Christmas Every Day

St Athanasius of Alexandria

Few prelates have had such a tumultuous career as Athanasius (296-373) or such a roller-coaster career arc. He was born into a prosperous Egyptian family and seems to have spoken and written in both Greek, the cultural language of the Roman Empire, and the local Coptic. Alexandria was a rich city and one of the cultural capitals of the civilized word with a reputation for its schools of philosophy.

Athanasius’s life in the church (he became a deacon and a priest in his early 20s) would be spent in the midst of the great Christological debates of the fourth century. Though Christians had since the earliest days of the Church regarded Jesus as divine, his exact relationship to God the Father had never been exactly determined. One view, which had considerable support in Alexandria and the Middle East, was that Jesus was a subordinate creation of God. The advancement of this view by the Egyptian priest Arius caused controversy in the wider Christian community and led to the Emperor Constantine in 325 summoning the First Ecumenical Council to Nicaea to rule on the question. Athanasius attended and took an anti-Arian stance which the Council strongly affirmed. When he became Patriarch of Alexandria in 328, Athanasius found himself opposed by number of prominent eastern bishops who continued to back Arius. They conspired against him and brought a number of preposterous charges which got a hearing in Constantinople. In 335 Athanasius was deposed from his see and exiled to Trier in Gaul. He returned to Alexandria after the death of Constantine, who was succeeded by his three sons who split the empire among themselves.

The emperor Constantius, whose territory included Alexandria, ordered Athanasius evicted once more but the bishop found refuge with Constans, the imperial brother ruling the West, including Rome. He stayed in the West gathering support for his anti-Arian theology for over 7 years until he was allowed to return to Alexandria in 346. Ten years later, however, Constantius, even more an Arian than ever, ordered the arrest of the patriarch who fled up the Nile into exile again, though he continued to write vigorously in opposition to subordinationist Christology.

The death of Constantius in 361 allowed Athanasius to regain his position but it brought to power Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome, no friend of Christianity. Julian, of course, ordered him into exile once more. Athanasius was reinstated at the death of Julian by Jovian, a Christian emperor, but was exiled for the fifth and last time by the emperor Valens, an Arian. Valens eventually relented and Athanasius once more assumed the patriarchate until his death in 373. The statement of belief called the Athanasian Creed was not, in fact, one of his works but seems to have appeared a century later.

1946

Father Divine marries Sweet Angel

Despite certain ambiguities of character, the self-appointed Father Divine was undoubtedly both charismatic and clever and prospered in one of the few leadership roles open to black males in early twentieth-century America. Divine’s theology blended various Christian traditions with a belief in positive thinking in ways that foreshadowed a number of contemporary New Age spiritual trends; and his career demonstrated how a promise of religious salvation, political progress and the philanthropic provision of basic social services can attract a large following in times of racial and economic turmoil. From obscure and humble origins Father Divine fashioned himself into a cult leader of god-like pretensions and created a controversial church whose beliefs fascinated America throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

There are a number of competing versions of the history of his early life; sources conflict as to his birthdate — variously noted as between 1874 and 1882 — but the most plausible account is that Divine was born George Baker to ex-slave parents in a Maryland African-American ghetto in about 1880. By the early years of the twentieth century he was traveling with a wandering evangelist who styled himself Father Jehovia, while the young Baker called himself the Messenger. After some years of preaching together they parted, and Baker began to refer himself as Major Jealous Devine and to proclaim himself as God. With a small band of followers in tow, he moved to New York where he changed his name yet again to Father Divine.

By 1919 he had obtained a base for his new Universal Peace Mission Movement in Sayville, Long Island, where his preaching initially attracted a mainly black audience. The years following World War I had seen a massive migration of southern African Americans to northern industrial cities, and Divine’s message of self-respect and racial equality drew an increasingly large following. The Universal Peace Mission mandated celibacy and modesty and shunned improvidence and debt, but it was its provision of employment, cheap lodgings, and inexpensive food to its adherents during the Great Depression that brought thousands of worshippers, white as well as black, flocking to Sayville. The influx aroused the ire of local residents whose complaints resulted in Father Divine’s arrest. He was charged with disturbing the peace, convicted in 1932, and sentenced to a year in jail. The court proceedings brought Divine widespread notoriety when, two days after sentencing him, the judge suffered a fatal heart attack. From his prison cell, the self-styled “God” proclaimed “I hated to do it” — a remark that, trumpeted by the media, confirmed their leader’s claims to divine status among his followers.

Moving the mission’s headquarters to Harlem, Divine continued to attract national attention on two fronts: by his lavish lifestyle and rumours of his sexual adventures, and by the progressive social ideas his believers practiced. The Mission’s services were scrupulously integrated racially, and the movement led the way in pressing for anti-lynching laws and for public facilities to be open to all races. In a time of economic disaster it rejected relief and welfare and bought hotels, which it termed “heavens,” where its members could live modest, mutually supportive lives free of alcohol, tobacco and reliance on credit.

In 1946 Divine was again in the headlines when he married one of his young followers, a white Canadian woman named Edna Rose Ritchings, also known as Sweet Angel. By the 1950s, however, he was in deteriorating health. His public profile dwindled alongside the importance of his movement as other, less outrageous, African-American leaders rose to prominence. Father Divine died in 1965 at his Philadelphia estate, where his wife, known as Mother Divine, presided over the remains of the Universal Peace Mission Movement until her death in 2017.

1478

Murder at Easter Mass

The Medici family, led by Lorenzo the Magnificent, were the de facto rulers of Renaissance Florence but they had powerful enemies. Inside the city they were envied by the old-money Pazzi clan of rich bankers, and outside the city they were despised by the Pope, Sixtus IV (after whom the Sistine Chapel is named.) The Medici had frustrated the pope’s plan to place one of his nephews on the throne of a city near Florence so Sixtus turned to the Pazzi to gain revenge. He took away valuable papal monopolies from the Medici that hurt them financially, and conspired to murder Lorenzo and his brother and invade Florence with an army of mercenaries.

Various plots were hatched, including poisoning the brothers, but it was finally decided that the best place to get at the victims, unarmed and together, would be at Easter Mass. A professional assassin was hired for the task but he recoiled when told that the murder was to take place at the elevation of the Host during communion. He refused the job, claiming that such a deed in the face of Christ would merit eternal damnation, so the killing was assigned to priests and members of the Pazzi family.

With the Medici brothers in the front row and the conspirators behind them, the murderers waited until the ringing of the bell that signifies the climax of the Mass. Then they leapt upon Lorenzo and brother Giuliano. The latter was killed instantly but Lorenzo was only wounded, his heavy scarf and cloak protecting him from the knife of the priest who attacked him. While Lorenzo was whisked away to safety, the Pazzi clan attempted to seize the city hall and its arsenal, and ran through the streets crying “Liberty!”, hoping to raise a popular rebellion. They were met with resistance by Medici supporters who shouted their own battle cry and turned on the conspirators who found they had almost no support. The mob exacted summary justice on the Pazzi family. The Archbishop of Pisa, one of the plotters, was hanged, in his full ecclesiastical garb, from the balcony of the city hall along with other leaders of the conspiracy. Pazzi mansions were looted while their followers were dragged through the streets and murdered.

Rather than be embarrassed that the head of the Catholic Church had conspired with archbishops and priests to commit a murder during the most sacred moment in the Christian calendar, the papacy expressed outrage that clergy had been killed in the retaliation and declared war on Lorenzo de Medici, a crisis which he was able to weather. A final ironical note: Guiliano’s mistress at the time of his death was pregnant. The posthumous illegitimate child was raised by the Medici clan and grew up to be Pope Clement VII.

St Mark’s Day

April 25 honours the writer of the third Gospel. The fourth-century Christian historian Eusebius, using much earlier records, says of him:  And so greatly did the splendor of piety illumine the minds of Peter’s hearers that they were not satisfied with hearing once only, and were not content with the unwritten teaching of the divine Gospel, but with all sorts of entreaties they besought Mark, a follower of Peter, and the one whose Gospel is extant, that he would leave them a written monument of the doctrine which had been orally communicated to them. Nor did they cease until they had prevailed with the man, and had thus become the occasion of the written Gospel which bears the name of Mark. . . And they say that this Mark was the first that was sent to Egypt, and that he proclaimed the Gospel which he had written, and first established churches in Alexandria. (Eccl. Hist. II, 15-16)

But who was Mark? Tradition links him to “John Mark”, the cousin of Barnabas, mentioned in the books of Acts, Timothy, Philemon and Colossians. He seems to have been a Jewish Christian who served in Paul’s missions for a time, was with Peter in Rome, and then went to Egypt becoming the first bishop of the African church in Alexandria. For a very long time Mark’s Gospel was seen merely as a summary of Matthew, but most scholars now agree that Mark’s was the first Gospel to be written and place the date of writing some time after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, though others date it from the 60s. The latter argue that Mark was writing for an audience of Roman Christians, then undergoing the persecution of Nero. We have no reliable account of his death but the Coptic Church claims that he was martyred in Alexandria by outraged pagans.

In the 7th century Egypt was overrun by Arab invaders and the native Christians placed under religious restrictions, largely cut off from western and Byzantine Christendom. In 828 Venetian merchants are said to have smuggled the relics of St Mark out of Alexandria and taken them to Venice where the basilica of San Marco was built to house them. (Coptic Christians assert, however, that the head of St Mark remains in Alexandria.)

Each of the Gospellers has been traditionally denoted by a particular figure, derived from visions recorded in the Book of Ezekiel and Revelation: Luke by an ox; John by an eagle; Matthew by a man; and Mark by a lion. The Lion of St Mark remains the emblem of Venice, on its flag and atop a pillar in the Piazzetta beside the Doge’s Palace.

1915

The Armenian Genocide Begins

On the evening of April 24, 1915 agents of the Ottoman Empire conducted a mass arrest of Armenian community members in Constantinople and other Turkish cities. Most of these men, among whom numbered clergy, intellectuals, newspaper editors and businessmen, were eventually murdered in the waves of atrocities that followed. This action is considered the first step by the Young Turks regime in an ethnic cleansing of Asia Minor that resulted in the deaths of over a millions Armenians and other Christian minorities in the empire.

The Ottoman Empire was on its last legs and involved in the First World War on the side of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. The government, ostensibly under the rule of Mehmed V, was really in the hands of nationalist officials known as the Three Pashas. For them the non-Muslim minorities in the Ottoman Empire were not to be trusted as their loyalties were believed to lie with the Christian Russian Empire, then at war with the Turks. The arrests of April 24 were undertaken to deprive the Armenian community of its natural leaders.

What followed was a series of deportations, forced marches, massacres and artificial famines against the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Orthodox population of Anatolia and parts of Syria that endured over a period of years until the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918. As many as 1.5 million people were reported to have been killed in this persecution. At the conclusion of the war, trials found the Three Pashas and other officials guilty of ordering the massacres. Two of the three pashas were assassinated by Armenian revenge seekers while the third died in battle.

The Turkish Republic, the successor of the Ottoman state, has acknowledged that many civilians died during relocations but has steadfastly denied that there was an organized plan of racial extermination and strenuously objects to the use of the word “genocide”. Members of the Armenian diaspora have long campaigned for their new homelands to recognize that the actions which began in 1915 were a deliberate attack on a race and religion.