Christian Culture, Revolution, & the Resurrection
by Erin Doom
Feast of the Theotokos of the Life-Giving Spring; Bright Friday
Anno Domini 2020, April 24
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.
Please read this essay!
And I hope you’ll read it again and again over the coming years.
4. Books: The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity
Eight years after his essay on Christian culture (2012), Wilken wrote a history of Christianity from a global perspective. Read the Eighth Day Books review here
and get a copy from Eighth Day Books.
5. Poetry: "Easter 2020" by Malcolm Guite
A few days ago a good friend sent me a link to this remarkable poem. You can read it or listen to Guite’s reading of it here.
6. Bible:
Acts 3:1-8, Jn. 2:12-22. Online here.
7. Liturgy: Feast of the Theotokos of the Life-Giving Spring
Today's feast commemorates an ancient church dedicated to the Theotokos and a spring nearby whose waters have worked many healings. Read a short account of its history here.
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).
Read the first part of this homily here
(second part to follow tomorrow).
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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