Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

I Love My German Shepherd

     Bravo to Benedict the Brave, who cunningly has identified the connection between reason-constricting secularism and Islamic fideism, and who has thereby invited all Christians to unite in a recovery of reason, reaffirming that it can lead us to the threshold of eternal truth, and that it can help us to understand those truths that have been revealed to us which reason alone could never have discovered.  Perhaps now Christians will remember the poor old Trinity, that insight into the life of the Godhead that God has mercifully vouchsafed us; for our God is Himself a community of Persons, and is not what Chesterton called "the lonely God of Omar," who dwells by himself in unapproachable and apparently unintelligible isolation.

     If you'll pardon me, I thought it might be interesting here to repeat a post from last February:

Non Angli sed Angeli

     Rome, early in the seventh century, A.D., has been reduced from the queen city of the world to a cow-town.  It still has a Senate, though its functions are at best those of a town council.  What it mainly has is a bishop -- the bishop of Rome.  If anybody is going to see to it that food supplies are distributed and the sick are tended and public buildings do not fall into worse disrepair than they have already fallen, it will have to be the bishop.  And that, of course, is not to mention his spiritual guidance of Romans everywhere, from north Africa to Farthest Ireland.  So you have to choose a capable and holy man.

     You choose a monk named Gregory, who feels so unworthy of the burden that at first he declines, he runs away -- as did his predecessor in episcopal avoidance, Gregory of Nyssa.  Finally he agrees, and with some embarrassment (and a great deal of Christian wisdom and humility) writes to explain why he went into hiding, understanding that the role of bishop is to be the unworthy slave of Christ and His people: to be the slave of the slaves of God.

     At roughly the same time, in the East, a merchant among the caravans has seen a vision in a cave, and has declared himself the final and perfect prophet of the one God.  Financed by his wealthy wife and protected by a powerful uncle in Mecca, he preaches to the traders and the pilgrims there -- for Mecca is already a pilgrimage site, where Arabs come to pay homage to a large cubic meteorite and to the panoply of gods to which the cube is dedicated.  Naturally, local merchants are not happy, since their livelihood depends on the pilgrim trade; so there are several armed skirmishes.  When the wife and uncle of this Mohammed die, the leaders in Mecca cut a deal with him: he will leave the city and go to Yathrib, and the people there, for their part, will submit to his Law.  Not that the people of Yathrib have agreed to this.  When Mohammed arrives there, he is opposed by the nine tribes that make up the city: six pagan, and three Jewish.  He seizes control, and orders the assassination of the tribal leaders.  The Hadith records that he laughed aloud as their heads were laid at his feet.  Muslims begin their calendar with this trek to Yathrib.

     Back in Rome, Pope Gregory one day sees a band of captives led to the block for sale.  They are tall and fair-skinned and, what strikes Gregory's eye most particularly, blond.  Moved with pity and curiosity he asks who they are and where they have come from.  "They are Angles," comes the reply.  "Not Angles but angels," says Gregory.  He determines to send missionaries to the lands of the north, the most prominent among them the bishop Augustine, later known as Augustine of Canterbury.  When Augustine arrives among the pagans of Anglia and Kent he writes a letter to Gregory, asking him what he ought to do about pagan shrines (where human sacrifices may have been performed).  Gregory's letter (preserved in Bede's history) would provide the template for Christian missionary work ever after.  Do not tear down those shrines, he said; but cleanse them.  In other words, Gregory saw that all people have a natural intuition of God, and that therefore the object of the Christian missionary is to do what Paul attempted for the Athenians in Acts.  You show them that in an imperfect way, no doubt tangled with considerable sin and error, they already know something of the Lord.  If your name is Boniface, you may chop away at the Germans' sacred totem, but at the same time you show them the Tree that really is worthy of their devotion.  Tertullian's famous rhetorical question, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?," would be repeated around 800 by the Irish Alcuin, exasperated that the monks still loved the tales of the old Germanic heroes.  "What does Ingeld have to do with Christ?"  Apparently quite a lot.

     Having reduced Yathrib to his sole control -- the place now named "Medina" or "The City" -- Mohammed returned with an army to Mecca, in no mood for nonsense.  He took the city by force, assassinating the leaders of its single tribe, the Quraysh.  For the next four hundred years -- really from that time until now, if you omit the interruptive flowering of Islamic heresy that coincided with the Arabic discovery of the ancient Greeks -- Muslims in their conquests would provide the implicit answer to their version of Tertullian's question.  Absolutely nothing.