here is a very good article in Standpoint by Nick Cohen, about Tom Holland's book.