Catherine Nixey - Heresy

Catherine Nixey, Heresy (Picador)

People believe what they want to believe, don't they? In what remains a liberal democracy in the UK today, we'd like to think,  even here there must be some people who believe what they believe because they have to, or perhaps because they can't see beyond what they've been told and some of them might not want to. It's already more complicated than I thought and I'm no better than any of them. There might be any number of contributory reasons why I, like Bertrand Russell wasn't, am not a Christian. And then a book like Heresy comes along and preaches to such a heretic. I must try not to uncritically accept it at its word as if it were gospel but that's difficult because it is exactly what I wanted it to be and it's brilliant.

For many years I've taken A.N. Wilson's biography of Jesus as my text. He says there that there were any number of prophets, preachers and teachers at the time and Jesus was simply the most successful but now Catherine Nixey provides the detail from those obscure times. There wasn't just 'the Word', there were many words, much of Christianity is replicated in other traditions but Emperor Constantine's conversion in the C4th brings the Roman Empire in on Christianity's side and that is a powerful weapon with which to suppress all opposition.

Asclepius and Apollonius were comparable figures. Raising the dead, curing the incurable and turning water into wine were regular party pieces performed by such men and the difference between magicians and the divinely gifted is not clear. Hocus pocus itself may, or may not, come from 'hoc est... corpus meum' and in those early centuries there was no shortage of those ready to question such articles of faith as the Creation. God's omniscience is immediately suspect when he apparently doesn't know where Adam is. Being the son of  a god is hardly an innovation because the likes of Hercules had been as much.

While saying that she takes no sides in these issues, Catherine's sardonic observations and the fact that her previous book was a similar demolition job on Christianity would indicate that she's not a devout Catholic, or not any more because she was brought up as one. Perhaps there's nobody as zealous as a convert but she has seen it from both sides now.

It is best not to be overly passionate in dismantling the case of one's adversaries. Being cross rarely wins a debate. Of resurrection stories, like those of St. Peter, she quotes M. R. James who finds them 'implausible' rather than perfectly understandably condemning them as absurd or ludicrous. Gentle understatement is a more effective strategy than bombast when undermining such blatantly silly 'miracles' and Catherine has a consistent line of gentle but firm scepticism that provides at least entertainment and often genuine laughs. But at the same time she is scholarly and has read the ancient, arcane texts she refers to because Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are very much the party apparatchiks, a fixed jury, as those selected to give evidence in The Bible. We knew that, of course, but one result of Christianity being on the winning side of history is that the many alternative accounts are much harder to find.

John Chrysotom, the 'fiery' believer, is against the ideas of curiosity and investigation because,

'where there is faith, there is no need for investigation'

which is a fragile approach to research and an unsound basis for education. It is redolent of all such tyrannies afraid of what their critics might find, from Julius Caesar through Henry VIII to Marxism, Trump, Putin and the more comedic, brief premiership of Boris Johnson but the Soviet Union, Hitler and such enterprises came and went in short order compared to Christianity which has so far been a reich that has lasted over 2000 years.

Like any of them, it presents to the world a credo of goodness and fine principles but a good proportion of ordinary people do good because that is in their nature. These powermongers achieve and maintain their positions not by goodwill but by whatever brutality and bloodshed it takes. Christians were undoubtedly persecuted in the first place but, as Catherine cites de Ste. Croix, 

it had been 'Too little, too late'. Christianity persecuted, too - but it was far, far more effective. 

And, reading Augustine, she can only conclude that,

the Church persecuted less from a love of righteousness than a love of real estate. 

 

It is, of course, a selective account. All history is that. It is not a history of Christianity, it is a survey of the 'heresies' that were swept aside by the orthodoxy of mainly Catholicism. As a devout non-believer, I'm not very interested in the schisms that occurred right from the beginning and I readily concede that good work has been done in among all the horrors by some sects more than others. But it is astonishing what we were told as children and sang about in school every morning about 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', the reverence that such an institution as the papacy, with its hideous back story, is accorded and the extent to which all our lives - not just in the West, because we are just a branch line of it - have been so rooted in this surreal unlikeliness. 

One should never sink to the level of one's adversaries, though. We are better than them and are grateful for the magnificent cathedrals and fine music. Eusebius saw Christians as,

'benighted fools', guilty of 'superficiality and gullibility'

for believing in a 'magician' like Jesus but even if that's what we might think we can choose to be polite enough not to say so. If it hadn't been him it would have been somebody else because we are our own worst enemies and are deeply anxious to be provided with,

Someone to claim us, someone to follow
Someone to shame us, some brave Apollo
Someone to fool us, someone like you.    (footnote)

 

This is unlikely to be made required reading in The Vatican but it's going to take an almighty book to prevent it being my Best Book of this year. I devoured it like a lion that walks abroad seeking what it might. Ms. Nixey's previous book, The Darkening Age, on the similar theme of Christian monoculture and the vandalism it wrought on Classical culture, has been duly ordered.

 

Footnote. David Bowie, Big Brother from Diamond Dogs, 1974.