Iona, Scotland, 800AD

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 426.

AD.

Vesuvius erupts, varying the Roman town of Pompeii.

This is one of those instances when something happened that for those concerned was a tragedy. Because they died. Choking in the volcanic ash,struggling to breath. And that's a terrible way to die. But, although we may say – a less and a lack, for us, selfishly, it turned out a great piece of good fortune, because the dry volcanic ash that should bury Pompeii, preserved a Roman city almost in its entity.

Here in the west, we went through the dark ages where rules and laws of the Roman Empire were a distant memory. Christian community is like the monks on the remote isle of Iona lived in real fear with Viking raids. But here they were also free to use their Celtic traditions, to create the greatest work of art ever to come from the British Isles - the Book of Kells.

If I say this is a book to die for people probably did die for it. Hiding it, finally escaping with it. One can imagine a little boat, a vehicle, and some of monks sitting there with the Book of Kells close to his breast, one of the few survivors who had to live to take the precious book back to the Irish mainland, and even there it wasn't safe, because about 200 years later somebody stole the book, not, alas, for the book itself, because it was probably an illiterate thief, but for the wonderful binding in a casket it was in.

And then a rigid villain threw the book into a bog and it stayed for some months until happily it was found.

And then Cromwell's men came and it was sent to Dublin to be safe. And then the worst came because a well meany restorer thought the book would be much better if it was likely smaller and cut bits off, here you can see.

This's an extraordinary page of St. John. The damage shows in the tragedy that this is a surreal St. John, because round the corners are sticking parts of another body: hands and feet and up at the top cut off by that restorer, adusted creature, whose name I will not reveal to you, the head would've told us whose this body is. Is that God the father embracing St. John, embracing the world? Or is this sort of crusade fiction? Is this Christ on the cross and St.John as it were makes the cross in the middle. Or is it neither of this? Is this just Celtic imagination round wild we don't know because it has been destroyed and things were written in the book, business transactions of the monastery and people signed their names. It's one of the miracles that something so wonderful and precious has survived.