Happisburgh, Norfolk: More than 15 minutes of fame

All but one of the photographs published here are my own. 

The lighthouse

Apart being a quiet & peaceful corner of Norfolk and well known for its a striking barber's pole of a lighthouse I never thought that Happisburgh had more notability than that. Happisburgh's apparent calm obscurity and that sense of it being no-where-ville was actually one good reason for the wife and I to have a couple of nights there in a caravan as a get-away from it all. I had never visited Happisburgh before and to my shame thought that it lacked notability. Well, I was wrong. Happisburgh sprung some surprises and in terms of its significance it punches well above its weight. 

The well-maintained village sign

Arriving on the North Walsham Road at what looked to me to be the centre of Happisburgh we found it marked by a colourful village sign which makes cryptic allusions to Happisburgh's early history. At this point one also finds a crossroads: The road to the left runs up to the church which with its high tower has dimensions disproportionate to the tiny size of Happisburgh. The church was largely rebuilt in the 15th century in the perpendicular style and this rebuild was probably financed by the wool trade, a trade that made Norfolk a wealthy place to be. The road to right is the high street: It boasts one tiny shop and a school. The high street eventually leads on to Whipwell street which in tum runs into Whipwell Green where legend has it that a well existed. This well is at the centre of a macabre ghost story which I heard told as a youngster, but it was news to me that Happisburgh was the location of this alleged haunting.

The Hill House Inn

Straight ahead at the crossroad is a hill which runs up to the Hill House Inn and then on to a derelict caravan site that was cleared of caravans some years ago because of coastal erosion (In fact the site has moved inland to the site where we were spending our two nights). Whilst dinning in the half-timbered interior of the ancient Inn the landlord told us that the grade 2 listed Inn had been given twenty years before it fell into the sea. It was criminal, he said, that those losing their homes to the sea were expected to pay for their demolition costs before they littered the beach. 

When Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Canon Doyle visited this part of the world it inspired two of his stories: The North Norfolk legend of Black Shuck was behind the story of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and at the Hill House Inn where he was fond of staying an inspiration came for the story of "The Dancing Men".  The Eastern Daily Press  tells us: 

Lying in a quiet Norfolk coastal village just a stone's throw from the sea, The [Hill House Hotel] was the perfect retreat for a famous writer who wanted to work in solitude. His writing desk was placed at the window, facing a bowling green and the sea, and the author was left in peace, with a maidservant on call to attend to him when he needed. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle liked the hotel so much that he became a regular visitor, and as well as providing peace and quiet, the Hill House also provided inspiration - in the form of a curious hand-written script formed by stickmen that the landlord's son had written in the guest book. Conan Doyle was so taken with the code that while staying there in May 1903 he wrote a Sherlock Holmes story called The Adventure of the Dancing Men, rated by aficionados of the great detective as one of the best.

Doyle captures the atmosphere of this part of Norfolk in The Dancing Men where he writes:

...there was much around us to interest us, for we were passing through as singular a countryside as any in England, where a few scattered cottages represented the population of today, while on every hand enormous square towered churches bristled up from the flat green landscape and told of the glory and prosperity of old East Anglia. At last the violet rim of the German ocean [The North Sea] appeared over the green edge of the Norfolk coast and the driver pointed with his whip to two old brick and timber gables which projected  from a grove of trees. "That's Ridling Thorpe Manor" said he.

Happisburgh church: One of those enormous square towered 

churches Canon Doyle speaks of.

The North Sea eats away at Happisburgh's cliffs

Doyle's reference to Ridling Thorpe Manor reminds me of Happisburgh Manor whose enormous thatched roof and chimneys we glimpsed poking over a line of trees. I don't think I've ever seen a mansion that large with a thatched roof; but then it is a Victorian fancy and belongs to the world of the Victorian imagination and a romantic take on all things medieval. With its lower half hidden behind the copse its builders would be proud to know that it looked the epitome of mystique and could well serve as the romantic setting for a haunting period piece. But at about 200m from the sea it seems to have become a hot potato. 

File: -2008-07-04 Happisburgh Manor, Happisburgh, Norfolk.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

The under populated isolation which is North Norfolk would have been strong in Doyle's day: By the 19th century the wealth and importance of Norwich and Norfolk had diminished considerably since the halcyon days of the Middle Ages as city & county lost out to the big industrial cities of the North. Also, although transport & communication had improved by Doyle's time it was still not advanced enough to rid North Norfolk of that sense of disconnection which can be felt even today. In Victorian days it was very much a slow backwater and its folk perhaps therefore more open to accepting the paranormal. I am sure it's significant that Doyle, who was fascinated by the paranormal, placed his other Norfolk inspired story in the wilds of isolated Dartmoor. Wild and isolated countryside seems to stimulate the imagination and enhance a sense of the numinous: Fred Hoyle and the Brontes may be further evidence of this rule of thumb.

A small erosion valley opens up in the soft cliffs of Happisburgh. 

The inevitable carving away of the glacial till cliffs of Happisburgh is slowly removing it from the map of Norfolk. But ironically it this very process which has put Happisburgh on the world map of paleontological fame. For underlying the till is a basement rock which been uncovered to reveal early hominin footprints. At nearly a million years old these are the oldest hominin footprints outside Africa. See here for more: Happisburgh footprints - Wikipedia . This is so long ago that the owners of these footprints would have seen a very different night-sky to the one I saw when I went out to look at the stars on our second night. In comparison with these time scales, it feels as though Happisburgh church was built only yesterday.  

A more recent manifestation of the hominin group

 treads Happisburgh's basement rock.  

From its ghost stories & legends, through Canon Doyle's dancing men, to those enigmatic ancient footprints, Happisburgh has plenty to pique the interest of the student of mystery. Take for example those early hominins: What did they look like? What did they think of the world in which they found themselves? Did they have a purely bestial secular mind set and simply take it all as necessarily granted and gave no further thought to it?* Or did they look up at the stars and wonder and attempt to make anthropic sense of those cosmic contingencies by integrating the enigmatic facts of life with religion? Did they have rituals and ritual sites? All the paleontologists find are the bare necessities of adaptive survival like flint tools and butchered bones. The kind of sacred sites we find associated with the neolithic and later ages have not been found in the Paleolithic; such sites seem to be a function of the wealth surplus of farming communities, an example being, of course, the monumentally huge structure that is Happisburgh church.

An air of intrigue & mystery hangs over Happisburgh which whets the appetite of the curious as did those strange dancing men fascinate Sherlock Holmes. 

Relevant Link:

Famous Sherlock Holmes manuscript by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle written at Hill House Hotel in Dereham set to fetch $500,000 at ... | North Norfolk News

Footnote

* This sentence is based on the fact that our science in essence only describes the inherent organization of our experiences: In this sense we are no further forward in our understanding than Paleolithic races whose difference to ourselves was that they didn't have available those very powerful and general descriptive organizing principles (e.g. the laws of physics) that we have today, or a sense of sight and sound greatly magnified by the artifacts of technology. But essentially those principles are a means of description which in the final analysis rely on a kernel of brute contingent fact at which point descriptive explanation hits a logical barrier and can go no further.  See here: Quantum Non-Linearity: Something comes from Something: Nothing comes from Nothing. Big Deal (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Abington, Fred Hoyle and the Cosmic Perspective.

The oldest house in Abington, Cambrideshire. 

Recently I happened to be in Abington, Cambridgeshire, for a family reunion event. One of the activities provided by the hosts was a very interesting guided tour round the historic village. The village is stacked with old houses some of which are pre-Tudor, an example of which I've pictured above. This particular house, which boasts the resilience of wood frames, is the oldest in the village, perhaps 14th century, the century of the societal mold breaking disaster of the black death. The existence of so many old houses is product of an irony: Going back some years we would likely find that the inhabitants of Abington were by and large dirt poor rural workers. In fact, too poor to support an economy with the wealth to update the houses of Abington. The effect was to preserve what to our modern eyes are delightful & quaint rural cottages, so delightful that only the rich can now afford to buy them and maintain them: Hence the area is now the sedate backwater for the relatively well-heeled.

Like history in general the development of Abington is a microcosm of chaotic twists and turns with no grand plan to explain or rationalize its complex history or layout. As with most human settlements it evolved in a haphazard fashion; a dwelling here and a dwelling there built as the complex vicissitudes of daily life made themselves felt. For me, however, there was to be in interesting twist at the end of the tour.

***

As our guide was finishing off he made a passing comment that just round the corner from where we were assembled cosmologist Fred Hoyle had his home during his tenure at Cambridge university. This was a complete surprise: I'd been coming to Abington and visiting relatives here for 38 years and this was the first I'd heard of it. It was as big a surprise to me as finding Cromwell's house in the shadow of Ely Cathedral. After I expressed an interest one of the guides took me to see it; it was an elegant looking Georgian/Regency house:

The plaque on the front wall reads:

At the age of 58 and after 28 years Hoyle resigned from the faculty of Cambridge university in 1973 as a protest against university bureaucracy* and moved to the Lake District, not that far from his region of provenance. By all accounts Fred Hoyle was not an easy-going character and didn't suffer fools gladly. I suspect that he put much of his own personality and how he viewed himself in relation to those around him in the pugnacious character of John Fleming, the scientist in Hoyle's novel "A for Andromeda". Fleming, like Hoyle, was constantly picking arguments with those lesser intelligences around him. Only Fleming could read the writing on the Wall about the danger of an intruding cosmic intelligence that had taken on the form of a computer. I watched the 1961 BBC production of A For Andromeda and apart from having a crush on Julie Christie (at the age of nine!) and a fascination with the sinister sounding staccato pulses from the computer's speaker,** the only other strong memory I have is of a bad-tempered John Fleming curtly snapping his way through the series; Fleming, like Hoyle, believed he knew better than most, particularly the bureaucrats and politicians. We have to admit, of course, that Hoyle himself often did know better!

Hoyle's new environment in the Lake district is described by an Express reporter who visited him in 1981 and wrote an article in the Express titled "Spaceman Sir Fred still winning his Star Wars". I don't know about winning, but he was still fighting those wars, just like his alter ego Dr. Fleming. In the article we read this:

Fred Hoyle lives in almost perfect peace. His old stone farmhouse is just a few telescope lengths from the lip of Ullswater and from the panoramic windows of his study the Helvellyn Hills drift silently away against the sky, as though into space. Far away is where Professor Sir Fred Hoyle likes to be. Distance and seclusion, and perhaps even the double glazing which shuts out sounds no more disturbing than the singing of garden birds, have been his way of life for almost a decade. It is also symbolically shuts out the aggravating sound of the ribald laughter with which the academic establishment greets so many of his pronouncements. For more than 30 years Hoyle, who will be 66 this month, has been rocking the world with his theories......... "At the time people were laughing at me" he says peering at the hills with dark penetrating eyes.  (Geoffrey Levy, Express 16 June 1981)

As time progressed the objects of Hoyle's novel generating imagination became inextricably mixed with his science. In his 1983 book "The Intelligent Universe" (of which I have a copy), the "scientific" ideas he sketches out could be a plot to one of his novels. The book provides insight into the direction his thought was taking as he mulled over the meaning of life, the universe and everything during his rambles in the epic landscape of the Lake District where, unlike Abington, the sense of ancient geologic time is very real. The book is subtitled "A new view of creation and evolution" and tenders an original way of looking at the cosmic evolutionary dynamic. Hoyle was well known for his startling originality and this book is no exception. In fact the book has, to my mind, parallels with A for Andromeda. In "The Intelligent Universe" Fred Hoyle is effectively playing the part of a Dr. Fleming type figure, telling us what he thinks an alien cosmic intelligence, an intelligence which literally pervades our own cosmos, is up to. In fact chapter 9 is titled "What is Intelligence up to?". For Hoyle that Intelligence emanates from the unimaginably long eons of the eternity of time posited by his Steady State Theory of the Universe. This Intelligence has learnt how to fine tune the universe to suit its eternal propagation. This management of the universe takes place largely via the vectors of microorganisms which travel across space delivering the information in their genetic makeup. This propagation has parallels with the radio signal from deep space in A for Andromeda. This signal transmitted information about how to build a computer intelligence, an intelligence that ultimately was looking out for its own survival at the expense of humanity. In Hoyle's mind the cosmic Intelligence he tenders in "The Intelligent Universe" is God-like in that its causation can be transmitted from the future as well as the past and therefore it straddles all of infinite time. Therefore, for Hoyle this Intelligence is, as it were, the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Rev 22:13). But Hoyle's Intelligence is no transcendent Christian God: His is a pantheistic view where his proposed Intelligence is very much part of and trapped in the cosmos as it engages in an eternal struggle to subdue its own internal tendency toward chaos: So, the meaning of life for Hoyle is a kind of eternal Kaos Kampf. In Hoyle's worldview the cosmos has no real endgame but is forever struggling to maintain intelligent self-awareness and humanity is bound up with this struggle.

All this, of course, is very far removed from that peaceful country lane in Abington where one Saturday afternoon in the summer of 2022 I stumbled across the large cottage Fred Hoyle occupied for a couple of decades or more. For someone like Hoyle I imagine that the quiet lanes of Abington with their trimmed hedgerows and the gentle undulating countryside of Cambridgeshire felt nearly as claustrophobic and stultifying as Cambridge University's bureaucracy. When Hoyle eventually settled in the untamed landscape of the Lake District, not so far from the wild lands of Wuthering Heights, it connected much better with his mentality. In this dangerous far-seeing landscape eternity & the cosmic perspective are much more palpable than they are in the cozy lanes of Abington. As with the Bronte's I suspect the elemental landscape around him helped to inspire his creativity. As he aged Hoyle started to speculate on the meaning of life and what appears to be some kind of God-consciousness surfaced in his later years. He was trying to make anthropic sense of the universe, much like myself.  Moreover, like many others he was puzzled by the highly contingent anti-chance configurations & specifications of the cosmos and thought that this fact demanded explanation; on that score I'm with him. But being an atheistic science buff, he sought to keep his speculations as far as possible within the material universe he knew, and so as a kind of seat-of-the-pants project he wrote The Intelligent Universe.  

As I've already said the landscape, he was now in was dangerous and that proved to be the case for poor Fred. Hoyle's end was hastened when during one of his country hikes, he fell into a ravine near Shipley not far from where he was born. That wouldn't have happened if he lived out his retirement in Abington. But then perhaps neither would some of his off-the-wall ideas have happened.

Hoyle: Tough, pugnacious and cantankerous.

Footnotes

* ...according to the journalist Geoffrey Levy.

** The early computers had their program loops linked to loudspeakers as a crude way of helping to debug a program and detect the cause of software lock ups. On the BBC's A for Andromeda this auditory rendering of algorithmic looping was an eerie sound effect successfully conveying the mystique associated with the "thinking machines" of that era & also represented the sinister nature of the "thoughts" of the Andromeda computer that was intent on controlling Earth. But having worked on my Thinknet project I find algorithmic looping a far too primitive a notion for a real thinking machine.

NOTE:

This proved to be an interesting article in the Guardian:

Fred Hoyle: the scientist whose rudeness cost him a Nobel prize | Nobel prizes | The Guardian

A Visit to the Isle of Ely Part III: Oliver Cromwell

My photograph of Oliver Cromwell's house in Ely

(See Part I here and Part II here)

Historians of the Seventeenth century will know that Oliver Cromwell's house, the one in which he lived and worked between 1636 and 1647, is within an arrow's flight of the huge monument to medieval Catholicism that is Ely cathedral.  Cromwell in many ways stood for everything that Ely Cathedral was not. The puritan Celia Fiennes was typical of  Cromwell's puritanical strain of thought:

When Celia Fiennes recorded her visit to Ely in 1698, she could remark, "this church has the most popish remains in its walls as any I have seen" (Ely Cathedral guide page 20)

As a mere dabbler in history I have to confess that I didn't know that Cromwell's house was so close to the Cathedral until I visited Ely in the warm September of 2020! But coming to this fact for the first time in my life meant that I was blown away by the surprising and hugely ironic juxtapositions of these two buildings, both monuments to two very disparate expressions of the faith. Cromwell so epitomized the austerity, the business-like practicality and lack of finesse & decorum that goes together with the resurgence of middle-class puritanical devotion of that day.  According to the Cathedral guide:

The puritans rejected all but the plainest forms of worship - in a letter to the Precentor, Cromwell described  the choir service as "so unedifying and offensive"  - and during the Commonwealth, Ely  ceased to function as a Cathedral. 

Cromwell's reaction to the Cathedral and its form of devotion is nothing but what you'd expect from him. 

Progressively, Cromwell had moved into a popularist position where he had gained the influence and authority to implement his brand of idealism:

Oliver who had undergone a religious conversion in his late twenties believed himself to be one of God's Chosen People or Elect. He was fiercely critical of High Churchmen, like Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely and of authority generally, defending the rights of the fenmen against  those who sought to drain their land without adequate compensation. The popularity and support that he won from those whose cause he defended earned him the name "Lord of the Fens". In 1640 Cromwell was elected MP for Cambridge and so became increasingly involved in national affairs.  (Guide to Cromwell's House page 2)

Here we see the beginnings of that common political phenomenon where a popularist rebel against established authority (who may otherwise have a just cause) eventually maneuvers themselves into a position of established authority without any sense of irony.  In fact after the 1642 civil war Cromwell became an absolute authority:

During the disturbances of the Civil  War in January 1644 Cromwell warned Mr Hitch, the Precentor of the Cathedral "Lest the souldiers in any tumultuary or disorderly way attempt the Reformation of the Cathedral Church, I require you to forbear altogether your choir service, so unedifying and offensive....". Hitch ignored the warning so Cromwell saying that he was "a man under authority" ordered him to "leave off your fooling and come down"; Cromwell then drove out the congregation. In 1649 Parliament ordered an inquiry into the possible demolition of the Cathedral, which was in a decayed state, so that the sale of the materials might be applied to "the relief of the sick and maimed soldiers, widows and orphans". The Cathedral survived  only because the cost of demolition was estimated as greater in the value of the materials remaining. but was almost certainly closed for about seventeen years. (Guide to Cromwell's house page 5)

The take home lesson here (as if we didn't know already), is that fundamentalists and idealists have no mercy if it cuts across their ideology; ideology first, grace second, if at all. The architectural wonder of Ely Cathedral only survived because practicalities made it too expensive to demolish!  (Let's recall how ruthless the Taliban and Islamic state were toward the heritage of the past). Notice also the time honoured tension between the cost of the monumental and the cost of servicing the less fortunate.

For me Cromwell is a frustrating figure who missed his opportunities for true reform because of his uncompromising idealism; his obsessive anti-Catholic ideals drove an unbending sometimes merciless  agenda. It is axiomatic to idealists and fundamentalists of Cromwell's ilk that critics are assumed to have hidden and malign motives for disagreeing and therefore justifiably dealt with by coercion. Cromwell's self-belief meant that he could see no irony in his wielding absolute authority and in his willingness to use the threat of lethal force, a threat which he excused with the euphemism of "being under authority". He used that threat to drive out Ely's congregation and later squabbling parliamentarians. He became head of a joyless dictatorship that was consequently all too open to a reactionary return to the very things he opposed. But in spite of all that I believe Cromwell had the right idea at least in a theoretical sense; that is, of a parliamentary forum for the common people; but for him only those common people of sufficiently puritanical frame of mind, else he was liable to exercise his "authority". Like idealists the world over Cromwell didn't see that as a sinner he was as much part of the problem as the solution. If he had seen that he might have understood that there is little choice but to work with a morally and epistemically compromised humanity. He might have also understood that a squabbling often corrupt  parliament with a tendency toward selfishness was, as Walpole observed, the natural state of human affairs and must be wisely managed & regulated rather than engaged in a futile struggle to eradicate sin - only God can do that. 

But then the mitigation for Cromwell was that this was early days in the democratic experiment and I suppose a lack of understanding of what real democracy actually looks like in all its messy compromised & argumentative untidiness would have been beyond an idealist who faced the conundrum of all idealists: That is, as the French revolutionaries discovered, the full implementation of an ideology can only be achieved under totalitarian conditions; the very thing many idealists see themselves as rebelling against.  Underneath it, however, I believe Cromwell was not motivated by a desire to seek power and he refused the crown. He genuinely wanted power to be in the hands of the commoners, but at that stage in British history he really had no idea how to implement his vision among sinners and his fall back was his own sense of being right and his willingness to use diktat.  That a noisy contention is a necessary concomitant of true democracy just seemed wrong, wrong, wrong to a buttoned up puritan. I'm tempted to accuse him of being a block-head, but I'll refrain; it's easy to criticize Cromwell in hindsight. 

***

Move on 200 years into another age, the 19th century, and we find the romance of the gothic revival in full swing. The attitude profile had changed; at least in some quarters. The gothic purists found the abuse of the fabric of Ely Cathedral as equally offensive as Cromwell found the Cathedral services of his day: According the the Cathedral guide:

The architect and chief protagonist of the Gothic revival in England, A. W. N. Pugin, on walking into the Lady Chapel, is said to have burst into tears exclaiming, "O God, what has England done to deserve this". 

The Cathedral underwent restoration in the early Victorian period. These post-enlightenment people who were now well into the age of the mechanical, the industrial and the intellectual had acquired a taste for the mysticism of ritual and symbol. Ely Cathedral as a suitably atmospheric & monumental venue serving these tastes suited them down to the ground.

***

In Mat 7:13-14 we read:

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."   

The ways to destruction are many, the ways to life very few; (that sounds like a consequence of disorder theory to my ears!). I would question whether sinners ever find that gate at all; rather it is found for them and revealed to them by a God of Grace.  

The path of human salvation goes through the narrow gate of the Cross, but the path to ultimate salvation (as Bunyan discovered) is a winding way, perhaps even a maze, as the complexities of Christian history testifies. Let me finish this post with these words taken from the Ely Cathedral guide as it comments on one of the millennium sculptures found in the Cathedral:

Adjacent to the labyrinth and complimenting its symbolism, is Jonathan Clarke's The way of Life [sculpture]. It is cast in aluminium with nine sections, each differently jointed. Like the journey of life, its path in irregular and unpredictable and as the journey is sometimes hard, sometimes joyful, so the surface texture and the colour also vary. Perhaps to give a human scale to the journey Jonathan Clarke placed a tiny human figure on the top arm of the cross. (See below)

To me it's also a metaphor for the journey of Christian history itself with its motely mix of heroes, sharp minds, successes, reverses, eccentrics, extremists, fundamentalists, cultists and woolly thinkers (They know who they are!)

Clarke's Way of Life sculpture

I'd call this the Maze of Life, with its dead-ends, opportunities, surprises and openings. 

A Visit to the Isle of Ely. Part II: Alpha Females

See here  for Part I of this series. 

The guide to Ely Cathedral tells of the founding of Ely as a monastery for men and women:

It was said that the body of St Ethel
was was discovered uncorrupted in
her shroud. She seems to have lost
her breasts too. 

Etheldreda was the daughter of Anna, Saxon King of the East Angles and like her father became an ardent Christian.,,,,She always felt called to the religious life, but for political reasons she was married first to Tonbert, leader of the people called the South Gyrwas, who gave her land and royal rights to the Isle of Ely. 

Tonbert died and Ethel married Egfrid heir to the kingdom of Northumbria. The marriage was unsuccessful and Ethel became a nun. She escaped Egfrid's unwelcome attentions by isolating herself on the Isle of Ely where in 673 she founded a double monastery for men and women. Ethel was abbess at Ely for seven years before she died. 

Sometime after Ethel's death stories circulated that her body was moved and in the process discovered  to be uncorrupted and was a source of healing miracles. Well, needless to say I don't believe any of that; not that I think miracles don't happen, but you can't trust some human beings to transmit reliable accounts about such things and I tend to use a "guilty until proved innocent" criterion when assessing these stories.  But what I do think is behind Ethel's story is that of a female frustrated by the strictures of the role forced on her by the male dominated society of the day. When her style wasn't being cramped Ethel was by nature a mover and shaker. In spite of the times, however, she nevertheless managed to find a way to express her character in one of the few avenues open to females with aspirations, thereby leaving her mark for posterity: She founded a monastery at Ely and became an abbess and saint. In an indirect way it is to St. Ethel we owe the marvellous experience that is Ely cathedral. 

A theme of  women of strong character & influence impacts the Cathedral at several points not least the Lady Chapel attached to the north side of the presbytery. Of this the guide says

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were notable for the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary, especially in England. Lady chapels in her name were added to many churches....The Lady Chapel of Ely is exceptional....completed in 1349 having taken 27 years to build....it is notable for the richness of its decoration, particularly that of the wall arcade, at the time the most elaborate to have been built in Europe....When it was completed the chapel looked very different to how it is today. It was highly coloured, the windows were alive with stained glass and there were painted statues in the niches.

No doubt much ink has been spilt eulogising the ornate carving and elegant gothic architecture of the Lady Chapel. I can't usefully add to those accounts other than to say that even today the chapel needs to be seen to be believed. But there is one big fly in the ointment that everyone remarks on: All the heads of the delicate statuary have been knocked off. This was the achievement of bishop Thomas Goodrich shortly after Henry VIII turned against Rome. But Goodrich u-turned when the Catholic Mary I become queen (no doubt for his own safety). Mary I was determined to return the country to Catholicism and persecuted protestants, burning hundreds at the stake in her mercifully short five year reign, to be succeeded by the pragmatic and relatively tolerant protestant queen Elizabeth I.

The medieval stonework in the Lady Chapel isn't the only thing that catches the eye today:  At  the head of the chapel we can see this dominating modern sculpture of Mary mother of Jesus (by David Wynne c2000). This striking depiction continues our theme of strong female characters:

This colourful statue, which (perhaps intentionally) clashes with bleached filigree of the chapel, represents Mary at the annunciation and has been controversial. It is a sculpture of a sexually serviceable Saxon blonde bombshell who is hardly the submissive immaculate Mary of Catholic tradition. She may even bring to mind the Celtic Queen Boudicca who once ruled in this part of England. This Mary glories in her exalted and favoured status and accepts her divinely appointed role. Or on second thoughts is she throwing up her hands in horror and anger at the destruction that has been wrought on the now pallid chapel built in her honour? The Ely Cathedral guide book laments the changes:

The windows are now plain glass, all the exquisite figures in the lower niches have been defaced, and above are empty pedestals where statues once stood.  The chapel is an eloquent reminder of the power of religious ideas and the way they can be used destructively.  

Tell me about it! Quite apart from the sins of the medieval church of Rome we now also look back on much destructive and mindless fractious factionalism among protestants. What has taken the biscuit for me personally is the recent evangelical popularist following of a wannabe dictator (a situation which does have some similarities with Germany in the 1930s) and the proliferation of unreason among them (i.e.: young earthism, flat earthism, conspiracy theorism, gnosticism, fideism, authoritarianism and above all hard sectarianism). The persecuted become the potential persecutors in a seemingly inevitable very human cycle of political & cultural debasement that I would put down to a very natural tendency which Sir Kenneth Clarke describes as the most terrible of all delusions; they believe themselves to be virtuous.  But the writer of Ely Cathedral's guide hangs his hope on the core gospel message:

The death of Jesus was the result of the same [destructive] forces at work, and his body, broken on the cross, bears the pain of the brokenness of the world. 

A Visit to the Isle of Ely. Part I: Infinite Mystery

 (Click any picture to enlarge)

The picture above isn't of some imaginative building dreamed up as an atmospheric backdrop for fantasy TV; it's real, it's Ely Cathedral. Here's how I saw it one hot mid September day, AD 2020: 

Ely cathedral  is built on a shallow rise on the Cambridgeshire fens, a rise which adds a few more metres to the 66 metre height of Ely's tower and means that the huge pile dominates the flat landscape for miles around. With its pillars, pinnacles, buttresses and mix of arches it could well serve as the location for a Victorian gothic melodrama.  It's exceptionally long nave and chancel  gives Ely cathedral a sprawling appearance. They call it "the ship of the fens" and it does look vaguely like a stretched out oil tanker at sea or even a huge sci-fi space ship crawling through space; after all, mediaeval cathedrals (and churches) were conceived as ships navigating the faithful to heaven with the priesthood at the helm.

Ely cathedral dominates the tiny city of Ely

The cathedral is central to the city of Ely. They call it a city but it is barely 2 kilometres across. In comparison  the relatively modest city of Norwich, with a width  of over 12 km, seems huge. Norwich's size diminishes the significance of its cathedral, a cathedral which in any case is well offset from the modern high-rise centre and tucked away down in the Wensum valley; in spite of its 100m spire it is nowhere near as dominating as Ely's cathedral which in contrast towers over a small cluster of largely traditional buildings, buildings which are probably not much higher than those of medieval times. The Cathedral therefore, leaves one with the strong impression that it continues its medieval role as a mother with her brood of gathered children watching after their spiritual life. I don't think I've been to another cathedral city where this sense of ecclesiastical matriarchal dominance is conveyed so strongly.

The above picture shows the triple viaduct of Romanesque arches which run down both sides of the nave as we see in many cathedrals. The author of the official cathedral guide remarks on the architecture of the building which like many other cathedrals has a...

....cruciform shape symbolising the Cross on which Jesus died. In the very plan of the church we are reminded that its life is founded on the faith in Jesus of Nazareth, a faith that sees in him the human face of God, the one who shows us what God is like. The symbolism is continued in the design of the nave; the ascending sequence of arches with their repeated three fold patterning resonates with the Church's belief that God is both one and three, a trinity of persons in unity of being; God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

The last time I visited this cathedral was in childhood during a school tour. As a safely obedient class we were led through the narrow colonnaded corridor high up in the clerestory of the nave; that is, the very top system of arches you can see in the picture above. There was no barrier and one trip would mean you'd fall 60 feet to your death! Such activities would surely be banned under current health and safety guidelines. But it was exciting, just as exciting as crawling through the dark Neolithic mines at Grimes Graves (also now banned).  We all emerged alive, however, so many thanks to my history teacher, a Mr. Fox, who took us on these fantastic adventures and whose enthusiasm for hands on history was catching! But actually in my case Mr Fox simply encouraged along a deep interest in the mysteries of origins that I already had in place. That times have changed so drastically from the days of flint mines and cathedrals only added to my fascination with the enigmatic dynamic & origins of our world and its cosmic context. I'm constantly being riddled about the meanings and purposes of the divine riddler who seems to take pleasure in regaling us with impossible riddles. Nevertheless in a strange way I welcome those mysteries just as Sherlock Holmes welcomed a new case. Mystery is the bread of life. 

Ely's magnificent architecture. 

As we can see above Ely cathedral has some marvellous architectural features not least the wonderful Octagonal lantern tower that everyone talks about. (Second picture above).  Gothic and Romanesque architecture always connects with my fascination with mystery; this, I suppose, is the l reaction the architects were striving to create as they sought to make us ponder the mystery & majesty of God. The architects of Ely would be glad to hear that I've never lost my interest in the meaning & mystery behind the human predicament, how it all started, where it's all going and humanity's place in divine purposes. The need to seek out and devour mystery has enveloped the whole my life. It is like an insatiable appetite, stronger even than social status & sexual interests. But I must confess that sometimes this mystery deeply frustrates me with its perplexities and paradoxes.

Striving to reach the infinite

The classical architecture of Georgian England is breathtakingly elegant; few would deny that. But in its perfection of completeness it conveys the antithesis of mystery, it's a finished and highly rational work. Of mystery and cypher Georgian architecture says "We've cracked it!". Yes it's a pleasure to experience the aesthetics of a problem rationally and elegantly solved, but then one feels "How boring, where's the next problem please, where's the next mystery!" Georgian architecture is undoubtedly highly satisfying in its appearance, but in another way it is unfulfilling: There is no sense of motion or of going-places; it's a job finished.  In contrast the open ended gothic tells us to reach for the sky; of infinite height that sky may be but it is this infinity which we have been made to grapple with.  Problem neatly solved gives way to  an open ended number of cases yet to be solved. 

Coming next, Part II: The Alpha Females of Ely. 

Status & Temptation in Christian Communities

Blickling Hall: A high status home and like all stately homes 

it was built to impress one's peer group and cement one's status.

 This was my view of it  as I walked up the drive for an interview 

there as a cleaner! (I got the job & was very proud of it!)

 

I have spent sometime pondering the role of status in human society and in fact I have made it one of the labels of this blog. Included under the "status" label is this very post which looks at a pertinent article appearing in the August Edition of Premier Christianity magazine. This article was titled "The Problem with Pedestals" and deals with the subject of  Christian celebrities and leaders who have been caught in wrong doing (i.e. sinned!) and fallen from their position of high regard among their respective Christian communities and following. 

The fact is human beings seek the approval, regard and care of their fellow human beings. For a gregarious animal which depends on a diverse range of support from their communities this is not only natural but in many ways an essential survival instinct; one can't easily live by being at odds with one's social surroundings. It's fairly obvious that at the very least human beings need the material support of their society but once this is satisfied the higher goal of human beings is to get emotional support as well and this takes the form of having a sense of role, purpose, acceptance, recognition, attention, regard, respect, approval, honour, pride, prestige, esteem and kudos etc from one's community; all these are extrinsic properties that can only be conferred by being in relationship with one's community and which I would like to subsume under the general heading of "status" or "community glory". Let me stick my neck out here and say that once one's basic survival needs are satisfied, status seeking is among the primary motives of just about all human beings and constitutes a drive so strong that it often trumps all other considerations. In fact for the really gregarious among us some measure of status is essential for mental health. Like food, sex and other appetites the instinct that seeks status is natural and is part of the repertoire of motives to be expected of healthy human beings needing material and emotional support.  

But like all appetites, especially if there is an ongoing desire for excessive satiation, status seeking can go badly wrong; we can become addicted to status, always demanding more of it. Since the tokens of status hood are a mix of attention and accolade from one's community along with the status symbols of material wealth, the implicit zero sum games which constrain status markers has the potential to lead us into a competitive world where people become rivals in a race for status tokens. Accompanying this competitiveness there are a cluster of negative emotions such as a sense of unfulfillment, envy and bitterness if we don't get our way. Once again, then, we face the age old conflict between service to others vs service to self. In the New Testament Philippians  2:1-11 directly addresses the conflicts of interest that status seeking implies: It is a passage which talks about the mind of Christ and implicitly tells us how status should be handled and why we need salvation. If the meaning of life, the universe and everything is actually found in the goals of successful community then Philippians 2:1-11 tells us why right meaning and right purpose have been lost and how Christ has saved the human community by doing the very thing we ourselves find very difficult -  namely, letting go of our hold on status because strong claims to status come at a cost to other members of the community.

The cut and thrust of human society revolves round the subject of status and so much of human behaviour is about maintaining the facades of status via image control. This was the subject of my series on my trip to the city of Bath. 

***

In the Christianity article I'm thinking of we read a very familiar story: Viz: Otherwise much admired Christian leaders, movers and shakers (now called "influencers"!) who have been exposed in some sin or other and subsequently fallen from grace. One of them is Steve Timmis who I blogged about here. Very common is sexual abuse, but I'm less interested in that than the case of Steve Timmis whose sin wasn't some hidden sexual vice but in fact an on going policy of power abuse at the heart of which was a harmful Restorationist ideology. However, I've always maintained that part of the problem is less to do with the "influencers" than it is the followers of "influencers" whose support has effectively made the celebrity and put them on a pedestal of power in the first place by giving them uncritical adulation, glory and honour they don't deserve. There is a free market of influencers out there and it is the demands of this market which gives these influencers their power.

But in spite of the danger of pratfalls, elevating certain people to a higher status is not only a very human trait found in society but may be entirely necessary; society needs clever leaders and innovators. Where the problem lies is less in status per se than in those celebrities and leaders who, all said and done are only human after all, are potentially corruptible through their power, influence and celebrity. Like life in general celebrity is beset by temptations. 

***

The story that did intrigue me in the Christianity article was about the one time head of Wycliffe Bible Translators, Eddie Arthur, who tells us of the effect on him of stepping down from this prestigious role: 

On his blog, [Arthur] describes the difficulty of leaving this role and his feelings about the subsequent loss of rank and invitations to speak. People who'd called him a "really good friend" have not contacted him since.  Though he was aware he "shouldn't" find it hard, in reality: "This loss of status was horrible.....Leadership is insidious and it is dangerous. I didn't realise how important my role, influence and title were to me until I stepped down....At this distance, I can see that it would have been all too easy to see myself as being more important than I am and to believe that normal rules didn't apply to me. I can understand why leaders fall and I can see why those responsible for monitoring them allow it to happen" 

A very sobering confession that brings one up with a start. The fact is many, if not most of us have (in vary degrees) an appetite for those status markers; attention, recognition, kudos, high position, accolades, praise, social glory, material status symbols and what have you. Nothing wrong there in and of itself but the status appetites, like most appetites, may present us with the temptation of glutting on those appetites in a way which brings ruin. Also at fault are those social scenes which are apt to lavish these things upon us; the tempter is as much a sinner as the tempted.

***

Another instructive article in the same edition of Christianity is by Christian band leader Chris Llewellyn who is a middle ranking Christian celebrity. In an article entitled Confessions of a Christian Celebrity Llewellyn expands further on the temptations of celebrity: He confesses that his minor celebrity makes him feel uncomfortable, especially as a worship leader is supposed to direct glory to Christ and not oneself.  Clearly Llewellyn understands the all too human tension between worshiping "the only one worth worshiping" and the pleasures of celebrity which in his case are bound up with him being a skilled musician and a (relatively) famous rock band member. He tells us of the good example of John Baptist who said "He [Jesus] must become greater; I must become less" (John 3:30). And then in a further confession Llewellyn says: "Honestly, I'm not even fully sure I want to become less for the Kingdom...I'm a minor Christian celebrity - get me out of here!". That's the central conflict of the human predicament in a nutshell; how do we cope with our pleasures in a society full of zero sum games? Well, guess what, Llewellyn ends by quoting Philippians 2:6-8.

There is tight rope to walk here. There's nothing wrong with talent in and of itself and neither I feel is there anything wrong in the wake of celebrity that talent leaves behind it; after all, worthy talent comes from God and deserves celebration. Moreover, there's nothing wrong with good leadership. In fact healthy society and community needs all these things; it needs leaders, movers, shakers, and talented showmen and innovators. But it's how our culture copes with these facts of life that is the crux of the matter. 

Fame, celebrity and concomitant status, are mathematically inevitable: They are extrinsic relationship properties not unlike web site connectivity. Hence, like website connectivity it is likely that celebrity has a power law distribution over the population.  Given, then, that we are likely to be dealing with a  mathematical fact of society then the temptations associated with celebrity and power will also be a fact. But it helps, as Llewellyn suggests, if Christians become more aware of the temptations they are heaping on celebrities and leaders via their accolades, regard and admiration. It may also help if the celebrities themselves become aware that our status appetites, though not wrong in & of themselves, all too easily lead into temptation and corruption.

Like other human appetites our status appetites are not going to go away; they are part and parcel of gregarious humanity; in fact a necessary part. So it is inevitable that these appetites are going to be abused at some point or other; it is a hazard of living, a hazard of community. But the first step is to recognise the inevitable, be braced for it when it comes and then above all recall Philippians 2:5ff:  In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus.....

Of Stones, Stars, Circles, Status, Secrets, Sacredness, Mystique and Masons. Part 3

Centre ground: Reconstruction of the temple of Sulis Minerva in Roman Bath

Parts 1 and 2 of this series can be found here and here respectively. 

Bath is a city of facades, a city where at its height in Georgian England image, style and above all displays of status reigned supreme. The ill-tempered queen Anne came to Bath in the early 1700s when it still looked rather medieval. She came to take the warm mineral rich waters bubbling up from the mysterious depths of the Earth in the hope that it might alleviate her ailments. It was her visits which were to the trigger the fashionable culture of Bath, setting the city on a road through heady Georgian elegance to its eventual award as a world heritage site today.

The creative masonic society men whose development businesses thrived in eighteenth century Bath believed their traditions to have descended from both the builders of the stone circles and the architects of Solomon's temple. But I wonder if in all their pretense at being the possessors of  esoteric secrets inherited from ancient craftsmen they were aware of an apparent cultural disconnect between the relatively well documented Solomonic temple and those mysterious stone circles about whose purpose there is very little data indeed.

My meeting with Sulis Minerva

Solomon's temple followed the linear plan that is still very much in the consciousness of modern man: A clear entrance at one end of a brick proportioned building and at the other end facing the entrance was a space dedicated to an effigy of a deity: This layout was the likely pattern of the Roman Temple of the syncretist god Sulis Minerva (See pictures), the deity who was worshipped at Bath's hot springs. This pagan temple configuration was also the pattern for Solomon's temple, but there was one important concession to the living God who suffers no potentially blasphemous depictions to be dedicated to him: In Jerusalem's temple the space normally occupied by a classical god was empty of all but His mysterious presence. The empty space behind the temple curtain was eloquent statement of a God who wanted to speak for himself. However, in many ways the Judaistic model still feels pagan in essence: How can an immanent cosmic God who has created everything be confined to a small space in a small building? This could only be symbolic of God's rightful centrality to the lives of those he has created.

When we turn to the henge circles of northern Europe it appears that they too had a holy of holies at their centres, but these sacred spaces weren't occupied by effigies of gods; as far as I am aware no traces of idols have been found in henges. Apart from an altar they were as absent of idols as the temple at Jerusalem. Moreover, as I have already remarked in part 1 their structures, via divers alignments, connect them with their cosmic surroundings. Unlike classical temples which tended to exclusively look in, the henges also looked out. They were, may be, like huge lenses focusing the power of a cosmic deity (or deities) into the centre of their circles. In this sense they feel less pagan than the classical world of temples and are more akin to our modern vision of an all pervasive, all powerful God. This is not to say, as is typical of human kind, their concept of God was uncorrupted; there is evidence of human sacrifice in at least one henge.

But why this change from an all pervasive God to the localised anthropomorphic God of the classical temples? Was this a knock-on-effect of the information revolution of writing which help facilitate the bureaucracy needed for large cities and a civil service which distributed the power of an absolute  monarch? Did such monarchs become the model for anthropomorphic deities celebrating the glory of  personality? Well, maybe; this is my current working theory!

The glorification and celebration of personality is what Bath, in Georgian days, was all about. Like the henge priesthoods the free-masons of Bath could rightly claim to know a thing or two about the world in which they worked. But to this they added the gloss of a contrived mystique and affectation: They pretended (perhaps even to themselves) that they were the possessors of secrets and this was expressed by the arcane symbols adorning their buildings. But keeping up appearances was useful in a social context: It help maintain the facades of mystery and status.

As I proposed in my first post in this series, the physical form of the henges may echo the fact that for the ancient cultures who built them life was full of circles & cyclic motions both on Earth and in the heavens and these circles and cycles governed those all important agricultural rhythms. So, as the wife and I left the sumptuous surroundings of No 1 The Royal Crescent, where the celebration of personality and status loomed large, it was appropriate that we then went on to the house of William Herschel, the eighteenth century astronomer whose life's work was taken up with a scientific study of the of movements in the heavens. It was Herschel who (re)discovered the dim object that was Uranus and eventually identified as a planet. He no doubt knew that those planetary motions weren't exactly perfect circles. He also knew about those erratically placed smudged patches they called nebulae and those truly wandering stars called comets, many of which were discovered by his sister Caroline. The Herschels therefore were very aware that the heavens did not fit into precisely tidy circular patterns and were full of anomalies.

While the Herschel's worked on discovering more about the pattern, or lack of pattern in the heavens, the celebration of personality and status continued in Bath unabated, oblivious to where the kind of thing the Herschel's were doing was taking us as a race. The Cosmos was looking increasingly less like a celebration of personality; at least certainly not human personality and by the eighteenth century it was well-known not to be the perfectly concentric henge-like temple of the Ptolemaic universe, a temple with man at the centre. The world was changing and the Almighty had some difficult lessons in store for humankind;....as if Philippians 2:1-11 which tells us what we should really be doing with personality, wasn't challenge enough.