I’m leaving Zanzibar today and heading to Ethiopia, which I’m slightly daunted by. War broke out in Tigray last week and I’m meant to be flying into the city where the Tigray People’s Liberation Front are headquarted on Tuesday and I’m starting to think this may not be such a great idea. It also hadn’t occurred to me that I should get some vaccinations (I’m not necessarily opposed, I just don’t like needles so I’ve been avoiding getting all the childhood ones I missed and failed to consider that I might be going to a country where there’s polio circulating; I also don’t have a plug adapter.) I have my malaria prophylaxis pills at least, which I haven’t had any side effects from, though I am currently quite sick and googling typhoid fever symptoms with mild anxiety. I had been warned off the iced drinks here and I guess they finally got me.

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As a travelogue, it records a week in Paje, swimming in the Indian Ocean, monkeys in mahogany forests, three days in Stone Town and my arrival yesterday in Nungwi. I might write a second diary about Nungwi. After this week, I’ll get the ferry to Dar es Salaam and fly to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, where I’m going, against some very strong advice, into the Tigray region and then to the Danakil Depression, the hottest place on earth with molten lava lakes and boiling acid pools and toxic gas vents and the ever-present smell of sulphur—essentially hell; also possibly the birthplace of humankind. Then I’ll fly to Lalibela in Amhara, where medieval churches were carved downwards out of the rock, for the Feast of the Assumption, and then I’ll go back to Addis and take a train to Harar to Rimbaud’s house and hopefully to see spotted hyenas fed raw meat over the city walls at night.

If you’d like to read about these things, consider becoming a paid subscriber so that I can keep going to ridiculous places with absolutely no oversight, media training or accreditation. You will not find travel writing like this in Condé Nast. At £5 a month, you can fund ten bus journeys on a Zanzibari dala dala, at least four packs of cigarettes and maybe five if I haggle well, or one good meal such as an octopus curry to sustain me. It’s cheaper if you subscribe via browser vs the app, btw.

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I can’t remember what that state felt like back then, can’t remember writing that piece (again, fault of the benzos), but I do remember how it was a few weeks ago, when I sat in the airport in Geneva and wrote 6,000 words on Jung and magic.1 I arrived in London that evening full of rage, the creative flight having tipped into its shadow side where mind’s energy is waning but the ideas are still coming and you can’t quite get a handle on them anymore; they come three at once and then disappear before you can even sketch their outlines in your Notes app. Irritation itches at the skin and the body, as if animated by a possessing spirit, seethes and, restless, looks for a fight.

Oddly, that line—the fire and the rose are one—had recently recurred. I read it in a book called Owning Your Own Shadow by Jungian psychologist Robert A. Johnson. I’d felt drawn to this book, and another titled Ecstasy by the same author, on the secondhand shelves at Treadwell’s, where I’d gone to pursue some esoteric threads that had been suggesting themselves. My approach to reading always tends towards the providential—I think books, authors or subjects suggest themselves to you when you’re ready to receive them—but in these periods the whole thing gets amped up and I feel like I’m being actively guided along a pre-ordained intellectual path. Each idea slots into place as if divinely revealed. Ideas develop at breakneck speed until I reach the state of physical exhaustion that I hit the night I returned to London. Before then, I was reading several books a day, writing thousands of words, filling my notebook with ten pages at a time, waking each day excited to see the various threads fused together as sense appeared out of the signs and messages I’d been receiving.

When I read that phrase, I underlined it and put an exclamation mark in the margin. I knew that I was reading the right book.

Now, I’ve spent a week resting in Wales and the pace has slowed. I no longer feel like entities of unclear allegiance are guiding me through a period of initiation. The analytic muscle is able to work again to supplement what is understood by intuition. I can ask ‘what is the evidence for this?’ and can bring to bear the skills of a historian, who is always sceptical and prefers to admit ignorance than make grand, sweeping judgements. Those two elements of my intellect are, I think, important counterweights. I’ve had periods of suppressing the intuitive sense of understanding, going only by what I can understand through reason just as I’ve periods of suspending reason altogether and going on a joyous flight of intuition. Neither extreme allows me to work at my best. Even in this calmer state, I can’t bring myself to write off the realisations that came to me in those few weeks of heightened intensity. I do believe, even on rational grounds, that God and whoever else speaks more easily during altered states—through dreams in sleep or visions in madness, when the mind’s defences are down and the subject is more willing to hear what is being said.

‘The fire and the rose are one’ is the last line of T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, the last in the series of poems collected as the Four Quartets. These are among my favourite poems in the world. I took that collection on my walk to Iona, reading it by firelight as I camped through the Highlands. The phrase indicates the union of two aspects of the spiritual path: desolation and consolation, affliction and grace, purgation and love. So tightly woven are these poles that neither can exist without the other, but the duality has to remain. They have to be experienced as if they were isolates even though they aren’t.

In Owning Your Own Shadow, Johnson uses the phrase in reference to the communication between the ego and the shadow and specifically in reference to the mandorla, an almond shape that can be understood as the overlapping segment in a Venn diagram. Christ and Mary are frequently depicted within this shape in medieval art, which for Johnson coheres with their roles as mediators between the otherwise dirempt parts of the soul or of human life. He writes: ‘the mandorla binds together that which was torn apart and made unwhole—unholy. It is the most profound religious experience we can have in life.’ The shape of the mandorla is also associated with Christ’s side wound, one of the Five Holy Wounds of medieval devotion, and with Mary as the gate through which Jesus entered the world. There’s a rich symbolic register here:

Jungian psychology is fertile ground for the manic mind which naturally thinks in archetypes and correspondences. It’s also exactly what I needed to encounter at this point in my life (I have a vague suspicion that these episodes are given to me when I’ve been stuck for too long and need to be shoved by force into a new way of thinking.) For a long time, I’ve lurched violently between extremes of overcontrol and undercontrol. I’ve become intensely religious, withdrawn, restrictive in appetites and then swung to the other pole of extravagance, excess, lust, irresponsibility and intoxication. My attempts to find somewhere to live in the middle have only created tension and a feeling of intense overexertion.

Johnson explains that ‘the refused and unacceptable characteristics do not go away; they only collect in the dark corners of our personality. When they have been hidden long enough, they take on a life of their own.’ He also explains that the shadow is a great reservoir of energy; when the ego has exhausted its reserves and become intellectually and creatively dry, the shadow is a deep well which can be drawn on. I’ve experienced this—like with the relationship I fell into in February where suddenly I was alive, thinking, writing and excited again. But I’ve always tended to project my shadow onto other people, usually men. These people, when they come along, enliven me. They let me live out a part of myself that I usually keep locked down. But it’s too extreme and it’s too much responsibility for them to bear. It wasn’t until reading this book that I realised what I was doing and that there’s a more efficient means of achieving the same result. The characteristics which enliven me when I encounter them in others are characteristics I possess within myself, only stuffed deep down and denied.

I also found Johnson’s discussion of the ‘golden shadow’ extremely useful. By this, he means the noble or positive parts of ourselves that we have repressed—either because they are connected to more ambiguous or dangerous traits or because we fear them for themselves. He writes:

‘The gold is related to our higher calling, and this can be hard to accept at certain stages of life. Ignoring the gold can be as damaging as ignoring the dark side of the psyche, and some people may suffer a severe shock or illness before they learn how to let the gold out. Indeed, this kind of intense experience may be necessary to show us that an important part of us is lying dormant or unused. In tribal cultures, shamans or healers often experience an illness that gives them the insight they need to heal themselves and then bring wisdom to their people. This is often the case for us today. We are still operating with the archetype of the wounded healer who has learned to cure himself and find the gold in his experience.’

I realised that, in every instance of intense attraction I’ve experienced as an adult, the man in question has demonstrated aspects of my shadow which I’m unconsciously trying to inhabit. They are cruel, apparently strong, unaffected by others’ feelings, decisive, impulsive, confident. There is a part of me that can be this way but I’m afraid of inhabiting her directly. It’s easier to bask in the glow of someone else’s gold, taking on only a little of it and without the responsibility of it being yours.

The men I’ve been attracted to have also been criminals, extremists, con-men, alcoholics and addicts. I envied how they could spin their double lives with apparent ease, knowing that attempting anything similar would break me. I didn’t see that it was also breaking them but in a steadier, less dramatic way. The down-side of projecting your shadow means that you never actually see the person in front of you, who is different and often lesser than your projections. Several times, I’ve had the experience of snapping out of an attachment and realising that a man isn’t some strong leader warrior type at all, only a scared child living in his parents’ house and punishing everyone around him.

‘Two things go wrong if we project our shadow: First, we do damage to another by burdening him with our darkness—or light, for it is as heavy a burden to make someone play hero for us. Second, we sterilize ourselves by casting off our shadow. We then lose a chance to change and miss the fulcrum point, the ecstatic dimension of our own lives.’

Johnson also explains the value of consciously carrying someone else’s shadow—or the collective shadow of a group. He tells a story about a Japanese priest who had been accused by a young woman of getting her pregnant. The villagers confronted him and he replied only, ‘Ah so.’ Though he was ostracised, he maintained his silence until a young man returned to the village and proposed marriage to the young woman, confessing to being the father of her child. The villagers went to apologise to the priest and he said, again, ‘Ah so.’ Johnson says that ‘this story shows the power of waiting while others do their shadow work. The priest did the villagers a great service by his silence; by not protesting or denying the situation, he left enough room for the people to work the problem out among themselves.’

Last year, when another writer accused me of secretly being a prostitute—claiming that I couldn’t possibly be supporting myself as a writer and PhD student without a day job—I was angry. It really bothered me. I went so far as to post my Substack income stats on Twitter. I told myself that this had a political basis—that I was angry because a male writer or a woman from a middle class or wealthy background would never have attracted this accusation, and because the person making the accusation was a supposed leftist. As I think about it now, though, this seems insufficient. It bothered me on a more fundamental level because it touched an archetype that I kept locked in my shadow.

Recently, I had a go at reframing the problem. Instead of trying to justify myself and prove the facts, I asked: what role am I playing in the psychic landscape of others to generate this accusation repeatedly? Why are people so certain of it despite lacking any evidence? At this, things began to fall into place. I could connect it with a recurrent problem I’ve had, which is that my freedom and the joy I take in my sexuality really bothers people. It’s because I function as a projection of their shadow. It’s not surprising that these people tend to be alienated from their own sexuality or tend to experience it in corrupted and commodified ways. My persistence in clinging to spirituality alongside sex puts me in ‘sacred whore’ territory; whether I’ve ever traded money for sex, then, isn’t really what people are interested in. I realised that I’d been wasting my breath trying to counter the rumour. Instead, I needed to see it as an opportunity to open a conversation with that archetype. Here was a precious chance to find that mandorla, the holy space between two seemingly incompatible extremes.

The next question, then, was how to open this conversation without letting the archetype run wild, which wasn’t something I wanted to risk. There are several options in the Jungian wheelhouse: active imagination (similar to Ignatian contemplation), circumambulation (mapping/writing the self) and ceremony. Johnson recommends active imagination but I haven’t gone that far yet. I was interested by what he had to say about ceremony. In particular, he suggested that any creative act required an equal and opposite destructive act to balance it out. Anything good done by the ego would be paid in kind by the shadow. He writes:

‘Does this mean that I have to be as destructive as I am creative, as dark as I am light? Yes, but I have some control over how or where I will pay the dark price. I can make a ceremony or ritual soon after doing some creative work and restore my balance in that way. […]

In this ritual you must find one of the left-hand contents of your personality and give it exporession in some way that satisfies it but does not do damage to anything in the right-hand personality. You can draw it, sculpt it, write a vivid story about it, dance it, burn something, or bury it—anything that gives expression to that material without doing damage… Remember, a symbolic or ceremonial experience is real and affects one as much as an actual event.

The psyche is unaware of the difference between an outer act and an interior one. Our shadow qualities are lived out equally well—from the viewpoint of Self—either way. Culture can only function if we live out the unwanted elements symbolically.’

This was lightning for me. I had never considered that I could make my own rituals. My dullness at Mass need not signal the end of my ceremonial life. My friend Nina had recently done a Thoth tarot reading for me and among the cards were the Devil and Lust, a card which features the Whore of Babylon, or Babalon as she is known in Thelema. She told me to look into that figure, correctly appraising that she was who I needed to integrate. The associations of evil and the demonic intimidated me—but I realised that this was part of the task, like how saying provocative things is a gatekeeping mechanism which only discloses what lies beyond to people capable of putting their sensitivities aside. I didn’t need to embrace evil to temporarily, for this particular task, lay aside good and evil as a strict dichotomy—or, at least, as a dichotomy which led to the suppression of one half of myself and the corruption of the other half into a false persona. Wholeness would require breaking down that particular mental trap.

In her book The Sacred Prositute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine, Nancy Qualls-Corbett writes:

‘It is this moving, changing, transformative aspect of the feminine that is associated with the goddess of love and with which the sacred prostitute is identified. When it is active, we view the world and ourselves in a different light. Creative juices are stimulated, and rational boundaries or limitations push into the realm of the unconventional and irrational. New attitudes usher in a certain excitement and life itself takes on new meaning. Welcome change proceeds hand-in-hand with creative risk taking.’

I’ve often lamented that the creative and sexual drives are tied together. When I’ve attempted periods of chastity, I’ve experienced concurrent creative drought. But with that stimulation comes danger; Qualls-Corbett notes that, as a moon goddess, the archetype of the sacred prostitute also entailed lunacy. The dark side of her unrestricted freedom was ‘boundless rage and ruthless destruction… As the moon, she was cyclic, following a rhythm of constant change.’ As such, this is not an archetype compatible with close human relationships, with romance or family. She is necessarily unmarried and alone, set apart in a temple context. These aspects of the archetype seem coherent with Aleister Crowley’s warning for the Scarlet Woman, an office in his system of ceremonial magick whereby a living woman functioned as an avatar of the goddess Babalon:

Let the Scarlet Woman beware! If pity and compassion and tenderness visit her heart; if she leave my work to toy with old sweetnesses; then shall my vengeance be known. I will slay me her child: I will alienate her heart: I will cast her out from men: as a shrinking and despised harlot shall she crawl through dusk wet streets, and die cold and an-hungered. But let her raise herself in pride! Let her follow me in my way! Let her work the work of wickedness! Let her kill her heart! Let her be loud and adulterous! Let her be covered with jewels, and rich garments, and let her be shameless before all men!

As it’s Crowley, this advice is framed in the darkest register. His approach is to be shocking because he is elaborating a difficult requirement, one which means going against our instincts and social codes. Qualls-Corbett explains this aspect of the archtype in a different way:

‘When there is a breakup of a relationship, if one attempts to replace the deep pain of mourning with fantasties of the partner’s return, then life comes to a standstill… The strength of the goddess lies in the capacity to give up that which is most precious, in order to ensure growth and regeneration; transformation can only take place when old attitudes and values give way to new ones. Hers is not a cold, calculating strength, denying all emotion; on the contrary, she feels the deepest emotions and does not restrict her mourning. This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the goddess to comprehend and certainly to integrate, for it goes against our cultural teachings.’

Especially in a culture where casual sex means disposability, it’s easy to misunderstand what is being said here. This archetype doesn’t mean using and disposing of people like objects. But it does mean standing alone, refusing the attachments that carry a woman from this archetype into that of the mother. Of course, this isn’t a permanent rejection of one in favour of another; both have to be integrated, just at different points in the life cycle. It’s this association of the archetype with transformation, renunciation and constant change that underlies the connection between the sexual and creative drives. Neither are domestic or able to be domesticated. Both carry a destructive aspect which must be discharged.2

Discussing the psychological function of this archetype, Qualls-Corbett uses the myth of Ariadne and Theseus, in which the Cretan princess, abandoned by her lover on the island of Naxos, is joined to Dionysius in hieros gamos. She is depicted leading maenads in an ecstatic dance, demonstrating her transition from the Apollonian to the Dionysian principle. In a frieze in the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii, this process is shown as a multi-stage initiation in which she is undressed and flayed before putting on new garments and emerging groomed and fully realised. This represents a kind of rite of passage: a divestment from patriarchal attachment as a preliminary to what Jung called individuation, where the shadow is joined to the ego in full realisation of the Self. Qualls-Corbett writes:

‘A maiden of any age regularly projects her creative abilities onto a man, seeing herself only as reflected in her love’s eyes and accomplishments. She falls in love with the hero, embodiment of her own unconscious potential, and the man fights her battles, carries out her wishes or takes her out of an undesirable situation.

Falling in love is always a result of projection; it is not a mature feeling of respect and appreciation for the other; rather one loves an aspect of oneself. When the partner does not live up to the demands of the projection (and no human possibly can), the projection cannot be sustainedl the reality of the person is seen and one wonders, “What did I ever see in him (or her)?”

For the woman to become more than just a reflection of her lover, the projection must be consciously withdrawn—abandoned or sacrificed. She must come to realize that the qualities she sees in him are actually inside herself. At that point she can also begin to appreciate the mature strength of the masculine, the god within, without losing the connection with her feminine nature. In the joining of opposite principles, the mature woman experiences the fertilization of her own creative energy.’

Another of the polarities I’ve vacilliated between is rejection or embrace of men. Part of my difficulty with this archetype is that I’ve misunderstood it as male-centred; in my periods of letting the whore run riot, I’ve also tended to elevate men and masculinity and to tolerate or concur with misogyny. I’ve seen my own femininity as something which needed to be corrected by a masculine power, and which ought to tolerate humiliation in the process of being humbled. This was a great mistake on my part. When I could stand it no more, I ran to the opposite extreme, rejecting men entirely, reflexively hating them. The archetype of the sacred prostitute doesn’t operate under the male gaze; her dancing is not a performance for men. Rather, she is the principle of change complementing the principle of upright stability. Her gift is that of wholeness; she can give without loss or diminishment.

Contemporary culture has little space for female sexuality which allows for male enjoyment but isn’t defined or ruled by men. The default interpretation of such a woman is that she is a whore, implying that she does what she does under duress, out of necessity, that she takes no enjoyment in it, that it is an inherently self-destructive rather than creative act. The woman herself is encouraged to see her own sexuality in these terms—as something aberrant and pathological, needing to be reined in. I have stayed in relationships for far too long because I feared what my sexuality would do unchained from a monogamous relationship. One ex, after ending our relationship, told me that we could keep sleeping together to save me from self-destructive acts. Certainly, I’ve also played into this narrative, casting myself as a damsel in need of rescuing and returning to the good, meaningful sex of the relationship. All of this is diagnostic of the archetype’s repression, both at the level of culture and individual psychology. The result of its loss is listlessness and lethargy punctuated by bursts of unrestrained sexuality which, because of being suppressed, does express itself in potentially dangerous and destructive ways.

In the ecstatic dance of the maenads, we loop around to where we began: mania. In his book Ecstasy, Robert A. Johnson laments that almost all contemporary examples of the Dionysian principle are in fact examples of inflation rather than enthusiasm. While the former means to be puffed up, the latter means ‘to be filled with God.’ Inflation leads easily to mania and madness. On the other hand, ‘enthuasiasm annuls the distance between pairs of opposites, and this brings ecstatic joy. A visitation of God, which enthusasism gives, transcends the duality of one’s live—the either/or—and brings them into a synthesis… Then, for a short time—because this is all that we can stand—the opposites cease torturing us. When we transcend the cross of opposites, we will find ecstatic joy.’

This, in fact, is the crucifixion: the still point at the centre of the universe, the meeting point of gravity and grace. The Christian tradition, though shorn of its medieval excess, has always carried this ecstatic principle at its centre—in the mandorla, where the furthest extremes of human life are, for a moment, joined.

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In the car afterwards I kept touching that place below my lip, feeling the wetness. Nobody had made me bleed before. I almost admired it: look, you did something new. I was always the one to make myself bleed, as if to say I couldn’t be hurt by anyone because I could always do it better to myself, but I’d never scarred my own face.

By evening the bruise is the shape of Africa across my chin. I have nothing with me, just the clothes I’m wearing, no make-up, and I feel so embarrassed in the taxi to Notting Hill where two women scoop me up and start making phonecalls.

In the weeks that follow my hand moves to touch that spot as it heals and turns silver. Only half a centimetre but undeniable. Indignation and disbelief but also a touchstone against disbelief. After my lip healed last time I filed it away. I half-believed it was worth it. I could take it—and, besides, I was embarrassed at finding myself here again. I expected antibodies but I only had a familiar groove that gave no resistance. Shall we just pretend this never happened. Harder to do with the red on my fingertip. The first to bring what’s inside me to the outside surface.

I meet confusion when I try to explain how you can be scared of someone and want to speak to them at the same time but it seems obvious to me. The person who created the fear is also the one who can take it away by acting like they used to, like they’re safe. You reject the support of friends or professionals because they can only ease it slowly but the object of fear can disappear it all at once. It’s an evil deal because the big fear goes but instead you get a low-grade fear burning all the time and eventually it burns your whole interior out.

See him again and become an animal, soft and docile, feel the anger blink away, be willing, placid, even seductive. Deny reality. No longer see the face contorted in anger overlie the face in front of you, which is the face you love belonging to the body that made you feel protected when you laid your head against it. You want to let your head fall like that again, to be rescued by him from him. He sees none of the interior reasoning, just the limp and the neck.

Tracey Emin at the Tate Modern

I like the part of Tracey Emin: A Second Life at the Tate Modern where she’s tip-exed out the name of her rapist and then written it back in over the top.

The exhibition makes me feel jealous. I wonder how she got away with it, making public things like this, because if you come from that background, you grow up with the knowledge that you won’t be protected or believed and that people will be able to get away with the things they do to you. Once you get the fame and wealth and institutional protection I guess you can say what you like. Maybe that’s when she wrote the name back in.

I liked the film Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), which is projected onto a wall, especially the part where she says ‘the reason why these men wanted to fuck me, a girl of fourteen, was because they were less, less than human. They were pathetic.’ It still means a lot to see an artist who grew up that way, which leaves with you a persistent sense of dirt and roughness, not just talking about those things but turning them into art—she has so many imitators that it’s easy to forget why the original mattered. I haven’t really got to the place where I can do anything creatively with my upbringing because there’s so much shame there. I’ve always wished—and I remember being aware of this as a child as well—that I was given a home and an education that taught me how to behave like a respectable person or taught me anything about morality instead of having to learn it from first principles or untrustworthy figures of authority as an adult.

When I was younger I thought the way to deal with this was to become shameless, Emin’s approach, but I couldn’t stomach it because I had, somewhere and somehow, acquired a set of values that I wanted to live by but continually fell short of. Trouble always seemed to befall me at random without my having any power over it. My solution was to look for a source of external control, a man who was cold and hard enough to keep me in line. Remarkably, despite discovering religion, it never occurred to me to entrust my will and decisions to God rather than another human being.

Emin’s film How it Feels (1996) is at the centre of the Tate Modern exhibition. It’s about her botched abortion, how she felt about making the decision and the ‘emotional suicide’ that followed, where she destroyed her previous work after having her understanding of creation fundamentally altered. There’s a lot in there that’s valuable, a lot that usually goes unsaid—about regret, about killing, about having the nerve to escape poverty and being willing to maim your soul and murder a child you want to have so as not to go back there (I’m not editorialising.) What disturbed me was the lilting, infantile quality of her voice, which reminded me of my own, and the sense that all this art came at the expense of goodness. There’s the same quality in the work, the childlike scrawl of her writing in the paintings and the sweary, brightly coloured patchwork blankets. It’s as if she’s frozen at thirteen (a number I select because it’s the age at which she was raped) and the repeat revisitation keeps her stuck there. There’s some evidence that counselling can make depression worse by dwelling on negative events; EMDR seems to work, in part, because it brings the traumatic memory to mind only briefly without reimagining it in detail. Penance and Reconciliation is similar.

By the end of the exhibition I felt exhausted, sad and a bit sick. The relentless self-disclosure doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. The bronzes in the final room are beautiful and some of her newer paintings like The End of Love (2024) and Rape (2018) are among my favourite works but there’s nothing surprising in them. You couldn’t divide Emin’s career into periods (except perhaps before and after the abortion—you can see polaroids of her earlier, destroyed paintings at the beginning of the exhibition.) Her work is confession without catharsis or change. Her brutal personality alone has prevented her from becoming the joke at the centre of her work, which is what happens to most women who capitalise on their pain over and over again. Most can only get away with it once or twice. Emin gets away with it forever, which is her genius.

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The result has been the happiest year of my life. I love my neighbourhood so much. It’s near where I went to sixth form so my oldest friends still live in the area (and are getting married soon—to each other—which is so thrilling.) I love my bus routes and I love getting home late on the night tube and skipping home under the streetlights and the wet gaze of cars. I love the ladies’ pond and foraging on the Heath and plucking wild garlic as a snack for my commute to the library. I love bumping into people I know, which happens surprisingly often—London often feels like a village full of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet.

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When, in 794, the Synod of Frankfurt decreed that ‘No new saints should be honored or invoked, nor shrines to them erected on the roads. Only those saints are to be venerated in a church who have been chosen on the authority of their Passion or on the merit of their Life’, it represented a major intervention in the cult of saints.1 In keeping with the programme of ecclesiastical reform known as the Carolingian correctio, the veneration of saints was subject to increasing regulation and oversight by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.2 While hagiography continued to flourish, the numbers of vitae for contemporary saints declined dramatically: in seventh-century Neustria, forty-five such vitae were composed, dropping to a mere eighteen over the course of the eighth and ninth centuries.3

The cult of saints had always possessed an anarchic, spontaneous quality: sanctity was not conferred by ecclesiastical superiors, but derived from personal charisma. By regulating the cult of saints, the Carolingian episcopate and emperor neutralised the potentially threatening power of rogue saints who were accountable to nobody but God, relocating them safely within an ecclesiastical chain of command. It is in this context that we should understand an increased interest in angels manifest in the late 820s and 830s. During this time, Hilduin undertook the first translation into Latin of Pseudo-Dionysius’ De caelesti hierarchia, and composed two passiones of Dionysius—an opus geminatum—in which angels feature prominently. Around the same time, Einhard’s Translatio et miracula sanctorum Marcellini et Petri depicted an angel performing miracles in the guise of a saint, and angels were equated with clergy in conciliar legislation for the first time. While the saint was a lone wolf, the angel was firmly enmeshed in a network of obedience and accountability which mirrored the ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth.

This essay will suggest that the increased prominence of angels in the reign of Louis the Pious was intimately connected with the ideology of the Carolingian correctio: because angels were located in a celestial hierarchy, their invocation in hagiography and conciliar legislation functioned as a defence of the reformers’ hierarchical vision of society, in which power and knowledge was transmitted through each rank to the laity and social stability relied on each ordo correctly performing its role. The rhetorical invocation of angels could also function as a means of admonishing the emperor for overstepping his role and endangering the spiritual health of the realm. Louis’ own participation in this discourse after his restoration can be understood as a display of penitential kingship—an admission that the authority of the emperor should not extend into spiritual matters, and a gesture of submission to the episcopate.

At Compiègne in September 827, Louis the Pious received an embassy from Byzantine Emperor Michael II. The ambassadors gave Louis a Greek manuscript (now BNF, grec. 437) containing the Corpus Dionysiacum, the complete works of Pseudo-Dionysius, which Louis immediately sent to his archchaplain, Hilduin, at the abbey of St Denis. By 834, Hilduin had completed the first translation of Pseudo-Dionysius’ works into Latin. The works included were De caelesti hierarchia, De ecclesiastica hierarchica, De diuinis nominibus, De mystica theologica, and ten Epistulae. Before Hilduin’s translation, Pseudo-Dionysius was little known in the West. Two brief quotations from the Pseudo-Dionysius’ letter to John the Evangelist and De caelesti hierarchia appear in a letter from Pope Hadrian to Charlemagne in 791 reporting the discussion of the Second Council of Nicaea of 787. These same quotations were repeated in the so-called Libellus Synodalis, composed following a council in Paris on 1 November 825 in the context of debate about iconoclasm.4

Significantly, the Libellus identifies the author of these quotations with the third-century St Denis, Apostle to the Gauls. The only other source of information regarding Pseudo-Dionysius was Gregory’s homily on Luke 15:1-10, which included an extended summary of De caelesti hierarchia. In his exegesis of the parable of the lost coin, Gregory explains that God created ten ranks of the elect: nine ranks of angels and a tenth rank, humanity, which, having been temporarily lost through sin, was then redeemed through Christ. He lists nine ordines of angel: seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations, principalities, powers, virtues, archangels, and angels. The ordines are arranged in a hierarchical relationship of obedience; the principalities, for instance are those ‘who preside over the good angelic spirits. When they arrange whatever must be done by those under their authority, they rule them in carrying out the divine ministries.’5 Even before Hilduin’s translation, at least some of the Carolingian elite could have linked the angelologist in Gregory’s homily with the Apostle to the Gauls, but the Libellus Synodalis fastened the association between St Denis, patron of the Carolingian dynasty, and Pseudo-Dionysius.

In De caelesti hierarchia, Pseudo-Dionysius defined a hierarchy as ‘a sacred order, a state of understanding and an activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine.’6 The element of activity is significant: hierarchy is the reaching out of the perfection of God to ‘grant every being, according to merit, a share of light.’ Its goal is to ‘enable beings to be as like as possible to God and to be at one with him.’7 Members of the hierarchy, having received this light, can ‘pass on this light generously…. to beings further down the scale.’8 Hierarchy is thus intimately related to the idea of ministerium: each rank is tasked with the transfer of participation in the divine to those beneath them, eventually encompassing the whole of creation. This definition applies not only to the hierarchy of angels, but also to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to which he dedicates a separate treatise. Pseudo-Dionysius listed nine ranks of angels, which he organised into three groups of three; likewise, the ecclesiastical hierarchy comprises the threefold order of bishop (or ‘hierarch’), priest, and deacon.

Beneath these is a second threefold order of Christians subordinate to the clergy: monks, the laity, and catachumens/penitents. Like the angels, the ecclesiastical hierarchy is a relationship of obedience: each rank is subject to the one above it and has a particular role suited to its nearness to the divine. Through the correct performance of these roles, the perfection of God flows down the hierarchy to be transmitted to the laity. Pseudo-Dionysius sketched a soteriology dependent on clerical discipline and especially on the correct performance of the sacraments. Pseudo-Dionysius drew a further link between clerics and angel in De caelesti hierarchia, addressing the question of how a ‘human hierarch’ might be called an angel, as in Malachi 2.7. He argued that because each rank shares in some of the powers of its superior, only in a humbler mode, so the human hierarch shares in some of the qualities and powers of the angels. Like the angels, the hierarch is ‘a messenger and… is raised up to imitate, so far as a man may, the angelic power to bring revelation.’9 The term in Malachi on which this exegesis is based is ἱερέως, typically translated as priest, but in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy Pseudo-Dionysius uses the term ‘hierarch’ as synonymous with ‘bishop.’ By situating the bishop immediately below the angel, the lowest of the angelic ranks, Pseudo-Dionysius makes the hierarchies not only parallel but also continuous: the power of clerics mirrors that of the angels, but is also derived from them, having been transmitted from God along the chain of angels.

For Pseudo-Dionysius, the ecclesiastical hierarchy is a rejection of ‘everything of disorder, of disharmony, and of confusion.’10 This emphasis on establishing right order was a major theme of the programme of ecclesiastical reform known as the Carolingian correctio.11 The capitulary and conciliar legislation demonstrates an intense concern with establishing the precise responsibilities and relationships of the secular and ecclesiastical ordines. Moral reform of the entire realm depended on each rank, possessing a distinctive ministerium, properly exercising its responsibilities. The 823-5 capitulary Admonitio ad omnes regni ordines, for instance, placed each ordo in a clear hierarchy descending from the emperor, while also emphasising the corporate nature of moral reform: each ordo had a responsibility for the good governance of the realm.12 Carine van Rhijn has demonstrated that this concern with correct governance descended to the lowest levels of clergy, with bishops intervening in the behaviour of the priests in their diocese.13 Moral reform thus proceeded from the highest rank down to the lowest, eventually being transmitted to the laity by local priests. The similarities between the reformers’ ideals and the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius is striking.

The parallels between angels and clergy went further than ecclesiology, however. Angels were frequently associated with sexual renunciation: in his De virtutibus et vitiis, Alcuin wrote that ‘chastity is the angelic life’, and the vita angelica was strongly associated with monastic celibacy.14 While clerical celibacy is more strongly associated with the Gregorian reform, it was also emphasised by Carolingian reformers.15 The adaptation of monastic ideals for secular priests was a prominent aspect of the Carolingian correctio: between 742 and 755, Chrodegang composed the first regula for secular canons, and in the Admonitio Generalis Charlemagne ordered that clerics should live according to a regula and obey their bishop as a monk would their abbot; for the first time, non-monastic clergy were expected to live according to monastic precepts.16 One of the canons of the Capitularia missorum generale issued by Charlemagne in 802 forbade priests and deacons from living with women who were not canonically approved; anyone who transgressed would lose his honor et hereditas until brought before the emperor. This prohibition was nothing new — the reference to canonical approval suggests that this was lifted from the first council of Nicaea, which forbade that priests live with women other than a mother, sister or aunt. The involvement of royal authority, however, was distinctively Carolingian: from the capitularies issued under Pippin III, matters of clerical purity and monastic regularity ‘became unequivocally harnessed to the legitimation of new political power.’17

Further, Carolingian capitularies demonstrated an increased concern with the liturgical and sacramental duties of the clergy. The rite of ordination for a priest came to involve the anointing of a priest’s hands; reinforcing the ritual purity of the priest and their separation from the laity; episcopal statutes made the sexual purity of the priest a necessary prerequisite to the consecration of the Eucharist. This was more than liturgical quibbling: efficacious ritual was a primary means of securing God’s favour for the whole realm. In the early Carolingian period, clerical celibacy became an increasingly important aspect of royal ideology; the idea of a well-functioning realm depended on a ‘priestly caste’ set apart from the rest of the populace. The function of this caste was to intercede between God and humanity: the Capitula Bavarica, written between 800 and 813, advised that priests should abstain from fornication because they were ‘intermediaries for the whole Christian people.’18

Why did angels not feature more prominently in the capitulary and conciliar legislation? Perhaps the reception and translation of the Corpus Dionysiacum came too late: the production of episcopal statutes stalled in 820 and only resumed in 850, and no capitularies were produced after Louis the Pious’s return to power in 834 until his death. However, there is an explicit statement of equivalence between angels and clerics in a piece of English legislation with strong Carolingian connections, the Legatine report of 786:

‘Therefore if bishops are called angels, they cannot be judged by laymen, as the Apostle says, ‘It is the least to me, as to be judged by you, or from the human day: it is the Lord who judges me. The Psalmist also says, ‘And he chastised kings for them, saying this, ‘Do not touch my anointed, or work evil against my prophets.’ The Apostle also writes: ‘Do you not know, how we will judge angels, how much more secular affairs. Just as kings are set above all ranks, so are bishops in the matters which concern God…’19

The Legatine mission was headed by bishop George of Ostia, who had been in the service of Pippin before Charlemagne, accompanied by Alcuin and his deacon, Pyttel, both members of Charlemagne’s court. The canons of the Legatine report also demonstrate similarities with Carolingian capitular and conciliar legislation: they are addressed to both laymen and ecclesiastics and concern the correctio of the whole realm, whereas Roman and previous English conciliar legislation tended to address only an ecclesiastical audience. The Admonitio Generalis, promulgated three years after the Legatine report, even shares verbal parallels in some canons. Why, then, are bishops not compared to angels in the Admonitio Generalis? The Admonitio Generalis may have imagined a different relationship between Church and state from that expounded in the Legatine report. In the Admonitio, the emperor sat at the head of both the ecclesiastical and secular hierarchies: all power flowed through him. In the Legatine report, the power of the king was more limited: he had authority over secular affairs, while bishops enjoyed sole authority over the ecclesiastical sphere.

The Legatine report more closely resembles the canons of the 829 Council of Paris, where the bishops distinguished between secular and ecclesiastical powers. These acts reference the Gelasian doctrine of the ‘two swords’: rather than all power flowing through the emperor, the saeculum is divided into two realms, the secular and the ecclesiastical, which function symbiotically but separately. It is in the acts of the Council of Paris in 829 that the equivalence between angels and clergy makes its only appearance in Carolingian legislation:

‘Whereby the Lord said to the prophet Malachi: “the lips of a priest should guard knowledge and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is he angel of the Lord”, which blessed Jerome explains as “but an angel, that is, a messenger, is most truly called a priest of God, because he is the mediator between God and men, and he announces his will to the people.’20

The designation of clergy as ‘angels of the Lord’ (sacerdos is an ambiguous term, applicable to both priests and bishops) is thus connected, in both Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon legislation, with the assertion of clerical independence from secular authority. Before the Council of Paris, at a council of Louis’ inner circle gathered at Aachen over the winter of 828-9, Wala had argued that current problems in the realm were caused by a confusion of the two ordines instituted by God. The emperor was responsible for the populus, and the bishops for the clergy; imbalance resulted when either order transgressed the boundaries of their role.

At the same council, Einhard presented Louis with a libellus full of edicts given by an angel. In his Translatio et miracula sanctorum Marcellini et Petri, c. 830, Einhard related how his notary, Ratleig, arrived at court with the book, he had acquired from a blind man named Alberic. Alberic had received a vision of an old man who had dictated a series of edicts intended for the emperor. The old man asked Alberic if he knew who he was, and Alberic replied that he was Saint Marcellinus. The man replied ‘It is not as you think, for I am the archangel Gabriel, and I have assumed the identity and appearance of Marcellinus.’21 Einhard related that he presented the book to Louis, who ‘did receive it and read it throughout, but of the things that he was ordered or urged to do by this small book he took the trouble to fulfill very few.’22

Einhard never revealed the contents of the capitula, and we cannot know what he desired from Louis at the winter council. Nevertheless, his depiction of Louis as failing to fulfill the requests of an archangel is a clear example of admonitiory mode used by the Carolingian elite.23 The identification of the angel as Gabriel adds even further significance—Gabriel’s primary association was with the Annunciation, when Mary acquiesced completely to the will of God. Louis, by comparison, had failed to heed God’s message. This point is emphasised in Gregory the Great’s Homily 34, where he explains that ‘Those who communicate less important messages are called angels, while those who communicate the most important [messages] are called archangels. This is why it was not just any angel, but the archangel Gabriel, that was sent to the virgin Mary. It was fitting that a mot important angel come on this message, to communicate the most important message of all.’24 Einhard could not have chosen a more authoritative method of delivery, or a more powerful means of admonishing Louis.

Why did Einhard depict Gabriel in Marcellinus’ form, instead of simply appearing directly? Nowhere else in the Translatio does Einhard depict angels working in the guise of martyrs. The only other mention of angels in Einhard’s writing, intriguingly, is in a letter to Louis after 837, where he writes ‘For what does it matter whether humans are forewarned of God’s impending anger by a human, by an angel, or by a star announcing [it]? Only this is necessary: to understand that the appearance of the star was not without meaning, but warned humans that by being penitent and calling upon the mercy of God they may work toward avoiding future danger.’25 As in the passage from the Translatio, Einhard here encouraged the emperor towards penitence, in an admonitory tone; the reference to an angel may remind him of the 828-9 apparition, when Louis had failed to heed God’s warning. That angels only appear in relation to Louis suggests that angelic discourse belonged to his immediate circle. Despite Einhard’s relic collecting rivalry with Hilduin, their hagiographic writing demonstrates one point of convergence: like Einhard, Hilduin’s twin passiones show the power of angels accomplishing miracles associated with saints. After Dionysius’ martyrdom, Hilduin writes in the prose passio that

‘the corpse of the blessed Dionysius raised itself up, and began — with angelic guidance directing its steps and heavenly light shining all around — to carry in his holy hand the head cut from the body by the lictor’s axe, cradling it in his arms. And a multitude of the celestial army, praising God without cease in sweet-sounding hymns, accompanied his lifeless body as it carried its own head from the hill where he had been decapitated, for almost two miles to the place where it now lies buried through the disposition of God and through His choice. […] But although it is miraculous, it is not however difficult for the body of a very holy man, once decapitated, to walk, with angelic attendants, in the manner of a living person…’26

While Hilduin took the image of Dionysius carrying his head from the anonymous passio beginning ‘Post beatam et gloriosam’, the presence of angels at the scene was his own innovation.

One explanation for Einhard and Hilduin’s use of angels in place of saints is that angels more aptly symbolised the hierarchical vision of society than did saints. The increased role of angels and corresponding decrease in the power of saints corresponds to a broader attempt to bring the cult of saints under control. As Julia Smith has demonstrated, cults in Carolingian were more closely associated with written hagiography and stressed the importance of relics under the guardianship of proper authorities than their counterparts in Brittany.27 The most widely distributed episcopal capitulary of the period, that of Theodulf of Orleans, decreed that shrines in churches go literally underground: ‘sed tumuli, qui apparent, profundius in terram mittantur, et pavimento desuper facto, nullo tumulorum vestigio apparente.’28 Saints remained a vital part of Carolingian religious culture but they were increasingly brought under the control of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Regulation of angelic cults, meanwhile, had been largely accomplished by Louis’ reign. In October 745, Pope Zacharias had called the synod to investigate Aldebert’s heresy. Boniface provided a dossier which accused Aldebert of conjuring angels named Uriel, Raguel, Tubuel, Michael, Adinus, Tubuas, Sabaoc, and Simiel. The synod concluded that aside from Michael, the named angels were in fact demons, and decreed that Michael, Gabriel and Raphael were the only angels with ‘divine authority’. The prohibition against invoking extra-biblical angels, reiterated by Charlemagne in the Admonitio Generalis, seems to have been successful: amuletic angelic prayers and litanies became less well-attested in the late eighth century, while a mass for St Michael survives in many liturgical texts from the period, suggesting that the veneration of angels increasingly took place within official ecclesiastical contexts.29 By attributing the powers of saints to angels, Hilduin and Einhard located them within a hierarchy of accountability and obedience.

Following Louis’ public penance in 833 and his subsequent restoration, Louis commissioned two passiones of St Dionysius from Hilduin, whom he may have met during his months in exile at St Denis. In his letter to Hilduin, Louis suggests that he had been restored to the throne through the patronage of Dionysius:

‘And I too have experienced his bounties through many and frequent disbursements, but particularly in the course of human events, when through the just judgement of God — as is always to be acknowledged — I was punished by the rod of his correction and the staff of his beautiful mercy before the his aforementioned altar: through the merits and help of our precious and holy father Dionysius I was raised up and restored by divine authority, and received back the military girdle, through episcopal decree and authority; and up to the present time I am sustained by his generous support.’30

Louis’ framing of his deposition as a legitimate penance has led many historians to suppose that this letter is a forgery, composed by Hilduin to legitimate his work.31 Recipients of such letters were often involved in their writing, so it is possible that Hilduin had such a role; nevertheless, such letters still expressed royal will.32 Following Mayke de Jong, recent scholarship has tended to view Louis’ public penance not as a Machiavellian plot foisted upon him by the bishops, but as simultaneously a political act and a gesture of authentic penance, intended to assuage God’s wrath and restore balance to the realm. Louis’ commission of the passiones can be seen as an extension of his penitential programme: the letter, included in manuscripts of the prose passio and distributed widely, functioned as a public recognition of the legitimacy of the penance. By professing his devotion to Hilduin’s composite Dionysius, the author of works on celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies which made no room for secular monarchs, the commission also functioned as a continued act of penitence. Louis was tacitly accepting the criticisms levelled at him in at Aachen in 828-9 and Paris in 829.

At the same time, however, the commission strengthened Louis’ claim to royal authority. Dionysius was not only Louis’ personal patron, but the founding saint of the Carolingian dynasty. Louis requested that request that Hilduin include the account of Denis appearing to Pope Stephen II in his passiones of the saint. Stephen’s vision in 754 had inspired his consecration of Pippin as King of the Franks, thus initiating the Carolingian dynasty. In 834, Louis had been restored to the throne but remained vulnerable; in particular, his relations with the papacy had been damaged when Gregory IV had joined Lothar’s camp in 833. The prose passio, which was distributed widely, acted as a statement of royal authority, demonstrating the historical support of St Dionysius and the papacy for the Carolingian dynasty. The commission was a simultaneous display of humility and legitimacy: the trademarks of penitential kingship.

Pseudo-Dionysius was not the first to draw parallels between the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, between angels and priests; even before the translation of the first translation of the Corpus Dionysiacum into Latin, Malachi 2:7 was being quoted to affirm the connection between angels and clergy, and secular clergy were increasingly expected to conform their lives to the vita angelica traditionally associated with monasticism. The contribution of Hilduin’s translation was to demonstrate that holy power operated within a strict hierarchy, both in heaven and on earth. From the 820s, angels were a way to talk about clerical power and to promote a particular understanding of the relationship between ecclesiastical and secular authority. Whereas capitularies until about 825 gave the emperor a position at the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, from 828 they removed the emperor from this chain of command, emphasising the distinction between ecclesiastical and secular spheres. Louis’ commission of the Dionysian passiones can be seen as an act of both power and humility: while emphasising his connection with the founding saint of the Carolingian dynasty, he gave his stamp of approval to a theology which removed him from the hierarchy that descended from God, through the angels, to the lowest ranks of clergy.

The first time I went to Rome, four years ago, I stayed in the only hotel room I could find—far out past the Esquiline Hill, somewhere in the bedraggled backstreets behind Roma Termini. I was there for one night. I walked 40,000 steps a day and saw as much as I could, traipsing between St Peter’s and Santa Maria Maggiore, the Lateran, the Capuchin crypt and Santa Maria in Trastevere. It was part of a longer Naples trip, which I wrote about here. But Rome was extraordinary and I’ve always wanted to go back.

Back then, I’d arrived at the Pantheon for the evening Mass and sat next to a woman who couldn’t receive communion because she was divorced. I couldn’t either as I was still an Anglican and I remember feeling such intense love and respect for her—to be a Catholic, the kind of Catholic who comes to Mass at the Pantheon, despite not being able to receive. I understood that this might be my lot if I converted, which I would do three months later, but I loved the religion even more for that. Not bending to the comfort of an individual but bringing them in anyway—allowing for the tension, bringing all the difficult cases indoors, where the sacraments might move the dial one millimetre from recalcitrance to grace.

After the Mass, some of us were picked out of the congregation and gathered to one side for an unknown purpose. We were led down a corridor behind the high altar to see the Hodegetria, the icon of the Virgin and Child gifted to the Pantheon by the Byzantine Ambassador when it was consecrated as a church on May 13th, 609AD. They are wearing royal purple, the most expensive pigment. Unusually, both Mary and her child Jesus are staring straight ahead. She isn’t directing your attention to her child, nor is he directing your attention to her. She is staring into you. The priest told us that we could pray the rosary here and said that whenever we came to the Pantheon, we should feel like we were coming home.

That was my only experience of Rome—I’ve never been back there as a Catholic. It’s been a running joke for almost a decade of my life that men offer to take me to Rome and never follow through. One of them was a historian of the papacy and said he would take me to the Vatican Archives, another would say we’d go to Rome to be married. This time, I had a man accompany me to Rome for the weekend—I was there for the Peter Thiel Antichrist lectures and I had an AirBnB booked and I said why not come along? Which I guess meant that it was me taking him to Rome, the subversion of my early twenties romantic fantasies. I will take the man to Rome myself…

Over March, I stayed in Trastevere for the first trip and Testaccio for the second. Under the paywall are some recommendations for museums, restaurants and gelatarias and bars, the odd church—mostly this was a time for sitting in piazzas drinking aperitivi, buying flowers and flirting in the vicinity of sculptures.

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Jesus’s refusal of the judicial process tells us something about the perils of self-justification. It’s the most human thing in the world to defend oneself. It’s automatic, the first thing we leap to when accused of something—whether the accusation threatens our lives and freedom through the threat of punishment or simply reveals something about ourselves that we would rather not hear. Refusing this response when one’s life is at risk is a gift of supernatural grace. We could not accomplish it with our purely human natures. This is the gift of the martyrs, the template of all forms of sanctity. Denying the impulse to self-preservation.

Why not speak the truth, though, if one is in the right? When Jesus is asked whether he is King of the Jews, he responds ‘Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say this about me?’ When Pilate then responds that is Jesus’s own nation, the Jews, who made this accusation, Jesus responds ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.’ Pilate then asks, ‘So you are a King?’ and Jesus answers with one of the most powerful self-disclosures in the Gospels: ‘You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.’

‘What is truth?’ says Pilate.

Jesus refuses the logic of the courtroom. He doesn’t defend himself against charges in the terms of the law. In so doing, he makes a mockery of our temporal pretensions towards justice and truth. Neither the Roman nor the Jewish law could fairly try Jesus; they could make no sense of who he was. Here was Truth Himself on trial. The eternal Logos who gave meaning to the world, underwriting every truth claim, every form of signification.

Aside from the fact that the salvation of the world necessitated Jesus’s conviction and execution, there is something to be learnt here about how frantic attempts to defend ourselves keep us twisted in sin. Defence usually entails counter-accusation rather than forgiveness. It might require twisting a story, leaving out our own culpability and contributions to what transpired as we flatten events into a simple victim-aggressor dynamic to make it easier to comprehend. The legal system is incapable of dealing with the sort of moral complexity that can be heard in the confessional or in prayer. It forces us to lie, whether outright or by omission. It demands a victim persona which seeks restitution. But there is no restitution in this world and the search for it is pointless, serving only to damage the person seeking it and heaping harm upon harm.

And then there is the demand to be heard—the desperate, insistent cry that others listen to us, validate us, believe us. I often think of the image in Simone Weil’s essay ‘Human Personality’ where a vagrant stands in front of a magistrate and, weighed down by a lifetime of incommunicable suffering and choices proceeding from that suffering, is unable to articulate his own defence. She writes:

There is a natural alliance between truth and affliction, because both of them are mute suppliants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence. Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.

I read Pilate’s ‘What is truth?’ as exposing the arbitrary quality of our human claims to truth and, as enshrined in law, justice. He knows that the law is inadequate to try the man before him; he knows that all our little systems for getting at the truth has little to do with truth as a transcendent reality (who stood before him that day.) Attempts to get closer to truth through natural reason are laudable but will never be sufficient. The Christian tradition relies on revelation as well as reason because reason was capable of trying and executing revelation itself.

Jesus was the ultimate victim because he did not victimise himself. A normal human being, trapped in sin, would invariably respond to unjust arrest, detention and trial, much less execution, with anger, defensiveness; he would lash out, scream, cry, throw things. Not go willingly to the slaughter knowing himself innocent. This is a difficult teaching, perhaps the most difficult. If we try to imitate it, not being perfect as Jesus was, it can easily lead us into the opposite sin of self-destruction. It is necessary to hold onto dignity. But it does tell us something real about the dangers of self-defence. The posture you must adopt to defend yourself is not the posture of Christian piety, which is supplication.

Also, I’m writing this on my phone because my laptop broke so if you’ve been thinking of becoming a paid subscriber now would be a great time to support my work so I can get a new laptop and keep doing it. Xx

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I want to link ’s rape spectrum diagram at this point, which I don’t think is accurate, nor do I think it’s especially helpful to put RAPE as the title for a bunch of acts that certainly fall short of rape, but that’s one way to look at it. You can read her blog here:

Knowingless

The Rape Spectrum Survey Results

A friend sent me a message last week asking if a dubious sexual encounter counted as “rape” or not. She didn’t feel particularly upset by it, but lots of other people were telling her it was rape, an…

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5 years ago · 91 likes · 9 comments · Aella

One of my worst experiences was sexual assault, not rape. My friend’s drink had been spiked. She was fourteen, I had just turned fifteen. Neither us were virgins and we had a reputation in our small school. The stories had made it to an older boy who’d been expelled and he’d offered to buy us vodka from ASDA. We waited in the car park for him. He’d forgotten mixer so had to go back. When he returned, my friend drank the vodka with the mixer and I drank the vodka straight, because I was anorexic and it was full-fat coke. Within ten minutes, she was collapsing on the street, couldn’t get her words out, and after about twenty minutes she was lying on the ground throwing up. I wanted to call my mum to pick us up but the boy took my phone off me. He wanted to take us to a house. It wasn’t far, he said. I decided I would have to let him sexually assault me to think we were chill so I could snatch my phone off him. As soon as I got it, he backed off. Game over. I dragged my friend’s body through the field and we got in the car. I didn’t mention what happened. The next day in school one of the boys said I’d ruined their fun, which leads me to suppose that there were others waiting for us in the house.

I suppressed all memory of this. It came back when I was 19, starting with full body flashbacks until I recovered more and more of the memory, until I could remember the boy’s name. It was a horrible, creepy process, finding out there’s something locked in your brain that you’ve been unable to access. The somatic symptoms came before the conscious memory. I felt hands on me when I went to sleep. I went crazy, real crazy. I sought out danger, I used drugs, I had sex with strangers where I saw myself looking down from above and watching an inert, barely conscious body. I got scared and I got violent. But that was an acute trauma: I did narrative therapy for it and it resolved. There are still some things that trigger it, like being grabbed in a certain way from behind, but mostly that one was easy to fit into my conscious memory. It was also straightforward. I didn’t will it. I’d gone along with it only as a strategy to get us back safely, because if I’d tried to fight there’s no way I’d have won or had a shot at getting my friend out of there.

In other cases of sex that I didn’t really want, I had a tactic to make it not rape: just reframe it as something I’m into, just pretend. It’s kind of ambivalent anyway. Like it doesn’t feel great but I don’t really mind. Sure, you end up feeling more like a piece of meat than a real person. But it’s mostly fine.

The other time that stressed me out, but didn’t traumatise me, was the time a guy tried to get me pregnant when I’d asked him not to do that. I wasn’t on birth control and we didn’t use protection, which is typical for me, but I’ve never had the experience of someone ignoring me when I say pull out. That felt pretty violating. It ruined the relationship and he left shortly after but we still speak. I think he knows that was wrong. But it’s also not so wrong that I don’t understand it. He had a lot going on and he really wanted a baby. He was unhinged but not actually malevolent. Even though that was technically rape it doesn’t feel like rape. My brain processed it as a slight wound to my sense of independence but not as a catastrophic breakdown of myself as a free and independent person. I think the thing that causes trauma is being stuck in a situation that you can’t escape. The total sense of disempowerment, the stripping of the agency and dignity which should be afforded to every person. That makes you feel sub-human. It fundamentally alters your ability to interface with the normal world.

So much shit has gone down in my life beyond the really bad stuff that it feels inane and harmless in comparison. I don’t think about it at all and it doesn’t arouse emotion in me beyond mild regret and embarrassment. But sometimes I sit down and think about it and wonder if I should feel more upset, if my numbness only means that I expect a certain level of ambient cruelty.

Almost a year ago I’d just been kicked out of my ex’s house and was crashing on my oldest friends’ sofa in Wood Green and feeling at the pit of everything. My survival instincts had kicked in and I was busy finding a new place to live and writing a review article for The Tablet and superficially seemed to have bounced back well. A guy I’d been on a date with six months prior messaged me inviting me to stay in his house in the countryside and I complied.

He picked me up from the station and I walked into his house, which was so beautiful and peaceful and full of antiques, and he got the fire going and I lay on the carpet and cried. He chose this moment to initiate sex. I didn’t exactly want to, but I was aware of the conditions of my being there. A beautiful, calm house, a comfortable bed, a fridge full of nourishing food which was duly cooked and fed to me, in exchange for sex—obviously unsaid and denied if it ever came up, but those were the implicit terms. And I guess it made me feel better too. It’s nice to be desired and to satisfy someone, even if the desire wasn’t there on my end.

It would be easy for me to retroactively reframe this, especially because I now regret my involvement with him. I was vulnerable, homeless and intensely sad. But I hadn’t taken leave of my rational faculties. The decisions I made were still my own, however much I might come to regret them. My vulnerability meant that I chose differently, but I chose rationally given the options available to me—comfort helped, having sex with someone new helped, putting my bare feet in the sea in the quiet English countryside helped. We make these calculations all the time and then we forget our workings once our circumstances improve.

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I simply grew up without that. Most of my family was on benefits and had been for decades; for the years my mum did work, it was in the third sector, running a community project based around healing, traditional land management and crafts. There was no progression and when it closed she went back to benefits. My grandmother lived on her late husband’s steelworker’s pension and made a little money from renting out caravan plots on her farm. My father, whom I only saw around once a year, built stoves and interactive sound installations and fire-breathing dragon figureheads for narrowboats and a giant robotic furry hand that rearranged itself into a sofa at the click of a button. None of it made much money.

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1. Radiators

2. Having electricity at home

3. The capacity to fall in love repeatedly

4. Access to emergency dental treatment at a reasonable price

5. The bad things that happened to me which brought me to this point

6. Being loved

7. High thread count Egyptian cotton sheets

8. Good friends

9. People who don’t abandon you when it’s convenient to do so

10. A British passport which gives me the freedom to travel easily

11. Being raised speaking Welsh

12. Having had the opportunity to visit five Caribbean islands

13. The grace of God

14. NHS Right to Choose for enabling my ADHD diagnosis

15. EMDR

16. Living in London

17. Seeing my niece and nephew grow up

18. Bubble tea

19. The magic of cinema

20. Being able to afford good quality food

21. Being healthy enough to move freely and not be limited in where I can go

22. Getting more writing commissions than I can keep up with

23. Offers from two indie publishing houses

24. Positive self-regard

25. Sobriety

26. Experiencing day-to-day happiness rather than emotional agony

27. Being able to give my mother nice things and experiences

28. Not living through war

29. Being free from abuse and coercive control

30. Access to affordable medication

31. The countryside

32. British meat and dairy produce

33. The kindness of strangers

34. High quality public transport

35. Being able to use the worst experiences of my life to help others

36. Having a roof over my head

37. Living alone

38. Hot chocolate

39. Being able to worship freely

40. The sacrament of penance and reconciliation

41. Access to more information than any of my ancestors

42. Not dying in a mine or being a mining accident widow like my ancestors

43. Libraries

44. Literary events where I can meet interesting people

45. A social life that means I’m never lonely

46. Being single and discovering my own competence

47. Museums and art galleries

48. The beauty of my immediate environment

49. Buying fresh flowers

50. Financial solvency

51. A good credit score

52. Earning money from doing what I love

53. A good education

54. Reasonably clean air

55. Easy access to water

56. Shoes without holes in them

57. Having the wherewithal to do my taxes

58. Being desired and desirable

59. Being able to read

60. Being able to pay for genetic testing so I know about my MTHFR gene mutation

61. Being able to pay back debts

62. Live music in pubs

63. Fancy gym membership

64. Never having done heroin

65. Being believed

66. Warm winter clothes

67. First class train travel

68. Having flown business class

69. Qigong workshops in the Egyptian desert

70. Learning from people wiser than me

71. Another year of life

72. The theatre

73. Recovery

74. Not succeeding in my suicide attempts

75. The memories I have of friends who did succeed

76. Retaining my capacity for sexual intimacy after trauma

77. Dating and being able to put an end to flirtations when the fit isn’t right

78. Good sexual health

79. Never having had an affair with a married man

80. Meditation

81. Access to help with administrative and financial issues

82. Learning difficult lessons early enough in my life that I won’t make the same ones in my later decades

83. Aeroplanes

84. Passenger ferries

85. The internet

86. My subscribers

87. The scholarships and academic grants that made my education possible

88. Being comfortable in my own skin at a range of weights

89. Being able to exercise for the right reasons and without triggering a relapse

90. Being able to visit my grandma in her old age

91. Owning several pairs of shoes that I lusted after for years

92. My Empresa bag from Florence

93. The friendship of select exes

94. Faith

95. Flexibility of mind that allows for changing opinions

96. Intelligence not entirely destroyed by carbon monoxide poisoning

97. Not having any debt that accrues interest

98. Easy access to a recovery community

99. Hope

100. Sheer grit

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I’ve made a Christmas playlist (on Apple Music this year because I’ve abandoned the Spotify ship) if you’d listen to some more of my favourites.

Earlier that evening, I’d gone to a meditation meeting—usually in church basements, this one was in the chancel of a church. We sat in the choir stalls with cups of tea and a woman passed around handmade kneelers with Christmas patterns. We said the St Francis prayer and meditated silently for about half an hour and I felt unthinkably happy, like I’d been returned to my first weeks of college Evensong. I felt the divine presence so strongly among that motley group of people, not all Christians, but all heaving their broken selves into a church on a cold December evening to spend an hour with God in whatever sense they understood Him. No liturgy, no reserved sacrament, but I felt Jesus more immediately than I had in a long time.

My faith has become complicated, too intellectual and overwrought, and I’m so grateful that God brought me there that evening to remind me of the simplicity where I’d first encountered Jesus. I went to the carol service afterwards and followed the Biblical story, the prophecies of the Old Testament, the weaving together of its luminous and paradoxical threads: King, lamb, victim, judge. The shoot from the stump of Jesse, the flower. The highway through the desert, making easy everything which had been impossible. The ancient O antiphons, sung for a millennium and a half. Thousands and thousands of years of myth and romance, the hearth-stories of desert tribes transfigured into the most elaborate theology of the Fathers and, finally, brought to a church just off Piccadilly Circus, where men in funny hats have devoted their lives to the careful and reverent retelling of those prophecies.

Christmas came easier to me than Easter. The incarnation was my way into Christianity, and it won me over in my heart before my mind could countenance confessing the faith as my own. It makes sense in an intuitive, immediate way. A mythic way. It joins the dots in the collective unconscious. Before understanding, you intuit: yes, of course God would come into the world in this way.

There is so much to explore in the Christian tradition. More than you could ever learn in a lifetime. But the beauty of the Bible and the liturgy is that it doesn’t take a genius to understand. You can spend years immersed in its complexities and understand it less than someone stumbling in off the street and kneeling in a pew for perhaps the first time in their lives.

I’m grateful for the cycle of liturgical time in Christianity. I’ve spent most of this year very far from God but without worrying about it too much. The cycle of feasts has a way of bringing you back, giving you what you need when you need it. It’s right that many people go to church only on Christmas, darkening the doors of a midnight mass half-drunk having not expected to be there.

Maybe you’ll find yourself there tonight.

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

— Advent Calendar by Rowan Williams

Wishing you a very happy Christmas.

x

A survey of Augustinian political theology is immediately faced with the weight of a millennium and a half of reception history and, secondly, with the need to define and historicise ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, particularly given the extraordinary variance in the political and economic contexts in which Augustine has been read and reinterpreted. These range, in general terms, from the early medieval context where pastoral care, monastic and ecclesiastical reform and salvation history were central political concerns, to the high and late medieval contexts where the church/state relationship, the maintenance of orthodoxy and the management of religious dissent returned to the political stage, to twentieth century responses to secularisation and civic participation, and finally to postmodernity.

Given the variety of scholarship, a survey of literature on ‘political Augustinianism’ (which I will refer to, in its broader sense, as Augustinian political theology or theory, depending on the relevant disciplinary context) should range beyond the church/state and grace/nature debates, taking into account work on virtue, love, sin, history and eschatology. A focus on these questions ought not to be seen as a retreat from political realism into apolitical realms of the psyche. Rather, they represent a return to a more truly Augustinian sense of the political. As Eric Gregory points out, ‘an ethic of caritas and a psychology of enjoyment… should be important themes for any Augustinian political theology.’ These, Gregory continues, are ‘neglected in modern political Augustinianism because of the tendency to collapse all theology into a never-ending story about politics as a response to sin.’1

Political theology which limits itself to politics as a remedy for or means of restraining human tendencies towards sin (encompassing violence, oppression and exploitation) remains within the concerns of the civitas terrena. Augustine, however, always had an eye on eschatology; ‘the political’, in a fuller sense, relates to our ultimate end as relational persons, to be realised in the political community of the world to come. As a bishop, meanwhile, he never forgot the pastoral concerns of his immediate community or those of Church more broadly. This tension, between the temporal and the eschatological, is a distinctive feature of Augustine’s political theology and remains a constant feature of its reception—often swinging between the poles, sometimes holding them in productive tension.

For political theologians and political theorists, the essential text for the medieval reception of Augustine’s political thought remains Henri-Xavier Arquillière’s L’Augustinisme politique.2 The term ‘political Augustinianism’, in Arquillière’s original usage, referred to the subordination of temporal power to the spiritual power of the papacy. Drawing on Mandonnet and Gilson’s suggestion that Augustine lacked a sufficient distinction between nature and the supernatural, Arquillière’s L’augustinisme politique advanced the thesis that post-Augustinian medieval political thought had tended to subsume the natural political order into the supernatural order of the Church. While Arquillière did not attribute ‘political Augustinianism’ to Augustine himself, he saw medieval theocratic politics as a development of an Augustinian theology of nature and grace. Augustine’s supposed prioritisation of supernatural justice over natural law resulted in a subordination of the state to the Church, resulting in the theocratic excesses of the medieval papacy.

The relationship of natural and supernatural ends of human life remains a central question for political-theological readings of Augustine. Those critical of political liberalism, among them theologians associated with Radical Orthodoxy as well as political post-liberals of a more integralist persuasian, oppose a separation between the natural and supernatural orders which would deny any possibility of building a political community around the common good; they draw instead on Henri de Lubac’s Surnaturel, which joined natural and supernatural beatitude by proposing that human beings have a natural desire for a supernatural end. For de Lubac, the neo-Thomist hypothesis of a purely natural end had ‘both generated modern secular humanism and legitimated the introverted otherworldly Catholicism that led to Vichy state.’3 De Lubac argued that the ‘political Augustinianism’ put forward by Giles of Rome and his followers was not found in the thought of Augustine himself. The rejection of Neo-Thomism by the ressourcement movement in early twentieth-century Catholic theology would significantly influence the theology of the Second Vatican Council, as well as the newly developing field of late antique studies; theologians and historians alike were concerned with a return to Patristic sources and a re-evaluation of Augustine on his own terms, scouring away the accreted centuries of Augustinianism.

As it relates to Augustinian political theology, Arquillière’s thesis only holds weight if the institutional Church on earth bears some strong relationship to the civitas Dei, whether as a prefiguration or as a visible aspect. The natural may be subordinate to and ordered towards the supernatural without this being reflected in a subordination of the temporal institution of the state to the at least partially temporal institution of the Church. Indeed, Augustine is careful to counsel against an exact identification of the Church on earth with the civitas Dei: the earthly and heavenly cities are ‘mixed together and, in a certain sense, entangled with one another.’4 This argument, against Arquillière, was made by Henri-Irénée Marrou, who suggested a tertium quid, the saeculum, which corresponded to the duration of human history.5 For Augustine, Marrou argued, the earthly Church was always an ecclesia permixta, related to but not coterminous with the civitas Dei. Marrou, furthermore, correctly identified that an excessive identification between the visible Church with the city of God resulted in a secularisation of Augustinian theology by reducing its eschatological fullness to questions of temporal power. Marrou’s intervention was crucial in restoring the eschatological dimension to considerations of Augustine’s political theology, steering the direction of scholarship away from debates about the relation of Church and state.

While Marrou does not fully succeed in answering Arquillière’s claim, which concerned the reception of Augustine rather than the political thought of Augustine himself, the notion of a tertium quid contributed significantly to a reconsideration of Augustine on his own terms, bracketing off the accumulated baggage of the ‘two swords’. As Michael J.S. Bruno notes, Marrou’s discussion of the communion of saints and ‘fertile communication’ between the saeculum and the heavenly city prompted new interest in holiness and virtue, rather than ecclesial power, as the primary vehicle towards the city of God.6 This shift mirrored and influenced the movement within the Catholic Church towards greater consideration of the role of the laity, the universal call to holiness and the relationship between Church and world (rather than Church and state) which were to culminate in the Second Vatican Council.

From the indeterminate and intermixed nature of the two cities within the saeculum, R.A. Markus developed a political vision of a neutral secular sphere open to religious pluralism. In Christianity and the Secular, Markus addresses criticisms that, in writing Saeculum, he had been ‘unduly swayed by the intellectual climate in favour of secularisation.’7 Here, he argues that ‘Augustine, while far from indifferent to the moral foundations of his society, was the principal Christian thinker to defend a place for the secular.’8 From an overidentification of the civitas Dei with the Church, Augustinian political theology now swung to the opposite pole, minimising the role of the Church in shepherding pilgrim souls towards the heavenly city. The Church becomes one voice among others jostling for attention in the public square; ecclesiology, stripped of its sacramental and mystical dimensions, becomes mere evangelism. Particularly relevant, here, is Markus’ reference to the ‘marketplace of religions’ which existed briefly between the conversion of Constantine and the Edict of Thessalonica: ‘Christianity was now a major competitor in the marketplace.’9 Revealing an indebtedness to John Stuart Mill, this positive invocation of the marketplace neglects its economics—the tendency of markets to meet consumer demands, to create ever more palatable and superficial products, to reduce costs and maximise profits. The secular public sphere cannot be separated from its economic undertow and thus cannot realise Markus’ ideal neutrality.

Markus identified the Church as a sacramental sign of the future Kingdom while arguing that there will always be ‘an “eschatological gap” between proclamation of the message and submission to it.’10 The necessity of maintaining this ‘eschatological gap’ is central to Markus’ argument for religious pluralism: homogeneity of belief within a state would encourage too great an identification between the Church and its ultimate end in the realisation of the Kingdom of God. This is not borne out historically—the early middle ages were characterised not by Constantinian triumphalism but by a persistent awareness of the need for correctio, the development of the penitential tradition, and the development of notions of post-mortem purification, generally within confessionally homogenous territories.

By invoking the eschatological gap as an argument for secularism and pluralism, Markus seems to lapse into a futurist eschatology which denies salvation history its narrative. This tendency towards an overly deferred eschatology, as Michael Lamb points out, is characteristic of American political theorists who similarly draw on Augustine to defend liberal democracy, though from a different perspective to that of Markus—among them, Reinhold Niebuhr and Herbert Deane.11 Eric Gregory names this school of thought ‘Augustinian realism’, characterised by a pessimism about the possibilities of the political and a pragmatic faith in liberal democracy as best suited to restraining the destructive impulses of human nature. In these defences of secularism, the element of peregrinatio which characterises Augustine’s secular is lost; history ceases to become a soteriological vessel and, flattened, becomes a waiting room for eventual transformation.

A separate tendency towards overly realised eschatology is visible in the reclamation of political Augustinianism in its ultramontanist sense by a group of Catholic theologians associated with political (rather than theological) postliberalism, common good constitutionalism or integralism. Edmund Waldstein adopts without reservation Arquillière’s historiographical lineage for political Augustinianism as support for its orthodoxy within Catholic doctrinal tradition but, against Arquillière, argues that political Augustinianism is to be found in Augustine’s own works. Waldstein argues that ‘medieval political Augustinianism does not involve a confusion about the relation of nature and grace, but rather a profoundly true understanding of the way in which the natural end is ordered to the supernatural end.’12 This ordering of the natural to the supernatural is reflected in the ordering of the state to the Church: ‘politics should aim at man’s true end’.13 Augustine’s support for imperial religious coercion in later life, which liberal theologians and biographers have struggled to integrate into a secularist reading of Augustine, is used to support Waldstein’s proposal for waves of ‘integration from within’ in the ‘direction of a confessional state.’14 Chad Pecknold, who has defended an integralist reading of Augustine, locates de Lubac’s Surnaturel thesis ‘within a centuries-old tradition, tracing back to Giles of Rome’.15

The final tendency within current approaches to Augustinian political theology is represented by a diffuse group of scholars, among them Eric Gregory, Peter Iver Kaufman, Oliver O’Donovan, Robert Dodaro, Michael J.S. Bruno, Eugene TaSelle and Philip Cary, all of whom are concerned with grounding the political in Augustine’s theology of desire, love or sanctity. Eric Gregory has identified this school as ‘Augustinian civic liberalism’, distinguished from ‘Augustinianism realism’ by its focus on love and the possibility of a virtue-oriented politics, escaping the pessimistic overemphasis on sin while continuing to refuse the possibility of a perfect political order within this world.16 Oliver O’Donovan, former Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford (during which time he supervised Gregory), began his theological work with a thesis on ‘The Problem of Self-Love in Augustine.’ A critic of modernity but a political liberal and a defender of Christendom without advocating its return, O’Donovan’s idiosyncratic position is grounded in Augustine’s notion that we are made for love of God but located within salvation history and limited by the conditions of the fall. Concern with Augustinian caritas, a love which wills the good of another, is central to O’Donovan’s project; he writes that ‘for Augustine the idea that one person’s individual interests could clash with another’s was simply a mistake: the only true interests had to be communal because the only true goodness was God,’17 and, connecting caritas to eschatology, ‘community alone can tell us of the universal order yet to arrive.’18

This relates to what Philip Cary has called Augustine’s ‘social ontology’, wherein community is understood ‘as a group of rational beings that is brought together by shared agreement of the things it loves.’19 This anthropology leads into a Platonist metaphysics and ontology in which everything is close to God and can only be separated from Him by a fault of the will. For Cary (and perhaps for O’Donovan), politics is ‘unnatural’ because it seeks fulfilment of temporal objects of desire rather than the eternal object of desire in God. Ethics, through the practice of caritas and the fulfilment of the commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself, is thus a prefiguration of the state of beatitude to be enjoyed in the community of the world to come.

There are several points here which are particularly relevant to my project. The first is that caritas, rather than being an entirely interior disposition, implies sociality and political life; it is therefore a central concern of political theology. This is coupled with a sense that temporal politics are secondary to the political life which flows from a life of virtue; it subordinates our natural to our supernatural end without implying theocracy. The second is that metaphysics and ontology are derived from an anthropology of the person as one who desires. The third is the centrality of martyrdom to these accounts. Both Kaufman and Dodaro highlight the significance of martyrdom; for Dodaro, ‘fear of death [timor mortis] epitomizes the fundamental threat to the formation of a just society’.20 The fourth is an eschatological orientation which balances the now and the not yet; as Eugene TeSelle argues, ‘we see how a theology of world-defying election and world-transcending peregrinatio can, under the right combination of circumstances, become world-transforming.’21

While the final realisation of a community transformed by caritas is not possible within history, ethics and sanctity are possibilities. Caritas is a realistic means of eschatological inbreaking in the persons of the citizens of the civitas Dei who are, for now, sojourners within the civitas terrena. It is not necessary to posit a tertium quid to explain the intermixed and indeterminate nature of the two cities within history. To this, going further than an evangelical Anglican theologian like O’Donovan would allow, should be added a metaphysical account of the correspondence between the communion of saints on earth and those on heaven; as such, ethics is joined to intercession as a dual engine of eschatological transformation.

In his survey of political Augustinianism, Michael J.S. Bruno discusses Joseph Ratzinger’s L’unità delle nazioni, which highlights the significance of martyrdom for Augustinian political and ecclesiological thought.22 Elsewhere, Ratzinger comments that martyrdom does not begin with the march to the martyrial arena; it is ‘not spectacular, but perfectly ordinary’, consisting in ‘the daily readiness to give greater weight to faith, to truth and to what is right than to the benefits of not getting involved.’23 This ‘subordination of individual to truth’ is what makes human intercommunication and interrelationship possible at all. It its thus ‘nothing other than the movement of love itself.’24

In making truth central to the equation, Ratzinger is drawing on Augustine’s canonical formulation that it is ‘the cause and not the punishment that makes the martyr.’^⁠ The element of truth means that martyrs cannot be merely people who get their desires in order and live well according to a code of their choice—desires must be ordered by the single, transcendent truth of God, which is communicated through the Church by revelation. The centrality of martyrdom therefore implies ecclesiology and sacramental theology and relates the Church, though not necessarily in a coterminous way, with the communion of saints and the post-eschaton resurrected community of the world to come. In turn, it makes the willingness to die for one’s neighbour and to endure persecution a necessary charism of the Church, refusing triumphalist ecclesial politics that would subordinate the eternal end of the Church to the natural end of temporal politics. It is worth noting, in relation to this, that early medieval salvation theology (in Bede, Wulfstan and others) expects an increasing persecution of the Church to characterise the progression of salvation history, culminating finally with the martyrdom of all the faithful; as the seventh age is filled with saints, so the Church of the sixth age is gradually diminished. Against a Church which seeks to market itself to a secular consumer base, the ecclesiology implied here is one of failure, weakness and defeat—what Donald MacKinnon called a ‘kenotic ecclesiology’, a Church of the cross.

Salvation history has become increasingly important, perhaps ironically, in studies of Augustinian theology inflected by postmodern philosophy. In Cities of God, for instance, Graham Ward begins by noting that the relation of history and salvation is the central question of theology: ‘Christians must ask “what time is this in which we stand” for this question is inseparable from “what am I called to be and do?”’25 Ward relates a soterio-historiographical reading of intellectual history, in which each age is furnished with the intellectual toolkit to render Christianity intelligible—just as pre-Christian Platonism providentially prepared the ground for Christian metaphysics, so the linguistic turn and postmodern articulations of desire and subjectivity prepare the ground for a political theology suited to the contemporary age.

Previous emphases within Augustinian political theology—the post-war optimism about the secular sphere and the public square—seem dated now given the collapse of political consensus and the replacement of a bourgeois public square with myriad virtual and anonymised spaces. Faith in liberal democracy as an effective restraint on the fallen will has in turn been replaced by an obsessive self-policing, an algorithmic therapeutic paradigm from which the only escape is increasingly extreme and perverse modes of self-creation. Discussions of the appropriate balance between temporal and spiritual power cease to make sense in a culture where neither exist—where power is diffuse, obfuscated, unaccountable and engaged in the active manipulation of human will and desire. Neither retreat from the world nor embrace of civic participation are available. Even the problem of grace and nature loses significance when nature is reprogrammable and, at the same time, on autodestruct. What remains is the desire for God and the intercommunicative life of the Trinity stamped on each human heart.

John Milbank writes that ‘The priority given to structural relations’ under the paradigm of postmodernity ‘allows theology to make a kind of half-turn back to pre-modernity.’26 The move from the isolated subject of modernity to the postmodern collapse of the subject allows relationality to return to the philosophical foreground, bringing with it a metaphysics and an ontology of desiring and self-giving (rather than self-transcending) subjectivities. This strand of postmodern Augustinianism, from its beginnings in Radical Orthodoxy, continues now under the banner of New Trinitarian Ontology. The postmodern collapse of the subject prompts a consideration of ‘Trinitarian metaphysics... is of the utmost practical significance if really to be is to be self-giving love.’27 This is not a move away from realist politics towards individualism and psychology; by situating inter-Trinitarian desire as the ontological ground of all human life, rather, it proposes a new starting point for considerations of the political. This prepares the stage for a reconsideration of martyrdom from the perspective of ontology and eschatology—and necessarily, within an Augustinian framework, of history.

Milbank writes that ‘“In the Image of the Trinity” means that “human beings” are moments of particularly intense and adaptive “recollection” within the temporal process, although such recollection is constitutive of the temporal process itself.’28 As postmodernism dodges the apparent linearity of time, premodern narratives of salvation history and eschatology regain credibility. The central problematic of ‘political Augustinianism’—the dichotomous opposition between this world and the next—breaks down. Instead, history is opened to and interpenetrated by the eschaton without collapsing into the realised eschatology of political utopianism or integralist triumphalism. The late antique landscape which formed Augustine’s immediate context, dotted with the graves and shrines of the martyrs—holy places where the eschaton flickered into view—refuses the linear temporality and oppositional ontology of modern political theory. As Peter Brown has so vividly described, late antique cosmology was thronged with mediators, intercessors, patrons, saints and angelic beings who could move easily between this world and the next, between history and history’s end.

The work of Milbank and others has enabled a reconsideration of salvation history through the lens of ontology—one which recalls the preoccupations of the immediate inheritors of Augustine’s thought. Bede’s adaptation of Augustine’s six ages of the world is of particular note. Building on Augustine’s argument in CDXV that the ‘city of saints’ was established with Cain’s slaying of Abel, Bede describes a ‘seventh age’, the age of saints, which runs in parallel to the sixth, historical age and has, as its first citizen, Abel, whom he calls ‘Christ’s first martyr.’ These ages will be joined on the last day, culminating in the eighth age of eternity. The sense of interpenetration between the sixth and seventh ages is implied by Augustine’s comment in CDXV that ‘the city of saints is up above, though it produces citizens here below, and in their persons the city is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes.’29 There is a sense, here, of reversal—of supernatural virtue projected back into history from an age which is now and not yet, beginning in the first generation of postlapsarian creation and yet characterised by eternal life.

To return, finally, to Arquillière, it may be useful to consider his thesis about the early medieval origins of ‘political Augustinianism’ in light of postmodern theology’s turn to the premodern. Arquillière located the origins of ‘political Augustinianism’ in the Merovingian era, with the transmission of ‘Augustinian’ ideas through Gregory the Great and Isidore of Seville.30 This is poorly evidenced and views Merovingian and Carolingian political arrangements anachronistically through the later context of the investiture controversy and the doctrine of papal supremacy under Gregory VII. While theologians concerned with ‘political Augustinianism’ continue to cite Arquillière, there is a neglect of the extensive modern historiography on Carolingian political theory, rhetoric, ritual and the complex and dynamic relations between the monarch/emperor, the court, the Frankish ecclesiastical hierarchy and the papacy. The first signs of tensions which would erupt in the eleventh century are certainly visible in the eighth and ninth-century Carolingian world, more so in the reign of Louis the Pious than that of Charlemagne, but even the public penances and depositions of Louis’ reign ought to be understood more in light of political rivalries within the Carolingian court than a doctrine of submission of temporal to spiritual power. The theological underpinnings of hierarchy visible in Carolingian capitularies and court literature owe more to Pseudo-Dionysius, transmitted through Gregory the Great and Hilduin and Eriugena’s respective translations of the Corpus Dionysiacum, than to Augustine.

The relative neglect of the early medieval reception of ‘political Augustinianism’ owes something to the nature of the sources; political treatises, as had been known in antiquity, were atypical of the post-Roman period, and as David Luscombe notes, ‘for the most part the political ideas of this period have to be recovered from theological treatises, from sermons and biblical commentaries, from official decrees and capitularies, and from public correspondence.’31 In a recent article on the Carolingian reception of Augustine, Josh Timmerman notes that homilies and homiliaries—arguably the best sources for tracing the reception of Augustinian thought—were ‘until the second half of the twentieth century… a largely untapped resource, rarely examined at all and almost never edited.’32

The turn from political-constitutional to cultural history has resulted in critical editions and studies on early medieval theological texts which remain understudied by theologians. In England, which lacked both the romanitas and the imperator Christianorum of Francia, politics had even less to do with temporal power—the Carolingian genres of admonitio and early mirrors of princes had no insular equivalent until the tenth century. Insular commentators, however, drew extensively on Augustine. Bede’s extends Augustine’s six age chronology in De temporum ratione, draws on an Augustinian theology of history in his attempt to relate the vera lex historiae in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, and quotes Augustine more than any other author in his Biblical commentaries. The surge of contemporary scholarship on Bede’s theology of time is particularly relevant to an Augustinian political theology which must necessarily consider history and eschatology in relation to the ends of human community.

As indicated above, a narrow understanding of ‘the political’ as relating only to states and governance has also contributed to this neglect. With regard to the period of Western European history between the disappearance of the late Roman state and the growth of the medieval state, theologians have tended to look for politics in either the classical or post-tenth-century model. In so doing, they replicate outdated historiographical notions of a ‘dark age’ before the renaissance of scholasticism and state formation. Greater engagement with the historiography of early medieval political thought is needed to remedy this. It is also necessary, however, to historicise ‘the political’ and to think about what political theology meant in an age without states (this is particularly relevant, perhaps, to the postmodern political landscape where auctoritas rests more with capital than with the institutions of the modern state.) As Timmerman indicates, Carolingian Augustinianism had more to do with ‘attitudes towards the apocalypse, methods of ordering historical time… the interpretation of dreams and visions, and the necessities of Christian education’ than with the balance of papal and imperial authority.33 These, too, are proper subjects for political theology.

The postmodern thus allows for a reintegration of early medieval, pre-scholastic thought, which received Augustine not in terms of temporal versus spiritual power but focused instead on salvation history, eschatology and sanctity. The metaphysics of sanctity, as it relates to this historical-soteriological scheme, has not been explicated, though many scholars have gestured towards sanctity and especially martyrdom as a crucial aspect of Augustine’s thought. Under the paradigm of modernity, sanctity has been privatised—sanctification, considered as a wholly personal and domestic matter belonging to an individual subject, has been pushed into the domain of pastoral theology and is rarely considered in relation to ontology, eschatology and political theology. The breakdown of boundaries around the historical subject and the historical timeframe presents an opportunity to return martyrdom to the centrality given to it by the fathers of the Church. The central question I wish to explore, then, is whether martyrdom can be said to be constitutive of our final supernatural ends. The second question, arising from this, is the relation between the community of the ‘very special dead’—the communion of saints—and the human person/human community within this world. Both questions make martyrdom central to the political—which is the problem of how to live with others and negotiate one’s being in relation to another.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to listen to our last episode of Foidcast with Calum Drysdale of the . We also just released a slightly more serious episode with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, which was super exciting as a chronic Wikipedia rabbit-hole insomniac. You can also listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, etc.

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