Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!

Last week's destruction of Nimrud by Daesh-IS is nothing less than a calamity.

Nimrud is a very ancient Assyrian site. The city was founded in the 2^nd millennium BC, and became the capital of the mighty Assyrian empire in the 9^th century under its legendary king Ashurnasirpal II. His palace was one of the most magnificent buildings of its age. You can see for yourself by going to the marvellous Assyrian Galleries in the British Museum (or by visiting the website www.britishmuseum.org). Two whole rooms are dedicated to Nimrud including the famous palace reliefs. They show in amazing detail the kind of activities that kings liked to engage in such as battles, lion-hunts, chariot rides and sacrifices. From Nimrud king Tiglath-Pileser III launched his campaign to overrun the kingdom of Israel in 721 BC. The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold; his cohorts were gleaming with silver and gold wrote Byron. It was the end for Israel. Twenty years later, when the capital had been moved to Nineveh, the Assyrians attacked again, this time the southern kingdom of Judah. The palace reliefs showing the siege of Lachish are among the Museum’s most precious treasures.

One of the Nimrud sculptures in the galleries is a statue of a winged lion. It was one of a pair that stood at the entrance to Ashurnasirpal’s throne-room. Because the king was seen as a divine figure, this room was the most sacred space in the palace complex. The carved lamassu, as they were called, had a ritual, protective function. The lion’s strength and the eagle’s wings together symbolised keeping chaos at bay. By defending the space against the demonic, they kept it as a ritually safe place where the gods could do business with the king and through him with the people whose sacred representative he was.

Some sculptures from that era survived in situ at Nimrud until last week. They must have been a magnificent sight. Not now. Even its famous winged lions and bulls have not been able to protect it against the power of the bulldozer. IS has said that it has levelled it. We needn’t doubt that they have razed its walls and buildings, ground its peerless sculptures and decorations into dust. They claim that these relics of an ancient civilisation are idolatrous. They are an affront to Islam with its prohibition of images; whatever is pre-Islamic must be destroyed. They glory in the iconoclastic project of erasing every survival, every trace, every memory of what is seen as subverting the purity of monotheism. It is an act of cultural cleansing. It's a crime against humanity. And it's heart breaking.  

How do you measure the value of heritage as against the value of human life? 

I've learned a little about the human and spiritual significance of heritage, having lived and worked in the Durham World Heritage Site these past 12 years. It has raised for me the sharp question about whether we shouldn't have an uneasy conscience about investing too much in ancient stones. We no doubt regret the loss of Nimrud, but shouldn’t we care more about the human beings and communities of Iraq and Syria who have been treated so cruelly? Isn’t the life of even one man or woman or child worth more than all the treasures of antiquity?

As soon as I pose the question that way, I see that it’s based on a false premise. It's not either-or: each is part of the other. The callous treatment of Iraq and Syria’s heritage is just another aspect of a regime that is callous in every other respect. Nothing is sacred to it except its own corrupted version of faith, its concept of a hideous deity whose pleasure is to exact vengeance. The destruction of heritage with all that it symbolises of human life, culture and achievement is just another expression of this murderous world-view. It is hardly the first time. Iconoclasts have flourished in many periods of history. In the 20th century, precisely this was true of Nazi Germany with its hatred of all that was not Aryan. The book-burnings, the re-writing of history, the suppression of ‘decadent’ art and culture were part and parcel of the terror, the deportations and the extermination camps. Where life is cheap, so are civilisation and heritage. These too become the objects of wrath and revenge. There is nothing new under the sun.

We have wept for many months for the victims of this tragedy that is being played out in the lands of the ancient near east. We would not have believed the cruelty inflicted on so many innocent victims if we had not seen it on our screens with our own eyes. The world seems powerless to stop it. ‘Look on my works ye mighty, and despair!’ And desperate is what it seems, when the lone and level sands stretch far away over the bodies of murdered victims and the vanishing human traces of millennia. But Ozymandias himself had become a mere memory in Shelley’s sonnet, his impotent toppled colossus a symbol of how all principalities and powers fall in time. There is a reign we look for that will be the judgment of all the cruelties and corruptions of human systems. Only this kingdom lasts for ever.

Meanwhile, we can still visit the Assyrian Galleries in London and wonder at the treasures from Nimrud. But for me, it will be with a deeper sense of the tears in things. The Assyrian empire was itself a theatre of cruelty: the atrocities of Ashurnasirpal were legendary. These ancient artefacts already speak of terror from the past. Now they speak of a terror of today that is the daily experience of ordinary people in Iraq and Syria. The palace reliefs, sculptures and winged lions mustn’t leave us untouched. They should evoke our lament and compassion, return us to the work of prayer and action on behalf of people we must go on holding in our hearts.

Valuing heritage must always mean reverencing human life, showing our solidarity with all of humanity past and present, especially the suffering peoples of all ages. If we don't cherish the memory of the past and try to understand it, perhaps there's something missing from our care for the victims of the present. Good remembering is a symbol of our capacity to be humane. It should excite our social conscience because at heart it is always about people. Those who despise it show us what their values really are.

At least no one can destroy the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Durham Cathedral's 'Open Treasure': a Big HLF Award

It is immensely heartening that in the latest round of awards, the Heritage Lottery Fund is supporting Durham and Peterborough Cathedrals. We are not the only two cathedrals to be grateful for the HLF’s generosity in recent years. No doubt it is a coincidence that both these famous and beautiful cathedrals are Romanesque, and that both their profiles are well known to travellers speeding up and down the East Coast Main Line.

The first thing I want to do is to pay tribute to the great team here at the Cathedral who worked up the bid and worked with staff, volunteers and community to prepare for its submission.  We have had great support from the officers of HLF itself, from the Cathedrals Fabric Commission and many other bodies and individuals along the way. And of course we want to say thank you to the HLF for this great news. It is a wonderful way of beginning Advent.

This £3.9 million award will mean that we are within sight of achieving our long-held dream of displaying the Cathedral’s marvellous treasures in some of its equally marvellous medieval spaces. The buildings round the cloister constitute the unique (for England) survival of an intact monastic enclosure that is still used for the religious purposes for which it was intended. Their treasures include relics associated with St Cuthbert such as his coffin, pectoral cross and portable altar. Not only that, but the Cathedral Library has retained more of its monastic collections of medieval manuscripts and early printed books than anywhere else in the country.

The collections are of international significance as a witness to the civilisation, culture and history of Christian North East England particularly in the Saxon and early Norman periods. They more than do justice to the landscape and architecture of the World Heritage Site that has been their home for so many centuries. What we have lacked are facilities to exhibit them properly. In the 21^st century, this means creating environments that conform to the highest conservation and security standards in which they can be safely displayed and interpreted. To adapt medieval buildings for this purpose while at the same time enhancing their beautiful interiors in their own right is a formidable challenge.

After years of planning, we are now poised to realise this dream. Called Open Treasure, the development will create a large exhibition space in the monastic Dormitory (which will still retain its 19^th century function as a library). Its focus will be the shaping of church and cathedral in medieval Northumbria, and how this story of a faith community has continued beyond the Reformation into the present day. A newly constructed gallery will house some of our most important and precious manuscripts together with our Saxon stones and artefacts, while the Great Kitchen will have as its focus St Cuthbert and the relics associated with his memory.

Why Open Treasure? Because we shall be opening up what has been largely hidden from public view in the past: incomparable medieval spaces, and the equally incomparable treasures they will contain. This year’s highly successful Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition, in which the Cathedral has been a partner and to which we lent no fewer than 14 items for display, has shown that there is a real appetite for Christian heritage that is beautifully displayed and intelligently interpreted.

There is another purpose to all this. We want to maintain free entry to the Cathedral itself. By opening up our ‘Treasure’ as a revenue-earning exhibition, we hope to stabilise the Cathedral’s finances so that it will never be necessary to levy an admission charge to such a fine sacred space. When we held a press call to announce the news, I was pressed hard on this point: it is hugely appreciated in North East England that the Cathedral does not charge for admission to the church itself. We want to keep it that way and we rely on Open Treasure to achieve this.

For our biggest treasure is the Cathedral itself, so much loved and admired across the world. Not just the building and what it contains, but its community that has its origins in 7^th century Lindisfarne and its saints such as Aidan and Cuthbert. Like the Benedictine house that it became, the Cathedral is still a living place of worship, work and learning and this adds contemporary human, Christian texture to the place. Our invitation to visitors to experience for themselves this rich past and present is part of our mission both of hospitality and of interpretation. We hope all our guests both young and old will not simply come here as sightseers or observers but become participants in the Cathedral’s life of prayer, community, arts, learning and outreach.

Thanks to HLF and other funders, this vision is close to becoming reality. We want to begin the works in 2014 and already have significant funds raised and pledged. Thank you to everyone who has supported us generously so far. If there is anyone reading this blog who can help us match the funding so that the project can begin all the sooner, that will be wonderful too. Call me night or day!

This is a revised version of my piece on the HLF Blog to coincide with the announcement of the award.

'Landscapes of Faith' is here!

I hope this is not seen as an act of shameless self-promotion.  But yesterday, an advance copy of my new book Landscapes of Faith: the Christian Heritage of North East England was delivered. It is published by Third Millennium International, and I have to admit that I am proud of how good it looks. It will be available in early July, maybe sooner.

 

'What's the use of a book without pictures or conversation?' asks Alice. Well, this glossy large-format book at least has plenty of pictures. And even if some will look mainly at the photographs and sit loose to the text, why not? I have bought many a book just to enjoy the images.

 

I spoke about 'my' book. I must at once nuance what it says on the cover.  I am not the author of all of its text or images, more like the mysterious Mr W. H., the 'onlie begetter' of Shakespeare's Sonnets. I had an idea which caught on. A lot of talented people have played a part in its realisation over the two years we have worked on this project. I pay tribute to them and thank them.  It's only really 'mine' in the sense that I have long wanted to have something attractive and accessible that would celebrate the North East's Christian past and how it lives on. I didn't want to focus simply on famous buildings like Durham Cathedral and great artefacts like the Lindisfarne Gospel Book. There are many less well known, even secret, places that tell their own moving story about a living Christian presence right up to today.

 

I have loved writing my sections of text and travelling up and down the North East to photograph for the book. The timing is deliberate: we wanted to contribute something to this summer's exhibition of the Lindisfarne Gospels in the University's library on the Durham World Heritage Site. The Gospels are so emblematic of the North East that it seemed apt to publish a book that set it in this larger regional context.

 

But Landscapes is not confined to the 'classical' Saxon and Norman periods. We wanted to portray the rich Christian heritage of this part of England in the broadest possible way, from Saxon shrines to urban parish churches, and from remote Methodist chapels to the self-conscious splendour of the legacy of the Prince Bishops. We wanted to reflect how landscapes and townscapes have both influenced how Christian communities have been shaped, and how these communities in turn have shaped their settings.

 

In the book, I wrote:

 

We need to know our history, read our landscapes, understand our communities.  We need to sit still in our north-east’s sacred spaces and listen to what they have to tell us.  This book is offered as a contribution to this all-important conversation with our past, present and future.

The title Landscapes of Faith implies something that is visible and tangible, that can be travelled to and enjoyed for all that delights and inspires.  But the true ‘landscapes of faith’ are those of the mind and heart of individual human beings and the communities they belong to. The places we visit in this book are signs of this life of faith, hope and love that despite the depredations of secularising modernity persists across the North East as it does everywhere.  It continues to express itself with the same conviction and vitality as it has always done.  The saints, long dead, still speak to us of a message they described as good news, a life-changing gospel. They would have understood the phrase ‘landscapes of faith’ and wanted us to invest it with new meaning for our own times.

 

I hope that this book may make a small contribution to what I see as the important task of rescuing the idea of 'heritage' from a dangerous obsession with simply preserving the 'past' at all costs. Instead, we need it to be a living entity with surprising power not simply to give us pleasure, education and enjoyment, but to touch our lives in ways that are both inspiring and life-changing.

 

ISBN 978 1 906507 89 3.  www.tmiltd.com