Fresco of the Theotokos of the Life-Giving Spring
1. Essays & Reflections: "How the Sick Became Precious"
Last week The Tablet published a piece by Tom Holland on the Church’s response to pandemics in the Roman Empire in the second century and in the middle of the third. Here’s Holland:
It was not as worshippers of a God of wrath that they would come to be viewed by many of their fellow citizens, but as worshippers of a God of love: for it was observed by many in plague-ravaged cities how, "heedless of the danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ." Obedient to the commands of their Savior, who had told them to care for the least of their brothers and sisters was to care for him, and confident in the promise of eternal life, large numbers of them were able to stand firm against dread of the plague, and to tend to those afflicted by it.
The compassion they showed to the sick – and not just to the Christian sick – was widely noted, and would have enduring consequences. Emerging from the terrible years of plague, the Church found itself steeled in its sense of mission. For the first time in history, an institution existed that believed itself called to provide compassion and medical care to every level of society.
The revolutionary implications of this, in a world where it had always been taken for granted that doctors were yet another perk of the rich, could hardly be overstated. The sick, rather than disgusting and repelling Christians, provide them with something they saw as infinitely precious: an opportunity to demonstrate their love of Christ.
Holland ends by turning to St Gregory of Nyssa on the dignity of the human person and to St. Basil the Great and his creation of the hospital.
2. Essays & Reflections (& Prefaces): Dominion: An Excerpt from the Preface
Here’s my last pitch for getting a copy of Dominion
from Eighth Day Books. Actually it’s Tom Holland’s pitch, since it’s his words in the book’s preface:
Well might the Roman Church have termed itself "catholic": "universal." There was barely a rhythm of life that it did not define. From dawn to dusk, from midsummer to the depths of winter, from the hour of their birth to the very last drawing of their breath, the men and women of medieval Europe absorbed its assumptions into their bones. […] whether in North Korea or in the command structures of jihadi terrorist cells, there are few so ideologically opposed to the West that they are not sometimes obliged to employ the international dating system. Whenever they do so, they are subliminally reminded of the claims made by Christianity about the birth of Jesus. Time itself has been Christianized.
More on Holland’s objective in writing the book:
How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world? To attempt an answer to this question, as I do in this book, is not to write a history of Christianity. Rather than provide a panoramic survey of its evolution, I have sought instead to trace the currents of Christian influence that have spread most widely, and been most enduring into the present day.
3. Essays & Reflections: "The Church as Culture"
When I read the preface to Dominion, I immediately thought of a short essay by Robert Louis Wilken. It is so good that I read it several times every single year. It’s one of a handful of writings that is so important for my work and the mission of Eighth Day Institute that I believe it deserves repeated readings (I’ll put a short list together for you in one of the future issues of Daily Synaxis). Published in First Things
back in 2004, the title is "The Church as Culture." Wilken opens with a brief rumination on the debate over the preface to a new constitution of the European Union:
While readily acknowledging the inheritance of pagan Greece and Rome, and even the Enlightenment, Europe’s political-bureaucratic elites have chosen to excise any mention of Christianity from Europe’s history. Not only have they excluded Christianity from a role in Europe’s future; they have banished it from Europe’s past.
What a marked contrast to Tom Holland!
Wilken goes on to muse on the future of Christian culture:
Can Christian faith – no matter how enthusiastically proclaimed by evangelists, how ably expounded by theologians and philosophers, or how cleverly translated into the patois of the intellectual class of apologists – be sustained for long without the support of a nurturing Christian culture? By culture, I do not mean high culture (Bach’s B-Minor Mass, Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew); I mean the "total harvest of thinking and feeling," to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase – the pattern of inherited meanings and sensibilities encoded in rituals, law, language, practices, and stories that can order, inspire, and guide the behavior, thoughts, and affections of a Christian people.
The rest of the essay is an examination three specific ways that "Christ becomes culture and endures as culture" in the history of the Church: 1) space, i.e., Christian art; 2) time, i.e., a Christian calendar (this one explains why I date everything according to the Church); and 3) language, i.e., a Christian way of speaking formed by the scriptures, the liturgies, and the fathers & mothers of the Church.
4. Books: The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity
5. Poetry: "Easter 2020" by Malcolm Guite
7. Liturgy: Feast of the Theotokos of the Life-Giving Spring
Apolytikion: O Theotokos, your church is like the Garden of Paradise, since it pours out healings and cures like ever-living rivers. We come to it with faith, and we draw strength and eternal life from its water, through you who are the Spring that received Life himself. For you intercede with Christ our Savior, who was born from you, and you entreat Him to save our souls.
8. Word from the Fathers: On the Resurrection (Matt. 28:1-4) – Part I
In the middle of this beautiful homily, St Peter Chrysologus (Bishop of Ravenna; d. 31 July, A.D. 450) reflects on the role of women in the fall and the resurrection:
"Late in the night of the Sabbath," it says, "as it began to dawn towards the first day of the week, Mary Magdalen and the other Mary came to see the sepulcher." Earlier, a woman hastened to sin; now, later on, a woman hastens to repentance. In the morning a woman knew that she had corrupted Adam; in the evening a woman seeks Christ.
"Mary Magdalen and the other Mary came to see the sepulcher." A woman had drawn a beginning of perfidy out of Paradise. Now, a woman hastens to draw faith from the sepulcher. She who had snatched death out of life now hurries to get life out of death. [A woman took death from the tree of life; now, a woman takes life from the tomb, the abode of death.]
"Mary came." This is the name of Christ’s Mother. Therefore, the one who hastened was a mother in name. She came as a mother, that woman, who had become the mother of those who die, might become the mother of the living, and fulfillment might be had of the Scriptural statement [about her]: "that is, the mother of all the living" (Gen. 3:20).
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