The Gothic novel Dracula by the Irish author Bram Stoker was first published today in 1897. Stoker drew on vampire themes and stories that had been circulating since the early 18th century, but his invention of Count Dracula (above) and his fixation on blood, virgins, death, coffins, communion wafers and crucifixes, tells a very Catholic story, seen through a dark, perverting lens, in which salvation becomes damnation. The novel grew vastly in fame and influence in the 20th century, spawning many adaptations, especially in the movies.
‘With a wrench, which threw his victim back upon the bed as though hurled from a height, he turned and sprang at us. But by this time the Professor had gained his feet, and was holding towards him the envelope which contained the Sacred Wafer. The Count suddenly stopped, just as poor Lucy had done outside the tomb, and cowered back. Further and further back he cowered, as we, lifting our crucifixes, advanced. The moonlight suddenly failed, as a great black cloud sailed across the sky; and when the gaslight sprang up under Quincey’s match, we saw nothing but a faint vapour.’ Bram Stoker, Dracula
Today is the feast day of St Augustine of Canterbury, the first missionary to the English, and the first Archbishop of Canterbury. Augustine, originally running a monastery in Rome, was sent to England in the year 595 with a band of 40 monks, and his mission was founded on a pun. According to legend, the future Pope Gregory the Great saw some young slaves in a Roman marketplace, ‘of fair complexion, with pleasing countenances, and very beautiful hair’, and asked where they were from. He was told that they were Angles, and quipped, ‘Not Angles, but angels!’ When he became Pope, he sent Augustine on his mission to the land of the Angles – England.
The Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI outlawed Martin Luther today in 1521, saying, ‘we want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic’, and offering a generous reward for his capture. The Duke of Saxony, who governed the region of empire where Luther lived, kidnapped Luther for his own safety and hid him in the Wartburg Castle, where he was given the code name Junker Jörg (‘Knight George’). To while away the time, Luther translated the Bible into German.
Today in the year 553, the Fifth Ecumenical Council took the novel step of excommunicating the Pope for some obscure Christological inaccuracy. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, who was calling the shots at the council, humiliated Pope Vigilius by publishing secret documents which revealed he had privately supported doctrines he was now condemning. He then had the Pope arrested and banished to an island in the Sea of Marmara.
The Venerable Bede, the scholar-monk of Jarrow, England, whose writings earned him the title, ‘the father of English history’, died today in the year 735. Bede is also something of a time lord, since he promoted the dating system of Anno Domini, invented 200 years earlier by the scholar Dionysius Exiguus. The AD/BC system only became popular after Bede used it in his widely read Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which he completed in 731 (AD, that is). Bede also has the honour of being the only Englishman named as a resident of paradise in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
See farther onward flame the burning breath
Of Isidore, of Beda, and of Richard
Who was in contemplation more than man.
Dante, Paradiso, Canto X (translated by Longfellow)
Image: Brecht Bug