Absurdity, Allegory and China

Behold, throughout the heavens
There shone a holy light

There are historic moments that I, like most of us, wish I could have witnessed, but only as a fly on the wall; being a participant removes any illusion of objectivity. And some of those favorite “moments” were desperately dangerous situations that allowed a fly a better chance to survive the event than any human participant. One of those moments on my revisiting wish list – and very much as a fly on the wall, since I don’t care all that much for swimming in cold water – is the mass Baptism of Kiev, generally pinned to 988 AD under the rule of Vladimir the Great, aka St. Vladimir of Kiev, whose feast day, celebrated by both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, is July 15th. But don’t mark up your calendar just yet. He wasn’t pitching in the same league as bird-feeding Francis or staff-swinging, snake-driving Pat. And when it came to appetites he was hardly a Catherine of Siena.

In the late 10^th C. the pagan Slavs were a loose confederation of tribes mucking about in the backwaters of Europe, bullied into cooperation by brute force rather than by a unifying shared vision of how the world is. Vlad was the man who did the bullying. Tribes had their own bosses, as well as their own bullpen of gods, so allegiances were more local than a man with a dream of being at the head of an emergent state could possibly hope for. The plan: get everyone on the same page. One of Vlad’s strategies for unification was to make one and all believe the same thing, or, more accurately, believe in the same One God. There were other benefits that came along with monotheism, and as things worked out, one included Anna, the 27 year-old sister of the Emperor Basil II. Constantinople was in a military jam and Vlad, with his six-thousand, worked out a deal to bail them out, and Anna, most likely, was one of the bargaining chips. Byzantine royalty did not marry out their women to heathens, so Christianity with its cultural and economic benefits, as well as – to a barbarian – its pedigree of historic legitimacy came with it too.(There’s a much better story written a century later by the monk/chronicler Nestor who has envoys traveling to observe different religions and reporting back to Vlad with the results of what they’d found, though it’s all a bit pitched to one side, as you would expect from an 11^th C. Christian monk holding forth on Islam, Judaism and Germans.) Master builders from the empire also came along, and the locals learned the language and skills of construction, and within a generation they were building cathedrals and cities without the help of the foreigners. Clergy showed up too, and literacy spread as the pagan gods retreated into the murky swamps of memory. (But the gods didn’t disappear. They never just disappear. Gods don’t work like that.) And Vlad the state-builder became a saint, despite being killed in a revolt that probably included many of his pre-Christian wives and children. That One God might let you be a saint, but at some stage you got to pay something. That’s part of the hand, no matter who’s dealing. (Ask the Buddhists, they’ll tell you. Nothing comes for free.)

But what about the swimming and cold water? Well, one story has it that when Vlad marched back to Kiev with his new wife and God of Abraham under his belt he mustered all the residents of Kiev, marched them into the Dnieper and had the lot of them baptized in one fell swoop: one minute pagans, the next minute Christians. Sounds almost Spanish. Was it true? It’s history, make of it whatever you want. But if this is one of Nestor’s yarns I’d be looking for it to unravel under the eye of a fly on the wall. But still, I like the image, the audacity, the wholesale adoption of a whole new way of seeing the world. If I’d been a fly, knowing then what I know now, I’d have buzzed away in a hurry. No telling how they’d redefine flies in the brand new order.