With even more turmoil and war than usual, even more stress radiating from our screens, could this be a moment to curate our imagination a little more carefully? What could that look like?

Too much Kronos and we have all the facts and none of the story. But Easter could be a circuit-breaker from endless doomscrolling. A time to settle into the nourishing strangeness of a story describing something impossible from a Kronos point of view. The death and resurrection of a God. It’s quite possible to get through Easter and completely avoid this gnarly old story. Just munch another chocolate egg and settle down for the afternoon movie. Maybe a day off work.

But we dig in and we find the tale: of a dusty healer from Nazareth tipping over the tables of polite society. He outrages and blesses in seemingly equal measure. His story is profoundly odd: he is born into this world as a fugitive, is butchered as an outlaw and has the audacity to return. His parables seem designed to melt our heads. Whatever game his contemporaries are playing, he’s doing something inflammatory and different. Even the Gospels can’t quite agree on the exact manner of his resurrection, only that it happened. A rock got rolled away.

Of course, Christ isn’t the first mystical character to return from the dead. The Sumerian goddess Inanna had ventured to the Underworld, been killed by her sister Ereshkigal and been resurrected by the god Enki. The Egyptian god Osiris was murdered by his brother Set and reconstructed by his wife Isis. There are tales of Dionysus being ripped to shreds and put back together. It happens. In fact it’s something of a gold standard for myths all over the world. Their capacity to reassemble in such a way is what would qualify them as a god. As a mythologist I’ve spent thirty years exploring these stories at universities all over America and the UK. The sheer variety of stories with this theme is why we are encouraged to see the Jesus story as not at all remarkable. We’ll come back to that.

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Here’s a couple of resurrection stories from outside the canon. For many years I’ve told a Siberian folktale called “The Red Bead Woman”. It involves a woman of the margins who agrees to marry the chief of the village. On the way to her wedding she’s murdered by a sorceress who gathers up her victim’s dress and pretends to be her, even succeeds in duping the girl’s husband-to-be. For a long time the body remains in the forest until a little dog turns up at the awful scene. By now it’s bones. Being a tiny little fellow, the hound finds something most wouldn’t. A little bit of her heart under her chest bone. Through snow and rain the dog carries the morsel to the very place she was born and buries it in the soil. As spring comes she is reborn and, after much to-ing and fro-ing, gets to the wedding that was always meant for her. Here we have the great Easter theme: life, death and renewal.

In a Russian story I tell called “The Firebird”, a young hunter jumps into a cauldron of boiling water and for twenty minutes is not seen. The surface bubbles and, in some sense, the hunter has clearly died. But keep looking at the water. Finally a man emerges from the waters, not a boy, and he is so beautiful they say it was as if he was burnished in gold. He has been resurrected from an ordeal so awful his former life is long gone. This and Red Bead Woman cheer us in the inevitable scuffs and betrayals of our own life. For in our lives we know something of the Easter cycle. Nobody is quite the same character they were 20 years ago. Things pass away, others are born. These are what I would call Kairos stories. They abide in the myth-time. But something different happens at Easter. Something even more mysterious.

Easter is where Kairos crashes into Kronos, causing the shockwaves of what we call the Christian experience. The timeless and the timebound actually meet in this strangest of stories.

Jesus arrives on a donkey to Jerusalem for the great harrowing we call the Passion. Not on a mighty stallion or cloaked in rubies and pearls. This odd, underestimated figure takes himself to the temple and steams into the money lenders. This begins the process that will ensure his terrible butchering. Jesus is the dog that God has in the race, and that race is now reaching its terrible and extraordinary accomplishment.

C.S. Lewis was once known to have said that anyone who calls the Gospels a myth clearly hasn’t read many myths. I think he’s referring to this extraordinary collision of time signatures. This most essential theme of myth lands in the dust and pain and wonder of the life of Jesus. Suddenly myth has a postcode. No fairytale reads like the Gospel of Mark. It’s rough, startling and feels an awful lot like reportage. It’s no longer happening “long ago, or in some other time” but right here in Kronos time. We even started counting modern time — A.D. — from this moment.

I think the story of Easter is not a tired retread of the older myth cycles but the formidable accomplishment of everything they hinted at. The martyrdom of the early Christians is not something accomplished by simply “a really entertaining story” but by an event so utterly life-changing that people were prepared to die for its reality. Fables are a beautiful education in the most profound of truths, and, for Christians, Easter is when this most profound of mythic truths reveals its hand in a lived reality. As C.S. Lewis claims, this is the arrival of the “myth made fact”.

Whether we are religious or otherwise, Easter is a moment to ask real questions about our own lives. What in us is ready to die, what’s looking to emerge? It may seem trite, but there are few more important questions. What do I wish to serve? In the mania of individuation it’s an oddly radical step to make decisions of moral strength, to have a lintel overhead that is not dependent on our own fluctuating emotional state.

Easter. We only have to look out the window to see how the pattern of life, death and renewal chimes with the movement of the seasons. As I write to you, here in the wilds of Dartmoor I glimpse the confirming sight of daffodils jutting defiantly out of cold dark soil. The innate poetry of this rhythm is inescapable. There’s a point in mid-January when we’d be forgiven for thinking such a redemptive sight most unlikely. But there it is, the daffodil, year after year. After a long winter it’s a sight we never get sick of. So what can we, as modern people, do with Easter?

I’ll start with Lent. Traditionally, Lent is a time to give something up. In a society addicted to feasting we attempt to become a culture conversant with fasting. It can be surprisingly difficult. For some friends, their Lenten sacrifice is not turning their phones on for an hour after waking, or only checking the news once a day. For others I know, it’s a return to writing longhand for forty days, strengthening their much neglected penmanship. Less keyboard tapping. Preparing for Easter is a time to become keener in spirit, more vigilant to habitual indulgence, and more open to renewal.

Even amongst the grit of Easter, in the end there is much to celebrate. The story is heading somewhere extraordinary. Somewhere wonderful. Easter is a dimension of what the mythologist Mircea Eliade called The Myth of the Eternal Return. Through ritual, music, story, prayer we step out of what he called profane time into the sacred. We all have our version of that.

But I’d like to finish by giving attention to the moments that are rather less glorious. Christianity is a religion that certainly understands, and gives enormous room to, the experience of suffering. Easter shows us that in the most terrible moments the door to mercy can still be open.

In our combustible climate there’s much nationalistic bluster about apocalypse, holy wars and the imminent return of Jesus amongst the missiles, but we seem to neglect the sorrowed places he says he’ll always be. Wandering the bomb shelters, refugee camps, tending the wounded, sitting with the dying and the desperately lonely. We should stop gazing zealously to the skies for redemption and bring our Kairos attention into the Kronos.

That is the Easter reality. That is Jesus’ legacy. To make the mud and smoke of our own lives luminous for a moment.

Maybe every time we do Jesus has, in fact, returned.

Happy Easter. 

I always called the largest mound a hill fort, though I have no idea if it qualified for the title. This was no Maiden Castle. The ring’s centre can’t have held more than a family and a few pigs. Yet here it still was, thousands of years on. That modest earthwork was my first experience of Deep England — or Deep Britain, since the fort was constructed centuries before England was born.

Deep England is not a place. It is a shock. A sudden awareness of time freed from measurement and scale. Such a shock can be triggered by a hill fort, a shaped stone, a worn staircase. But you don’t need to tramp the Sussex countryside to find Deep England. It can be felt in the paintings of David Inshaw and Simon Palmer, the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, the work of Alan Garner. And at this time of year, it can easily be found in John Masefield’s 1935 Christmas tale The Box of Delights, one of those children’s books best enjoyed by adults.

A brush with Deep England might produce feelings of recognition and homecoming; equally, time’s long drop can inspire eeriness and threat. The best art devoted to England’s deep past is always a shuffling of the familiar and the strange. This makes Christmas the perfect time to reflect on the passage of centuries. There is a strained cosiness to modern Christmas, but beneath the lights and mulled wine lurks the black pause of the year’s end. It is a time for barred doors and ghost stories. John Masefield understood these things.

Masefield was Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967. In 1953, Muriel Spark declared that “John Masefield is known to all of us… I do not think there is any need of a book to make him wider known.” My father can still recite Masefield’s poem “Cargoes”, drummed into him as a schoolboy in Sixties Belfast. And yet, a few short decades later, Masefield has joined the ranks of the unread. This is not an unusual fate for a Poet Laureate, but it is sad in Masefield’s case. He wrote good verse, and although some of his work has withered on the page, much still sings.

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If anyone under the age of 60 knows of Masefield today it is because of The Box of Delights. The story is simple enough. Kay Harker is going home for the Christmas holidays. He meets an old eccentric on the station platform, a Punch and Judy showman with a fondness for gnomic utterances: Cole Hawlings. But he is in trouble. He is being hunted across England by dark forces, and although he has powers of his own, they are waning. He asks for Kay’s help: “Now that the Wolves are Running, perhaps you would do something to stop their Bite?” Kay agrees to safeguard the Box of Delights, a magical object that serves as a doorway to the distant past.

Masefield was a great proponent of the old-fashioned yarn. In his autobiography So Long to Learn, he emphasised the importance of straightforward storytelling. The rarefied devices of celebrated writers did not interest him. He wanted the spare, salty narratives of earlier epochs: “The sagas with their simple power made the story-telling of most of our masters almost absurd. What was Flaubert, with his labour and richness of language; what was Pater, with his learning and instinct for felicity, to the tellers of the Laxdale or Njala sagas?” For Masefield, “literature” was an obstruction, an elaborate rood screen that hid a story from its audience.

The Box of Delights is a great story simply told. But it is not just the story of Kay Harker. It is the story of Britain. “A nation’s past is the poet’s pasture,” said Masefield, and Kay’s adventures bear this out. The winter landscape surrounding his village is a map of the past: the ruined Abbey, the Roman road, the hill fort known as Arthur’s Camp, even the trees that advance and retreat as Kay moves through time. He marches with legionaries, fights alongside ancient Britons, and gallops through the forest with Herne the Hunter. Always the Wolves are there, a sinister army that harries mankind. Cole Hawlings is himself a figure from the deep past, though fading now. Once the forces of good and evil were evenly matched, but his enemies have learnt new tricks. They employ the latest technology and prosper in plain sight amid respectable society, while Hawlings and his allies must live on the run.

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The tale’s Christmas setting serves as more than a cosy backdrop. The Box of Delights is a book about time, and the Winter Solstice is the appropriate moment to consider the passage of countless years. More specifically, the book is about deep time unfolding in one particular place. And so it is appropriate that in the final chapter, Kay attends the Christmas service at Tatchester cathedral, the thousandth such service to have been held there — the rhythms of worship are the only clock that can measure deep time. While Masefield’s reach extended back far beyond the arrival of Christianity in Britain, the novel is unambiguous in its religious message. Greed and aggression are punished, and the weak triumph at the close. Even Cole Hawlings, who has been knocking about “since Pagan times”, adheres to the new faith:

“In one place, the river ran through a wide cavern, the wall of which had been painted with a procession of men leading bulls and horses. ‘That was our old religion, Master Harker,’ Cole said, nodding towards it. ‘It was nothing like so good as the new, of course…’”

The Box of Delights remains in print. It was brilliantly adapted for the BBC in 1984, with a grizzled and twinkling Patrick Troughton starring as Hawlings, and a play based on the book is currently on at the Royal Shakespeare Company. There is no doubt that the novel has an enduring appeal.

While much of the dialogue is couched in Blytonisms (“splendiferous!”), and although its commitment to place and history could not be less fashionable, the story still delivers. It is perhaps more powerful now than when it was first published. Masefield’s world has joined the far-off epochs visited by Kay, just as ours soon will. Layers and layers of time and history will deepen Deep England further. As Cole Hawlings says, “Hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs it goes. And then all the way back again.”

During this year’s 200th anniversary celebrations, I thought about my ancestor a lot, particularly when I read Mark Mazower’s sublime new book, The Greek Revolution. Mazower describes him as “one of the most powerful magnates in the west of the Peloponnese” — but he was also a complicated man. Probably brilliant, he was a patriot and integral to the war effort. But he was also, essentially, a warlord.

This matters. Mazower is at pains to underscore the relationship between myth and reality and the importance of the latter to Greece’s 1821 revolution from Ottoman rule. In particular, he understands that the “national-togetherness” (ethniki omopsychia) so important to the Greek national story was in many ways just that: a story. In fact, what existed were clusters of people like Sisinis and his followers: local clans and chieftains who often fought each other, occasionally allied with the Ottoman Empire, and frequently had entirely different visions of how to build a nation-state and what that state should in fact be.

Even the idea of the “Greeks” of an Ottoman province was wrong. “The peoples of the peninsula included not only Greeks but also Serbs and Albanians, Bosnians and Romanians, an assortment of Orthodox, Catholics, Muslims and Jews,” Mazower notes. How could this mob be turned toward a single national goal? Mazower’s answer is: imagination, or what we might call myth. The portrayal of chieftains like Sisinis as what Mazower calls “heroes” was and is vital because “heroes have their uses too and in the Greeks’ struggle with a far mightier foe, heroism had been at the heart of revolutionary thinking”.

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The goal was simple: to homogenise a variegated population into a nation, which emphatically it was not. But it worked and “the fiction bolstered what otherwise seemed a hopeless cause”. It was genuinely a tremendous achievement for Greeks; and an important one for the West. Greece was the first country to break free of empire and become a nation state in the modern age. It began the age of modern nationalism that in turn created the Europe — and indeed the West – that we know today.

If Greeks began the first modern nationalist movement then, perhaps fittingly enough, Greece was also the first example of what the historian Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community”. For Anderson, all nations are “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”.

This is doubly true for Greece, which more than any other country, except perhaps the United States, is not just a state but an idea. The relationship between myth and reality is the nation’s dialectic — fitting for the land of the myths that underpin much of Western civilisation. 200 years ago, these myths drove Lord Byron to travel to Greece to join the battle for independence. He never actually got to fight any Ottomans because he died from a fever at age 36 in the Greek town of Missolonghi. His body was embalmed and sent back to England while his heart was supposedly kept in Missolonghi and placed in a cenotaph that remains a tourist attraction to this day.

But he made his mark. He raised much-needed cash for the revolutionaries and his death was yet one more global event that implanted the Greek struggle firmly into the Western consciousness. Byron had vowed that if Greece should fall, “I will bury myself in the ruins”. But why? What makes a Cambridge-educated aristocrat die for a small Balkan province of the Ottoman Empire on the edge of Europe? The answer, of course, is the idea or the myth of Greece, which for a man of Byron’s class and time was pretty much second nature. As Mazower observes, “travellers to the region took with them not a modern guidebook (there were none), but a fake ancient one, a bizarre eighteenth-century travelogue that purported to describe the journeyings of a young Scythian in the fourth century BC”.

The Greeks were savvy enough to understand this. Delegations were dispatched to Western countries to ham all this up; newspapers trumpeted the struggle of Plato and Aristotle to break free of the Sultan. Greek independence cannot be understood without the mass of volunteers, intellectuals and journalists — as well as the intervention of the Great Powers — who served as geopolitical alchemists transmuting ancient myths into contemporary reality; doing what the Greeks could not do themselves.

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The importance of all this cannot be overstated. The rebels were set to lose the war until the 1827 Battle of Navarino, during which the British and French navies, along with Russia, smashed the Ottoman and Egyptian forces and made independence pretty much a certainty. Mazower tells us that “the country that tourists visit today was born to a large extent out of the revolution of 1821” — and the West made it possible.

Yet from the beginning, the relationship between Greece and the West was both co-dependent and dysfunctional. If the modern state was born in 1821, then so were many of the trends that have defined it throughout its modern history: the familiar idea of Greeks biting off more than they can chew and then getting bailed out by the major — predominantly Western — powers; foreign aid provided to refugees fleeing the fighting in Chios; the Greek nation-state’s entanglement with foreign loans; and above all, the ability of this small patch of land to affect Western history.

When I pitched up in Greece in 2015, what was supposed to be a relaxed six-week family break turned into a frenzied six months dashing around the country covering the financial crisis. It was during this time, as I spoke to those made homeless by the credit crunch and interviewed Syrian refugees flopping down on the shores of Lesbos, something dawned on me. Greece today is a small, not especially rich, not especially powerful state at the eastern edge of the European continent. But it is also the epicentre of three of the great crises of the West: EU, financial, and migration. (And with the recent fires that destroyed over 10% of the country’s forest you can probably add a fourth: climate change.)

2500 years ago, Greek society created the philosophical and political underpinnings of what we call the West. 200 years ago, it birthed modern nationalism. In 2021 Greek society has become the locus of the West’s biggest threats: and therefore, part of a potential solution to them. If you want to tackle migration in Europe, you need Greece; and if you want to at least try to fix some of the disequilibrium between the continent’s north and south, as well as the pervasive financial dysfunction that still exists, then you must internalise at least some of its lessons.

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Whether it’s independent or subjugated, rich or poor (usually the latter) influential or not (almost invariably the latter), Greece has always mattered deeply to the West. Far beyond its importance as a political entity or its power as a national actor.

I try to stroll through Athens each evening, and as I do I pass streets whose names — Alexandros, Themistocleous, Achilleos — have been with me my whole life. But I first heard them not because I am of Greek origin, but because I was an English schoolboy. And they mean so much not because they are a part of my Greek identity but because they are a part of my Western heritage. That is why Greece has always mattered, why it continues to do so today and why, for all its many flaws and endless frustrations, the West will never give it up.

Demons, as they are presented in myth and legend, aren’t opposed to this or that human value, but to value as such. Hell resounds with the yelps, sniggers, chortles and guffaws of those who mock the preposterous idea that human existence could have any meaning or worth. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, the devils itch to puncture this moral pomposity and show up human beings for the miserable waste of space that they are.

Evil, in other words, is a form of cynicism. What it finds intolerable isn’t this or that piece of the world, but Creation itself. Its mission is to return things to pure nothingness, and it reaps the kind of delight from this destructiveness that we see dimly reflected in a small child smashing up a toy. Destruction is an inverted form of creation, which brings into being a new entity known as nothingness. Since God has cornered the act of creation, the devil can only imitate this creativity by trying to break up God’s handiwork; but this means, to Satan’s eternal chagrin, that evil is dependent on good, and is always belated in relation to it.

There’s a long tradition for which evil is a kind of lack or absence. It may look frighteningly real, but it really springs from an incapacity for life.

The evil are the living dead, botched simulacra of authentic human existence. One such simulacrum walked among us fairly recently, known as Jimmy Savile. This isn’t necessarily to say that Savile was evil, but he was certainly a hole in the air. The point of the wig, shades, cigar, tracksuit and other appurtenances was to disguise the fact that there was nobody behind them. His eyes were dead and his geniality entirely bogus. He was devoid of talent, believed in nothing and had no relationships with other people because he was unable to love — which is to say, unable to be alive. He happened, however, to be a Roman Catholic by birth, and his charitable activities were probably an attempt to persuade St Peter that they sufficiently outweighed his crimes to allow him to squeeze into heaven.

When evil people feel agonised by the sickening void inside themselves, they try to fill it by annihilating others. Only in the act of destruction can they feel alive. Only by spreading their own nothingness around themselves can they hope to escape from it. Yet one can also view this from another perspective.

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One reason why the evil detest human life is because it is messy. Evil is unnerved by the untidy and unfinished. Materiality is shapeless, mercurial stuff which seeps all over the place. The evil, however, are purists and disciples of order who find chaos unbearable, and who are therefore deeply hostile to the human body. Hitler couldn’t stand being touched. If he demonised Jews, it was partly because they signified this chaotic nothingness or non-being, which needed to be purged for the purity and orderliness of the German race to shine forth like some luminous work of art. And since the need for purity is absolute, this meant that not even a tiny scrap of nothingness was to be left around, which meant in turn that every Jew on earth had to be liquidated.

Hitler, then, was engaged in the impossible project of trying to destroy nothingness. This, to do violence to language, was the constructive aspect of his project. The destructive side of the Nazis was the orgiastic way they revelled in nothingness and meaninglessness for their own sake. They, too, were in thrall to the death drive, which seduces us into delighting in destruction as an end in itself. As Primo Levi points out, one of the most chilling aspects of the Nazi concentration camps is that they were unnecessary. In fact, from the Nazis’s viewpoint they were in some ways counterproductive, disposing of men and women whose talents could have been harnessed to their war effort and tying down personnel and resources which might have been used elsewhere.

You might claim that it suited the Nazis to create a bugbear — an alien Other against which the nation would be united in its antagonism. But you do not need to kill six million people to create a bugbear. There was a crazed excess about the project which betrays the fact that the rationality driving it was by no means simply an instrumental one. This is one way in which the Nazi extermination differs from, say, Stalin’s slaughter of the kulaks and others, which was practically, politically motivated. This needless to say, is not to claim that Stalin’s behaviour was less morally atrocious than Hitler’s. The former murdered far more people than the latter.

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Perhaps the camps were driven by practical reason in the sense that you needed to kill every last Jew in order to ensure that a Germany cleansed of despicable weakness would triumph in its wars. This was one motive for supposedly purifying the race. But it was also an end in itself. Evil has the mystery of things that are motiveless. This is one reason why it is sometimes seen as glamorous, compared to the prim world of virtue. In fact, virtue is also a matter of doing things for their own sake, rather than for profit and reward, and thus has an unnerving resemblance to evil. The devil, one should recall, was once an angel. Evil may appear full of energy and exoticism, but that is just outward show.

In reality it is flat, kitschy, sham and superficial, an incapacity for living at any depth. It is Jimmy Savile’s tracksuit, not Dracula’s gown, the spectacles of Adolf Eichmann rather than the lethal eyes of the Medusa. The evil are those who are deficient in the art of living — an art which Aristotle believed you had to get good at by constant practice if you were truly to become a person. There is no reason for doing this, any more than there is reason for burying little children on Saddleworth Moor.

Vice became exciting when virtue grew boring. For Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, virtue is all about abundance of life. By the time we arrive at the philosophy of John Locke in the late 17th century, virtue is now a thoroughly bourgeois affair — a matter of thrift, prudence, chastity, temperance, honesty, sobriety and a number of other qualities for which one feels more admiration than affection. No wonder, then, that with the rise of the middle classes evil finally comes into own, as Milton’s magnificently rebellious Satan overshadows his stiff-necked bureaucrat of a God. Dickens’s heroes have all the virtues, but his villains have all the life. One would rather knock back a glass of whisky with Fagan than share an orange juice with Oliver Twist. How to make goodness interesting becomes an exacting artistic problem. A few centuries later, “wicked” would come to mean “great”, and Gothic would be all the rage in university English departments.

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In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the saintly monk Father Zosima declares that the Satanic “demand that there be no God of life, that God destroy himself and all his creation. And they shall burn everlastingly in the flames of their own hatred, and long for death and non-being. But death shall not be granted them.” The evil can’t die because they are kept alive by their own loathing and self-torment. Only their misery can assure them that they still exist. This is what is traditionally meant by hell. It is the kingdom of the mad, absurd, surreal, farcical, disgusting and excremental — of all, in short, that pounds meaning and value to pieces. If only the evil could let themselves go, they might recognise that there is a more fertile kind of nothingness than destruction, namely the act of self-dispossession. Only in this way might they be open to genuine life.

Yet this demands a courage which is found wanting in one of the great literary figures of our own time, William Golding’s Pincher Martin. Marooned on his rock in the Atlantic Ocean, dead but unable to accept the fact, Martin’s giant, lobster-like claws grip one another to protect the dark centre of his identity against the flashes of black lighting which batter relentlessly against them, seeking to unlock his self-defence and penetrate his inner being so that he might be saved. Martin, however, who regards himself as too precious to die, turns his face to the sky and shouts “I shit on your heaven!” The novel ends without the reader ever learning who is the victor in this contest. We shall never know whether heaven could take this insult on the chin, smash Martin’s defences to pieces and thus allow him to be reborn.