Christmas Every Day

Hroswitha of Gandersheim

One way medieval historians make themselves annoying to the general public is by contradicting popularly-held beliefs. After centuries of stating that the fall of Rome produced a Dark Age in the West, medievalists began to say there was no such thing. It’s “late antiquity”, they said, not the Dark Ages, and it wasn’t so horrible after all. The barbarians must no longer be called that; they became “migrants” or “settlers”. They didn’t invade so much as they “intermingled” and “created new societies”. Were these new societies literate? Well, no. Did they encourage long-distance trade or sophisticated mass-production as in the days of the Roman Empire? Sadly, no. Did they have the rule of law? No, savage tribal customs replaced Roman law. So, after twenty years or so of this sort of revisionism a new group of historians began pointing out that the barbarian invasions did, indeed, cause a civilizational catastrophe that took centuries to overcome. Among the things that disappeared in Western Europe was drama and it took a remarkable woman to reintroduce it.

Hroswitha of Gandersheim (c. 935-c. 1002) was a German nun during the cultural renaissance that was sponsored by the German Ottonian emperors in the tenth century. She was probably born into a noble family and certainly received a classical education that was not usually given to women of the time, even of the elite classes. Even more remarkably one of her teachers was herself a woman, the abbess Gerberga, sister of Emperor Otto I and a former Queen of France.

We have no record of anyone in Latin Europe writing a play since the days of imperial Rome but Hroswitha took it upon herself to revive the art form. Her plays deal with political problems, women’s roles, the challenge of sin and romance. She also wrote saints’ lives, poetry and works of history. Unlike many female authors, right up until the twentieth century, Hroswitha did not hide her sex, rather she sought recognition of herself as an exceptional woman, blessed by God.

Saint Joseph the Hymnographer, “the sweet-voiced nightingale of the Church”

Sicily in the 9th century was ruled by the Byzantine empire based in Constantinople and its inhabitants were largely Orthodox Christian. Arab invaders from North Africa gradually conquered the island and forced many Christians to flee. One of them was a young man who would become known to history as Joseph the Hymnographer (c. 810-881). He joined a monastery in Thessalonica where he impressed his superiors who recommended that he take a post in the capital. After some years, he attempted a trip to Rome to speak to the pope on behalf of the pro-icon party which was being persecuted by the iconoclastic rulers, but was captured by pirates and spent time as a slave on Crete. After escaping (with the help of the ghost of St Nicholas who encouraged him to sing praises to God) he returned to Constantinople where he established a monastery; he again fell foul of the government and was sent into exile on the Crimean peninsula. When he returned he rose high in the ranks of the Orthodox Church.

Joseph is most famous as the composer of hundreds of hymns, some of them still in use today in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Churches. He is praised in an Orthodox hymn:

Come, let us acclaim the divinely inspired Joseph,

The twelve-stringed instrument of the Word,

The harmonious harp of grace and lute of heavenly virtues,

Who lauded and praised the assembly of the saints.

And now he is glorified with them.

1692

The execution of an American witch

By the end of the 1600s most of Western Civilization had abandoned the hunt for witches.  Gradually across western Europe, the judicial proceedings that had resulted in the deaths of some 60,000 accused over the course of 200 years were less and less frequently put into motion. Almost a century before, the Spanish Inquisition had recognized that witchery was not an objective reality but rather the product of deluded minds. However, in Puritan New England an outburst of bizarre phenomena in a number of towns resulted in a series of hearings known as the Salem Witch Trials, trials in which hundreds were accused and twenty victims were put to death.

The disturbances began in early 1692 when two young girls began having fits and exhibiting signs of demonic possession. Soon more people were behaving strangely. The authorities reacted by arresting three women, the sort that made typical small-town scapegoats — a black slave, a beggar woman, and one who seldom attended church. As more and more people in surrounding villages claimed to be the object of spectral persecution, the arrests mounted and the accused now included prominent and godly community members.

In June seven men sitting as judges in the Court of Oyer and Terminer began to hear the cases. The first to be tried was Bridget Bishop, a thrice-married tavern owner of unsavoury reputation, who was accused of  tormenting and striking down her targets by witchcraft. Though she denied even knowing her accusers, she was convicted speedily and executed by hanging on June 10.

The trials would continue until 1693 by which time twenty had been executed, one had been pressed to death for refusing to testify, and more had died in prison. Soon the communities began having second thoughts about the trials, particularly the admission of evidence of visions. By 1695 relatives of the convicted began to appeal for reversal of the sentences and restitution, pleas which were eventually granted. Many who had taken part in the trails and who had supported the accusations repented. One minister, John Hale, said ruefully: “Such was the darkness of that day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents, that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.”

A similar, though less mortal, hysteria broke out in the 1980s when pagan feminists began to claim that over the centuries a Female Holocaust, operating as a tool of oppressive Christian patriarchy, had executed 9,000,000 women under the guise of witchcraft accusations. This fable was widely taken up by radical academics and was taught in universities. The National Film Board of Canada fell for this hoax as well, its notorious Studio D producing in 1990 The Burning Times, narrated by Starhawk, an enthusiast of the Goddess movement.

1905

Death of missionary Hudson Taylor

China in the mid-nineteenth century was in a dreadful state. The decadent Qing (or Manchu) dynasty was unable to deal with challenges posed by natural disasters and the intrusion of the outside world after years of relative isolation. The British East India Company had encouraged a massive drug problem in order to alleviate its balance of payment problems and the Chinese governments’ attempts to counter this were met by the Opium Wars. China was forced to open its doors at the point of a gun and in poured foreign merchants, ideas and missionaries. One of those missionaries gave a pamphlet entitled “Good Words to Admonish the Age” to a young Chinese man named Hong Xiuquan, a failed candidate for the civil service exams. After reading Christian tracts and undergoing visions, Hong proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus and began a rebellion that would lead to the death of 20,000,000 of his fellow countrymen. Into this chaos stepped Hudson Taylor (1832-1905).

Taylor was the son of an English Methodist lay preacher who desired that his son become a missionary to Asia. To prepare himself for this task Taylor studied medicine and Mandarin. In 1853 he set sail for Shanghai under the auspices of the China Evangelization Society but he soon abandoned that unreliable organization and conducted himself according to his own principles. Unlike other western missionaries Taylor dressed in the Chinese style, shaved his forehead and wore his hair in a pig tail. He shunned the company of Europeans and headed inland distributing tracts and Bibles. He was often robbed and caught up in riots; mission stations were overrun by combatants; his supplies were destroyed in a fire; and he encountered the vicissitudes of a land undergoing civil war. His wife and 4 young children died in China. During the Boxer Rebellion many of his colleagues and their families were murdered in the anti-foreigner uprising. Despite these challenges Taylor continued his work and built the China Inland Mission into the country’s biggest evangelistic endeavour. He died in 1905 and was buried in China. Today there are tens of millions of Chinese Christians and Taylor’s work continues to be carried on by the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (International).

1453

Better a turban than a tiara

Gennadius II becomes the first ecumenical patriarch of the Orthodox Church to serve under a Muslim ruler when Mohammed II invests him with staff and mantle.

As the Byzantine empire shrank under the attacks of various Turkish tribes, it consistently called to western European Christians for aid. Time and again, the Orthodox Byzantines were told that the price of military help was conversion to Catholic theology and submission to the pope. A number of emperors decided to pay that price and converted, at least in name, but they could never convince their population that they should abandon Orthodoxy. The people always replied that they would prefer rule by Muslims who would allow them to keep their traditional religion than to take western aid and abandon their faith. “Better a turban than a tiara” was the cry in the streets.

In the 1450s as the situation in Constantinople grew increasingly dire, the emperor Michael XI Paleologus decided that he had no choice but to give in to the pope’s demands. In return for some western troops Michael announced that he had converted to Catholicism. His chief opponent in this was the monk and scholar Georgios Kourtesios Scholarios (1400-73), known as Gennadius. Gennadius had earlier in his career been a supporter of the ecclesiastical union of Eastern and Western Christianity but in 1453 told those who came to him for counsel: ”O unhappy Romans [the name always used by Byzantines to refer to themselves], why have you forsaken the truth? Why do you not trust in God, instead of in the Italians? In losing your faith you will lose your city. Have mercy on me, O Lord! I protest in thy presence that I am innocent of the crime.”

When the city fell on May 29, Gennadius was taken prisoner by the Turks but he was set free by the new conqueror Mehmet II. It was Mehmet’s plan that Constantinople be resettled and rebuilt with Orthodox Christian help. To that end he granted them limited religious self-government under their Patriarch. Mehmet named Gennadius to this post, knowing him to be one who would not be seeking assistance from the West. Though he was uneasy as Patriarch, Gennadius initiated the subservience of his office to the Turkish state, a condition which exists to this day. In 1953 the Turkish republic issued a stamp celebrating the 500th anniversary of Mehmet investing the Patriarch with his staff of office.

844

St James rises to smite the Moors

On May 23, 844 an imaginary battle took place between the Spanish Christian forces and the Muslim Emir of Cordoba. In this conflict, the spirt of the Apostle James appeared and led the outnumbered Christians to victory. According to legend, the night before the encounter, Santiago appeared in a dream to the leader of the Spanish forces, King Ramiro I of Asturias, promising him victory.  The next day, the warrior-saint appeared on the battlefield, in a full suit of armour riding on a galloping white horse with a sword in the right hand and the banner of victory in the left; henceforth the saint would be known as Santiago Matamoros, Saint James the Moor-Slayer. Though this legend started centuries after the non-event, it became a myth that energized the Spanish Christian Reconquista, the medieval drive to expel Islamic occupiers from the Iberian peninsula.

But what was Saint James, son of Zebedee, doing in Spain? Traditional accounts tell of James being martyred in 44 at the order of Herod Agrippa. Spaniards, however, say that James had earlier preached the Christian message in Iberia before returning home to be executed. His body was taken back to Spain, either by friends or by angels in a rudderless boat, and buried in Compostela (interpreted as “Field of Stars” or “Burial Ground”). It became a major site of pilgrimage and even today the Via Compostela attracts thousands of devotees every year.

1252 The papacy legalizes torture by the Inquisition

The medieval Inquisition has a terrible reputation for cruelty and intolerance; the notion that officials of the church established by Jesus Christ would participate in the torment and death of unbelievers seems abhorrent to us today. Indeed, it was, at first and for centuries, abhorrent to the Church. It was only when the Roman Empire officially became Christian and governments undertook to maintain the uniformity of religion that was force used against heretics and dissidents. Still the Church tried to hold itself apart from the infliction of death and pain. Clerics were forbidden to shed blood or to participate in proceedings that might lead to capital punishment and the Church refused to sanction the old Germanic customs of trial by ordeal or combat. But the rise of powerful heresies that seemed to challenge the fundamentals of not only the Church but civilization itself seemed to call for new measures.

In the thirteenth century the dualist heresy known as Catharism or Albigensianism took root in western Europe. It denied most of the Bible, claimed that the god of the Old Testament was an evil bungler, repudiated the sacraments, and discouraged marriage and procreation. It won the adherence, or at least toleration, of many local rulers and even churchmen in northern Italy and southern France, causing the Church to doubt the ability of bishops to detect and root out the problem. For this reason, the papacy authorized a central Inquisition with the power to question believers as to their faith and morals. At first these tribunals were kept from using the well-established powers of torture which the secular courts possessed, but as heretic resistance increased to the point of assassinating church officials, it was decided that sterner measures had to be taken.

On May 15, 1252 Pope Innocent IV issued the bull Ad extirpanda which permitted torture in the question of heretics but which limited its use. It stated:

 To root up from the midst of Christian people the weed of heretical wickedness, which infests the healthy plants more than it formerly did, pouring out licentiousness through the offices of the enemy of mankind in this age the more eagerly (as we address ourselves to the sweated labor of the task assigned us) the more dangerously we overlook the manner in which this weed runs riot among the Catholic growth. Desiring, then, that the sons of the church, and fervent adherents of the orthodox faith, rise up and make their stand against the artificers of this kind of evildoing, we hereby bring forth to be followed by you as by the loyal defenders of the faith, with exact care, these regulations, contained serially in the following document, for the rooting-up of the plague of heresy. . . The head of state or ruler must force all the heretics whom he has in custody, provided he does so without killing them or breaking their arms or legs, as actual robbers and murderers of souls and thieves of the sacraments of God and Christian faith, to confess their errors and accuse other heretics whom they know, and specify their motives, and those whom they have seduced, and those who have lodged them and defended them, as thieves and robbers of material goods are made to accuse their accomplices and confess the crimes they have committed.

Because jurists knew that torture could often produce false results, the Church, for a time, insisted that it be only a last resort, only be imposed once and used only when proofs of guilt were almost certain. Unfortunately, these strictures were before too long ignored or evaded and the Inquisition came to merit a large part of the shame that is heaped upon it to this day.

1794

Robespierre inaugurates the Cult of the Supreme Being

When the French Revolution broke out in 1789 it seemed, at first, a moderate enough affair, demanding the sorts of rights that Americans or Englishmen would find unremarkable: freedom of the press, freedom from arbitrary arrest, an end to feudal oppression and a monarchy bound by a constitution. But social upheavals have lives of their own and often cannot be stopped even when early demands have been realized. The Revolution became increasingly radical, particularly in regard to religion. By 1790 ecclesiastical lands had been seized and the French Catholic Church severed from papal control; priests were forced to swear an oath of loyalty to this new “Constitutional church”, though many went underground or into exile; archbishops were deposed; bishops were henceforth to be elected. Churches were vandalized, despoiled of their treasures and their bells were melted down to make cannon for the revolutionary armies. Religious toleration, which had briefly been the order of the day, gave way to a policy of dechristianisation and a rejection of any worship of that “Jew slave” and his mother “the adulteress of Galilee”.  Almost all of France’s 40,000 churches were closed by early 1794, sold or converted to stables, warehouses or factories. Notre Dame Cathedral was turned into a “Temple of Reason” with images of Liberty instead of crucifixes. Priests were murdered or forced to marry; public Christian worship was forbidden.

Maximilien Robespierre, the leading revolutionary figure, was no friend of Christianity but neither did he favour the sort of godless rationalism that other radicals wanted to advance. He sent proponents of “the Cult of Reason”, men like Jacques Hébert and Antoine-François Comoro, to the guillotine. He proposed instead the “Cult of the Supreme Being” which held to certain religious tenets such as the immortality of the soul, a moral code and a deity but which disavowed any other Christian practices. On May 7, 1794 the Assembly decreed the establishment of the new religion and proposed a grand public ceremony instituting it in early June. Robespierre’s part in this festival seemed to suggest that he had elevated himself to priestly status — he set fire to the Statue of Atheism and gave a sermon which concluded with:

Frenchmen, you war against kings; you are therefore worthy to honor Divinity. Being of Beings, Author of Nature, the brutalized slave, the vile instrument of despotism, the perfidious and cruel aristocrat, outrages Thee by his very invocation of Thy name. But the defenders of liberty can give themselves up to Thee, and rest with confidence upon Thy paternal bosom. Being of Beings, we need not offer to Thee unjust prayers. Thou knowest Thy creatures, proceeding from Thy hands. Their needs do not escape Thy notice, more than their secret thoughts. Hatred of bad faith and tyranny burns in our hearts, with love of justice and the fatherland. Our blood flows for the cause of humanity. Behold our prayer. Behold our sacrifices. Behold the worship we offer Thee.

Robespierre and his priestly pretensions inspired ridicule and helped to lead to his overthrow in July — the Thermidorian Reaction — and the extinction of his new cult.

Pope Saint Pius V

Throughout the almost two millennia of papal history, 80 pontiffs have been regarded as saints. Some were venerated for their piety or godliness, some for their martyrdom. In the case of Pius V (1502-1572), born Antonio Ghislieri in northern Italy, one can attribute his canonization to his firmness of purpose in defending Roman Catholicism against Protestantism and Islam.

Ghisleri joined the Order of Preachers in his teens and went on to acquire a reputation as a theologian and reformer. He rose high in the ranks of the Inquisition. In his role as Dominican prior and then bishop he acted harshly against those he deemed to be corrupt clergy, cracking down on nepotism, absenteeism, theological novelty and moral laxity. During his six years as pope he took actions that would have long-lasting consequences.

The Council of Trent had mandated changes to the Mass which Pius was anxious to enforce. In 1570 he ordered a standardized version of the liturgy which came to be known as the Tridentine Mass that would endure for almost 400 years until the Vatican II Council of the 1960s. Politically, he was active in opposing the French government’s attempts to compromise with native Protestants — the Massacre of St Bartholomew which occurred shortly after his death would have been applauded by Pius V. He was instrumental in organizing and funding the Holy League to oppose Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean and the naval victory at Lepanto owed much to his impetus in uniting Catholic Europe. He was less successful — in fact, he was downright disastrous — in his policies against Protestant England. His support for the Rebellion of the Earls and his bull “Regans in Excelsis” which excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I hardened the heart of the English government against Catholics.

1667

John Milton sells Paradise Lost

John Milton (1608-74) was one of the greatest of English poets and controversialists, writing at a time of social upheaval and Civil War. Born into a prosperous family of the middle-class, Milton had an excellent education, both at Cambridge, through his voluminous readings, and in his European travels. His poetic career began early and while still at university he was writing works that have endured, such as “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and his epitaph for Shakespeare.

In the late 1630s England was drifting toward civil war, a country divided by religious differences and quarrels over the powers of monarchy and parliament. Milton found himself on the side of Puritanism and political liberty. He attacked the role of bishops in the Church of England, advocated divorce and wrote a classic defence of free speech in his 1644 tract Areopagitica. After the triumph of parliamentary armies and the execution of King Charles I, Milton wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, defending popular power and regicide. The Puritan government made him “Secretary for Foreign Tongues”, responsible for disseminating propaganda favourable to the new regime. He kept up his radical political tracts even after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 which brought him briefly to jail for having been such a firm supporter of the English republic.

By 1658 Milton was going blind but this did not step him from composing poetry, which he would dictate to a scribe (as depicted above by Eugene Delacroix). In his blindness Milton’s greatest work was the epic Paradise Lost, a description of the rebellion of Lucifer and the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden. In over 10,000 lines of blank verse he fulfills the promise made in the opening lines: “Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit/Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste/Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,/With loss of Eden, till one greater Man/Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat. . .” It is a profound meditation on the allure of evil (many critics have said that the real hero of the poem is Lucifer), the dilemma of free will and the grace of God. In 1667 Milton sold the poem to a publisher for £5 with a further £5 to be paid if the print runs sold out.