High above the Molo Audace, at the summit of Trieste, the cathedral of San Giusto stands beside a castle on the top of a hill. It is dedicated to St Justin, but is equally devoted to the well-known Roman martyr Sergius, because at the very moment when he was decapitated for the faith in Syria, in the fourth century A D, a halberd fell out of the skies into Trieste, and has been preserved in the city ever since, besides appearing on the civic coat of arms. The view from San Giusto’s campanile is magnificent – a grand panorama of sea and mountain, city, port and suburb, looking south and east to Croatia and Slovenia, north towards Austria, westward across the gulf to Venice. Such a noble prospect sets one thinking about a definition of Europe.
I did not think much about definitions when I first came here. I thought of Europe simply as ‘abroad’. The rest of the world seemed on the whole rather less foreign, and huge swathes of it were actually British. Fifty years later, defining the continent is much less simple for me. I take it to end at the frontiers of Turkey and the old Soviet Union, but that is a matter of prejudice or convenience. It is an invented place anyway. Geographically it is no more than a peninsula protruding from the land mass of Asia, with attendant islands and archipelagos. Culturally it has always been a shifting confusion of languages, peoples and traditions. Politically it is a movable feast: of the thirty-five sovereign States in my idea of Europe, nine have been created or resurrected during my half-century. Sweden was not considered a proper European country until the seventeenth century. Greece, for all its classical pedigree, was hardly a part of Europe until it gained its independence from the Turks. Spain often feels, as Auden once said, as though it is ‘tacked on to the bottom of Europe’. Within living memory people in northern Bulgaria called going to Vienna ‘going to Europe’, and British people to this day say they are visiting Europe when they cross the English Channel. It seems to me that down the centuries only religion has given the continent any lasting common identity.
Judaism has sometimes been powerful in Europe; the threat and presence of Islam has crucially affected its history; but paganism and Christianity have been the continent’s universal defining factors, and the one long ago mastered the other. ‘Populus et christianitas una est,’ declared the Emperor Charles the Bald in the ninth century; nine centuries later the Treaty of Utrecht was still talking about a ‘Republica Christiana’; Gladstone thought the Concert of Europe symbolical of Christian unity. Europe and Christendom were synonymous, and even now, if you happened to fall from outer space anywhere in Europe, somewhere in sight there would probably be a steeple, a dome, a belfry-tower or the silhouetted mass of a monastery. But God knows the Christian temples raise their crosses to heaven in very different styles and tones of voice, and looking down at Trieste from its cathedral tower we can see for ourselves the bewildering variety of the faith. The domed neoclassical church down there, presiding over a canal full of boats, is the Roman Catholic church of Sant Antonio Taumaturgo – St Antony the Wonder-Worker. The one with the two towers is the Greek Orthodox church of San Nicolò. With a street map in our hands we may be able to place the pretty little Anglican Christ Church classically pedimented, and the Evangelical church with its tall neo-Gothic steeple, and the seventeenth-century Jesuit church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and the eleventh-century church of San Silvestro where the Waldensians worship, and the big Serbian Orthodox church with a Byzantine dome; and there is a Benedictine church down there, and a Franciscan church, and the former church of the Armenian fathers, where they now have Catholic services in German, and a Methodist chapel somewhere, and the neat little private church that the crooked millionaire Pasquale Revoltella built as a mausoleum for his mother and himself. In the autumn of 1995 I came up here to the cathedral with a television crew, in search of material. It turned out to be the festival day of St Sergius, and there on an altar was displayed the miraculous halberd, with policemen guarding it, and a mighty choir singing, and priests in golden vestments processing all around.
And that’s just the Christians! There were religions in Europe long before Christ, pagan beliefs of many kinds, cults of the Greeks and Romans which have entered all our myths – and even before them, and far more compelling for me, the misty megalithic religion, which seems to have been as widespread as European Christianity would ever be, and probably longer lasting. Looking back upon my half-century of Europe, then, trying to give shape to my responses from my vantage point in space and time, I recall first a few random and decidedly mixed symptoms of its sanctity.
1 The rocks
I am an animist or pantheist myself. I believe all Nature to be God, and like Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago I reverence the forces of earth and sky as my own ancestors. Years ago I found myself profoundly moved by Dafydd ap Gwilym’s great Welsh poem ‘Offeren y Llwyn’, ‘The Woodland Mass’, which imagines a forest as a place of worship, with the golden leaves as a chancel roof, and the nightingale raising the host ‘a charegl nwyf a chariad’ – ‘with a chalice of ecstasy and love’. So I have always been moved too when, all across Europe, I have found relics of the religions that preceded Christianity. In this continent people were exploring the mysteries of theology for several millennia before the news of Christ came out of the East, and when they were not contemplating the sacred wonders of the sun and moon, or the numen of forests, or idols of one sort or another, it seems to me that they were generally venerating rocks. In Malta and Orkney, Ireland and Corsica, from the myriad menhirs of Carnac in Brittany to the grand ensemble of the English Stonehenge, the rocks were elevated into sanctity. Sometimes they were given priestly significance too, as intermediaries with the heavens; but while the arcane powers of the heavenly bodies have unfortunately been discounted (nothing could be much less magical, it turns out, than the moon), the rocks themselves defy geological analysis to retain their enchantments still. To my mind they are the holiest things in Europe. Reverently indeed, and affectionately, I place my foot into the sacred footprints incised in stones in the west of Europe – supposed now, of course, to be the footprints of Christian saints or pilgrims, but to my mind the stamps of far older divines. I love the texture of the old stones, roughened sometimes by lichen. There are some rocks which seem to me warm to the touch, as if there is a gentle fire inside them – nothing as savage as flame, more a meditative smoulder of wood-ash. Also some, especially near my home in Wales, have a sweet and comforting smell to them, like the smell of donkeys.
2 Touching things
Surrounded still by pagan legend, many a sacred boulder has lingered into our own times as palladium or public charm, and the passion for touching things, a favourite form of modern European mumbo-jumbo, undoubtedly descends from the reverent caressing of such significant stones, by way of relics of the Cross. Nowadays most of the objects people publicly touch for luck are made of bronze or some equally wearable metal, and are visibly polished or worn down, but they are all of stony pedigree. I enjoy watching people perform the touching process (when I am not performing it myself). In some places they touch the lucky object as a matter of course, without thinking about it; in others it seems to be a genuinely spiritual experience; in others a semi-joke.
¶ The figure of the mythical Cuchulain in Dublin’s General Post Office, a focus of the rebellion against English rule in 1916, has been a talisman only since then, and is less than a century old anyway, but has already been given the gloss of sanctity by much credulous fingering (regular customers touch it with a sort of intense matter-of-factness, rather as they dip their fingers into the holy water on their way into mass). ‘Who is that figure?’ I once asked a woman as she joined me in the queue for stamps, having made her ritual touch. ‘Sure I don’t know his name,’ she said, ‘but he’s a well-known lucky feller.’
¶ Till Eulenspiegel, that archetypal rascal of German myth, is the personage to touch at Mölln in Schleswig-Holstein. He sits in bronze below the church in the old market-place of the town, a setting of such fairy-tale picturesqueness, with its gable roofs and half-timbering, that the whole thing might be an illustration from a children’s pop-up book. Till has only been there since 1951, but such is his tactile allure that already two of his toes, and one of his long fingers, have been rubbed through to the brass.
¶ At Dijon in France women touch the little figure of an owl on the Rue de la Chouette as casually as they might pull on a glove – except that, since it is perched rather high on a wall, small ladies have to jump a bit to reach the bird, and children have to be lifted one after the other, their mothers never interrupting, all the same, the flow of their own conversations,
¶ On the other hand people in Brussels seem a little self-conscious as they approach the reclining figure of the local fourteenth-century hero Everard ’t Serclaes, off the Grand’ Place. They look around and smile rather defensively as they stroke it – even more so, I fancy, if they reach up to touch the little dog in the plaque above the champion’s figure, which is almost as worn as he is.
¶ Almost all visitors touch the lucky figure of St John of Nepomuk on the Charles Bridge at Prague (he was martyred in 1393 by drowning in the river below). This is one of the supreme tourist icons of Europe, and it is entertaining to see how anxious they all are to proclaim their scepticism: ‘It’s only for fun,’ they one and all seem to be saying as they pose for the camera; ‘of course we don’t take it seriously …’ But I have seen young Czechs at twilight touching it with real reverence.
¶ Outside the Rathaus in the city of Dresden there stands a large bronze of the god Bacchus, riding what looks like an extremely drunk small donkey. One of the god’s toes gleams with the wear of devotees’ fingers, and I am not surprised: through all the horrors of war and miseries of Communism this merry figure, on his cheerfully inebriated ass, must have offered some symbolic reminder of happy times and irresponsibilities.
¶ Nobody sniggers, nobody looks self-conscious, nobody’s mind is elsewhere when they pause to touch foreheads with the bare bronze head of Maestro Mateo, the architect of Santiago Cathedral in Spain, who kneels for ever beside its western door. Santiago de Compostela is one of the supreme pilgrim sites of Europe, and Mateo is the gatekeeper at the end of every pilgrimage – the gatekeeper of fulfilment. Who would be foolish or ungrateful enough not to bump heads with him, there at the door of his magnificent building, with the gleam of its altars waiting inside?
¶ I have noticed that in Bucharest, on the hill which leads from the Patriarchal Cathedral to the concrete modern quarters below, many people touch a particular lamppost. I don’t know why. When I asked one citizen why he did it, he asked me if I would care to change some US dollars at extremely favourable rates.
3 The old religion
Many of the old stones are totems of the megalithic faith, whatever that was: the most widespread of the religions, it seems, that gives some specious cohesion to the idea of Europe before Christianity arrived – specious, because modern scholarship seems to show that it did not after all constitute any grand unitary system. There are said to be almost as many megalithic monuments still extant on the continent as there are Christian churches. Nowadays they are ever more vulnerable to archaeology and tourism, two disciplines about equally immune to reverence and numen which have done more than time itself to take the magic out of megaliths. I cheer when their arcane virtue triumphs anyway! For instance I know a rock near Reguengos, in the Alentejo country of Portugal, that has merrily survived all scholarly or bureaucratic attention. It is a very tall and flat-topped fertility symbol. Lovers who succeed in throwing a stone to the top of it can be assured of a happy romance, and the Rocha des Enamoradas is littered with successful pebbles, and frequented by scores of weekend couples who, having parked their cars across the road, throw their stones up there only half in self-mockery. At Riga in Latvia some phallic-looking stones stand on the banks of the River Daugava, in the heart of the city: I don’t know if they are themselves of any ancient sanctity, but I do know (because I have watched them from my hotel window) that two or three times almost every day brides go there all in white to be photographed beside them, honouring if only unconsciously the lusty rites of their forebears.
Once I stopped for a picnic lunch off the road between Vitoria and Pamplona, in the Basque country of Spain: and as I spread out my cheese, wine and bread-hunks on the grass, I caught sight of five or six little cypress trees, planted in formal gravity upon a nearby mound. I wandered over to see why they had been planted there, expecting to find some florid Catholic shrine or memorial of the Spanish Civil War. Instead I discovered in the hollow beyond the mound an inexpressibly ancient stone cromlech. It looked rather toad-like – greyish, speckled with lichen, squat. Authority had fenced it with those cypresses as if to reduce it to a more prosaic status, like a cemetery or a commemorative slab: but the wind whistled superbly through its great ugly boulders that day, and made the line of trees seem a finicky irrelevance.
4 The Paladins
For my tastes the grandest and strangest of all the megaliths are the tall menhir-statues of Filitosa on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. They are called the Paladini, the Paladins, and they have a majesty all their own. The archaeologist Dorothy Carrington, who first made them known to a wider world, claims that they are ‘perhaps the earliest portraits of individual human beings in western Europe’, the predecessors of a hundred thousand equestrian marshals, marmoreal statesmen, bronze Lenins and anonymous mourning soldiers. Dr Carrington thinks they are probably about 5,000 years old. When I discovered them for myself in the 1970s not much had been done to temper their arcane authority. A track led through the fields to them, but it was muddy and slippery and unwelcoming to tourist groups, and the fields themselves were unkempt, with brambly bushes here and there, a few clumps of neglected olives, and a smell of the sea. It felt essentially an ordinary, workaday place, which ought to have had cows in it, and perhaps sometimes did: but the five pillars stood there marvellously recondite, maybe a little sinister. They looked aloof and scornful. Were they really human heroes? Were they gods? Were they phallic emblems? Were they good or bad? Nobody knew then; nobody knows now. While I was considering them a mist came drifting off the sea, and for a moment they looked like so many twisted and time-worn crucifixes.
5 Światowit
I suppose you could always see in those Paladins what you wanted to see, and they may have been idols all the time. The line is thin between a simple megalith and a graven image, as you may see if you ever visit the archaeological museum at Kraków in Poland. There lives Światowit, the very last survivor of the pagan gods of the Slavs. He is about a thousand years old, and none of his comrades has ever been found. He stands in an alcove of his own in the museum, against a photographic background of a birch-wood, and at first sight he may seem no more than another standing stone, seven or eight feet tall. When you get close to him, though, you find he has crossed the line between rock and idol. His body is no simple pillar of stone after all, but is carved all over with mystic images of animals and people: his head has four faces, one on each side, and is crowned with a bowl-like hat. A copy of this arcane divinity stands at the foot of the hill that leads up to the castle and cathedral of Kraków, the stateliest place in Poland: and especially when there is snow on the ground, and Światowit stands there silhouetted grey and enigmatic in his bowler, looking all ways at once, you may think he has not lost his powers even now.
6 Cheerfulness creeps in
Enigmatic in a more cheerful way are the queer stone maze-games which the ancients have left, here and there across the continent, to intrigue us still. Sometimes they are large enough to walk through, sometimes just scratches in a rock. They are traditionally associated, nearly everywhere, with the city of Troy, and are sometimes named after it. Just outside Visby, the capital of the Swedish Baltic island of Gotland, there is a famous example which has always been known to the islanders as Trojeborg – Troytown – and is as casually accepted by the people as an amusement park. It seems almost new, and to this day hosts of children entertain themselves by following its paths, their laughter echoing through the woods and up the hillside behind. I did it myself, all on my own one bright spring morning, and felt remarkably close to the prehistoric designers, who, whatever their reasons for making it, surely had fun trying it out.
In Gotland there are also many ship-graves – graves of prehistoric notables laid out in the shape of galleys. These too, though clearly sacred sites, possess none of the melancholy one rather expects of megalithic monuments. They lie dreaming on woodland glades, clambered over delicately by flowers and creepers, or bask in a self-satisfied chieftainly manner in grasslands above the sea, inspiriting all who visit them. I like to think this is because they retain some of the boisterous convivial temperament of the nobles buried in them, and the confidence of their beliefs. Prehistoric places can feel much less reassuring when they have clearly lost their holiness, when their gods and ghosts have gone. I was decidedly disturbed by my only visit (one was enough) to the cave called Idheon in Crete, on the slopes of Mount Psiloritis. This was an extremely sacred place in ancient times – Zeus was said to have been born in it – but it did not comfort me. Dusk was falling as I reached the place, but it was not the high loneliness of it or the greyness of the scene that chilled me. It was the feeling that, for all the faith and reverence expended there down the centuries, not one shred of emotion lingered. The wind had scoured it all, and the cave was just a hole in the rock.
7 Old music
Music must always have echoed around these holy places and their rituals, and in northern Europe there still exist some of the instruments played by the priests or acolytes of long ago. In Denmark they have hauled out of bogs some thirty examples of the lur, the bronze horn that sounded among the rocks at least a thousand years before the birth of Christ. They have long wiggly worm-like tubes, carefully fashioned mouthpieces and decorated flat bells, and, since they were evidently sometimes used as war-trumpets, loose metal plates that jangled to make the general effect more terrifying. At the National Museum at Copenhagen several of these things are strung on wires within a glass case, their convoluted tubes twisted this way and that, looking like so many sea-snakes or amoebas. Sometimes pairs of them are removed from the museum and played on ceremonial occasions, producing then what must be the oldest sound in Europe. Opinions seem to differ about its nature. The National Museum calls it deep and plangent, rather like the sound of a trombone. Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1940 edition) thought it rough and blatant. The French writer Marcel Brion called it a sombre, tragic call. A frank Danish lady told me it was horrid. But we are at liberty to imagine for ourselves what the lur sounded like in the hands of its original masters, and I prefer myself to think of its call as hoarse, breathy, gusty and intermittent, like the sound of a sea-wind through a crevice in a cliff, or the voice of a Corsican paladin.
8 Two magical stones
I visited two of the most magical of European stones on a single afternoon in London. First I took a cab and went to see the London Stone. ‘To the London Stone!’ I theatrically cried, and the driver understood me, although nobody really knew what the London Stone was, or ever had been. Perhaps it was something very holy once. Perhaps it was something lewd. Perhaps it was the central milestone of Roman Britain. Perhaps it was a column at the gate of the Roman governor’s palace, a symbol of his authority. By medieval times the legend had arisen that its possession guaranteed mastery of the capital itself – ‘Now London is mine!’ cried the rebel Jack Cade when in 1450 he struck it with his sword – and it was eventually built into a wall of St Swithin’s church in the City of London. This was bombed in the Second World War, and an office of the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation now stands upon its site, almost opposite Cannon Street railway station. In a wall of the bank a last fragment of the London Stone was carefully preserved. My taxi-driver knew exactly where to find it. I could only just see it from the street, half-hidden behind an iron grille, but inside the building the Chinese bankers displayed it with some reverence behind a sheet of glass. It looked like an ancestral totem there, or perhaps something to do with feng-shui.
Next I went to Westminster Abbey, and among all the cluttered paraphernalia of English historical pride, the shadowy statues, the flowery memorials to poets, statesmen and generals, the jumble of royal mementoes, the daily multitude of tourists, glowering for all to see I found the Stone of Scone, 335 pounds of rough-hewn limestone also known as the Stone of Destiny. Its prehistory was stunning. Was it not the very stone upon which Jacob rested, when he saw the angels coming? Did it not reside for a thousand years upon the Hill of Tara, mystic seat of the high kings of Ireland? Its history was extraordinary too. For several centuries it was kept at the Scottish village of Scone in Tayside, and there it became so revered a symbol of Scottishness that the kings of Scotland were crowned upon it. When the English invaded Scotland in the thirteenth century they took it away to London and built around it their own coronation throne, upon which kings and queens of England were consecrated ever after. Farcical muddles, contradictions, misunderstandings and escapades attended the Stone of Scone, and some Scots believed that it was only a copy anyway, and that the original was hidden somewhere in Scotland. When I went to Westminster to see it, whether or not it was the true talisman, it lay there beneath the seat of the throne as a broodingly charismatic emblem of historical dreams and resentments. But hardly had I made my pilgrimage that day than the British Government, inspired less by altruism than by expediency, after 700 years returned the Stone of Scone with preposterous flummery to the Scots (who prudently deposited it this time in Edinburgh Castle, the most secure of all their fortresses, and charged visitors of all persuasions £5.50 to see it).
9 Chimerical aspects
There were chimerical aspects to the old beliefs that I greatly enjoy, bridging as they do the gap between intellect and instinct. They call it crypto-zoology nowadays, but the Loch Ness Monster is distinctly holy to me. Whether it exists in the flesh or only in the mind, it is undeniably a truth of some sort, peering at us from the murky past like the goggle-eyed insect in cuckoo-spit. Some cynics say it is no more than an unconscious memory of the dinosaurs, but I do not doubt that it was once a religious conception, a figure of good or evil, born out of the rocks. All over Europe such creatures are remembered – lakes and rivers from the Baltic to the Black Sea boil, hiss and steam with their legendary thrashings. The last of the Welsh dragons spent his nights in the dragon-chamber high in the church tower of Llandeilo Graban, and beside the doorway of the great cathedral of Kraków there hangs a bundle of queer, crooked, immemorial bones to remind the faithful of the holy animals of long ago.
Most of their sanctities have been frittered away into folk-tale or tourism, and outsiders make a joke of the Loch Ness chimera, draw silly cartoons of it and call it ‘Nessie’. To many Scots people living around the loch, though, it is as real as the lake itself. Long before the engines of publicity fell upon the mystery, they had been brought up in the everyday knowledge of creatures out there in the water. Their fathers and grandfathers had known of them, and never doubted their existence; in the Gaelic language they were called nothing so insulting as ‘monster’, but each uisce, ‘water-horse’. I have met several sober people who assure me they have witnessed Loch Ness water-horses, who see nothing comical in the idea of them, and who talk without self-consciousness about their experiences. In 1985 the postmistress of Dores told me that she occasionally saw a creature or two playing off the point below her house. It was usually about teatime, she said.
10 Looking for witches
The idea that the megalithic cults gave rise to a benevolent European witchcraft has apparently been discredited by scholars. Religious witches and warlocks throughout Europe think otherwise: they maintain white witchcraft to be an ancient and benign matriarchal faith, inherited from most ancient times and given a bad name by macho Christian persecutors. I prefer to agree with them, because I feel a sympathy for what I read about their practices: their reverence for the old stones, their taste for harmless private ritual, their belief in a universal Mother-God all seem to make theirs one of the less unappealing of organized religions, even if it is tangled up with Aquarianism, New Ageism, Flower Peopleness, feminist dogma and neo-Tolkienism. But of course for most people a witch is a witch is a witch, and belief in witchly maleficium certainly survives. Not only schoolgirls, in twentieth-century Europe, stick pins in wax effigies of their enemies, and nobody denies the power of suggestion, for good or for ill. In Normandy in the 1970s bad witches were still often blamed for miscarriages, children’s sicknesses or butter refusing to churn, and good witches (‘blessers’ they used to be called) were frequently called in to put things right. Recognizing your witch is, of course, always a problem. In sixteenth-century Europe the only sure sign was thought to be something called ‘the witch’s mark’ – a sort of teat on a woman’s body, usually near the pudenda, which showed where her devilish familiar – rat, toad, hare or cat – had sucked her blood; yet even in my time people in different parts of the continent have confidently asserted the presence of genuine, old-school witches.
A few years ago in the Sierra Nevada of Spain, for example, I was assured that witchcraft both malicious and benign was flourishing. I should look out, they said, for herbalists and magic potionists in the hill-villages. Sure enough, idling through one such hamlet I saw a notice in a window advertising an infallibly curative and rejuvenative jelly, and went inside to inquire. The room was pitch-black but for the flickering light of a television showing, at that moment, a young American male in bed with two nubile girls. Amidst the gloom, surrounded by dim glass jars of liquids and boxes of desiccated vegetables I could just make out two grimly antediluvian figures: a withered old man with a stick, sitting in an armchair, and a fierce stooped-shouldered woman at a velvet-clothed table. They stared at me in grisly silence. Real witches? I hardly liked to ask – ‘Excuse me, do you happen to have a teat near your pudenda?’ – and thinking that they looked decidedly more malicious than benign, I bought a bag of figs and ran. Then again, I was intrigued to learn that a village in Corsica which really did seem to me of black vibrations was a notorious residence of the Mazzeri – powerfully scary seers and sorcerers who had the power to foresee death, could be in two places at the same time, and lived in a dream-world all their own. How chill and penetrating were the eyes, at least in retrospect, of some of the villagers I interviewed!
Near my home in Wales a woman who habitually left field gates open, allowing sheep to wander, was alleged only half in fun to be a witch, but for myself I agree with the English sage Reginald Scot, who wrote in 1584 that malevolent witchcraft was a matter for ‘children, fooles and melancholike persons’. It is not witches we should fear, but witch-hunters.
11 ‘Mere superstitions’
‘Mere superstitions,’ say Christian theologians about all these remnants and echoes of old faiths, but of course they have long spilled over into the Christian consciousness too. It is belief that does the trick. Contemporary European beliefs run the gamut from trust in lucky numbers to the conviction that the bread and wine of the Eucharist really are, despite all taste and appearance, transmuted by magic mantras into the flesh and blood of Christ. At Namur in Belgium people revere a reliquary supposed to contain some of the Virgin Mary’s milk! Thousands of Neapolitans are persuaded to this day that on the feast of St Januarius the solidified blood of that martyr is miraculously liquefied, although it is 150 years since the Oxford scholar William Buckland, falling on his knees before the liquefaction, licked the blood and pronounced it bat’s urine. Adolf Hitler, the dominant European of his time, belived in the tomfoolery of astrologers. In the streets of Bucharest, after nearly half a century of dialectical materialism, it was common to see well-dressed, perfectly modern members of the bourgeoisie crossing themselves before braving a traffic intersection; in Zagreb market-men do the same thing, without looking up from their commerce, when the cathedral bell sounds the angelus. I myself have not walked under a ladder for years, and invariably reach out of my bedclothes to touch my wooden bedstead if a rashly complacent thought enters my mind. Like nearly everyone, too, I frequently offer a silent prayer at moments of stress or frustration – always opening archaically, I have observed, with the phrase ‘Please O God’, inexpungible echo of an Anglican childhood.
Charms, magic crystals, holy oils, tarot cards, vampirology, exorcisms, the prophecies of fortune-tellers, prayers for rain or victory, sacred relics, touching things – Europeans still have faith in all these nostrums. In the months before the Second World War the then-famous astrologer of the London Daily Express repeatedly assured his readers, having consulted the constellations, that there would be no war in Europe. When the Germans invaded Poland, precipitating the maelstrom, the headline above his column read ‘HITLER DEFIES THE STARS.’
12 In between
Being a sort of permanent compromise myself, I especially enjoy the syncretics of European religion, places and rituals where old faiths impinge upon new. Gandhi used to say that all religions were right, and all were wrong. Certainly they are all related, however much they detest each other, and when its time came Christianity never did quite throw off its pagan inheritances. Of course the Christian Establishment did its best, being particularly severe about the rocks. Lighting candles at stones, declared St Martin, Bishop of Dumium, in 574, was nothing more or less than devil-worship, and the Decree of Nantes, in 658, ordered bishops to ‘dig up and remove and hide in places where they cannot be found those stones which in remote and woody places are still worshipped’. In ancient churches all over Europe I have been pleased to find elfish figures, little green men or chimeras, deftly translated from one belief to another – from one sect to another too, for they have often been willy-nilly inherited through doctrinal revolutions and reforms, and it is fun to see them mischievously peeking out from rood screens and choir stalls in austere churches of Protestantism. Often you will find a rock of ancient faith nervously incorporated in a church wall, just in case, or standing outside a Gothic porch like Banquo’s ghost, or converted into a cross or a Calvary. At Gamla Uppsala, where Sweden’s primeval kings are buried, the little church beside the burial mounds was built on the site of Sweden’s last active pagan temple – perhaps on the same foundations, perhaps even to a similar design. The imagery of the rock proved inexpungible, too. ‘Upon this rock I will build my church,’ said Jesus himself of Simon Peter. ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me,’ sing faithful Anglican congregations to this day. ‘When God made the rocks he made the fossils in them,’ declared the brave fundamentalist John Keble. When Charlemagne set up his imperial capital at Aachen in the eighth century of the Christian era, his royal chapel was built with infinite subtlety of biblical allusion, following the proportions of the mystic numbers in the Book of Revelation; but although one of his own edicts, in 789, had execrated ‘before God’ all the holy stones, still his own throne, the supreme seat of earthly power, was made of rough marble rock.
Beside a road in central Portugal I once came across a little building which seemed to speak to me direct from the in-between days of European religion. The chapel of São Brissos was famous actually, but I had never heard of it before. Its basis was an ancient cromlech, three stones in tripod with a boulder on top, but a Christian church had been built within and around it. All was whitewashed, with a blue margin around the base, and pagan and Christian were inextricably united. On one side there was a door, and a window with white lace curtains, looking rather cosy: on another the rocks were bare and lightly touched with lichen, and looked as though they had been there since the Ice Age. They held regular Christian services in this primeval structure, so a passing bicyclist informed me, and I had to assume that the priests of the rock had been obliged to give way to the priests of the Cross. I could not help wondering, though, whether the devotions of the present congregation were not partly pagan too, and sure enough long afterwards I came across this observation about São Brissos, and other such hybrids, in an official Portuguese publication of 1992: ‘Local people are aware of the religious character of dolmens and … it is in the interest of those who hold power in society that these monuments be integrated into the official order of things.’
13 Regression
As it happens those who have held power in society have often been under the spell of the rocks themselves, almost into our own times. The common people of Europe frequently used the ancient megaliths as Christian shrines, as tombs, as barns, as cowsheds and even occasionally as cafés. The governing classes more often made new ones, because in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became modish to commission mock-megalithic monuments, garden follies and hilltop ornaments. Some were very convincing shams. Most strangers who penetrate to the so-called Druids’ Temple near Masham in Yorkshire, England, take it to be as old as Merlin. Actually it was built in the 1820s by a local squire, William Danby, to give work to local people at a time of hardship. Hidden away secretively in a pine plantation on the moors, it is a very elaborate approximation of Stonehenge – smaller, but more so. Within a circle of standing stones and capstones there are ceremonial pillars, platforms, altars and chambers, and among the trees around stand sundry dolmens and triliths. When I was there an elderly man I found intensely studying the ensemble asked me how old I thought it was. I told him about Mr Danby, and he said I had cruelly shattered his illusions, especially as it had taken him two days to find the place.
In Germany megalithic monuments were often associated with more dreadful pagan traditions, warlike gods and Wagnerian legends, and so had a particular appeal for the balefully mystic Nazis. It is said to have been Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS and chief scourge of the Jews, who inspired the most ambitious of all megalithic shams, the vast pagan place of ceremony at Sachsenhain, near Verden in Lower Saxony. Built in the 1930s, it was meant to commemorate 4,500 Saxon slaves slaughtered there by the Franks – a slaughter, that is, of healthy Nordic pagans by effete Christian intruders from the South. Accordingly 4,500 boulders were taken to the site and erected in a vast circular avenue, perhaps a mile and a quarter round. I suppose it is the largest neo-antiquity ever made. Sometimes the avenue opens out into platforms, sometimes it is joined by lesser paths of boulders, and it surrounds a pleasant grassy meadow, with a stream running through it, and cows grazing, and cherry blossoms in season, and a tump, whether natural or man-made, conveniently sited at the edge of it.
When I was led to Sachsenhain I was at first rather charmed by the place. It suggested to me Christ Church Meadows at Oxford, harmlessly transformed under the influence of some eccentric scholar. But as I walked around the avenue myself (birds singing, a couple of women exercising their dogs) I thought about the fanatic ceremonies the Nazis held there at solstice times, proclaiming their allegiance I suppose to the virile and ethnically impeccable Old Gods of the Germans. I fancied then their torchlight parades processing between the rocks, ritually challenged by other companies of cultists at symbolical intersections, shouting slogans, singing hymns of hatred, pausing at platforms for curses or incantations; and in the flicker of their torches I saw the glinting narrow eyes of the High Priest Himmler, behind his steel-framed glasses. Even phoney megaliths can be powerfully evocative.
14 Inscription upon an entirely bogus mock-megalithic folly erected by George Law, Bishop of Bath and Wells, circa 1840
Here where once druids trod in times of yore
And stain’d their altars with a victim’s gore
Here now the Christian ransomed from above
Adores a God of Mercy and of love.
15 We Druids
Those Druids came somewhere between the megalithics and the Christians, and they are relatively familiar to us. Nobody knows what a priest of the megalithic religion looked like, but we all think we know the look of a Druid. Druids survived into historical times, and left some of their mysteries behind. In Wales the classical forms of alliterative verse, still enthusiastically practised by poets young and old, are said to be inherited from the mnemonics of the Druids, and costumed Druids preside over the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol, the itinerant national cultural festival, attended by flower-maidens of the forest. I am myself a Druid on those occasions, a member of the White Order of the Gorsedd of Bards. Our rituals and regalia are in fact of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century origins, devised by a half-crazed genius littérateur called Iolo Morgannwg, and given substance by the painter Hubert Herkomer and the sculptor Goscombe John, who between them designed a glorious set of neo-Druidical robes and insignia – blue, green, white, gold, silver and ermine.
Before the grand occasions of the festival, we members of the Gorsedd (a body of bards which Iolo resurrected, or perhaps invented) assemble in some nearby school to Druidize ourselves in flowing robes and headdresses. There is no denying comedy to this process. The setting is generally prosaic – the usual deal tables and metal-framed windows of a country school, the playground empty outside, the air smelling slightly of chalk and india-rubber. The bards range from scholarly dissertationists to opera singers or poetical anarchists. The Mistress of the Robes is a motherly soul like a minister’s wife at a chapel fête. And there we cheerfully transform ourselves, with laughter and badinage, into figures from a mythical past. The men’s shoes tend to protrude awkwardly beneath their robes. The women’s earrings are not invariably in keeping. Some people have trouble getting their headgear right. Never mind, off we go in a mass of whites, greens and blues, to clamber into the buses that will take us to the Eisteddfod field – through their windows we can be seen peering out, often incongruously spectacled, to wave greetings to un-Druidical friends and relatives lining the route. Outsiders often sneer at this charade, but they do not understand it. It has its funny aspects, but it represents a conviction and a comradeship as strong as any forest-oath of the original Druids. When I first assumed the dignities of the Druidic Order of the White Robe it was one of the proudest moments of my life.
16 Atavism
In the most varied European places one discovers religious atavism (‘some strange recurrence,’ as Walter Bagehot defined it, ‘to a primitive past’). When St Bernadette saw her apparition of the Virgin at Lourdes in 1858, she called it ‘une petite demoiselle’ – a fairy in the local vernacular. As late as the 1880s, in England, the Revd John Atkinson was told disconcertingly that ‘the priests of the old religion were more powerful conjurors than you church priests’. Even Friedrich Nietzsche, declaring God to be dead, allowed that the divine shadow might still lurk in caves! Inside the Church of England church at Haworth in Yorkshire, where the Revd Patrick Brontë brought up his genius daughters, in the 1980s I found a branch of a tree set up as a votive. Among its twigs the local population had expressed its hopes and yearnings as fervently as any African tribeswoman propitiating evil spirits. ‘Please Let Me Be Mark Aspen’s Girl Friend,’ said one childish scrawl on a crumpled piece of lined writing-paper, ‘Please Let Me And My Sister Be Friends Again,’ said another, and there were several heartfelt pleas requesting a victory for Halifax Town in their Saturday match. Tatters of rags on Polish bushes – discarded crutches in holy places of Spain or Italy – midnight processions and miraculous cures – ‘Please O God make me find the car keys’ – all such feral manifestations, conducted now under the aegis of the Cross, remind me still of the rocks.
17 In love with death
A death-cult, some scholars think, was part of the megalithic religion. If so, it has certainly been inherited by modern Europeans. Mummies and corpses, blood and bones go naturally enough, I suppose, with a culture which was founded upon death by torture, and no ghoul or necrophile need feel deprived in Christian Europe. Dead people are available everywhere, together with innumerable anatomical pieces pickled in reliquaries. There are mummified nuns in Dublin, calcified monks in Naples, leathery corpses from the marsh at Schleswig, perfectly preserved 2,000-year-old people from Trundholm Bog in Denmark, a charnel-house lined with the bones of 5,000 dead bodies at Évora in Portugal and the skeleton of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, wearing nankeen trousers and bedroom slippers, sitting in a glass case at University College, London. If you drop fifty forints into a slot in Budapest the mummified hand of St Stephen will automatically be illuminated. At the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, Sicily, the desiccated corpses of generations of citizens are on display, guarded by friars and climaxed by the body of a child labelled ‘BAMBINA – SLEEPING BEAUTY GIRL’. ‘Be very careful,’ one of the friars said in a flat sort of voice as I left this macabre exhibition – ‘watch out for robbers.’ I thought there was a queer look in his eye, rather like the stare of those Corsican villagers, and hardly had I left the sacred premises than two thugs on a motor-bike snatched my bag and left me destitute.
18 The mountain
I am sure that sages long before St Patrick frequented the mountain called Croagh Patrick, on the west coast of Ireland in County Mayo, from whose summit the saint expelled all serpents from the island. It is the epitome of a holy rock, with Druidical associations too. The Irish call it ‘The Reek’, and it rises bare and bold from the sea-coast, overlooking a bay littered with a hundred islands. Nowadays the crowds who make the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage on the last Sunday in July ostensibly make the climb in search of Christian solace, but when I joined them I am sure I was not alone in feeling instincts far more elemental. We could hardly claim to be aspiring to the sun or the moon – we could scarcely see the top of the mountain itself for the rain – but we were certainly in intimate contact with the rocks.
Some 20,000 of us made the climb. We would have been more, I was told, were it not for a Roscommon – Mayo football match being played that afternoon. At the bottom of the mountain tinkers and their boys sold us rough-cut sticks – ‘Reek Sticks’ in the vernacular – and all that day, huddled in anoraks against the drizzle, the pilgrims set off up the mass of the mountain, some alone, some in groups, some laughing and singing, some saying Hail Marys all the way. It was like moving with the crowd along a city shopping pavement. There were imps and there were elders. There were rugged old ladies. There were teams of soldiers in uniform. Some of the tinkers loped along on the edge of the crowd, and prancing urchins brandished their sticks. Many zealots climbed barefoot, with facial expressions of excruciating dedication and blood mixed with mud oozing from their toes. Halfway up was easy, but then we saw in front of us, stretching away into the mist and rain, a steep wall of rubble with no track at all. ‘Jesus,’ said a man beside me, ‘will you look at that?’ They call the scree ‘Hell before Heaven’, and up it we laboured gritting our teeth. Sometimes people fell over; often they stood still and silent, breathing heavily, praying for help or trying to make up their minds whether to give up or go on. Occasionally stretcher men came stumbling down with casualties, bloodied and bandaged, pour encourager les autres. ‘When you get to the top,’ said my man, ‘your soul will be cleansed, and you can start sinning all over again.’
And sure enough at the top, in a small glass-fronted oratory, non-stop masses were being said, the amplified voices of the priests strangely thudding through the mist, while a crowd of pilgrims milled around the summit. Some were buying tea and buns at ad-hoc refreshment stands. Some were queuing to make their confessions. Some wearily made the statutory seven circuits of the stone called St Patrick’s Bed – bumping now and then into me, until I realized I was circuiting the wrong way round. I loved the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick, bruised and breathless though I was. ‘Your first time?’ sympathetic voices kept asking me, when at last I slumped heavily on the ground to eat a sandwich, and I told them yes; but I didn’t feel it was, any more than I have ever felt a stranger to those warm donkey-rocks at home.
19 The last pagans
The best place of all to sense the lingering power of the old gods is Lithuania, which was the last European country to accept Christianity – thirteen centuries after the birth of Christ. So inescapable still are signs and echoes of the old beliefs that I sometimes think the Lithuanians are not entirely free of their paganism even now. Reminders of Perkūnas, the Thunder-God, are everywhere, and sometimes images of him too: a formidable Thunder-God figure, a true idol, stands in a square at Kaunas, the former capital of the country, and the cathedral below the castle at Vilnius, the central national symbol, occupies the site of a temple in his honour (there is said to be a pagan altar somewhere among its foundations, but during a long chill tour among the miscellaneous coffins, corpses and sacred relics stored down there I failed to discover it). In 1996 they erected in the cathedral square a statue of one of the supreme national heroes, Grand Duke Gediminas, the founder of the city. This was specifically conceived both as a riposte to the style of the Soviet Russians who had ruled the country until a few years before, and as a declaration of national meaning. It is my favourite equestrian statue in the world – partly because the Duke is not galloping triumphantly into the sunset, as he would be if the Communists had made him, but simply stands beside his horse’s head in a posture of generous magnanimity; partly because it was erected directly above an ancient holy stone of the pagans.
Not far away, off a quiet backstreet, is the small redbrick church of St Nicolas. It is a fine little building, secluded within its surrounding walls, and very stalwart. So it had to be. It was built by the German merchant community of the city in the early years of the fourteenth century, well before the conversion of the Lithuanians to Christianity. Those pious Germans, when they assembled for Sunday service, knew that the heathen were all around them, with their sacred rocks and trees and springs, and old Perkūnas was being worshipped with who knew what profane and horrid rites up the road below the castle.
20 The Hill of Crosses
Even the site most profoundly sacred to Lithuanian Catholics seems to me to reflect convictions older than Christ. Kryži
Kalnas, the Hill of Crosses, is another famous symbol both of religious devotion and of national pride. It is the strangest place. Since the early nineteenth century at least, and probably far, far longer, people have regarded it as holy. Over the generations they have implanted its mound with a tangled forest of crosses, of wood, of iron, of stone, tall carved crosses, crosses made of old pipes, crosses exquisitely sculpted, crosses in rows, crosses in clusters, crosses piled and stacked there in an indistinguishable jumble. Around almost every cross hundreds of lesser crosses are hung, together with tangled masses of rosaries, and between them little alleys have been trampled by the pilgrims who come here in an endless flow from every corner of Lithuania. The whole hillock looks molten, as if all its myriad symbols have somehow been fused together, leaving jagged protrusions everywhere. There is an overpowering sense of mystic primitivism to this place, and as a pantheist I myself honour it as much for its abstract holiness as for its Christian meaning. In the days of Soviet rule in Lithuania the Communists loathed it either way. They rightly saw it as a focus of patriotic defiance, too, and did their surly best to put an end to it. They bulldozed away some 6,000 of its crosses, and forbade the erection of any more, but of course it did them no good. Patriots and pietists crept in there at night and planted new crosses anyway, and since the collapse of Communism thousands more have gone up, spreading out across the meadows about the mound; even as I stood there one afternoon thinking about it all, on the banks of the little reedy stream which runs nearby, I heard on the quiet pastoral air a pounding from somewhere in the thicket of crosses, as yet another was hammered in. How could a measly local commissar prevail against the combined forces of Christ, patriotism and Perkūnas the Thunder-God?
21 In a class by herself
Long ago Christianity won in Europe, triumphing over diverse permutations of paganism, displacing the whole pantheon of the Greeks and Romans, humiliating all the Perkūnases, surviving countless heresies and schisms of its own. ‘Le roi est mort, vive le roi!’ wrote Sir James Frazer, in 1880, imagining the angelus sounding on the wind from Rome over the Temple of the Golden Bough at Nemi. Glass weakened the primeval power of stone, and a new order of divine beings took over. They are with us still. I have more than once encountered people who have seen the Virgin Mary, and once met a lady who had come across Jesus Christ himself. They had, however, never actually spoken to these holy persons, who had crossed their paths in stately silence, so in 1994 I was excited to discover, during a visit to the pilgrimage site of Fátima in Portugal, that the legendary Sister Lúcia, who had enjoyed long conversations with the Holy Mother in 1917, was still alive. She was in a class by herself among Christian seers of her time. Her accounts of the miraculous encounters had made Fátima one of the great shrines of Christendom – it was the headquarters of the Blue Armada, an anti-atheist movement alleged to have tens of millions of members in more than 100 countries. Also she was the keeper of the mysterious Third Secret, something either so awful or so banal that it had never been revealed to the world, but was known only to Popes and innermost confidants of the Vatican: shut away, as Cardinal Ottaviani, Prefect of the Holy Office, said in 1960, ‘in one of those archives which are like a very deep, dark well, to the bottom of which papers fall and nobody is able to see them any more’, and so tantalizingly mysterious that in 1981 a former Trappist monk hijacked an Irish airliner in an unsuccessful attempt to force its extraction. Sister Lúcia was almost certain to be beatified after her death, and the vast basilica at Fátima, attended by a ceremonial square twice as large as St Peter’s Square in Rome, stood ever ready for her funeral.
A priest at Fátima told me all this, and when he happened to remark in the course of conversation that Sister Lúcia was alive and well at a convent at Coimbra, I did not waste a moment. Sister Lúcia! A prodigious and fateful mystery in herself, who was likely to be honoured for ever and ever, who had lived a life of magical revelation, whose tomb awaited her within that mighty church, whose sainthood was assured, whose Third Secret lay immured in a bottomless archive and was hijacked for by Trappists! Within the hour I was at the door of her Carmelite convent, where she had lived with her memories and her Secret for almost half a century.
I did not meet her, though, and perhaps it was all to the good. What would I have said to her? I was only an inquisitive pagan. The young nun who opened the convent door, revealing a cadaverous hall suggestively within, regretted that Sister Lúcia could not talk to me, even through a grille. I mumbled something about only wishing to have her blessing: but I was prevaricating, and the young nun knew it.
22 Seeing things
It was a colossal event when the Holy Mother appeared to Sister Lúcia at Fátima in 1917; Bernadette of Lourdes saw Our Lady in 1858, became a saint, and had a movie made about her; but by the later years of the twentieth century holy apparitions were all the rage among European Christians. It was a sign of the times, perhaps. The sudden prevalence of sacred visions and miracles in many parts of the continent went well with the taste for Unidentified Flying Objects and other Unsolved Mysteries of the television culture. In Italy innumerable Madonna images were seen to weep tears of water or of blood, although the Church itself recognized the authenticity of only one, and scientists dismissed them all as frauds or natural phenomena. Ireland proved to be the great place for your Moving Virgins, and sacred statues all over the island miraculously shook and swayed, sometimes attended by insubstantial visitants delivering didactic messages about divorce and clean living. I looked in one rainy afternoon at a Marian grotto among a dark grove of trees at Cappoquin in County Waterford, where an image of the Virgin had repeatedly moved, been transfigured and made pronouncements, such as ‘The World Must Behave’, ‘Thanks for the Hymns’ or ‘The People Must Go to Mass More.’ A solitary family sat there doggedly in the wet, in a kind of gazebo above the grotto: mother, father, adult son and daughter, they waited there as in trance, clutching rosaries and staring fixedly at the statue on its rock, willing it to shift perhaps, praying for a sacred manifestation, lips moving sometimes but bodies still as images themselves. They were like addicts at a gaming table. The rain fell all around, and dripped heavily off the roof of the gazebo.
The most baffling of these visitations was the marvel of Medjugorje, a hill-hamlet in Bosnia where a group of children, in 1981, claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary. Ever afterwards they reported almost daily access to the Madonna, nobody being able to shake their evidence, and although the Catholic hierarchy disassociated itself from the affair, the hamlet became another of Europe’s great pilgrimage places. Throughout the wars in Yugoslavia (which did not reach Medjugorje, considered by the faithful a miracle in itself) pilgrims came from many parts of the world in the hope of sharing the visionaries’ experience or, as second best, seeing a subsidiary phenomenon, the dancing of the sun. By the time I got there the little cluster of houses in the mountains had become one of your archetypal Christian shrines, in the Fátima tradition (the Medjugorje children were given Secrets, too). A brand-new sanctuary had been built, with two square towers, and around it on the bleak and stony site had arisen all the essentials of the pilgrim destination – bazaar-like shops aglitter with holy trinkets, pizza restaurants, heaps of bed-and-breakfast places, gas stations, taxi ranks, banks. Several million people, I was assured, had gone to Medjugorje since the original visions, but on my winter day there you would never guess it. It was drizzling there, too. The sanctuary was empty. The shops were deserted. The taxis waited forlorn at their ranks. I went to the Hill of Apparitions, where the children had first seen their visions, and there up the stony track I saw my only pilgrims, clambering under a line of black umbrellas towards the sacred summit. The rain poured down, the clouds scudded overhead, and even for the most visionary the sun of Medjugorje did no dancing.
23 An Irish eyewitness account of the sun dancing,quoted in Carmina Gadelica, by Alexander Carmichael, 1900
The glorious bright-red sun was after rising on the crest of the great hills, and it was changing colour – green, purple, red, blood-red, white, intense white, and gold-white, like the glory of God of the elements to the children of men. It was dancing up and down in exaltation …
24 Toenails
Another phenomenon of my European years has been the appearance of a highly mobile Pope, riding around in a vehicle called a Popemobile which has always reminded me of the glass cage Adolf Eichmann sat in during his death-trial in Jerusalem. The Polish Pope John Paul II is a terrific traveller, a terrific showman too, and for the first time he brought the mysterious power of his office into every part of Europe – who could possibly have guessed, fifty years ago, that a Pope would ever come to Cardiff? I have never met a Pope, but I was acquainted with an Archbishop of Canterbury once. We shared a birthday – with Gandhi, too – and we also shared the circumstance that every five years or so the big toenails of our right feet came off. His had been damaged in a tank during the Second World War, mine by a block of ice in the Himalaya. He was the spiritual head of some 70 million Anglicans throughout the world, with 800 archbishops and bishops, but I have to say that I never found myself daunted by his eminence. It might have been a different matter if I had shared a disposable toenail with a Pope, because even in the mind of an animist the Bishop of Rome has some transcendent majesty. Canterburys come and go, and retire as it were to their maiden names, but a Pope is a Pope for ever. The Pope is the Big Time. Nearly 900 million Catholics pay allegiance to the Pope. There have been venerated relics in cathedrals, bowed to by cardinals, honoured by princes, less majestic than the toenail of a Pope.
25 A dead Pope
I saw a dead Pope once, and he was refulgent even in corpsehood. Pope Pius X had been Patriarch of Venice before his ascension, and when I was living in that city in 1959 he paid a posthumous revisit to his old patriarchate. We watched his passing from our balcony over the Grand Canal. Embalmed though he was by then, he moved by with infinite condescension. Gondolas full of priests came first, cushioned deep in their seats and rowed by white-robed gondoliers. Then came a series of dream-like barges, their velvet draperies trailing in the water behind. And finally in a blaze of gold came the Bucintoro, successor to the magnificent State barge of the doges of Venice, rowed by a crew of tough young sailors to the beat of a drum. Bells rang, plainchants sounded from loudspeakers across the city, and to the solemn boom, boom of the drum the cadaver of the Holy Father, flat on his back in a crystal coffin, sailed by as to the manner dead.
26 A live Pope
In life too a Pope still has an aura all his own, and to my mind the best of all European pilgrimages remains the Easter pilgrimage to St Peter’s Square in Rome to witness His Holiness speaking to his 900 million across the world. It may be a hackneyed spectacle, even a cliché among ceremonies, and what the Pope says is unlikely to set hearts on fire, but the very predictability of it is half its strength. It is as it always has been. ‘Upon this rock!’ The immense good-humoured crowd, disgorged from a myriad coaches, walking leisurely up the Via della Conciliazione, seeping out of the back-quarters of the Vatican, contains all the requisite nuns, pasty-faced seminarians, Poles, American tourist groups, Irish enthusiasts, backpackers, enormously old arthritic ladies and couples from England on All-Inclusive Easter Breaks. The Swiss Guard, though not quite so stalwart nowadays as their reputation says they used to be, still look stylish in their sixteenth-century liveries, with pikes over their shoulders. The soldiers who turn up on parade march about with the true Italian military panache of tossing feathers and high-pitched bands. There are the statutory television cameras all over the place, and properly fussy chaplains appear now and then on the papal balcony to mess about with the lectern, adjust the microphone and look important.
When at last His Holiness appears, attended by an obsequious cardinal or two, and further attentive acolytes with hands clasped in the mantis position, then it really is like seeing God himself up there, so old and distant, so angelically attended; and when his voice comes echoing over the great piazza, slightly delayed, it seems, like a conversation on a bad overseas telephone connection, at once very near and far away, it might indeed be the voice of Heaven, so unimpeachably platitudinous are its sentiments and so irreproachable its turn of phrase – just the sort of speech of welcome we may expect, if we are fortunate enough one day to stand at the gates of paradise.
27 Christian power
‘How many divisions has the Pope?’ Stalin sneeringly but ingenuously asked. In fact, of course, Christian power has been incalculable in European history, and it is the presence of the Pope, far more than the President of Italy, that makes Rome one of the great cities of the world. Many other European cities have become internationally important specifically because of their Christian connections – the great pilgrimage destinations, like Santiago de Compostela in Spain; the great centres of dissent or heresy, like Canterbury, Avignon or Luther’s Wittenberg; powerful archbishoprics like Trier or Mainz; or cities which have been the sites of crucial Christian conferences, affecting the fate of the continent. Constance – Konstanz in German – is one of these. It is a middle-sized city, situated grandly at the site where the Rhine flows out of Lake Constance, but otherwise not very remarkable. The resonance of its name depends still upon the fateful Christian Council which was held here between the years 1414 and 1418. The Council formally condemned the propositions of the heretics John Wyclif and Jan Hus, treacherously burning Hus at the stake (he had gone to Constance with a safe conduct), and it succeeded in ending the Great Schism which had divided the Catholic Church between rival Popes at Rome and Avignon. But when I wander the streets of the city I do not see in my mind’s eye the empurpled ecclesiasts at their conclave in the cathedral, or the triumphant Martin V who emerged as the one and only Pope. I see instead the amazing ragbag of followers who jammed the city for four years, and have remained part of its legend ever since. Going to the Council of Constance in 1414 was like going to an Olympic Games city today. Heads of State, ambassadors, scholars and lawyers filled these old houses, together with thousands of servants, guards and courtiers, and the city was turned into an enormous trading fair and emporium. Some 100,000 people, it is said, came to Constance for the Ecumenical Council, and most of them were not greatly interested in theology, for they included every sort of trader, mountebanks and con men of all kinds, peregrinating actors, street musicians, clowns and vast numbers of prostitutes. I can see them clearly still, milling around the cathedral square while Hus was burning: and I can imagine the squabbles there would be now over the sale of television rights, or the propriety of displaying advertisements around the stake.
28 The uses of faith
During my fifty years Christianity in Europe has been most obviously influential when it has provided defiance in oppressive times, or plain pleasure. (Nowadays it seldom represents, as it still does in America, social pride or business advantage.) I shall never forget the magnificent outpouring of ritual and ceremony which surrounded the Catholic Church in Poland in the days when it stood alone against the dingy autocracy of Communism – so resolutely that every chapel of the pilgrimage church at Czestochowa, the holiest shrine of Polish Christendom, was bugged by the secret police. It hardly struck me as a sacramental effulgence, though. In Warsaw on a weekday evening in the 1950s one often saw citizens slipping into church, out of the cold and snowy city, rather as commuters elsewhere popped into a bar before catching the train home: entering hurriedly, crossing themselves as one might sign in at a club, and emerging a few moments later buttoning up their coats, pulling on their thick gloves, and hurrying away to the trolley-bus – stocked up, as it were, with some reviving stimulant. And when on a festival day Catholicism displayed itself in all its glory, all shine and incense, all tremendous fugues and stately priests, then the huge shabby congregation was elevated in the same way as an audience at some brassy musical in the capitalist West, given just for an hour or two a spectacular escape from reality.
Was it really remorse when, in the later years of Franco’s dictatorship, the burghers of Málaga or Seville took to the streets on a saint’s day carrying their enormous images of the Virgin, led by an official on a horse with sword drawn and medals jangling? Group by group came the penitents then, with tall conical hoods on their heads and wands in their hands, looking eerily from side to side, swaggering in a rather lordly manner, and behind them vast gilded icons swayed in the lamplight, carried by ranks of bent-backed, cowled and cassocked devotees. A hooded major-domo kept them in time with the clang of a bell, rather like that drummer with the dead Pope, and in a sad and dreadful rhythm they made their slow way through the streets. Yet I used to notice that when they stopped for a rest those sweating slaves of God often waved convivially to friends in the crowd, called for Coca-Colas or lit cigarettes. Those were not really processions of contrition: they were partly reflections of the forces that ruled Spain then, Church and State in almighty tandem, but partly expressions of the national delight in effect.
In the spring of 1996 I was walking through Bratislava, the capital of the newly created Republic of Slovakia, in search of my supper, when I became aware of groups of merry and noisy young people all making for some common destination. A promising wine-cellar? Some jolly café with music? I fell in with the stream of them, feeling like a wine-and-music evening myself, and found myself drawn into the jam-packed and festively rococo church of the Jesuits, where the undergraduates of the university, all apparently in the highest of spirits, were assembling for their student mass. In Ireland I sometimes suspect that the harshest rituals of Catholicism are undertaken in a spirit of enjoyment – masochistic enjoyment, perhaps, like the wonderfully jolly ascent of Croagh Patrick. One of the most demanding of Irish pilgrimages takes the faithful to a grim island in Lough Derg, a remote and dispiriting mountain lake in Donegal, where they endure a three-day fast, a twenty-four-hour vigil, barefoot peregrinations over stony tracks and the compulsory recitations of 63 Glorias, 234 Creeds, 891 Paternosters and 1,458 Hail Marys. I was once at a wedding reception at Drogheda, away on the east coast, when I heard a woman ask a worldly young guest with a carnation buttonhole and a glass of champagne where he was going for his holidays that year. I expected Barbados or Mykonos, but no. ‘I thought of giving myself,’ he said, ‘the three days at Lough Derg.’
29 A prince of the Church
Certainly the best-known Catholic martyr of my time was considered in his lifetime more an ideologue than a saint. Cardinal József Mindszenty first came into my life in 1949, when during my vacations from Oxford I was sub-editing on The Times in London. He was the Primate of Hungary, and a nightly stream of news passed through my hands concerning his trial for treason at the hands of the Communist Government in Budapest. After days of torture and a show trial he was sentenced to jail for life, but re-entered the news even more spectacularly when he was briefly set free during the Budapest Rising of 1956. The Communists having regained control, he took refuge in the United States Embassy in Budapest, and there he remained for fifteen years, repeatedly refusing invitations to go into exile abroad. For people of my generation Mindszenty was a household name, a living symbol of anti-Communist inflexibility – he later fell out with the Vatican itself because he thought it too soft on Stalinism.
Mindszenty died and was buried in Austria, but when the Communists finally lost power in Hungary, in 1991, his body was reburied in the basilica at Esztergom, the seat of the Hungarian primates, and there I made a pilgrimage to his tomb. What a conclusion for a prince of the Church! The huge domed basilica of Esztergom stands on a high bluff above the Danube. Far below it a broken bridge to the Slovakian shore, blown up during the Second World War, adds an extra note of tragic violence to a truly epic site, and in front of the building a vast never-completed piazza, leading upwards to a classical colonnade, makes you feel you are approaching one of Christianity’s power-centres. The church is claimed to be the fifth largest on earth, and its treasury contains a fabulous hoard of gold and silver objects. Mindszenty is buried in its crypt, which is sustained by walls fifty feet thick, is guarded by two female colossi representing Resurrection and Immortality, and is pervaded by an atmosphere of immensely portentous gloom. Many of his predecessors are commemorated by tablets in the walls, and one of them is portrayed in effigy sheltered beneath the wing of a gigantic black angel: but nothing down there matches the significance of Cardinal Mindszenty’s tomb, which is one of the great shrines of Hungarian Catholicism. When I was there, two decades after his death, a mass of wreaths, ribbons and memorial messages still surrounded it, together with photographs of papal visits to the sacred site. An organ played gigantically in the basilica above, and as I emerged into the sunshine I reflected wryly upon the days, long before, when I had wrestled with the problem of writing a two-column headline around a name with ten letters in it.
30 True faith
But at some places, in eastern Europe especially, one may still experience Christian belief at its most transcendental. One such site is the city gate called Aušros Vartai, the Gates of Dawn, at Vilnius. The city is largely Polish in population, and the holiest thing in it for Polish Catholics is a miracle-working icon of the Madonna which is housed in a little chapel above the gateway. Old pictures show the street below crowded with kneeling worshippers, gazing up at the chapel above, and in the late 1990s I found the strength of adoration unabated. The Gates of Dawn remained a place of daily pilgrimage, conducted so far as I could see in a spirit of purest devotion. Mass was said there every day, its music sounding in the street below (the chapel windows were opened, to allow people to see the Madonna): and when one weekday morning I found my way into the staircase which leads up to the holy place, it was crowded almost to suffocation with Christians in a state of ecstasy – some singing, some praying aloud, some trying to shuffle up the steps on their knees, all pressing joyfully towards a glimpse of the sacred picture, radiant there in black and gold among a shimmer of priestly ritual.
Another gateway alive with faith is the right-angled Stone Gate which leads into the upper town at Zagreb, in Croatia. On a Sunday especially this provides an unforgettable spectacle of Christian dedication. In the gate’s shadowy interior there stands another miraculous Madonna icon, within a grille, and before it the faithful stand in silent supplication, or kneel in rows of pews half-concealed in the darkness. A small cavernous shop sells votive candles, and these the supplicants hand over to attendant nuns to light and put in place. There were two candle-nuns when I was there – unsmiling, preoccupied women. A mass of candles burned before them on a large tray, its flickering light a blaze in the gloom, and they worked incessantly with metal spatulas to make room for more. The scores of candles had coagulated into one big waxy flaming mass. The nuns separated them into clumps, as though they were working on a cake in a medieval kitchen, cutting them into slices, shifting them here and there, scooping huge lumps of molten wax out of the tray, slicing, scooping, shifting without a pause, while the faithful stood silent and immobile before the Madonna, dim figures crouched in the pews behind, and a line of believers queued with unlit candles to add to the furnace. Cut and scoop, cut and scoop, the nuns continued with their sacred duties, silhouetted against the flames (it sacrilegiously occurred to me) like a pair of imps in Hades. From outside the gate sounded a monotonous sing-song mantra, kept up by two beggar children, one on each side of the path – faltering sometimes when they ran out of breath, renewed whenever a likely votary emerged.
31 Passion Flower
Such has been the popular force of faith like this that even in my time un-Christian ideologies of Europe have sometimes requisitioned the trappings of Christianity. When I was working on a book in Spain in the 1960s an undeclared anathema applied to the name of Dolores Ibárurri Gómez, ‘La Pasionaria’, one of the supreme Communist heroines of the Spanish Civil War. Under the left-wing Republic of the 1930s she had been elevated to an eminence hitherto only occupied by the Virgin Mary herself. In the great political processions her icon was actually carried in place of the Madonna’s, preceded by candle-bearers and drummers just as in the Easter processions of other times. Her Civil War battle-cries were quoted like holy decrees – ‘No paserán!’‚ ‘Better to die on your feet than live on your knees’ – and even her nickname referred explicitly enough to the Christian story. This flaming prophet of Marxism was created in the pattern of holiness. If history had gone a different way we might well have had miraculous statues of her, or liquefactions of her blood. During my time in Spain La Pasionaria was an exile in Moscow; but religions being what they are, whether sacred or secular, after the death of the Catholic dictator Francisco Franco she came home again, and died in 1989 as a respected member of Spain’s new democratic parliament.
32 St Scrooge’s Day
Some of the great festivals of Christianity, themselves inherited from paganism, have maintained something of their immemorial popular sanctity. Going to church on Easter Sunday, a purely Christian festival, is still a great occasion among congregations across Europe – almost obligatory, for example, among millions of organically agnostic Anglicans – but I have never noticed that it has any immediate effect on the manners or morals of the continent. On the other hand Christmas, directly descended without a doubt from pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, still works. Christmas Day is St Scrooge’s Day. Perhaps because it is a children’s festival, because the Christmas story is so charming and Christmas carols are such good tunes, somehow on Christmas Day all Europe is a better place. Pickpockets stay home on Christmas morning. Grumps are less grumpy then. Smiles come easier, and all across the continent one feels the peoples moving into a slower and gentler mode, as the goose, the duck or ever more commonly the tasteless turkey browns in the oven. One Christmas in Vienna I went for a stroll in a park before returning to the Sacher Hotel, where my own Christmas dinner was roasting. There was hardly a woman in the park. Everywhere the husbands of Vienna, with their children, aimlessly but expectantly loitered, expelled from under the womanly feet of the city while Gretchen and Helge got on with the job. Christmas is a time when old hierarchies are restored. ‘For Heaven’s sake,’ I could hear the housewives of all Europe grumbling that day, ‘go and get yourself a bit of fresh air, and take the children with you!’
33 Christmas with the Pickwick Club
Scandinavian Christmases are especially convincing. Santa Claus lives up there, after all (visited, on direct flights to Swedish Lapland, by countless package tourists and their children – who sometimes find it bewildering that only the day before they had seen the old gentleman in a plastic grotto at Toys ’R’ Us). At Christmas a smell of spiced mulled wine, onomatopoeically called glögg, pervades the city markets of Scandinavia, and the stewardesses of Scandinavian Airlines put candled crowns on their heads and appear in aircraft cabins to sing squeaky hymns. Some of my own happiest Christmas memories are of the restaurant called the Operakällaren in Stockholm, where dark falls long before the festive meal is over, and through the great plush dining-room the flambeaus outside send their lurid light.
There, as evening draws on, and more and more of the Operakällaren’s house aquavit is poured by merry waiters of the old school, the Christian spirit of Christmas seems to me exemplified in a way Dickens would have loved – almost as though one is dining with the Pickwick Club itself. All ages are there, and everyone gives the impression of being related to everyone else. Marvellously goes the elk-meat, swiftly pass the herrings, one great salmon succeeds another on the buffet, and very soon you find yourself on familiar terms with the Swedes at the next table, complimenting them on their fluent English, admiring little Eva’s Christmas frock or little Erik’s blue bow-tie, exchanging grandmotherly confidences with Mrs Andersson, toasting them all with yet more aquavit. Stockholmers are not especially religious people, and I imagine they have been eating those Baltic herrings and downing fiery liquids at least since the days of the heathen kings of Old Uppsala up the road: but still if I wanted to show visitors from outer space an exhibition of Christianity ritually in action I might well take them behind the flambeaus to try a Christmas smorgasbord at the Operakällaren. Devilish good dinner, as Mr Jingle would say – cold, but capital – pleasant people these – well behaved, too – very.
34 Are Christians kinder?
Of course spirituous conviviality is not what Christianity is about, and, Christmas or no Christmas, people from Iceland to Bulgaria generally assume that practising Christians will probably be kinder persons than the rest of us. Perhaps they are. In Bucharest, not I think the most compassionate of capitals, I once paid a visit to the little Patriarchal Cathedral. It was a festival day of some kind, and the church was full of people queuing up to kiss the sacred icons. Old women in kerchiefs, distinguished-looking gentlemen, ragamuffins, drop-outs, through the candle-lit musty space they patiently shuffled; and when they emerged from behind the iconostasis a tall thin priest was standing there to bless them and sprinkle them with holy water – stiffly, with jerky bird-like movements, right and left, one after the other. At first it seemed to me a perfunctory devotion, and I sat watching the scene out of the shadows with a cynical eye: but presently there entered the church a madwoman, all disjointed, paraplegically stumbling and falling here and there, shouting what I took to be imprecations. I thought they would eject her, or at least try to silence her, but they took no notice of her insanity, allowing her to lurch and shove and shout her way among the waiting faithful. Now and then a kindly hand reached out to pat her on the shoulder, or help her through the crowd.
Oh, often enough the spirit of kindness still finds a practical outlet in Christianity. Where better to test it than in Rome, just down the Tiber from the Vatican itself? One Christmas morning I was loitering with literary intent around Trastévere, a not yet gentrified quarter of poor people and Bohemians, when I heard the hum of voices and the clatter of crockery from inside the church of Santa Maria. Poking my nose inside, I found the enormous dark space of the church filled with row upon row of trestle tables, and at them sat several hundred poor Romans, eating a substantial Christmas dinner by courtesy of the Christian ethos. They were being served by obvious members of the Roman jet set, mostly young and very smart, often beautiful too, who bustled around with soup ladles and bowls in a furore of charitable purpose. (But at the very bottom of the church, all the same, away in the shadows at the gloomiest end of it, the Gypsies of Trastévere had been cautiously segregated.)
35 Two monks
Christianity certainly affects its practitioners in different ways, sometimes diametrically opposite ways. On a single European journey I felt the full blast of devout contrast in the presence of two young members of the monastic orders. The first was a Benedictine at the Bavarian monastery of Andechs, not far from Munich. I can see his face now. In his late twenties, I would guess, he looked like an interrogator more than a confessor, far more accusatory than forgiving. Tall, thin, pale, unsmiling, cold-eyed, pious as all hell, when I asked him the way to the monastery cemetery he did not at first reply at all, but simply turned his cod-like features upon me with raised eyebrows. When at last he gave me a curt and loveless answer I hardly had time to thank him (not that I was planning to be very fulsome about it) before he turned on his heel with a swish of his cassock, pushed his way arrogantly through the crowd of tourists, and disappeared inside the church. I hope he choked on his vespers.
The second monk was about the same age, and was an Augustinian at the hospice on the Great St Bernard Pass between Switzerland and Italy. He and I were talking in a hospice corridor when we were approached by a somewhat eccentric old man. His bristly white hair was cut very short, his beard was stubbly, he was wearing shorts and shabby boots, and slung all around him was a wide variety of rucksacks, sticks and mugs. He reminded me of a famous Sherpa who was known to the uninhibited British Everest climbers of the 1930s as ‘The Foreign Sportsman’. This esoteric ancient interrupted our conversation to ask the young monk (whom he called ‘Father’) if he could have a room for the night. The Augustinian turned to him with the kindest of smiles, and with only a single question: ‘Did you come on foot?’ The dear old codger most certainly had – how else? Excusing himself from me, the monk relieved him of his more disposable equipment and conducted him down the corridor with all the care, courtesy and respect of an assistant manager at a five-star hotel – ‘No need to register now,’ I could imagine him saying, ‘we can look after all that when you’ve settled in.’ May all his monkly life be happy, and when he reaches the reception-desk of heaven – ‘Did you come on foot?’ – may his welcome be just as professional.
36 Two saints?
Yes, Europe still produces holy persons, and some no doubt, like Sister Lúcia of Fátima, will eventually be canonized. I have met two possible candidates. I once ran into Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Mother Teresa, the Albanian heroine of the Calcutta slums, at the door of a house I was visiting. She was still travelling widely then, and I was not altogether surprised to meet her, or to feel her little cold hand in mine. She was much smaller than I had supposed, though, and reminded me irresistibly, with her chirpy voice and bright eyes, of a diminutive sex therapist of American television known as Dr Ruth, famous for her frank talk about things like masturbation. Mother Teresa offered me no counselling during our brief conversation, but she did give me a holy leaflet, and went off in high spirits, having just persuaded our common host to commit several hundred thousand dollars to a new hospice.
My other potential saint was Francis Aungier Pakenham, Knight of the Garter, seventh Earl of Longford, Baron Longford, Baron Silchester, Baron Pakenham, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, writer and politician who made himself famous in England by publicly befriending the most squalid, degraded and unlovely of criminals. The tabloid press derided him for it. The broadsheets mocked him as a holy fool. Comedians sneered at him. Cartoonists lampooned him. He became a figure of public fun. But when from time to time I saw his lanky bespectacled figure uncoiling itself from his seat to greet me, kind smile at the ready, I always felt that I was in the presence of sanctity. It takes guts to be a martyr, to have arrows stuck all over you or be pulled apart on wheels: but it perhaps takes a truer holiness to be laughed at by louts for your convictions.
37 The decline of faith?
It is conventionally assumed that the Christian faith is now declining in Europe. Even in 1851, in that supposed stronghold of Christianity, Victorian Britain, an official census showed that only half the population of churchgoing age actually went to church. A century and a half later, almost nowhere in Europe could boast as much. Virgin birth, the meaning of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the infallibility of Popes – the certainties of dogma were generally open to question, and only the more elemental sub-sects prospered. As I have travelled around Europe I have witnessed with my own eyes the diminution of traditional Christianity, just as I have seen visually enacted the population explosion of India. The priests, nuns and seminarians who used to throng the streets of Spain are no longer there, and their dark conventual buildings are often shuttered or demolished. Mendicant friars, once the familiars of our Venetian neighbourhood, are a rarity on the streets of Venice now. Big comradely congregations no longer pour out of the chapels of Wales on a Sunday morning, and visiting preachers are no longer carried off in triumph to Sunday dinner at the tables of hospitable elders – mutton, roast potatoes and mint sauce over an earnest discussion of the morning’s sermon. I was in a bookshop in Dublin some years ago, browsing through the stacks, when I heard over the radio on the proprietor’s desk a scandalously funny programme satirizing the Catholic hierarchy. I could hardly believe my ears, to hear such outrageous talk in a country where Roman Catholicism had for so long been omnipotent, but the bookseller seemed indifferent. ‘Sometimes they’re comical,’ was all he said – ‘it depends on the material.’ More recently, walking down Cathedral Street in the same city I was saddened to find ‘For Sale’ signs outside McCaul’s, a venerable and celebrated clerical outfitters. In its windows there was displayed its very last generation of cassocks, clerical bibs and remarkably undesirable mud-coloured shoes for nuns – since the early 1980s the collapse of demand among nuns had been ‘particularly dramatic’, Mr Padraig McCaul told the press next day, and I must say I was not surprised. Some authorities suggest that Sister Lúcia’s Third Secret concerns nothing less than the decline of faith within the Church of Rome itself. The process is known as ‘Diabolical Disorientation’.
38 Fire and brimstone
Yet you would hardly know the faith was in any trouble at all, from the continuing passions of its sects. In the Czech Republic in 1995 I found Protestants violently objecting to the canonization of Jan Sarkandner, a seventeenth-century Catholic priest, claiming that, far from being martyred by fanatical Moravian noblemen, as the Vatican maintained, he had himself recruited Cossacks to persecute Bohemian Calvinists. Enormously assertive fanes are still being built: the mammoth church (with attendant airport) commemorating miraculous events at Knock in Ireland; the Arctic Cathedral at Tromsø in Norway, which looks like an angular Sydney Opera House; the monastic church at St Blasien in Germany, which was conclusively rebuilt in 1983, and has a dome smaller only than those of St Peter’s in Rome and St Paul’s in London. Jehovah’s Witnesses knock ever-hopefully on the doors of Europe, and in many parts of the continent charismatic Christians are talking in tongues, laying on hands, falling in convulsions or literally rolling in the aisles in paroxysms of holy laughter. If you have doubts about the energy of sectarian conviction, nearly at the end of the twentieth century, come with me now to the bridge over the river at Derry in Northern Ireland (Londonderry to the English) on a July day in the 1980s, when the men and boys of the Protestant Orange Order are celebrating a famous victory over the Roman Catholics three centuries before. Never will you see a parade more aflame with righteous pride, more militant, more arrogant or more horribly fascinating. It makes those Spanish processions seem ordinary. Nowhere in the world have I seen faces as fiercely individual as the gingery and florid faces of the disciplined Orange bourgeoisie, beneath their statutory bowler hats and tam o’ shanters, or more elfish than the faces of the drummer boys twirling their sticks, beating their drums, as they march and remarch across the bridge over the River Foyle.
What fire! What brimstone too! The Catholic population of Derry keeps well away, in its barricaded enclave called the Bogside up the hill, and the Protestants march back and forth all day, waving their banners, beating their drums, playing their trumpets – little boys of five or six, white-haired elders with rows of medals, prancing and strutting, grinning right and left, brandishing their swords or their walking-sticks, twirling their batons, tara tara, thump thump, while swaggering in the middle of it all comes the presiding champion of the anti-papists, a large Presbyterian clergyman with a cohort of aides, cheered all across the bridge by his adoring fellow-bigots.
39 From ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’, 1932,
by W. B. Yeats
Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother’s womb
A fanatic heart.
40 Too many bells
At least the Christian cacophony of bells is beginning to fade. The American writer Elmer Davis, who was a Rhodes Scholar, once described Oxford as a place where too many bells were always ringing in the rain. I have always been of the same mind about bells, and as it happens Oxford bells were the worst of all for me. There the bell Great Tom at Christ Church rang 101 times every night at five past nine, honouring some antique and long-inoperative regulation – enough to drive a saint crazy; and every now and then the air of the city was split asunder with the awful rehearsals of the chain-ringers, clanging down the campanological octaves over and over again. Venice is terrible too, with the variously grating, shovelling, booming, tinkling and jangling of its church bells. The chimes of carillons, all too often sickly and funereal, inescapably ring out across many European cities – Antwerp in Belgium, for instance, where whenever you think the recital has ended, and settle down gratefully to read your book, dear God the famous carillon is sure to start again. (Its carillonneur is a civic celebrity, once pointed out to me with infinite respect as he strode across Grote Markt to his performance, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti once wrote a poem about its muscular peals – ‘circling thews of sounds at sunset’.)
There are church clocks in Portugal that strike the hour twice, in case you miss it the first time. The clock in the Mint Tower at Amsterdam strikes the next hour at the half-hour too. And who has not gone to bed in some sweet hostelry of France, when the last swallow has returned to its nest, the restaurant chairs have been up-ended, and the final desultory murmur of gossip has died away from the cottages round about, to find that every fifteen minutes – crash! – the bell of the church of Notre-Dame-des-Insomniacs, immediately across the picturesque alley from your bedroom, is obligingly going to tell you the time all night?
41 In the cathedrals
I was amused one day to read an entry in the visitor’s book of Our Lady’s Cathedral at Antwerp (into which I had retreated, I dare say, to escape the carillon). ‘Seeing this superb cathedral,’ wrote L. R. Bultoen on 15 February 1995, ‘we are very proud of being Belgian.’ When the builders of Antwerp began work on their masterpiece in the fourteenth century, there was no such place as Belgium, and no Belgian nationality to be proud of, but still the Cathedral of Our Lady has long since become a national possession, and L. R. Bultoen can be forgiven for feeling some proprietorial satisfaction. Many of the continent’s greatest cathedrals are only sublet, so to speak, as houses of God. Some give the impression of being thriving commercial undertakings, even if all their profits are ploughed back into the business. Some are essentially art galleries. Some double as concert halls or even theatres. And many are frank displays of national history, disguised as places of memorial, dedication or reconciliation, but really galleries of self-esteem.
Spanish cathedrals can be gloriously bombastic, with their great golden grilles, their mighty tombs of kings, queens and champions, the pipes of their organs like artillery massed for action. Pope John Paul II himself described the Wawel Cathedral at Kraków as containing ‘a vast greatness which speaks to us of the history of Poland, of all our past’; forty-one monarchs are buried there, together with sundry martial heroes, making the building a mighty shrine not so much of God as of Polishness – as the Pope said, the sanctuary of the nation, which cannot be entered ‘without an inner trembling, without an awe’. Generally pre-eminent in this kind, though, are the cathedrals of England, making many of their domestic visitors – at least those of a certain age – decidedly proud to be English. Few of them nowadays greet you with much sense of holy mana. They are too far gone for that – at the cathedral of Oxford I was once greeted by an effusive functionary officially called a Welcomer. God may be all-powerful still in his own quarters of these buildings, around the high altar, but everywhere else the officers of English history are paramount, and are registered only incidentally by their claims to Christian virtue. Here they march elaborately by us, wall by wall, the public-spirited local magnates, the gentlemen of illustrious but never-flaunted pedigree, the generals tried, tested and found true in foreign battlefields. Unwaveringly just judges have spent their lifetimes in Bengal, successful West Indian merchants have generously shared their good fortune with society at large, aldermen have been three times elected with public acclaim to the mayoralty. As mysterious as any holy shroud or saint-fragranced handkerchiefs are the faded cobwebby standards that rot the generations away in the ceilings of regimental chapels; as holy as any Bible are the great memorial books, their hand-lettered pages turned week by week within their oak-framed glass-cases, which list the names of the victorious English dead (for all are victorious in the end, in the wars of the English).
42 Age shall not weary them
In my time the memorials of the Second World War have, as it were, overlaid the memorials of the First, and often enough the inscriptions of one have been added to the epitaphs of the other. I find them all profoundly saddening, but I have to say they do not always stir me to feelings of reconciliation. The Germans, in the national change of heart that followed the defeat of their Nazi cause, commemorated their war dead with some of the most exquisite of war-cemeteries, but there is gall to my tears when I wander around their graves. I remember a particularly lovely one not far from Athens, its hundreds of silent gravestones unobtrusively laid out among the myrtles and the olive trees: but even as I mourned for the poor young fellows lying there in death, I imagined how they probably were in life, fresh out of the Hitler Youth, swanking around Attica as a master race. They should not have been there at all! And I was certainly not moved to Christian charity by the tremendous memorial to the U-boat crews of the Second World War which stands beside the Baltic outside Kiel. A huge, predatory and magnificent figure of a sea-eagle stands above this edifice, looking anything but remorseful. Inside, the submarine crews are listed boat by boat, and when I was there a Dutchman near the gate told me particularly to look out for the name of Lieutenant Commander Prien, the brilliant submariner who had penetrated Scapa Flow to torpedo the British battleship Royal Oak in 1939. This was a mistake on his part. I loved the Royal Oak and all she stood for, so venerable and so stately, and when I found Prien’s name on the wall I thought less about him and the crew of U47 than about the men of the grand old battleship, all 833 of them, deep in the cold waters of the North.
We are all children of our times – to a visitor of a later generation such a response would not occur. I wonder, all the same, about the true meaning of the bombed churches and sacred objects left unrestored across Europe as reminders of war’s horrors – the hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, the remains of the old cathedral at Coventry, the melted-down bells of Lübeck’s Marienkirche. How much do they speak of Christian forgiveness, and how much of reproach?
43 The little hero
Who could fail to be touched, though, of whatever nationality, whatever age, whatever ideology, whatever background of faith or experience, by the sculpted Monument to the Little Insurgent, which stands beside the ramparts of the Old Town in Warsaw? It remembers the tragic heroism of the Warsaw Rising of 1944, when the Poles in a splurge of hopeless romantic courage rose in arms against the overwhelming forces of the Nazis who oppressed them. A very small boy, in a steel helmet far too big for him, holds a sub-machine-gun as if it were a toy, and bears himself ready for all comers, as so many children of Warsaw truly did at that great and awful time. It is a sentimental little image, and rightly so. There are nearly always flowers at the foot of it.
44 God’s system
Anyway, if religion can give us a groping sort of definition of Europe, what makes a metaphysical unity of this continent is art, which to a pantheist like me is the ultimate revelation of the divine. In my view European religion has been the acolyte of art, rather than the other way round. Edward Gibbon said Europe was no more than ‘a system of arts and laws and manners’: the laws and manners came from Christianity, but the arts came from God, and the true human glory of Europe, as I have learnt to see it, lies in the fact that in every corner of this continent, for thousands of years, people have been inspired to make beautiful things, in the service of one god or another, or of no consciously recognized god at all. The rankest amateur, painting the slushiest water-colour of Swiss waterfall or Grand Canal, has contributed to the oneness of Europe (‘The lake here,’ wrote Cézanne of the lake of Annecy in France, ‘lends itself admirably to the line-drawing exercises of young English misses’). The particular combination of mode, time and harmony which has made European music different from Asian and African music has been a defining factor of the continent; so, for centuries, was the use of perspective. Even the nature of Europe must bow before its art: as Gustav Mahler observed to the conductor Bruno Walter when they travelled through the Alps together, ‘No need to look – I’ve already composed them.’
Art is unity is God, and the absurd rules that some European nations have devised for keeping works of visual art within national boundaries seem to me downright irreligious. Fortunately they cannot prevent the grand distribution of genius across all the frontiers of Europe. One cathedral leads you to another across this magnificent corner of the earth. In the glory of an Italian palazzo you may recognize, as in family likeness, the charm of an English country house. Shakespeare, who is undoubtedly one of God’s own personae, belongs to everyone in Europe. Mozart worked in London as in Salzburg. Napoleon invited Goethe to go and live in France. Samuel Beckett was French as well as Irish. Voltaire, Rousseau, Byron, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shelley, Liszt, Hans Christian Andersen and Tchaikovsky all, at one time or another, lived and worked beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Above all else (except perhaps marijuana), rock music has linked the young of modern Europe – it was a civic celebration to match the fantastic festivities of old when in the 1980s the rock-and-roll group Pink Floyd played on a raft in the Bacino di San Marco in Venice. I strolled into Notre-Dame in Paris one evening to find a glorious German choir singing Bach’s St Matthew Passion before the high altar, while all around the dim-lit cathedral young French people sat on the floor, or leant against pillars, reverent and entranced; and I once listened to just the same music, performed to just the same effect, in a bare and clinical church hall in a suburb of Reykjavik.
45 ‘Sweet Rosemarie’
Loiter with me now for a moment or two, on a winter day in 1996, in an alley off Ban Jelačić Square in Zagreb, down the hill from the Stone Gate. A man bundled in a greatcoat is playing an instrument of his own invention, consisting of rows of wine and mineral-water bottles strung on a contraption rather like a washing-line, and tuned by their varying contents of liquid. He is playing with great delicacy a piece you and I both know well, but can’t for the life of us place, and around him a smiling crowd has gathered, amused by the instrument, touched by the tune. In the front row of the audience a small child of two or three in a woolly blue and white jumper suit, with hat to match, is performing a shuffly sort of dance to the beat of the music.
It is a curiously affecting performance, partly because of the sweetly familiar music – what is that tune, damn it? – played upon so homely a device, but partly because the musician is one of a grand company of street performers who greet us nowadays all across Europe, a league of artists of varying talent but generally cheering message. They are a true concert of Europe. I remember, off the top of my head, a trombonist and a cellist playing a Marcello sonata in a park at Weimar, and a juggler of genius outside the Beaubourg in Paris, and brilliant Gypsy fiddlers, and a virtuoso flautist in the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, and pavement portrait-painters in Prague, and rustic bagpipers in Rome, and mimes and clowns all over the place, and my son Twm with his harp and his Welsh songs in the cathedral square at Freiburg, and a young woman with an oboe in an underground train in London (where they call it ‘busking’ – a word which originally meant, it seems, ‘cruising as a pirate’).
They are no pirates to me. They are part of Europe’s holy fabric, and except for the mimes and clowns I am always glad to see them. And hang on, I think I’ve remembered what that tune is. Isn’t it one of those charming Fritz Kreisler fripperies they used to play in Palm Court cafés, with a lady violinist in a satin blouse, and the grammar-school music-master moonlighting at the piano? ‘Schön Rosmarin’ – isn’t that it?
46 Old friends
Art makes Europe European – Joyce’s Dublin, Cervantes’s Spain, Camoëns’ Portugal, Dickens’s London, Kafka’s Prague, Proust’s France, Rembrandt’s Holland, Bach’s Germany, Sibelius’s Finland, Ibsen’s Norway, Mozart’s Austria, Leonardo’s Italy – all made common property by art’s genius. You may find works by the divine Giorgione not only in his native Venice but in Amsterdam, Bassano, Bergamo, Berlin, Budapest, Dublin, Florence, Glasgow, London, Madrid, Milan, Monaco, Naples, Oxford, Padua, Paris, Rome, Rotterdam and Vienna. After a lifetime of familiarity with reproductions of his Sleeping Venus, all unexpectedly I came across its original among the war-ruins of Dresden. I was not in the least surprised. I was not even ecstatic – merely pleased to see it there. It was like coming across an old friend in the street one day, not far from home.