Paganism

One of the things I did during my nine-month hiatus from Prufrock, the email newsletter I send three times a week (if you aren’t a subscriber, why not give it a try?) was to cycle the Blue Ridge Parkway twice. I started in Cherokee, North Carolina, rode to the start of Skyline Drive, Virginia, and back. It took two weeks — one at the beginning of the summer and one at the end — and I clocked over 900 miles and 100,000 feet of climbing. It was something I had wanted to do for a long time. I loved it and will never do it again. Cycling is an ideal way to experience a landscape. You feel the ups and the downs. Walking has a pleasure of its own, but with cycling you can experience an entire region — in all its subtle variety — in a single day.

In the reign of Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity in AD 310 set the entire Roman world on a course to becoming Christian, a Palestinian scholar named Eusebius pondered the reasons for the triumph of his faith. Naturally, he saw behind it the guiding hand of God; but he did not rest content with that as an explanation. The purposes of heaven were to be traced in the patterns of earthly history. ‘It was not merely as a consequence of human agency that the greater part of the world’s peoples came to be joined under the sole rule of Rome — nor that this should have coincided with the lifetime of Jesus.’ A global faith, Eusebius argued, had been rendered possible by a globalised age.