My Name is Alban

From King Oswald's Heirs

Dear friends and readers

Here’s a little gift for you to celebrate England’s protomartyr. It is a chapter from my new book, King Oswald’s Heirs, beginning as each chapter does with a question from the 1662 Catechism.

If you have not yet bought a copy, perhaps this might prompt you to do so?

I was ordained both deacon and priest in the abbey church and cathedral pictured below which bears St Alban’s name and harbours his relics – indeed, I have celebrated mass several times in the chapel where they are enshrined. Holy martyr, St Alban, pray for us!

Q. Dost thou not think that thou art bound to believe, and to do, as they have promised for thee?

The default answer to this question in today’s cynical and individualistic age is, I suspect, “no.” Why should I believe something just because my parents and godparents believed it? Just because it has been the shared belief of my people for generations and centuries, that does not mean that I am “bound to believe” it at all. It’s up to me and nobody else.

Prompted by this line of thought, some people who were baptized as babies are seeking unbaptism services, sometimes through pagan or openly Satanic ceremonies. The idea promoted in our society is that we, as individuals, should trust ourselves more than our family or wider society, and that our own conclusions on these matters are as good as anybody else’s.

It is a commonplace of modern fiction to valorise orphanhood. Most of the heroes of contemporary Western novels and cinema have either lost or been estranged from their parents. Oliver Twist, Mowgli, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Bruce Wayne, Superman, Bambi, Elsa and Anna—just a few names, but you could find many more, especially in Disney franchises. Don’t suppose that this is a coincidence. There is a pragmatic side to it, in that it saves a lot of narrative baggage for the storyteller and gives a compelling motivation to the lead character. But there is surely something telling that the most popular stories of our time are those which regard parents as “baggage.” The animus of the stories that modern parents tell their children—especially daughters—is that to find themselves, they need to leave home, “Let it go,” “Turn away and slam the door,” and sing:

I don’t care
What they’re going to say...
No right, no wrong, no rules for me
I’m free.

Fathers’ day? No way. Parents = patriarchy, kids! Let ‘em go.

How alarming to those imbued from childhood with such sensibilities is the Prayer Book’s insistence that true freedom consists in inheriting belief from other, older people. Yet that is what we have always done. And many of them our forefathers in the faith died to pass it on to us.

A year that every English Christian should keep in mind is AD 597, when Pope Gregory made St Augustine the first Archbishop of Canterbury. It is said that when St Gregory first saw fair-haired Englishmen on sale at a slave-market, he asked who they were. He was told that they were “Angles,” and replied with the pun, “they’re not Angles, but angels!” (It is a bit lazy for people who did not come up with this joke to dismiss it as a bad one). Thence Pope Gregory dispatched St Augustine to bring more of these angelic-looking people to the Christian faith. The heroic exploits of St Augustine, his successors, and the holy kings and priests of Anglo-Saxon Britain make for fine reading, and we will meet some more of them in these pages. But already, when the missionary bishop arrived at the end of the sixth century, Christianity had long since been established in those islands. Before the English came to Britain, there were already British bishops, saints, and martyrs who died for the belief which they themselves had inherited, and would pass on to their English successors.

So let us go back before them, to third century Roman Britain and the city of Verulamium, north of London. There lived a man whose death would give that city a new name. Himself a pagan, he was once startled by an unexpected visitor at his door: a man wearing the distinctive cloak of a Christian priest. This was in the days when Christianity was prohibited throughout the Empire on pain of death. The priest, Amphibolus by name, sought refuge from the authorities, and had heard of the man’s good repute. The latter agreed to shelter him. They spent days and nights together in hushed conversation, fearing the step of the soldiers’ boots outside. During those conversations, Amphibolus persuaded his host of the truth of the Christian faith.

One day came the knock on the door that Christians have come to fear in many lands through many generations, whether in Ancient Rome or under the Communists of the Soviet Union, and even now in North Korea, China and parts of the Middle East. The man swiftly took off Amphibolus’ priestly robe and put it over his own clothes. The secret propagation of the faith by this brave and holy priest was more important now to him than his own life, convinced as he was that he would enjoy eternal felicity in the next. While Amphibolus made his escape, the soldiers took the householder and tried him, tried to force him to recant. He replied, “my name is Alban, and I serve the one true God.”

So St Alban, Protomartyr of Britain, was beheaded. He gave his name to that city, and to the abbey church which stands there to this day. There, you can find relics of his body enshrined, where the mass is offered daily in thanks for his gift and in hope of his prayers and aid. Though a cathedral of the Church of England, Roman Catholic masses and Eastern Orthodox services of veneration are also regularly offered there.

The St Alban chapel and reliquary

St Alban died for his belief. In our day, belief is often taken as something opposed to reason, which cannot be explained, essentially as a kind of unjustifiable opinion which people have a right to hold if they wish, but not to impose on others. It’s something which we may choose once we have slammed the door on our parents. Belief is even treated in Britain as a “protected characteristic,” though the legal protections sometimes seem to extend more to non-Christian beliefs than those of the nation’s historic faith. So, when we claim in the Catechism to “believe the articles of the Christian faith,” we may think that we are supposed to submit to a long list of impossible things to believe before breakfast.

But St Alban’s example shows that belief is not unthinking assent. It is not opposed to reason. We do not know the content of his conversations with Amphibolus, but whatever he heard, it was enough to make him give up his life for the sake of the itinerant missionary. He was persuaded of the truth of the faith. This does not just apply to British martyrs, of course. Apostles such as St Peter and St Paul were likewise convinced enough of the Christian faith that they died for it. Neither, in their writings, come across as particularly stupid or gullible men. They were intellectually convinced that Jesus had died for their sins, rose from the dead, and ruled over their lives. They thought, not just opined, that they had to entrust themselves to Him and Him alone as their saviour and to obey Him as their Lord. The faith for them was not just a matter of “opinion,” take it or leave it: it was literally the singular matter of life and death.

But why did they come to believe it? How did their reasoning get them there? A considerable part of the answer to that question lies in what they had already inherited and were bound to believe. In the case of the Apostles, that inheritance is obvious: their Jewish faith was transmitted to them by their families and their nation, and that gave them the basis on which to interpret the life and claims of Jesus. St Alban was no Jew. But even his pagan understanding of the world prepared him, surely more thoroughly than secular modernism and Disney stories, to accept the God whom Amphibolus preached and represented. Jesus famously claimed in one encounter that He could find greater faith in a certain pagan Roman centurion than in his own people (Luke 7.9). This soldier understood hierarchy, authority, and obedience, those values so despised by our modern heroes.

Many of us in the West were raised by parents who firmly believed in the modern myths of independence, autonomy and adulthood, which tell us that the fully realised human is the human cut off from family ties and social obligations: the human alone. This is utterly different from the tradition they grew up, and which continues to cement the non-Western societies we regard as “backward” even as our own cascades into oblivion while theirs hold. The irony is that they believed this because the culture around them formed them to do so. That is, they inherited the myth of self-invention, the very myth which makes inheritance of anything a taboo. They thought that making us orphans from our cultural, social and religious inheritance was the right thing to do, and the best they could do for us. They did not have us baptised or attend Sunday school so that we could, once we had “grown up,” make decisions about these things for ourselves. The problem was, we lacked even the basic framework necessary to make those decisions.

That framework, in a word, is trust: and trust is another, perhaps even a better, word for belief. What has been destroyed, very actively and deliberately, in Western countries is our capacity to trust parents and other people in authority. We have been taught that scepticism is the norm. As a result, we have the society we deserve. And that is because we trusted in the wrong thing, in a myth which has ultimately caused the incalculable harm of familial and social breakdown. A myth which seems to have a will of its own, and is driving humanity to destruction.

The Catechism exhortation to believe what our parents and godparents taught us assumes that they, too, were taught the Christian faith by those before them. In our time, it comes as an invitation to repair the broken chain, and to choose to trust what St Alban and all the martyrs before and after him have trusted, that we may answer with them:

A. Yes verily: and by God’s help so I will.