the centralising influence

Create a vacuum, thought the churchmen apparently, as they were writing the documents that appeared in Hillgarth's book -- draw attention to a contradiction -- a crack will be created there, the universe no longer naturally bound together in that area of the pagan mind -- who created the universe if our gods had to be born? wonders the hypothetical German confronted by Boniface's honest craftiness -- the new idea will ooze in, this new root will sprout, we will be both question and answer, and A manager, said a casino security sergeant to me recently, never asks a question he doesn't know the answer to, but the new Germanic parishioners were not au fait with Latin, they were not sympathetic, they were not Mediterranean though the missionaries were Mediterranean, the instructions had to be changed for them; some tried to graft the new system of worship onto old practices and have sons inherit their fathers' churches -- no, no, said the central church, this is not how it is done -- grinding their teeth in prose -- and Hillgarth picks his excerpts to make you see the rules gradually growing, you can detect the churchmen becoming more law-bound, less ecstatic, less excited, less direct, differently bossy, no longer assuming that they are confronted by a unity; it appears that the unity must be created now consciously, with instructions, not trusted but built.

(Geoffrey Hill, speaking at Oxford University on the meaning of the word eccentricity, said that the original orbit of any revolutionary social movement is eccentric or asymmetrical until "the centralising influence of bureaucrats takes charge" -- then symmetry asserts itself -- the Egyptian uprising in 2011 was his example. (Eccentrique to the ends of his master or state, May 8th, 2011))

Hillgarth works his way chronologically through the centuries. In the beginning, when he is taking examples from the 300s AD, he has passages that address multitudes, Victricious of Rouen telling the crowd they're all loved and valuable, they, the virgins, the widows, the soldiers, the boys, the monks, are all adorable, all able to adore, "let us exert ourselves and put forth sighs from the deepest veins of our bodies" (translated by the Rev. Fr. Jacobus Mulders, S.J.), and then there are epitaphs trimmed into stone for a public audience, "Here there rests at peace the servant of Christ, the Honourable Lady Guntelda ..." (translated by E. Diehl); but by the 6- and 700s at the end of the book there are private letters describing covert plans, the addresses now start with lists of formal church-titles, a phrase like "beloved brother" appears to have become standardised, Bishop Daniel sends his secret guidelines to Boniface, certain ideas are forbidden, decisions are laid down, a wall of laws is being set up to compete or collaborate with the secular kingships; the church starts to make decisions about marriages, charity, land distribution, and clothing. "Each woman, when she communicates, shall have her veil ..." decided the authors of the document known as A Diocesan Council: Auxerre, 561- 605 (translated by C. de Clercq), and a monk may not wear a stole or a ring.

Thus you've gone from mystics to bureaucrats or from external rhetoric to internal canniness, or from largeness to minuteness like Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, which in some ways really is "a history of every one" as it promises, mimicking this movement of forces, the accumulation of increments; everything is reconfiguring, the religion becoming a device with humans responding to its grip, the orderly mind that the churchmen prescribe for the tribesmen is also the order they have found for themselves in this industrial revolution of the brain.

All of this insinuates itself into the religious community over the course of four hundred years, 350 - 750, according to the book's title, human beings calibrating or being calibrated in this way, which is mirrored in secular ways as well at the current time, too, on the internet, the freewheeling messy days gone, gone the days when a personal website was an animated .gif of a road sign and three pictures of your favourite fairies against a field of purple though everyone visited you nonetheless, lame as you were; now there is more to assimilate and less to experience; perhaps this would have been Hillgarth's perception too, if he had lived to see it -- the book published in 1969 -- I think he has to be dead -- once he was the "Assistant Professor of History, Harvard University," according to the front of the book -- tidied away like autumn leaves by now, mouldering with oak and elm and the other trees around which druids in Europe once (according to the documents he arranged into a book) bound their fillets -- a fillet in this case meaning, a band of cloth.

spent with heat, and dissolved

In Hillgarth's book I see a letter from Bishop Daniel of Winchester to Bishop Boniface the missionary, one man telling the other how he should use logic to argue the pagans out of their paganism. "When they have been forced to admit that their gods had a beginning, since they were begotten by others, they should be asked whether the world had a beginning or was always in existence ..." (Translated by C.H. Talbot.) Time will pass and vindicate his cunning; time will make it necessary; the present will have become the only conclusion of the action. For centuries there were monks trying to establish that Aristotle and Virgil were really Christians, as they should be. They were Christians, at heart, somehow, Christians. This is recorded by Haskins. Earlier, earlier, Greek philosophers of the first few centuries AD decided that Plato had been a kind of Moses. "What is Plato but Moses speaking Attic Greek?" asked Numenius of Apamea. Jeremy Taylor in 1651 quotes Pindar and St James together; he praises first Lucien in his Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying and then "God's mercy or God's anger," all of these sources in his essay agreeing with him and supplying him with sayings. They are a united group, Homer, St James, God, and Jeremy Taylor, a Church of England bishop, dead of fever in 1667 with a portrait in Cambridge, the eyes of this portrait looking back over the shoulder, and the hands disembodied against the black cloth of his cape like Egon Schiele flippers.

There was once an Ephesian woman, he says in Dying, who was so miserable after her husband's expiration that she "descended with the corpse into the vault, and there, being attended with her maiden, resolved to weep to death, or die with famine, or a distempered sorrow: from which resolution nor his, not her friends, nor the reverence of the principal citizens, who used the entreaties of their charity and their power, could persuade her." But passion had wrung her out and her feelings were "willing to be gathered into order at the arrest of any new object, being weary of the first, of which, like leeches, they had sucked their fill, till they fell down and burst," so that a soldier came down to see how she was, wound up "married" (writes Taylor) to the mourner on her husband's grave.

For so the wild foragers of Lybia, being spent with heat, and dissolved by the too fond kisses of the sun, do melt with their common fires, and die with faintness, and descend with motions slow and unable to the little brooks that descent from heaven in the wilderness; and when they drink they return into the vigour of a new life, and contract strange marriages; and the lioness is courted by a panther, and she listens to his love, and conceives a monster that all men call unnatural, and the daughter of an equivocal passion and of a sudden refreshment.

The Catholic character M. Paul Emmanuel in Brontë's Vilette accuses the Protestant narrator of paganism but loves her anyway.

Contradictions are reasonable as long as they're kept inside the brain, but bring them out and try to state them logically in public and the soft coexistence of gods or ideas is cut apart; the private God is willing to relax while you burn your magical turf or "immolate a victim for the purpose of a sacrifice, or to consult the quivering entrails" (Theodosian Code (392), translated by Clyde Pharr) but when someone unsympathetic draws hard lines then no, the relaxation vanishes, there's no relaxation, they can't coexist publicly though in your head why not -- in public don't ask don't tell -- and yet what a surprise, I bet you, for many people, to have this pointed out, the private universe cut and prism'd, and themselves forced to choose, a logical toughness is proposed, ancient tourist, if you really believed you were unworthy would you have put those names there? No but the word meant something else when I said it.

to be truly polar

In Hillgarth the early Catholics are destroying and disturbing existing structures, not to do away with structure but to introduce a new one; the mind could not love two structures at once said their verdict; the mind could not be a pagan and a Catholic although to be honest I think that in the privacy of the individual brain these do not have to be contradictory ideas, for who is there anywhere who cannot hold ideas that go against one another, who can't know and not know at the same time, the two states intermixed and cosy, or pressing against one another, so that a teenage passenger in a speeding car comes up with these words for her last text message, "I'm going to die lol," typing with her fingers, first the el, the oh, then another el, an action that comes to pause, later, in the sight of this same message printed later in a newspaper for the sake of horror, the doomed woman expressing a belief in death but also hitting an attitude with those words (almost undoubtedly in sweetly intimate correspondence with the behaviour she has shown in the past) as though she believed she was continuous and should remain consistent: here is faith in life's extension?

No thought goes unmixed, and there is no borderline between thoughts; the plural form of the word thought must be more arbitrary than it looks but I use it anyway, very helplessly.

Perhaps she was horrified when she sent the message out but probably not in the way that the reader of the newspaper is horrified. The word is the same but the experience is not. Hnh, the reader thinks, I might be in the same situation without knowing it, complacent and about to die -- entertaining themselves with this ghost story -- then the piano falls out of the window above them and smack -- no it doesn't -- they go on with life regardless, as Robert Louis Stevenson recommends in Aes Triplex, the writer in this essay sounding so gung-ho that I remember his criticism of Thoreau. "Thoreau was a skulker," says Stevenson, who likes his men to run around with "dash" and get a bit drunk. Shakespeare, he says. Who is there among us who does not believe that the Bard was game for a good shickering when the thought occurred? Drunk he was, and rolling around with the oranges. Thoreau, on the other hand.

"He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had not enough of them to be truly polar with humanity."

But then the essay slides toward the favourable. Contradictory thoughts are easy: the patriot can call the country fine and right even though they've seen the account of the massacre; the parents of gangbangers are quoted in an article saying that their burglar son is a good boy, and when I consider those examples I realise that the woman in the place behind the tree would probably be volcanic with counter arguments if I called her a repressive mother, even though the words I hear her say to her children most often are "Shut the fuck up" and "Get the fuck in your room and don't come out," and yesterday she interrupted one of their arguments by screaming this sentence at her son, "Then let her play with the fucking game by her retarded self; you go outside." Afterwards she kept on screaming with nothing but vowels, and who was that aimed at?

The vikings in Henry Treece's novels manage to cope with all of their gods together, the Christian and the not-Christian, and they were happy until they were lectured and so, apparently, according to documents in Hillgarth, were thousands of other early-Catholic people, going to church at the appointed times, then burning their magical turfs in the barn afterwards and being kind to a tree until someone arrived sternly and said, no, you may not, if you are that then you cannot be this as well; your private accommodations between one jealous god and a group of other gods cannot be sustained, and the private justifications have to be eliminated or buried.

dragged by force

Gaps will be filled, the world wants gestures, "If a monk wanted a book during hours of silence, he made a sign of turning the leaves; if he wanted a classical book, he scratched his ear like a dog," writes Charles Homer Haskins in The Renaissance of the 12th Century; and the early Catholics made pilgrimages to Palestine, says J.N. Hillgarth's book The Conversion of Western Europe 350 -750; they went there to see the places and objects that they recognised from descriptions and perhaps just to get out of the house: "No doubt the pilgrims' motives were mixed, combining, at times, curiosity and tourism with asceticism." Palestine was there, and they were not in it, they must put themselves in it, therefore they went.

One tourist during the 600s came across the couch where Jesus had lain during the wedding at Cana and Jesus was not occupying those cushions at the time, no one was on it, so he lay on it, as did his friends, and his parents' names were not on this couch, so he put them there, a fulfillment of the world's promise -- it was possible for his parents' names to be there -- they were not there -- he put them there -- and relieved himself, and fled from the experience of that vortex. The possibility occurred to him -- my parents' names could be there! -- at that moment he experienced a terrible vacuum, which seemed exterior to himself. Rushing into it he added the names. Irresistible finity had presented itself.

Reading this story I wonder, Where is that couch now, where has the couch gone, what happened to it? I can't believe they've destroyed the couch. I want to see that couch; I want to look at his parents' names, and what handwriting did he have when he described himself with this word: "unworthy"?

... upon which, unworthy as I am, I wrote the names of my parents.

(he explained in a letter, and it must have been translated by Hillgarth)

He knew he shouldn't but he did it anyway, tall child, easily swayed. The early Catholics, who worked against the pagans and Arians during the first centuries AD, must have believed that the mind can choose the system that occupies it, the thread, in other words, that makes it tie events together with one implication and not another implication; the mind could choose Catholicism or paganism, it had to be deterred from paganism; a pagan today did not have to be a pagan tomorrow, the particle was charged one way or another. Bishop Boniface went out from the European south to convert the Germans, other missionaries went out to convert the British; the Spanish in their Lex Visigothorum (642 - 52) laid down a law of force and said that magicians should be scourged, scalped, and then dragged through ten villages.

Magicians and invokers of tempests, who, by their incantations, bring hail-storms upon vineyards and fields of grain [...] shall be publicly scourged with two hundred lashes; shall be scalped; and shall be dragged by force through ten villages in the neighbourhood, as a warning to others.

(Translated by S.P. Scott)

Well yes, you think, but they could have gone further.