Tag: Palmer, Martin

In Our Time: Prester John

Prester John was the greatest Christian King who never lived. All through the Middle Ages there were persistent legends (sometimes backed up by apparent documentation) about this powerful priest-king in the East who was ready to bring his powerful armies to attack the Muslims in concert with the Western Crusaders. The experts who discussed these legends on In Our Time were Marianne O’Doherty (University of Southampton), Martin Palmer (Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and Culture) and Amanda Power (University of Sheffield).

They opened the programme with a bit of a discussion about the historical truths in which these legends might’ve been rooted. During the early Middle Ages there was a large Christian population in the Middle East and in India. There’s evidence that Western Christians were in contact with them – for instance King Alfred (of England) sent some people to India. It’s written about as if the journey wasn’t anything particularly special – a long way, and a relatively rare event but perfectly doable. These Christians weren’t from the same branch of Christianity as the Western Church, and the two Churches would’ve regarded each other as heretics. They are sometimes referred to as Nestorian Christians, but that is a bit of a derogatory term and it’s politer to refer to them as the Church of the East or the Syrian Church. The schism between this Church and Western Christianity hinges round a theological point about the nature(s) of Christ. Western Christianity (or monophysitism) holds that Jesus’s human nature was absorbed into his divinity and he had only one nature. However those who followed Nestorious believed that Jesus had two natures that were only loosely connected (this is called dyophysitism) – he was both divine and human and those were separate from each other. So there was a substantial Christian population in the East (probably larger than in the West), which dwindled after the rise of Islam – after which the legends of Prester John began to develop.

The first forms of the legend are known from the 12th Century AD. One of these is an account of a visit to the Pope in 1122 by an emissary from Prester John. It’s not clear to modern scholars what, if anything, this is actually based on – if there was any visit from anyone that got garbled in the reporting or if someone just made it all up. The emissary purportedly says that he has come form Prester John’s kingdom to the east, and that Prester John had been leading a force to aid the Christians at Jerusalem. However the army had been unable to cross a river on the way, and had been forced to turn back. The account of this emissary’s visit gives details of the fabulous force that Prester John had available, and gave hope they would make another attempt to join the Crusaders.

Another early piece of “evidence” for Prester John was a letter that was purportedly sent from Prester John to the Byzantine Emperor in 1165, and subsequently translated into German and forwarded on to the Holy Roman Emperor. This letter goes into detail about what life is supposedly like in the land that Prester John rules. It’s an earthly paradise, full of wondrous beasts. Everyone lives long and virtuous lives, and after death they don’t rot and will return to life at the Day of Judgement. The kings are always called Prester John and combine the roles of secular and religious leaders in one person. The experts on the programme said that it’s extremely likely that this letter was originally written in German – it doesn’t read like translated Greek. There’s also no obvious reason why the Byzantine Emperor would be forwarding his post on to the Germans! The most plausible explanation for the letter is that it’s a piece of propaganda produced by the Holy Roman Emperor’s court. At the time he and the Pope were embroiled in a power struggle, and a document that explained how perfect everything would be if the secular leader of a country was also the spiritual leader was rather useful for the Holy Roman Emperor.

It seems odd to us as modern people to think that these tales of an earthly paradise (of an incredible nature) were so easily believable, but the programme pointed out that during this era there was a large body of literature of tales of wondrous lands beyond the known world. This is the period where maps have areas labelled as where the Doghead people live, and where the people live who have their faces in their torsos. Around the 12th Century and onwards this begins to change, as more people travel and write more accurate travelogues. It’s a slow change though – not all the early travelogues are written by people who’ve actually been where they claimed to be. For instance the author John Mandeville apparently travelled to Prester John’s land and met him – but a lot of other things in Mandeville’s book are made up, and most of the rest appears to’ve been copied from other books. There’s no indication Mandeville actually went anywhere! He’s not the only example of this from the time, either.

The rise of the Mongols changes the legends of Prester John a bit. There are some stories about Prester John being conquered, but other stories suggest that maybe he was never in Central Asia and his land is actually in India. Another blow to the believability of the legends is that travellers visit the Mongols from Europe, and whilst they meet Christians they don’t meet or find any evidence of Prester John. (Nor do they find any wondrous beasts, or Dogheads etc.) They do try and make an alliance with the Mongols against the Muslims, but this doesn’t interest the Mongols.

And later still as China becomes more well known to Europeans it becomes ever more implausible that Prester John and his kingdom could be anywhere in Asia. By the 14th Century AD the legend of Prester John has shifted to Africa, and Ethiopia is the new focal point. As an aside one of the experts (I forget which one) said that you could think of the 14th Century as “the century when Ethiopia discovered the West”. Ethiopia had been Christian since the early AD period, and in the 14th Century they sent emissaries to the Pope and to some of the European kings. They seemed to fit in with some of the Prester John stories – in particular the “long lost Christian Kingdom” aspects of it. And they also seemed to fit other legends about the Queen of Sheba. But the legends still weren’t true. Which apparently didn’t stop European travellers from visiting Ethiopia and asking the rather bemused locals about Prester John.

They finished up the programme by talking about whether or not people actually believed the stories at the time. I think the overall conclusion was that mostly they probably didn’t, it was just a good story or a useful one for propaganda purposes. However there were examples of people who did believe – for instance during the Crusades some commanders made strategic errors because they believed they were about to be joined by Prester John’s army any time now.

In Our Time: The Book of Common Prayer

The Book of Common Prayer was written during the English Reformation as the new reference for the services & ceremonies for the new Church of England, and it’s still in use in many churches today. Discussing it on In Our Time were Diarmaid MacCulloch (University of Oxford), Alexandra Walsham (University of Cambridge) and Martin Palmer (Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and Culture).

Prior to the break with the Roman Catholic Church all church services were in Latin, and the forms of the services came from several different books depending on what sort of service it was and so on. Even though the English Church’s break with Rome was driven by Henry VIII’s desire for a divorce from his first wife there were genuine supporters of the European flavour of Reformation involved in the process. A key figure amongst these was Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, who not only orchestrated the original split from Rome but was also (in Edward VI’s reign) responsible for the original versions of the Book of Common Prayer. This was designed to be the single book that contained all the necessary prayers and ceremonies for the Church of England – each parish church had a copy, and used it for its services. The first version was to some degree a compromise between those who wanted a fully Reformed Church and those who wanted a more traditional Catholic theology (with or without the Pope as the head of the Church). As such a contemporary of Cranmer’s (who wasn’t as keen on Reformation as Cranmer) demonstrated that it could quite easily be interpreted in line with traditional Catholic theology. The second edition, again written by Cranmer, was published in the closing months of Edward VI’s reign and it was more hardline Protestant. Edward’s death & his sister Mary’s ascension to the throne returned the country to the Catholic Church and so the Book of Common Prayer was sidelined for a while. When Elizabeth I came to the throne she had the Book of Common Prayer republished, in much the same form as the second edition, and it was again the official prescribed version of the services.

By the time Elizabeth died the book which had once been regarded as “too Protestant” was regarded as “too Catholic” for hardline reformers. There was hope that Elizabeth’s successor would bring about a proper Reformation of the English church – after all James VI & I had been brought up in the Scottish Kirk. Sadly for the reformers James rather liked the ceremony of the English Church, and wasn’t fond of the dour Scottish Kirk – and in particular he liked the hierarchical nature of the English Church which reinforced his sense of his divinely anointed authority. So the Book of Common Prayer (and the concept of bishops) lived on. After the Civil Wars, while Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector the Book of Common Prayer was again abolished – this time replaced with a much more Puritan form of worship. The Restoration of the Monarchy was also the restoration of the Book of Common Prayer – revised another few times subsequently, but the definitive version is the 1662 revision. This was used throughout the British Empire as it grew, and is still used in some churches today.

As well as the history of the Book of Common Prayer they also talked about the language of it in the programme. Obviously it’s in English – and this was one of the important features of the new service book. An important part of the Reformation was the idea that everyone should understand what was going on – both in having access to a bible in their own language and in having services in their own language. The actual phrasing of the book is also important – it has had a significant impact on the sort of language we use today. They were keen to stress on the programme that it was written with its use in mind – in that the same words are to be used time and time again, so the prayers were constructed to be repeatable. Not florid prose that might sound foolish after a while nor witty or full of punchlines that might sound lame the umpteenth time you heard them. For much of the century or so of the reformation process in England there was a requirement to attended Church of England services that used the Book of Common Prayer. This ensured that the words and their underlying theology sunk in, over time, and that all children were properly indoctrinated.

One thing that they mentioned several times in the programme is something that always strikes me when learning about the Reformation in England – how very odd it was compared to the rest of Europe. The English Church tried (and mostly succeeded) in navigating a third way between catholicism and protestantism. A lot of the theology was reformed as compared to the Catholic church (like transubstantiation), and obviously the Pope is no longer head of the C of E. But the C of E still has bishops and a hierarchy, and even though it’s been austere at various times and places it has also still had ceremony and pomp at various times and places. So it didn’t really make either of the extremes happy – and the way the Book of Common Prayer was discarded once for being too Protestant and once for being too Catholic within the space of a century sort of sums that conflict up.

In Our Time: Gnosticism

Gnosticism was part of the growth of secret knowledge cults in the first few centuries AD, flourishing in the 2nd & 3rd Centuries. Although not necessarily associated with Christianity it is best known as a different interpretation of Christianity, and the mainstream Christian Church reacted against what they regarded as heresy in ways that are still part of Christianity today. The three experts who talked about this on In Our Time were Martin Palmer (International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and Culture), Caroline Humfress (Birkbeck College, University of London) and Alastair Logan (University of Exeter).

This was a programme that constantly threatened to runaway with itself – I think there were three times that Melvyn Bragg had to stop some tangent (often that he’d started) by saying it was a topic for another programme. And they ended a little abruptly having pretty much run out of time. The jumping off point for the programme was that in 1945 a set of documents were found buried in Egypt, and whilst some were burnt for fuel some made their way to scholars. These documents turned out to be Gnostic “gospels” and this revolutionised scholarship about Gnosticism as prior to this time it was mostly known through the writings of Christians explaining how terrible it was.

So first they talked about what Gnosticism was. Which isn’t quite as easy to pin down as all that – it wasn’t so much an organised religion as a collection of revelations and beliefs that share commonalities. And that’s part of the point. One of the commonalities is that they saw the world as divided into the material world (bad) and the spirit world (good), and the route to salvation or enlightenment was to awake from the cares of the flesh to a more spiritual awareness. It spread across a lot of Europe & Asia, and was banned by many authorities both religious & secular, but the experts mostly discussed it in the context of its interactions with and reactions to Christianity (I think that might be where Gnosticism in general is centred, but I’m not sure if that’s the case or if that’s just where they chose to focus).

Humfress told us about the creation myth that (with variations) is common throughout Gnosticism. In this there is an unknowable divine God from whom are generated various emanations of this divinity, the number varies between tellings of the myth. The last of these emanations was Sophia – Wisdom – and she desired to see the divine without his permission or knowledge. Her efforts to do so created a rent in the spiritual world and through this rent or veil is created the demiurge Yaltabaoth who creates the material world. Yaltabaoth is pretty definitely associated with the god of the Old Testament, and is pretty definitely cast as evil (the material world is Bad). This was the point where J & I were saying “oh so that’s why it was banned in lots of places” 😉 Once Adam was created he had no soul, so Sophia sent her daughter Zoey to be Eve and to tempt Adam to eat of the tree of knowledge. All humans as descendents of Adam & Eve have a spark of the divine within them, their soul, and if they awake to this knowledge then they will join with the divine unknowable God.

They were keen to stress the point that in mainstream Christian tradition one is saved and redeemed from one’s own sins – guilt is an important part of the deal. You did do wrong, and Jesus died to save you from the consequences. But the Gnostic tradition is about salvation through awakening to knowledge of your true self. You aren’t guilty of sin, your previous behaviour was the result of the demiurge who made you part of the material world. And once you are awakened it’s like you were drunk and are now sober & see how the thoughts you had before weren’t profound but were the result of the state you were in.

Gnosticism involved secret knowledge & initiation into the mysteries, but once you were initiated & anointed you were a Christ and you were an equal of anyone else who’d been anointed. This is very different from the hierarchical order that was developing within mainstream Christianity. And in fact the reaction against the Gnostics was part of what strengthened that heirarchy – making themselves different from the “heretics”.

They also talked about the impact that discovering Gnostic texts had. In academia it had a profound impact on how people interpreted the Gospels that made it into the canonical texts. And lead to re-interpretations of early Christianity (or “Christianities”). And in the more popular world it’s also had an impact. They were saying how it has influenced New Age thought & philosophies, but also the interpretation of the place of women in the Church. Particularly in light of the Gnostics having a trinity that consisted of Father, Mother & Christ, and I think they were implying that part of the Church sidelining women was reacting against the Gnostics.

It was definitely an programme where you could see that the 45minutes just skimmed the surface of the subject.