Gods, Temples, and Blood

"Why are we here? (said Camaban). We know that the gods made us, but why? Why do we make things? You make a bow - to kill. You make a pot - to hold things. You make a brooch - to fasten a cloak. So we were made for a purpose, but what was that purpose?" He waited for an answer but neither Haragg nor Saban spoke. "And why are we flawed?" Camaban asked. "Would you make a bow that was weak? Or a pot that was cracked? We were not made flawed! The gods would not have made us flawed any more than a potter would make a bowl that was cracked or a smith would make a knife that was blunt, yet we are sick, we are maimed and we are twisted. The gods made us perfect and, and we are flawed. Why?" He paused before offering the answer: "Because we offended Slaol (the Sun god)."

You don't expect to find a statement of Christian anthropology in a secular novel, least of all in one set in the second millennium BC, but that's exactly what you get in Bernard Cornwell's Stonehenge.

I've read quite a few of Cornwell's novels, particularly from the Sharpe series, dealing with the Napoleonic wars, and the Warlord Chronicles, set in England in the early Middle Ages. I've yet to delve into the Starbuck Chronicles, which tell the story of the American Civil War. An Englishman, now living on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with his American wife, Cornwell is a natural storyteller with a fine eye for detail and a flair for the description of battle. There are very few references to Christianity in his novels. Rifleman Richard Sharpe, for example, seems to have been dragged up without any thought of God. Some of the villains, such as Sergeant Hawkswill, use god-fearing language, but their lives belie their words. It's only in Cornwell's later books (ironically, dealing with Sharpe's early career) that one encounters a sympathetic presentation of devout Scottish Highlanders praying the psalms before marching fearlessly into battle. Sharpe's early mentor in India, though a somewhat dour Presbyterian, is at least a man of great personal integrity. Then, out of the blue, in Stonehenge, we find a passage that is almost Calvinist.



Admittedly Camaban, the sorcerer, who speaks the words I have quoted, turns out to be as crazy as a loon, but that doesn't make his assessment false. Camaban, who was almost offered as a human sacrifice as a child, turns out to be flawed himself. He is not averse to murdering his older brother, or to stealing his younger brother's wife. This merely confirms his own hypothesis. For most of the characters in Stonehenge, life is nasty, brutish, and short.

Yet the search for truth remains. God is not to be found in the the cycle of the seasons, or the phases of the moon, or the progression of the sun. Though a blue-stone be brought from farthest Wales, or a cap-stone be set in place, four times the height of a man, these exertions do not bring Camaban closer to God. The construction of Stonehenge merely symbolizes the spritual quest, the striving for the divine that seems so much a part of the human psyche. Perhaps, in his novels, Cornwell also participates in the quest.

On his website, Cornwell confesses that he was raised, in East Anglia, within a Christian sect known as the Peculiar People, (a phrase taken from I Peter 2:9).

At some point he must have rebelled against their strict and regimented way of life. I have no idea what his religious affiliation is today, if any; but his novels still contain echoes of the homesickness of the soul, which is our longing for God.

Camaban has the wrong solution. A temple will not bring a god to earth, no matter how grand. Neither will the Ruler of the universe be impressed by the shedding of human blood. But his analysis has the ring of truth. We were made for a purpose; but we are flawed. We have offended against God's desire and design. Recognizing, somehow, that we were made to be worshippers, we have raised our monuments to the sky, but they have not reached to heaven.

The genius of Christianity is not just its anthropology, its understanding of the fallen nature of humanity, it is the unique claim that heaven has come to earth. Christ was not drawn down by our blood-offerings, but by our misery; and it is by His sacrifice that we are healed.