The Story of Christianity

the ‘Enlightenment’, the chief tenet of which was that human reason possesses the power not only to penetrate to the natural laws underlying the world, but to determine the nature of a just society, to advance the cause of human freedom, to discover the rational basis of morality and to instill moral behaviour in individuals and nations.

chief among the guiding ideals of the Truce was a commitment to protect the defenceless against the depredations of violent men, and

Persian Zoroastrianism – life after death, resurrection, the Day of Judgment, the great cosmic struggle between good and evil – had been absorbed into the faith of most Jews, and that of the influential sect of the Pharisees

a capacity to adapt to current conditions is a sign of life – many of the oldest Christian Churches gave plenteous evidence of continued vitality.

Islam was, above all, the strictest of monotheisms, reserving all devotion for God alone, hostile to any hint of polytheism or idolatry and censorious of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

It varied in form, but its content was fairly uniform: it was an attempt at a ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ religion, common to all nations and cultures, available to all reflective minds without recourse to childish mythologies, ‘revealed’ truth, miracles or abstruse metaphysical systems.

The new order soon attracted many of the most talented young men of western Europe; its emphasis upon scholarship in every field of learning, its missions to the farthest-flung regions of the world, its stated aim of making Christ known in every quarter of the globe – all these things imbued the Society of Jesus with a quality of what one can only

The title ‘Theologian’ is a very high honorific in Eastern Christian tradition, indicating a special knowledge of the mysteries of the Holy Spirit, and Symeon is one of only three persons to whom the distinction has been accorded (along with St John the Divine and St Gregory of Nazianzus).

Alexei Khomyakov (1804–60), a poet, philosopher, political theorist and theologian, who was the first to expound the ‘Slavic Christian’ ideal of Sobornost – which might be translated as ‘concordance’, ‘integralism’ or ‘harmony’ – as both a spiritual and a political principle. Khomyakov was equally contemptuous of capitalism and socialism, which he