Chapter One

A THOUSAND YEARS LATER
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD
by Hotetsu

In 480 BCE, in a region straddling what is now the India-Nepal border, Prince Siddhartha Gotama was born. A thousand years later, in 520 CE, in a region straddling what is now the Germany-Czechia border, Princess Radegund was born.

[Case]

Book of Serenity #67: In the Avatamsaka Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha says: "As I now see all sentient beings everywhere, they're endowed with the wisdom and virtues of the enlightened ones. But because of deluded thoughts and attachments, they do not realize it."

[History]

Princess Radegund of Thuringia lived as Europe was beginning to form in the void left by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. This collapse was very slow because, for centuries, a barbarian battle victory typically had meant not the end of essentially-Roman rule in that area, but merely that a branch office of the Empire was under new management – administering the same systems in much the same way. Sometimes barbarian incursion meant even less: some looting followed by departure, leaving the same management to continue. In 410 CE, for example, Visigoths led by Alaric, who had himself been a commander in the Roman army, sacked and plundered Rome. The Visigoths, however, committed no general slaughter of the populace, burned only a few of the buildings, and after three days of looting, abruptly left.

Barbarian armies vacillated between fighting against Rome and fighting on behalf of Rome – with Roman leadership, Roman training, and Rome-conferred military titles and ranks. Alaric’s time in Roman military command was typical of barbarian leaders. Thus, Rome was brought down slowly and by forces Rome itself had trained.

One landmark in Rome’s decline was Odoacer’s 17-year reign as King of Italy (476-493). Odoacer, probably a member of the Germanic group the Scirii, had joined the Roman army and risen to command. When Orestes, the general who had taken command of the Western Roman empire, reneged on promises to grant land to Germanic people living in Italy, Odoacer led them in a revolt, killed Orestes, deposed Orestes’ son Romulus Augustulus (sometimes called “the last Western Roman emperor”), and established himself as the ruling power in Italy. Designated a “patrician” by the Eastern emperor, Zeno, and supported by the Senate in Rome, Odoacer’s term brought little change to the administrative system of Italy. Warring, for instance, continued apace: Odoacer made gains in Dalmatia and lost some ground in northwest Italy.

Meanwhile, by 484, Ostrogoths under Theodoric launched a campaign of raids ravaging provinces of the Eastern empire. Zeno made Theodoric a patrician, master of the soldiers, and appointed him consul, but the raids continued. With Constantinople itself threatened, and Zeno’s relations with Odoacer souring by the year, Zeno addressed both problems at once by appointing Theodoric King of Italy and bidding him to go and claim his realm from Odoacer.

The Ostrogoths quickly took almost all of Italy – except Ravenna where Odoacer holed up for more than three years. Finally, in 493, Odoacer and Theodoric agreed to govern Italy jointly. Odoacer admitted Theodoric into Ravenna, where, at a banquet 10 days later, Theodoric toasted the new partnership, drew his sword, and killed Odoacer. He went on to murder Odoacer’s wife and son and massacre suspected Odoacer loyalists throughout northern Italy. For the next 33 years Theodoric ruled Italy, and by the end, much more besides.

Just north of Theodoric’s realm, in Thuringia, in 520, Princess Radegund was born, daughter of King Bertachar. “Thuringia” was the Roman name for the region covering parts of what is now Germany and Czechia, between the Harz mountains to the north and the Danube River to the south. The inhabitants called themselves Thorings: devotees of Thor, Norse god of thunder, storms, human protection, fertility, strength, and oak trees.

Rome never conquered Thuringia. It’s the function of empire to extract wealth from colonized territory, and Thuringia, even by the standards of the 6th-century, was rural and pagan, its economy little more than subsistence farming. Even with their superior horse breeding, the area’s taxability warranted the cost neither of invasion nor of maintaining a garrison. Thus, Roman ways – from military training to civil administration -- had not influenced the Thorings as they had the Goths, Franks, and other Germanic groups.

Thuringia had not been worth conquering for the Romans, but when Radegund was age 11, the Franks, less concerned with the calculations of extraction economies, invaded and conquered Thuringia. The girl princess was claimed by Frankish King Chlothar, who sent her away for safe keeping to his villa in Athies, northern France.

Under the tutelage of her caretakers in Athies, Radegund may have read or been told descriptions of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, written in 524. Boethius, a career civil servant trained in neoplatonic philosophy, became Theodoric’s consul and then magister officiorum (head of all the government and court services). When Theodoric, suspecting Boethius of conspiracy to overthrow him, sentenced his magister to death, Boethius, in prison awaiting execution, wrote the Consolation – the last great work of the West’s Classical Period, and the most influential single book in Europe’s first thousand years. Radegund would have been captivated by Boethius’ attention, in the face of impending death, to questions of ultimate meaning. Boethius’ questions were hers: How can evil exist in a world governed by God? How can happiness be attained amidst fickle fortune? From Boethius’ imagined interlocuter, Lady Philosophy, Radegund would have read that "no man can ever truly be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune," and that virtue and things of the mind are the only ground of happiness because they alone are not subject to the vicissitudes of fortune. Boethius’ Consolation would have consoled her.

When Radegund was 20, Chlothar had her brought to his capital in Soissons and married her. Radegund was an unwilling bride and reluctant queen. She’d have preferred to be a martyr and, failing that, a nun. She refused to act like a queen, wore simple clothes, ate only plain food and not much of that. Her chief interest in her privilege was in using it to give alms to the poor, and her chief interest in life was prayer.

[Fiction]

Sometimes in prayer Radegund listened, seeking to discern the voice of God in what faint sounds from God’s creation reached her ear. She found this quieted her mind and gave her refuge from the brutish king. Thus Radegund found her way to a practice of sitting upright, very still and quiet, with eyes almost-but-not-quite closed, listening. She sat like this for an hour almost every morning and another hour almost every evening.

After a year in the castle at Soissons, Radegund began to want more prayer than this. She resolved to devote a full week to spending all her waking hours in the still, quiet, listening form of prayer she had discovered – excepting only short breaks for meager meals or to empty her bladder. On the evening of the seventh day, she went outside into a courtyard, and there she stayed all through the night: eyes lowered, still, silent, listening. She sat facing the courtyard gate through which a short walk away the Aisne River flowed along tree-lined banks.

As the morning sky was lightening, Radegund looked up through the gate, and saw the morning star, Venus, above the horizon. In that shining light, the majesty and beauty of the heavens seemed suddenly fully revealed. Phrases from Genesis 1 came to mind: “Let there be light . . . and it was good.” That light contained all of God’s creation and by it the whole world was shown to her. “God gave me a vision,” she would later say.

All living beings were encompassed at once within her consciousness. She seemed to perceive billions of creatures, including the faces of every human that was, ever had been, or ever would be, distinctly and individually, yet also simultaneously. She saw that they were all beings of light, like the morning star – that they were shining lights of love, of compassion, of penetrating wisdom, of a stellar honesty utterly incapable of dissembling for even an instant.

What could this mean? she wondered. Everything she knew of her world told her the opposite: people were vicious. They lied and murdered to gain the power to dominate others. A few souls – Boethius, the kindly priests and nuns who had cared for and taught her in Athies, and the Greek and Roman Stoics she had read about. True, the Stoics were pagans, but they were modest in their worldly desires and regarded desire as an obstacle to freedom rather than an imperative to be indulged. Most people though, were, when powerful, rapacious, and, when not powerful, venal.

Radegund’s education in Catholic Christianity had imparted to her a theology of sin that saw deep corruption as the fundamental fact of human nature. The violent world of her experience provided ample confirmation. How, then, to make sense of the vision that had shaken her being when her eyes met the morning star?

There was no denying the vision. It had, whether she wanted it to or not, rendered her unable any more to see sinfulness as fundamental. What was fundamental was ineradicable glory. She could no longer not know that.

But she also recognized that many people didn’t see the ineradicable glory that continuously poured out from themselves. They are beings of love and light, but they don’t know they are. Their desires and aversions distort their vision, keep them from seeing what they are.

She remembered words that Diogenes Laertius had attributed to Socrates: “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” She had thought that the knowledge Socrates was talking about was knowledge of the good – as when Socrates said, “to know the good is to do the good.” Perhaps, Socrates was talking about that. But knowing the good, Radegund now realized, is secondary. The essential knowledge isn’t knowledge of the good – at least, not immediately. It’s something else Socrates also urged: knowledge of the self. It’s the noncognitive perception of the truth of oneself as majestic wonder. People act badly because they think they, and others, are bad. If they saw what they, together with all beings, truly are, they’d be less quick to be vicious.

In the days that followed, as Radegund continued to marvel and reflect on her morning star experience, the phrase “separation is delusion” arose and settled into her heart and mind. It didn’t capture or express the fullness of her revelation – no words could – but that phrase, along with, “ineradicable glory,” and “beings of light and love,” helped her remember and retain the orientation her morning star experience wrought. She’d seen the oneness of God and the oneness of all creation as the manifestation of God. Yet we – we humans, at least – rarely see our oneness. We imagine ourselves to be separate and distinct souls when the reality is that we are each other.

Catholic orthodoxy had it that some souls were damned, some were saved, and the damnation of some was independent of the salvation of others. While Radegund never rejected this teaching, she also now saw through to a deeper truth behind it. At one level, the orthodox doctrine was valid and applicable, but at a more ultimate level, the mystery of the trinity extends to every being.

Trinitarian teaching, expressed in the Nicene Creed (325) and amplified in the Athanasian Creed (late 400s), said that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are consubstantial, coequal, coeternal, and not created. Catholic leaders presented this doctrine as if it were about a reality outside ourselves. Radegund had come to understand, however, that to see the full depth to which trinitarian doctrine points is to apprehend that all beings are consubstantial, coequal, coeternal, neither created nor destructible. It is delusion to presume for an instant that we ever could be separated from God, and it is the same delusion that we imagine ourselves separate from each other. We are all saved – and all equally damned – together.