“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”

Decluttering does have its benefits, although I’ve not been as disciplined about it as planned during Lent. Today, however, I reached into a box which appeared to have a lot of things I’d written neatly filed away, and randomly pulled this out, dated 18 December, 2006.

“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” But what happened when the Christianised Constantine unfurled his banner and frightened the pagans into submission? Did God and Caesar become one? Ever since have we been bowing to a two-headed god, God made in the image of man, and empire mistaken for heaven?

Not that no good came of this. The template of civilisation imposed by the Romanised church upon barbarian chaos kept alive in the West the memory of better times until new life was transfused from the East, ironically through the new prophet, Mohammed.

For a time, perhaps as long as four hundred years, the three Peoples of the Book flourished in mediaeval Spain. Someone has even written a book describing Cordoba as “The ornament of the world.” (Maria Rosa Menocal, a title she got from a tenth century nun, Hroswitha, a Saxon nun who described Cordoba thus in a poem.) Who could then have imagined that in the future lay the Spanish Inquisition, later the Holocaust, today (remember this was written eighteen years ago) the everyday horror of Islamist terrorism. Perhaps this is what happens when human beings confuse Caesar with God?

If we could rewrite history, to the moment when Caesar imposed his idea of Christianity upon Europe, could we discover what went wrong? Or perhaps we should go back even further, to the time just after Jesus’ death when Saint Paul took it upon himself to convert the Gentiles. Should the Christians always have remained a sect of Judaism? Would they then have kept their connection to God, the pathway to salvation that Jesus sought to reveal?

We cannot rewind history. We can only continue into the future, time travellers all, but only in one direction. Are we now reaching a fork in the road, another place where we can choose either to create a time of high civilisation, or (what seems more likely) to sink even further into darkness and unknowing?

Jean M Chard 18 December, 2006