The Medieval Manichee by Steven Runciman

A few days ago I received a message with the very sad news that one of my most influential teachers at SPS had passed away — the Revd Hugh Mead, back then the chaplain, but from 1990 also the school's biographer.

It seems fitting to me that he attained a position at the Temple church as I imagine that had he been born almost a millennium previously he might well have signed up as a Templar. His eyes used to light up with every mention of William Marshal.

I lastingly associate two (very different) books with him: The Castle by Kafka and this one. Both were plugged regularly. I got my own copy of Steven Runciman's acclaimed 1947 dualist survey at Heffers in '86. I've been re-reading it this week in the Reverend's honour.

Gifted linguist and aesthete, Runciman was old school in that what we tend to venerate as 'western' civilisation was for him little more than the barbarian hinterland of where the real action always was, the eastern Med.

In late antiquity this region played host to a complex theological ecosystem, held up by resilient levels of mass education and bookishness. And back then, the more sophisticated you were, the more likely you were to be bothered by the presence of evil in the cosmos.

Heresy would probably not be the most suitable way to describe the resulting explanations, many of which were more semi-obsolescent than new-fangled.

The Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia, for instance, had been 'in the air' for a long time — two perfect realms of light and darkness had somehow become venn-diagrammed, resulting in reality. The rise of Islam had shunted these notions westwards.

Mainstream Christian belief was then being formulated by a series of officially sanctioned compromises, but out 'in the field' many of the key issues remained up for grabs. Was Jesus God, man or both? Did he arrive with his status fixed or did it change in his lifetime etc. And most importantly, what kind of psychotic idiot had fabricated this flawed world?

In 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu stopped at Philippopolis en route to Constantinople and noted the presence there of a strange sect she called 'Paulines'. Not the sort poor Hugh Mead had to contend with, even though they had originally been called Paulicians, or 'contemptible' Paulines. They were a remnant of an 8th century Armenian group who had maintained their own mini-state in Tephrice and had sometimes aligned with Islam against Byzantium, depending on the balance of unhinged puritanism then current between the civilisations.

They were periodically persecuted by the emperors and in the tenth century one made the fateful decision to re-settle a load of them in Thrace (Bulgaria), from where their dualist fancies would seep into the minds then in the main managed by the Bishop of Rome.

Those that remained back east seem to have forgotten most of their old doctrines by the time Lady Mary passed by.

Like many gnostic sects they had been dividing humanity into named classes of spiritual worth based on their level of initiation. Some referred to the masses as 'materials'. Meat, basically.

Amusingly, some believed that a person could become so fused with the holy spirit that they could return to a life of luxury and license and it would make no difference to their ultimate salvation status.

While some strove to make their Christianity more Judaistic, others wanted to demote Jehova to the status of semi-divine being aligned with the Demiurge. As such, anyone who stood up to this false deity in the Old Testament might be hero-worshipped, like Cain, or indeed the Sodomites.

Anti-social types, like V and me, present as least awkward for everyone else when we stick to our own private spaces. But when we become militant, roaming the world whilst declaring it to be one big waste of time, we can present as a serious social, political and economic pathology to the powers that be.

By declaring the visible word totally toxic, literally the devil's work, gnostics were setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy, particularly during an epoch when our civilisation was generally struggling to keep its head above water.

But Orthodoxy had a solution to hand: monasteries. Just stick all the world-rejecting, constitutionally anti-social types in a kind of walled garden. Therein the people who most despised society could be made to do useful things for it (healthcare, education, regulated thinking etc.) within a contained, if not entirely hermetic environment.

And this ultimately worked pretty well, as the gnostics were just a bit too anti-social for their own good. Not everyone could spend every waking hour worrying about the origins of darkness and malign forces, and the sects often seemed more concerned with protecting the wellbeing of pockets of light in this world than the wellbeing of actual fleshy human beings. And so their support levels never reached the tipping point…

Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai

Published in 2021 (though not until ‘25 in English, after his Nobel), Krasznahorkai was relenting on his pledge never to pen another novel. Perhaps the great doom-monger had been tempted out of silence by the pandemic?

The format is a single 406-page sentence which darts between perspectives as it zigzags around a central temporal line. Knowing this and that the underpinning of both style and subject matter was particle physics, I was concerned that it would read like one of those smart-arsey American postmodern novels.

Nada que ver. A lightness remains even as the material darkens. I tried to recall when I was last so eagerly devouring a narrative like this. Krasznahorkai has avoided all the tricks of the genre writer (short chapters, cliffhangers etc) only to fashion an elemental impetus, reminiscent of how I’d find myself compulsively turning the pages of Bolaño’s tomes with the nagging suspicion that this shouldn’t really be happening.

The protagonist is Florian, revealed as a gentle giant embarking on a seemingly unrequited correspondence with Angela Merkel. He has been plucked from an orphanage by ‘The Boss’, a Neo Nazi gruppenführer with a Bach obsession. Florian will come to share this, indeed this music will become his ‘state of being’, but his initial fixation has come as a result of attending evening classes with a local scientist. We are left to ponder just how big an idiot Florian might be, but as he posts his letters to Berlin, it also seems he might be something of a savant: a half-wit whose wit is half full, not half-empty.

Existence is a surplus, an excess, a mistake which might be corrected at any moment, Florian advises Merkel. As he becomes gripped by this absolute dread, the people of made-up town Kana in Thuringia become beset with a dread of a far more creeping kind. The fancied cosmic apocalypse is replaced in reality by a piecemeal combination of human, social and natural decay (all part of the same phenom for Krasznahorkai) against which we are equally impotent....beyond ringing up information hotlines.

Nationalisms require desacralising...

Nationalism is almost never an unalloyed positive force. Just as the structures it seeks to supplant (typically 'empires') were never an unalloyed negative force. 

This is as true in the Middle East — Zionism, Arab and Kurdish nationalisms etc — as elsewhere. History is never a simplistic morality play in spite of concerted efforts in the contemporary world to portray it as such. 

The most obvious flaw in most expressions of nationalism is how easily it becomes a piggyback prop for more mean spirited and ultimately extremist modes of thought.

In the case of Arab Nationalism it is easy to trace the pattern, from resistance to both long-standing Ottoman domination and the European interference of the early twentieth century to a set of ideals that had been distorted by exposure to militant Islamism, itself a religious impulse contaminated by twentieth century secular western totalitarianism. 

The end result is a form of nationalism which regards Arab sovereignty as inextricably Islamic sovereignty, constitutionally unable to share or even properly coexist with non-Islamic peoples and their own national aspirations. The deeper history of Arab presence in the Levant is one of conquest and colonialism, yet modern Arab nationalism not only denies this, it turns this denial into something SACRED. 

And therewith issues which need to be pondered carefully when not picked apart, compromises always on the table, become matters of almost childlike commitment and obstinacy.