The Eastern and Western branches of Christianity had been growing farther apart over the centuries. Though they were in theory one Church, a number of factors had resulted in the development of separate worldviews and liturgical practices. The Eastern church thought and wrote in Greek, a language of which the Latin-speaking churchmen of the West were largely ignorant. The West demanded a celibate clergy; the East allowed priests (but not monks) to marry. The two churches quarrelled about the proper system for dating Easter and whether leavened or unleavened bread was to be used in communion. For Westerners the Bishop of Rome was the undisputed head; Easterners, under the thumb of the emperor in Constantinople, tended to regard the pope’s supremacy as only one of respect. Rome looked to the semi-barbarian kingdoms such as those of the Franks or the Germans for political muscle; Constantinople looked to convert the Slavs and orient them to Constantinople. Even theologically there were quarrels, especially over whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and Son (as in the Western creed) or only the Father (as in the East).
Matters came to a head in 1054. In the previous year Byzantine churches in southern Italy were harassed by papal authorities and Michael Keroularios, Patriarch of Constantinople, had closed Western churches in the capital. Anti-Western riots broke out in Constantinople before two legates arrived from Rome carrying a document signed by Pope Leo IX seeking military aid from the emperor and his help in curbing Keroularios who had termed Western clergy as “dogs, bad workmen, schismatics, hypocrites and liars.” Though they received a friendly reception from emperor, relations with the Patriarch grew heated. On July 16, the Roman emissaries laid a bull of excommunication against the Patriarch and his supporters on the altar of Hagia Sophia, and four days later Keroularios excommunicated the Roman legates. At the time, this was seen as being of little importance. The pope had died in April, rendering the commission of the delegates invalid; the Patriarch’s excommunication only extended to the Roman diplomats personally. But as time went on the split, later called the Great Schism, only widened and mistrust grew. In 1204 the sack of Constantinople by Catholic crusaders left a scar on the body of Christendom that has still not healed, though attempts have been made by Pope John Paul II, Francis I, and the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Moscow to heal the split.
In the early summer of 1381 the English peasantry, oppressed by the latests in a series of increased poll taxes, rose in rebellion. The most serious of these risings was that of the men of Kent. Led by Wat Tyler, the peasant army grew to number in the thousands, able to take several towns, including Canterbury, burning tax records and opening the jails. Among the prisoners freed was John Ball (c. 1338-81) a “hedge-priest”, or excommunicated cleric, who may well have been of a Lollard church.
Ball accompanied the rebels in their assault on London and in their attempt to force a meeting with the young king Richard II. When the peasant army was camped on Blackheath outside London he spoke to them of revolution in terms they could understand. “When Adam dalf, and Eve span” he asked [When Adam was digging and Eve was at her spinning], “who was thanne a gentilman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and that servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord”. Ball ended by recommending “uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the great lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in future.”
Though Wat Tyler was murdered, the king promised to honour the promise he made to end serfdom, and the peasants dispersed. When London was free of the threat, Richard II ordered a mass round-up and execution; Ball was arrested in Coventry, and condemned to death by being hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of the king. His head was exhibited on London Bridge as a warning to would-be rebels.
The publication of his work The Christian Year in 1827 led to John Keble (1792-1866) being named Oxford Professor of Poetry and resulted in a much keener interest in the Anglican church of the Christian calendar and long-neglected traditions. This poetic call to look backward was made in the midst of much turmoil. The British government had weakened the dominant position of the Church of England by removing restrictions on Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics and by legislation regarding the property of the Church of Ireland. Many, including Keble, felt that all this signalled a moving away from the proper relationship between Church and State. On July 14, 1833, he gave a strongly-worded sermon at Oxford University with the provocative title “National Apostasy”. In it, Keble warned of a weakening of religious sentiment and a loss of the notion that Britain was a Christian nation and he went so far as to predict a time of persecution. How was an English Christian then to behave? Keble counselled patience and encouragement.
I do not see how any person can devote himself too entirely to the cause of the Apostolical Church in these realms. There may be, as far as he knows, but a very few to sympathise with him. He may have to wait long, and very likely pass out of this world before he see any abatement in the triumph of disorder and irreligion. But, if he be consistent, he possesses, to the utmost, the personal consolations of a good Christian: and as a true Churchman, he has that encouragement, which no other cause in the world can impart in the same degree:—he is calmly, soberly, demonstrably, SURE, that, sooner or later, HIS WILL BE THE WINNING SIDE, and that the victory will be complete, universal, eternal.
This sermon inspired what became known as the Oxford or Tractarian Movement, an impulse inside Anglicanism to return to older ceremonial practices which may be termed High Church and a fondness for Gothic architecture and decoration. It eventually led to the abandonment of the Church of England by leading Tractarians such as John Henry Newman and Henry Manning, both of who adopted Roman Catholicism and rose to the rank of cardinal. Keble stayed within the Anglican Church.
St Margaret of Antioch, Virgin Martyr and Foe of Dragons
On this day Eastern Christians (who call her St Marina) celebrate the apocryphal life of Margaret of Antioch. Margaret was the daughter of a pagan priest in Asia Minor but was converted to Christianity by her nurse. Her beauty attracted the amorous interest of a local Roman official who, thwarted in his base desires, denounced her for her religion. Margaret suffered many tortures unscathed: an attempted burning, a twisting on the rack, being ripped with iron combs, a boiling and a spell in the innards of a dragon. The beast spit her out when the cross she was carrying irritated his digestive system. She was finally killed by beheading. Margaret is often portrayed emerging unharmed from the dragon and because of this is the patron saint of woman in childbirth and those suffering kidney stones. She was one of the saints who appeared to the young Joan of Arc.
The above illustration is a rubbing made from the brass plate commemorating Marguerite de Scornay, who was Abbess of Nivelle in Belgium from 1443 – 1460. The panel , the survivor of three after 1940’s bombing, shows the Abbess being presented to the Virgin and Child by St. Margaret of Antioch, her patron saint. Note the tamed dragon.
The development of the American trade union movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was often a violent affair: beatings, arson, lynchings, murders, and massacres are part of labour history. On this date in 1917 a remarkable act of lawlessness saw hundreds of people kidnapped and forced on to box cars to compel a settlement favourable to management in a mining strike.
The miners of Bisbee, Arizona were represented by the radical union, the International Workers of the World. The IWW (or “Wobblies”) presented a list of demands on wages and safety that the company, Phelps Dodge, rejected utterly, thus precipitating a walkout of about 8,000 miners. The company, claiming that this work stoppage threatened the American war effort, asked for federal troops to be sent in, but President Wilson refused and appointed a mediator instead.
The mine owners came up with a daring and illegal plan. Deputizing over 2,200 men in a posse and arranging with a railway company to provide transport, the deputies entered Bisbee and arrested 2,000 men (not all of them connected to the strike or the union) at gunpoint and marched them to the trains. Two men, a deputy and a striker, died in a shoot-out. They they were given the choice of denouncing the IWW and returning to work or being forced on to boxcars spread with manure and ridden out of the state. 700 of the prisoners took the opportunity to go back to the mines and the remaining 1300, guarded by machine gun positions, were entrained and sent 170 miles away to New Mexico.
Public opinion was divided when news finally leaked out. Most assumed that the miners had provoked violence and deserved their deportation, though the federal government condemned the action. The Justice Department arrested 21 company officials and sheriffs but a court ruled that the federal government had no jurisdiction; it was a state affair and Arizona declined to prosecute.
A YouTube video illustrates the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXOVp9LLRAU
Benedict (480-543) was born into a family of the Roman nobility but in his early adulthood he left the city to become a hermit in the Italian hills. He was approached by some monks who wanted him to lead their abbey but his ideas about the monastic life and theirs did not mesh. He was so strict an abbot that his monks tried to poison him and he eventually returned to a life of solitude. He founded a string of other abbeys and eventually developed the moderate Benedictine Rule, a regulated lifestyle which, as well as mandating the three-fold oath of “Poverty, Chastity and Obedience”, concentrated on prayer (7 daily services including the 2 a.m. vigil) and useful work. Monks had little private property but were well-fed by their own labours. The monasteries, or abbeys, had to be self-sufficient so that monks became their own physicians, weavers, farmers, bee-keepers and brewers. Monasteries thus were led to conduct agricultural research, medical care, hospitality in a world of violence and insecurity and, perhaps most importantly for civilization, the preservation of learning by the copying of books. Monks also led many of the missions which converted the barbarians who had destroyed the Christian Roman Empire to Catholic Christianity: Augustine of Canterbury, converted the Anglo-Saxons of England while St Boniface carried the gospel to the Germans.
Benedict’s influence through his monastic example was enormous: thousands of houses were founded based on his Rule. He is he patron saint of Europe, architects, monks, spelunkers, students, agricultural workers, civil engineers and coppersmiths and can be called upon by sufferers of gall stones, fever, kidney disease, nettle rash and poison.
A recent book, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option, proposes Benedictine solutions for today’s ills.
By 1555 Europe had suffered two generations of religious upheaval. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had had enough; he had battled Islam in the Mediterranean and Protestantism in Germany, Spain, and the Low Countries but now he was retiring. The German lands he gave to his brother Ferdinand and to his son Philip he bequeathed the Spanish possessions, which included the Netherlands. Ferdinand brought an end to the religious wars in Germany and Austria by the Peace of Augsburg which tolerated the presence of both Catholic and Protestant areas, but Philip was made of sterner stuff. Declaring that he would not be a king over heretics, he resolved to snuff out the reformed religion in all the lands he ruled. This would involve him in religious conflicts in England, France and the Netherlands.
Philip was ruler over the Dutch provinces but the locals enjoyed many traditional liberties and many of them felt that these freedoms should extend to the adoption of Protestantism. An anti-Spanish party grew in the Netherlands, opposed to the introduction of the Spanish Inquisition and the presence of Spanish troops. One of its leaders was William of Orange, known to history as the Silent. Political opposition grew into open rebellion and for decades Protestant forces battled the Spanish. In 1580 William was declared an outlaw by King Philip and a price placed on his head. The proclamation read:
And to the end indeed, that this matter may be the more effectually and readily performed, and so by that means our said people the sooner delivered, from this tyranny and oppression, we willing to reward virtue, and to punish vice, do promise in the word of a king, and as the minister of God, that if there be any found, either among our own subjects, or amongst strangers, so noble of courage, and desirous of our service, and the public good, that knoweth any means how to execute our said Decree, and to set us and himself free, from the aforesaid plague, delivering him unto us quick or dead, or at the least taking his life from him, we will cause, to be given and provided, for him and his heirs, in good land or ready money, choose him whether, immediately after the thing shall be accomplished, the sum of 25 thousand crowns of gold, and if he have committed any offence or fault, how great and grievous soever it be, we promise to pardon him the same, and from henceforth do pardon it, yea and if he were not before noble, we do make him noble, for his courage and valiant act: and if the principal doer, take with him for his aid, in the accomplishment of this enterprise, or execution of this his fact, other persons beside himself, we will bestow upon them benefits and a reward, and will give every one of them, according to their degree, and according to that service which they shall yield unto us in this behalf: pardoning them also whatsoever they have ill done, and making them likewise noble.
These generous inducements to murder proved effective. In March 1582 a French teen-ager named Jean Jaureguay fired at William from point-blank range but his gun was overloaded with powder and it blew off the would-be killer’s thumb instead. He was cut down instantly by William’s guards. In July 1584 an assassin succeeded in taking William’s life. Balthasar Gerard, a Burgundian Catholic, infiltrated the court of the prince and shot him dead, the first murder of a head of state by a firearm in history. William’s last words were “Mon Dieu, ayez pitié de mon âme; mon Dieu, ayez pitié de ce pauvre peuple.” (My God, have pity on my soul; my God, have pity on this poor people). Gerard was found guilty and hideously tortured.
In commissioning the killing of his opponents Philip created a fashion for targeted assassination. Many English Catholic attempts would be made on the life of Elizabeth I and the Gunpowder Plotters of 1605 attempted to wipe out the whole English ruling class. In France, Henry III sanctioned the murder of his Catholic foe Henry of Guise in 1588 and in the next year was himself murdered. His successor Henry IV was assassinated in 1610.
The London Daily Telegraph made the following report:
It was announced yesterday that, at 7.30 p.m., M. de Groof, the “Flying Man” would repeat at the Cremorne Gardens “his astounding performance of flying through the air a distance of 5,000 feet.” True to this announcement, the Flying Man did endeavour to repeat the exploit which he had accomplished in safety ten days before, and perished in the attempt.
M. de Groof was a Belgian, who had expended years in constructing for himself an apparatus with which he believed it possible to imitate the flight of a bird. The general outline of this apparatus was an immitation of a bat’s wings, the framework being made of cane, and the intervening membrane of stout waterproof silk. The wings were in all 37 feet long, with an average breadth of 4 feet, while the tail was 18 feet by 3. These wings were inserted into two hinged frames that were attached to a wooden stand upon which the aeronaut took his place. Here he had three levers which he worked by hand to give his machine propulsion or guidance as might be required; his theory being that having started from a given height, he could manage his descent so as to reach the earth by a sort of inclined swooping motion, without risk of concussion.
About a year ago M. de Groof made an attempt, of which our correspondent at the time telegraphed the particulars. to descend from a great neight on the Grande Place at Brussels. The effort was a failure, but l’Homme Volant as he was then called, escaped unhurt, though his network was afterwards torn in pieces by the crowd. On Monday, the 20th ultimo, however, M. de Groof repeated his experiment at Cremorne Gardens, with success. Mr. Baum, tho proprietor of the gardens, had, it seems, after making an engagement with him, felt some uneasiness as to the result, and at first refused to allow the trial to be made. The “Flying Man” protested the absolute feasibility of his scheme, and insisted on the contract being carried out; and this was done. The wings and stand were attached to a balloon guided by Mr. Simmons, who, after drifting over London towards Brandon, in Essex, released his companion at a considerable height—three or four hundred feet, it is said—and the flying apparatus was immediately set in motion. “For a time” it is stated, “it was a race between the aeronaut and the flyer, De Groof winning by two flelds’ lengths, and attaining the ground in perfect safety.”
How the accident occurred last night cannot be clearly ascertained. The apparatus, previous to the ascent, seemed in satisfactory order, and De Groof—though, according to custom, he took an affectionate farewell of his wife—appeared fully confident of making a successful ascent. About a quarter to 8 o’clock the balloon was cut loose, and rose slowly in the air, bearing with it the Flying Man and his gear. There was hardly a breath of air, a circumstance which might have been supposed to be favourable to the performance of an aeronautical feat of the kind. Be this as it may, however, when the balloon had attained a height of three or four hundred feet, the unfortunate performer seemed either to mistrust his own powers or the capability of his apparatus, for he was heard by the spectators below shouting to the man in the balloon to bring him nearer the earth. This request was complied with, and the balloon descended slowly towards Robert-street, which lies a quarter of a mile or so to the north of Cremorne Gardens. On approaching St. Luke’s Church, Mr. Simmons, the balloonist, was heard to say: “Yon must cut loose now, or you’ll come on the church roof.” The answer was, “Yes; let me drop into the churchyard,” and these were, no doubt, the last words De Groof uttered.
He cut the rope when about eighty feet from the ground, but, to the horror of the spectators, who must have numbered many thousand, the apparatus, instead of inflating with the pressure of the air, collapsed, and, turning round and round in its descent, fell with great violence in Robert-street, a yard or two from the kerbstone. Assistance to the unfortunate man was instantly forthcoming. Although still breathing, he was insensible; but the despatch with which he was extricated from the wreck of his apparatus and conveyed to Chelsea Infirmary proved in vain. He never recovered consciousness, and on his arrival at the hospital the surgeons pronounced him dead, Madame de Groof, who witnessed her husband’s fall, fainted at the sight, and a still more painful scene took place a short time later at the hospital, when she learned the whole sad truth.
The apparatus was carried off in shreds by the crowd before the police could secure it. From the hospital the body was removed to the dead-house, where it now awaits the inquest. It only remains to add that the balloon, on being freed from the weight of De Groof and his flying machine, soared away over the metropolis in a north-easterly direction; and, at dark, was seen at a great height above Victoria Park, where it was watched with much interest by large numbers of people, who were, of course, ignorant of the shocking tragedy in which it had played a part.
The Book of Acts (18:2-3) says that, in his visit to Corinth, Paul “found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. And he went to see them, and because he was of the same trade he stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade.” Historians have dated Claudius’s expulsion of Roman Jews to the year 49 and estimate that Paul lived with the couple for about a year and a half. Priscilla and Aquila are further mentioned in Acts as accompanying Paul on a trip to Syria, and Priscilla appears to have corrected the theology of the preacher Apollos. The couple is also sent greetings in I Corinthians, Romans and II Timothy.
Modern theologians have made much of the authority that Paul seems to have granted a woman (despite his injunctions against women speaking in church). Some have gone so far as to identify Priscilla as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the only New testament book without a named author. Ruth Hoppin in Priscilla’s Letter: Finding the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, (1997) and A Feminist Companion to the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews (2004), claims that in Priscilla “we have a candidate for the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews who meets every qualification, matches every clue, and looms ubiquitous in every line of investigation.” Priscilla’s connection with the letter, Hoppin speculates, may have been suppressed so as not to discourage the authority and persuasiveness of the work. (Hoppin also claims that her own work has been mysteriously suppressed.)
After their stay in Corinth Priscilla and Aquila moved to Ephesus, Rome and back to Ephesus. Legend says they were martyred either in Asia Minor or Rome. The tent-making couple have been honoured in both Eastern and Latin Christianity and are considered as patron saints of married couples.
Hats off to Otto Frederick Rohwedder and the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri. Rohwedder was an Iowa jeweller and optician whose earlier attempts at producing a bread-slicing device had literally gone up in flames, but by 1927 he had patented a new technique and sold the first machine to his friend, the Chillicothe baker, Frank Bench. This day in 1928 saw the first use of Rohwedder’s electric bread-slicer to produce “Kleen Maid Sliced Bread”. It proved a great hit and the new product took America by storm, encouraging the sales of bread and spreadables such as jam and peanut butter as well as electric toasters. By 1933 sliced bread was outselling whole loaves.
During World War II the American government briefly banned sliced bread on the belief that it required more wrapping paper to keep the pieces fresh. When it was discovered that the nation’s wax paper supplies were sufficient to withstand any threat to America’s war-time security, the ban was lifted.
