England: Monuments in Shrewsbury

 There is a strange link between these pictures

This is the magnificent 15th century "Angel ceiling" in the nave of the church of St Mary the Virgin in Shrewsbury. One night in February 1894 the town was hit by a terrible storm, part of the spire collapsed and brought it all down.

  A steel roof was erected to keep the rain out, and the ceiling was all put together again. This must have been like a gigiantic jigsaw puzzle! Only one small part of the ceiling today is new wood: all the rest is the original oak! 

  The story goes that the vicar said that the storm was God's curse on the town - because of a proposal to erect a statue of Charles Darwin, Shrewsbury's most famous son! But if that was indeed the case, it didn't work, because the statue was erected anyway in 1897: it is outside what was once Shrewsbury school, where Darwin was educated, but which is now the town library.

Darwin would have come to the church with the school when he was a boy, but his family were Unitarians and worshipped at the Unitarian Chapel in the High Street, where there is a memorial to him.

Bertrand Russell investigates Early Christianity

 Bertrand Russell on Early Christianity

“The Christian religion, as it was handed over by the late Roman Empire to the barbarians, consisted of three elements: first, certain philosophical beliefs, derived mainly from Plato and the Neoplatonists, but also in part from the Stoics; second, a conception of morals and history derived from the Jews; and third, certain theories, more especially as to salvation, which were on the whole new in Christianity, though in part traceable to Orphism*, and to kindred cults of the Near East.

The most important Jewish elements in Christianity appear to me to be the following:

• I. A sacred history, beginning with the creation, leading to a consummation in the future, and justifying the ways of God to man.

• II. The existence of a small section of mankind whom God specially loves. For Jews, this section was the Chosen People; for

Christians, the elect.

• III. A new conception of ‘righteousness’. The virtue of almsgiving, for example, was taken over by Christianity from later Judaism. The importance attached to baptism might be derived from Orphism or from oriental pagan mystery religions, but practical philanthropy, as an element in the Christian conception of virtue, seems to have come from the Jews.

• IV. The Law. Christians kept part of the Hebrew Law, for instance the decalogue, while they rejected its ceremonial and ritual parts. But in practice they attached to the Creed much the same feelings that the Jews attached to the Law. This involved the doctrine that correct belief is at least as important as virtuous action, a doctrine which is essentially Hellenic. What is Jewish in origin is the exclusiveness of the elect.

• V. The Messiah. The Jews believed that the Messiah would bring them temporal prosperity, and victory over their enemies here on earth; moreover, he remained in the future. For Christians, the Messiah was the historical Jesus, who was also identified with the Logos of Greek philosophy; and it was not on earth, but in heaven, that the Messiah was to enable his followers to triumph over their enemies.

• VI. The Kingdom of Heaven. Other-worldliness is a conception which Jews and Christians, in a sense, share with later Platonism, but it takes, with them, a much more concrete form than with Greek philosophers. The Greek doctrine — which is to be found in much Christian philosophy, but not in popular Christianity — was that the sensible world, in space and time, is an illusion, and that, by intellectual and moral discipline, a man can learn to live in the eternal world, which alone is real. The Jewish and Christian doctrine, on the other hand, conceived the Other World as not metaphysically different from this world, but as in the future, when the virtuous would enjoy everlasting bliss and the wicked would suffer everlasting torment. This belief embodied revenge psychology, and was intelligible to all and sundry, as the doctrines of Greek philosophers were not.

To understand the origin of these beliefs, we must take account of certain facts in Jewish history, to which we will now turn our attention ...“

— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book Two. Catholic Philosophy, Part. I. The Fathers, Ch. I: The Religious Development of the Jews, pp. 307-09

Learn Russian!

 Start to learn the Russian alphabet with the help of Tolkien! 

I'm sure that everyone will be able to transliterate the first two lines of this book cover! But notice how several Russian letters bear a misleading resemblance to ours (which are taken from the Roman alphabet) but are pronounced quite differently. (The Russian letter, not included here, that looks like a backward R is actually pronunced "ya"). Note that the Russian language has no "J" sound, so two letters are used here to give a rough equivalent, which is pronounced "D-ZH". Neither is there an "H" sound: the letter looking like an X is pronounced something like the Scottish word "loCH". Also note the odd fact that the simple word "the" has no equivalent in Russian. It was also absent in Latin.

  This book cover was the work of Denis Gordeev (more correctly, Gordeyev), a  very good Russian fantasy artist little known in the West. If you enter his name into Google, you'll discover a huge selection of his work, illustrating Tolkien and many other writers. 

Postscript: Overheard on the streets of Moscow some years ago, from two British tourists in search of somewhere to eat: "There's what we want: one of those pecktopah places!" No prizes are offered for using the picture above to help in transliterating the Russian PECTOPAH!

 

Politics: Court versus Country

The oldest and most fundamental political division can be called “Court vs. Country”. It was first used by Sir Lewis Namier in his investigations of British politics in the 18th century, but can be applied to almost all modern political and social structures.

The Court = Those who are more or less permanently in power. Their opponents sometimes dub them "the King's Friends", because of their alleged servile and self-seeking support for whoever happens to be the present leader. 

The Country = Those who are, or see themselves as being, permanently excluded from power, and whose interests are being ignored. Often, they are people with local power and influence, who resent interference by central government. But, at the same time, they often have no intention of actually taking responsibility at the centre: they prefer to grumble.  

The fundamental ideology of the Court is that government must be carried on to protect against lawlessness, and without proper leadership there will be chaos. There is often a snobbish contempt for the Country

The Country tends to harbour a set of discontented attitudes: that government is corrupt, that its leaders are entirely self-seeking and that there is far too much interference in ordinary people’s lives: taking their hard-earned money and undermining theirfreedom with new and unwelcome innovations. Govenrment should get off our backs!

The Politicians are a separate group, defined by Namier as those who are sometimes in power, sometimes not. When out of power, they ally themselves with the Country in order to stir up trouble, wih the aim of either getting themselves recruited to the Court, or of replacing the current Court entirely. When in power, the Politicians often abandon their Country slogans and start to behave like a new Court, to the bitter disillusion of their erstwhile Country supporters! A genuinely "Country" government is so are as to be almost a contradiction in terms.

  The English Parliament, from the earliest times, provided a meeting-place for Court and Country. But, unless the Court maintained a majority there, trouble was likely to follow, as shown most spectacularly in the troubles of Charles I!

The Court vs. Country theme can be detected almost everywhere. In the 18th century, both the campaign for American independence began as typical "country" movements, though they soon developed into something different.

In the early days of Nazi Germany, the rank and file stormtroopers were increasingly restive about ahving gained nothing from Hitler's rise to power, and Soviet Russia in the early 1920s witnessed the grumbling of the "workers' opposition" and the armed rising. of the Kronstadt sailors. All these "Country" revolts had to be violently crushed before full dictatorship could be established 

 In Britain, the prpoganda of both the Brexit campaign and Boris Johnson's appeal in 2019 were strongly "Country", successfully appealing to "the people" against the "ruling liberal elite". Donald Trump's appeal to the voters is entirely "Country", constantly attacking a mysterious and unnamed "elite" who are conspiring firstly to destroy him and then to bring the entire nation to ruin by destroying the people's liberty. 

  To my mind, Trump, with his lack of any cultural pretensions and his love of Macdonald's hamburgers, is a far more convincing "man of the people" than the highly educated, would-be academic Johnson. 

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Annunciation

 March 25th is the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary. It was a very popular subject for artists, and these illustrations from the Book of Hours of Anne Boleyn show how mediaeval illumination techniques continued in England well nto Tudor times.

England: Old St. Chad's; Shrewsbury

 This church fell down at the end of the 18th century, leaving only a small side-chapel standing.

 Repairs to the fabric of this are currently under way, and this week I was able to persuade the workmen to let me in for a brief look round. Here are some phographs I was able to take. The font is ancient and very simple, and the heraldic hatchments are particularly fine, though some are ruined beyond repair.

Many  of these hatchments feature a raven, or crow, which was the coat of arms of the Corbet family, who were powerful in north Shropshire. Since the name for this bird in old English or Scots was a "corbie", this is an example of a "canting" coat of arms, which make a pun on the family's name.

Fortunately, the finest work at old St Chad's was removed in 1788, before the building collapsed, and installed at the nearby church of St. Mary the Virgin. This is the great mid-14th century Jesse window.

The architect George Stewart was commissioned to build a replacement church (see an earlier post)

Spring in Clive churchyard

 

Spring in Clive churchyard