Or Walking with WG Hoskins.
“…many parts of the English landscape remain just as our forefathers left a long time ago. It is to these quiet solitudes…that we can still gratefully turn for refreshment and sanctuary from noise and meaningless movement”
I have of late been reading “The Making of the English Landscape”, by WG Hoskins, which the above quote is taken from. In this book Hoskins sets out two principles and then illustrates them with meticulous detail, he argues that the present appearance of the English countryside is not just shaped by recent events but actually by our long history, and further, that our history can be read in features of the landscape if you know what to look for.
By describing the visible effects on the landscape of the work of different historical epochs Hoskins provides the reader with a tool box for getting out into the countryside and seeing what they can discern in the lay of the land. This is a book to be read but then not left on a shelf, the idea is for the reader to be able to take the book out with them, either physically or remembered, and look over the landscape with a historians eye, albeit an amateur historian’s eye in the case of most readers. So for example, looking out for Roman roads, or Medieval Ridge and Furrow fields, identifying Early Medieval boundary dykes, recognising the evidence of ruined churches and lost villages, understanding the effect of canals and the beginnings of industrialisation on the countryside, and seeing the effects of modern intensive farming, all these things that can be read in the landscape. Hoskins writes,
“…most of England is a thousand years old, and in a walk of a few miles one would touch nearly ever century in that long stretch of time.”
Our ancestors, although bodily disappeared, have left visible marks in the landscape of town and country, and we will do the same. The Celts, the Romans, the Anglo Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, the Tudors, their work is still with us, broken and mangled by the passage of time and plough, reassembled, forgotten, unearthed, conserved, a partial record of peoples and communities long past, a jumbled record in the landscape that speaks of who they were.
Going for a walk in the countryside is like reading a book, not just the countryside, in urban places too you can read as you walk and look about you. History is not the author, our ancestors under the sway of history’s presiding genius are the authors, most often writing their lives upon the pages without any thought that future generations might read over the traces of their lives.
It’s not just grand historical epochs that leave a trace in the landscape, individuals do to. Sometimes the individuals can be identified, like the Medieval Stone Mason who signed his work with a carved Wolf head high up on the columns in the naves of churches he worked on, but even with more anonymous work the trace is there. Just as you can touch history in the landscape so the things we make with our hands bears the imprint of our touch. Laying a hand on a stone window transom links you to the touch of the Mason who made it, it is as if shaking hands through time. This is because if you make something yourself it then bears witness to some aspect of your personality, and even if you have not created something with your own hands but by your choices then a testimony to an aspect of your identity will remain after you have moved on to other things.
Anyone who has done any DIY around the home will know this to be true, when we strip back wall paper in a house we find the taste in design of former residents, when we take down the structures they have added to a house we find evidence both of the quality of their work and the way they used the space, we may even notice their finger prints in the paint work. Most history books only record the wealthy and the great, but the book of the landscape randomly collects testimonies to those who otherwise pass unnoticed, the improvised shed leaning on an allotment, the layout of a garden, gaffer tape repairs to pipes, all these things tell a story. Landscape is not just big views, it is quiet corners and back lanes too. From the grandiose features of a landscape, like the walled garden of a country house, to the mundane, like the 1960s sunburst garden gate at the entrance to a suburban semi, in all these things there is history to be read, the collective history of the community and the story of individuals.
I would add to Mr Hoskins thoughts that it is not only landscape that carries the imprint of communities long past but also the institutions they founded and developed, the books they wrote, the ideas and languages they passed on, their self-expression in art and music, the stories they told and the stories we tell of them. As so often we walk through a landscape heedless of those who have passed that way before, perhaps imagining we are authors writing upon a blank page, so we can pass through our society and culture heedless of those who bequeathed to us the page on which we write, a page that is full of ideas and stories, crossings out and scribblings, learning and falsehoods. Both the book of our landscape and the book of our times are written and rewritten in conversation with those long past, even if our ancestors are only inclined to gift us the bric-a-brac of their lives by the sheer force of mortality. The passing of time steals from one generation to give to the next without seeking the ascent of either. A fact that this present generation inheriting climate change are beginning to grasp to their understandable annoyance.
The past is like a great wave crashing into this present moment, a great wave of the countless millions of decisions and actions taken by those who have gone on before us. The future is an open plain but the great force of the wave breaks upon it in ways we cannot wholly foreknow, we can try to direct a course in that streaming flood but we cannot direct the waters, or at least not until the direction we have set ourselves becomes that great wall of water.
There have been philosophers who thought we could foreknow how the wave will break, that by studying the course of history and the nature of humanity we can confidently speak of the future, however we are always stood on the coast between the sea and the land as the great wave rolls in, to see how the wave breaks we would have to be lifted up out of this moment into transcendence.
The nineteenth century German philosopher Hegel almost makes this point. At the conclusion of the Preface to his book, ‘The Philosophy of Right’, he observes, "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk", meaning that human understanding (the owl) only comes to understand a historical condition just as it passes away. However, he then goes on to say that the day has come to an end and that the owl has flown, describing the grand progress of freedom through human history, from the public freedom of the polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the European nineteenth century nation state where he argues history and freedom have reached their destination. To revert to my metaphor, he thought the wave of history had rolled in and drawn back so we could survey the whole landscape. Even if one accepts that the history of all hitherto existing society is in fact the history of a particular German nineteenth century understanding of freedom it is surely possible to see that through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth the ideal of freedom in Europe continued to develop, with for instance the extension of the electoral franchise, and also has contended with the challenge of Totalitarian Fascism and Communism. If it ain’t over till the fat lady sings Hegel may have applauded too early.
To put it simply, imagine if Brian were the most popular name of recent years, and increasingly so, it wouldn’t however mean the graph would continue in that rising direction and one day everyone would be called Brian.
When you are standing in the landscape even if you climb a hill to get a big view you cannot be certain that the road ahead will be as you expect, to be certain you need to be able to see the whole landscape, even beyond the horizon. However, the idea that history has a purpose, and therefore a destination that can be predicted, is surprisingly widespread. For instance, Karl Marx thought history could be explained in terms of the class struggle which would inevitably result in a classless Communist society, and Adolf Hitler thought history was all about the growth of his corrupted idea of German nationalism and would inevitably result in its triumph. On a less gruesome level, Science Fiction takes aspects of society and projects them into the future to create imagined new worlds. In Science Fiction the key aspect of society is usually seen as being science and technology so it is this that determines what the future imagined worlds look like, but take a more pessimistic view of life and project that forward and you end up with all sorts of interesting dystopias. The difficulty with all such theories is that the proof is always tomorrow, if it hasn’t happened yet we are assured the denouement will surely be tomorrow – or the next day. So when I hear the doomy preacher proclaim ‘repent for the end is nigh’ I always want to ask, ‘so, we’re Ok for another day then?’
If the Revolution, or the Reich, or Freedom, or utopia, or the Apocalypse is always tomorrow and never there from the beginning, if the message is not there where I can hear it with my ears, and see it with my eyes, and touch it with my hands, then I may just pull the duvet over my heard and ignore the bugle call. But before you think I am just another lazy sceptic I should add that I don’t think history is ‘just one dam thing after another’, I believe history does have a rhyme and a reason, to believe otherwise is accept that life has neither map nor compass to navigate the landscape we inhabit.
The bible sets out a history of humanity from beginning to end, from Genesis to Revelation, and I do wonder if this is where the idea that history has a purpose and a destination comes from. However, if God is who he says He is then clearly He is better placed than Marx, Hitler, Hegel or anyone else to comment on history. The Book of Isaiah in the bible says of God,
“He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.” Isaiah 40:22
Sat above the circle of the earth God can see beyond mortal horizons, the one who stretched out the heavens like a canopy knows when His purpose is accomplished and the heavens can be gathered up. God’s perspective is not confined by the present moment, God is eternal, He is the one who created time and space.
As the Hymn ‘Crown Him with Many Crowns’ sings, God is
“…the potentate of time,
creator of the rolling spheres,
ineffably sublime.”
The biblical story runs from creation in Genesis to a new heaven and earth in Revelation, from our alienation from God and each other to our reconciliation to God and each other. In Revelation, the last book of the bible, we read in chapter 21 of the coming age,
“I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!
So why should I believe this more than any other promise of a golden age?
In the book of 1 John in the bible we read of what the first Christians proclaimed,
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us.”
The first Christians did not proclaim an abstract idea or a doctrine, they proclaimed what they had heard, seen and touched - a person. In Jesus they believed they had encountered unstoppable life, or ‘eternal life’, which had come from God. John is saying Jesus was not just a life, he was the embodiment of life. In this passage, and in his account of the life of Jesus, John also describes Jesus as the Word. You can hear words, you can see them in written form, but you can’t touch them, but you could hear, see and touch Jesus. John is saying Jesus was an embodied word – or idea, but not just any idea, he was the ultimate idea made touchable in flesh and blood, God in human form.
In the prologue to his account of the life of Jesus John writes,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”
Notice in speaking of Jesus as the Word John writes, “Through him all things were made”, and that Jesus “was with God in the beginning”. A creative partnership is being described here. In the passage where John describes Jesus as the “life” he writes that he “was with the Father and has appeared to us”, so the relationship being described, this creative partnership, is Father and Son.
The disciples came to believe Jesus was the Son of God because he did and said the things that God did and said in the Old Testament, and he fulfilled all the puzzling prophecies of the Old Testament that suggested the Messiah would be both human and divine. Jesus was a walking, talking picture of all they knew about God, the account of the life of Jesus written by his disciple Matthew calls him “Immanuel”, meaning ‘God with us’. Those who opposed Jesus even angrily accused him of saying he was the Son of God as this was blasphemy to them. For the disciples to say that Jesus was the Son of God risked them getting rocks thrown at their heads by the Jewish authorities and risked them being put to the sword by the Roman authorities who claimed that Caesar was the divine Son of a god and to obeyed.
In Colossians the Apostle Paul also describes this creative relationship between the Father and Jesus, writing,
“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
The one through whom all things were made stepped into the created order of time and space in the form of a man. In the varied human theories of the purpose of history the ideas that drive them are made fully manifest at the end of the story, the goal is the end that is always tomorrow, but in the biblical account of the purpose of history the idea turns up in person part way through.
It’s like a novel in which the author steps into the pages as a character, so when this author/character tells you what the novel is about, and assures you that it will end well, you can believe him.
In Revelation, in which Jesus speaks to John about the end of time, he says to him, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” So, to return to WG Hoskins, It is like walking through a landscape and finding the beginning and the end of the journey, that both now lay out of sight, the very purpose of the journey, has walked in to view and greeted you as a fellow traveller.
So when I consider if the Christian account of the purpose and end of time could be true I can say that only the eternal creator God could speak with authority on the matter, and that the life of Jesus is a picture of the purpose and destination of time. Further than this, Jesus taught about the Kingdom of Heaven, a place not located as we so often imagine at the end of time or beyond the grave, the Kingdom of Heaven is anywhere in this world or the next where God’s will is done. As Jesus was heaven breaking into this world so any act of selfless love in accord with the teaching of Jesus is a breaking in of heaven into this world. To love God and neighbour, to forgive, to heal, to bring peace and justice, is to participate in the Kingdom of Heaven that will be fully realised at the end of time. Not only can the purpose and destination of history be seen in the life and teaching of Jesus, it can be experienced now by living what Jesus taught. You do not have to wait and see until a perpetual tomorrow if the Christian account of the purpose and destination of history is true, go and love and serve as Jesus taught and you will see the Kingdom of Heaven.
In the Book of Acts, the bible book that tells the story of the beginnings of the Church, the disciple Peter refers to Jesus as “the author of life”, an author originates and writes a story, the story that is being written is life in all its teeming and varied abundance, so what would happen if this creative life force met with all that is destructive, if the author of life met with death? If death won then the story would be become about destruction, the hoped for life giving ending written on the last pages would be ripped out. The story would be that there is life but death has the final say.
Peter tells the crowds, “You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this.”
The cross stands as a sign post in history, though the struggle be brutal and bloody, in the end life wins, creation overtops destruction, love triumphs despite hate, and light shines through the darkness, the Kingdom of Heaven will prevail.
John was a young man when he became a disciple of Jesus but it was as an old man that he wrote his account of the life of Jesus and his letters about how to live as a Christian. He grew up as a Jew and would have known his Old Testament, he had witnessed the astonishing life of Jesus, and the tumultuous beginnings of the Church, so what was his considered understanding of all this? What did it all mean? In 1 John he writes, “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” The epic narrative of the bible, written over hundreds of years, from Genesis to Revelation, through the story of the people of Israel in the Old Testament, through the accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus and the beginnings of the Church in the New Testament, all this reveals the meaning of history as the struggle for, and ultimate victory of, love of God and each of other.
In 1 Corinthians 13 the Apostle Paul writes of love as the prime virtue that gives worth to all other virtues and qualities,
“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
He then goes on to explain the kind of love he is thinking of, the kind of love embodied by the life of Jesus and the ideal for every Christian to reach for, he writes,
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
Finally he explains that at the end of all things, when everything else has passed away and we can finally see ourselves as God sees us, there shall remain three things, “faith, hope and love”, and he adds, “…but the greatest of these is love.”
The story that is revealed through the pages of the bible is love. To my mind this is the most inspiring account of the meaning and direction of history, better than history as freedom wins, or my nation and culture wins, or social justice wins, certainly better than life is meaningless and death wins, and far better than the doomy religious prophet who says judgement and destruction win.
Better not only because love is the greatest virtue that gives worth to all other virtues and qualities, but because the goal of history, the Kingdom of Heaven, stepped into history in the life of Jesus and left an impression on history in the life of his disciples and the Church. More than this, the Kingdom of Heaven can be experienced now by living according to the teachings of Jesus, and by the inspiration of Holy Spirit can be glimpsed in prayer and worship.
Jesus was not an abstract idea, he left footprints in the dusty ground as he went about in the villages and towns of first century Palestine proclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven, his blood mingled with that dusty ground at the crucifixion, and his life left such an impression on his disciples that they told anyone who would listen of his story, and they wrote of him and met together to speak of him and to pray and praise God as he had taught. The Christian bible and the Church both find their genesis in the impression made by Jesus on the life of his disciples, countless millions have found inspiration in the pages of the bible and the teaching of the Church down through the centuries, the teaching of Jesus has shaped the lives of individuals and societies, the marks Christianity has left in the landscape of our history are there for all to see, not just church buildings, there are hospitals and schools with Christian foundations, there are numerous Christian Charities, the Medieval Monasteries that both organised cultivation of the land and studiously preserved literacy and learning in a brutal age, and brave individuals like William Wilberforce opposing slavery, Florence Nightingale speaking up for the ordinary soldier, or the work done for social justice by members of the Rowntree family, the creation of the welfare state was influenced by Christian Socialism, radical nonconformist churches campaigned for and won political reform in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Christians giving their time today to staff Food Banks, the Queen as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, all this is a part of our national landscape and traces back to the life and teaching of Jesus.
No doubt in our history bad things have been done in the name of Jesus and the Church, and have left their mark on the landscape of our nation too, but Jesus taught love for neighbour and for enemy, any opportunist or bigot can stand up and say ‘in the name of Jesus’, but it is up to the rest of us to ask if their actions are consistent with the teachings of Jesus. Peddling hate and violence in the name of the Church, which should stand for love and peace, is like sounding a claxon for quietness, or farting for clean air.
Reading Hoskin’s descriptions of how the English landscape came about through history, and how it can then be read for signs of that history, made me realise the bible could be described in similar terms. The bible was written, edited and collated over hundreds of years, the bible has many authors, some are known while the identity of others is lost in time, they write as members of a community in the times in which they live, not all their ideas are their own, sometimes they write down the stories that have come down to them through the generations, perhaps even from the earliest times of their ancestors, at other times they write the stories witnesses have told them, included are sayings, poems, prayers and songs from diverse sources, quite often the known authors are channels for now unknown voices from their communities, and what they write quite often represents just part of a conversation about God and their world; the bible, like the English landscape, is the product of individuals and their communities writing and conversing through a long historical process. One might say that as the landscape has been written by individuals and communities under the sway of history’s presiding genius so the bible was written by individuals and communities under the sway of God’s presiding genius.
As landscape records a partial and broken history of the people who have worked it, so the bible records a partial and broken record of the people of the Old and New Testaments, not everything Moses, Elijah or Jesus said or did is recorded, John even concludes his account of the life and teaching of Jesus by acknowledging that it is inevitably incomplete, saying,
“Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”
As landscape records the history of Kings and commoners, so the bible includes records of amazingly diverse characters, from Monarchs to servants, prophets to traders, men and women, rich and poor, a fabulously rich variety of tribal, ethnic and national identities, heroes and villains, cowards and the courageous, scholars and fishermen, rebels and establishment figures, the morally upright, the morally uptight, the morally bankrupt, children and the aged, zealots and sceptics, tribal warlords, theologians, priests, and a talking donkey, all these characters, named or otherwise, are gathered up in the pages of the bible, and we can read of them centuries, even millennia, later. How people cannot be interested in the bible I do not know, it contains hundreds of fantastic stories and characters, it asks and debates the big questions of life, contains passages of startling beauty and shocking brutality, it shows humanity at our best and at our worst, and holds out the hope that love is the grand narrative of history.
It is usually said that the victors write history books, but the bible is a book written by characters who are more often than not hard pressed; in the Old Testament the Israelites under David and Solomon were for a brief time a regional power but mostly their nation is under foreign domination or even exile and had been enslaved in Egypt, in the New Testament the Church was persecuted by both the Jewish and Roman authorities, and the central figure of the bible, Jesus, left this earth his mission seemingly failed and with his few remaining followers afraid and disillusioned. Indeed in the New Testament the Apostle Paul writes to the Church in Corinth,
“God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are.”
The bible has authority for Christians because it is a record of our genesis and identity, just as the English landscape is a record of the English and their identity, both landscape and scripture are an inheritance left by community through time.
The picture attached to this article shows the view from the remote hamlet of Ilton in North Yorkshire. If Mr Hoskins had been with me when I took the photo he could have explained what the features of the landscape revealed about the history of the place, however I have now read his book and will in future endeavour to interpret what I see in the landscape according to his wisdom and learning.
The past feels very present in places like Ilton, which is why I love them. They are as Hoskins writes the “quiet solitudes” to which we can “turn for refreshment and sanctuary” and which “remain just as our forefathers left a long time ago.”
In the centre of the picture is a small square building that looks like a house, as you get closer it starts to look like an old chapel, and when you stand before it you may read the old inscription that confirms this. It is a former Methodist Chapel, a stone built record in the landscape of a part of English history, and a testimony to faith in Jesus Christ. Many generations will have entered its doors, for harvest festivals, weddings, funerals, Sunday services, bible studies, decoration and restoration, until some rueful soul turned the key in the door for the last time as a living place of worship. People now unseen, available now only to our imaginings, but present in the story of the building, a hardy community of faith and farming, they now see the glory of which they spoke and endeavoured to practice and we see their legacy.
The intersection of faith, community, landscape and history.
The picture sums up what I have been trying to say.
Personal Note. This article has taken me a month to write. I am not well at present so progress is very slow. Writing bit by bit doesn’t make for a particularly cohesive read – but it keeps me sane(ish).
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