This apparently coloured statue is actually a plain wooden carving of Jesus of Nazareth in his death agony.
It's inside a chapel in Leeds where I found myself with an old friend and his family.
I am not religious, but spending an hour among ancient ceremonies does tend to make me think, slowly and carefully without any snap rejections.
For example, they sang Christmas Carols; one was by Wesley, which is not traditional for Catholics you would think. As I browsed the hymn book, reading lyrics, I found a hymn written by a Roman in the sixth century and translated from the Latin.
That's quite a tradition, a living tradition. While I read that they sang an old Testament Hebrew prayer(in English).
The Roman hymn was strident; the traditions of Rome were present in the talk of celestial battle and victory song; not at all like the moral crusading of the eighteenth and nineteenth centruies, or the insipid grovelling of the twentieth.
I realised a few things about Christianity and Catholicism in particular.
The Roman Church has been the guardian of the link with ancient classical history;the Christian beliefs have fallen throughout the Dark Ages like rain from the sky, making everybody under it wet with faith but not actually challenging directly; washing but not flooding.
Catholicism destroyed and immortalised Rome both at once, and today we turn our backs on all of Christendom only if we want to build temporarily.
There is just too much wisdom incorporated into this system, even today, to cast it aside lightly.
Take me. I'm not a Christian. I don't praise charity. I don't forgive. I don't give people much of a chance for redemption, because I believe what they say when they say it.
Does this mean Christianity doesn't know right from wrong?
The first Christians risked their lives going out into the shadowlands of Europe, preaching and dying.
Any one man would either die or hate-and fight.
This would doom the bearers of the message to being regarded as rivals,competitors, men who were no better than they ought to be.
So, as a tiny minority in a world of savagery, what did they do?
They offered redemption and forgiveness.
Conversion may not always be sincere, but if you kill everybody who's left?
Thus they established the basic psychology of discussion instead of war, when war was far too easy.
At least to start with.
Invasions came and went; invasions designed to destroy Christendom.
Physically they were saved by the Bulgars and the Russians and men like Charlemaine, but they were sidestepping direct involvement. They therefore introduced the concept of 'unworldliness' to avoid being destroyed by any one putsch. Clever.(But later this was subverted to become an virtue in itself, which is altogether
not a message worth spreading to the world.)
At all points as Christianity and particularly the Roman tradition matured, steps were taken to ensure that the message went on, through
individual integrity and example. This message?
What was it that they didn't want us to forget?
Never mind the assessments.That Jesus died for us, that sinners would be redeemed etc etc.
The main point is this: A godly,individual man was persecuted to his death for speaking his mind.
In remembering this fact, we see the presentation of an evidence that resonates the innate sense of justice of Aristotle's ordinary people, a fact that Ayn Rand considered including in the climax of
The Fountainhead, that paeon to atheist life.
This is the subversion and essential success of Christianity.
Happy Christmas.
