Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

that Peter would sound. Yet the author himself, for all his outward show of self-confidence, was inwardly racked by anguish and self-doubt. Meeting with Agnes in the candle-washed shadows of St Peter’s, hearing her confession, encouraging her in her resolve to retire to a convent, he could see in the troubled empress only a reflection of his own inner turmoil. The cardinal too, though a prince of the Church, knew what it was to fear greatness. All the opportunities that high rank had brought him, all the glory, the power, the fame, appeared to him in truth only the most devilish temptations. Upon Hildebrand, indeed, he had bestowed the nickname – not altogether a jesting one – of ‘my holy Satan’. Peter could hardly neglect his duties as a cardinal, nor scorn his responsibilities to the Christian people; and yet he dreaded, all the same, what the fruits of such a lordship might be. Deep within his heart, no less devoutly than any heretic, he believed that it was in wild places without churches and hectoring archdeacons, out in forests, in swamps, in caves, that the surest hope of redemption lay. Arrayed in all the splendid robes of his office, Peter yearned only to be wearing filthy rags. Surrounded by the swirl and clamour of the Roman crowds, he longed for solitude. Pacing palaces, he dreamed of the rocky and unadorned cave in which, before becoming a cardinal, it had been his calling for many years to live. ‘You purify the hidden places of the soul,’ Peter had fondly saluted his cell. ‘You wash away the squalor of sin. You cause men’s souls to shine with the brightness of an angel.’

And once, kneeling on the bare rock of his cave, lost in an ecstasy of tears and prayer, Peter had been granted a glimpse of Christ Himself. Like Ademar, he had witnessed his Saviour ‘pierced through with nails, and hanging from a cross’. Unlike Ademar, however, he had been so close to the terrifying spectacle that he had been able to crane his neck upwards and raise his parted lips to the wounds. To drink the blood of God! There was nothing in all the universe that could possibly taste sweeter. What, in comparison, could the entire fallen world appear except a realm of dust and distraction and shadow? No wonder, then, that Peter, in his yearning to free himself from the bonds of the earthly, should have fretted that all his obligations as a leader of the Christian people, oppressive as they were, might be serving to keep him an exile from the City of God. For he knew, none better, what it was to be an outcast, and deprived of the hope of love.

Born in Ravenna in 1007, the last of a large and impoverished clutch of siblings, all his childhood had been one wretched sequence of rejections. His mother, slumping into post-natal depression, had refused to feed him; then she and her husband both, while Peter was still a baby, had abruptly died; brought up by one of his brothers, the young orphan had been starved, and beaten, and at length sent out to work as a swineherd. One day, guarding the pigs, he had come across a gold coin glinting in the mud – and for a brief moment, visions of everything that he could buy with it had served to dazzle the famished and shivering boy. But then, setting his thoughts against such ephemeral pleasures, Peter had steeled himself to answer a profounder need: going to a priest, he had handed over his precious coin, and paid for a Mass to be said for the soul of his father. More than food and more than clothes, what Peter had been missing were the parents he could never have. No wonder, then, all his life, that he should have longed with such desperation to behold the face of God: his Father in heaven. No wonder either that he should always have taken it for granted that, to do so, he would have to suffer.

In which, of course, he was not alone. Growing up in Ravenna, Peter would sometimes have glimpsed, out in the swamps that stretched beyond the city, the disciples of St Romuald, stooped dots set amid a mosquito haze. The memory never left him. Redeemed from servitude by a second brother, given an education, and emerging from it as the most brilliant teacher of his day, Peter had nevertheless flinched from taking the road that might have led to further advancement – and so it was, during or shortly after the fateful year 1033, that he had opted instead to follow the path of Romuald. From that moment on, never quite able to shake off a leaden sense that the end days remained imminent, he had imagined God sitting over him in unblinking judgement. Not a pleasure, but the experiencing of it would be a torment. Even finding himself the object of others’ generosity was sufficient to induce dizzy spells, and a feeling that hungry worms were seething in his guts. ‘In all conscience,’ he cried out, after having had a vase forced on him by an admirer, ‘I would have preferred to be struck down with leprosy than bear the wound inflicted by this gift!”

Yet by a sombre irony, it was the very eloquence with which Peter expressed his yearning to be free of all earthly distractions that doomed him to his celebrity. Whatever other pleasures he felt able to give up, he could never quite abandon his addiction to firing off letters, to offering commentary, to self-promotion. Certainly, as Peter well knew, there were other hermits whose austerities were far worthier of fame than his own. One of them, a neighbour from his days as a hermit, was a particular hero. Dominic — ‘Metal Corset Man’, as he was known to his admirers — had bound his limbs as well as his stomach with bands of iron; stood upright all day while