Eulogy for Dr. Nicholas Gendle, 22nd November 1945 – 20th August 2022.

Blackfriars, 25 November 2022, 3 p.m.

Nicholas Gendle was a loyal friend, a fine scholar and excellent, if demanding, company. He was a man of contrasts: of genuine piety and outrageous irreverence; of Epicurean tastes (in the popular sense); and Stoic virtue. Somehow he managed to combine a strict morality with a full engagement with the world.

I was dazzled by his erudition and highly amused by his stories, which amused him too, making him gurgle with pleasure at his own jokes. His learning and sensitive taste was immediately apparent in the way that he transformed the study in his modest accommodation in Oxford. A small study became a rather jewel-like chapel of learning suitable for a Byzantinist; books enough to strain the foundations, walls lit up with ikons, Isnik tiles and pictures and cartoons from admiring students. This is where he gave his tutorials, complete with coffee mugs and cigarette ash. Somewhere a piano testified to other tastes, mostly earlier music but guests might also be entertained to a little Sati. Rublev’s Holy Trinity presided over the dinner table, on which he would set for guests simple substantial suppers punctiliously presented.

Nicholas was himself something of a work of art, taking much care over his appearance, often with decidedly original results. I first met him on Sirkechi station in Istanbul to rendezvous with a student group to catch the train back home. I was struck to see an eccentric wearing a sola topi strutting around giving orders. It was, of course, Nicholas, getting a cheap ticket by acting as Reiseführer to the student group.

Nicholas could find comic potential in the most unlikely religious scenes, turning them into a kind of divine comedy. For him, paradise was evidently a perpetual upper-middle -class drinks party. For example in one ancient Roman church there is a fine mosaic depicting St Peter leading with kindly arm a bashful saint into paradise. Nicholas imagined it thus: ‘Do come along, my dear’, purred Nicholas in that marked RP accent in which he supposed divine persons conversed ‘don’t be shy. I know that Jesus is simply dying to meet you’.
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This relish for anecdote and comedy, his wit and knowledge, made him a favourite for dinner parties, to which he was greatly addicted, always more willing to attend than to leave. Once at a bash of mine he really distinguished himself. Overwhelmed by the occasion he fell backwards like a felled column, measuring his length on the carpet. But he preserved both glass and contents. This devotion to Bacchus provoked considerable applause.

Well, enough of that. Underneath all this mirth lay something serious; a friendly interest in the state of one’s spiritual life, about which he would ask disconcerting questions: a shadow of the priest that he would have liked to have been. The Epicurean Nicholas was matched by the Stoic. Nicholas had many problems in life, material, medical and in his career. His income was always marginal, his body battered by accidents as when he was run over by a taxi on leaving the Byzantine Museum in Athens, It gave him some trouble, the botched bone setting having to be re- broken and reset in England. Later he had a serious spine operation. But he refused to whinge, always showing a positive attitude which I found most admirable. I never saw him moping in self-pity. His manner was upbeat whatever the weather; his was the stiffest of stiff upper lips. In his last year or two he was put to the final test. He endured with dignity, patience and good humour loss of memory and awareness of the recent past, although old learning never quite departed.

For many years his life was enlarged and enriched by the companionship of Dr Jean Harrison. In those last couple of years he came absolutely to depend on her selfless and devoted care, together with friends who clustered round to help. He was not, I think, fully aware of these efforts. But we, his friends, should be profoundly grateful to Jean and to many others, among whom I might name Mr Richard Thompson.

His energies were impressive. On tour he devoured abbeys and art at breakneck speed, gobbling them up swiftly before moving on to the next. Slower of mind and less fleet of foot, I found it exhausting, as I gather did his devoted tour groups at home and abroad. He was an indefatigable cyclist, even at times when he shouldn’t have been. His courage, or recklessness, comes to mind from an incident on holiday in Dalmatia. We happened to be passing the Gulf of Kotor and espied the island of St Nicholas on which was a convent of some kind. Nicholas resolved to swim to it. I did not dare risk the distance and wished he would not either. Anyway he stripped off and plunged in, wearing I think rather little. Well, the Great Redeemer guided him safe to Canaan’s shore. But by chance a nun was passing by. She screamed at the sight of this tall Triton emerging from the foam. Nicholas tried to quiet her, booming in reassurance ‘Filius Dominicani sum!’ ‘Deo gratias’ squeaked the nun but still fled rather than stay to enjoy Nicholas’ instructive conversation.

This congregation will be familiar with his tremendous scholarship, recognized internationally, and the fluency, zeal and humour with which he imparted it to his appreciative students and devoted audiences. He had a unique ability to bridge the academic and devotional worlds. He was particularly courteous and generous, so his students tell me, in discussing and correcting other people’s work. We all know that hell is other people’s D Phil theses, and Nicholas patiently improved many of them – and other work too, often with scant acknowledgement. As my background is in zoology, latterly concerned with birth, death and migration in the human species, it may be imagined that my knowledge of Byzantine history and patristic theology is rather restricted. So I will not attempt to summarise his academic achievements. But I will say that Nicholas could make anyone interested in anything, even such as his intellectual heroes St Gregory Palamas with his mind-bending disputations, and Gregory of Nyssa, For me he brought the latter to life by describing his encounters with demotic Trinitarian theology in the 4th century market place: requesting the price of bread, he is harangued instead that the Father is superior to the Son.

Of course I was never his student, but in many discussions I was kept on my toes by the rigour of his logic and the precision that he required in speech. There was zero tolerance for sloppy thinking or culpable ignorance. He could not stop teaching. I enjoyed his impromptu discourses on matters theological and art historical. But I could never perfectly remember the precise reason that filioque was so important, and now Dr Alzheimer has run away with it. Occasionally I could score a point. Sometimes in my travels I could send him pictures of obscure churches which he had not seen, including the hermitage near Thessaloniki of Gregory of Palamas himself. I think I piqued his amour propre by managing to get into two churches in Constantinople which had hitherto eluded him – Agia Irene, always difficult, and the church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus.

His formal lectures and study days and expeditions abroad and at home, were well known, as we have heard from Liz Carmichael. But perhaps his most spectacular teaching success lay in his recruitment of a coterie of educated art-loving laypersons, mostly ladies, who formed a devoted following to attend his wonderful lectures on art history, which his profound understanding of religion and its iconography made especially insightful. ‘Absolutely magical, absolutely blown away, life enhancing’ were some comments which I have heard. Some of these acolytes regularly travelled from London and elsewhere to hear him.

I greatly regret that I could never persuade him to have the lectures recorded, which the university would have been pleased to do. I was impatient with his reluctance to put his wit and scholarship into print. I could never get him to write a popular account of his art-historical or Byzantine knowledge, thus illuminating a wider public. His talent would have opened the eyes of many. But he always insisted that it had been done before. I suspect that the sin of perfectionism lay behind it. Lack of academic publication, which surely could have flowed easily from his pen (and it would have been a pen), surely cost him the university post which his erudition warranted.

Although brilliantly delivered and organized intellectually his lectures often arrived in a cloud of chaos. Nicholas was a technophobe, and clung to the most old-fashioned equipment. Slides would be forgotten, notes dropped on the floor. Sometimes he forgot to turn up, most notably once when sitting in his Oxford garden receiving an anguished phone call from Syria asking his whereabouts. From time to time I would have to have a solitary lunch in the Lamb and Flag, or turn up chez lui for supper to find that the cupboard was bare.

Nicholas was soppy about dogs and kind to children. Mine – I mean children but probably the dogs too – regarded him with fascination and an element of awe, dazzled by his learning and amused by his naughty jokes and donnish eccentricity. He was the godfather to one of them and never forgot it.

Not for me to say, but I will say it: Despite some of my comments, and because of some of my comments, Nicholas would have made an excellent if erratic priest, although always at risk of becoming a loose Canon. He could, I think, have shown the way to Christ to some who might reject more orthodox guides.

I can hardly believe that such a strikingly original, positive, affectionate person should have gone. I miss him. I am only now realizing just what we have lost. May he rest in peace.

David Coleman
Emeritus Professor of Demography, University of Oxford.

November 2022.