By the end of the fifth century, it was only out in the wildest reaches of the countryside, where candles might still be lit beside springs or cross-roads, and offerings to time-worn idols made, that there remained men and women who clung to ‘the depraved customs of the past’.2 Bishops in their cities called such deplorables pagani: not merely ‘country people’, but ‘bumpkins’. The name of ‘pagan’, though, had soon come to have a broader application. Increasingly, from the time of Julian onwards, it had been used to refer to all those – senators as well as serfs – who were neither Christians nor Jews. It was a word that reduced the vast mass of those who did not worship the One God of Israel, from atheist philosophers to peasants fingering grubby charms, to one vast and undifferentiated mass. The concept of ‘paganism’, much like that of ‘Judaism’, was an invention of Christian scholars: one that enabled them to hold up a mirror to the Church itself.
And to much more besides. Reflected in the idols and cults of pagans, Christians beheld a darkness that imperilled the very reaches of time and space. Just as Origen, amid the smoking altars of Alexandria, had dreaded the vampiric appetites of beings that demanded blood, so Augustine, even with sacrifices banned, had still warned against the ancient gods, and ‘the hellish yoke of those polluted powers’.3 The danger was particularly acute in a landscape such as Gargano. Here, where the gods had long been in the habit of haunting dreams, was precisely the kind of wilderness in which they might be expected to have taken refuge. Certainly no Christian could imagine that it was enough merely to have closed down their temples. The forces of darkness were both cunning and resolute in their evil. That they lurked in predatory manner, waiting for Christians to fail in their duty to God, sniffing out every opportunity to seduce them into sin, was manifest from the teachings of Christ himself. His mission, so he had declared, was to ‘drive out demons’.4 Such a conflict was not bounded merely by the dimensions of the mortal. The challenge of defeating demons spanned heaven as well as earth.
Which was why Gargano’s bishop, visited by the figure arrayed in blazing light, could feel so relieved that it was not Apollo who had appeared to him, but rather the celestial general of the armies of God. Angels had been serving as messengers since the time of Abraham. That, in Greek, was what the word meant. Most, even the angel who had appeared to Abraham as he was raising his cleaver to kill Isaac, even the angel who had brought death on the eve of the Exodus to the first-born of Egypt, had been nameless. They were defined by their service to God. Repeatedly, in the Old Testament, visions were described of the celestial court: of the Seraphim, six-winged angels who sang the praises of the Lord Almighty from above his throne, and of the numberless hosts of heaven assembled to his left and right. For Christians, when they sought to imagine what angels might look like, it was as natural to envisage them as bureaucrats in the service of Caesar, in medallions and crimson tunics, as it had been for the author of the Book of Job to model God’s court on that of the Persian king. Yet not all angels were anonymous. Two in the New Testament were named. One of them, Gabriel, had brought the news to Mary that she was to give birth to Christ. The other, Michael, was defined simply as ‘the archangel’:5 greatest of all the servants of God. Charismatic as only a lord of the heavens could be, he exerted a cross-cultural appeal. Jews hailed him as ‘the great prince’,6 the watcher over the dead, the guardian of Israel; pagans carved his name on amulets, and conjured him in spells. At Pessinus he had even shared a shrine with Cybele. Christians, warned by Paul on no account to worship angels, had traditionally shrunk from offering Michael open honour; but increasingly, across what remained of the Roman Empire, in the eastern Mediterranean, his fame had spread. He was said to have appeared in Galatia; then near Constantinople, the great capital founded back in 330 to serve as a second Rome, in a church built by Constantine himself. Never, though, had Michael been seen in the west – until, that was, he alighted on Gargano, and proclaimed himself its guardian.
Further wonders soon followed. Overnight, inside the cave discovered by the errant bull, an entire church appeared, and then the mysterious imprint in marble of the archangel’s feet. The people of Gargano were fortunate in their heavenly guardian. The century that followed Michael’s appearance on the mountain saw the very fabric of civilisation in Italy start to shrivel and fall apart. War, then plague, swept the peninsula. Bands of rival militias ravaged landscapes that were being lost to marshes and weeds. Entire villages vanished; entire towns. Even on the slopes of Gargano, where black mists would veil the mountain against the depredations of freebooters, and which the plague never reached, people knew that Michael’s patronage had its limits. They had only to look to the skies, and ‘the flashes of fire there that foretold the blood that was to be shed’,7 to recognise that there could be no escaping the cosmic clash of good and evil. For all Michael’s potency, he and the hosts of heaven were faced by adversaries who did not readily yield. Demons too had their captain. He and Michael were well matched. Foul-smelling though the chief of the demons had become, with ‘the bloody horns of an ox’,8 and skin as black as night, he had not always dwelt in darkness. Once, in the beginning, when the Lord God had laid the earth’s foundation, and the morning stars had sung together, and all the angels had shouted for joy, he, like Michael, had been a prince of light.
Many centuries had passed since the writing of the Book of Job. Inevitably, in the wake of Alexander’s conquests, memories of the Great King of Persia and his secret agents had begun to dim. The word satan had come to serve many Jews, not as the title of an official in God’s court, but as a proper noun. Nevertheless, not every Persian influence had dimmed. The conviction of Darius that the cosmos was a battleground between good and evil, between light and darkness, between truth and falsehood, was one that many Jews had come to share. Satan – the ‘Adversary’ or Diabolos, as he was called in Greek – had grown to stalk the imaginings of various Jewish sects. The first generation of Christians, when they sought to fathom why their Saviour had become man, and what precisely might have been achieved by his suffering on the cross, had identified as the likeliest answer the need to put Satan in his place. Christ had taken on flesh and blood, so one of them explained, ‘that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the Devil’.9 Unsurprisingly, then, in the centuries that followed, Christian scholars had parsed scripture with great care for clues as to Satan’s story. It was Origen who had pieced together the definitive account: how originally the Devil had been Lucifer, the morning star, the son of the dawn, but had aspired to sit in God’s throne, and been cast down like lightning from heaven, ‘to the depths of the pit’.10 More vividly than Persian or Jewish scholars had ever done, Christians gave evil an individual face. Never before had it had been portrayed to such dramatic and lurid effect; never before endowed with such potency and charisma.
‘Two companies of angels are meant by the terms “Light” and “Darkness”.’11 Augustine, when he wrote this, had known the heresy that he was skirting: the Persian conviction that good and evil were principles equally matched. As a young man, he had subscribed to it himself. Then, following his conversion, he had robustly set this doctrine aside. To be a Christian was, of course, to believe in a single, omnipotent god. Evil, so Augustine had argued, possessed no independent existence, but was merely the corruption of goodness. Indeed, there was nothing mortal that was not the merest, faintest glimmering of the heavenly. ‘That City, in which it has been promised that we shall reign, differs from this earthly city as widely as the sky from the earth, life eternal from temporal joy, substantial glory from empty praises, the society of angels from the society of men, the light of the Maker of the sun and moon from the light of the sun and moon.’12 Demons, when they tempted mortals with the swagger of greatness, all the trumpets and battle-standards so beloved of kings and emperors, were offering nothing but delusions made out of smoke. What were angels of darkness themselves, after all, if not the shadows of angels of light?