The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

By Joseph Pearce

Christ is "the way, and the truth, and the life";, but fallen mankind, although made in Christ's image, is not so pure. Human history—including Church history—is a tapestry woven of three threads: the good, the bad, and the beautiful. This book tells the story of Christendom over two millennia, focusing on what was good, bad, and beautiful in each century.

These three threads run through the heart of every person, revealing the pattern of our individual lives. These very same threads bind together the collective lives of men and make up the fabric of culture and civilization. No one saw this three-dimensional form more clearly than Benedict XVI. For him, the goodness of the saints and the beauty of art are the only antidote to the dark thread of evil that runs through history. Inspired by this insight, Joseph Pearce presents the past twenty centuries to show how goodness and beauty—stemming from God himself—work to conquer the bad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642292497

Joseph Pearce

Joseph Pearce is the author of numerous literary works including Literary Converts, The Quest for Shakespeare and Shakespeare on Love, and the editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions series. His other books include literary biographies of Oscar Wilde, J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Book preview

THE GOOD, THE BAD,

AND THE BEAUTIFUL

JOSEPH PEARCE

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

History in Three Dimensions

IGNATIUS PRESS    SAN FRANCISCO

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition) copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Art credits

(Top panel)

Last Judgement

Fra Angelico, circa 1450

Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Wikimedia Commons Image

(middle and bottom panel)

Landscape with Crossing of the Styx

(details of Sheol and the Land of the Blessed)

Joachim Patinir, circa 1480–1524

Museo del Prado, Madrid

Wikimedia Commons Image

Cover design by Enrique J. Aguilar

© 2023 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-62164-534-4 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-64229-249-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Catalogue number 2023934924

Printed in the United States of America ♾

CONTENTS

Prologue: The Three Dimensions of History

In the Beginning . . .

Life, Death, and Resurrection

First Century

This Is My Body

Second Century

Romans and Catholics

Third Century

Mother and Bride

Fourth Century

Upon This Rock

Fifth Century

The City of God

Sixth Century

The Resurrection of Rome

Seventh Century

Northern Lights

Eighth Century

Anglo-Saxons and Saracens

Ninth Century

Great Kings and Vikings

Tenth Century

Monasteries and Monstrosities

Eleventh Century

Ends and Beginnings

Twelfth Century

Charity and Chivalry

Thirteenth Century

The Best and Worst of Times

Fourteenth Century

Holy Women and Divine Poets

Fifteenth Century

Rebirth and Rebellion

Sixteenth Century

Rupture and Reformation

Seventeenth Century

Old and New

Eighteenth Century

Religion and Superstition

Nineteenth Century

Revolution, Revelation, and Revival

Twentieth Century

Wars of Irreligion

Epilogue: The End of History

Notes

PROLOGUE

The Three Dimensions of History

Director Sergio Leone considered his iconic spaghetti Western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, to be a satire on the Western genre and a deconstruction of the romanticism surrounding the Old West. His antihero, played by Clint Eastwood, represents the antithesis of the archetypal Western hero, the latter of whom, epitomized by John Wayne, could be seen as a modern-day knight in shining armor, sure-sighted in terms of both virtue and marksmanship, and unswervingly chivalrous in the face of chicanery. In shockingly sardonic contrast, all three of the protagonists in Leone’s Western are utterly self-serving, spurning the self-sacrifice that is the very essence of true heroism. It could be argued, therefore, that a more accurate and fitting title for the film, or at least a more accurate depiction of its spirit, would be The Bad, the Worse, and the Ugly. In this sense, it can be seen that Leone looks at what he perceives to be New World naiveté from the jaded perspective of Old World cynicism.

And it could be argued that Leone takes his cynicism still further. On a deeper level than the desire to deconstruct and subvert the romance surrounding the Wild West is the desire to subvert the traditional transcendental foundation of the Old West, which is wisdom itself. At the heart of all healthy societies and cultures is the presence of the good, the true, and the beautiful. This triune presence is perfected in the Person of Christ, who is, as He tells us, the way, and the truth, and the life.¹ He is the way of goodness, which is to say that He embodies the fullness of virtue made manifest in love; He is the truth, which is to say that He is the end to which all properly ordered reason points; and He is the very life of beauty, which is to say that He shines forth the glory of creation as the Word-made-flesh, as the poem that perfectly reflects the perfection of the Poet. Since this is so, it can be seen that the more that Christ is present in the soul of a culture or society, the more will such a society or culture truly reflect the goodness, truth, and beauty of His image. Conversely, His absence leads to the way of evil, to the de(con)struction of truth in the living of the lie, and to the killing of life in the culture of death and its cult of ugliness.

Once this is understood, we can see the very pattern of history as a tapestry, time-stitched and weird-woven,² of varying threads that are good, bad, or beautiful. These threads reflect the three facets of man, who manifests himself in life and therefore in history as homo viator, homo superbus, and anthropos.³

Homo viator is pilgrim man; he is the man on the journey of life, which he sees as the quest for heaven, his ultimate and only true purpose. His is the path of virtue, the path of the saints and aspiring saints. He weaves the threads of goodness that we see in history.

Homo superbus is proud man; he is the man who refuses the appointed journey, spurning the quest for heaven so that he can do his own thing. Homo superbus does not sacrifice his life for others; he sacrifices the lives of others for himself. He wanders from the path of virtue in the waywardness of egocentrism and the viciousness that is its cankered fruit. He weaves the bad threads of wickedness that we see in history.

Anthropos is poetic man; he is man who looks up in wonder at the beauty of the cosmos, singing its praises by the making of beautiful things. His is the way of creativity that reflects the presence of the Creator Himself in the creation of beautiful works. He weaves the threads of beauty that illuminate the threads of goodness, offering hope in the midst of evil.

These three threads weave their way through the hearts of each and every person, forming the tapestry that reveals the pattern of their individual lives. In consequence, these same threads weave their way through the collective lives of men, which we call history. They are the three dimensions of history itself.

In every generation, the virtuous find themselves living as exiles in a vale of tears, witnessing to the goodness of love even unto death in a world of sin and sorrow dominated by viciousness. In the midst of this never-ending interwoven battle between good and evil is also woven the indomitable power of beauty, both in the grandeur of God to be seen in the beauty of creation and also in the glory of God’s creative presence in the beauty of great art. No one has seen this perennially present three-dimensional pattern in the tapestry of history more clearly than Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI). In words of beauty and brilliance, Cardinal Ratzinger speaks of the goodness of the saints and the beauty of art as the only antidote to the dark thread of evil that runs through the whole of human history:

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their Church into a place where beauty—and hence truth—is at home. Without this the world will become the first circle of hell.⁴

It is, therefore, the twin threads woven by the goodness of the saints and the beauty of the arts that witness to God’s presence, in contrast to the third dark and twisted thread of pride that witnesses to his absence. All three threads are interwoven in the history of man because they are all interwoven in the heart of man. Inspired by this understanding of history and by these words of Cardinal Ratzinger, the present author has sought to present the history of the past two millennia in the light of this three-dimensional pattern of the good, the bad, and the beautiful.

In the Beginning . . .

Life, Death, and Resurrection

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

— John 1:1

The very first thing that we need to know about history is that it is worded into being. Its pattern preexists it in eternity. It is made manifest in what we call time by the Word of God and the will of God, in whom and in which there is no past and no future, only omnipresence. To the One who patterns it, Alexander the Great and Alfred the Great are equally present, even though, in terms of time, they lived more than a thousand years apart. To our finite and timebound perception this is, of course, a mystery. History is, therefore, a mystery. It needs to be seen in the light by which it exists: God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.¹

None of this would be known or indeed knowable unless God Himself had revealed it. This He does in the Person and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. It is in Christ that God reveals Himself to man, and it is also in Christ that God reveals Man to men. Christ shows us in Himself the perfect man to whose perfection we are called to strive, and He reveals to us in His life, death, and Resurrection the very template of the pattern of history. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.²

In His revelation of Himself as the way, and the truth, and the life,³ Christ reveals Himself as the good, the true, and the beautiful. When He commands us to follow Him, He calls us to love one another as He has loved us.⁴ When He tells us to take up our cross in order to follow Him,⁵ we are shown that love is inseparable from self-sacrifice, demanding the death of the self for the good of the other. He shows us that love comes at a great price, which we must be willing to pay. The way of Christ is, therefore, the way of the cross. There is no other way, except the way of refusal. The acceptance of the cross is the thread of goodness, or sanctity, which weaves its way across the centuries; the refusal of the cross is the evil thread, which, ironically and paradoxically, is the very cause of the suffering that it refuses to accept.

In this sense, the whole of humanity and the whole of human history can be seen to be present at Golgotha, on either side of Christ, in the presence of the good and bad thief.⁶ The one is repentant, accepting his suffering; the other is unrepentant, resenting his suffering. One accepts the cross, the other refuses it; but both are crucified. Golgotha shows us that there is no escape from suffering. It is simply what we choose to do with it. This is the pattern of good and evil, which is weird-woven throughout history by the choosers and refusers of the cross.

But what of the third thread? What of beauty? As with the acceptance of the cross, it is inseparable from humility. It is humility that gives us the sense of gratitude that opens the eyes in wonder; and it is only with eyes wide open with wonder that we are moved to the contemplation that leads to the opening of the mind and soul into the fullness of the beauty of God’s presence in creation. We will follow Christ only if we see Him as the Son of God and acclaim Him as such. If our eyes are wide open with wonder, we will see that He is not merely a man but also is our Lord and our God. It is the scribes, Pharisees, and hypocrites, with their eyes shut in pride, who refused to believe the Word of God, even when He was in their midst. It was they who saw only the man and not God, and it is they who demanded that the man be crucified, not that God be adored.⁷ They were blind to the beauty dwelling among them.

Returning to Christ’s revelation of Himself as the way, and the truth, and the life, we can see that beauty is the life of Christ in both the beholder of beauty and in the beauty beheld. Without such life, our pride and prejudice make us blind. This is evident in the way that we perceive the Gospel, which, as we have seen, is the very template of the pattern of history. It is only if we see the ugliness of the Crucifixion from the perspective of the beauty of the Resurrection that we can perceive the fullness of the life of Christ that defeats death itself. Without this Christ-life, we see only death; and if we see only death, it is because we are not alive. Without this Christ-light, we see only darkness; and if we see only darkness, it is because we are blind. The problem is not with the life or the light but with the lifeless blindness of the one who fails to behold it.

In seeing the Crucifixion in the light of the Resurrection, we are also seeing the long defeat of human history, awash as it is with wickedness, in the light of the final victory that Christ has already won. This is the light and the life that illumines and animates the three dimensions of history.

First Century

This Is My Body

The Good

The life, death, and Resurrection of Christ was enacted on a Roman imperial stage, Palestine being part of Rome’s burgeoning empire. Such was the pomp and pomposity of imperial Rome that it saw itself as the Eternal City, destined by the gods to rule the world. This was expressed with triumphalist zeal in The Aeneid, Virgil’s patriotic epic, written twenty or so years before the birth of Christ. The Aeneid depicted Rome as being founded by the Trojan warrior Aeneas, who had sailed to Rome on a perilous voyage, via many adventures, having been warned in a dream to escape the fall of Troy. The idea was that Rome, the Eternal City, had risen phoenixlike from the ashes of Troy. Seen in this mythical light, the great historian Christopher Dawson perceived that St. Paul was the real-life Aeneas, introducing the Church to Europe, which, a few centuries later, would rise from the ashes of the fallen Roman Empire:

Now the Virgilian myth became the Christian reality. When St. Paul, in obedience to the warning of a dream, set sail from Troy in A.D. 49 and came to Philippi in Macedonia he did more to change the course of history than the great battle that had decided the fate of the Roman Empire on the same spot nearly a century earlier, for he brought to Europe the seed of a new life which was ultimately destined to create a new world.¹

It is largely through St. Paul, along with St. Luke, that we gain our knowledge of the first century of Christendom, the latter of whom, as author of the Acts of the Apostles, wrote the earliest history of the Church. It is through their testimony that we know that, within ten years of Christ’s death and Resurrection, Christianity (as it became known) had spread from Palestine to Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Cyprus, Thessalonica, Crete, and Rome. There were Christians in Rome before either St. Peter or St. Paul arrived in the city.

Although St. Paul, as the apostle to the gentiles, seems to have been the most successful in spreading the Gospel and winning converts, he was never considered the leader of the early Church, nor the one who spoke with most authority. That role clearly belonged to St. Peter. In all three of the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), Peter’s name is always placed first in every list of the names of the apostles. In all three Gospels, he is the first of the disciples to be called by Christ. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, we are told that it is Christ Himself who gives Peter his name, which means rock, declaring that on this rock I will build my Church, adding that He will give to Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven, promising that whatever Peter bound on earth would be bound in heaven also.² St. John, echoing the other three Evangelists, also gives Peter prominence as the first of the apostles, telling us that Christ commanded Peter three times to feed my lambs,³ tend my sheep,⁴ feed my sheep.⁵ There was, therefore, from the beginning, no doubt about the apostle to whom Christ had bestowed the authority to govern and lead the Church. It is also clear from the Acts of the Apostles, St. Luke’s continuation of, or sequel to, his Gospel, that Peter is considered the foremost figure in the newborn Church. It is Peter who leads the proclamation of the Resurrection at Pentecost; it is he who presides over meetings; it is he who works miracles; and it is he who is rescued from prison by an angel.⁶ In his baptism of the centurion Cornelius in obedience to a heavenly vision,⁷ which showed that the reception of the gentile into the Church was God’s will, he precedes and therefore symbolically supersedes St. Paul’s role as apostle to the gentiles.

After his miraculous escape from prison, it seems that Peter went into exile to escape Herod’s persecution of the Church. All that St. Luke tells us is that he departed and went to another place.⁸ The next we know of Peter’s whereabouts is given in his First Letter, which was written in a time of persecution from Babylon, an early Christian euphemism for Rome.

If St. Peter had escaped from persecution in Jerusalem, only to find a similar persecution in Rome, moving from the proverbial frying pan to the fire, St. Paul was similarly dogged on his travels by persecutors of the Church. In Damascus, he escaped from a garrison of soldiers sent to arrest him by being let down in a basket through a window in the wall of the city, and this was by no means the worst of his troubles:

Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.⁹

The apostle’s courage in the face of these trials and tribulations is breathtaking. He tells the Romans that he reckoned the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed,¹⁰ and to the Corinthians, who were prone to sensuality and the desire for comfort, he counsels the embrace of the suffering that comes with discipleship:

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.¹¹

These words of courageous faith, written by an apostle, were also the words of a prophet. St. Paul, along with St. Peter, would be put to death in Rome, sometime between A.D. 64 and 68, during the persecutions in the reign of the emperor Nero. According to tradition, St. Peter was crucified upside down on the site of what is now the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, a tradition that appeared to be confirmed forensically during excavations in the twentieth century in which the remains of a first-century man, who was aged around sixty at the time of death, was discovered beneath the crypt under the altar. St. Paul was beheaded just south of Rome. The ‘Healthful Fountains’ still whisper beneath the whispering trees where they beheaded him, wrote the Jesuit C. C. Martindale, and you may find it easier to pray to him there than in the vast basilica under which still his body lies.¹²

The Bad

Nero’s persecution of the Church was one of the earliest manifestations of the secularist intolerance of those who refuse to render unto Caesar the things of God.¹³ It is to Caesar that we now turn our attention.

Tiberius Caesar, the ruler of Rome during the time of Christ, was a septuagenarian when Jesus began His public ministry, and died four years after the Crucifixion. It is not known whether he died of natural causes or whether he was murdered on the orders of Caligula, his successor. Caligula would rule for a little under four years before falling victim to a conspiracy of senators and members of the elite Praetorian Guard. He was murdered in what was effectively a military coup, the Praetorian Guard proclaiming Claudius, Caligula’s uncle, as the new emperor, a fait accompli de facto that was ratified by the Senate de jure. Claudius would reign until A.D. 54, dying at the age of sixty-three, probably being poisoned by his wife Agrippina so that her son, Nero, could rule in his place.

The political culture of endemic treachery and murder, which had characterized the reign of his predecessors, would characterize the reign of Nero, who was only sixteen years old when he became emperor. If anything, Nero took the art of treachery and murder to even more tyrannical extremes. He had his own mother murdered, an act of ingratitude that was fitting recompense for the murderous way she had brought him to power.

According to the second-century Roman historian Suetonius, writing only fifty or sixty years after Nero’s reign, Nero practiced every kind of obscenity,¹⁴ including marrying a boy whom he had castrated specially for the occasion. Many of his other perversions are so obscene that they do not even bear mentioning. His most famous or infamous act, the arson that set Rome ablaze in A.D. 64, is also recounted by Suetonius, who claims that the deranged emperor wanted to destroy drab old buildings to make way for the building of a new palace for himself, as well as for the perverse aesthetic pleasure of seeing the beauty of the flames.¹⁵ Having raised the fury of the people for this act of wanton destruction of their own city, Nero sought to deflect blame through the use of a scapegoat. According to another Roman historian, Tacitus, who was also writing only fifty or sixty years after the events he