Sham Virigins, Trainee Shamans, Phantom Storms and Medieval Conversion October 24, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Medieval , trackback
We are in the Middle Ages beyond the banks of the Rhine in the pagan communities there. A young man has had a great disappointment, he has married a woman only to discover that she is not a virgin. There follows a wretched series of illnesses that lead the young man towards death. In all this he has one hope. Many years before he had visited, in another country, a Christian church and had been impressed by the happiness and well-being of the Christians he met there. He searches, then, for God’s love and after ‘a convoluted and traumatic crisis’ he realises that he must forgive his wife and become a Christian. His ailments heal almost immediately. Filled with confidence and the authority of one who has returned from death, he converts a number of influential locals and convinces them to be baptised. They agree but on the day set for this life-changing acts demons whip up a storm and it is only with the young man’s insistence that he convinces the converts to go through with the ceremony. At the moment they go into the river to be washed over with Christ’s love the sun breaks through the cloud and the baptism is pronounced a miracle. The Church prospers and the next miracle emerges in a church ceremony. A young pregnant woman, in training to become a priestess of a local pagan diety, is brought to the church as she has been told that she will died in just a few weeks. The young man touches her in God’s name and she shrieks and collapses. He, then, exorcises her, as she lies on the floor, and she begins to speak to him in a male voice (the demon, of course). For hours he fights the powers of darkness until she levitates above her bed, then collapsing down free of demons and a confirmed part of the body of Christ.
Which early medieval work of hagiography does this little story come from and who is the saint in question? Well, here Beach must admit a slight deception. This is actually a late twentieth-century account from Okinawa in Japan, not across the Rhine (well, unless you talk about across the Rhine in a very broad sense) and certainly not in the Middle Ages. The young man in question is the Reverend N. His early experience of Christianity had been in Kyoto while at college. His unvirgin wife caused stomach ulcers (that apparently threatened to kill him!). The miracle at the river was not just seen but photographed by ecstatic converts. And the pregnant woman was being recruited by a local shaman at the time that Revered N. touched her and sent her to the floor. Why bother with this deception? Quite simply because in many communities in antiquity and the Middle Ages Christianity arrived in just this way. If it was the local king, then conversion was done in corporate terms, of course: Augustine in Kent, for example. But in fragmented tribal societies or in the cities of the ancient Mediterranean the curing of stomach ulcers, the sudden disappearance of a storm, and a woman responding to some spell-making would be enough to create a church. Blood may have been the seeds of Christians; but so were ‘miracles’ and charisma. Other medieval conversion stories from the present: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Note that this account is from James McLenon’s very fine Wondrous Events, 143-145.
31 Oct 2014: KMH writes ‘In defense of the pre-Christian religions, if the miracles of Christianity had been matched by pagan miracles there would have been very few, if any, converts to Christianity. It is only when these pagan religions have lost their salt that new religions have a chance to make converts. It is to be expected that when a particular religion is dying that a new form will appear that may seem to be an advance over the prior religion. At present, the religious are fervently looking for the second coming of Christ in the hope that a new form will be given to them, superior to the present one. Anyone with miraclulous powers today would have a field day in gaining converts – this is exactly what the Anti-christ is expected to do.’ Thanks, KMH!
