Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

VI

HEAVEN

492: M

OUNT

G

ARGANO

The story brought from the mountain seemed scarcely believable. That a bull, wandering from its herd, had discovered the mouth of a cave. That its owner, indignant that the animal had gone rogue, had shot it with a poisoned arrow. That the arrow, its trajectory reversed by the blast of a sudden wind, had ‘struck the one who loosed it’. All this, reported by the peasants who had witnessed the miraculous event, left the local bishop intrigued. Anxious to make sense of what had happened, he embarked on a fast. After three days, a figure of radiant beauty armoured in light appeared to him. ‘Know that what happened,’ the figure told the bishop, ‘was a sign. I am the guardian of this place. I stand watch over it.’¹

Gargano, a rocky promontory jutting out from south-eastern Italy into the Adriatic Sea, had long been a haunted spot. In ancient times, pilgrims to the mountain would climb its summit, and there make sacrifice of a black ram, before sleeping overnight in its hide. Glimpses of the future were granted in dreams. A soothsayer lay buried near by who, according to Homer, had interpreted the will of Apollo to the Greeks, and instructed them, at a time when the archer god had been felling them with his plague-tipped arrows, how to appease his anger. Times, though, had changed. In 391, sacrifices had been banned on the orders of a Christian Caesar. Apollo’s golden presence had been scoured from Italy. Paulinus, in his poetry, had repeatedly celebrated the god’s banishment. Apollo’s temples had been closed, his statues smashed, his altars destroyed. By 492, he no longer visited the dreams of those who slept on the slopes of Gargano.

His fading, though, reached back long before the conversion of Constantine. The same convulsions that, over the course of the third century, had inspired various emperors to attempt the eradication of Christianity had proven devastating to the cults of the ancient gods. Amid war and financial chaos, temples had begun literally to crumble. Some had collapsed altogether; others been converted into barracks or military storehouses. The decay witnessed by Julian at Pessinus had owed less to any crisis of faith than to the erosion of traditional patterns of civic patronage. Naturally, though, given the opportunity, some bishops had not hesitated to press for the coup de grâce. The hunger of the gods for sacrifice, for the perfume of blood on blackened altars, had never ceased to horrify Christians. Before their righteous and militant indignation, even the most venerable of cults had proven powerless. In 391, the endemic aptitude of the Alexandrian mob for rioting had turned on the Serapeum, and levelled it; four decades later, the worship of Athena had been prohibited in the Parthenon. Time would see it converted to a church. Nevertheless, despite loud Christian crowing, these celebrated monuments were the exceptions that proved the rule. No matter how much the biographers of saints might claim for their heroes the triumphant annihilation of a great swathe of temples, or their conversion to the worship of Christ, the reality was very different. Most shrines, deprived of the sponsorship on which they had always depended for their upkeep and rituals, had simply been abandoned. Blocks of masonry were not readily toppled, after all. Easier by far to leave them to weeds, and wild animals, and bird-droppings.*

By the end of the fifth century, it was only out in the wildest reaches of the countryside, where candles might still be lit beside springs or cross-roads, and offerings to time-worn idols made, that there remained men and women who clung to ‘the depraved customs of the past’.² Bishops in their cities called such deplorables pagani: not merely ‘country people’, but ‘bumpkins’. The name of ‘pagan’, though, had soon come to have a broader application. Increasingly, from the time of Julian onwards, it had been used to refer to all those – senators as well as serfs – who were neither Christians nor Jews. It was a word that reduced the vast mass of those who did not worship the One God of Israel, from atheist philosophers to peasants fingering grubby charms, to one vast and undifferentiated mass. The concept of ‘paganism’, much like that of ‘Judaism’, was an invention of Christian scholars: one that enabled them to hold up a mirror to the Church itself.

And to much more besides. Reflected in the idols and cults of pagans, Christians beheld a darkness that imperilled the very reaches of time and space. Just as Origen, amid the smoking altars of Alexandria, had dreaded the vampiric appetites of beings that demanded blood, so Augustine, even with sacrifices banned, had still warned against the ancient gods, and ‘the hellish yoke of those polluted powers’.³ The danger was particularly acute in a landscape such as Gargano. Here, where the gods had long been in the habit of haunting dreams, was precisely the kind of wilderness in which they might be expected to have taken refuge. Certainly no Christian could imagine that it was enough merely to have closed down their temples. The forces of darkness were both cunning and resolute in their evil. That they lurked in predatory manner, waiting for Christians to fail in their duty to God, sniffing out every opportunity to seduce them into sin, was manifest from the teachings of Christ himself. His mission, so he had declared, was to ‘drive out demons’.⁴ Such a conflict was not bounded merely by the dimensions of the mortal. The challenge of defeating demons spanned heaven as well as earth.

Which was why Gargano’s bishop, visited by the figure arrayed in blazing light, could feel so relieved that it was not Apollo who had appeared to him, but rather the celestial general of the armies of God. Angels had been serving as messengers since the time of Abraham. That, in Greek, was what the word meant. Most, even the angel who had appeared to Abraham as he was raising his cleaver to kill Isaac, even the angel who had brought death on the eve of the Exodus to the first-born of Egypt, had been nameless. They were defined by their service to God. Repeatedly, in the Old Testament, visions were described of the celestial court: of the Seraphim, six-winged angels who sang the praises of the Lord Almighty from above his throne, and of the numberless hosts of heaven assembled to his left and right. For Christians, when they sought to imagine what angels might look like, it was as natural to envisage them as bureaucrats in the service of Caesar, in medallions and crimson tunics, as it had been for the author of the Book of Job to model God’s court on that of the Persian king. Yet not all angels were anonymous. Two in the New Testament were named. One of them, Gabriel, had brought the news to Mary that she was to give birth to Christ. The other, Michael, was defined simply as ‘the archangel’:⁵ greatest of all the servants of God. Charismatic as only a lord of the heavens could be, he exerted a cross-cultural appeal. Jews hailed him as ‘the great prince’,⁶ the watcher over the dead, the guardian of Israel; pagans carved his name on amulets, and conjured him in spells. At Pessinus he had even shared a shrine with Cybele. Christians, warned by Paul on no account to worship angels, had traditionally shrunk from offering Michael open honour; but increasingly, across what remained of the Roman Empire, in the eastern Mediterranean, his fame had spread. He was said to have appeared in Galatia; then near Constantinople, the great capital founded back in 330 to serve as a second Rome, in a church built by Constantine himself. Never, though, had Michael been seen in the west – until, that was, he alighted on Gargano, and proclaimed himself its guardian.

Further wonders soon followed. Overnight, inside the cave discovered by the errant bull, an entire church appeared, and then the mysterious imprint in marble of the archangel’s feet. The people of Gargano were fortunate in their heavenly guardian. The century that followed Michael’s appearance on the mountain saw the very fabric of civilisation in Italy start to shrivel and fall apart. War, then plague, swept the peninsula. Bands of rival militias ravaged landscapes that were being lost to marshes and weeds. Entire villages vanished; entire towns. Even on the slopes of Gargano, where black mists would veil the mountain against the depredations of freebooters, and which the plague never reached, people knew that Michael’s patronage had its limits. They had only to look to the skies, and ‘the flashes of fire there that foretold the blood that was to be shed’,⁷ to recognise that there could be no escaping the cosmic clash of good and evil. For all Michael’s potency, he and the hosts of heaven were faced by adversaries who did not readily yield. Demons too had their captain. He and Michael were well matched. Foul-smelling though the chief of the demons had become, with ‘the bloody horns of an ox’,⁸ and skin as black as night, he had not always dwelt in darkness. Once, in the beginning, when the Lord God had laid the earth’s foundation, and the morning stars had sung together, and all the angels had shouted for joy, he, like Michael, had been a prince of light.

Many centuries had passed since the writing of the Book of Job. Inevitably, in the wake of Alexander’s conquests, memories of the Great King of Persia and his secret agents had begun to dim. The word satan had come to serve many Jews, not as the title of an official in God’s court, but as a proper noun. Nevertheless, not every Persian influence had dimmed. The conviction of Darius that the cosmos was a battleground between good and evil, between light and darkness, between truth and falsehood, was one that many Jews had come to share. Satan – the ‘Adversary’ or Diabolos, as he was called in Greek – had grown to stalk the imaginings of various Jewish sects. The first generation of Christians, when they sought to fathom why their Saviour had become man, and what precisely might have been achieved by his suffering on the cross, had identified as the likeliest answer the need to put Satan in his place. Christ had taken on flesh and blood, so one of them explained, ‘that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the Devil’.⁹ Unsurprisingly, then, in the centuries that followed, Christian scholars had parsed scripture with great care for clues as to Satan’s story. It was Origen who had pieced together the definitive account: how originally the Devil had been Lucifer, the morning star, the son of the dawn, but had aspired to sit in God’s throne, and been cast down like lightning from heaven, ‘to the depths of the pit’.¹⁰ More vividly than Persian or Jewish scholars had ever done, Christians gave evil an individual face. Never before had it had been portrayed to such dramatic and lurid effect; never before endowed with such potency and charisma.

‘Two companies of angels are meant by the terms “Light” and “Darkness”.’¹¹ Augustine, when he wrote this, had known the heresy that he was skirting: the Persian conviction that good and evil were principles equally matched. As a young man, he had subscribed to it himself. Then, following his conversion, he had robustly set this doctrine aside. To be a Christian was, of course, to believe in a single, omnipotent god. Evil, so Augustine had argued, possessed no independent existence, but was merely the corruption of goodness. Indeed, there was nothing mortal that was not the merest, faintest glimmering of the heavenly. ‘That City, in which it has been promised that we shall reign, differs from this earthly city as widely as the sky from the earth, life eternal from temporal joy, substantial glory from empty praises, the society of angels from the society of men, the light of the Maker of the sun and moon from the light of the sun and moon.’¹² Demons, when they tempted mortals with the swagger of greatness, all the trumpets and battle-standards so beloved of kings and emperors, were offering nothing but delusions made out of smoke. What were angels of darkness themselves, after all, if not the shadows of angels of light?

Yet still, in the imaginings of many Christians, there seemed more to Satan than merely the absence of good. The more vividly he was evoked, the more autonomous he came to seem. His great empire of sin seemed hard to square with the sovereignty of an all-powerful and beneficent God. Why, if Christ had defeated death, was Satan’s reach still so long? How, when the very armies of heaven remained in the field against him, armed and ready for war, could mortals in a fallen world hope to stand proof against his powers? What were the prospects, if any, of overcoming the Devil for good?

Answers to these questions existed; but they had not come easily. This, of course, was no surprise. Christians knew that they were not mere spectators in the great drama of Satan’s claim on the world, but participants – and that the stakes were cosmically high. The shadows cast by this conviction were deep ones – and destined to extend far into the future.

War in Heaven

In November 589, the Tiber burst its banks. Granaries were flooded, several churches swept away on the currents, and a great school of water-snakes – the largest ‘a massive dragon the size of a tree-trunk’¹³ – washed up on the shore. Two months later, plague returned to Rome. Among the first to die was the pope. His death sent a chill through the city. Although nominally it was ruled by the emperor in far-off Constantinople, responsibility for Rome’s protection had effectively devolved upon its bishop. Its citizens, ravaged by plague as they were, and menaced by predatory barbarians, did not delay in electing a replacement. Their choice was unanimous. Amid the evils of a debased age, they craved a touch of class. In the spring of 590, in the great basilica that Constantine had raised over the site of Saint Peter’s tomb, a man from the very heart of the Roman establishment was consecrated as pope.

Gregory’s ancestors, so it was reported in awed tones by his admirers in Francia, had been senators. The claim, although an exaggeration, was understandable. The new pope did indeed have something of the vanished age of Roman greatness about him. He had inherited a palace on the Caelian hill, in the heart of the city, and various estates in Sicily; served as urban prefect, an office that reached back to the time of Romulus; lived for six years among the imperial elite in Constantinople. Gregory, though, had no illusions as to the scale of Rome’s decline. A city that at its peak had boasted over a million inhabitants now held barely twenty thousand. Weeds clutched at columns erected by Augustus; silt buried pediments built to honour Constantine. The vast expanse of palaces, and triumphal arches, and race-tracks, and amphitheatres, constructed over the centuries to serve as the centre of the world, now stretched abandoned, a wilderness of ruins. Even the Senate was no more. When Gregory, emerging from his consecration into the plague-ravaged streets, raised his eyes to the sky, he claimed to see arrows raining down, fired from an invisible bow. Time would see him dread that all traces of life might be expunged from the city. ‘For since the Senate failed, the people perish, and the sufferings and the groans of the few survivors are multiplied day on day. Rome, now empty, burns!’¹⁴

Yet Gregory did not despair. He never doubted that redemption from the plague was possible. ‘God is full of mercy and compassion, and it is his will that we should win his pardon through our prayers.’¹⁵ The crowds, listening to the new pope deliver this message of hope, were primed to listen. The attachment of the Roman people to their ancient religiones, to the rites and rituals that for so long had governed their city’s calendar, had been decisively broken. Only a century before, in February 495, a predecessor of Gregory’s had been scandalised by the spectacle of young men in skimpy loincloths haring through Rome, lashing the breasts of women with goat-skin thongs, just as young men had been doing every February since the time of Romulus; half a century before that, another pope had been no less shocked to see some among his flock greet the dawn by bowing to the sun. Those days, though, were past. The rhythms of the city – its days, its weeks, its years – had been rendered Christian. The very word religio had altered its meaning: for it had come to signify the life of a monk or a nun. Gregory, when he summoned his congregation to repentance, did so as a man who had converted his palace on the Caelian into a monastery, who had lived there as a monk himself, pledged to poverty and chastity, a living, breathing embodiment of religio. The Roman people, hearing their new pope urge them to repentance, did not hesitate to obey him. Day after day, they walked the streets, raising prayers and chanting psalms. Eighty dropped dead of the plague as they went in procession. Then, on the third day, an answer at last from the heavens. The plague-arrows stopped falling. The dying abated. The Roman people were spared obliteration.

Pagans, brought up on Homer, had been perfectly capable of attributing pestilence to the murderousness of an indignant and vengeful Apollo. Christians, though, knew better. Gregory never doubted that the sufferings of the times in which he lived were bred in part of human sinfulness. God, whose presence was to be felt in every breath of every breeze, in the passage of every cloud, was always close, nor was there anyone who could escape his judgement. Gregory had only to count his own faults to recognise this. ‘Every day I transgress.’¹⁶ This did not mean, though, that salvation lay beyond the reach of sinful humanity. Christ had not died in vain. Hope still remained. Gregory, when he sought to make sense of the calamities being visited on Italy, turned above all to the Book of Job. Its hero, given through no fault of his own into the hands of Satan, and plunged into abject wretchedness, had endured his sufferings with steadfast fortitude. Here, so Gregory argued, was the key to understanding the shocks of his own age. Satan was abroad again. Just as Job had been cast into the dust, so now were the blameless suffering disaster alongside sinners. ‘Cities are sacked, strongholds razed to the ground, churches destroyed, fields emptied of farmers. Swords rage incessantly against those few of us who – for now, at any rate – remain, and blows rain down on us from above.’ Gregory, after listing these tribulations, did not hesitate to declare what he believed they portended. ‘Evils long foretold. The destruction of the world.’¹⁷

That the earthly order was destined to come to an end, and the dimension of the mortal to be joined for all eternity with the divine, had long been kept from the mass of humanity. Time, so most people assumed, went in cycles. Even the Stoics, who taught that the universe was destined to be consumed by fire, never doubted that a new universe would emerge from the conflagration, as it had done before, and as it would do again. Philosophers, though, had never had any particular cause to hope for anything different. First under Alexander and his successors, and then under Rome, they had been prized, sponsored, fêted. Men to whom the status quo had been kind could view with some equanimity the prospect of its perpetual renewal. Yet not everyone had been content to view time as a ceaseless cycle. The Persians, in the wake of their conquest by Alexander, had come to believe that it was destined to have an end, and that Ahura Mazda, in a final reckoning, would triumph over the Lie once and for all. In ad 66, the yearning for a very similar consummation had fuelled the Jews in their doomed revolt against Rome. Jesus himself, only a few decades earlier, had proclaimed the Kingdom of God to be at hand. Christians, right from the beginning, had dreamed of their Saviour’s return, when the dead would be raised from their graves and all humanity be judged, and a kingdom of the just be established for ever, on earth as it was in heaven. That dream, over the course of six centuries, had never faded. When Gregory, contemplating the miseries of the world, foretold its imminent destruction, he spoke in hope as much as dread.

‘This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’¹⁸ So Christ himself had warned. Similar prophecies – of how, on the day of judgement, both the living and the dead would be sorted into two groups, like good fruit and bad, like wheat and weeds, like sheep and goats – appeared throughout the gospels. So too, no less chilling, did lists of the signs that would herald the fateful moment. These were the portents that Gregory, when he looked about him at the agonies of the age, could recognise: wars, and earthquakes, and famines; plagues, and terrors, and wonders in the sky. Beyond that, however, detail in the gospels was lacking. Instead, for those Christians who longed to stare fully into the face of the end times, it was a very different work of scripture that provided them with an apocalypsis – a ‘lifting of the veil’. The Revelation of Saint John – whom Irenaeus, for one, had confidently identified with the disciple beloved of Jesus – offered the ultimate account of the judgement that was to come. Like a troubled dream, it provided no clear narrative, but rather a succession of haunting and hallucinatory visions. Of war in heaven, between Michael and his angels and ‘that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray’.¹⁹ Of how Satan would be cast down and bound for a thousand years. Of how martyrs, raised from the dead and given thrones, were to reign with Christ for the length of the millennium. Of a whore drunk with the blood of the saints, who sat on a scarlet beast, and whose name was Babylon. Of how a great battle would be fought at the place ‘that in Hebrew is called Armageddon’.²⁰ Of how Satan, after the thousand years had passed, was to be released, and would deceive the four corners of the earth, before being thrown for ever into a lake of burning sulphur. Of how the dead, great and small, would stand before the throne of Christ, and be judged, according to what they had done. Of how some would be written in the book of life, and some – those who did not appear in its pages – would be cast into the lake of fire. Of how there would be a new heaven and a new earth. Of how the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, would descend out of heaven from God. Of how heaven and earth would become one.

Here, in this apocalypse, was a vision of the future more overwhelming in its impact than that of any pagan oracle. No riddling pronouncement of Apollo had ever served to reconfigure the very concept of time. Yet this, across the Roman world, was what the Old and New Testaments had combined to achieve. Those who lacked the Christian understanding of history, so Augustine had written, were doomed to ‘wander in a circuitous maze finding neither entrance nor exit’.²¹ The course of time, as sure and direct as the flight of an arrow, proceeded in a straight line: from Genesis to Revelation; from Creation to the Day of Judgement. Gregory was certainly not alone in measuring the events of the world against his knowledge of where time was destined to end. In Galatia, one bishop – a noted ascetic named Theodore, who insisted on wearing a fifty-pound metal corset and only ever eating lettuce – predicted the imminent materialisation of the Beast; in Tours, another, who shared with the pope the name of Gregory, anticipated ‘the moment foretold by our Lord as the beginning of our sorrows.’²² From east to west, the same anxiety, the same hope was expressed. The end days were drawing near. Time was running out.

And yet there was, for all that, a certain pulling of punches. Bishops, charged though they might be with shepherding the Christian people towards the time of judgement, flinched from calculating the exact hour. Pointedly, they refused to draw a precise correspondence between the events described in Revelation and the convulsions of their own age. The chance to identify who the Beast might be, or the Whore of Babylon, was spurned. Leaders of the Church had long dreaded the speculations that St John’s vision of the Apocalypse might foster among those given to wild and violent imaginings. Origen, ever the philosopher, had dismissed the idea that the thousand-year reign of the saints was to be taken literally. Augustine had agreed: ‘The thousand years symbolise the course of the world’s history.’²³ In the Greek East, councils were held which denied Revelation a place in the New Testament at all. Few in the Latin West went that far: John’s vision of the Apocalypse was too firmly inscribed in their canon for that. Equally, though, the leaders of the Western Church could not help but dread how the ignorant and excitable might interpret its prophecies. The veil had been lifted; but it was perilous to look too closely at what lay beneath. Christ, as Gregory put it, ‘wants the final hour unknown to us’.²⁴

Which did not mean that Christians should be unprepared for it. Quite the opposite. The vision of the end days was a vision as well of what awaited everyone after death. As such, it was bound to unsettle. ‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’²⁵ So Christ himself had warned. The new Jerusalem and the lake of fire were sides of the same coin. For the earliest Christians, a tiny minority in a world seething with hostile pagans, this reflection had tended to provide reassurance. The dead, summoned from their graves, where for years, centuries, millennia they might have been mouldering, would face only two options. The resurrection of their physical bodies would ensure an eternity either of bliss or torment. The justice that in life they might either have been denied or evaded would, at the end of days, be delivered them by Christ. Only the martyrs, those who had died in their Saviour’s name, would have been spared this period of waiting. They alone, at the moment of death, were brought by golden-winged angels in a great blaze of glory directly to the palace of God. All others, saints and sinners alike, were sentenced to wait until the hour of judgement came.

This, though, was not the vision of the afterlife that had come to prevail in the West. There, far more than in the Greek world, the awful majesty of the end of days, of the bodily resurrection and the final judgement, had come to be diluted. That this was so reflected in large part the influence – ironically enough – of an Athenian philosopher. ‘When death comes to a man, the mortal part of him perishes, or so it would seem. The part which is immortal, though, retires at death’s approach, and escapes unharmed and indestructible.’²⁶ So had written Plato, a contemporary of Aristophanes and the teacher of Aristotle. No other philosopher, in the formative years of the Western Church, had exerted a profounder influence over its greatest thinkers. Augustine, who in his youth had classed himself as a Platonist, had still, long after his conversion to Christianity, hailed his former master as the pagan ‘who comes nearest to us’.²⁷ That the soul was immortal; that it was incorporeal; that it was immaterial: all these were propositions that Augustine had derived not from scripture, but from Athens’ greatest philosopher. Plato’s influence on the Western Church had, in the long run, proven decisive. The insistence of Augustine’s opponents that only God was truly immaterial, and that even angels were created out of delicate and ethereal fire, had ended up dead and buried. So, as time went by, had the primordial teaching of the Church that only martyrs could be welcomed directly into heaven. The conviction that the souls of even the holiest saints were destined to join Abraham, just as Lazarus had done, and there await the hour of judgement, had faded. They too, so Augustine had taught, went straight to heaven. Yet even saints, before they could be received by Michael among the angels, still had to be judged. Gregory, the bishop of Tours, when he wrote in praise of his patron saint, described how Martin, as he died, had been visited by the Devil, and obliged to render account for his life. Naturally, it had not taken long. Martin had soon been on his way to join his fellow saints in paradise. The episode had redounded entirely to his glory. Nevertheless, in describing it, Gregory of Tours could not refrain from a certain nervous gulp. After all, if even Martin could be subjected to interrogation by Satan when he died, then what of sinners? Simply by asking this question, Gregory was speaking for a new age: one in which all mortals, not just martyrs, not just saints, could expect to meet with judgement at the moment of their death.

Here, then, as Christians in the West began to go their own way, was a deep paradox: that the more distinctive a vision of the afterlife they came to have, the more it bore witness to its origins in the East. Jewish scripture and Greek philosophy, once again, had blended to potent effect. Indeed, across what had once been Roman provinces, in lands pockmarked by abandoned villas and crumbling basilicas, few aspects of life were as coloured by the distant past as the dread of death. What awaited the soul after it had slipped its mortal shell? If not angels, and the road to heaven, then demons black as the Persians had always imagined the agents of the Lie to be; Satan armoured with an account book, just as tax officials of the vanished empire might have borne; a pit of fire, in which the torments of the damned echoed those described, not by the authors of Holy Scripture, but by the poets of pagan Athens and Rome. It was a vision woven out of many ancient elements; but not a vision that Christians of an earlier age would have recognised. Revolutionary in its implications for the dead, it was to prove revolutionary as well in its implications for the living.

Powerhouses of Prayer

There were places wilder than Gargano where those with a sufficient love of God could hope, perhaps, to glimpse angels. Yet it was dangerous. At the limits of the world, where the grey and heaving ocean stretched as far as the eye could see, monks served as Christ’s vanguard, and by their prayers kept sentry against the Devil and his legions. Tales would be told of those who sailed beyond the horizon, and found there both mountains of eternal fire, where burning flakes of snow fell on the damned, and the fields of Paradise, rich with fruit and precious stones. True or not, it was certain that some monks, taking to the treacherous waters of the Atlantic, had made landfall on a jagged spike of rock – or sceillec, as it was called in the local language – and there lived in bare cells. Cold and hunger, which kings built great feasting-halls to keep at bay, were valued by those who settled on Skellig as pathways to the radiant presence of God. Monks who knelt for hours in sheeting rain, or laboured on empty stomachs at tasks properly suited to slaves, did so in the hope of transcending the limitations of the fallen world. The veil that separated the heavenly from the earthly seemed, to their admirers, almost parted by their efforts. ‘Mortal men, so people believed, were living the lives of angels.’²⁸ Nowhere else in the Christian West were saints quite as tough, quite as manifestly holy, as they were in Ireland.

That the island had been won for Christ was a miracle in itself. Roman rule had never reached its shores. Instead, sometime in the mid-fifth century, Christianity had been preached there by an escaped slave. Patrick, a young Briton kidnapped by pirates and sold across the Irish Sea, was revered by Irish Christians not just for having brought them to Christ, but for the template of holiness with which he had provided them. Whether working as a shepherd, or fleeing his master by ship, or returning to Ireland to spread the word of God, angels had spoken to him, and guided him in all he did; nor had he hesitated, when justifying his mission, to invoke the imminence of the end of the world. A century on from Patrick’s death, the monks and nuns of Ireland still bore his stamp. They owed no duty save to God, and to their ‘father’ – their ‘abbot’. Monasteries, like the ringforts that dotted the country, were proudly independent. An iron discipline served to maintain them. Only a rule that was ‘strict, holy and constant, exalted, just and admirable’²⁹ could bring men and women to the dimension of the heavenly. Monks were expected to be as proficient in the strange and book-learned language of Latin as at felling trees; as familiar with the few, ferociously cherished classics of Christian literature that had reached Ireland as toiling in a field. Like Patrick, they believed themselves to stand in the shadow of the end days; like Patrick, they saw exile from their families and their native land as the surest way to an utter dependence upon God. Not all headed for the gale-lashed isolation of a rock in the Atlantic. Some crossed the sea to Britain, and there preached the gospel to the kings of barbarous peoples who still set up idols and wallowed in paganism: the Picts, the Saxons, the Angles. Others, heading southwards, took ship for the land of the Franks.

Columbanus – ‘the Little Dove’ – arrived in Francia in 590: the same year that Gregory was elected pope. The Irish monk, unlike the Roman aristocrat, came from the ends of the earth, without status, without pedigree; and yet, by sheer force of charisma, he would set the Latin West upon a new and momentous course. Schooled in the ferociously exacting monasticism of his native land, Columbanus appeared to the Franks a figure of awesome and even terrifying holiness. Unlike their own monks, he consciously sought out wilderness in which to live. His first place of retreat was an old Roman fort in the Vosges, in eastern Francia, long since lost to trees and brush; his second, the ruins of a city burned a century and a half before by invading barbarians. Luxeuil, the monastery he founded there, was built as a portal to heaven. Columbanus and his tiny band of followers, clearing away brambles, draining marshes, building an enclosure out of the shattered masonry, seemed to the Franks men of supernatural fortitude. When hungry, they would gnaw on bark; when weary after a long day of physical labour, they would devote themselves to study, and prayer, and penance. This routine, far from scaring away potential recruits, was soon attracting them in droves. To enter the monastery enclosure, and to submit to Columbanus’ rule, was to know oneself in the company of angels. The discipline imposed on novices was designed not merely to break their pride, to annihilate their self-conceit, but to offer them, sinners though they were, the hope of paradise. Columbanus had brought with him from Ireland a novel doctrine: that sins, if they were regularly confessed, were manageable. Penances, calibrated in exacting detail, could enable sinners, once they had performed them, to regain the favour of God. Punitive though Columbanus’ regime was, it was also medicinal. To those who lived in dread of the hour of judgement, and of the Devil’s accounting book, it promised a precious reassurance: that human weakness might be forgiven.

‘Let us, since we are travellers and pilgrims in this world, keep the end of our road always in our minds – for the road is our life, and its end is our home.’³⁰ Not to journey, not to live in exile from the world, was to spurn heavenly rewards for earthly ones. Columbanus, when he preached this message, did so as a man who had literally turned his back on his family and his native land. As a result, he was able to serve his Frankish admirers as a living embodiment of the potency of religio: of a life utterly committed to God. A shimmer-hint of the supernatural attached itself to almost everything he did. Miraculous stories were told of him: of how bears would obey his commands not to steal fruit, and squirrels sit on his shoulders; of how the simple touch of his saliva could heal even the most painful workplace accident; of how his prayers had the power to cure the sick, and to keep the dying alive. Favoured by kings, who knew authority when they saw it, Columbanus nevertheless disdained to play by the rules. In 610, asked to give his blessing to four princes who had been fathered by the local king on various concubines, he refused. Instead, he pronounced doom on them; and as he did so, a great clap of thunder sounded from the heavens. Even confronted by soldiers, Columbanus did not back down. Escorted to the coast, and put on a ship bound for Ireland, his prayers saw violent winds three times blow the ship back onto the mud-flats. Freed by his guards, who had come to fear his potency far more than that of their king, he crossed the Alps and descended into Italy. News came to him that, just as he had prophesied, the four princes had met with miserable deaths. Columbanus, though, did not turn back. Instead, as he travelled, he continuously sought out the wildest places that he could, remote spots haunted by wolves and pagans, far from the temptations of the world; and wherever he paused, there he would plant a monastery. The last of his foundations, built in a river-scored defile named Bobbio some fifty miles south of Milan, was where, in 615, the aged exile finally died.

Life itself, though – for the sinner adrift from heaven – was an exile. For all that, Columbanus’ departure from his homeland struck Franks and Italians as a peculiarly drastic gesture of penance, and a distinctively Irish one at that, the resonances that it stirred in them reached back deep into the past of the Latin West. Augustine, looking about him at the great cities of the world, at Rome, and Carthage, and Milan, had imagined the City of God as a pilgrim, unshackled by worldly cares. ‘There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity.’³¹ This, when supplicants ventured through the woods that surrounded Luxeuil and approached the settlement founded by Columbanus, was what they hoped to find. The very wall that enclosed the monastery, raised by the saint’s own hand, proclaimed the triumph of the City of God over that of man. The shattered fragments of bath-houses and temples had been built into its fabric: pillars, pediments, broken statuary. These, converted to the uses of religio, were the bric-à-brac of what Augustine, two centuries previously, had identified as the order of the saeculum. The word had various shades of meaning. Originally, it had signified the span of a human life, whether defined as a generation, or as the maximum number of years that any one individual could hope to live: a hundred years. Increasingly, though, it had come to denote the limits of living recollection. Throughout Rome’s history, from its earliest days to the time of Constantine, games to mark the passing of a saeculum had repeatedly been held: ‘a spectacle such as no one had ever witnessed, nor ever would again’.³² This was why Augustine, looking for a word to counterpoint the unchanging eternity of the City of God, had seized upon it. Things caught up in the flux of mortals’ existence, bounded by their memories, forever changing upon the passage of the generations: all these, so Augustine declared, were saecularia – ‘secular things’.³³

The potency of Columbanus’ mission lay in the vivid way that he gave physical expression to the conception of these twin dimensions: of religio and of the saeculum. Even after his death, stories told of the men and women who submitted to his rule left admirers in no doubt that it could indeed open the gates to heaven. In Columbanus’ own lifetime, a dying brother had told him of seeing an angel waiting by his sickbed, and begged him to cease his prayers, which were only serving to keep the angel at bay; in a nunnery founded by one of his disciples, a sister on the point of death had ordered the candle in her cell snuffed out. ‘For do you not see what splendour approaches? Do you not hear the choirs singing?’³⁴ Stories like these, told wherever Columbanus or one of his followers had established a foundation, gave to their monasteries and convents a charge, and a sense of potency, that not even the greatest basilicas could rival. Those who dwelt in them were living embodiments of religio: religiones. To pass their walls, to cross the ditches and palisades that marked out their limits, was to leave the earthly behind, and approach the heavenly.

No surprise, then, that in time the wings of the most powerful angel of them all should have been heard beating golden over Columbanus’ native land. Almost certainly, it was Irish monks studying in Bobbio who brought home with them the cult of Saint Michael. From Italy to Ireland, the charisma of the warrior archangel came to radiate across the entire West. In time, even the furthermost spike of rock, as far out into the ocean as it was possible for monks to go and not vanish beyond the horizon, would end up under his protection. Skellig became Skellig Michael. There was nowhere so remote, it seemed, nowhere so far removed from the centres of earthly power, that the presence of an angel – and perhaps even his voice – might not be experienced there.

The summons to be born anew, to repent and be absolved of sin, was one that would prove to have many takers.