The Oxford Union

It's been especially interesting reading Augustine of Hippo's Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans over the last weekend. Partly this has had to do with the trip some of us took yesterday with our hosts in Oxford (the aptly-named Oxford Study Abroad Program) to the Roman baths in: Bath. The baths were excavated some 110 years ago and are now restored mainly as a museum to the city's Roman developers. Unfortunately, you can't bathe there anymore; in fact, they tell you not even to touch the water. The array of ancient structures that made up a whole complex of pools and rooms (the photo here looks into the pool at the source, first built up in the first century of our era) is now mostly under the open air (though it was covered with a high, arcing canopies during its heyday). The waters are thus liable to the insults of passing birds (and tourists?), all of which renders them apparently rather toxic (though this could be a ruse to dissuade the overeager from doffing their parkas and shorts). I wasn't much tempted to do more than contemplate the stuff. Once it was, apparently, rain water that has, since it fell, filtered down and then back up from depths of thousands of meters over transits lasting tens of thousands of years. Now it's a languidly steaming, algaeic-green murk. At the base of the main pool lie huge, worn blocks of rust-colored stone littered with pennies and a silver spackling of five and ten-pence coins. What's curious is that our fondness for consigning spare change hopefully to shallow waters seems to be an inverted echo of the Romans' practice at Aquae Sulis (as they called the place) of committing not wishes but curses to these depths. The archaeologists here have uncovered a treasure of petty malevolence, prayers addressed to the goddesss of the waters, Sulis Minerva, all in the form of scratches, in coded (and sometimes just bad) Latin, on slips of pewter rolled up and thrown into the pools. And how vivid a sense one gets from these remnants of ancient spite as to how radical a Christian, or even Stoic, ethic must have been to those taking the waters here close to the edge of the known world. Often, the cursers sought requital for a theft - of a cloak, a comb, or a purse - from the changing rooms at the baths, one imagines. But rather than asking simply for its return (which no devout Christian or principled Stoic would even have bothered to do), the aggrieved usually sought rather more persuasive and final judgments, asking, often, for the blood, even the life, of the thief, "be it a man, a woman, a slave or free" as one seething devotee of the (otherwise presumably soothing) waters had it. Other curses leave some mystery as to their causes and objects, but that the malice they express was deep and lasting they leave no doubt. And all this "bloody-mindedness" (in the suitable British English phrase) is only amplified by contrast with the baths themselves. World-class masterpieces of engineering, they bespeak the Romans' ability to conceive and execute on a truly grand scale. One recalls further that magnificent as they are, the baths were actually nestled distantly at the remote northern end of an Empire which, during Aquae Sulis' heyday, ruled everything between here and Gibraltar, the Danube and the Euphrates. Augustine and the other early founders of the church had their work cut out for them.

Of course, by the time Augustine wrote The City of God Against the Pagans the empire had shrunk considerably and been split down the middle. Some Emperors had even found the Christian God (after their own fashions). And the final insult - the sack of Rome (by Christian Goths!) - had come just a few years before Augustine began recording his devastating case against the "pernicious mob of false gods" under whom the Empire had risen, then long faltered, and finally decayed. Meanwhile, the bathers' angry prayers to Minerva, and presumably millions others like them across the Roman world, scratched out or merely muttered, festered and gathered silt under the churches and mosques that eventually rose over the ruins - as here at Bath, where the chapel looks, itself rather imperiously, down into the main pool.


You may have asked yourself by now why I am going on about the baths at Bath under the heading of the Oxford Union. It's that I started reading Augustine's City of God on Friday afternoon (at Blackwell, the local bookstore), the day after the last debate at the Oxford Union. A few words on the Union itself first (from the Library of which I obtained my copy of the Augustine). The photo here is of the first debate at the Union this term, where the proposition was that "This House has no confidence in Her Majesty's Government," the pictured speaker, the Rt Hon Paul Murphy, a member of the Labor Party (that of Her Majesty's current Government) since he was fifteen, an MP (Member of Parliament) and former Sec of State for Wales, and the last speaker in opposition (to the proposition). Each week on Thursday evening, the House (i.e. the Union) hosts a debate, and usually starts the term with a critical look at whomever is in power. Power matters to many at and from the Union, founded as Oxford's premier debating society in 1823, and one of whose first Presidents was William Gladstone, a major political force in Victorian England. The Union has had a host of PMs (Prime Ministers) and other political leaders pass through, and it's still seen as a main conduit toward a successful career as a politician in Britain. In addition to weekly debates during the school terms, the Union hosts speakers of world-historical import, has a cozy library and bar, and serves generally as a social spot for up and comers in Oxford. Most of Shimer's students become members (though I am not sure if the networking is what they're in it for).

At any rate, last Thursday's debate concerned the proposition "This House believes that the world would be better off without Religion." That may tell you why it seemed so apropos to be reading Augustine this weekend. Sadly, I imagine that Augustine (having been himself a Master of Rhetoric to the Imperial Court at Milan) might have had a better case to make than the others speaking in opposition to this proposition last Thursday, who offered rather questionable points in favor of religion at times (including, from the last speaker, the contention that it had won increasing support for gay rights!). That said, the arguments in support of the proposition seemed rather tired, too - all the usual fulminating against the enormities of religiously-motivated conflict (is there such a thing?) and japing at the variously amusing and infuriating inanities of faith. I wondered where Richard Dawkins was, and whether he might have at least livened things up in a last hurrah as a full don (word has it that he's leaving his chair at the University to go crusading full time against Harry Potter, whom he sees as damaging children's interest in science). But the arguments for the proposition seemed finally to be on the same side as Augustine a millennium and a half ago, i.e. in the ascendence (however much Augustine would have been - is! - in the opposition sub species aeternitatis). I haven't checked yet, but the Union's website probably has the outcome of the vote on who won now posted. One votes with one's feet after a Union debate, leaving the hall either by the door marked Nays or the one marked Ayes. To my eyes as I was leaving (myself from the balcony, and hence unable to vote), the line under the Ayes was longer. But who knows, like much of what people think, it may have been merely a matter of convenience (the Ayes door is on the side of most of the seating).