[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] If you separate.
I'm Malcolm Evans, principal of the college, and it's with great pleasure.
I welcome you here this evening for the Nichols lecture.
I pause because we were having a little bit debate, trying to work out precisely how long the Nicholls lecture has been taking place,
and we've had the privilege and pleasure of hosting it here at Regent's.
We have decided this is in the environs of 25 years, as far as I'm concerned.
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.
Um, and this is against that background that it does indeed give me great pleasure
to welcome you all here for yet another instalment within that tradition.
It's also a great delight and a pleasure to welcome this evening's speaker, Gerald,
who is has many contacts with the with the college and has a an honorary fellow position with us.
So it's a multiple pleasure to welcome him here to give this lecture here this evening.
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.
Um, I willingly, um, pass it over to others.
But I do just want to say that we do very much value this collection.
This connection with the with the with the trustees, with the lecture series.
And that we do hope to continue to work together to make it flourish and prosper.
There have been many great lectures within this series. I'm sure we will have another tonight,
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.
So thank you all very much indeed. Thank you.
Thank you very much indeed. And it's a great pleasure to be here, uh, once again at Regis Park, Regent's Park College.
My name is David Howard. I'm a chair of the David Nichols Memorial Trust.
And, um, we are delighted every year to have the annual lecture.
David Nichols, uh, many of you will know, was a very much respected local priest.
He was, uh, a renowned theologian and radical theologian and political scientist,
um, and, and also an expert, particularly Haiti and Trinidad and Caribbean Studies.
Uh, the trust was set up when he, uh, passed away, um, in honour really to celebrate his polymath.
His energy is polymath. Tendency of just enjoying life, exploring whole range of ideas, uh, being quite provocative.
Uh, many of you will know that there were a few letters written to the Times Independent by Archdeacon Palin.
Archdeacon Paley, uh, who was seen to be a minister in South Africa.
It was actually the parrot of David Nichols, who would be writing with the help of David Nichols.
He was a great character around Oxford who was a maverick, uh, and just a really, really lovely person to know.
So it's in his honour. We have an annual lecture which is here tonight.
We also have the David Nichols collection of books, which we are replenishing and refreshing.
Uh, actually, as we noted, our librarian is here tonight, and she's doing a wonderful job, uh,
keeping that collection very much attuned to today's needs, but also wonderful, uh, past records, um, from David's work.
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.
So we've now entered the sort of a sports event, a relay and tag team and that sort of, uh, that tradition.
I will hand over to Anthony will introduce Father Gerald.
I would also say that after this reception, after this lecture, there's a reception over in the college room.
Uh, and so do come and join us there. And those who want to stay.
There's a dinner and a formal dinner at college. Uh, £10 per person.
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.
So do join us if you'd like to. Dinner afterwards.
And I'll be walking around with yellow tickets and contactless machines to, uh, to help you join us.
So over to Professor Anthony. Ready? Yeah.
It's a great pleasure to introduce my friend, Father Gerald Robinson Brown.
He is a distinguished Anglican priest, scholar,
and writer known for his contribution to theology and his advocacy for LGBTQ plus inclusion within the church.
He currently serves as the Vicar of Saint James Church in um, the Town and Cardiff.
Okay, now I've got some other stuff to say about, and I'm not going to say because that's just boring stuff.
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.
As only good friends can do what I call soft ritual humiliation, sir.
So I first met him when he was 14 years old. And it was a skinny little youth.
Quite frankly, you know, young filled out that much either. Well, obviously I have, but he asked,
and it was a question of a circuit service in the Methodist Church in Greenwood Methodist Church in in west London and Ealing.
And I was the guest preacher, and it was a mutual friend of ours who was being admitted to the office of local preacher.
So I turned up to do the preaching to. I think I did not preach a bit.
And then afterwards this old black Caribbean woman came to me and said, preacher man.
I said, yeah, and she says, I want you to have a word with me. Um, if you can help me.
She says, I've got my nephew. That's it.
And you turn around. And it was literally current underneath her skirt and said, hey boy, come on now.
And she grabbed him and pulled him out and said, now. This young man wants to be a preacher.
She says. I'm not convinced about that. But if you're a preacher that you go talk to him.
And she walked off and left me and drove at you, looking at each other, thinking, so what exactly do we do now?
Okay, well, I guess that we should go have a conversation. I probably spoke.
Should he have said he was 14 years old? I knew he wanted to be a minister now.
At the time, I remember saying to him what sensible 14 year old wants to be a minister, you know?
I'm like, you should be out romping with your friends, man. Basically, I could go get a life.
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.
I still want to be a minister. And so we have journeyed ever since.
I did not imagine that at that point that skinny youth would turn up looking like a super Catholic.
But hey, all of us are on a journey.
The ritual humiliation of upon. It has been an immense joy to see him grow into the man he was always destined to be.
And so it's a great honour. To say that he is one of my mentees.
So all his great attributes are the ones I've given him.
Hahaha. And all this fall sovereign talent of our entirely of his own making.
Amen. So please let us put our hands together and welcome our distinguished speaker this year.
Oh, thank you so much. It's a Tuesday today. It's.
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.
Thank you for for your wonderful and very embarrassing introduction.
I hope that one day I get my own back, but I can't imagine it happening anytime soon.
Um. I obviously obviously give this lecture as we together on a David Nicholls.
But I do need to mention, um, one of my friends without whom I would not also be here.
Um, that's the right reverend, um, Keith McGlynn, who passed away not all that long ago and who passed away suddenly,
but who for me was a very close friend, a great, um, encourager,
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,
and so I'd never been in this space with him before. But he is, um, someone for whom I'm deeply grateful.
The first slide on, uh, PowerPoint.
As a young child, you've already heard that it wasn't exactly ordinary.
Um, but I was also obsessed with learning the names of birds and birds of prey in particular.
I spent much of my childhood as an amateur ornithologist at the West London Wetland Centre in barns.
So when I wasn't in church under my grandmother's wing, there I was looking at creation.
To this day,
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.
And today, I am still enamoured by what I consider the very first sign of summer.
When staring high into the sky, I hear the sound and spot a sight of my absolute favourite bird, the swift.
Swifts spend the first 2 to 3 years of their lives in constant flight until they find a mate.
They eat, drink, bathe, mate and sleep in the air on the wing.
The swift will only land to nest and to die.
They are the fastest birds in flight, flying at 69mph and migrate 3400 miles per year.
So they are not my favourite bird for nothing. Now, this might seem a rather bizarre and obscure place to begin tonight's lecture.
But imagine if the history of the sky were written by chickens or geese or ostriches.
Yes, birds of a feather with the swift, but very different perspectives from land, from sea and from air.
Different diets, different breeding patterns, different ways of relating.
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,
because it is the death of history to insist on one sole interpretation of the facts, whatever those are.
This is something the historian Peter Brown remarks on beautifully in his recent memoirs, journeys of the mind A Life in History,
in which he says the more I read, the more I happened to be impressed by the diversity of Christian views.
Far from following the fate of a single, unambiguous line of Christian doctrine from which discordant voices were excluded as heretical,
as extreme or downright dotty, I found that I was in a world of many voices.
To read myself into early Christian texts with an eye to their diversity.
Century by century and region by region was like learning a strange new language or picking up an exotic tune.
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.
Patristic like birdwatching or the world of late antiquity, might not appear as an obvious interest to a young black boy from west London.
Let's still one who back then knew nothing of Anglo Catholicism and was firmly situated in Methodism.
But I can still remember the first time I encountered the non-Western church.
When I went to Cambridge at the age of 18 to train for ordination at Wesley House,
and discovered the riches that waited for me in the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies Library, which was resident at Wesley House.
It smelt different. Was quieter,
had Ikon situated amongst the bookshelves and every now and then accommodated
a random to us at least bid it high a lark from somewhere around the world.
I remember the SSI vote on FM the Syrian and how I fell in love with his theology.
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.
And yet Africa remained in the entirety of my theological education.
Unspoken. This is why I want to go to the next slide figure.
So how is it that Africa can just be silent in one study of Christian theology,
not just in Cambridge, but also in Durham, also in other places in Cardiff where I've studied?
Africa basically did not really present itself as of any importance.
And yet Africa has been the home of some of Christianity's most important texts,
not only the acts of the martyrs and the writings of the saints, but the scriptures themselves.
The earliest of the four Gospels bears the name of Mark, the Apostle to Africa.
And there are, of course, some very notable documents, the first three texts ever to be written in the history of Christianity on prayer.
All are written by Africans Tertullian, Cyprian, and origin.
All are expositions on the Lord's Prayer and the centrality of that prayer to early Christian life in Africa.
We see the Codex signing Atticus, the oldest complete version of the New Testament discovered in Sinai.
On the next slide, we see the Codex Syriac Castine. Atticus.
Uh, unlike the old the other, uh, manuscript, this one is in Syriac.
The other one was in Greek. This is the oldest translation of the Bible into any language discovered by two sisters from Cambridge.
Um, in an amazing, uh, encounter in voyage, which is written by Janet Wysocki, is called the Sisters of Sinai.
And then, of course, we have the Nag Hammadi codices,
and also the oldest copy of the Book of Psalms, all made and preserved on the continent of Africa,
and the craftmanship and style of many other texts and material culture shape British Christianity through things like the Book of Kells.
Um, this is a manuscript, uh, which was discovered in a bog in Ireland.
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,
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.
So there is this connection between Africa and Ireland which I've written on before.
And on the next slide.
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,
which also again, like the colour blue and other colours specifically used in this manuscript show a link to Africa.
So the high crosses of Ireland, even the British liturgy that we use in our churches, um,
it's shaped some of the things that we say and do in church are shaped by early African Christianity.
The term late antiquity was not always used as a term to define that period of transition,
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.
Centuries. Other terms such as late Roman, early Byzantine, and early medieval were often used to describe that particular milieu.
Yet, despite the field of Late Antiquity expanding to include the third and the eighth centuries,
it has often neglected to engage seriously, either with Africa in the earliest years of that period or with Islam in the latest years.
And this has led, I think, to a general lack of attention to what were often self-defined as non Roman cultures,
even if they existed under a Roman Empire.
So one might suggest that it is this clash of cultures, these different identities,
the emergence of new ethnic groups within the population of the Roman Empire that leads to Roman imperial power being under threat.
But often the interrogation of that conversation fails to pay attention to Africa in particular.
Now, I want to argue that on the whole, the approach to Africa's place in late antiquity has been unimaginative,
ignorant and lacking in reverence for the people of Africa.
I want to invoke here Edmund Burke and his notion of the moral imagination.
What role do our imaginations have to play in our writing of history?
For Burke, the imagination had been given to humankind by God to perceive the divinely infused meaning imbued in the entirety of the cosmos.
And it is crucial for us to consider whether or not wonder and awe in our approach to the past have a
role in helping us to critique and consider our posture to the world or worlds that came before us.
As a Christian theologian, I confess to a preaching all study, and maybe this is a flaw as a spiritual discipline.
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.
I am mindful here the Dominican fire Antonin Gilbert such to launch,
who once remarked that study is a prayer to the truth because it is both desire and an invocation of the truth.
But if study is a afraid of the truth and the desire for an invocation of the truth,
then we have to ask ourselves, I think, as historians and theologians.
The question Pilate asked Christ, what is truth?
What is the historian's relationship with what she discerns to be the facts of the past?
Next slide. And when. Morgan. One of my greatest influences is someone called Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel,
who speaks profoundly about awe and the kind of approach that might inspire in us towards what we understand in the world.
When we think of Africa and our relationship to this place, not just this part of it,
but the whole of the continent, what role does all and imagination and reverence have to play?
Next slide. Bye bye. Heschel says, or is more than an emotion.
It is a way of understanding. Insight into a meaning greater than ourselves.
The beginning of all is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is all.
Or is an intuition for the dignity of all things.
It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine.
What we cannot comprehend by analysis we become aware of in all.
The loss of all he says is the avoidance of insight.
A return to reverence is the first prerequisite for a revival of wisdom.
So now I want to help us think about how we relate to time and how we understand an African relationship to time.
An African relationship to the past is likely to be deeply unhelpful for the historian of late antiquity,
who has an understanding of time firmly fixed in their mind.
African modalities of time and concepts of space mostly resist the linear econometric exactitude of Europe and tends to embrace the polyclinic,
what I might call truly liturgical time, time in which past, present, and future converge, intertwine and communicate.
Dominique Zihan, in his work, notes that for Africans,
time has to do with a succession of generations which face towards the past rather than the future.
The primary orientation is toward the world of the ancestors.
This orientation toward the world of the ancestors is, I suggest, evidence in early African Christian literature.
The next slide. This is an image of me looking at some ruins in Carthage, and feeling that connection to a past,
and wondering in my mind if Augustine or Monica or Perpetua ever looked at this same stone.
And on the next slide. Um, in a baptistry in Carthage about two years ago, um, wondering what that space would have been like.
What sounds, um, it it soaked up who was baptised there.
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,
the site of the burial of Perpetua and Felicity, which had been built upon an altar, was placed there.
Um, but now looks like this. Just completely kind of forgotten, um, and hard to even recognise.
I had to get out of an Uber and walk through bushes to discover where I thought this place was on my map.
Um, to the church in North Africa, particularly in terms of its historic material culture, has been almost completely forgotten.
These are not pilgrimage sites. No one seems to go to them. I found the ditch of dead dogs by this particular site.
Um, and just rubbish everywhere. I mean, I went to the cathedral in Tunisia on the Sunday for mass.
Um, it was not full of Tunisians.
It was full of people from other parts of Africa and other parts of the world.
To the next slide. So this orientation toward the world of the ancestors.
Is, I think, examples in some of the writings of Augustine.
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.
In book six of Confessions, Augustine writes of his mother, saying.
On one occasion she bought stew and bread and wine to the chapels of the saints, as she used to do in Africa.
At this point they're in Milan, and the gatekeeper to Milan Cathedral, he says,
stopped her when she learned that it was Bishop Ambrose who had forbidden such offerings.
She acquiesced with such obedient devotion that I myself was astounded at how easily she became critical of her own custom,
rather than disagreeing with this ban.
So because those observances were a virtual ancestor festival, very like a non-Christian superstition, she was very glad to give them up, says.
In place of her basket filled with offerings of fruits of the earth she had
learned to offer up at the martyrs chapels a heart filled with pure prayers.
Now, you always have to take what Augustine says, sometimes with a pinch of salt,
because we do know that Monica didn't just give up her traditional practices,
and at times he is deeply embarrassed by the fact that his mother, um, is still doing her very African things.
Meanwhile, he is a bishop is trying to stop these things happening in his diocese.
But we see this also in earlier literature, in the acts of the martyrs Perpetua and Felicity.
Perpetua tells us that whilst they are in prison awaiting martyrdom, she has a number of visions.
Firstly of the tourists, the first of them to die, who she says had been the builder of our strength, possibly their catechist.
And that person speaks to her in a vision, saying, Perpetua, I am waiting for you.
Another night, she has a vision of her brother, democratise,
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.
I saw, she says, democratise, all clean, well-dressed and refreshed.
I saw a scar where the wound had been, and the poor that I had seen before had its rim lowered.
Then I awoke, and I realised that he had been delivered from his suffering.
There are also, of course, countless moments in early Christian hagiography written in Africa.
The upper segment, apart from the writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers in particular The Life of Shanta by Basir,
which clearly shows how the desert is a place in which time present, past and future converge,
where the dead are not resting in peace, but present in the life of the African disciple as guide,
inspiration and challenge, and a demonology in particular which remains prevalent in Black Christianity.
Like Montaigne, ism can be seen early on.
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.
Speaking in the present in a particular way. Lastly,
we might think of the Coptic Orthodox Church having a calendar of 13 months and the calendar
which began on the 29th of August two eight for the year when Diocletian became emperor.
And therefore Coptic time is set within this context of extreme martyrdom.
So what happens when we allow those approaches, the time and space to influence our approach to history and our imaginations?
How is it that Christians in a land evangelised quite late, had the audacity to evangelise a dark continent which had received,
treasured and adorned the light of the gospel with theologians, martyrs, monks and saints for centuries?
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,
but he is someone who, um, really, really develops it.
That perception of late antiquity is a particular moment in time is a huge gift to historians.
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
conjure up our imaginations and to take us to times and places and people that we have never known or seen is,
I think, unsurpassed. I mean, we'll always be indebted to him for that.
But I do think we can ask why Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad.
Is there something there that traps us in binary thought of a particular dimension?
A decline and a fool. Civilisation and its opposite.
Sophistication and barbarism. Christianity and paganism.
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.
Next slide, please. And again one more. I want to talk now about Africa as tabula rasa.
Interrogating this idea of indigeneity and the past.
There were two statements that I believe are true when trying to understand early Christianity in Africa.
The first is that we must look for the history of Africa beyond Africa.
The second is that in the history of Christianity, Europe is peripheral to Africa.
That should not be shocking or surprising or in any way controversial, but I often experienced pushback when making this point.
One of the questions I am often faced with in my work is how far south did Christianity go in Africa in late antiquity?
Next slide. I'm often asked what did early Christianity Christians in Africa look like?
How dark were they? How African were they really?
And in a sense, I don't believe this to be a question which concerns a black scholar.
I'm not sure it's a question which concerns me.
But I think of Nubia, that land of dark skinned people. Being one of the world's oldest civilisations,
blackness has still been associated with inherent sinfulness, social undecidability and political threats.
Even in early Christian writings written by Africans, there is anti-Blackness.
So it's not as simple as trying to say that all the early Christians in Africa I'm talking about were black.
That's not what I'm trying to say.
But as a result, Christianity has often been understood as synonymous with European, with progress, with civilisation.
Think Kenneth Clarke, 1969, standing outside Notre Dame, talking about civilisation and the history, um, of Europe and Christianity in particular.
Next slide. When I used the language early African Christianity.
I am not talking about blackness.
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,
music, language, spirituality, a proximity to martyrdom, all of which, and to date, our relationship to blackness as Africans.
So if there is in Africa a hesitation to embrace blackness, which is particularly often spoken about in relation to North Africa,
and how North Africans of today see themselves, if there is that hesitation to embrace blackness.
This is because blackness does not belong in Africa, and therefore does not belong in an African understanding of the Christian past in Africa.
As we can see, if you want to use one particular term,
is just one example of a contemporary appellation that seeks to understand African cultures by their unity and similarities.
It offers possibilities that include solidarity among those who were born in African provinces under Roman rule, but who saw themselves as distinct.
A letter attributed to Marcus Aurelius speaks of an African man, but with little of the African in him.
In reference to Clodius Albinus. They're not sure whether that letter is actually written by Marcus Aurelius, but it's an interesting idea.
What does he mean? Whoever that author is of the African in him.
Little of that being that. And so in Coming to know Africa.
Most scholars simply come to a deeper understanding of the ignorance of the continent, rather than any truth about its contribution to global history.
Next slide. Each car in his seminal work What Is History?
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.
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.
How can you understand the minds of the people you are writing about if you don't really understand them to be people?
Olivet. Otel writes of how the connections between various stories of people in Africa have been forgotten
because physical subjugation was accompanied not only by a rewriting of the oppressive history,
but also by the shaping of the story of the oppressed.
Speaking of Cedric Robinson's work,
he continues that Robinson notes that the destruction of the African past was a process that went through various stages.
For example, naming played a crucial role in the process of erasure, the construct of the Negro.
Unlike the terms African more or easier suggested no situated ness in time, that is, history or space that is, ethno or political geography.
The Negro had no civilisation, no culture, no religion, no history, no place, and finally no humanity that might command consideration.
Now, it's not just historians and academics who get themselves into this particular view of Africa being a place of nothingness.
Um. Former president of France Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking in Dakar in 2007, described Africa as a continent that has not fully entered into history,
whose people live in an imaginary world devoid of human adventure or the idea of progress,
wallowing in a static order where everything seems to have been written beforehand,
and who need to realise that the golden age that Africa is forever recalling will not return because it has never existed.
Africa, then, is seen as a tabula rasa, a continent in which there is nothing innately civilised or profound or sacred or theological.
Edward Gibbon when speaking of, uh, early Christianity in Africa and particularly speaking about monasticism.
Uh, we know that Gibbon, you know, attributed the whole of the fall of the Empire to Christianity.
Right. And therefore doesn't see anything really good in it.
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.
Hegel lights that Africa is no historical part of the world.
It has no movement or development to exhibit. Professor Hooch of a roper in 19.
That's the car. We'll go in again. Each calls a grand.
Great granddaughter has also written a book and following up calls question what is history asking?
What is history now? Um, I won't talk about that particular book, but it's great.
There's a lot in there that I recommend to you. Edward Gibbon again.
Another one. There we are.
Whoever opened 1963 famously said, perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach, but at the present there is none.
There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The West is darkness, and darkness is not the subject of history.
And he repeated this statement in 1969, labelling the entire continent as UN historic.
Now, we might think that that's all in the past, but nope.
In 2020, David Starkey remarked on live TV that slavery was not genocide.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain.
An awful lot of them survived. Professor Nigel Biggar, fellow priest, retired professor of this university,
says in his most recent work that the vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire.
And whatever racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit.
In North America, Australasia and Africa, the policies of the Imperial government in London,
and consequently those of colonial governments beneath it,
were based on the Christian and Enlightenment conviction of the basic human equality of members of all races,
and driven by the human and humanitarian desire to enable less advantaged, less privileged peoples to survive, develop and flourish.
I leave no bigger statement to your own judgement. Go on more time.
So what's going on? How is it that people who are.
Intelligent. Who are people who are spending time researching the past,
can have this view of an entire continent as this un historic empty thing, void of any value or history.
It's interesting that this really does come in to buttress sticks in many ways,
and there's a very deliberate, I think, attempt to try and separate Africa from its African theologians.
The next slide.
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.
It was a Roman Africa that produced these men. They were not moles nor Negroes.
As an innocent African of America had supposed. Their Carthage owed more to Julius Caesar than to Dido.
Roman Africa was a long way from the eastern world, separated by sea and desert.
But it is not far from Italy. And the genius of the people is Latin.
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.
The new environment induces a new mind, which is very often really the old mind of the race,
fertilise and quickened by new experience and new problems that may have been
Moorish or Punic blood on recorded in the veins of some of these great men,
but it is not necessary to postulate it on the ground of racial characteristics.
For when we dog metaphors upon race and its types, we strayed into an area ill explored and very treacherous for those who guess.
So how African is African enough?
No one asked this question of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, or Saint Aubyn, or Columba, or Palladio, or Patrick or David.
These are saints of the British Isles Scottish saints English saints Welsh saints.
Not only in terms of devotion, but in terms of ownership.
And that is largely because of their relationship to the land, but also due to the strength of their cult.
These are rarely defined as the saints of Roman Britain or of North England.
So one is encouraged often to look deep into subsaharan Africa for evidence of indigenous African Christianity,
for something that will validate someone saying that early Christianity is indigenous to Africa.
But I want to suggest that it would be wiser to look around the whole world.
Look at Oxford and Cambridge. Well, any university with a Christian foundation and you see something of early Christianity in Africa's legacy.
The next slide. Look at Westminster Abbey or any British cathedral with a monastic foundation,
and you see the fruit of African Christianity's greatest export monasticism.
Next slide. So we have to look beyond Africa.
For evidence of early African Christian history.
When we hear the names John Cassian or Jerome or Benedict or Maximus the Confessor, we might not think Africa, but we should.
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.
Jerome is the same. Benedict and his rule are unimaginable without the African desert.
Maximus the Confessor writes his mystical genes based on the architecture of African churches.
The Cappadocia is. Saint Basil the Great's paternal grandmother is also, of course, Gregory of Nyssa.
His grandmother Macrina the Elder, who was catechist by Gregory the Wonder Worker, who was a pupil of origin of Alexandria.
So we might think Constantinople and the copied notions, but their lineage is coming out of Africa.
And it's interesting to me as well. In this year, when we celebrate the 1,500th anniversary of Nicaea.
How much or how little Africa will be mentioned in celebrations of that council.
So many of the councils and the creeds originate because of African controversies, and are settled because of the triumph of an African orthodoxy.
It's really difficult for me to imagine Orthodoxy having one without Athanasius
and other people who contributed so powerfully to those councils and those creeds.
So. What I hope to have shown in this lecture is the simple fact that if Africa has
a place in the study of late antiquity and patristic and Christian theology,
then that place deserves to be central, not peripheral. It deserves to be explicit.
Africa must place itself in the history of Christianity on its own terms,
and in a way which refuses to find its Christian credentials in its Roman or European identity or its proximity to blackness,
but simply because of its shared relationship with a continent and the way that continent and its
people have shaped and continued to shape the earliest manifestations of the Christian faith.
The transatlantic slave trade was more than an imperial vanity project.
It was a theological enterprise which demanded Africa be stripped of its patristic grandeur and its early Christian credentials.
This is why Christianity without Christ and an ahistorical Christianity,
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,
in contemporary society, either as bloodthirsty patriarchs or petulant presidents,
wished to use it as a weapon to invade neighbouring sovereign territories or help make countries great again.
And this is why a truly historical Christianity is always inconvenient,
always sits uneasily within the structures of power because it has its eyes on its founder and those who,
in its earliest incarnation, took the economic demands of the gospel seriously.
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.
Early Christianity in Africa knew what it meant to lay down power and privilege and riches.
Rather than storing those things up. Which is why martyrdom is such a key feature of early African Christianity.
Now Augustine in the City of God writes. How can I tell of the rest of creation, with all its beauty and utility?
Which the divine goodness has given to man to please his eye and serve his purposes?
Condemned though he is, and held into these labours and miseries.
Shall I speak of the manifold and various loveliness of the sky and earth and sea?
Of the plentiful supply and wonderful qualities of the light of sun, moon and stars, of the shade of trees,
of the colours and perfume, of flowers, of the multitude of birds, all differing in plumage and in song.
Of the variety of animals of which the smallest in size are often the most wonderful.
I have no idea which birds Augusten may have had in mind, but it may well have been the swift.
Swift's winter in North Africa and breed in the UK.
Summer, like the recently rewarded white storks in London, who also decided to choose North Africa as their holiday home.
The swifts remind us that Africa is not all that far away.
A bit like the London Wall or the Emperor Severus.
They remind us in the song that they sing in our British skies is dependent upon their spending time in another land.
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.
The truth may well be that because they choose to dwell so close to us in urban centres,
the Sheriff may well know more about me and the continent of Africa than I may ever know about it,
and it may well consider itself an indigenous British bird.
When people think of the kangaroo, they immediately think of Australia.
Absolutely no one thinks of New Guinea. Yeah, the kangaroo is native, is indigenous to both.
It may well be that the Christian approach to history needs to share more with the vocation, the true vocation of the theologian.
If Africa is anything, it is, I think, reverence for the other.
Reverence for wonder. Reverence for the inherent spirituality of people and animals and places and creation.
Reverence and respect for the incoherence of the past.
It seeks not to narrate the past as something I own or get to sum up,
but rather to seek the past blessing as that which hovers incessantly over the present.
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.
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.
Thank you.