1 00:00:02,630 --> 00:00:05,780 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] If you separate. 2 00:00:14,360 --> 00:00:18,139 I'm Malcolm Evans, principal of the college, and it's with great pleasure. 3 00:00:18,140 --> 00:00:22,610 I welcome you here this evening for the Nichols lecture. 4 00:00:22,730 --> 00:00:31,549 I pause because we were having a little bit debate, trying to work out precisely how long the Nicholls lecture has been taking place, 5 00:00:31,550 --> 00:00:34,940 and we've had the privilege and pleasure of hosting it here at Regent's. 6 00:00:34,940 --> 00:00:40,040 We have decided this is in the environs of 25 years, as far as I'm concerned. 7 00:00:40,040 --> 00:00:48,170 From where I come from, the environs of 25 years means what it means, which is that this is a long and hallowed and valued tradition. 8 00:00:48,590 --> 00:00:52,909 Um, and this is against that background that it does indeed give me great pleasure 9 00:00:52,910 --> 00:00:57,980 to welcome you all here for yet another instalment within that tradition. 10 00:00:58,130 --> 00:01:02,810 It's also a great delight and a pleasure to welcome this evening's speaker, Gerald, 11 00:01:02,810 --> 00:01:08,900 who is has many contacts with the with the college and has a an honorary fellow position with us. 12 00:01:08,900 --> 00:01:15,140 So it's a multiple pleasure to welcome him here to give this lecture here this evening. 13 00:01:15,260 --> 00:01:21,950 Um, I know we all want to hear what he's going to say. So I will not do what people always do at this moment, which is hog the lectern. 14 00:01:22,190 --> 00:01:25,480 Um, I willingly, um, pass it over to others. 15 00:01:25,490 --> 00:01:29,560 But I do just want to say that we do very much value this collection. 16 00:01:29,870 --> 00:01:34,249 This connection with the with the with the trustees, with the lecture series. 17 00:01:34,250 --> 00:01:38,900 And that we do hope to continue to work together to make it flourish and prosper. 18 00:01:39,020 --> 00:01:43,250 There have been many great lectures within this series. I'm sure we will have another tonight, 19 00:01:43,460 --> 00:01:51,740 and we want to work together in partnership in order to try to make this lecture the event that we know it is and want it to continue to be. 20 00:01:51,890 --> 00:01:57,990 So thank you all very much indeed. Thank you. 21 00:01:57,990 --> 00:02:02,790 Thank you very much indeed. And it's a great pleasure to be here, uh, once again at Regis Park, Regent's Park College. 22 00:02:03,000 --> 00:02:06,750 My name is David Howard. I'm a chair of the David Nichols Memorial Trust. 23 00:02:06,920 --> 00:02:10,410 And, um, we are delighted every year to have the annual lecture. 24 00:02:10,770 --> 00:02:15,160 David Nichols, uh, many of you will know, was a very much respected local priest. 25 00:02:15,180 --> 00:02:19,860 He was, uh, a renowned theologian and radical theologian and political scientist, 26 00:02:20,160 --> 00:02:25,470 um, and, and also an expert, particularly Haiti and Trinidad and Caribbean Studies. 27 00:02:25,890 --> 00:02:32,550 Uh, the trust was set up when he, uh, passed away, um, in honour really to celebrate his polymath. 28 00:02:32,850 --> 00:02:41,370 His energy is polymath. Tendency of just enjoying life, exploring whole range of ideas, uh, being quite provocative. 29 00:02:41,670 --> 00:02:46,860 Uh, many of you will know that there were a few letters written to the Times Independent by Archdeacon Palin. 30 00:02:47,130 --> 00:02:51,810 Archdeacon Paley, uh, who was seen to be a minister in South Africa. 31 00:02:51,840 --> 00:02:56,310 It was actually the parrot of David Nichols, who would be writing with the help of David Nichols. 32 00:02:56,520 --> 00:03:02,280 He was a great character around Oxford who was a maverick, uh, and just a really, really lovely person to know. 33 00:03:02,520 --> 00:03:06,000 So it's in his honour. We have an annual lecture which is here tonight. 34 00:03:06,210 --> 00:03:11,070 We also have the David Nichols collection of books, which we are replenishing and refreshing. 35 00:03:11,280 --> 00:03:15,890 Uh, actually, as we noted, our librarian is here tonight, and she's doing a wonderful job, uh, 36 00:03:15,900 --> 00:03:24,600 keeping that collection very much attuned to today's needs, but also wonderful, uh, past records, um, from David's work. 37 00:03:25,050 --> 00:03:32,520 And we also have two travel awards for Caribbean research, uh, each year, uh, every 1st of April, there's a deadline and details on the web. 38 00:03:32,640 --> 00:03:38,730 So we've now entered the sort of a sports event, a relay and tag team and that sort of, uh, that tradition. 39 00:03:38,730 --> 00:03:40,950 I will hand over to Anthony will introduce Father Gerald. 40 00:03:41,280 --> 00:03:46,050 I would also say that after this reception, after this lecture, there's a reception over in the college room. 41 00:03:46,380 --> 00:03:49,950 Uh, and so do come and join us there. And those who want to stay. 42 00:03:49,950 --> 00:03:54,120 There's a dinner and a formal dinner at college. Uh, £10 per person. 43 00:03:54,420 --> 00:04:01,380 Um, you can either pay £10 in cash or we have a contactless card, and you'll be given a very nice souvenir yellow ticket. 44 00:04:01,530 --> 00:04:03,809 So do join us if you'd like to. Dinner afterwards. 45 00:04:03,810 --> 00:04:09,510 And I'll be walking around with yellow tickets and contactless machines to, uh, to help you join us. 46 00:04:09,870 --> 00:04:14,090 So over to Professor Anthony. Ready? Yeah. 47 00:04:15,560 --> 00:04:22,190 It's a great pleasure to introduce my friend, Father Gerald Robinson Brown. 48 00:04:22,220 --> 00:04:24,890 He is a distinguished Anglican priest, scholar, 49 00:04:25,280 --> 00:04:32,960 and writer known for his contribution to theology and his advocacy for LGBTQ plus inclusion within the church. 50 00:04:33,740 --> 00:04:39,470 He currently serves as the Vicar of Saint James Church in um, the Town and Cardiff. 51 00:04:41,120 --> 00:04:46,550 Okay, now I've got some other stuff to say about, and I'm not going to say because that's just boring stuff. 52 00:04:46,580 --> 00:04:54,110 Now you seen now what you really want to know is, is my deep production with Darryl, and I've already warned him that this is a moment of. 53 00:04:55,500 --> 00:05:00,200 As only good friends can do what I call soft ritual humiliation, sir. 54 00:05:01,020 --> 00:05:06,460 So I first met him when he was 14 years old. And it was a skinny little youth. 55 00:05:07,570 --> 00:05:11,320 Quite frankly, you know, young filled out that much either. Well, obviously I have, but he asked, 56 00:05:12,340 --> 00:05:22,000 and it was a question of a circuit service in the Methodist Church in Greenwood Methodist Church in in west London and Ealing. 57 00:05:22,390 --> 00:05:28,750 And I was the guest preacher, and it was a mutual friend of ours who was being admitted to the office of local preacher. 58 00:05:28,750 --> 00:05:35,110 So I turned up to do the preaching to. I think I did not preach a bit. 59 00:05:35,590 --> 00:05:40,630 And then afterwards this old black Caribbean woman came to me and said, preacher man. 60 00:05:41,110 --> 00:05:44,950 I said, yeah, and she says, I want you to have a word with me. Um, if you can help me. 61 00:05:44,960 --> 00:05:50,140 She says, I've got my nephew. That's it. 62 00:05:50,150 --> 00:05:54,950 And you turn around. And it was literally current underneath her skirt and said, hey boy, come on now. 63 00:05:55,610 --> 00:06:01,640 And she grabbed him and pulled him out and said, now. This young man wants to be a preacher. 64 00:06:03,180 --> 00:06:07,380 She says. I'm not convinced about that. But if you're a preacher that you go talk to him. 65 00:06:08,820 --> 00:06:14,800 And she walked off and left me and drove at you, looking at each other, thinking, so what exactly do we do now? 66 00:06:14,830 --> 00:06:19,750 Okay, well, I guess that we should go have a conversation. I probably spoke. 67 00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:24,440 Should he have said he was 14 years old? I knew he wanted to be a minister now. 68 00:06:24,620 --> 00:06:30,300 At the time, I remember saying to him what sensible 14 year old wants to be a minister, you know? 69 00:06:30,320 --> 00:06:35,830 I'm like, you should be out romping with your friends, man. Basically, I could go get a life. 70 00:06:35,850 --> 00:06:42,410 I told him. Anyway, so we stayed in touch and I feels that it came back and said, but you know, I still want to be a preacher. 71 00:06:42,800 --> 00:06:47,230 I still want to be a minister. And so we have journeyed ever since. 72 00:06:47,920 --> 00:06:52,930 I did not imagine that at that point that skinny youth would turn up looking like a super Catholic. 73 00:06:54,370 --> 00:06:57,820 But hey, all of us are on a journey. 74 00:07:01,180 --> 00:07:09,580 The ritual humiliation of upon. It has been an immense joy to see him grow into the man he was always destined to be. 75 00:07:10,630 --> 00:07:15,130 And so it's a great honour. To say that he is one of my mentees. 76 00:07:15,130 --> 00:07:18,490 So all his great attributes are the ones I've given him. 77 00:07:19,300 --> 00:07:25,990 Hahaha. And all this fall sovereign talent of our entirely of his own making. 78 00:07:26,500 --> 00:07:30,640 Amen. So please let us put our hands together and welcome our distinguished speaker this year. 79 00:07:33,220 --> 00:07:36,580 Oh, thank you so much. It's a Tuesday today. It's. 80 00:07:40,680 --> 00:07:52,510 Oh. Vince, thank you so much for the invitation and thank you for all of you who are here, uh, this evening to to listen to this lecture. 81 00:07:52,520 --> 00:07:56,490 Thank you for for your wonderful and very embarrassing introduction. 82 00:07:56,510 --> 00:08:00,650 I hope that one day I get my own back, but I can't imagine it happening anytime soon. 83 00:08:01,130 --> 00:08:07,100 Um. I obviously obviously give this lecture as we together on a David Nicholls. 84 00:08:07,100 --> 00:08:12,080 But I do need to mention, um, one of my friends without whom I would not also be here. 85 00:08:12,470 --> 00:08:19,730 Um, that's the right reverend, um, Keith McGlynn, who passed away not all that long ago and who passed away suddenly, 86 00:08:19,730 --> 00:08:25,459 but who for me was a very close friend, a great, um, encourager, 87 00:08:25,460 --> 00:08:34,220 and someone whose name, um, it's important for me to, to hallow in this space because my relationship with regents began after his death, 88 00:08:34,550 --> 00:08:39,770 and so I'd never been in this space with him before. But he is, um, someone for whom I'm deeply grateful. 89 00:08:43,000 --> 00:08:46,300 The first slide on, uh, PowerPoint. 90 00:08:47,200 --> 00:08:50,770 As a young child, you've already heard that it wasn't exactly ordinary. 91 00:08:51,130 --> 00:08:57,820 Um, but I was also obsessed with learning the names of birds and birds of prey in particular. 92 00:08:58,540 --> 00:09:05,350 I spent much of my childhood as an amateur ornithologist at the West London Wetland Centre in barns. 93 00:09:05,380 --> 00:09:10,360 So when I wasn't in church under my grandmother's wing, there I was looking at creation. 94 00:09:11,350 --> 00:09:11,919 To this day, 95 00:09:11,920 --> 00:09:21,160 I can remember having my first bittern before seeing it and feeling a huge sense of achievement at catching sight of one of Britain's shyest birds. 96 00:09:21,670 --> 00:09:27,370 And today, I am still enamoured by what I consider the very first sign of summer. 97 00:09:27,910 --> 00:09:35,980 When staring high into the sky, I hear the sound and spot a sight of my absolute favourite bird, the swift. 98 00:09:37,410 --> 00:09:45,390 Swifts spend the first 2 to 3 years of their lives in constant flight until they find a mate. 99 00:09:46,140 --> 00:09:52,110 They eat, drink, bathe, mate and sleep in the air on the wing. 100 00:09:53,370 --> 00:09:56,520 The swift will only land to nest and to die. 101 00:09:57,740 --> 00:10:05,960 They are the fastest birds in flight, flying at 69mph and migrate 3400 miles per year. 102 00:10:06,440 --> 00:10:14,970 So they are not my favourite bird for nothing. Now, this might seem a rather bizarre and obscure place to begin tonight's lecture. 103 00:10:16,000 --> 00:10:23,650 But imagine if the history of the sky were written by chickens or geese or ostriches. 104 00:10:24,630 --> 00:10:31,950 Yes, birds of a feather with the swift, but very different perspectives from land, from sea and from air. 105 00:10:32,820 --> 00:10:36,540 Different diets, different breeding patterns, different ways of relating. 106 00:10:36,840 --> 00:10:46,380 And so it is with the various approaches we might take or not take to the Christian past, a past which I already want to make plural, 107 00:10:46,620 --> 00:10:53,880 because it is the death of history to insist on one sole interpretation of the facts, whatever those are. 108 00:10:55,200 --> 00:11:03,180 This is something the historian Peter Brown remarks on beautifully in his recent memoirs, journeys of the mind A Life in History, 109 00:11:03,570 --> 00:11:11,430 in which he says the more I read, the more I happened to be impressed by the diversity of Christian views. 110 00:11:12,300 --> 00:11:20,790 Far from following the fate of a single, unambiguous line of Christian doctrine from which discordant voices were excluded as heretical, 111 00:11:21,210 --> 00:11:26,760 as extreme or downright dotty, I found that I was in a world of many voices. 112 00:11:27,660 --> 00:11:31,920 To read myself into early Christian texts with an eye to their diversity. 113 00:11:32,280 --> 00:11:40,890 Century by century and region by region was like learning a strange new language or picking up an exotic tune. 114 00:11:41,820 --> 00:11:51,660 I realised I was listening in to a grand debate, in which the very nature of society, of the human person and of the material world was at stake. 115 00:11:53,510 --> 00:12:02,780 Patristic like birdwatching or the world of late antiquity, might not appear as an obvious interest to a young black boy from west London. 116 00:12:03,530 --> 00:12:10,250 Let's still one who back then knew nothing of Anglo Catholicism and was firmly situated in Methodism. 117 00:12:11,260 --> 00:12:15,140 But I can still remember the first time I encountered the non-Western church. 118 00:12:15,530 --> 00:12:20,090 When I went to Cambridge at the age of 18 to train for ordination at Wesley House, 119 00:12:20,720 --> 00:12:29,060 and discovered the riches that waited for me in the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies Library, which was resident at Wesley House. 120 00:12:29,960 --> 00:12:32,990 It smelt different. Was quieter, 121 00:12:33,680 --> 00:12:38,479 had Ikon situated amongst the bookshelves and every now and then accommodated 122 00:12:38,480 --> 00:12:43,070 a random to us at least bid it high a lark from somewhere around the world. 123 00:12:44,480 --> 00:12:49,580 I remember the SSI vote on FM the Syrian and how I fell in love with his theology. 124 00:12:49,610 --> 00:12:59,570 Not that dissimilar to Wesley and his humanity as a vista opened up for me of a Christianity that did not find its origins or centre in Europe. 125 00:13:00,930 --> 00:13:06,330 And yet Africa remained in the entirety of my theological education. 126 00:13:06,840 --> 00:13:11,500 Unspoken. This is why I want to go to the next slide figure. 127 00:13:14,320 --> 00:13:21,070 So how is it that Africa can just be silent in one study of Christian theology, 128 00:13:21,430 --> 00:13:27,280 not just in Cambridge, but also in Durham, also in other places in Cardiff where I've studied? 129 00:13:27,580 --> 00:13:32,200 Africa basically did not really present itself as of any importance. 130 00:13:33,340 --> 00:13:38,140 And yet Africa has been the home of some of Christianity's most important texts, 131 00:13:39,010 --> 00:13:44,500 not only the acts of the martyrs and the writings of the saints, but the scriptures themselves. 132 00:13:45,190 --> 00:13:50,200 The earliest of the four Gospels bears the name of Mark, the Apostle to Africa. 133 00:13:51,040 --> 00:13:59,200 And there are, of course, some very notable documents, the first three texts ever to be written in the history of Christianity on prayer. 134 00:13:59,470 --> 00:14:05,680 All are written by Africans Tertullian, Cyprian, and origin. 135 00:14:06,100 --> 00:14:14,050 All are expositions on the Lord's Prayer and the centrality of that prayer to early Christian life in Africa. 136 00:14:16,140 --> 00:14:22,860 We see the Codex signing Atticus, the oldest complete version of the New Testament discovered in Sinai. 137 00:14:23,870 --> 00:14:27,320 On the next slide, we see the Codex Syriac Castine. Atticus. 138 00:14:28,070 --> 00:14:31,549 Uh, unlike the old the other, uh, manuscript, this one is in Syriac. 139 00:14:31,550 --> 00:14:39,020 The other one was in Greek. This is the oldest translation of the Bible into any language discovered by two sisters from Cambridge. 140 00:14:39,230 --> 00:14:45,260 Um, in an amazing, uh, encounter in voyage, which is written by Janet Wysocki, is called the Sisters of Sinai. 141 00:14:46,370 --> 00:14:48,950 And then, of course, we have the Nag Hammadi codices, 142 00:14:49,700 --> 00:14:55,130 and also the oldest copy of the Book of Psalms, all made and preserved on the continent of Africa, 143 00:14:55,670 --> 00:15:04,310 and the craftmanship and style of many other texts and material culture shape British Christianity through things like the Book of Kells. 144 00:15:04,730 --> 00:15:09,290 Um, this is a manuscript, uh, which was discovered in a bog in Ireland. 145 00:15:10,320 --> 00:15:21,720 Um, and on the next slide we see, um, what is actually one of the Psalms, um, which was discovered in um, fad more in, in Ireland it's called the fad, 146 00:15:21,810 --> 00:15:30,720 more Psalter, and it's made of um, papyrus and has Coptic binding and was found in Ireland um, and dates to the eighth century. 147 00:15:30,930 --> 00:15:35,580 So there is this connection between Africa and Ireland which I've written on before. 148 00:15:36,420 --> 00:15:37,410 And on the next slide. 149 00:15:38,250 --> 00:15:51,270 The Book of Kells shows, um, such a strong link to Coptic iconography and also, um, early African art and, uh, market carpet pages in manuscripts um, 150 00:15:51,270 --> 00:15:57,750 which also again, like the colour blue and other colours specifically used in this manuscript show a link to Africa. 151 00:15:59,830 --> 00:16:05,170 So the high crosses of Ireland, even the British liturgy that we use in our churches, um, 152 00:16:05,170 --> 00:16:12,010 it's shaped some of the things that we say and do in church are shaped by early African Christianity. 153 00:16:13,540 --> 00:16:19,329 The term late antiquity was not always used as a term to define that period of transition, 154 00:16:19,330 --> 00:16:28,239 which began with the first Christian emperor and ended with the end of Roman imperial rule in the late fifth in the west and late seventh in the East. 155 00:16:28,240 --> 00:16:38,770 Centuries. Other terms such as late Roman, early Byzantine, and early medieval were often used to describe that particular milieu. 156 00:16:39,790 --> 00:16:44,920 Yet, despite the field of Late Antiquity expanding to include the third and the eighth centuries, 157 00:16:45,250 --> 00:16:54,670 it has often neglected to engage seriously, either with Africa in the earliest years of that period or with Islam in the latest years. 158 00:16:55,870 --> 00:17:04,450 And this has led, I think, to a general lack of attention to what were often self-defined as non Roman cultures, 159 00:17:04,720 --> 00:17:08,680 even if they existed under a Roman Empire. 160 00:17:10,190 --> 00:17:14,600 So one might suggest that it is this clash of cultures, these different identities, 161 00:17:14,840 --> 00:17:23,690 the emergence of new ethnic groups within the population of the Roman Empire that leads to Roman imperial power being under threat. 162 00:17:24,440 --> 00:17:29,900 But often the interrogation of that conversation fails to pay attention to Africa in particular. 163 00:17:31,390 --> 00:17:37,900 Now, I want to argue that on the whole, the approach to Africa's place in late antiquity has been unimaginative, 164 00:17:38,260 --> 00:17:41,710 ignorant and lacking in reverence for the people of Africa. 165 00:17:42,680 --> 00:17:46,970 I want to invoke here Edmund Burke and his notion of the moral imagination. 166 00:17:47,510 --> 00:17:51,620 What role do our imaginations have to play in our writing of history? 167 00:17:52,700 --> 00:18:01,670 For Burke, the imagination had been given to humankind by God to perceive the divinely infused meaning imbued in the entirety of the cosmos. 168 00:18:02,630 --> 00:18:10,250 And it is crucial for us to consider whether or not wonder and awe in our approach to the past have a 169 00:18:10,250 --> 00:18:17,990 role in helping us to critique and consider our posture to the world or worlds that came before us. 170 00:18:19,830 --> 00:18:26,010 As a Christian theologian, I confess to a preaching all study, and maybe this is a flaw as a spiritual discipline. 171 00:18:26,820 --> 00:18:35,910 I expect to hear from God in all the study that I do, and I seek to dialogue with God in every bit of research I undertake. 172 00:18:36,930 --> 00:18:40,800 I am mindful here the Dominican fire Antonin Gilbert such to launch, 173 00:18:41,130 --> 00:18:50,190 who once remarked that study is a prayer to the truth because it is both desire and an invocation of the truth. 174 00:18:51,960 --> 00:18:57,120 But if study is a afraid of the truth and the desire for an invocation of the truth, 175 00:18:57,900 --> 00:19:01,710 then we have to ask ourselves, I think, as historians and theologians. 176 00:19:02,010 --> 00:19:06,870 The question Pilate asked Christ, what is truth? 177 00:19:08,380 --> 00:19:15,640 What is the historian's relationship with what she discerns to be the facts of the past? 178 00:19:16,690 --> 00:19:26,240 Next slide. And when. Morgan. One of my greatest influences is someone called Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, 179 00:19:26,750 --> 00:19:34,580 who speaks profoundly about awe and the kind of approach that might inspire in us towards what we understand in the world. 180 00:19:35,630 --> 00:19:41,480 When we think of Africa and our relationship to this place, not just this part of it, 181 00:19:41,480 --> 00:19:47,210 but the whole of the continent, what role does all and imagination and reverence have to play? 182 00:19:48,200 --> 00:19:52,670 Next slide. Bye bye. Heschel says, or is more than an emotion. 183 00:19:53,450 --> 00:19:59,480 It is a way of understanding. Insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. 184 00:20:00,380 --> 00:20:05,630 The beginning of all is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is all. 185 00:20:06,860 --> 00:20:10,490 Or is an intuition for the dignity of all things. 186 00:20:11,000 --> 00:20:15,200 It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine. 187 00:20:16,330 --> 00:20:21,430 What we cannot comprehend by analysis we become aware of in all. 188 00:20:22,820 --> 00:20:27,380 The loss of all he says is the avoidance of insight. 189 00:20:28,410 --> 00:20:34,800 A return to reverence is the first prerequisite for a revival of wisdom. 190 00:20:37,870 --> 00:20:47,440 So now I want to help us think about how we relate to time and how we understand an African relationship to time. 191 00:20:49,730 --> 00:20:55,610 An African relationship to the past is likely to be deeply unhelpful for the historian of late antiquity, 192 00:20:55,940 --> 00:20:58,970 who has an understanding of time firmly fixed in their mind. 193 00:20:59,990 --> 00:21:09,530 African modalities of time and concepts of space mostly resist the linear econometric exactitude of Europe and tends to embrace the polyclinic, 194 00:21:09,740 --> 00:21:19,040 what I might call truly liturgical time, time in which past, present, and future converge, intertwine and communicate. 195 00:21:20,540 --> 00:21:24,380 Dominique Zihan, in his work, notes that for Africans, 196 00:21:24,620 --> 00:21:31,250 time has to do with a succession of generations which face towards the past rather than the future. 197 00:21:32,170 --> 00:21:36,940 The primary orientation is toward the world of the ancestors. 198 00:21:38,410 --> 00:21:45,190 This orientation toward the world of the ancestors is, I suggest, evidence in early African Christian literature. 199 00:21:46,280 --> 00:21:54,019 The next slide. This is an image of me looking at some ruins in Carthage, and feeling that connection to a past, 200 00:21:54,020 --> 00:21:59,150 and wondering in my mind if Augustine or Monica or Perpetua ever looked at this same stone. 201 00:21:59,420 --> 00:22:07,370 And on the next slide. Um, in a baptistry in Carthage about two years ago, um, wondering what that space would have been like. 202 00:22:07,370 --> 00:22:11,780 What sounds, um, it it soaked up who was baptised there. 203 00:22:12,380 --> 00:22:20,290 And on the next slide we see, um, the grandeur at one one time of the site of the martyrdom of, um, not the site, 204 00:22:20,300 --> 00:22:26,390 the site of the burial of Perpetua and Felicity, which had been built upon an altar, was placed there. 205 00:22:26,990 --> 00:22:34,030 Um, but now looks like this. Just completely kind of forgotten, um, and hard to even recognise. 206 00:22:34,040 --> 00:22:39,950 I had to get out of an Uber and walk through bushes to discover where I thought this place was on my map. 207 00:22:40,310 --> 00:22:49,430 Um, to the church in North Africa, particularly in terms of its historic material culture, has been almost completely forgotten. 208 00:22:50,030 --> 00:22:56,840 These are not pilgrimage sites. No one seems to go to them. I found the ditch of dead dogs by this particular site. 209 00:22:57,260 --> 00:23:02,450 Um, and just rubbish everywhere. I mean, I went to the cathedral in Tunisia on the Sunday for mass. 210 00:23:02,750 --> 00:23:06,470 Um, it was not full of Tunisians. 211 00:23:07,040 --> 00:23:10,430 It was full of people from other parts of Africa and other parts of the world. 212 00:23:11,750 --> 00:23:17,360 To the next slide. So this orientation toward the world of the ancestors. 213 00:23:18,320 --> 00:23:22,250 Is, I think, examples in some of the writings of Augustine. 214 00:23:23,510 --> 00:23:35,149 Saint Monica ask Augustine to bury her wherever he wills, but insists that he prays for her soul whenever he is at the altar celebrating mass again. 215 00:23:35,150 --> 00:23:38,510 In book six of Confessions, Augustine writes of his mother, saying. 216 00:23:39,020 --> 00:23:45,860 On one occasion she bought stew and bread and wine to the chapels of the saints, as she used to do in Africa. 217 00:23:46,160 --> 00:23:50,780 At this point they're in Milan, and the gatekeeper to Milan Cathedral, he says, 218 00:23:50,780 --> 00:23:56,030 stopped her when she learned that it was Bishop Ambrose who had forbidden such offerings. 219 00:23:56,270 --> 00:24:05,060 She acquiesced with such obedient devotion that I myself was astounded at how easily she became critical of her own custom, 220 00:24:05,390 --> 00:24:07,280 rather than disagreeing with this ban. 221 00:24:08,300 --> 00:24:17,540 So because those observances were a virtual ancestor festival, very like a non-Christian superstition, she was very glad to give them up, says. 222 00:24:18,500 --> 00:24:22,729 In place of her basket filled with offerings of fruits of the earth she had 223 00:24:22,730 --> 00:24:29,120 learned to offer up at the martyrs chapels a heart filled with pure prayers. 224 00:24:30,640 --> 00:24:34,209 Now, you always have to take what Augustine says, sometimes with a pinch of salt, 225 00:24:34,210 --> 00:24:37,990 because we do know that Monica didn't just give up her traditional practices, 226 00:24:37,990 --> 00:24:44,650 and at times he is deeply embarrassed by the fact that his mother, um, is still doing her very African things. 227 00:24:44,860 --> 00:24:48,850 Meanwhile, he is a bishop is trying to stop these things happening in his diocese. 228 00:24:49,660 --> 00:24:54,520 But we see this also in earlier literature, in the acts of the martyrs Perpetua and Felicity. 229 00:24:55,770 --> 00:25:01,890 Perpetua tells us that whilst they are in prison awaiting martyrdom, she has a number of visions. 230 00:25:02,460 --> 00:25:10,710 Firstly of the tourists, the first of them to die, who she says had been the builder of our strength, possibly their catechist. 231 00:25:11,340 --> 00:25:16,680 And that person speaks to her in a vision, saying, Perpetua, I am waiting for you. 232 00:25:17,990 --> 00:25:21,350 Another night, she has a vision of her brother, democratise, 233 00:25:21,620 --> 00:25:29,720 who had died from cancer when she was seven years old and who most likely died before he was baptised, and she has a vision of him healed. 234 00:25:30,590 --> 00:25:35,390 I saw, she says, democratise, all clean, well-dressed and refreshed. 235 00:25:35,960 --> 00:25:41,930 I saw a scar where the wound had been, and the poor that I had seen before had its rim lowered. 236 00:25:42,650 --> 00:25:47,360 Then I awoke, and I realised that he had been delivered from his suffering. 237 00:25:49,840 --> 00:25:54,340 There are also, of course, countless moments in early Christian hagiography written in Africa. 238 00:25:55,090 --> 00:26:01,210 The upper segment, apart from the writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers in particular The Life of Shanta by Basir, 239 00:26:01,480 --> 00:26:08,500 which clearly shows how the desert is a place in which time present, past and future converge, 240 00:26:08,950 --> 00:26:16,180 where the dead are not resting in peace, but present in the life of the African disciple as guide, 241 00:26:16,420 --> 00:26:23,560 inspiration and challenge, and a demonology in particular which remains prevalent in Black Christianity. 242 00:26:23,830 --> 00:26:26,950 Like Montaigne, ism can be seen early on. 243 00:26:28,450 --> 00:26:37,570 I think it is also true. I want to suggest that the Alexandrian approach to Scripture is also one which takes seriously the voice of the past. 244 00:26:37,870 --> 00:26:42,749 Speaking in the present in a particular way. Lastly, 245 00:26:42,750 --> 00:26:48,120 we might think of the Coptic Orthodox Church having a calendar of 13 months and the calendar 246 00:26:48,120 --> 00:26:54,750 which began on the 29th of August two eight for the year when Diocletian became emperor. 247 00:26:55,620 --> 00:27:00,090 And therefore Coptic time is set within this context of extreme martyrdom. 248 00:27:01,970 --> 00:27:11,420 So what happens when we allow those approaches, the time and space to influence our approach to history and our imaginations? 249 00:27:12,410 --> 00:27:22,490 How is it that Christians in a land evangelised quite late, had the audacity to evangelise a dark continent which had received, 250 00:27:22,670 --> 00:27:29,390 treasured and adorned the light of the gospel with theologians, martyrs, monks and saints for centuries? 251 00:27:31,620 --> 00:27:37,940 Now, I want to be absolutely clear. I think Peter Browne's perception of late antiquity, and we know he did not create that field right, 252 00:27:37,950 --> 00:27:41,340 but he is someone who, um, really, really develops it. 253 00:27:41,910 --> 00:27:47,610 That perception of late antiquity is a particular moment in time is a huge gift to historians. 254 00:27:47,610 --> 00:27:56,700 And of all the historians we have seen. I don't think anyone has helped us to imagine the past in the way in which Peter Brown has Brown's ability to 255 00:27:56,700 --> 00:28:04,379 conjure up our imaginations and to take us to times and places and people that we have never known or seen is, 256 00:28:04,380 --> 00:28:08,310 I think, unsurpassed. I mean, we'll always be indebted to him for that. 257 00:28:09,150 --> 00:28:13,590 But I do think we can ask why Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad. 258 00:28:14,820 --> 00:28:20,160 Is there something there that traps us in binary thought of a particular dimension? 259 00:28:20,730 --> 00:28:24,300 A decline and a fool. Civilisation and its opposite. 260 00:28:24,540 --> 00:28:28,200 Sophistication and barbarism. Christianity and paganism. 261 00:28:28,380 --> 00:28:38,820 Whiteness and its opposite. When in fact, as Brown has shown us at times, the past is much more diverse, much more complicated, much more vibrant. 262 00:28:40,970 --> 00:28:48,720 Next slide, please. And again one more. I want to talk now about Africa as tabula rasa. 263 00:28:49,660 --> 00:28:53,170 Interrogating this idea of indigeneity and the past. 264 00:28:54,380 --> 00:28:59,750 There were two statements that I believe are true when trying to understand early Christianity in Africa. 265 00:29:00,960 --> 00:29:06,060 The first is that we must look for the history of Africa beyond Africa. 266 00:29:07,260 --> 00:29:12,480 The second is that in the history of Christianity, Europe is peripheral to Africa. 267 00:29:14,250 --> 00:29:22,080 That should not be shocking or surprising or in any way controversial, but I often experienced pushback when making this point. 268 00:29:23,080 --> 00:29:32,410 One of the questions I am often faced with in my work is how far south did Christianity go in Africa in late antiquity? 269 00:29:33,330 --> 00:29:39,600 Next slide. I'm often asked what did early Christianity Christians in Africa look like? 270 00:29:40,170 --> 00:29:43,860 How dark were they? How African were they really? 271 00:29:44,850 --> 00:29:51,300 And in a sense, I don't believe this to be a question which concerns a black scholar. 272 00:29:52,080 --> 00:29:55,110 I'm not sure it's a question which concerns me. 273 00:29:56,190 --> 00:30:01,379 But I think of Nubia, that land of dark skinned people. Being one of the world's oldest civilisations, 274 00:30:01,380 --> 00:30:09,510 blackness has still been associated with inherent sinfulness, social undecidability and political threats. 275 00:30:09,750 --> 00:30:14,970 Even in early Christian writings written by Africans, there is anti-Blackness. 276 00:30:15,360 --> 00:30:20,950 So it's not as simple as trying to say that all the early Christians in Africa I'm talking about were black. 277 00:30:20,970 --> 00:30:22,230 That's not what I'm trying to say. 278 00:30:22,980 --> 00:30:31,180 But as a result, Christianity has often been understood as synonymous with European, with progress, with civilisation. 279 00:30:31,200 --> 00:30:40,980 Think Kenneth Clarke, 1969, standing outside Notre Dame, talking about civilisation and the history, um, of Europe and Christianity in particular. 280 00:30:42,160 --> 00:30:47,360 Next slide. When I used the language early African Christianity. 281 00:30:47,840 --> 00:30:49,940 I am not talking about blackness. 282 00:30:50,600 --> 00:30:59,990 Rather, I am talking about the idea of a shared heritage, a connection to the land, an understanding of belonging which may well be shaped by food, 283 00:31:00,200 --> 00:31:09,920 music, language, spirituality, a proximity to martyrdom, all of which, and to date, our relationship to blackness as Africans. 284 00:31:11,780 --> 00:31:19,540 So if there is in Africa a hesitation to embrace blackness, which is particularly often spoken about in relation to North Africa, 285 00:31:19,690 --> 00:31:24,940 and how North Africans of today see themselves, if there is that hesitation to embrace blackness. 286 00:31:25,090 --> 00:31:34,660 This is because blackness does not belong in Africa, and therefore does not belong in an African understanding of the Christian past in Africa. 287 00:31:35,960 --> 00:31:38,540 As we can see, if you want to use one particular term, 288 00:31:38,870 --> 00:31:47,300 is just one example of a contemporary appellation that seeks to understand African cultures by their unity and similarities. 289 00:31:47,870 --> 00:31:58,910 It offers possibilities that include solidarity among those who were born in African provinces under Roman rule, but who saw themselves as distinct. 290 00:32:00,550 --> 00:32:06,790 A letter attributed to Marcus Aurelius speaks of an African man, but with little of the African in him. 291 00:32:07,270 --> 00:32:15,250 In reference to Clodius Albinus. They're not sure whether that letter is actually written by Marcus Aurelius, but it's an interesting idea. 292 00:32:15,580 --> 00:32:18,790 What does he mean? Whoever that author is of the African in him. 293 00:32:18,790 --> 00:32:23,300 Little of that being that. And so in Coming to know Africa. 294 00:32:24,400 --> 00:32:34,060 Most scholars simply come to a deeper understanding of the ignorance of the continent, rather than any truth about its contribution to global history. 295 00:32:35,170 --> 00:32:39,700 Next slide. Each car in his seminal work What Is History? 296 00:32:40,270 --> 00:32:49,090 Says that history cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing. 297 00:32:50,230 --> 00:32:59,110 Now, of course, this presents an issue for much of the writing of early Christian history, because it has not seen the African as fully human. 298 00:33:00,220 --> 00:33:05,500 How can you understand the minds of the people you are writing about if you don't really understand them to be people? 299 00:33:06,650 --> 00:33:13,610 Olivet. Otel writes of how the connections between various stories of people in Africa have been forgotten 300 00:33:14,000 --> 00:33:19,790 because physical subjugation was accompanied not only by a rewriting of the oppressive history, 301 00:33:20,330 --> 00:33:23,420 but also by the shaping of the story of the oppressed. 302 00:33:24,560 --> 00:33:26,540 Speaking of Cedric Robinson's work, 303 00:33:26,600 --> 00:33:34,340 he continues that Robinson notes that the destruction of the African past was a process that went through various stages. 304 00:33:35,060 --> 00:33:41,360 For example, naming played a crucial role in the process of erasure, the construct of the Negro. 305 00:33:41,570 --> 00:33:52,580 Unlike the terms African more or easier suggested no situated ness in time, that is, history or space that is, ethno or political geography. 306 00:33:53,450 --> 00:34:05,360 The Negro had no civilisation, no culture, no religion, no history, no place, and finally no humanity that might command consideration. 307 00:34:07,770 --> 00:34:16,680 Now, it's not just historians and academics who get themselves into this particular view of Africa being a place of nothingness. 308 00:34:17,130 --> 00:34:27,030 Um. Former president of France Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking in Dakar in 2007, described Africa as a continent that has not fully entered into history, 309 00:34:27,810 --> 00:34:34,830 whose people live in an imaginary world devoid of human adventure or the idea of progress, 310 00:34:35,310 --> 00:34:40,290 wallowing in a static order where everything seems to have been written beforehand, 311 00:34:40,710 --> 00:34:49,110 and who need to realise that the golden age that Africa is forever recalling will not return because it has never existed. 312 00:34:52,030 --> 00:35:01,990 Africa, then, is seen as a tabula rasa, a continent in which there is nothing innately civilised or profound or sacred or theological. 313 00:35:03,090 --> 00:35:09,750 Edward Gibbon when speaking of, uh, early Christianity in Africa and particularly speaking about monasticism. 314 00:35:10,150 --> 00:35:14,580 Uh, we know that Gibbon, you know, attributed the whole of the fall of the Empire to Christianity. 315 00:35:14,580 --> 00:35:16,920 Right. And therefore doesn't see anything really good in it. 316 00:35:17,310 --> 00:35:26,220 Um, but he does speak of the swarms of monks who arose from the Nile and overspread and darkened the face of the Christian world. 317 00:35:27,060 --> 00:35:30,450 Hegel lights that Africa is no historical part of the world. 318 00:35:30,810 --> 00:35:37,810 It has no movement or development to exhibit. Professor Hooch of a roper in 19. 319 00:35:38,230 --> 00:35:42,600 That's the car. We'll go in again. Each calls a grand. 320 00:35:42,630 --> 00:35:48,420 Great granddaughter has also written a book and following up calls question what is history asking? 321 00:35:48,420 --> 00:35:51,989 What is history now? Um, I won't talk about that particular book, but it's great. 322 00:35:51,990 --> 00:35:56,319 There's a lot in there that I recommend to you. Edward Gibbon again. 323 00:35:56,320 --> 00:35:57,120 Another one. There we are. 324 00:35:58,200 --> 00:36:08,700 Whoever opened 1963 famously said, perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach, but at the present there is none. 325 00:36:09,450 --> 00:36:17,970 There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The West is darkness, and darkness is not the subject of history. 326 00:36:20,210 --> 00:36:25,280 And he repeated this statement in 1969, labelling the entire continent as UN historic. 327 00:36:27,320 --> 00:36:30,890 Now, we might think that that's all in the past, but nope. 328 00:36:31,160 --> 00:36:36,710 In 2020, David Starkey remarked on live TV that slavery was not genocide. 329 00:36:37,010 --> 00:36:41,150 Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain. 330 00:36:41,450 --> 00:36:49,100 An awful lot of them survived. Professor Nigel Biggar, fellow priest, retired professor of this university, 331 00:36:49,640 --> 00:36:57,140 says in his most recent work that the vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire. 332 00:36:57,620 --> 00:37:01,160 And whatever racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit. 333 00:37:02,000 --> 00:37:07,520 In North America, Australasia and Africa, the policies of the Imperial government in London, 334 00:37:07,820 --> 00:37:10,730 and consequently those of colonial governments beneath it, 335 00:37:11,060 --> 00:37:18,590 were based on the Christian and Enlightenment conviction of the basic human equality of members of all races, 336 00:37:18,980 --> 00:37:28,430 and driven by the human and humanitarian desire to enable less advantaged, less privileged peoples to survive, develop and flourish. 337 00:37:29,610 --> 00:37:34,240 I leave no bigger statement to your own judgement. Go on more time. 338 00:37:37,180 --> 00:37:41,050 So what's going on? How is it that people who are. 339 00:37:42,050 --> 00:37:46,400 Intelligent. Who are people who are spending time researching the past, 340 00:37:46,580 --> 00:37:54,230 can have this view of an entire continent as this un historic empty thing, void of any value or history. 341 00:37:55,830 --> 00:37:58,709 It's interesting that this really does come in to buttress sticks in many ways, 342 00:37:58,710 --> 00:38:04,920 and there's a very deliberate, I think, attempt to try and separate Africa from its African theologians. 343 00:38:05,640 --> 00:38:06,630 The next slide. 344 00:38:07,850 --> 00:38:18,200 T.R. Glover, in his 1931 introduction to two of Two Italians works, is absolutely clear in stating that Tertullian is a Latin of Africa. 345 00:38:19,170 --> 00:38:23,970 It was a Roman Africa that produced these men. They were not moles nor Negroes. 346 00:38:24,240 --> 00:38:30,930 As an innocent African of America had supposed. Their Carthage owed more to Julius Caesar than to Dido. 347 00:38:31,650 --> 00:38:36,720 Roman Africa was a long way from the eastern world, separated by sea and desert. 348 00:38:37,110 --> 00:38:41,280 But it is not far from Italy. And the genius of the people is Latin. 349 00:38:41,700 --> 00:38:52,720 But with a difference. The colonist acquires sometimes a new accent by crossing the sea, or retains an old one, which later on may seem old fashioned. 350 00:38:53,470 --> 00:38:58,900 The new environment induces a new mind, which is very often really the old mind of the race, 351 00:38:59,080 --> 00:39:04,059 fertilise and quickened by new experience and new problems that may have been 352 00:39:04,060 --> 00:39:08,290 Moorish or Punic blood on recorded in the veins of some of these great men, 353 00:39:08,710 --> 00:39:12,670 but it is not necessary to postulate it on the ground of racial characteristics. 354 00:39:13,090 --> 00:39:21,430 For when we dog metaphors upon race and its types, we strayed into an area ill explored and very treacherous for those who guess. 355 00:39:24,400 --> 00:39:26,890 So how African is African enough? 356 00:39:28,780 --> 00:39:38,680 No one asked this question of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, or Saint Aubyn, or Columba, or Palladio, or Patrick or David. 357 00:39:39,690 --> 00:39:45,540 These are saints of the British Isles Scottish saints English saints Welsh saints. 358 00:39:46,980 --> 00:39:50,940 Not only in terms of devotion, but in terms of ownership. 359 00:39:52,160 --> 00:39:57,710 And that is largely because of their relationship to the land, but also due to the strength of their cult. 360 00:39:58,940 --> 00:40:04,160 These are rarely defined as the saints of Roman Britain or of North England. 361 00:40:05,550 --> 00:40:12,630 So one is encouraged often to look deep into subsaharan Africa for evidence of indigenous African Christianity, 362 00:40:13,200 --> 00:40:18,840 for something that will validate someone saying that early Christianity is indigenous to Africa. 363 00:40:19,860 --> 00:40:23,160 But I want to suggest that it would be wiser to look around the whole world. 364 00:40:24,140 --> 00:40:33,620 Look at Oxford and Cambridge. Well, any university with a Christian foundation and you see something of early Christianity in Africa's legacy. 365 00:40:34,920 --> 00:40:42,320 The next slide. Look at Westminster Abbey or any British cathedral with a monastic foundation, 366 00:40:42,740 --> 00:40:47,960 and you see the fruit of African Christianity's greatest export monasticism. 367 00:40:48,980 --> 00:40:52,750 Next slide. So we have to look beyond Africa. 368 00:40:53,580 --> 00:40:57,690 For evidence of early African Christian history. 369 00:40:58,770 --> 00:41:06,480 When we hear the names John Cassian or Jerome or Benedict or Maximus the Confessor, we might not think Africa, but we should. 370 00:41:06,990 --> 00:41:16,500 Don't. Cassian would not have had a connection to to the east and the West and the monastic link if he hadn't spent time in the deserts of Africa. 371 00:41:16,890 --> 00:41:23,310 Jerome is the same. Benedict and his rule are unimaginable without the African desert. 372 00:41:23,700 --> 00:41:30,780 Maximus the Confessor writes his mystical genes based on the architecture of African churches. 373 00:41:31,440 --> 00:41:38,909 The Cappadocia is. Saint Basil the Great's paternal grandmother is also, of course, Gregory of Nyssa. 374 00:41:38,910 --> 00:41:48,360 His grandmother Macrina the Elder, who was catechist by Gregory the Wonder Worker, who was a pupil of origin of Alexandria. 375 00:41:49,340 --> 00:41:57,710 So we might think Constantinople and the copied notions, but their lineage is coming out of Africa. 376 00:41:58,990 --> 00:42:05,140 And it's interesting to me as well. In this year, when we celebrate the 1,500th anniversary of Nicaea. 377 00:42:06,060 --> 00:42:13,950 How much or how little Africa will be mentioned in celebrations of that council. 378 00:42:14,870 --> 00:42:23,840 So many of the councils and the creeds originate because of African controversies, and are settled because of the triumph of an African orthodoxy. 379 00:42:24,680 --> 00:42:31,520 It's really difficult for me to imagine Orthodoxy having one without Athanasius 380 00:42:32,060 --> 00:42:36,950 and other people who contributed so powerfully to those councils and those creeds. 381 00:42:38,990 --> 00:42:45,830 So. What I hope to have shown in this lecture is the simple fact that if Africa has 382 00:42:45,830 --> 00:42:50,360 a place in the study of late antiquity and patristic and Christian theology, 383 00:42:50,930 --> 00:42:56,430 then that place deserves to be central, not peripheral. It deserves to be explicit. 384 00:42:57,510 --> 00:43:01,530 Africa must place itself in the history of Christianity on its own terms, 385 00:43:01,890 --> 00:43:10,320 and in a way which refuses to find its Christian credentials in its Roman or European identity or its proximity to blackness, 386 00:43:10,830 --> 00:43:15,540 but simply because of its shared relationship with a continent and the way that continent and its 387 00:43:15,540 --> 00:43:21,360 people have shaped and continued to shape the earliest manifestations of the Christian faith. 388 00:43:24,110 --> 00:43:27,770 The transatlantic slave trade was more than an imperial vanity project. 389 00:43:28,850 --> 00:43:36,980 It was a theological enterprise which demanded Africa be stripped of its patristic grandeur and its early Christian credentials. 390 00:43:38,090 --> 00:43:42,980 This is why Christianity without Christ and an ahistorical Christianity, 391 00:43:43,640 --> 00:43:52,879 whose story is only ever half told by those who are convinced that the past flatters, then will always stand feckless in the face of those who, 392 00:43:52,880 --> 00:43:59,120 in contemporary society, either as bloodthirsty patriarchs or petulant presidents, 393 00:43:59,540 --> 00:44:06,710 wished to use it as a weapon to invade neighbouring sovereign territories or help make countries great again. 394 00:44:08,240 --> 00:44:11,780 And this is why a truly historical Christianity is always inconvenient, 395 00:44:11,780 --> 00:44:19,819 always sits uneasily within the structures of power because it has its eyes on its founder and those who, 396 00:44:19,820 --> 00:44:25,670 in its earliest incarnation, took the economic demands of the gospel seriously. 397 00:44:26,640 --> 00:44:37,690 The call to lay down one's life. The call to become like a grain of wheat which falls to the earth and dies but bears much fruit. 398 00:44:39,060 --> 00:44:45,870 Early Christianity in Africa knew what it meant to lay down power and privilege and riches. 399 00:44:46,140 --> 00:44:54,660 Rather than storing those things up. Which is why martyrdom is such a key feature of early African Christianity. 400 00:44:56,970 --> 00:45:03,810 Now Augustine in the City of God writes. How can I tell of the rest of creation, with all its beauty and utility? 401 00:45:04,200 --> 00:45:09,450 Which the divine goodness has given to man to please his eye and serve his purposes? 402 00:45:09,780 --> 00:45:13,890 Condemned though he is, and held into these labours and miseries. 403 00:45:15,000 --> 00:45:19,500 Shall I speak of the manifold and various loveliness of the sky and earth and sea? 404 00:45:19,800 --> 00:45:27,570 Of the plentiful supply and wonderful qualities of the light of sun, moon and stars, of the shade of trees, 405 00:45:27,870 --> 00:45:34,890 of the colours and perfume, of flowers, of the multitude of birds, all differing in plumage and in song. 406 00:45:35,960 --> 00:45:41,810 Of the variety of animals of which the smallest in size are often the most wonderful. 407 00:45:44,120 --> 00:45:50,270 I have no idea which birds Augusten may have had in mind, but it may well have been the swift. 408 00:45:51,610 --> 00:45:56,730 Swift's winter in North Africa and breed in the UK. 409 00:45:56,740 --> 00:46:05,440 Summer, like the recently rewarded white storks in London, who also decided to choose North Africa as their holiday home. 410 00:46:06,310 --> 00:46:11,470 The swifts remind us that Africa is not all that far away. 411 00:46:12,830 --> 00:46:16,460 A bit like the London Wall or the Emperor Severus. 412 00:46:17,300 --> 00:46:24,860 They remind us in the song that they sing in our British skies is dependent upon their spending time in another land. 413 00:46:25,340 --> 00:46:34,200 The continent, which for so long was seen as dark. What I do know is that I must honour the distance between myself and the swift. 414 00:46:35,430 --> 00:46:41,580 The truth may well be that because they choose to dwell so close to us in urban centres, 415 00:46:42,420 --> 00:46:48,240 the Sheriff may well know more about me and the continent of Africa than I may ever know about it, 416 00:46:49,140 --> 00:46:53,280 and it may well consider itself an indigenous British bird. 417 00:46:54,780 --> 00:46:58,020 When people think of the kangaroo, they immediately think of Australia. 418 00:46:58,620 --> 00:47:05,160 Absolutely no one thinks of New Guinea. Yeah, the kangaroo is native, is indigenous to both. 419 00:47:07,580 --> 00:47:15,560 It may well be that the Christian approach to history needs to share more with the vocation, the true vocation of the theologian. 420 00:47:17,050 --> 00:47:23,500 If Africa is anything, it is, I think, reverence for the other. 421 00:47:24,870 --> 00:47:35,890 Reverence for wonder. Reverence for the inherent spirituality of people and animals and places and creation. 422 00:47:36,850 --> 00:47:40,090 Reverence and respect for the incoherence of the past. 423 00:47:41,210 --> 00:47:46,610 It seeks not to narrate the past as something I own or get to sum up, 424 00:47:47,420 --> 00:47:53,630 but rather to seek the past blessing as that which hovers incessantly over the present. 425 00:47:54,870 --> 00:48:06,000 With a gift and the message. And in the end, a security for me is an acceptance that the narrative is never mind, never yours. 426 00:48:06,990 --> 00:48:19,800 It is surrender to the sovereignty of the Almighty over the past, present, and future in which we seek to discern the truth which is the voice of God. 427 00:48:21,410 --> 00:48:21,920 Thank you.