June 3

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).

June 1

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.

May 29

1453

The Fall of Constantinople

On May 29, 1453, the troops of the Turkish Sultan Mehmet II broke through the defences of Constantinople and completed the conquest of the city. Michael Paleologus, the last ruler of the Roman Empire died fighting before the city was comprehensively sacked and its inhabitants sold into slavery. The great Church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, was immediately turned into a mosque. The most sacred relic of eastern Christians, the Hodegetria, a portrait of Mary and the baby Jesus supposedly painted by Luke the Evangelist, was chopped into bits for the gold in its frame.

By that time, Constantinople, once the grandest city on the planet, was only a hollow shell of its former self and the Roman Empire, of which it had been its capital, was reduced to a few scattered holdings. But the capture of the city had enormous political and symbolic importance. Both the Turks and the Russians claimed to be the heirs of Byzantium. Mehmet styled himself the Kayser-i-Rum, “Roman Emperor” and decreed that his next conquest would be Rome itself. The ruler of Muscovy, Ivan III, married a Byzantine princess and declared that he was the successor of Orthodox supremacy, appropriating the title of Czar, or “Caesar”. The flood of exiles from the city who found refuge in Italy brought with them manuscripts and a knowledge of Greek that helped fuel a second stage in the Renaissance. Turkish expansion brought with it a strangling of the trade between Asia and Europe, encouraging Europeans to embark on direct voyages to the East rather than relying on Islamic middle men; the expeditions of Columbus and Vasco da Gama are results of the fall of Constantinople.

Today, visitors to Constantinople, called “Istanbul” by the Turks, can visit a tiny enclave in the Fener district by the Golden Horn and see the compound of the Patriarch of Constantinople, the last remaining official of the Roman Empire.

May 23

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.

May 21

1660

Battle of the Long Sault

The continued existence of the colony of New France was always more than a little perilous. At risk from European powers when the home country went to war with the Dutch or the British, and under the constant threat of native resistance, particularly from the savage Iroquois Confederacy, the colonists lived in a state of perpetual tension.

Dollard des Ormeaux was a young man with some military experience before migrating to New France where he settled in Ville-Marie, what is now Montreal. Learning that an Iroquois force assembling on the Ottawa River was intent on raiding French settlements on the St Laurence, Dollard proposed taking a party inland and ambushing the hostile natives. With the agreement of the town’s leadership, Dollard gathered 17 settler volunteers and 4 Huron for the guerrilla task. In early May they reached the Ottawa and established themselves in an old Algonquian fort at the Long Sault, where they were joined by another 40 Huron warriors.

The Iroquois force they meant to ambush was far larger than anticipated, numbering perhaps 700, and Dollard and his men soon found themselves besieged. They held off the Iroquois for five days, despite the defection of many of the Huron. The crucial moment came when Dollard lit a barrel of explosives which he meant to hurl into the enemy ranks but at that moment he was shot and the gunpowder fell back into the fort, killing many of its defenders in the explosion. The Iroquois soon overran the palisades and found only 5 Frenchmen alive; 4 soon died and the other was taken prisoner along with a few Huron to be tortured to death and cannibalized.

The fact that the Iroquois, at this point, returned home and did not attack the settlements has led to Dollard and his men being treated as the saviours of New France. Recent historians have tried to downplay the heroic aspect, suggesting that Dollard was really intent on stealing furs, and that the Iroquois would not have gone on to imperil New France anyway. The debate continues.

May 19

A Big Day in Tudor History

1499

Heir to the Tudor dynasty of England, Prince Arthur, weds by proxy Spanish princess Katharine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. Katharine is 13 and Arthur is 12; they will not meet until over two years later. They were married on November 14, 1501 but they may not have consummated the marriage — a matter of enormous consequence as Arthur died in April 1502 and Katharine was left a widow. Her claim to be a virgin sped the papal dispensation that allowed her to marry Henry VIII, Arthur’s brother, in 1509.

1536

Henry VIII divorced his wife Katharine of Aragon in order to marry his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn. Unfortunately for Anne, she could not produce a male heir, giving birth only to a daughter Elizabeth, and suffering three miscarriages. Henry then decided to replace her with Jane Seymour and charged Anne with incest and adultery; she was beheaded on this date.

1568

Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII, was not the only claimant to the English throne. In the person of Mary, Queen of Scots, she faced another woman of Tudor blood, untouched by the accusations of bastardy which haunted Elizabeth, and supported by the princes of Catholic Europe. On this day, Elizabeth orders the arrest of Mary who had abdicated the Scottish throne and fled over the English border from rebellious nobles.

May 17

1164

The death of Héloïse

Chambers recounts the story of Peter Abélard (1079-1142), a brilliant but erratic theologian, and Héloïse, a scholar and nun (1090-1164). Abélard was a remarkable philosopher but not a good man, as you shall learn:

The story of Heloise and Abelard is one of the saddest on record. It is a true story of man’s selfishness and woman’s devotion and self-abnegation. If we wished for an allegory which should be useful to exhibit the bitter strife which has to be waged between the earthly and the heavenly, between passion and principle, in the noblest minds, we should find it provided for us in this painful history. We know all the particulars, for Abelard has written his own confessions, without screening himself or concealing his guilt; and several letters which passed between the lovers after they were separated, and devoted to the exclusive service of religion, have come down to posterity.

Not alone the tragic fate of the offenders, but also their exalted worth and distinguished position, helped to make notorious the tale of their fall. Heloise was an orphan girl, eighteen years old, residing with a canon of Notre Dame, at Paris, who was her uncle and guardian. This uncle took great pains to educate her, and obtained for her the advantage of Abelard’s instruction, who directed her studies at first by letters. Her devotion to study rendered her remarkable among the ladies of Paris, even more than her beauty. ‘In face,’ Abelard himself informs us, ‘she was not insignificant; in her abundance of learning she was unparalleled; and because this gift is rare in women, so much the more did it make this girl illustrious through the whole kingdom.’

Abelard, though twice the age of Heloise, was a man of great personal attraction, as well as the most famous man of his time, as a rising teacher, philosopher, and divine. His fame was then at its highest. Pupils came to him by thousands. He was lifted up to that dangerous height of intellectual arrogance, from which the scholar has often to be hurled with violence by a hard but kind fate, that he may not let slip the true humility of wisdom. ‘Where was found,’ Heloise writes, ‘the king or the philosopher that had emulated your reputation? Was there a village, a city, a kingdom, that did not ardently wish to see you? When you appeared in public, who did not run to behold you? And when you withdrew, every neck was stretched, every eye sprang forward to follow you. The women, married and unmarried, when Abelard was away, longed for his return!’ And, becoming more explicit, she continues: ‘You possessed, indeed, two qualifications—a tone of voice, and a grace in singing—which gave you the control over every female heart. These powers were peculiarly yours, for I do not know that they ever fell to the share of any other philosopher. To soften by playful instruments the stern labours of philosophy, you composed several sonnets on love, and on similar subjects. These you were often heard to sing, when the harmony of your voice gave new charms to the expression. In all circles nothing was talked of but Abelard; even the most ignorant, who could not judge of harmony, were enchanted by the melody of your voice. Female hearts were unable to resist the impression.’ So the girl’s fancies come back to the woman, and it must have caused a pang in the fallen scholar to see how much his guilt had been greater than hers.

It was a very thoughtless thing for Fulbert to throw together a woman so enthusiastic and a man so dangerously attractive. In his eagerness that his niece’s studies should advance as rapidly as possible, he forgot the tendency of human instinct to assert its power over minds the most cultivated, and took Abelard into his house. A passionate attachment grew up between teacher and pupil: reverence for the teacher on the one hand, interest in the pupil on the other, changed into warmer emotions. Evil followed. What to lower natures would have seemed of little moment, brought to them a life of suffering and repentance. In his penitent confessions, no doubt conscientiously enough, Abelard represents his own conduct as a deliberate scheme of a depraved will to accomplish a wicked design; and such a terrible phase of an intellectual mind is real, but the circumstances in which the lovers were placed are enough to account for the unhappy issue. The world, however, it appears, was pleased to put the worst construction upon what it heard, and even Heloise herself expresses a painful doubt, long afterwards, for a moment, at a time when Abelard seemed to have forgotten her. ‘Account,’ she says, ‘for this conduct, if you can, or must I tell you my suspicions, which are also the general suspicions of the world? It was passion, Abelard, and not friendship, that drew you to me; it was not love, but a baser feeling.’

The attachment of the lovers had long been publicly known, and made famous by the songs which Abelard himself penned, to the utter neglect of his lectures and his pupils, when the utmost extent of the mischief became clear at last to the unsuspicious Fulbert. Abelard contrived to convey Heloise to the nunnery of Argenteuil. The uncle demanded that a marriage should immediately take place; and to this Abelard agreed, though he knew that his prospects of advancement would be ruined, if the marriage was made public. Heloise, on this very account, opposed the marriage; and, even after it had taken place, would not confess the truth. Fulbert at once divulged the whole, and Abelard’s worldly prospects were for ever blasted. Not satisfied with this, Fulbert took a most cruel and unnatural revenge upon Abelard, [his men castrated Abelard] the shame of which decided the wretched man to bury himself as a monk in the Abbey of St. Dennis. Out of jealousy and distrust, he requested Heloise to take the veil; and having no wish except to please her husband, she immediately complied, in spite of the opposition of her friends.

Thus, to atone for the error of the past, both devoted themselves wholly to a religious life, and succeeded in adorning it with their piety and many virtues. Abelard underwent many sufferings and persecutions. Heloise first became prioress of Argenteuil; afterwards, she removed with her nuns to the Paraclete, an asylum which Abelard had built and then abandoned. But she never subdued her woman’s devotion for Abelard. While abbess of the Paraclete, Heloise revealed the undercurrent of earthly passion which flowed beneath the even piety of the bride of heaven, in a letter which she wrote to Abelard, on the occasion of an account of his sufferings, written by himself to a friend, falling into her hands. In a series of letters which passed between them at this time, she exhibits a pious and Christian endeavour to perform her duties as an abbess, but persists in retaining the devoted attachment of a wife for her husband. Abelard, somewhat coldly, endeavours to direct her mind entirely to heaven; rather affects to treat her as a daughter than a wife; and seems anxious to check those feelings towards himself which he judged it better for the abbess of the Paraclete to discourage than to foster. Heloise survived Abelard by twenty-one years.

May 15

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.

May 11

2001

The death of Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams (1952-2001) was a British writer, educated at Cambridge, and known for his humour and wry observations on the human condition. His best-known work was The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which appeared first as a radio series, then a television series, and then a worthless piece of cinematic junk. (However rotten the movie treatment of the Guide was, it was infinitely better than the unspeakably dreadful TV series made of his Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The fact that this series has been granted a second instalment is one of the more profound arguments against the existence of God.) Adams also wrote for, and appeared in, Monty Python skits, as well as authoring a number of Dr Who episodes. He died of heart failure in the United States.

Here are some of his lines:

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. 

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

 He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.

Douglas Adams was an outspoken atheist.

May 7

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.