Looking forward to..the Dark Ages

I am looking forward to a new series on BBC - The Dark Ages: An Age of Light in which art critic Waldemar Januszczak embarks on a trip around the world to discover if the Dark Ages were actually a time of artistic achievement inspired by novel ideas and religion.  This is a subject dear to my heart since it is the background of my biography Columbanus: Poet, Preacher, Statesman, Saint which more or less explores the same subject.  Historically the Dark Ages are dark to us for two reasons.  It is thought of as an illiterate age but it was far from that.  The reason we think so is because they wrote on paper, made from Egyptian papyrus, which does not survive in our damp northern climate.

In the 7th century the supply of papyrus to western Europe dried up due to the Arab incursions and upheavals all over the Middle East and it was at this time that writers, mainly monks, switched to using parchment and vellum. (The aristocracy was only illiterate in the sense that they did not read or write if they could get someone else to do it for them.) The benefit of this for us is that those books have lasted very well indeed.  Our earliest books such as The Lindisfarne Gospels date from the late seventh century.  The downside for historians is that no public records which are the mainstay of historical research survive from the end of the Roman Empire through to the seventh century.  We know they kept written public accounts because the 6th century Frankish king Chilperic threw all his tax records on the fire but much else must have been destroyed.  The later monks occasionally oblige us by copying records out onto parchment and vellum thus ensuring their survival but these are usually just records relating to their own monastery recording for example the monatery's title to its various lands and not general information that would be available from census records and tax accounts.

 

In art too we are deprived of a real view of this period between the end of the empire and the early middle ages proper.  There are no portraits even of the kings and queens of the period, no glimpse of the great and good.  This is not because they were so self-effacing as to not require to have their portraits painted but because paintings were made on wood panels in tempera (water-colour) which does not survive over the centuries.  Our earliest such paintings in Europe date from the 12th century, much later in historical terms. But we know from Egyptian mummies of the late Roman period that portrait painting had reached extremely high levels of skill and realism and there can be no doubt that portraits of the great and good between 400 and 750AD did exist and were probably of very fine quality.  Again our damp climate is to blame.  The Egyptian mummies have survived because they were buried in sand and in very dry conditions. 

 

The Dark Ages was not a period of great technological advancement.  By and large they stuck to the technology that they had achieved in the late Roman period but the level of craftsmanship we know from the artefacts we do have was extraordinarily high.  It was not a primitive age.  Above all it was an age of ideas, the age when most of our own ideas began to flourish.  In religion particularly there was an explosion of radical thinking which spilled over into science and politics.  We may not have much left to go on but what we do have is of vital importance to our understanding of modern history.

 

The Dark Ages: An Age of Light begins on BBC4 at 10:00 p.m on Thursday 29 November.  My book on Columbanus is published by Imprint Academic and is available from bookshops and libraries.

The Nativity - where did the shepherds come from?

Pope Benedict is just about to publish a scholarly book on the various stories relating to the nativity of Jesus examining how they come to be included in the gospels.  Matthew for example only tells us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and fails to suggest that there was anything miraculous or unusual about his birth. Rather more interestingly the apocryphal gospels suggest that Jesus had a twin brother in which case of course the traditional nativity scene should present two babies in the manger but convention dictates that there is only ever one child in the Madonna's arms. This is because the scene is not meant to be a historical representation of the facts surrounding the birth of Jesus but is an effective bit of allegorical symbolism.  The Holy Family represents the Trinity - God the Father represented by Joseph, God the Holy Ghost or Spirit of Holy Wisdom represented by Mary and God the son represented by the infant Jesus.  It's an easy visual image to enable Christians to grasp the very tricky philosophical principles of Trinitarianism, one that even small children understand.

 

So what about the shepherds and angels?  If Jesus was actually born one of twins in a regular house in Bethlehem where did they come from?

 

The shepherds and angels occur only in the gospel of Luke which is believed to have been written down somewhere between 100AD and 150AD, quite some considerable time after the events the writer was describing. I believe the date is significant.  In 110AD the Emperor Hadrian is recorded as having become confused between the followers of Horus in Alexandria and the Christians in the same city.  Possible the two had combined as it was common practice for the early Christians to work alongside their pagan counterparts and gradually try to achieve a merger. 

 

The introduction of the followers of Horus into the Christian community is significant because at least two features of the story of Horus have found their way into the nativity.  It was Horus who was born in a stable and whose birthday was celebrated on 25th December.  Jesus, it is believed, was actually born around 4BC and on 6th January.  The Celts too seem to have had a corresponding myth regarding the birth of the sun-god Lud.  The Venerable Bede tells us that 25th December was known to the Celts as 'Mother's Night' suggesting a corresponding nativity myth associated with that date.  The mother goddess was Dana or Don, depending on whether you are British or Irish.  However we have no record of any shepherds or angels appearing in either the Egyptian or Celtic versions.

 

So where did Luke come by his beautiful story?  I believe the answer is he pinched it.  Luke's gospel is deliberately fashioned to appeal to a western audience.  You will note that in his account of the sermon of the mount he omits the obviously Jewish features such as the tradition of circumcision which appear in Matthew.  Luke knew that his western readers would not be interested in this and it might put them off accepting the more universal aspects of Jesus's teachings.  Instead he slips in to the narrative key symbols that they would find familiar.  Luke lifted the story, not to put too fine a point on it, from one of the Roman masters of literature, Virgil.

 

Why do I think this?  I have no proof as such but around forty years before the birth of Jesus Virgil wrote a great series of poems called The Eclogues which tell the tale of shepherds in northern Italy and recount the details of their lives living in the fields and on the hillsides.  In Book 4 of the Eclogues Virgil announces the arrival of a 'prince of peace' in terms which have long been thought to foreshadow the coming of Christ.  In fact the passage was so well-known in the Middle Ages Virgil was deemed to be a prophet or a wizard.   

 

Eclogue 4 describes a Golden age 'foretold in prophecy' when the 'first-born' of Justice comes down from heaven and is born in human form beginning an era in which 'hearts of iron cease and hearts of gold inherit the whole earth'.  In this age mankind will be freed from fear and all the stain of past sins will be cleansed.  The child will eventually return to the life of the gods.  The parallels with the Christian story are obvious.  But Virgil adds a bit more to his prophecy that is not contained in Judaic Messianic tradition.  His Prince of Peace will receive as his first birthday presents 'nature's small presents'.  He will be surrounded by the fruits of the natural world, the kind of gifts that in the Christmas tradition are represented by the shepherds.  Virgil seems to echo Isaiah when he writes that 'the ox will have no fear of the lion'.  Small wonder that mediaeval Christians believed he was foretelling the birth of Jesus.

 

At the end of Eclogue 4 Virgil observes that the baby is already overdue and the birth is imminent but then he returns to his original narrative and we hear no more of it.  Of Virgil's original ten Eclogues survive but he framed his poem according to an earlier Greek poem by Theocritus which has eleven books.  I have a theory - and it is only a theory - that Virgil did in fact write eleven books and in his final book - because this is the way the story has been tending - his shepherds visit the new-born prince of peace.  Whether Virgil included angels or whether they were Luke's invention I couldn't say - except to note that the Egyptian Coptic gospels are full of angels - but by slipping Virgil's shepherds into his narrative of the nativity Luke achieved a literary masterstroke suggesting that the much-revered Latin poet had predicted the birth of the Christian Son of God thus giving him a western provenance to match that of earlier Jewish tradition.  In Mediaeval Britain which was heavily economically dependent on the wool-trade shepherds abounded and it is no surprise to find that this is the most popular gospel story in mediaeval literature. Mediaeval Europeans knew Luke and they knew Virgil.  What happened to Virgil's final Eclogue if it existed?  Now there's the mystery.