Turbulent Priests

Books read this week: A History of Christianity 6/10 (Diarmaid MacCulloch)

I've been reading it off and on since Christmas, and this week I finally got round to finishing MacCulloch's History of Christianity. It would be, I imagine, something of a doorstopper if I weren't reading it on the Kindle. It covers something like 3000 years of history (as it follows both the Jewish and Greek roots of Christianity) in a surprising amount of detail. There's plenty here: martyrs, saints, sinners and a whole lot of hypocrisy. MacCulloch is (understandably) very careful not to tread on anyone's toes, especially when it comes to terminology, and naming the various denominations. I understand why he does it, but it did take me a while to adjust. I've spent fifteen years reading about the monophysites, and so calling them miaphysites took a little getting used to. And the odd reference to "The Church of Rome" does creep through (a phrase I hear in my mind in the voice of an angry Ian Paisley). MacCulloch is also, in my opinion (and quite understandably for a religious historian) unreasonably unsympathetic to the French and Russian revolutionaries. He fails to take account of the close relationship between the Ancien Regime and the Church in both cases: if the Church maintains (as the Russian Orthodox Church did) that the old ruler was "Equal of the Arch-Angels and God's Vice-Gerent on Earth" then they're not going to get a very sympathetic hearing from the people who've just been compelled to bump off that ruler. Also, the characterisation of Nicholas II as "well-meaning and amiable" is one I have to take exception to: when discussing that monarch phrases like "bloody handed butcher", "criminally incompetent" and "evil little bastard" are rather more accurate. I think this tendency was most grating in the discussion of the suppression of the Greek Catholic Church in the Ukraine in the late 1940s. There's a lot of condemnation of Stalin's suppression of the Church, which is all well and good (after all, Stalin was a very unpleasant man who did some very unpleasant things), except that only two pages earlier MacCulloch was telling us how the Greek Catholic Church spent the early part of the 1940s murdering tens of thousands of Polish (Roman) Catholics as part of a program of ethnic cleansing: something which, in my opinion, should really get your church suppressed.

Which leads quite neatly into one of the other things I took from the book: the phenomenal ability of Christians and Christian Churches throughout the ages to persecute each other (and other faiths), even when they have recent experiences of persecution themselves: the funniest passage in the book is one which reads (more or less) "24th March 323 CE: Christianity recognised as the official religion of the Roman Empire. 25th March 323 CE: First official persecution of heretics by the Roman Empire." We also have the Bishop who said "You know back when Christians were a persecuted minority and we were made to wear coloured strips of cloth so we could be identified?" "Yes?" "I was just thinking, that was a really good idea!". I actually read a blog post the other day which suggested The Song of Ice and Fire wasn't really like Medieval Europe because there's religious persecution in the books. I would suggest telling that to the Albigensians, except you can't because they're all fucking dead.

I think the final thing I took from the book was a renewed dislike of Augustine of Hippo (do you have a picture of a hippopotamus in a dog collar? Because I do.). He wasn't top of my list of favourite theologians to begin with, but according to MacCulloch, basically everything I don't like about Christianity comes directly from his work: hang ups about sex, forcible conversion, even predestination. I single out predestination because I consider it a particularly odious piece of theology, and moreover, absolutely impossible to reconcile with the concept of a benevolent God. Not that it matters to me, being an atheist, but nevertheless the point stands. MacCulloch casts the Reformation as a battle between Augustine's doctrine of the Church (on the Catholic side) and Augustine's doctrine of Faith (on the Protestant side): as far as I can tell, Augustine is in the unenviable position of being responsible for the worst ideas on both sides of one of the larger and more bloody conflicts in human history.