HISTORY AND SPIRITUALITY

At the Grave of a Medieval Minstrel

A strange experience of the power of early Christianity

“That after so many centuries people still care enough to lay flowers at his grave,” I thought. It is not known where Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170 — c. 1230) was born, but here I found myself standing at the grave of the famous medieval minstrel, in a walled courtyard next to the Neumünster in Würzburg. The Neumünster is one of many churches in the attractive Franconian town of Würzburg, and on a visit to my mother in Germany we had gone on a train journey to visit the place.

In fact, Franconia has a fairly long history of Christianity, thanks to the arrival of the Irish missionary Saint Kilian in the second half of the seventh century. Würzburg Cathedral, it is said, was built on the very spot where Kilian and his companions were later murdered, and their skulls are preserved in the crypt of the church to this day.

The Romans had not succeeded in conquering the whole of Germania; they had to restrict themselves to the south, around the Danube, and the west, around the Rhine. To protect the conquered territory from the Germanic tribes on the other side, they built a fortified border, the Limes, with watchtowers and military camps along the length of it. This meant that when Constantine converted to Christianity and the Roman Empire subsequently became Christianised, the lands beyond the Limes remained untouched by the new religion. After the collapse of the Imperium Romanum, it therefore fell to enterprising missionaries from other parts of the former empire to establish the faith in those places. Bishop Kilian from Ireland was one of them.

Not that we had sought out Walther’s grave purposely; we had simply come upon it by chance. It was a bitterly cold winter day, with a temperature of minus 10° Celsius (14° Fahrenheit) and a leaden-grey sky. At the time — it was in the mid-1990s and I was in my early thirties — I was going through a phase of depression, and the weather that day certainly matched my mood. I was depressed because I experienced a life whose final reality was death as wholly meaningless. If there was nothing more than this temporal world, then what was the point of living for anything — of fighting for anything — when all would in the end be swallowed up by the ever-expanding sinkhole that is the past?

After an ambitious start in life, I had been hit by the slow but steady accumulation of losses, and at the time I came to believe that death meant the complete extinction of consciousness. I was too aware to be able to live in ignorance of this dire fate — and I cared too much about lost love to not be depressed about it. If I had been a less passionate spirit or a less honest one, perhaps I would have been able to live with such a death. But I was not someone interested in consolation prizes. If things were to have meaning, they had to have ultimate meaning. Otherwise they would ultimately be meaningless. What, then, was left for me other than to wait for the clock to run down on my life? If there was a single good to be found in the evil of death, it was that my suffering would have come to an end with the latter.

I looked up from the stone slab which marked Walther’s grave. My eyes caught sight of the plain sidewall of the Neumünster church, with its simple round-arched, Romanesque windows. On this cold and dark winter afternoon it looked particularly oppressive — an image of the grey death of depression. But then something strange happened:

It suddenly was to me as if I had been taken back to medieval times.

I don’t mean that I was thinking about those days: rather, it was as if the past had become the present for me. It was as if right there and then I lived in those times, as if I had become perhaps a warrior of a thousand years ago. Unlike modern existence with its comforts and complications, life felt raw and direct: you lived, you loved, you fought, you died. There was a stark clarity to this vision: the whole focus was on this short and simple earthly life, of which death was the end point. There seemed to be no concern with an afterlife or a transcendent divinity. All power and energy was invested in the natural world, and whatever gods there might have been belonged to this world too.

Then, in this barbarian dominion of might and violence, there arrived a radical message from an exotic land: a God-man had lived in Palestine; he had spoken of a kingdom not of this world, of a God of love unimaginably other and infinitely greater than any of the tribal gods. He had not fought but instead had allowed himself to be crucified for the sake of humanity. And finally the outrageously impossible: after three days he rose from the dead, walked the Earth for another forty days, and then ascended to Heaven.

What a revolution of outlook! If the story was true, then nothing could be more important. Reality had been blown open far beyond this world, and our temporal lives counted not only in themselves but were decisive for the whole of eternity. We were more than creatures of nature: we were the children of God. Monastic orders were founded that dedicated themselves entirely to the worship of the Divine; saints practised a radical love; mystics sought to unite themselves with the Most Holy. A very different culture from the old pagan one, with its emphasis on worldly wisdom, was taking hold. From the most brutally carnal of destructive acts, the crucifixion of an outsider called Jesus, was to come the glory of Christ.

Now in its twenty-first century, Christianity has grown old. Its churches and cathedrals still lend many of our villages and cities their accustomed atmosphere. But we know so much more now than our medieval forebears. Christian texts and doctrine have long since been compared, contrasted, contextualised and criticised. Christianity competes for the truth with other religions and, of course, non-religious philosophies. In an age before widely available information, were our ancestors naïve believers who were too easily taken in by the powerful rhetoric of the new missionaries? Is the Christian story an archaic myth, incompatible with our modern understanding of the world? Or does it speak of a truth about reality so advanced that we have barely begun to comprehend it?

Above all, are today’s believers and non-believers alike, after two-thousand years of familiarity — of over-familiarity — with the faith, still capable of being shocked by the very STRANGENESS of it? What is the mysterious kingdom of God, which supposedly has already begun? What is the true meaning of Jesus’ parables, which are more disturbing than they are reassuring? How can it be that the seemingly contingent events of a particular time and place are deemed to be of universal significance for all of humanity?

Anyone with a sufficiently strong sense of reality — anyone aware enough to grasp more than mere intellectual propositions — must shudder in the contemplation of it. Can it really be that we earth-bound creatures have it in us to rise to divine heights? Or is it that our lives, whose consciousness now burns so brightly, will be reduced to nothing but ashes, with the total loss of everything we have ever known and loved? How utterly extraordinary does reality have to be if the Christian story is to be true! Or has it only ever been a mad fantasy, the credibility of which depended on the number of its believers?

Only a transcendental reality so much more powerful than this solid physical world can possibly overcome the abyss of death: that grey and cold day in Würzburg, I had an inkling of the impact of the revolutionary message that had arrived from the other end of the known world.