Interview

Coptic Church

Creed

Egypt

Freedom of Belief

Middle East

Monastic life

S&U interviews

16 February 2024

9 min read

An Archbishop’s life: monasteries, martyrs and media

Archbishop Angaelos, the leader of the Coptic Church in the UK, is one of the most respected and recognisable Christian leaders in the UK and around the world. He shares his journey and that of the Middle East's largest church in conversation with Belle Tindall and Graham Tomlin.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

An archbishop wearing a black hat and robes stands next to a new building's plaque, while King Charles, wearing a suit stands the other side holding a mic.

The archbishop with King Charles at the opening of a Coptic Church centre.

Archbishop Angaelos, the first Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of London, tells Graham Tomlin and Belle Tindall what life is like as a Coptic Orthodox monk, what makes this church so distinctive, and why, despite the harrowing danger that so many Christians are in, we should not consider them to be victims.

We wanted to discover your background and what has led you to where you are today, yet also about the situation faced by the Coptic Orthodox Church, both here in Europe, but also in Egypt as well.

But I'm just going to start off the conversation by asking you about your own story. You were born in Cairo, in Egypt - did you also grow up there? And how did you become an Archbishop in the Coptic Orthodox Church?

By complete surprise to me.

I was born in Egypt and we migrated as a family to Australia when I was five. I finished my education there, completed my qualifications, worked. And then I decided to go back to Egypt to join the monastery, expecting that I would live the rest of my life in, quite literally, the desert.

How old were you when you decided that?

I was the ripe old age of twenty-two.

And what prompted it? That’s quite an unusual decision.

It is, I think, like any sort of ministry, a calling.

And no, there were no bright lights or big voices. But I do remember the exact moment in my room, I was doing some postgraduate studies, so I had my books surrounding me, and all of a sudden I felt this incredible calling, this feeling. I remember I closed my book, put it on the side, and never looked back.

And that was it – I was going to the life of the monastery. But then in retrospect, you realise that the calling has been happening over a long period. That's the wonderful benefit of the hindsight. So many things had been preparing me for that moment, but that's the moment when it became real.

And so, you moved back to Egypt, and you joined one of the monasteries, which of course goes back to the days of Antony, back in the second century, and that long tradition of Egyptian desert monasticism?

I did.

The monastery is halfway between Cairo and Alexandria. And it's said that that part of wilderness was a monastic area where there were, at one stage, 10,000 monks and nuns. There were 50 major monasteries and 500 settlements. It has been there for 1,500 years, which is quite the history.

I remember one particular instance when I was there, towards the end of my time (I was there for six years before I was sent to the UK to serve), I was walking down a tunnel, a tunnel that links the back of the church with the refectory. Because, of course, monks would come from the desert, gather for Liturgy in the church, and then after they finished, would move into the refectory to break the fast. And I just had shivers down my spine. I don't know why, but for the first time, it struck me that monks had been walking up and down this tunnel for 1,500 years, and I was the latest generation of monks to do that very thing. It was just such a beautiful feeling.

There's been quite a revival of Coptic monasticism in Egypt in recent decades.

What has stimulated that revival?

It was stimulated by the late Pope Shenouda III, who was our Pope before the current Pope Tawadros II. He was a monk from the same region, the same area. He had a great love of monasticism, and really did reinvigorate monastic life through small things, such as that he ensured that his residence was in the monastery.

He wanted the monasteries to have more of a presence in people's lives. Because, if you imagine a community that is living under persecution, they need their monasteries as a haven. I remember one particular day, it was 6th October, which is the Egyptian Day of Independence, and a public holiday. I went to the main monastery and spoke to one of the monks who looked after the guests, and he had said that on that day, 10,000 pilgrims had come through the monastery. They come in busloads from all over the country. It becomes their haven, their escape.

Monasticism is one of the three major pillars of the Coptic Orthodox Church, along with theological teaching, and martyrology. So there is still a great space for monasticism, and we have a very specific experience of it, because we have an oversubscription of people wanting to be monks and nuns. For that reason we're constantly building monastic cells in our monasteries and our convents, to keep up with the demand.

It's quite a rigorous life. We wake up at 4am for what we call midnight praises, which are preceded by the Midnight Prayers, one of the seven offices that are prayed throughout the day: a series of psalms, Scripture readings and litanies. That will go through to about 6am, at which point there will be a Eucharistic service, and then monks go back to their cells. Those who don't have to work very early will get a little bit of sleep, others will go straight into their work. All of the monks work.

They do everything from overseeing agricultural work, to construction and maintenance. There is a workforce of about, let's say, two to three hundred, just to oversee these incredible acres of agricultural farmland. We also have livestock.

There are monks who will be responsible for guests, engineering, and so on. So, everyone has a job. It's like a city. It's a complete community.

In the evening, at sunset, we meet in church again for the evening prayers, where again, we chant the Psalms, read Scripture, and then we literally go out and walk in the desert, and just greet sunset in the desert, then come back and then do our own studies.

Do you miss being there?

Well, I still have my cell there, because monks die to the world. You see, there are two parts of a monastic consecration service. The first half is a full funeral service, where you lie on the ground, are covered with an altar curtain, and there’s a full funeral service for you. Your old life has concluded. The second part is a joyous service where you get up, are given a new name, and are welcomed into monastic life. The monastery becomes your family. So, my cell will remain mine in my monastery until I die, because I have nowhere else to go to. It’s home.

Tell us a little bit about the Coptic Orthodox Church, what makes it distinct?

Well, Coptic simply means Egyptian.

Christianity has been in Egypt since the first century. In 55 AD, St Mark the Evangelist, the writer of the Gospel, went to Egypt and started preaching Christianity there.

It spread quite quickly because of the foundation of ancient Egyptian theology and mythology. In the Egyptian spirituality, you already have concepts of deities, an afterlife and of judgment. It was easy for Egyptians to absorb and accept the idea of Christ and Christianity.

Within a few centuries, Egypt became 85 per cent Christian. The church has remained there. St Mark is considered our first Pope, and we’ve had an unbroken succession of priesthood until now; so I can trace my priestly ancestry all the way back to St. Mark, and through him, to Jesus.

We are also a very scriptural church, with the Bible is core to all things. It's also a deeply sacramental church.

While Islam and Arabization in Egypt started in the seventh century in Egypt, Christianity went back to the first century. So, our roots are in ancient Egypt.

I think that's important for us because it shows not only the longevity, but the resilience of the Christians in Egypt, who have been persecuted massively. If it wasn't Rome, it was Byzantium, the Turks, and many others. And yet the church remains strong. It still remains the largest Christian gathering in the Middle East, with about 15 million Christians in the Egypt.

You began talking about the reality of persecution. This always strikes me when I meet Coptic Christians. I have a Coptic friend in Jerusalem who has the cross tattooed on his wrist, as all Coptic Christians do.

Yes. It’s a proclamation of Faith and a daily witness.

And I suppose, most people’s minds go to that horrific event in 2015 when 21 Coptic Christians were lined up on the beach and beheaded by ISIS.

I just want to offer a slight correction, there were 20 Coptic Christians and one of them was a Ghanaian whose name was Matthew.

You must remember that time. Do you remember where you were when you heard that and what your reactions were and what were your feelings around that time?

Absolutely. The Libya martyrs were pivotal in my life.

You were talking about tattooed Coptic crosses, I have one on my right wrist on the inside of the wrist, if you imagine palm facing up.

I didn't have one originally because I grew up in Australia. I had it done in 2015 after the Libya martyrs because I was so moved by their story and I was so moved by their witness. And so this was done in memory of that.

I remember it very well. I was visiting a family and over the course of the day, we were receiving lots of communications backwards and forwards that these men, who had been kidnapped and we didn't know where they were, had died. The Egyptian foreign ministry said they had died. Then they said they hadn't. There was confusion all day.

And then I finally got a call around 8pm from a news organisation to say that there was a video.

I remember jumping in my car and driving. I stopped along the way because I thought people wanted to know. I posted on my Twitter account that it had been confirmed that these men had died, and that we were praying for their families and communities.

I don't know why, but I felt compelled to write ‘father forgive’ at the end of my message. It's just what I felt. I went and did this interview, and the interviewer asked - how can you talk about forgiveness? How does a Coptic bishop, who sees this happen to his spiritual children, talk about forgiveness? Quite simply, that's really what we've been taught by our church: forgiveness, resilience, and reconciliation.

I remember, during the next 24 hours, I must have done something like 36 back-to-back interviews between television, radio and press, and the whole conversation became about forgiveness.

Even right up to today, it's remarkable how much the witness of these men has touched so many lives.

We can spend a lot of our Christian lives only pondering the hypothetical. And yet, some of the real tenets of Christianity are laser sharp for those who face persecution. They're focused and their witness is vibrant. Those of us who don't have pressure put on us for our faith have so much to learn from them about the preciousness and resilience of our faith.

This has been the story of Christianity since the beginning, since our Lord Jesus Christ himself walked on this earth. He was rejected and persecuted. He was captured, tortured, killed, and so that is our story. It's one of carrying that cross, but carrying the cross comes with grace.

One thing concerns me sometimes - when we speak of Christians who are persecuted, we speak of them as victims. The language we use is ‘survivors’, not ‘victims’. Christian communities have survived, and survived incredibly well, with great courage and grace.

Article

Belief

Creed

Doubt

Faith

Royalty

5 February 2024

8 min read

Prince William's doubt is normal - it's impossible to be certain whether there is a God

Our limited human understanding means we will never fully understand God in this life, writes Graham Tomlin.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A young man wearing a dark suit talks to a minister wearing regalia.

Prince William talks with the Dean of Westminster Abbey, 2019.

LPhot Belinda Alker, OGL 3, via Wikimedia Commons.

A new book, serialised in the Daily Mail, suggests Prince William is wondering whether he really wants to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. While he respects the Church, it claims, he doesn’t consider himself particularly religious and doubts if he should head up a church he doesn’t attend much. There has been a fair amount of comment on the contrast between his grandmother’s strong Christian faith, increasingly evident in her Christmas broadcasts as she came to the end of her life, and that of his father, who has also made a point since his accession to the throne of emphasising his own personal Christian commitment, both in statements around the time he became king, and in his Christmas broadcast this past year.

William, however, is less forthcoming. He was dutifully confirmed at Eton at the age of 14, and goes to church at Christmas and Easter, so presumably is not a hardened Dawkins-esque atheist. Like many of his generation he probably has his doubts about God and religion, doesn't often speak publicly about faith and so it's hard to know from the outside whether this really is a motivating force in his life or not.

Of course, there is a whole separate argument about why personal faith, while it helps, is not strictly necessary for such a role. Many British monarchs in the past have not had a very strong Christian faith. The significance of the role rests in the office not the person - it is a constitutional not a personal, arrangement. But that is a different story. What interests me is what this story tells us about faith and doubt and the experience of what it is to believe.

Like in my atheist days, I have days when I wake up and wonder whether it's all true. Am I deceiving myself?

I was once an atheist. Yet, like most atheists, I had my doubts. I tried to get on with my life not believing in God, yet every now and again something would happen to make me doubt my atheism. I would meet a Christian with a profoundly impressive life motivated by their faith and it disturbed me. An argument from a Christian writer momentarily seemed strangely plausible. An encounter of the beauty and wonder of nature suddenly might lodge the thought in my mind that maybe there is a Creator after all? Like all good atheists, however, I managed to push these thoughts to the back of my mind. I learn to doubt and resist these impulses and return to my central take on the world which was that there definitely is no God.

As it happened, in time, my doubts became too strong for me, and I began to think that Christian faith made more sense of the world than atheism did. And so, eventually and slowly, I became a Christian. Of course, the process happens the other way around as well. People with a notional Christian faith start to doubt it to the extent that it no longer makes sense to them.

I have now been a Christian for many years and a Bishop for a few of those. Like in my atheist days, I have days when I wake up and wonder whether it's all true. Am I deceiving myself? Have I wasted most of my life on something that is not real? I might read a book that is sceptical about some aspect of the Christian story and a doubt niggles away in the back of my mind. God suddenly appears silent in answer to heartfelt prayers, and for a moment I wonder if he is there at all. I have doubts, just as I did in my atheist days.

But just like I did when I was an atheist, I learned to doubt my doubts. Atheists often challenge Christians to come up with a piece of evidence that would suggest that God exists. And sometimes we try, with arguments from the design of the universe, apparent miracles, fulfilment of biblical prophecies and so on. But they never quite convince. The reason they don't convince is that the atheist can always come up with an alternative explanation. And that takes us to the heart of the issue.

For Christians, and for other believers in God for that matter, God is not another object in the universe that can be proved or disproved. I might find indications that point in the direction of there being a God but, as the atheist points out, you can always explain them away in some form or other.

Instead, atheism and belief in God are better seen, not as the result of a process of sifting evidence, looking for proof one way or another, but as different ways of looking at the world.

A cartoon etching of a duck that looks like a rabbit. — Wittgenstein's cartoon.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once picked up a common cartoon that circulated in German comic newspapers in the late nineteenth century to make a similar point. Looked at one way, it looks like a rabbit. Look at it another way it looks like a duck. Whether you see a rabbit or a duck is dependent upon other factors. Children who have just been to the local duckpond might be inclined to see a duck. Someone with a pet rabbit might be inclined to see a rabbit. Wittgenstein’s point was about the way concepts in our mind shape our perceptions of reality. We may perceive the same thing, but we see it as something different.

This idea of ‘seeing as’ – seeing something not just in itself, but ‘as’ something shaped by our mind’s perceptions, became well known in philosophy after Wittgenstein’s use of the image. It may help us in thinking about belief in God as well.

On a Christmas Day edition of ‘The Rest is Politics’ with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart (soon after his appearance on Re-Enchanting’), two of the most popular podcasts of our times met when Tom Holland of ‘The Rest is History’ came on the podcast. As it was Christmas Day, Alistair Campbell asked Tom Holland whether he believed the Christmas story and all the rest of the Bible. His reply referred to this very picture of the duck / rabbit, and he said: “There are times where I can believe it, and there are other times where I look at the stories and think this is absolutely ridiculous - how could it possibly be true? I think the Infinity of space, I think of vast geological time and I think it's absolutely nonsense. So I kind of veer between the two.”

In a way he’s right. You can’t decide between the two ways of looking at the picture by some process of forensic scientific evidence. There is no ultimate way of deciding whether it is a duck or a rabbit.

Now the analogy with faith is imperfect. The picture could be a rabbit, it could be a duck. Whereas, to put it bluntly - there either is or is not a God – both can’t be true. Where the image helps us, is that in our limited understanding of things it is impossible for any of us to say, whether believer or atheist, that we know 100 per cent definitively that there is or is not a God. Even Richard Dawkins agrees on that point!

The other difference is that you can’t be neutral on this. Whether you see it as a duck or a rabbit probably makes no difference to your life. Yet faith is more than just an opinion. It is a way of life. To ‘believe’ in God, in the Christian sense of ‘believe’ is not just to hold the opinion in your head that God exists, but to decide to live as if it true that God exists, that he is revealed in Jesus Christ, that each person you meet each day is a precious soul, for whom Jesus died and so on.

The American philosopher Michael Novak put it like this:

“The centre of the argument concerns whether I should think of the universe as impersonal and indifferent to me, and ruled by randomness and chance. Or whether I should interpret it as personal through and through, in such a way that all things that are and have been and will be dwell in the presence of God a person who understands and chooses all that he brings out of nothingness into existence.”

Whatever faith position you take up - to believe that there is a God or that there isn't, you will have doubts. But the nature of faith is not to have an absence of doubt, but it's how you treat those doubts. At the end of the day, each of us has to decide which approach makes most sense of the world that we experience every day. Does the problem of Evil – why bad things sometimes happen - mean you can’t believe in God? Or does the problem of Good – why good things sometimes happen – mean you can’t be an atheist?

Prince William, and Tom Holland for that matter may have their doubts about faith, But that is no reason not to decide to believe.

When I became a Christian it was because the world no longer made sense to me as a place that emerged by chance, that has no ultimate purpose, that our intelligence emerged literally from non-sense. Our deep need for love seemed to fit better with the idea that this world emerged out of love, than that it emerged from a heartless, random void. Seeing the world in that way makes better sense to me than the alternative. It doesn't mean everything suddenly makes sense, but it does offer me a better way of thinking and living in the world. I can't prove it. I have my days of doubt. But that's the way I choose to believe, and choose to live.