Humpty, do you know the meaning of that lovely old word ‘Saskatchewan’?
‘No, but I guess it’s indigenous.’
‘Good guess. It comes from a Cree word meaning ‘fast flowing river’.
‘So?’
‘So, I’m catching up on my geography.’ I didn’t tell Humpty that I gave up geography at school in favour of Latin. The geography teacher was a political friend of George Orwell and a nice man. But geography and I did not mix. Mr Holdaway, Marxist intellectual and crime-writer, made that quite clear.
However, place-names matter. Verdun mattered to the French. Singapore mattered to the English. And Istanbul matters to everybody.
‘Why so?’ You may ask. The point is: things happened at these places, things that shaped a nation’s or a continent’s destiny.
Istanbul (aka Constantinople, Byzantium) was the ravishing scene of a momentous event in the Christian Church. Eastern Christians broke with Western Christians. Latin separated from Church-Slavonic. Catholic pulled away from Orthodox. Pope and patriarch went their separate ways. The Western Church had its Reformation; the Eastern Churches had no such thing.
Orthodoxy continues to be found in the West. I remember encountering Nicolai Zernov and his group ‘St Alban and St Sergius’. I remember too an African violet specialist who switched from Anglican to Orthodox and looked after a small congregation in East Anglia.
We who worship in the vernacular, the language inherited from and boosted by King Alfred, and think that English Christianity is the car’s whiskers do well to remember that not everybody sees things that way. I ask you. Most of us don’t even know the meaning of ‘Saskatchewan’.
ARCHIMANDRITE
I met my first archimandrite in Berlin. (Just name-dropping, you know.) He was very good company and his title means something like ‘chief of the sheepfold’. I suppose he ranks as something like an archdeacon in the C of E., below a bishop but above the clergy in general. He wore his honorific title lightly. That, together with the overwhelming experience of gazing up into the dome of Hagia Sophia, won me over to the Orthodox. I won’t hear a word against them. St James’s church, Gerrards Cross has a Byzantine-style dome – on a more modest scale, of course. St Mary’s, Ealing has gone Byzantine more whole-heartedly, thanks to S.S. Teulon. Of course, St Paul’s cathedral has a dome to be proud of.
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