Carols

The moon is high in a cloudless sky and we walk down the long farm track, puddles shining in the moonlight, to St Boniface Kirk for carols, the wind vigorous outside, the sea breaking against the rocks ... candles and torches, accordion accompaniment ... some century or other, light in darkness, what counts as darkness, what counts as light, Celtic priests with the vigilance of warriors, alert to every sound in the darkness, to every gleam of light, the form of consciousnesness without which ... not, as I sometimes dismissed them, early muscular Christians ...

Mars in the dawn sky

Well, dawn is a little after nine o'clock these mornings, though the winter solstice has almost arrived, but it has been wonderful to see the rosy fingers at the horizon with a turquoise blue above it and high in the sky the planet Mars.

The pictures are of the New Pier at Moclett Bay where, Jim tells me, pilgrims would land on their way to St Tredwell's chapel at the side of the loch.

The last few days have all been sunny and bright with hardly any wind, and that will surely change in the next day or two. Rosemary flew off to do some shoppping in Kirkwall this morning, Josephine and I wandered off up to the shop ...

...met a trainee GP on the island whose husband did philosophy at Liverpool in the early nineties ...

Back in Papay

We flew in this morning. Jim had left our car at the airfield for us, the heating was on, we have been to the shop and bought some provisions, christmas tree in the hall waiting to be freed from its netting. Josephine has been set up with a bed downstairs. A crowd of North Ronaldsay friends coming in at Kirkwall on the Islander, quick greetings before we board, beautiful calm weather ...

Claudius and Wilfrid

I have to confess to a curious resentment as I read about the occupation of Britain by the Romans, the sense of a conquered and subdued country forced to assimilate Roman ways: curious because it is, after all, nearly two millennia ago. The Irish always point out that the Romans didn't get there so that the old tribal ways endured: they had to wait for the British for their own subjugation. The connection with Wilfrid is that I went to a school, full of boys and priests with Irish surnames, which was named after a man who did Rome's work on the Christians of these isles at the Synod of Whitby. I love the image of the Celtic priests with their tonsures, shaved to behind the ears and the rest of the hair worn in a pigtail.

Ferocity and compassion

Interesting to read Hume on human nature, on our practice of seeing regularities across time and space, examples of avarice and ambition, generosity and public spirit. In some ways, perhaps, the best of Hume's work.

I have been in Norwich, talked to A about Nietzsche, and realised how easy it is to conflate 'the herd' with 'slaves'. I wrote about the herd or what is herdlike only a couple of days ago. One can easily be disdainful and dismissive in talking about Christianity, say, as a religion of slaves. But one needs to be more cautious than that. I think more and more that what we call morality has to be understood in terms of our primal emotions in conditions of (extreme) adversity, of terror and instability, where there is an intense need and desire for compassion or mercy, or pity. What is expressed in the gaze of a Mithras, as opposed to a Christ or a Buddha, and what is the source of our need to find something in that gaze? We are casually relativistic about the values of the warrior elite as opposed, say, to those of Buddhists or other religionists, and it is certainly true that the former are silent about or contemptuous of the latter. But, on the other hand, the warrior elites require values that are functional in maintaining their fitness to act, and, nevertheless, ferocity brings horror, carnage and devastation in its wake and awakens other values in us, born of a bone-weariness of slaughter, so that we cannot simply 'compare' two apparently incommensurable value- systems, but need to see the one emerging as a result of the other ... or as light in darkness ... and nor is there a neutral self that stands over against these possibilities to elect one or the other, the self is rather constituted by the conflict between them, and its orientation is already there in its language, by which I mean, roughly, that a preference for the light is already implied in the nature of our talk of 'temptation', etc. The significant thing is that out of our deepest consciousness we seek rescue, and it is this which is the source of our orientation. Nor is this to be understood in terms of some transcendent agency beyond the human, a redeemer, for instance, though we may project our yearning into the form of such a possibility. But of course, we also have to incorporate the values of the slaves into a larger morality that includes that of the masters, we don't want nerveless exhaustion ... or for that matter the passionate intensity of 'the worst'.

'Britannicus noster': The First British Thinker

Reading about Roman Britain reminded me of our first, extant British thinker, Pelagius Britto, Pelagius the Brit, whose dates are roughly 360CE to 430, though after he was condemned for heresy in c 420 he rather disappears, last seen in Egypt or Palestine, apparently. His views were attacked with a vindictive venom by Jerome, and Augustine also had a go at him. But what a ghastly doctrine of Original Sin, I'd prefer to go along with Pelagius. There is a traditional view apparently and for which there is no evidence that he returned to Britain, specifically to the place he had been as a child, Bangor-is-y-coed, a few miles south of Chester. Two or three years ago I had a strong urge to visit the place and was astonished to realise that it had been the site of a large monastic settlement, mentioned by Bede, a place where there was a massacre later in some battle between the Mercians and the Northumbrians (I need to check who the combatants were, and something about the Red Field). There is an interesting story in Bede about the reluctance of the British priests to help Augustine (of Canterbury) in the conversion of their colonial masters the Anglo-Saxons. They sent a delegation to see him, but were advised by an old priest (?) to take their cue from the demeanour of Augustine. If he greeted them with a suitable courtesy and modesty then okay, otherwise, no cooperation ... for which they were cursed .... He remained seated when they arrived ...

The other traditional view is that 'Pelagius' translates as Morgan, the man who comes from (across) the sea (so maybe he was (of) Irish (descent), though his father was supposed to be a decurion). His doctrines at least appear to have made it back to Britain perhaps via someone they call 'the Sicilian Briton' (to whom is attributed a passionate Pelagian essay against wealth as the cause of poverty) and and were preserved in Ireland, and that is supposed to explain the hasty mission of Germanus to Britain to stamp out the 'poisonous' doctrine of Pelagianism. They were pretty nasty, those guys. There is also a claim that there is something Druidic about Pelagius' version of Christianity (though I am not sure how the commentators I have read are so confident of their knowledge of Druid doctrine) and that it fitted into the Celtic tradition of warrior heroism. Anyway, after my trip to Bangor and a walk along the Dee I wrote about Pelagius, a bit stodgy in places and there is a grumble from Augustine in italics:

A place to die where in the wind
The trees that lean towards the river

Also creak and groan as I do now
But I am not, as I was, affronted

By the insult of old age
The distant hills still there and I

Recognised only by one old monk

ii

He was large and stout, grandis
Et corpulentus

Walked like a turtle
Fat and slow

Awash with porridge
Our Britisher in Rome, his home

For thirty years
Across the square he goes, to speak

Exquisitely with friends and strangers
Of Christ our light in darkness

Lingers over supper with the ladies
His head thrust forward with the concentration

Of an angry ram

Though he frowned with urgency

Not anger, his exasperation
With us, his conforming pagans

And our doctrines of convenience
To our luxury and torpor
Mildly expressed with charm and grace

There was never a man more gracious
Than the man, Pelagius
Nor a man more sharp, nor of cooler wit

What matters is what you do

And what you refuse to do


iii


So I had thought as well

A good man
Advanced in the faith

Till I saw how he tempted his disciples
To pride, an enemy of grace

No grace but the law and teaching
And our creation as free beings

He was not
As I was forced to be
Twice-born

Who could not act
Unless God raised me first
Raised me by force and sweetness

From my concupiscence and sin


iv

I need a stick and a sturdy boy
To get down here again to the river's edge

To settle my limbs a moment on a bench
And listen to the rush of water

As it runs, down to Carlegion, and the sea

v

Ah, a grace of nature shows me flowers
In winter, a kindly, friendly sign

A flurry of snowdrops along the bank
Shows me life emerge from death

The bridge that the river can be crossed
The church that death wakes us into life


I sang here


But wake from the same dream
Of my remote island, wet and green

And the mental scourges start to sting
Again, the sufferings of Christ

Lay on my soul the grace
Of the Father, I consent

And my resentment melts
That anxious, controlling intellects

Condemned me, ah, to what?
Another Flight into Egypt

And after interrupted sleep the dawn
Shows through the curtained door

And I watch the sun rise hugely
Between the two hills, see light

Race across the plain towards me
Flood me with illumination, and God's grace

vi

We are by God's good grace created
To choose or refuse the good

To be changed by the path we take
Into light or into darkness

Even to perdition, or salvation, never
Say my sin is not my choice

But my necessity
(How would it then be sin?)

If we choose evil, pride
Then the act is ours …

… So how can it not be ours
If we choose the good

Are my good deeds then not my deeds?
—Praise is for encouragement, not pride

As blame is for admonition
What is ours is given

What we are
Does not come from us

I have turned gladly towards his light
And sometimes stubbornly away

From what I saw was good
I have been shown what I need to see

The right book has come to hand
Opened at the page I need to read

The unexpected memory, the dream
The moral luck that rescued me

From what I knew too well I willed
But I cannot tell

Whether God prevents us …
Or our larger selves

In the swift perception of created spirit

vii

A natural shame and indignation
Recoil from the brutal act

That also satisfies, reveals
The will to good as well as evil

Native in the first blush
Of our God-created spirit, smothered

We thought we crushed it
In the fleshly habits of desire

We follow our father Adam in
Too stupefied to own our sin

Unknown the treasure buried deep

II

We shook from our heels
The dust of Syracuse

And took his books away
From the heat and accusation

And reached our northern islands
Where we dispersed

To teach Christ’s truth
Be cursed, and still obey

ii

So much reality, so dark
Occluded from the density of sense

By the red light of desire
But I was lifted in the spirit

Swirling and billowing out
I was the sail, the flimsy curragh, lifted

Whirled and tossed and racing, spun
In turbulent current, rushing, gusting wind

iii

I stood waist deep and naked
In the freezing winter river

Chanting the psalms and praising God
I fasted and kept night vigils, used the rod

Contending for the athlete's prize, austerity
Subdued the flesh but attuned

The body, payment for release
Of the bound spirit, straining to be free

iv

Miles out and dangerous, the Skellig rock
And a violent shock and wall of wind

To lean against and scream within its roar
News of the Christ to the restless, desperate sea.

A remarkably fine boar

Apropos of the fired up demonstrators who do not see Gillian Gibbons, a Liverpool primary schoolteacher, within their field of vision but only an archetype that lives vividly in their imagination, who are easily caught up into an imaginary world of monsters, demons and angels and who seek to destroy the demons ... both deeply within this imaginary world and tenuously but devastatingly outside it ... I have been reading a book on Roman Britain by Peter Salway, who talks, on page 33, of how religion provides the most telling evidence for the assimilation of Roman and native because it 'affected the deepest levels of consciousness'.

The book is very short and he moves quickly on, but there is an interesting ambiguity in the sentence. Does he mean that religion then 'affected the deepest levels of consciousness' (as opposed to now), or does he imply that this is a permanent feature of religion? If the former, then we should have to ask, and so what now 'affects the deepest levels of consciousness'? And if the latter, and maybe it almost comes to the same thing, how does religion affect these deepest levels? We could make it a criterion of 'religion' that it operates at these depths, and then the two questions coincide, particularly if we agree that formal religion at least has largely lost its grip on the imagination. So what is happening within our imaginations? Blake.

But perhaps the point is that 'religion' only works in extremis.

In any event, a Roman cavalry officer in Wearsdale gives thanks to Sylvanus 'for a remarkably fine boar that no one had previously been able to catch'. And 'Diodora, a Greek priestess, dedicated an altar at Corbridge in her own language to the demi-god Heracles of Tyre' (p 34). Surely we know both these people quite well. At least in the former case some muscular Christian officer in the British army might have offered up a similar prayer after a day's hunting. And the Greek priestess ... well, amulets, essential oils, crystals? But what is a Greek priestess doing in Corbridge on the A68. Maybe she was formidable rather than flakey.

There is some sense in the familiar thought that the good and evil, light and darkness, angels and demons dualism is deeply embedded within our pyches and is perhaps most apparent under conditions of existential extremity. Thus there is nothing at all Islamic in the commotion in Sudan, it is much more primeval than that: nor do I mean that they are primeval, whereas we are not. Much depends on how close one is to the edge, though that proximity is also in part a function of education. How does one negotiate with these deep sources of action except through the development of judgment: are we really dealing with demons and monsters here?-the moments of reflection available before and after engulfment. Standing alone and above what is herdlike in our nature, forming a new and free association ... but our own danger is that we forget how to fight monsters and do not recognise them when we see them.