Melvyn Bragg:A SECOND LOOK
I owe Christianity a debt, and so, I believe, does the world we have lived in for the past 2 000 years. Much of what is best in that duo-millennial span has been due to the man who inspired the faith which took his name. But Christianity also owes me and many others an explanation: for the bigotry, wickedness, inhumanity and wilful ignorance which has also characterised much of its history. Its force and extraordinary persistence have informed “the best of times and the worst of times” from the manger in Bethlehem to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Maybe all the work we do is some form of paying debts. I began regular churchgoing – Church of England – in the Forties. In 1945 I joined the local choir of St Mary’s in Wigton and sang Sunday after Sunday, for 12 years. I still know prayers and psalms by heart, still remember snatches of the sermons, can feel the crushing, holy silence, live with the guilt which, if not engineered by religion, was certainly stirred and spiced by it. I still think the Sermon on the Mount is the most radical manifesto ever delivered, still clutch at God at unexpected moments and still have the doubts about His existence which I began to experience at the age of about 16.
It is difficult perhaps for younger generations to imagine a place known so well and often hated so firmly by so many of us until recently. The place I speak of is Sunday. A place of suffocated silence and closures. A place where casual blasphemy outside the male workforce was forbidden; a place in which a small town such as my own with a population of about 5 000 could support more than a dozen flourishing churches of different denominations. A place where the churches stood as pillars of the community and centres for the stern and innocent leisure which was most of our public ration of fun.
Did we have to be driven so unremittingly with that intransigent image of utter perfection which will never leave us? Did guilt have to be so remorselessly cultivated until all pleasure became stolen – sweeter perhaps for that but also corroded by the sense of sin in which we became Olympic contenders? Simple questions were never addressed until we had to shut them into the void. How did Cain and Abel get children? Why did Christianity support evil people? What does eternal life mean? Where exactly is the soul?
Now, in making 20 one-hour television programmes on the history of Christianity, I have opened up old pathways to see where they lead, wondering why and how they once dominated my life entirely, spiritually – if one can claim that – and intellectually, an even more tenuous claim for the religiously saturated boy I was then, fired to be a missionary and earnest beyond embarrassment when kneeling by the bed in prayers before sleep. On the broadest level, what meets you when you return to the Gospels which are the burning core of Christianity is the clamour of events, the violence of the arguments and the men whose furies drove them for and against the teaching of the gentle rabbi.
The voice of Constantine is there with his Earth-changing dream of victory in battle which made him convert to Christianity. He took care not to do it until the very end of his life, but during the greater part of his reign he dismantled almost four centuries of persecution, slaughter and intolerance.
By the end of the fourth century Emperor Theodosius was forced to beg mercy from Bishop Ambrose of Milan who had been appalled by the massacres at Thessaloniki and excommunicated him. Though the state would use the church whenever it could and distort the teachings and purpose of its founder, the journey of the outlawed sect which began in Judaea and persisted for centuries, displacing all other gods in the greatest empire on earth, is an astounding tale.
So is the story of Charlemagne, 400 years after Constantine, when, inspired by English missionaries, he conquered pagan tribes and forcibly converted them to Christianity, thus re-establishing the empire. But this time it was not the Roman Empire; it was the Holy Roman Empire. He also took on the mantle of teacher. He produced books and invented a new, more legible system of writing. On New Year’s Day 800 Pope Leo III crowned him the first Holy Roman emperor.
The success of Christianity in the worldly sphere was paralleled by its influence among the unworldly. In fact it scaled new pinnacles of self-abnegation – literally in the case of Simeon Stylites, who became a venerated figure by living on the top of a pillar for 38 years.
The divergent uses to which Christianity was put and the events it inspired furthered its spectacular way into the second millennium. In the 13th century, for instance, opulent cathedral buildings began to sweep through the Christian countries, resulting in works in stone and glass which still today have a grandeur scarcely matched since. Yet in the same century, the Cathars in Southern France were preaching a stern unworldliness and found many converts, as did the wandering friars who continued, in an unbroken line from the Apostles, to preach “leave all that thou hath and follow me”.
The crusades were one of many wars more often inspired and blessed by Christianity than averted or condemned. Yet if nothing was too bad to do in the name of the Christian Father, Son and Holy Ghost, nothing was too good either. Christianity did indeed kow-tow to the European slavers, but Christianity also was the moral force which brought it to an end. The place of William Wilberforce in history is obscured by current understandable bruises and furies over slavery, but the fact that it was ended was due to the power of those carrying out the teachings of Christ.
Christianity has had its opponents. But despite Voltaire, Nietszche, Darwin, Marx, Freud and other dissenting voices, Christianity still flourishes. It does not flourish in all the countries it once did, but is still a palpable force, not least in the one remaining world empire – as powerful as Constantine’s Rome in the fourth century – the United States. There the God of the New Testament and the God of Abraham lives, and Satan was seen until recently in communism, itself inspired by another Jew, another rabbinical figure.
At present Darwinians argue most persuasively against the Christian philosophers and teachers of the past and present, but the Christian agenda still drenches the lives we have led in this century. What part did Christianity play in the anti-Semitism which led to the Holocaust? Has Christianity helped to organise and enable the state to become a machine for crushing individuals, or has Christian faith fortified individuals against the juggernauts of the state? And if science neither needs nor knows of a religious sense, where does the religious temperament come from?
Christianity over these 2 000 years has magnetised history, thought and art: it has made coalitions out of contrary forces and yet bred and cultivated centralisation in itself. It has never been afraid to rely on the miraculous and its survival alone must surely rank as some sort of miracle.