I have always been a reader. There have always been books in my life from my earliest recollection. A voracious appetite for the written word. It has always bought me pleasure and joy. Perhaps the act or reading is one of the reasons I was attracted to the law. The law as written word had an attraction. As Lord Camden said in Entick v Carrington commenting on the power of the Secretary of State to issue a particular warrant
“if this is law it would be found in our books, but no such law ever existed in this country; our law holds the property of every man so sacred, that no man can set his foot upon his neighbour’s close without his leave”
I wonder if sub-consciously my attraction to the printed word led me to my PhD question which was about the impact of a new technology (the printing press) on the law and legal culture. Certainly without printed books, Lord Camden could not have said what he said.
But there is more to reading and books that any practical or pragmatic considerations. There is the joy or reading. And in that respect I unashamedly prefer the physical book – printed pages between covers – to words on a screen. For me reading is a tangible activity, as is writing. Indeed, this piece started life on a lined sheet of paper and the outline was handwritten with a fountain pen (a Pelikan Souveran M600; medium nib). And text analysis involves printing the article or piece and annotating it or highlighting it with a highlighter. Physical engagement with the text.
I have had a library in most of my homes. Over the years it has expanded. Presently I have floor to ceiling bookshelves around two and a half walls of my study. Although visually a first look would suggest disorder in arrangement there is a method that the Dewey Classification system would not recognize.
Reading books is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable activities that anyone can do. Books can transport us to different worlds, teach us new things, inspire us, and make us think. Reading books can also improve our mental health, cognitive skills, and creativity.
There are a number of elements that make up the joy of reading.
One is that books stimulate our imagination. When we read a book, we create mental images of the characters, the settings, and the events. Much depends upon the author and his or her skill. For transport to the vivid imaginary world my choices are Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion or Frank Herbert’s Dune. There are others
We also imagine how we would feel and act if we were in the same situation as the protagonists. Reading books allows us to escape from our reality and enter into a different one, where anything is possible. Reading books can also help us develop empathy, as we learn to understand and relate to the perspectives and emotions of others.
Books can enrich our knowledge and understanding of the world. Books can expose us to different cultures, histories, sciences, arts, and philosophies. More on this shortly.
Reading books can also help us improve our vocabulary, grammar, and communication skills. Reading books can also challenge our assumptions and beliefs, and make us more critical and analytical thinkers. Reading books can also inspire us to pursue our passions and interests, and to discover new ones.
Books enhance our creativity and imagination. Reading books can spark new ideas, insights, and solutions to problems. Reading books can also influence our own writing, as we learn from the styles, techniques, and voices of different authors. Reading books can also encourage us to express ourselves, to share our stories, and to create our own works of art. Reading books can also help us develop our own voice and identity, as we reflect on our own experiences and values.
I have a pile of “to read” books – some fiction, some non-fiction and I can safely say that my next book will be fiction – perhaps a thriller.
The reason for that decision lies in the book that I am just finishing – a physically and intellectually heavy book entitled Christendom – The Triumph of a Religion AD 300 – 1300 by Peter Heather.
Why this book? I have always been interested in the Classics and Antiquity as well as the development of religion and its association with power. Within the time frame covered by Heather we have the rise of Christianity as well as the rise of Islam – and within the time frame both demonstrate aspects of the imperial nature of religion as an organizing force.
Christendom covers a millennium, from the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in 312 to the baptism of Grand Duke Mindaugas of Lithuania, the last pagan ruler in Europe, around 1250. But the progression is anything but linear. There were times when the Christian religion was fortunate to survive. Heather adopts an holistic approach to his subject.
He characterizes with particular clarity the Roman governing class, its recruitment practices, and its outlook. Heather emphasises the strengths and weaknesses of the unique classical culture that bound the Roman elite together. He follows the profound changes that took place when this thousand-year edifice of superiority lost its purpose as the empire receded from Western Europe after 600 and as the sword replaced the pen in all but the higher reaches of the clergy.
With that change, Europe is said to have entered “the Dark Ages.” Heather reminds us that this image of darkness is not the whole story. It was a negative image “largely constructed by outraged classicists” who were blind to the new literary forms that were created for a more restricted elite of monks and clergymen—a silent mutation of an entire culture that has been studied with greater sympathy by recent scholars of early medieval Europe.
One element that was particularly interesting was the decline in literacy as the empire began to crumble. Literacy was taught in grammeria and by rhetors primarily to prepare students for public life either within ruling elites or as administrators in the Imperial civil service. It was an expensive business. The crumbling empire meant that the need for such training declined. As the Imperial administration contracted so did the need for trained administrators. And the matter of literacy became the province of religious elites.
But Heather’s approach is challenging and very detailed. He is very thorough in his analysis and the presentation of his evidence. He demands a lot of his reader, not the least sustained concentration. He often develops his argument by travelling by-ways to the main narrative, often of many pages and with great detail. There were occasion early in the reading where I was not sure where the narrative was going, but the by-way finally joined the main road.
Heather rejects the romantic notion that Christianity rose to the top of late Roman society by its intrinsic merits alone, without the help of the powerful. He adopts the position, one that is not new, which was that that Constantine’s revolution was perhaps the most bold act ever committed by an autocrat in disregard and defiance of the vast majority of his subjects.
Heather offers a cogent analysis of the structure of Roman upper-class society and its relation to the Roman state—a relation that made elites peculiarly vulnerable to pressure from a Christian court.
If pressure was exercised by Constantine and his Christian successors on the wider population, it was the gentle violence of a state that lacked the strength and organizational capacity of modern dictatorships. The late Roman state was not “a decadent Leviathan,” as many scholars from the 1930s onward deemed it to be.
The late Roman state could not enforce an ideology; it was too “rickety.” But it could seduce. Its immense ambitions depended on networks of friends and clients that stretched from the court to the lower reaches of the gentry in a never-ceasing waterfall of favors asked and favors received. If one wanted to get anything done, one had to please someone. And ideally this was someone who had pleased the emperor and those around him.
Once the emperor made plain that he was an orthodox Christian and that he would shut the “divine ears” to the petitions of heretics, Jews, and pagans, the message trickled down with surprising speed. A confessional state was born.
Beginning in the reign of Theodosius I(379–395), access to public office and to the full privileges of Roman citizenship was restricted to coreligionists, who held something like party membership in a modern totalitarian country. As Heather notes, it was only then that the Christianization of the Roman world could be said to have begun in earnest. And it began very much from the top down.
However, not every Christian was entitled to membership. Much of Heather’s narrative deals with the various strands of belief especially surrounding the nature of the Trinity as articulated by the Nicene Creed and the Arian belief which saw Christ as “similar” but not one with the Father. The Arian beliefs were held by the Goths and Vandals who, far from being barbarian destroyers (although the occasional sack is recorded – Alaric of Rome in 410 for example) established kingdoms in Spain and North Africa.
Once the Goths and Vandals became masters of the western Mediterranean, they set about creating their own version of a confessional state. To establish Arianism as the official religion of their kingdoms, they used the same cocktail of blandishment and constraint that had been used so effectively in the Roman Empire. And recent research has proved that they almost succeeded.
But one of Heather’s main arguments is that throughout the millenium covered lay rulers, first the emperors and then the local potentates, called the shots. All over Western Europe, from the Atlantic coast of Ireland in the sixth and seventh centuries to Iceland in the tenth, the well-tried formula—the combination of the carrot and the stick—was sufficient to create Christian communities, which were then served by local bishops and clergy as effectively as their means permitted. A central ecclesiastical authority was largely absent.
One example given surrounds the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 AD by Pope Leo III. The received wisdom is that this was done at the behest of the Pope and was a surprise to the Frankish rule. Heather develops a careful argument to suggest that it was anything but that. For some time, he suggests, Charlemagne had been angling for the Crown. Pope Leo himself had legitimacy difficulties and needed the support of Charlemagne whose presence in Rome was to restore the state of Church – an example of a lay ruler calling the shots. Charlemagne’s coronation was the climax, sought by him, of political maneuvering that had been in train for some time.
The coronation was revolutionary and also extralegal. Papal co-operation gave a form of legitimacy to his assumption of wider power but the Pope had no right to make him Emperor. The only imperial territories on which he laid hands were the duchy of Rome and the former exarchate. Otherwise he remained, as before, king of the Franks and of the Lombards.
In 812 AD, after unsuccessful war and wearisome negotiation, the Byzantine emperor Michael I recognized Charlemagne’s imperial title. It was still a personal title, and Charlemagne was recognized merely as emperor.
In view of the fact that in 806 he made arrangements to divide his territories among his three sons, one may doubt whether Charlemagne’s empire would have survived had not the two elder sons died before him, leaving the undivided inheritance in 814 to the third son, Louis I the Pious. But the reign of Charlemagne and his surviving son Louis provided, as Heather observes, a level of stability in Western Europe that lasted for almost three-quarters of a century.
This period of stability allowed the rise of an administrative state and what could be viewed as a revival of classical learning – a form of mini-Renaissance – which was followed again by a similar movement in the early 13th century. Heather spends some time examining the life of Peter Abelard as an exemplar of this movement.
Heather ends with the Lateran Council of 1215, at which Christianity once more transformed itself. But this time, for good or ill, it became the Catholic Church that we can recognize: the church of the Crusades and the great cathedrals of Gothic Europe. It was now a church centered firmly on the papacy. It legislated on every detail of the Christian life. Its representatives and decrees reached the farthest corners of Europe. Alas, it was also a church flexing its muscles for the fi rst time by turning random local prejudices against heretics and Jews into the Inquisition—the product not of mindless bigots but of professors in the dynamic, newly founded universities. Indeed the book closes on a discussion of the assertion of power by the rise of the Inquisition rather than the early form of legal proceeding known as the accusatio.
Accusatio was a form of private prosecution. An accusation would be made by an accuser. The burden of proof was on the accuser. That person would be able to call witnesses to support the accusation. If it was proven, well and good. But if it was not it was seen as a false accusation and the accuser would suffer a penalty.
By contrast the inquisitio was a legal procedure initiated by a court, instead of a procedure started by accusations of the plaintiff. The accusation could be made to the authorities, often anonymously. The Church adopted this form of procedure. Unless armed with papal authority, inquisitors worked locally under the jurisdiction of the bishop. The Dominicans were not the first inquisitors, but they did often act in this role. Franciscans, too, acted as inquisitors. Heather closes his book with the discussion of the inquisition process as a means of enforcing doctrinal purity along with dealing with heretics, the Jews and contrarians such as the Cathars.
The book is not an easy read. It is hardly bed time reading. It demands much of the reader. But what Heather offers us is a thousand years of rich, decentered creativity in which the population of Europe moved—and moved slowly—“from an original position of enormous religious diversity to Lateran uniformity.” And at the same time the story is one of the entanglement of state power with religion that forms the basis of medieval Western Europe.
I thought that upon retirement I would have unlimited and frequent reading time. The thought of a day stretching ahead with a book nearby – especially over winter – was a working day dream. It has happened to a slight degree but a couple of hours every day with a book in a comfortable chair in a warm room, or, in summer, in a sunny spot, has not come to pass. Part of this is self-inflicted. I write and that takes time. There are other calls. The garden needs attention. There are other chores associated with a house. But the books are always there, ever patient, waiting to be read or, in the case of my many favourites (Tolkien and Dune are but two of a long list) re-read. My only concern is that I shall be left with more books than my allotted time allows. But every moment with a book is and will be savoured, celebrated and enjoyed.
When I was two my mother bought me my first book. It was 'Puppies and Kittens'. "What have you bought her a book for?" exclaimed my father, "She can't even read!"
Now I have several large bookcases well filled - two layers deep in some places. Few are as heavy as your tombs, I suspect, and many are children's books - which I keep partially so my grandchildren have wholesome reading material (getting harder to find in the library these days) and partly because they are old friends.
You might relate, as I do, to Arnold Lobel's poem:
Books to the ceiling,
books to the sky;
My piles of books
are a mile high.
How I love them,
how I need them.
I'll have a long beard
by the time I read them.
Humans are kinaesthetic and tactile creatures, and as you say, for some of us there are few pleasures greater than that of the physicality of reading a book. Among other things, reading has preserved my sanity from a very early age. I've always owned a lot of books and some years ago when we made one room in our new home a library to collect our combined tomes in one place, my mother looked around, sniffed, and said "You've got too many books". The idea that we might re-read old favourites was obviously a novel concept, but especially during periods of illness and depression there's nothing like reacquainting oneself with an old friend, even when it's falling to bits with use.