Book Review on getting power. (fwd)
MichaelP
At the root of the MAI discussion lies the question of power - the have's
getting more and the havenot's losing ... this debate surely ought to
include whether the result can be influenced by theatre.
MichaelP
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 1997 08:29:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: MichaelP <pap...@peak.org>
Subject: Book Review on getting power.
This is an interesting book review; the subject is about using spin to
get power, and the reviewer is ex- Archbishop of
Canterbury
(mp)
=====================
London Sunday Times September 14 1997 BOOK REVIEWS
Let there be light
The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity 371-1386
by Richard Fletcher
HarperCollins £25 pp562
___________________________________
Robert Runcie
The Church of England is nearing the end of a decade of Evangelism.
History will judge its success, but among the varied missionary
strategies canvassed during the 1990s, there has been little emphasis
on detonating beer barrels in public. By contrast, in the 7th century,
the blessed St Columbanus of Leinster found this ability handy for
converting the pagan Swiss; they were highly impressed that his God
could demonstrate such emphatic powers of destruction.
The feat was not an anticipation of American Prohibition: it did not
indicate any disapproval of alcohol. Columbanus was simply annoyed
that all that beer was going to be wasted on a false god, Woden, so he
made a pre-emptive strike against Woden's sacrifice by blowing hard on
the giant barrel. It blew up. Woden lost his beer.
From Richard Fletcher's massive story, we learn about the otherness of
the past: how different Christianity was then and now. His book is
about conversion, but it is not conversion in the sense often demanded
by evangelists in the 20th century, accepting Christ as your personal
Saviour in a great individual spiritual turnaround. All through the
period that Fletcher describes, there were only one or two recorded
examples of such experiences, taking their cue from the New
Testament's description of what happened to the Apostle Paul. So
Augustine of Hippo and Anselm of Canterbury do, indeed, write about
spiritual struggles that sound like those of Paul on the Damascus
Road: they talk of dramatic change, it was a question of obeying,
rather than making a personal choice.
If two authorities clashed, what mattered was deciding who had the
most power, and, therefore, who most deserved to be obeyed. Hence the
importance of blowing up beer barrels and the like. Another very
successful missionary, Martin of Tours, undermined a tree sacred to
old gods, then stood in the path of its fall, but forced it to fall
elsewhere by making the sign of the Cross. The audience loved it. As a
result, "you may be sure salvation came to that region," said the
saint's biographer.
Christian missionaries were as much at home with worldly as with
supernatural power. They expected people to be unequal, that was what
God wanted, and inequality was there to be used for God's glory. Mass
rallies were not their style; most evangelists were what we would call
gentry or nobility, and they normally went straight to the top when
preaching the faith. That way they could harvest a whole kingdom (as
long as local rulers did not have second thoughts or take a better
offer). Above all, Christians had a big advantage in being associated
with the ancient power that obsessed Europe imperial Rome. Everyone
wanted to be Roman. When Fletcher's story begins, the Roman empire had
already gone into partnership with the Church, after Constantine I had
won his decisive battle under the patronage of the Christian God.
Within a century, the empire crumbled in the West, but it continued to
fascinate the successor peoples. It stood for wealth, wine, central
heating and filing systems. Its two languages, Latin and Greek, could
link Armagh to Alexandria. And the experts and information technology
specialists were Christian clergy. Among the most honoured of these
clergy was Rome's Bishop, who was increasingly called the Pope. The
further Fletcher travels into the Middle Ages, the more his story is
about the Pope.
There was more to mission than simple material matters, as Fletcher
well knows. People hungered for meaning, they were terrified of their
own frailty. Famously, an English thane reminded his master of the
baffling brevity and inconsequentiality of human life; he compared it
to the little bird that swoops in suddenly through one door into the
warm, brightly lit, noisy royal hall, and then flies straight out
through the other door, back into the darkness. The troubled people of
Europe sought not only good drains and elegant tableware, but a
glimpse of the light that would make sense of their own brief flights
out of the darkness. Some travelled as far as the terrifying beauty of
the Skellig Isles to look for light; they said that they could see the
sun dance for joy over the ocean on the day of Christ's resurrection.
It is the genius of this enthralling book that epic moments and tiny
vignettes mingle to convey the flavour of Christian life as the people
of Europe were experiencing conversion. The scale is ambitious, and
the style lucid, but you never feel that you are adrift from the
detailed reconstructions of modern scholarship. Apart from a swipe at
dewy-eyed ecologists with their sentimental dreams of an original
Celtic church, there is not a sneer in the book.
Now, the Church is letting slip its alliance with the powerful.
Christian mission is a different matter from the days of exploding
barrels or blood-drenched crusaders. Some of it remains loud and
triumphalist; some may be a still, small voice, which will never
convert arenas of vast crowds. But it is only by viewing an infinitely
different past that we can discern what has remained unchanged in the
message, and what can still be good news for the people of Europe, 14
centuries after Augustine landed in Kent. Fletcher convinces us that
the task is possible, and well worth pursuing.
The Rt Rev Lord Runcie was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1980 to 1991
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