At the junction of Fournier Street and Brick Lane, about 15 minutes’ walk from where I live, there is a building that has hosted religious services for almost three hundred years. From the mid-eighteenth century it was used as a chapel by the Huguenots, the French Protestants who congregated in the Spitalfields area after having been forced to flee their homeland following persecution by the Catholic church, enthusiastically supported by the French king, Louis XIV. Around sixty years later, the building was taken over by the Methodists – another group of Protestants, who, like the Huguenots, dissented to submit to the authority of the Anglican Church – and was used by them for almost a century. In 1891, the building was occupied by the local Jewish community, many of whom were recent immigrants from Russia and parts of Eastern Europe (including what are now the Baltic States, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine), and it became known as the Great Synagogue of Spitalfields. By the mid-twentieth century, many Jews had moved away to other parts of London and its suburbs and, in the 1960s and 70s, the local area repopulated as a result of yet another wave of migration, this time from Sylhet – a region in what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh – who came to work in the textile industry that was concentrated in east London at that time. In 1976, the building was renamed the Jamme Masjid Mosque, and for the past fifty years it has served as a religious centre for the local Muslim population.
Last month, I spent a few days in Köln, on the banks of the Rhine, home of the famous Catholic Cathedral, which is reported to attract around six million visitors each year. This building was first started in 1248 – five hundred years before the Huguenot chapel opened – but was not completed until 1880 – shortly before the building on Brick Lane converted to a synagogue. The Cathedral is huge and impressive, and thirty years ago it was designated a UNESCO world heritage site. Despite its very different scale and grandeur, and despite its longevity – almost three times as old – and despite the fact that it was built by the same branch of the Christian church that persecuted the Huguenots, when I stood outside Köln Cathedral in the cold December air, looking up at its spectacular twin Gothic spires, I was reminded of the Brick Lane chapel/synagogue/mosque. Not because the buildings are visually similar, but because both are suggestive of the sharp contrast between the durability of building materials and the transitoriness of human beliefs.
Over two hundred and seventy years, the building on Brick Lane has hosted French Protestants, British Methodists, Ashkenazi Jews, and Sunni Muslims, whereas over seven hundred and eighty years, the building on the Rhine has always hosted German Catholics. But in both buildings, the beliefs and values that have brought people together have changed significantly. This is immediately clear in the case of Brick Lane, but in the case of Köln Cathedral, while less obvious it is also true. What the local archbishop believed in 1248, when Thomas Aquinas was working on his commentaries on Aristotle, would have been very different to what the local archbishop believed in 1548, when the Council of Trent was in session, formulating a response to the Protestant reformation. And this in turn would have been very different from what the local archbishop believed in 1848, during the revolutionary upheavals across Europe, in the aftermath of which eleven local members of the Communist League were put on trial in Köln, although another member of the group – Ferdinand Feiligrath, the famous poet and bank manager – escaped arrest and fled to London, where he hung out with his friend Karl Marx, and lived for a while next door to my former house in Hackney. And, I strongly suspect that the current archbishop of Köln – Cardinal Rainer Woelki – believes rather different things to his many distant predecessors, despite his claim in an interview, in 2019, that the Church stands for truths that transcend time.
While it is traditional for all religious leaders to claim that they stand for truths that transcend time, in reality, whereas the words used to express beliefs might persist, the meanings of these words shift over time to reflect changes in our ideas, just as the buildings themselves persist but the people who congregate within them are ever-changing. The Neo-Platonism that characterised early Christian theology – from Paul to Augustine and beyond – is conceptually distinct from the Neo-Aristotelianism of Aquinas, which is different again from modern Christian theology, whether Catholic or Protestant, which has – slowly and reluctantly – adjusted its view of the physical universe to accommodate the discoveries of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. Christians might have repeated the prayer, Pater noster, qui es in caelis for two thousand years, but over that time their conceptions of where heaven might be and what it might be like have changed radically. As for their understanding of the nature of fatherhood – a sociological concept – it seems quite clear that the family structures common in the Middle East two millennia ago are not at all the same as the family structures of modern Western societies, although both might be appropriately described, each in their own way, as patriarchal. We might like to think that we understand what Jesus meant when he taught his disciples to repeat those words, but on reflection it seems rather implausible that twenty-first century Europeans and North Americans have much clue what a first century Palestinian Jews might have believed, felt, or thought. Their daily lives, and the conceptual framework through which they understood their daily lives, are as different from ours as is the experience of riding into Jerusalem on a donkey compared with driving down an autobahn in a Mercedes.
I do not mean to suggest that there are no such things as truths that transcend time. Certain facts about the physical universe might be eternal, it’s just that our knowledge of them evolves over time, so the sense in which we understand the composition of the matter of the universe is likely to be very different from those who lived a century before us and from those who will live a century afterwards. The same is true of our ethical values: that we should treat our neighbours as we would like them to treat us, might always be true, but how we understand the concept of ‘neighbour’ will likely vary from society to society, from era to era. Once organised religions start to document ethical values into detailed codes of behaviour – religious laws – the meanings of the code will change even though the language in which they were first written remains sacred. For which reason, the core truths that were celebrated in Brick Lane, first by the Huguenots, and then by the Methodists, the Jews, and the Muslims, might be very similar, despite the formal doctrinal differences between them. Whereas, the apparent linguistic continuity of Catholic services in Köln disguises the changing nature of belief, even if the core message of the faith remains constant.
What is true of religious buildings is true of other buildings too. A few years ago, a local bank branch closed down and the premises have been converted into a pizza restaurant, which tells us that while most people nowadays prefer to manage their finances online, a sufficient number still enjoy eating out together, despite the increase of fast food delivery services. But, were I to go into any bank branch in London, the products on offer would all be very similar to each other, and all very different from the products that a bank might have provided two hundred or five hundred years ago. Similarly, most pharmacies in London sell the same sorts of products as each other, in the same sorts of packaging, which is all very different from the type of shop where Emma Bovary purchased arsenic in the 1850s, which itself would have been very different from the apothecaries of the 1600s. And, despite the wide variety of styles of clothes shops in present day London – from the bespoke tailors of Saville Row, to the department stores on Oxford Street, to the pop-up fashion outlets in Shoreditch – all of them have far more in common with each other than any of them do with retail outlets that sold clothes in London in 1826, or 1626, or 1426. Today’s variants – whether we consider retail goods and services, or religious beliefs – are much more similar to each other than to their distant precursors, irrespective of the persistence of forms of language used to describe them.
To make this point another way, my friends who are descended from Bengali Muslim immigrants, and my friends who are descended from Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants, and my friends from British Methodist families, and any of my friends who might have Huguenot ancestors, all share much more in common with each other, with respect to their understanding of the physical, social, and moral world we inhabit today, than they share with the beliefs of their forebears. And, even though he pretends not to believe this, the Archbishop of Köln shares more in common with London atheists such as me, than he does with the Catholic citizens of his city who started to build the magnificent Cathedral almost eight hundred years ago. So while it is sometimes said that the past is another country, that misses the important point that there is much more continuity between contemporaries from different countries, than between people from the same country who are separated by centuries. Other countries are accessible, the past is another universe.
For this reason, political appeals to nostalgia are delusory. It’s not just that we cannot recreate the past, but even if we could, we would never feel at home there. This is also why the only meaningful and lasting religious truth is that we should treat our current neighbours as we ourselves would like to be treated, and not as we imagine our ancestors would have done.