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.

A Landscape of the Mind

I've recently re-read A.E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad," a slim volume of poems published in 1896. What a wonderful gift to English literature!

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

is hung with bloom along the bough,

and stands about the woodland ride

wearing white for Eastertide.

Poem II.
Housman (1859-1936), the elder brother of Laurence Housman, the playwright and artist, wrote very little poetry. Then, in 1895, aged 36, he had a sudden burst of creative energy. This book is the result. It's full of the great themes of life and death, of war and peace. It appears to be very simple, almost like primitive poetry, but on closer inspection Housman's work weaves together Classical themes, archaic language, and metres taken from old country balladry. The poems have a slow, yet relentless rhythm; they touch on most of the major themes of life. Rustic and earthy, homespun yet elegant, they create a vista that is both wonderfully attractive and unutterably sad. Shropshire, for Housman, becomes a landscape of the mind, an idealised country haven far from the arid streets of London where
"...till they drop they needs must still
Look at you and wish you ill." (Poem XLI)
Housman was a native of Worcestershire, not of Shropshire. Nevertheless, in the poems he uses the place names and history of Shropshire to conjure up the hilarity of Ludlow Fair, the wind on Bredon Hill, the swift-flowing Teme and the stately Severn. The Shropshire of Housman's mind is a place where young lads fall in love, then go away to fight Victoria's wars. It's a place where lovers lie down together, but death soon steals them. In a profusion of narrative and evocative language, Housman creates a place that does not change, where the Wrekin hill still looks down, impassivly on the emotions of man, where the vane on Hughley steeple still stands bright against the sky.
It's hard to choose a favorite, but if I have to, I'll go for
Poem XIX - To An Artist Dying Young.
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Housman’s imagery is stark in its intensity: once the hero was carried high in victory; now he is carried shoulder-high, in a coffin. Whereas once his achievements were lauded by the living, now he can only share his glory with the shades. But there’s still more to the poem. The warning to a man, not to let his name die before he does, and the image of the garland, briefer than a girl’s, remain after the narrative has ceased. Therein lies Housman's true genius. He is not just recreating an antique land of the imagination, he is populating it with people just like us, people for whom the themes of love and death are just as pertinent. We, too, know the pain of loss, the nostalgia for things past.
In one poem, XLVII 'The Carpenter's Son,' Housman speaks of Christ. In his words, I do not sense the devotion of one who has known the soul-satisfying embrace of saving faith. His words are respectful, yet a little cold. In the fifth verse, Christ speaks:
Here hang I, and right and left
Two poor fellows hang for theft:
All the same’s the luck we prove,
Though the midmost hangs for love.

Of course, Housman is right, Christ dies for love, yet in the poem it is a strangely ineffectual love. There is nothing of salvation. We feel sorry for the crucified One. Christ's only advice, repeated twice is merely "Live, lads, and I will die."

I think this could be the clue to the whole work. Housman longs for another country, a fairer land, so he invents Shropshire, a landscape of the mind. He is actually searching for heaven, for the place where he will enjoy peace with God, reconciled with his Maker through the atoning sacrifice of Christ.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
Poem XL

We wade through the melancholy and the nostalgia. We weep with him at the sight of a loved one leaving whom he shall meet no more. His loneliness and sense of loss are, at times painfully intense. He speaks for us, restless and homesick, until we find our rest in Him, until we come home to God.