What the Greeks Did for Us by Tony Spawforth;

Author:Tony Spawforth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300271805
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER 9

THE GOSPEL TRUTH

T

here are said to be some two billion Christians in the modern world. Christianity is its largest religion. It might seem unlikely that the ancient, pagan Greeks had anything to do with this dominance of today’s Christian faith. If so, another family volume in my home holds clues to a surprising story.

On the day of her marriage in 1905, my father’s mother received as a gift from her eager swain a rather fine Book of Common Prayer ‘according to the Use of the Church of England’. The case cloths are purple silk, the pages are gilt-edged and – as would not happen now – the bindings are ivory. Attached to the front cover, in silver, is the initial of my grandmother’s Christian name.

She hung on to this prayer book throughout her life, without exactly living up to its ‘C’ for Constance. In mitigation, neither did her husband of 1905, despite inscribing his gift ‘To my own dear Wifie from her loving and devoted Boy’. Inside the prayer book, my grandmother later folded up and stowed a short poem on a small piece of paper. Handwritten by another man who signed, dated (1918) and composed it, this loving effusion, entitled ‘A wish’, begins: ‘May all thy life with happiness / from day to day be fraught.’

Only relatively late in my own life did I find out from a perusal of divorce records and newspaper reports that in 1910, my paternal grandmother had deserted for this same versifier the husband whom she’d married only five years earlier and who, in the meantime, had become (so it was alleged in a courtroom) a serial adulterer. More shockingly for those times, my grandmother’s own paramour was her father-in-law, twice her age, by whom she then had my father.

This piquant tale was long buried and then forgotten within the family. Once stumbled upon, in my mind’s eye it transformed my paternal grandparents from buttoned-up Edwardians, as they seem in their photographs, to something vastly more interesting. Adventurous by the social norms of their day, they still brought my father up an Anglican, as he then did me. I was permitted to fall away in my early teens. I write all that follows as a detached observer of religions ancient and modern.

Going back to the prayer book, it includes a declaration of what it is that Anglican and many other Christians believe about the complicated nature of their God. At a given moment in the church service, the standing congregation speaks, or sings, this statement of belief. For the purposes of this book, the fascinating thing about the statement – or creed, as it is known – is that it goes back to the early fourth century AD.

It is not just that Christian thinkers formulated this creed in the Greek-speaking half of the then Roman empire. More than that, these thinkers devised its definition of the Christian God in dialogue with – among other influences – a centuries-old succession of pagan Greek ‘wisdom-lovers’ stretching back to Plato in the fourth century BC or even earlier.

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