Church of Fools, an early experiment in online church (above), opened its virtual doors today in 2004. Worshippers appeared in the Gothic-looking building as avatars which walked, sat in pews, clapped, waved, shook hands, laughed, crossed themselves and shouted hallelujah (although not all at once). The church, developed by Ship of Fools, featured daily services and pixellated guest preachers, and became an internet sensation for the summer it was online.
‘Put out into the deep. It is command of Jesus Christ that we set out into the cyber ocean aware that the Spirit of God is already brooding over the face of the deep. To our generation has been entrusted a new sphere of communication. Just as the oceans girdle the world, we have been given the potential to engage with all humankind in a common conversation.’ Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, in the opening sermon in Church of Fools
At 4pm today in 1926, CS Lewis first met JRR Tolkien at an English faculty meeting at Merton College, Oxford. They became close friends in the 1930s, with Lewis being one of the first readers of the manuscript for Tolkien’s celebrated book, The Hobbit.
‘He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap – can’t read Spenser because of the forms… Thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty… No harm in him: only needs a smack or two.’ CS Lewis on meeting Tolkien
Mary Astell, the English protofeminist and philosopher, died today in 1731, in Chelsea, London. Astell was an early critic of the subjugation of women by men, and wrote several books arguing that women possessed the same rationality as men, and should be educated in protected, all-female academies. She was satirised by Jonathan Swift, criticised by Daniel Defoe, and her focus on religion is a disappointment to some modern feminists.
‘If all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves? As they must be, if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slavery? And why is Slavery so much condemn’d and strove against in one Case, and so highly applauded, and held so necessary and so sacred in another?’ Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage, 1700
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins burnt all his poems today in 1868, at the age of 24, on the grounds that poetry was too worldly for his new vocation as a priest. Sensibly, he had taken the precaution of sending a few copies to his friends.
After six years of rapid expansion, during which the old city looked like a building site, Byzantium was given a new name, Constantinople, today in the year 330. The Roman Emperor Constantine the Great intended it to be the ‘New Rome’, as the old capital was too distant from the frontiers of the Empire.
John Cadbury, the Quaker chocolatier and founder of Cadbury, the second biggest confectionary brand in the world, died today in 1889. He opened a shop in Birmingham selling coffee and drinking chocolate when he was in his 20s. By the time he was 30 he had opened the world’s first chocolate factory. He also campaigned for the welfare animals.
Image: Ship of Fools