Europe
Page 6
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, nearl
y 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 water
s 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.