The Tablet , UK
Feb 11 2005
Lead Book Review – 12 February 2005
The encounters that cause sparks to fly
Holy Fire
Victoria Clark
Macmillan, £20
Tablet bookshop price £18.
My wife was recently asked by the accident and emergency department
of a London hospital to complete a form requiring her – in addition to
the usual enquiries about ethnicity, religion, blood group and so on –
to state her “cultural identity”. In the end she entered “Anglican”,
even though she had given the same answer to the question on religion.
The best passages in Victoria Clark’s very clever book suggest that
the NHS bureaucrat behind that form may have been on to something:
there is a dimension to our sense of identity which certainly includes
religion – or the lack of it – but encompasses all sorts of other
factors too. And if Ms Clark is right it is a thoroughly destructive
force. There is little in Holy Fire about religion as a source of
goodness, holiness or moral order; instead, poisoned by politics,
race and history – and poisoning them in return – religion in this
book is a sectarian battle standard.
Her story begins with a brawl between two clerics in one of
Christianity’s most sacred places. Within the Basilica of the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem is a tiny chapel known as the “edicule”,
built over the spot St Helena identified as Christ’s tomb. On Easter
Saturday the “Holy Fire” is said to appear miraculously within it,
and candles lit from this wondrous confirmation of Christ’s divinity
are, by ancient tradition, passed among the faithful by Jerusalem’s
Greek Orthodox Patriarch and one of the church’s Armenian Orthodox
priests. In Easter 2002 the Armenian priest decided to “hurry the
miracle along a little” with the aid of a cigarette lighter. The
Patriarch intervened, and the two came to blows. A couple of Orthodox
monks piled in to help their leader and the Israeli police had to
storm the chapel to restore order.
The incident inspires Ms Clark’s investigation of the centuries-old
war between the Christian denominations for control of the Holy
Places. Some of the stories are very funny: the Ethiopian Orthodox nuns
and monks of the Holy Sepulchre have been reduced to living in a squat
on the church’s roof, and jealously guard their territory from the
Egyptian Copts next door; when an elderly Coptic monk started taking
his afternoon snooze in a chair by the Ethiopians’ gate they suspected
him of annexation by stealth, and Israeli police were again called
to stop things turning violent. Some of the stories are dreadful:
the Holy Fire ceremony of 1834 ended with a stampede, mass suffocation
and a massacre by panicky Ottoman troops; a British observer described
the church walls “spattered with the blood and brains of those who had
been felled, like oxen, with the butt-ends of the soldiers’ bayonets”.
Holy Fire unfolds against the background of the current Palestinian
intifada, and Ms Clark moves skilfully between contemporary anecdote
and big-picture history, using the Holy Sepulchre’s story as a focus
for exploring the broader issue of Christianity’s involvement in the
Holy Land. For the most part her points are subtly made, and she allows
her characters to reveal themselves. Fr Athanasius, a Franciscan from
Texas, tells her: “What we have in that church [the Holy Sepulchre],
is not three different takes on Christianity – Orthodoxy, Catholicism
and Oriental Orthodoxy. That would be complex enough, but it’s worse
than that. The territory the church occupies and all its contents are
divided six ways on mostly tribal lines except for us Franciscans –
we’re multinational. Otherwise you’ve got Greeks, Armenians, Egyptians,
Ethiopians and Syrians.”
Explaining the “status quo” agreement which froze the
interdenominational rivalries where they were in 1852 and still
applies today, he says: “It’s important to realise that there are
three different sets of rights governing everything inside the church
and everything that happens there: rights of property, rights of use
and rights of cleaning. Having the right to clean something doesn’t
pre-suppose a right to use it, and the right to use it doesn’t
necessarily entail ownership, because ownership can be shared.”
Every so often the author’s voice intrudes when she asks her
interlocutors whether this kind of talk has very much to do with
the teaching of what she terms the “man-God” the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre is supposed to celebrate. It is gently done in the book,
but this tale encompasses centuries of petty rivalry, greed, venality,
corruption and violence in the name of Christianity.
There is a bigger point behind all this, but when Ms Clark finally
steps outside the brilliant artifice of her narrative to make it
directly it is disappointingly crude. During one of her highly
effective vignettes – a meal at which two old friends, one Jewish
and one Palestinian Christian, confront the damage done to their
relationship by the intifada – she lets us know what she really thinks:
“They are waiting for me to speak but I am suddenly overwhelmed by
the thought of Arabs and Jews dying in their hundreds and thousands
on account of mistakes made and crimes committed by a succession of
Christian powers over hundreds of years.”
So there you have it; we Christians have infected Jerusalem with what
Edward Lear called its “squabblepoison”, and we are responsible for the
world’s most intractable political problem. I found myself scribbling
“Up to a point, Lord Copper” in the margin, and this statement a couple
of paragraphs later is even more questionable. Listing the Christian
enthusiasts who contributed to the foundation of the State of Israel,
Ms Clark writes: “I suspect that if the Earl of Shaftesbury, Arthur
Balfour, Lloyd George and President Truman had not been so versed in
the Old Testament and therefore so susceptible to Jewish emotionalism
about a God-given homeland, so willing to dream the Jewish dream,
an Israel would eventually have come into being, especially given
the Nazi Holocaust, but it would not have been here.”
This huge historical assumption jars – and is at odds with the subtlety
which characterises the rest of the book. Holy Fire successfully
demonstrates that nothing relating to Jerusalem is ever simple; and
I suspect that the author has a sense that she may have overstepped
the mark here, because she plunges immediately back into the West
Jerusalem restaurant where her two friends are finishing up their
meal. But from this point the book goes downhill: the material on
Christian Zionists is perfectly respectable, but it feels familiar –
and Christian fundamentalism is too easy a target.
In her introduction, Victoria Clark writes: “My argument is that
fourth-century Byzantine Orthodoxy and twenty-first-century American
Christian Zionism are two ends of a single long continuum in the
eyes of many non-Christians. Three years on from 11 September 2001
it seems more urgent than ever that we in the traditionally Christian
West begin to see ourselves as others see us.”
I am not quite sure she makes the case she states in the first of those
sentences – but the aspiration expressed in the second is triumphantly
realised; and this is a humbling book for any Christian to read.
Edward Stourton
–Boundary_(ID_agim4QQjaupCj6zoqF6P4g)–