Microsynaxis

Sisters of Sophia presents Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, and St Verena on Feb. 17, 2026

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 04:12:39 GMT

The Sisters of Sophia will gather on the Commemoration of the Great Martyr Theodore, Anno Domini 2026, February 17.

Rachel Garton will present The Battlefield of Compassion: Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, and St Verena .

Sisters of Sophia

When
Every third Tuesday

Where
The Ladder
2836 E Douglas, Wichita
Parking available behind Eighth Day Books

Schedule
Food, drink, and fellowship at 6:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation & Lecture at 7:20pm

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join here !

Hall of Men presents St. John Henry Newman on Feb 12, 2026

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 03:56:53 GMT

The Hall of Men will gather Thursday evening on the commemoration of St Meletius, Archbishop of Antioch, Anno Domini 2026, February 12.

David Beutel will present on St. John Henry Newman.

St. John Henry Newman (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890) was an English Catholic theologian, academic, philosopher, historian, writer, and poet. He was previously an Anglican priest, and after his conversion to Catholicism, became a cardinal. Newman's beatification was proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI on 19 September 2010 during his visit to the United Kingdom. His canonization was officially approved by Pope Francis on 12 February 2019, and took place on 13 October 2019.

Come and jo in us for the first toast of 2026 at the Hall of Men!

If you haven’t seen a Catholic listen to the life story of John Wesley; if you haven’t watched a Protestant learn about Evagrius of Pontus; and if you haven’t seen Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant men sit around a table together and talk theology until midnight . . . then you need to come to the Hall of Men.

When

The commemoration of St Meletius, Archbishop of Antioch, Anno Domini 2026, February 12.

Where

The Ladder at 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67214

Schedule

Doors Open at 7 pm

Food is served at 7:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30pm

Presentation and toast by Derek Hale immediately following Convocation.

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

The Christian & The Media: Malcolm Muggeridge's Lectures at the 1976 London Lectures in Contemporary Christianity

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 07:45:00 GMT

by Michael Simmon

Commemoration of St Gregory the Theologian

Anno Domini 2026, January 25

This Life’s dim windows of the soul,

Distort the heavens from pole to pole,

And lead you to believe a lie

When you see with, and not through, the eye.

- William Blake

In his book The Demon-Haunted World — published in 1996 — American astrophysicist Carl Sagan lamented what he called the “dumbing down of America.” This degenerative process, he claimed, was the direct result of the ever-increasing influence of mass media (with its lack of substantive content), 30-second sound bites, and lowest-common-denominator programming combined with, in his view, “a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

Today, mass media and the devices on which we consume information not only influence the world around us, they dominate our every waking moment. The 24-hour news cycle, the constant intrusions of advertisements, the droning of “social media” — not to mention the memeification of everything — bombard us with an unrelenting stream of words and images. And, nearly all of it perpetuates a culture of consumption.

However, we no longer simply consume media (and the products, services, and ideas it entices us to consume) passively. Nearly every media platform actively encourages its users to create their own content. According to recent statistics, more than 500,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, 500,000,000 X posts are created, and billions of items are shared on Facebook every single day. [1, 2, 3]

We no longer live in an information economy; we now live in an attention economy, and when attention is currency, the truth is of little value. Social media companies claim they are helping create a better world while they suppress the fact their platforms cause anxiety and depression. Podcasters and “new media” personalities who peddle conspiracy theories and pseudo-science are considered credible while the credibility of those who were previously called “experts” erodes.

Malcolm Muggeridge once quipped, “Not only can the camera lie, it always lies.” Muggeridge was not exaggerating. He had experienced this reality first-hand.

As the Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in the early 1930s, Muggeridge witnessed numerous Western journalists publish false reports on the conditions within the USSR in service to a progressivist / socialist / collectivist ideology. Muggeridge, along with a few brave others, reported the truth of Soviet oppression and manipulation, at great professional and personal risk. Later in his career, as a commentator and documentarian for the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s, he learned how lighting, angles, props, and cutting room techniques could be used to distort reality, reshaping and reimagining a sequence of events such that, in the end, the final product held little connection to the actual event as it transpired.

In 1976, in a series of lectures Muggeridge gave on the relationship between the media and contemporary Christianity[4], he expounded on the fantasy world in which the media induces us to live. According to Muggeridge, the fantasy of the media is a juxtaposition to the reality of humans being image-bearers of God.

Like the prophets of old who were persecuted for their pronouncements of judgment, Muggeridge’s contemporaries accused him of being anti-media and for biting the hand that fed him. He was frequently maligned, even hated, in the media class for the truths he dared proclaim. It would be tempting to sympathize with Muggeridge’s detractors; after all, Muggeridge was part of the media, so he could be considered a part of the problem — if indeed there was a problem. Muggeridge, though, appreciated this critique, and thus he never advocated a scorched-earth approach to engaging with, or even participating in, the media.

Instead, he advocated a more nuanced approach, one that recognizes that the camera, by nature, bends toward deception and illusion and views everything with a healthy dose of skepticism, bordering on cynicism (one can only imagine what Muggeridge would say about the current acceleration of artificial intelligence which makes discerning what is real from what is not more difficult by the hour). He said we must face the fact that the majority of what we read and hear and see is designed to manipulate us and divide our minds and hearts.

“The fantasy is all-encompassing,” he said. “Awareness of reality requires the seeing eye which comes to those born again of Christ.”

When Christ taught His disciples that the eye is the lamp of the body, He was not talking about the fleshy objects in our skulls. Christ was talking about spiritual eyes. When we “look” at the world around us and “filter” it through the “lens” of the Spirit, the Spirit sheds light so we can “see” clearly.

To determine truth from fiction and reality from fantasy, we must take every thought captive and submit it to the authority of Christ. Without Christ to guide us, we can be tempted to turn to the left or to the right. Without Christ to anchor us, we can be tossed to and fro by every change of doctrine. Without Christ to enlighten us, we can be blinded by our passions and desires.

One of Muggeridge’s favorite refrains was the quote from Blake at the top of this post. When we see through the eye, we will be able to see the truth amidst lies and recognize the fantasy masquerading as reality. Thus, we will walk in the light and not in the darkness.

Both Sagan and Muggeridge came to the same conclusion about the influence of the media, but they proposed radically different solutions. For Sagan (and others committed to a scientific-materialist worldview), the restoration of a world plunged into darkness by a media- and technology-induced stupefaction can only be found in a deified natural world; indeed, the subtitle to Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World is “Science as a Candle in the Dark.” For Muggeridge (and for those who claim to follow Christ), true and lasting restoration can only be found in the Incarnate Christ. He is the Light which shines in the darkness, the true Light which gives light to every man who comes into the world.

[1] https://seo.ai/blog/how-many-videos-are-on-youtube

[2] https://www.dsayce.com/digital-marketing/tweets-day/

[3] https://blog.wishpond.com/post/115675435109/40-up-to-date-facebook-facts-and-stats

[4] https://www.eighthdaybooks.com/product/156872/Christ-and-the-Media

About the Author

Michael Simmon is a 20-year veteran of the marketing and advertising profession specializing in content and campaign development in the manufacturing industry. A self-described "Orthodox-adjacent Patristic Protestant" committed to Eighth Day Ecumenism , Michael is a coordinator of and regular contributor at the Hall of Men and currently serves as Secretary of the EDI Board of Directors. He resides in Wichita, Kan., with his wife and their four children, along with one dog, two cats, three ducks, and five chickens.

The Pattern of Glory - Pt 2

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 15:15:07 GMT

An Introduction to Charles Williams

by Charles Hefling

Commemoration of St Hosea the Prophet

Anno Domini 2025, October 17

HIS HIGH doctrine of creation, in any case, does not stand alone, for although natural goodness is a fact, natural facts are not the only facts. On one side, the side of the creatures, there is the fact of “the chosen catastrophe which we call the Fall”; on the other, the fact that “the Creator had to become a Savior lest His creation should be wholly lost.” Three points thus define the pattern within which the holiness of matter has its explanation, corresponding to the three acts of the biblical drama—creation, fall, redemption. Nothing all that remarkable so far. But Williams’s reading of the drama in “Natural Goodness” is not the conventional one, although it is certainly a Christian reading. Theologians are agreed that the way in which the Creator became a Savior was to unite Himself with the created, with matter in flesh. Usually, though, they go on to explain that it was because of the Fall that God became incarnate, whereas Williams takes the position that the Incarnation would have occurred, Fall or no Fall. Being united with matter was the Creator’s intention all along. It is why He created at all. To say that matter is good because it was so created is true, then, as far as it goes, but there is a reason why it has been so created. That reason is the Incarnation.

About the Incarnation, in itself, Williams has little to say. The union of the Creator with the created is in the strict sense of the word a mystery, and he was deeply suspicious of mere speculation in such matters. There is, however, one thing he does say about the Incarnation, and he says it often, usually by quoting the Athanasian Creed. This “great humanist ode,” as he calls it, is not so familiar as the other Christian creeds, but the Book of Common Prayer in use when Williams wrote calls for it to be recited on certain festivals. Here is the description in The Greater Trumps of a country church choir singing it on Christmas Day:

The mingled voices of men and boys were proclaiming the nature of Christ—“God and man is one Christ”; then the boys fell silent, and the men went on, “One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God.” On the assertion they ceased, and the boys rushed joyously in, “One altogether, not”—they looked at the idea and tossed it airily away—“ not by confusion of substance, but by unity”—they rose, they danced, they triumphed—“by unity, by unity”—they were silent, all but one, and that one fresh perfection proclaimed the full consummation, each syllable rounded, prolonged, exact—“by unity of person.”

Williams obviously loved the creed for its crisp precision, among other things. In Christ, Creator and created, deity and humanity, have become one in a definite way, which can be unambiguously stated: “not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God.” This clause in particular shows up again and again in Williams’s prose, and the distinction it draws is no quibble. Should we think of the Incarnation as a contraction of deity, a “conversion of the Godhead into flesh”? Or was it, as the creed specifies, an intensification of humanity, a “taking of the manhood into God”? It makes all the difference, and something of what the difference amounts to can be gathered from the second piece in this collection, “The Incarnation of the Kingdom.” Briefly stated, it is that the gospels present a Christ as enigmatic as His title.

The enigma is for Williams an essential part of the meaning of the Incarnation. In Christ God has, certainly, been made like us. Williams had no doubt about that, or about the gratitude and love which that likeness has evoked. Still, he adds, “there is at least equal satisfaction that it is an unlike us who is so made. It is an alien Power which is caught and suspended in our very midst.” To condemn the aloof, impersonal Christ of Byzantine icons is all very well, but to replace them with the uninterestingly ordinary Jesus of so many modern accounts is at least as much a distortion, and in Williams’s judgment a more pernicious one. With “immature and romantic devotions to the simple Jesus, the spiritual genius, the broad-minded international Jewish working-man, the falling-sparrow and grass-of-the-field Jesus,” he had small sympathy. “They will not serve. The Christian idea from the beginning had believed that His Nature reconciled earth and heaven, and all things met in Him, God and Man. A Confucian Wordsworth does not help here.”

In stressing the otherness of Jesus so relentlessly—to the point of calling Him “the Divine Thing” and using neuter pronouns, as though personality itself would make him, or it, too familiar—Williams is objecting to a domesticated Christ, a Christ made bland in hopes of making Christianity easier to swallow. Cutting the “alien Power” of God incarnate down to manageable size is one thing that falls under the rubric of “converting the Godhead into flesh.” Yet for all his stress on the deity of Christ, Williams by no means minimizes the humanity. He does relocate it, though. Unlike the doctrine of Christ as God, which was worked out, with its corollaries, and definitively settled long ago, “the other doctrine of His manhood, with its corollaries, has still to be worked out and put into action,” and Williams is himself working it out in much of his writing. Its corollaries, however, do not regard the human Jesus so much as the humanity that in Jesus has been taken into God.

It is in working out some of these corollaries that Williams makes one of his most original and lasting contributions to Christian thought: his theology of romantic love The fact that the Divine Being who is Love itself has become one with the humanity He created means, among other things, that “any human energy…is capable of being assumed into sacramental and transcendental heights—such is the teaching of the Incarnation.” It may be only once in a life that the body with its physical energies reveals a transcendent meaning so as to become, for that moment, a kind of divine incarnation. But, rare though they are, such moments do occur, and their occurrence is perhaps least rare in a lover’s experience of the beloved. On that experience Williams built his romantic theology.

Sayers tells the story of Williams having his hair cut and hearing the barber say that when his sweetheart was with him he felt he had not an enemy in the world and could forgive anyone for anything. Whereupon Williams jumped from the chair to shout, “My dear man, that’s exactly what Dante said!” Her anecdote makes two points that are worth noting. The first is that Williams’s theology of romantic love is anchored solidly in the human condition rather than the shifting sand of a particular culture or period. “The thing happens,” he was fond of saying, and it happens without regard to this or that place and time. Six hundred years separate his barber from Dante, and fourteenth-century Florence was quite a different milieu from twentieth-century London, yet the barber could, in his own way, say exactly what Dante said in magnificent verse, because both had found themselves in the same state of affairs. Each had fallen in love.

The second point regards Dante himself. That “the thing happens” is important, but far more important is what happens next . The moment of romantic love can be an end or a beginning. To take it as an end, as complete in itself, is “the preference of an immediately satisfying experience of things to the believed pattern of the universe; one may even say, the pattern of the glory.” It is a preference that Williams identifies with sin. But such a moment can instead be a beginning, a question in search of an answer; and that is where Dante comes in. For Williams the one and only question to ask about the state of being in love is the question Dante asked: “Is it serious? Is it capable of intellectual treatment? … Is it (in some sense or other) true ?” And his answer had a deep and lasting effect on Williams’s own intellectual treatment of romantic love, which appears most comprehensively in The Figure of Beatrice, regarded by many as the finest of his books. There are also shorter versions, though, and a Williams anthology without at least one of them would be like the proverbial princeless Hamlet .

The one included here is from He Came Down from Heaven , which Williams dedicated to his wife, “with whom I began to study the doctrine of glory.” In “The Theology of Romantic Love” he relates the pattern of that glory, as he discovered it both in Dante and in his own experience, to the pattern of the Incarnation of Love. They are, or ought to be, the same pattern, for reasons which are at the very heart of Williams’s understanding of Christianity. He states them succinctly in “Saint John” when he says that the fourth gospel “particularly stresses the fact that all the events in the life of our Lord, as well as happening in Judea, happen in the soul.” There is an indissoluble connection between what happened in history and what is happening in the individual. Not only do they mirror each other, so that “the historical events … are a pageant of the events of the human soul,” but also they do happen because they did happen. Had they never existed outwardly in the past they could not exist inwardly in the present.

But the inward events that constitute romantic love have another, more immediate outward cause as well. What happens in the lover’s soul happens because of the beloved. And because it happens, not in a single moment but as the unfolding of a story, romantic love has a narrative shape that may, and should, conform with the shape of the gospel narrative. “The beloved … becomes the Mother of Love; Love is born in the soul; it may have its passion there; it may have its resurrection there. It has its own divine nature united with our undivine nature.” In the lover as in Judea the kingdom becomes incarnate. Two natures become one, as they did in Christ; and like its original in history this incarnation in the individual takes place, not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by the taking of humanity into God.

In assigning so crucial a place in his theology to the moment of romantic love Williams is not claiming it is the one and only point of entry into the pattern of the glory. “Romantic love between the sexes,” he readily admits, “is but one kind of romantic love, which is but a particular habit of Romanticism as a whole, which is itself but a particular method of the Affirmation of Images.” The almost incredible nature of things is that there is no fact that is not in the glory of God, and therefore no fact that cannot be affirmed as an image. For Dante the fact around which everything revolved was a person, Beatrice, who “was, in her degree, an image of nobility, of virtue, of the Redeemed Life, in some sense of Almighty God Himself.” Williams does not mean that she was like nobility, virtue, the redeemed life, the Almighty. She was like nothing but herself. For just that reason, however—because she was entirely and exclusively the person she was and no other—she could be an image . The same is true of every image, in Williams’s sense of the word. Like a sacrament or an index, an image includes and makes present the thing of which it is an image, so that for Dante to behold Beatrice was to behold beatitude and nothing less. Yet the image does not cease to be uniquely and wholly itself. Together with an identity there is always an otherness.

As a way of apprehending transcendence, the Way of the Affirmation of Images is associated with one of the aphorisms that are such a characteristic feature of Williams’s writing. To affirm an image as a revelation of God is to say, “this also is Thou.” But because an image conceals even as it discloses, any such affirmation must always be corrected by adding its opposite: “neither is this Thou.” As the first phrase is the maxim of the Affirmative Way in general and of romantic love in particular, so too the second conveys the essence of another, complementary spirituality, which Williams calls the Way of the Negation (or Rejection) of Images. To the Negative Way belong asceticism and self-denial, wordless, imageless prayer, and the mystical ascent to a “cloud of unknowing.” Neither of these Ways is entirely independent of the other, and their watchwords are the two halves of one saying, which Williams treats as a quotation although he never found its source: this also is Thou ; neither is this Thou . “As a maxim for living,” he said of this formula, “it is invaluable, and it—or its reversal—summarizes the history of the Christian Church.”

As such it serves as a motto for The Descent of the Dove , Williams’s own history of the church. This remarkable book has been called the only imaginative church history ever written...

*Part III forthcoming

** CLICK HERE for Part I of this essay

***Originally published in Charles Williams: Essential Writings in Spirituality and Theology, edited by Charles Hefling (Cambridge & Boston: Cowley Publications, 1993), pp. 1-30.

An Epistolary Encounter: Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis First Meet in Letters

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 16:50:15 GMT

Commemoration of St Longinus the Centurion

Anno Domini 2025, October 16

Magdalen College

March 11, 1936

Dear Mr. Williams,

I never know about writing to an author. If you are older than I, I don’t want to seem impertinent: if you are younger, I don’t want to seem patronizing. But I feel I must risk it.

A book sometimes crosses one’s path which is so like the sound of one’s native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer. I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris. There are layers and layers—first the pleasure that any good fantasy gives me: then, what is rarely (tho’ not so very rarely) combined with this, the pleasure of a real philosophical and theological stimulus: third, characters: fourthly, what I neither expected nor desired, substantial edification.

I mean the latter with perfect seriousness. I know Damaris very well: in fact I was in course of becoming Damaris (but you have pulled me up). That pterodactyl … I know all about him: and wanting not Peace, but (faugh!) “peace for my work.” Not only is your diagnosis good: but the very way in which you force one to look at the matter is itself the beginning of a cure. Honestly, I didn’t think there was anyone now alive in England who could do it.

Coghill of Exeter put me on to the book; I have put on Tolkien (the Professor of Anglo Saxon and a papist) and my brother. So there are three dons and one soldier all buzzing with excited admiration. We have a sort of informal club called the Inklings: the qualifications (as they have informally evolved) are a tendency to write, and Christianity. Can you come down some day next term (preferably not Sat. or Sunday), spend the night as my guest in College, eat with us at a chop house, and talk with us till the small hours. Meantime, a thousand thanks.

C. S. Lewis

Oxford University Press, Amen House, London

March 12, 1936

My dear Mr. Lewis, If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed. It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me. My admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence rises every day.

To be exact, I finished on Saturday looking—too hastily—at proofs of your Allegorical Love Poem . I had been asked to write something about it for travellers and booksellers and people so I read it first … I admit that I fell for the Allegorical Love Poem so heavily because it is an aspect of the subject with which my mind has always been playing; indeed I once wrote a little book called An Essay in Romantic Theology , which the Bishop of Oxford (between ourselves) shook his head over. So amen House did not publish it, and I quite agree now that it was a good thing. For it was very young and rhetorical. But I still toy with the notion of doing something on the subject, and I regard your book as practically the only one that I have ever come across since Dante, that shows the slightest understanding of what this very peculiar identity of love and religion means. I know there is Coventry Patmore, but he rather left the identity to be deduced.

After vacillating a good deal I permit myself to believe in your letter and in the interests of the subject so far as to send you a copy of one of my early books of verse [ Poems of Conformity , 1917], because the Poems from page 42 – page 81 may interest you….

You must be in London sometimes. Do let me know and come and have lunch or dinner … I should like very much to come to Oxford as you suggest; the only thing is that I am a little uncertain about next term because I may be at Canterbury off and on to see the rehearsals of the Play I have written [Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, 1936] for the Friends of the Cathedral to do in June … You will conceive Cranmer as coming under a similar danger to that from which Damaris was saved by the Mercy. Do forgive this too long letter, but after all to write about your Love Poem and my Lion and both our Romantic Theology in one letter takes some paragraphs. … P.S.2. And I am 49—so you can decide whether that is too old or too young.

Charles Williams

Magdalen College

March 23, 1936

Dear Williams,

This is going to be a complicated matter. To make a clean breast of it, that particular species of romanticism which you found in my book and which is expressed in the poems you send me, is not my kind at all. I see quite clearly why you think it is—the subject of the book, the at any rate respectful treatment of the sentiment, the apparently tell-tale familiarity with Coventry Patmore—it all fits in perfectly and must seem to you almost like a trap: while it shows me for the first time how paradoxical it is that I, of all men, should have elected, or been elected, to treat such a subject. I trust, however, that there has been no writing with (horror of horrors!) my tongue in my cheek. I think you will find that I nowhere commit myself to a definite approval of this blend of erotic and religious feeling. I treat it with respect: I display: I don’t venture very far. And this is perhaps what one ought to expect from a man who is native in a quite distinct, though neighbouring, province of the Romantic country, and who willingly believes well of all her provinces, for love of the country herself, though he dare not affirm except about his own.

I hope you will find that where I talk of the value of the gods and, above all, of their death and resurrection, I speak much more confidently than I ever do of the Celestial and Terrestrial Cupids: there I am on my own ground. That’s where I live.

I don’t know how far I am making myself clear … the matter, at this stage in our knowledge of each other, is not easy. Put briefly, there is a romanticism which finds its revelation in love, which is yours, and another which finds it in mythology (and nature mythically apprehended) which is mine. Ladies, in the one: gods in the other—the bridal chamber, or the wood beyond the world—a service incensed with rich erotic perfume, a service smelling of heather, salt water etc.

But this distinction is a little complicated by two facts. 1. While writing about Courtly Love I have been so long a student of your province that I think, in a humble way, I am nearly naturalised. 2. In the book I am sending you (don’t read it unless it interests) you will find lots about the frontier between sexual and religious experience [probably The Pilgrim’s Progress ]. But look to your feet, here. It really has nothing to do with your province: it is simply about desire, longing, the impersonal thing: which oddly enough can be diverted from the wood beyond the world (are you still following me?) into lust just as quickly as “love” can. We shall have a great deal to talk about when we meet.

After this you will not be surprised to learn that I found your poems excessively difficult. I think I have followed Ascension . I take it this deals with the death of passion into matrimonial routine which is to passion as the Church is to the earthly life of Our Lord. Am I right? If so it is because we touch here: the death and re-birth motive being of the very essence of my kind of romanticism. If so, it is a good poem, specially stanzas 2 and 7. The Christian Year I take to be on the same theme, but there are a lot of gaps in my understanding. What I liked best was the bit about the Shepherds at the top of page 73. This may quite possibly be even a great poem—I’ll tell you in a year or so, if I find out. (And talking of years, I’m 37.) Churches I didn’t like, except that dear duplicity of love and Love—which I suppose is the thing we’re talking about. Presentation I liked, and the bit in Gratia Plena about the provincial dialect. Orthodoxy and Ecclesia Docens I definitely disliked. (I embrace the opportunity of establishing the precedent of brutal frankness, without which our acquaintance begun like this would easily be a mere butter bath!) But the thing I like best of all came outside the “pages prescribed for special study”—notably Endings , The Clerk , and Ballade of a Street Door (tho’ I can’t construe line 2).

I have read Many Dimensions with an enormous enjoyment—not that it’s as good as the Lion , but then in a sense it hardly means to be. By Jove, it is an experience when this time-travelling business is done by a man who really thinks it out. I believe all your conclusions do really follow—and I never thought of being caught in that perpetual to-and-fro. The effect which that first idea of a really possible hell has on Lord Thingummy is excellent.

I shouldn’t dream of coming to London without visiting you, but I can and do dream of not being in London for a long time. But Canterbury can’t claim you all the time, and there are others besides me who want to meet you. The fourth week of next term (May 18th-May 22nd) would be a good time. Could we nail you now for a week day night between those dates? Of course, I realise that this letter, for more than one cause, may have quenched all wish for a meeting: but acting on the pleasanter hypothesis—

C. S. Lewis

P.S. Thanks for the very kind and intelligent blurb [on cover of The Allegory of Love ]—a relief, after the nonsensical one put out from Walton Street! But not a word, he [sir Humphrey Milford] may have been doing his best.

*Published in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931-1949 (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), pp. 183-187. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

The Assumption

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 15:36:02 GMT

by Charles Williams

Commemoration of St Lucian the Martyr of Antioch

Anno Domini 2025, October 15

With all arms bare to household toil

And a little child in hand,

The Mother of God goes on, goes on,

Beside her Peter, beside her John,

And chanting priest and singing bard,

And Michael the warrior for her guard,

She walks a fertile land.

She treads the ways of Sarras town [the land of the Grail]

As Nazareth she trod

She knows to mend, she knows to cook,

She knows on Lord Jesus’ face to look,

Before her feet the high kings ran,

She, the Maid, is the Mother of Man,

She is the Mother of God.

Sorrow and Labour and Delight

Go surely up with her.

Softly and gaily she goes on,

As when she did her sandals don,

As when she rinsed the cup and can [by implication, the Grail]

For blessed Joseph, a labouring man,

And God, a Carpenter.

*Originally published in Charles Williams, Poems of Conformity (London: Oxford University Press, 1917); reprinted in The Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams , eds. Grevel Lindop and John Matthews (Hannacroix, NY: Apocryphile Press, 2022), p. 162.

**“The Assumption” offers a deliberately working-class image of the Virgin, busy with “household toil,” caring for small children, cooking and mending, and doing the washing-up: rinsing “the cup and can” for Joseph, “a labouring man,” and for God. But she is “tread[ing] the ways of Sarras town”; Sarras is the land of the Grail: the Blessed Virgin is thus placed within the Arthurian myth, and the “cup and can” by implication become the Grail. ~ Grevel Lindop , The Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams , p. 5

The Pattern of Glory - Pt I

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 19:45:03 GMT

An Introduction to Charles Williams

by Charles Hefling

Commemoration of St Cosmas the Hagiopolite

Anno Domini 2025, October 14

WHEN CHARLES Williams said that “if one is anxious to write about God, one ought to be anxious to write well,” he might have been stating his own aspirations. Writing was both his trade and his vocation, and he was always writing about God. Not that everything he wrote is theology. Most of it, in fact, is not. He wrote fiction, seven novels in all; he wrote non-fiction, chiefly history and literary criticism; he wrote, above all, poetry—“whether that is or is not fiction,” as he put it. He wrote nearly forty books, all told, three or four of which a librarian would catalog under “theology.” But the conventional classifications are too clumsy to describe what Williams wrote. “All his books,” Dorothy Sayers rightly observed, “illuminate one another, for the same master-themes govern them all, so that it is impossible to confine any one of them to a single book.” Nor can any of the books be assigned to a single category.

T. S. Eliot, who like Sayers knew him personally, thought Williams used such a variety of literary forms because “what he had to say was beyond his resources, and probably beyond the resources of language, to say once for all through any one medium of expression.” That is not to suggest that what he had to say is elaborate or obscure. It is blazingly simple. As a character remarks in one of the novels, once you have said “Good God!” there is not much else to say. But the ways of saying “Good God!” are endless, and if exploring them is “doing theology” then there is very little in Williams’s writing that is not theological.

During his life the writing for which he was best known was his literary criticism. Poetry was his special field as a critic, English poetry in particular but also Dante, as we shall see. His own verse, however, is what he would have wished to be remembered for, and “CHARLES WILLIAMS: POET” is inscribed on his tombstone. C. S. Lewis ranked Williams’s mature poetry among the two or three most valuable books of verse produced in the twentieth century, although he added, presciently perhaps, that its extreme difficulty might kill it. The novels, on the other hand, are alive and well. They have never been out of print for long, and it is through All Hallows’ Eve or The Greater Trumps , Descent into Hell or War in Heaven , to name my own favorites, that readers today are most likely to have encountered Williams saying “Good God!”

As a novelist Williams is often named in one breath with Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and not without reason. He belonged for a time to the Inklings, the now famous circle of writers of which Tolkien and Lewis were the most famous members. He shared their conviction that a story is sometimes the best way of saying what there is to say, he wrote “fantastic” fiction, as they did, and his tales, like theirs, reflect a Christian outlook. But the comparison only goes so far. Lewis never seems to leave the lecturer’s podium; writing fiction is a species of teaching. Tolkien is just the opposite in that narrative, for him, needs no other purpose. Telling a story is an end in itself, and the reason he gives for writing The Lord of the Rings is that he wanted to try his hand at telling a really long one. Williams does not fit either mold. Certainly his stories, like Lewis’s, are about something, other than themselves; but they are not about Christianity in the sense that they translate Christian tenets into imaginative prose. A better way to put it would be that Williams’s fiction is about the same things Christianity is about—where we come from, where we are going, and how we get there. In other words, it is about God. But the purpose of the novels is not so much to instruct as to indicate—to call attention to what things are like in fact, by redescribing them in fiction.

In effect, then, though not in form, Williams’s novels are poetry, which helps to explain why they are at once more ordinary and more extraordinary—or better, they are more natural and at the same time more supernatural—than The Lord of the Rings or Lewis’s outer-space trilogy. The plot of a Williams novel turns on events that are as uncanny as anything in Lewis or Tolkien. But where do they happen? Not in the exotic world of a distant age or a distant planet, but in the matter-of-fact, middle-class world of a publishing house, a London suburb, or a sleepy village. And they do not happen to characters who are more or other than human, but to rather unremarkable people—a secretary, a minor civil servant, a butterfly-collector. When the uncanniness begins, it is all the more sublime—or all the more terrible—because of the contrast with the ordinariness that surrounds it. A pterodactyl is much the sort of thing you might expect to see in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It is not what a graduate student writing a dry research thesis on a medieval philosopher expects to see outside her window, as a character does in The Place of the Lion .

Someone has called Williams’s novels “supernatural thrillers,” which fits them well enough, but they are no less serious on that account. As Lewis himself pointed out, “the frank supernaturalism and the frankly blood-curdling episodes” are not there for their shock-value. Although Williams was not an allegorist like Bunyan or a preacher like Milton, his stories do put fiction to use for truthful purposes. Quite often the best commentary on some theological point he makes will be found not elsewhere in his theology but in the novels. Because they make their appeal to imagination, to “the feeling intellect” rather than emotion alone, they can convince the reader as perhaps nothing else could that what they depict is objectively real—that the routine stream of sights and sounds which meets us every day runs deeper than we suppose, and that an intangible dimension exists in, with, and under every moment of our experience. Call this further reality spiritual, if you like, or metaphysical or transcendental. By whatever name it can, if Williams is to be believed, make its presence known and felt at any moment—and it does.

People knew him personally and observed the same coexistence of the mundane and the otherworldly in Williams himself. “I have never met any human being,” one of them wrote, “in whom the divisions between body and spirit, natural and supernatural, temporal and eternal were so non-existent, nor any writer who so consistently took their non-existence for granted.” Eliot puts a similar impression on record in his introduction to All Hallows’ Eve , arguably the best of Williams’s novels. “To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural. And this peculiarity gave him that profound insight into Good and Evil, into the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell, which provides both the immediate thrill and the permanent message of his novels.”

The writings collected here display the same insight and perhaps also, in their own less dramatic way, the same thrill. None of them is fiction, although some discuss fiction. All of them are about facts, and all of them are about God, which for Williams amounts to the same thing. Every fact is a theological fact, simply because it is a fact. “The glory of God,” Williams declares, “is in facts. The almost incredible nature of things is that there is no fact which is not in His glory.” In those two sentences he lays the foundation on which everything in this volume is built. The rest of my introduction will be an attempt to explain what they mean.

“Glory” is the place to begin. It is one of Williams’s favorite words, and he uses it in a sense of his own. The “mazy bright blur” that people commonly associate with glory is not exactly what he has in mind. Amazement, yes; brightness, yes; but not blurry indistinctness. “The maze should be…exact, and the brightness should be that of a geometrical pattern.” Glory is like what you see through a kaleidoscope rather than what you see through a fog. It is precise and regular, like a solemn liturgy or an intricate dance, which are two of the images Williams uses in his novels for the all-inclusive orderliness that bespeaks the divine. Another, which appears in his non-fictional writing as well, is the image of a city. Places and buildings, each distinct yet connected with the others by a network of paths, and a multitude of persons with different roles to play and jobs to do, all coordinated with the others in a vastly complex web of interdependence—that, for Williams, is an earthly counterpart of heaven.

As though to emphasize that glory is not just splendor but orderly splendor, Williams often speaks of “the pattern of the glory.” It is one of his most characteristic phrases, and I have made it the title of this introduction. The web of relationships that he means by pattern is intelligible, but the intelligence needed to grasp it is not the kind computers imitate. Perceiving in facts the glory of God is as much a matter of aesthetic intuition as of logical reasoning. Perhaps the best analogy would be understanding poetry: facts are the words, God is the poet, and the world, past and present, is the poem. If this universal poem is to be rightly construed, all the words—every fact—must be accounted for. Each has a place in the whole and none may be overlooked. And if it is to be construed in terms of its author’s intention, as a poem should be, the terms must be God’s rather than ours, “the terms He deigns to apply, not the terms we force on Him. And this, it seems, is the use of all science—to discover His own terms.” Far from thinking of the “secular” sciences as opposed to theology, Williams held their pursuit of accurate, factual knowledge in high esteem as an exploration of divine glory.

That “the glory of God is in facts” is the theme on which the essays in this volume are variations. Some of the facts Williams writes about are historical facts; some, the second World War for example, were occurring even as he wrote. Some are permanent, and some are always occurring. Spiritual facts are included, of course. Nobody had a stronger sense than he of the reality of forgiveness, charity, and redemption, sin, and damnation, “the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell.” At the same time, nobody was more vividly aware, either, of the divine glory of material facts, not least the facts of sensuality and sex. The body, he insists, “was holily created, is holily redeemed, and is to be holily raised from the dead. It is, in fact, for all our difficulties with it, less fallen, merely in itself, than the soul.”

That is why he found D. H. Lawrence, that “convinced and rhetorical heretic” as he called him, worth paying attention to. Lawrence exaggerated, as heretics always do; it is what makes them heretical. But he erred on the right side. The body in general, and sexuality in particular, have generally been given low grades by religious and philosophical teachers. Plato is a prime example, but even Christians, who ought to know better, have too often regarded the flesh as at best a nuisance and a distraction. For the most part they have said the right things, officially at least, but in the wrong tone, so that the youngster Williams quotes can be excused for asking, “Isn’t marriage rather a wicked sacrament?” Williams did not think so. Merely in itself, the body is less fallen than the soul, and merely in itself he calls it, following Woodsworth, an “index.” The words in a printed index are meaningful in themselves while at the same time they also point beyond themselves to the meaning of the whole book. Likewise, the material existence of “the holy and glorious flesh” has a significance of its own, which also indicates the corresponding significance of the whole material world. That is what Lawrence was able to see, even though he had not much understanding of the reasons why it is there to be seen.

The first essay in this volume is about those reasons. “Natural Goodness” is Williams in a nutshell, or as close to it as anything he wrote. It draws an outline to which the rest of this collection adds depth and detail, and I put it at the beginning on that account. It has the defects of its virtues, however. Because it is so compact, readers who are unfamiliar with the way Williams thinks and writes may find it a little daunting. If so, I recommend beginning with one of the more specific items instead—with “Sensuality and Substance,” for example, where the discussion of Lawrence appears; or with the book review “Augustine and Athanasius,” which like many of the reviews Williams wrote tells as much about his own ideas as about the books reviewed; or with “The Cross,” probably the most personal essay in this collection. But almost any of the others will serve. What Sayers said of Williams’s books is equally true of his shorter writings [contained in this book]: the same master-themes govern them all.

One of those themes is the main point in “Natural Goodness”: natural, material things are expressive in their own right. In making this point, however, Williams also gives its theological explanation. Matter is a creature , a created reality. But to be created involves having, and so referring to, a creator; and Williams argues that the physical creature called matter refers no less surely than does the immaterial creature called spirit. The sheer fact of existing, physically or spiritually, is meaningful. There is more than an echo here of the protest raised by nineteenth-century romanticism against the idea that matter is good for nothing except to be manipulated for economic ends by technological means. But it would be equally true to say that Williams was ahead of his time. He would have found much to approve of in the creation spirituality that is flourishing at the end of the twentieth century.

*Introductory essay to be continued

**Originally published in Charles Williams: Essential Writings in Spirituality and Theology, edited by Charles Hefling (Cambridge & Boston: Cowley Publications, 1993), pp. 1-30.

Preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 19:32:21 GMT

by C. S. Lewis

Commemoration of the Holy Prophet Zacharias, Father of St. John the Forerunner

Anno Domini 2025, September 5

IN THIS BOOK the reader is offered the work of one professional author, two dons, a solicitor, a friar, and a retired army officer; if he feels disposed to complain of hotch-potch (which incidentally is an excellent dish; consult the Noctes Ambrosianae ) I must reply that the variety displayed by this little group is far too small to represent the width of Charles Williams’s friendships. Nor are we claiming to represent it. Voices from many parts of England—voices of people often very different from ourselves—would justly rebuke our presumption if we did. We know that he was as much theirs as ours: not only, nor even chiefly, because of his range and versatility, great though these were, but because, in every circle that he entered, he gave the whole man. I had almost said that he was at everyone’s disposal, but those words would imply a passivity on his part, and all who knew him would find the implication ludicrous. You might as well say that an Atlantic breaker on a Cornish beach is “at the disposal” of all whom it sweeps off their feet. If the authors of this book were to put forward any claim, it would be, and that shyly, that they were for the last few years of his life a fairly permanent nucleus among his literary friends. He read us his manuscripts and we read him ours: we smoked, talked, argued, and drank together (I must confess that with Miss Dorothy Sayers I have seen him drink tea only: but that was neither his fault nor hers).

Of many such talks this collection is not unrepresentative. The first three essays are all on literature, and even on one aspect of literature, the narrative art. That is natural enough. His All Hallows’ Eve and my own Perelandra (as well as Professor Tolkien’s unfinished sequel to the Hobbit ) had all been read aloud, each chapter as it was written. They owe a good deal to the hard-hitting criticism of the circle. The problems of narrative as such—seldom heard of in modern critical writings—were constantly before our minds. The last two essays are historical. Father Matthew’s bears on an aspect of the Middle Ages which always seemed to Williams of deep significance and which had, indeed, been the common interest that first brought him and me together. The final essay carries us to seventeenth-century France. My brother’s lifelong interest in the reign of Louis XIV was a bond between Williams and him which no one had foreseen when they first met. Those two, and Mr. H. V. D. Dyson of Merton, could often be heard in a corner talking about Versailles, intendants , and the maison du roy , in a fashion with which the rest of us could not compete. Between the literary and the historical essays stands Mr. Barfield’s work, which is literary and historical at once. We had hoped to offer the whole collection to Williams as what the Germans call a Festschrift when peace would recall him from Oxford to London. Death forestalled us; we now offer as a memorial what had been devised as a greeting.

Something must here be said to those who may ask “Who was Charles Williams?” He had spent most of his life in the service of the Oxford University Press at Amen House, Warwick Square, London. He was a novelist, a poet, a dramatist, a biographer, a critic, and a theologian: a “romantic theologian” in the technical sense which he himself invented for those words. A romantic theologian does not mean one who is romantic about theology but one who is theological about romance, one who considers the theological implications of those experiences which are called romantic. The belief that the most serious and ecstatic experiences either of human love or of imaginative literature have such theological implications, and that they can be healthy and fruitful only if the implications are diligently thought out and severely lived, is the root principle of his work. His relation to the modern literary current was thus thoroughly “ambivalent.” He could be grouped with the counter-romantics in so far as he believed untheologized romanticism (like Plato’s “unexamined life”) to be sterile and mythological. On the other hand, he could be treated as the head of the resistance against the moderns in so far as he believed the romanticism which they were rejecting as senile to be really immature, and looked for a coming of age where they were huddling up a hasty and not very generous funeral. He will not fit into a pigeon-hole.

The fullest and most brilliant expression of his outlook is to be found in his mature poetry, and especially in Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars . As I have in preparation a much longer study of these works, I must here content myself with saying that they seem to me, both for the soaring and gorgeous novelty of their technique and for their profound wisdom, to be among the two or three most valuable books of verse produced in the century. Their outstanding quality is what I would call glory or splendor; a heraldic brightness of color, a marble firmness of line, and an arduous exaltation. The note struck is very unlike that of the Nineteenth Century, and equally unlike that of most moderns. It is the work of a man who has learned much from Dante (the Dante of the Paradiso ) and who might be supposed (though in fact he had not) to have learned much from Pindar. If its extreme difficulty does not kill it, this work ought to count for much in the coming years. I am speaking only of his mature work. He found himself late as a poet and in his earlier poems I, for one, do not see any promise of what he finally became.

He is best known by his criticism. I have learned much from it—particularly from The Figure of Beatrice and Poetry at Present . But it is distressing that many people, on hearing the name Williams, should think chiefly or only of The English Poetic Mind , or even of his criticism at all, for it is probably the least valuable part of his work. Those who find the poetry too difficult would be much better advised to turn to the novels.

The Greater Trumps , War in Heaven , Many Dimensions , The Place of the Lion , Descent into Hell , and All Hallows’ Eve present, under the form of exciting fantasy, some of the most important things Wiliams had to say. They have, I think, been little understood. The frank supernaturalism and the frankly blood-curdling episodes have deceived readers who were accustomed to seeing such “machines” used as toys and who supposed that what was serious must be naturalistic—or, worse still, that what was serious could not be gay. And in the earlier stories, it must be allowed, there were technical defects which stand between us and the author’s meaning. There was a good deal of overwriting, of excess in descriptions and, in dialogue, of a false brilliance. But this was overcome in the later work and in this respect the distance between War in Heaven and the sobriety and strength of the Descent and the Eve is a remarkable witness to his continually growing, self-correcting art. But the imagination and the spiritual insight had been there from the beginning; and it is these that always justify both the infernal and the paradisal turns of the story. They are never in excess of what the author most seriously intends. Hence the cathartic value of these fantasies. We are not likely in real life to meet an objective succubus as Wentworth does in Descent into Hell , nor to be haunted by a pterodactyl as Damaris Tighe is haunted in The Place of the Lion . But those who, like Wentworth, are following what seems to be love into the abyss of self-love will know in the end what the succubus means; and the frivolously academic who “do research” into archetypal ideas without suspecting that these were ever anything more than raw material for doctorate theses, may one day awake, like Damaris, to find that they are infinitely mistaken.

I first heard of Charles Williams a great many years ago when a man who was sitting next to me at dinner (Dr. R. W. Chapman) asked me if I had read any of his novels. He described them as “spiritual shockers.” I was interested and made a mental note that this was an author to be looked into, but did nothing about it. A few years later I spent an evening at Exeter College in the rooms of Mr. N. K. Coghill. He was full of a book he had just read called The Place of the Lion , by Charles Williams. No man whom I have ever met describes another man’s work better than Mr. Coghill (his description of Kafka always seemed to me better than Kafka himself) and I went home with his copy of The Place of the Lion . Twenty-four hours later I found myself, for the first time in my life, writing to an author I had never met to congratulate him on his book. By return post I had an answer from Williams, who had received my letter when he was on the point of writing a similar letter to me about my Allegory of Love . After this, as may be supposed, we soon met and our friendship rapidly grew inward to the bone.

Until 1939 that friendship had to subsist on occasional meetings, though, even thus, he had already become as dear to all my Oxford friends as he was to me. There were many meetings both in my rooms at Magdalen and in Williams’s tiny office at Amen House. Neither Mr. Dyson nor my brother, Major W. H. Lewis, will forget a certain immortal lunch at Shirreff’s in 1938 (he gave me a copy of He Came Down from Heaven and we ate kidneys “enclosed,” like the wicked man, “in their own fat”) nor the almost Platonic discussion which followed for about two hours in St. Paul’s churchyard. But in 1939 the Oxford University Press, and he with it, was evacuated to Oxford. From that time until his death we met one another about twice a week, sometimes more: nearly always on Thursday evenings in my rooms and on Tuesday mornings in the best of all public-houses for draught cider, whose name it would be madness to reveal. The English faculty was depleted by war and Williams was soon making an Oxford reputation both as a lecturer and as a private tutor. He became an honorary M.A. It grew continually harder to remember that he had not always been at Oxford. I am afraid that in our pride we half-imagined that we must be friends whom he had been in search of all his life. Only since his death have we fully realized what a small and late addition we were to the company of those who loved him, and whom he loved.

In appearance he was tall, slim, and straight as a boy, though gray-haired. His face we thought ugly: I am not sure that the world “monkey” has not been murmured in this context. But the moment he spoke it became, as was also said, like the face of an angel—not a feminine angel in the debased tradition of some religious art, but a masculine angel, a spirit burning with intelligence and charity. He was nervous (not shy) to judge by the trembling of his fingers. One of the most characteristic things about him was his walk. I have often, from the top of a bus, seen him walking below me. The face and hair being then invisible, he might have passed for a boy in the early twenties, and perhaps a boy of some period when swords were worn. There was something of recklessness, something even of panache, in his gait. He did not in the least swagger: but if a clumsier man, like myself, had tried to imitate it a swagger would probably have been the result. To complete the picture you must add a little bundle under his left arm which was quite invariable. It usually consisted of a few proofs with a copy of Time and Tide folded round them. He always carried his head in the air. When he lectured, wearing his gown, his presence was one of the stateliest I have ever seen.

No man whom I have known was at the same time less affected and more flamboyant in his manners: and also more playful. The thing is very difficult to describe, partly because it is so seldom seen. Perhaps it will be best imagined if I track it to its sources, which were two. Firstly, he was a man fitted by temperament to live in an age of more elaborate courtesy than our own. He was nothing if not a ritualist. Had modern society permitted it he would equally have enjoyed kneeling and being knelt to, kissing hands and extending his hand to be kissed. Burke’s “unbought grace of life” was in him. But secondly, even while enjoying such high pomps, he would have been aware of them as a game: not a silly game, to be laid aside in private, but a glorious game, well worth the playing. This two-edged attitude, banked down under the deliberate casualness of the modern fashion, produced his actual manners, which were liked by most, extremely disliked by a few. The highest compliment I ever heard paid to them was by a nun. She said that Mr. Williams’s manners implied a complete offer of intimacy without the slightest imposition of intimacy. He threw down all his own barriers without even implying that you should lower yours.

But here one of my collaborators breaks in upon me to say that this is not, after all, the true picture; that he, for his part, always found Williams a reserved man, one in whom, after years of friendship, there remained something elusive and incalculable. And that also seems to be true, though I doubt whether “reserved” is the right name for it. I said before that he gave to every circle the whole man: all his attention, knowledge, courtesy, charity, were placed at your disposal. It was a natural result of this that you did not find out much about him —certainly not about those parts of him which your own needs or interests did not call into play. A selfless character, perhaps, always has this mysteriousness: and much more so when it is that of a man of genius.

This total offer of himself, but without that tacit claim which so often accompanies such offers, made his friendship the least exacting in the world, and explains the surprising width of his contacts. One kept on discovering that the most unlikely people loved him as well as we did. He was extremely attractive to young women and (what is rare) none of his male friends ever wondered why: nor did it ever do a young woman anything but immense good to be attracted by Charles Williams. Yet, on the other hand, all the memories of him are in bachelor surroundings where he was so at home—that you might have thought them the only surroundings he knew. That face—angel’s or monkey’s—comes back to me most often seen through clouds of tobacco smoke and above a pint mug, distorted into helpless laughter at some innocently broad buffoonery or eagerly stretched forward in the cut and parry of prolonged, fierce, masculine argument and “the rigor of the game.”

Such society, unless all its members happen to be of one trade, makes heavy demands on a man’s versatility. And we were by no means of one trade. The talk might turn in almost any direction, and certainly skipped “from grave to gay, from lively to severe”: but wherever it went, Williams was ready for it. He seemed to have no “pet subject.” Though he talked copiously one never felt that he had dominated the evening. Nor did one easily remember particular “good things” that he had said: the importance of his presence was, indeed, chiefly made clear by the gap which was left on the rare occasions when he did not turn up. It then became clear that some principle of liveliness and cohesion had been withdrawn from the whole party: lacking him, we did not completely possess another. He was (in the Coleridgian language) an “esemplastic” force. He was also, though not a professional scholar, one of the best informed of us all and will always stand in my mind as a cheering proof of how far a man will go with few languages and imperfect schooling. On the ancients and on the early Middle Ages there were one or two present with whom he could not compete, nor had he an exact knowledge of any of the great philosophers: but in history, theology, legend, comparative religion, and (above all) English literature from Shakespeare down, his knowledge was surprising. Malory, Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Scott, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Patmore, and Chesterton he seemed to have at his fingers’ ends. Before he came I had passed for our best conduit of quotations: but he easily outstripped me. He delighted to repeat favorite passages, and nearly always both his voice and the context got something new out of them. He excelled at showing you the little grain of truth or felicity in some passage generally quoted for ridicule, while at the same time he fully enjoyed the absurdity: or, contrariwise, at detecting the little falsity or dash of silliness in a passage which you, and he also, admired. He was both a “debunker” and (if I may coin the word) a “rebunker.” Fidelia vulnera amantis [loosely translated as “the wounds of a lover are faithful”].

This double-sidedness was the most strongly developed character of his mind. He might have appropriated Kipling’s thanks

to Allah who gave me two

separate sides to my head,

except that he would have to omit the word separate . The duality was much subtler than Kipling’s, who in that poem really (I am afraid) intends little more than a repetition of Montaigne’s Que sçais-je ? In Williams the two sides lived in a perpetual dance or lovers’ quarrel of mutual mockery. In most minds, and in his, the lower mocks at the higher; but in his the higher also mocked the lower.

Thus on the one hand there lived in Williams a sceptic and even a pessimist. No man—and least of all the common run of antitheists—could have written a better attack on Christianity than he. He used to say that if he were rich enough to build a church he would dedicate it to St. Thomas Didymus Sceptic. He toyed with the idea that he and I should collaborate in a book of animal stories from the Bible, told by the animals concerned—the story of Jonah told by the whale of that of Elisha told by the two she-bears. The bears were to be convinced that God exists and is good by their sudden meal of children. He maintained that the prayer in which we give thanks “for our creation” could be joined in only by an act of wholly supernatural faith. “Thanks!” he would say, and then followed by an eloquent pause. He was ready to accept as a revealed doctrine the proposition that existence is good: but added that it would never have occurred to him, unaided, to suspect this. He vehemently denied that he had any natural desire for life after death. In one of his earlier poems the man who is made ruler of three cities says

I bore the labor, Lord,

But cannot stomach the reward.

He even said, mocking himself while he said it, that if he were saved, the acceptance of eternal life would be not so much the guerdon as the final act of obedience. He also said that when young people came to us with their troubles and discontents, the worst thing we could do was tell them that they were not so unhappy as they thought. Our reply ought rather to begin, “But of course ….” For young people usually are unhappy, and the plain truth is often the greatest relief we can give them. The world is painful in any case: but it is quite unbearable if everyone gives us the idea that we are meant to be liking it. Half the trouble is over when that monstrous demand is withdrawn. What is unforgivable if judged as a hotel may be very tolerable as a reformatory. It is one of the many paradoxes in Williams that while no man’s conversation was less gloomy in tone—it was, indeed, a continual flow of gaiety, enthusiasm, and high spirits—no man at times said darker things. He never forgot the infinite menaces of life, the unremitted possibility of torture, maiming, madness, bereavement, and (over all) that economic insecurity which, as he said in War in Heaven , poisons our sorrows as well as modifying our joys.

But that was only one side of him. This skepticism and pessimism were the expression of his feelings. High above them, overarching them like a sky, were the things he believed, and they were wholly optimistic. They did not negate the feelings: they mocked them. To the Williams who had accepted the fruition of Deity itself as the true goal of man, and who deeply believed that the sufferings of this present time were as nothing in comparison, the other Williams, the Williams who wished to be annihilated, who would rather not have been born, was in the last resort a comic figure. He did not struggle to crush it as many religious people would have done. He saw its point of view. All that it said was, on a certain level, so very reasonable. He did not believe that God Himself wanted that frightened, indignant, and voluble creature to be annihilated; or even silenced. If it wanted to carry its hot complaints to the very Throne, even that, he felt, would be a permitted absurdity. For was not that very much what Job had done? It was true, Williams added, that the Divine answer had taken the surprising form of inviting Job to study the hippopotamus and the crocodile. But Job’s impatience had been approved. His apparent blasphemies had been accepted. The weight of the divine pleasure had been reserved for the “comforters,” the self-appointed advocates on God’s side, the people who tried to show that all was well—“the sort of people,” he said, immeasurably dropping his lower jaw and fixing me with his eyes—“the sort of people who wrote books on the Problem of Pain.”

I have heard (from a lady) that he himself, before he went into hospital, had some expectation that he was going there to die. We, his male friends at Oxford, had had no notion that he was even ill until we heard that he was in the Radcliffe Infirmary; nor did we then suspect that the trouble was serious. I heard of his death at the Infirmary itself, having walked up there with a book I wanted to lend him, expecting this news that day as little (almost) as I expected to die that day myself. It was a Tuesday morning, one of our times of meeting. I thought he would have given me messages to take on to the others. When I joined them with my actual message—it was only a few minutes’ walk from the Infirmary but, I remember, the very streets looked different—I had some difficulty in making them believe or even understand what had happened. The world seemed to us at that moment primarily a strange one.

That sense of strangeness continued with a force which sorrow itself has never quite swallowed up. This experience of loss (the greatest I have yet known) was wholly unlike what I should have expected. We now verified for ourselves what so many bereaved people have reported; the ubiquitous presence of a dead man, as if he had ceased to meet us in particular places in order to meet us everywhere. It is not in the least like a haunting. It is not in the least like the bitter-sweet experiences of memory. It is vital and bracing; it is even, however the word may be misunderstood and derided, exciting. A lady, writing to me after his death, used the word stupor (in its Latin sense) to describe the feeling which Williams had produced on a certain circle in London; it would almost describe the feeling he produced on us after he had died. There is, I dare say, no empirical proof that such an experience is more than subjective. But for those who accept on other grounds the Christian faith, I suggest that it is best understood in the light of some words that one of his friends said to me as we sat in Addison’s Walk just after the funeral. “Our Lord told the disciples it was expedient for them that He should go away for otherwise the Comforter would not come to them. I do not think it blasphemous to suppose that what was true archetypally, and in eminence, of His death may, in the appropriate degree, be true of the deaths of all His followers.”

So, at any rate, many of us felt it to be. No event has so corroborated my faith in the next world as Williams did simply by dying. When the idea of death and the ideal of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed.

He was buried in St. Cross churchyard, where lie also the bodies of Kenneth Grahame and of P. V. M. Benecke.

C. S. L.

*Originally published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams edited by C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1966), pp. v-xiv.

**Contributors and essays included in this out-of-print book:

1. “…And Telling You a Story”: A Note on The Divine Comedy by Dorothy Sayers

2. On Fairy-Stories by J. R. R. Tolkien

3. On Stories by C. S. Lewis

4. Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction by A. O. Barfield

5. Marriage and Amour Courtois in Late-Fourteenth Century England by Gervase Mathew

6. The Galleys of France by W. H. Lewis

The Third Lewis

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 12:08:20 GMT

by Jason M. Baxter

Commemoration of St Lucian the Martyr of Antioch

Anno Domini 2024, October 15

In the early 1960s, the editors of the Christian Century sent a question to one hundred of the most famous literary and intellectual personalities of the day: “What books did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life?” The editors were trying to map the books that had shaped the minds of their generation. C. S. Lewis was among those polled.

By that time, Lewis had already been famous for two decades, as a “novelist, essayist, theologian,” as the Christian Century summed him up, curiously leaving out something he considered essential to his intellectual identity. He was particularly admired for his Screwtape Letters , his war-years broadcast, Mere Christianity , and for his imaginative, fictional writings (especially The Chronicles of Narnia , published throughout the 1950s). Already in September 1947, he had been on the cover of Time magazine, whose feature article on him was tellingly titled, “Don vs. Devil.” And over those years, he had spent two hours a day patiently responding to the letters that poured in from his devoted admirers from across the Anglophone world. He had hosted journalist seeking interviews with him and had accepted dozens of invitations to give lectures and sermons. In sum, his cultural standing was founded on his perceived mastery of psychology, his ability to recast Christianity imaginatively in myth, and for his work in apologetics. As Rowan Williams, summing up fifty years of admiration, put it, Lewis’s gift was “what you might call pastoral theology: as an interpreter of people’s moral and spiritual crises; as somebody who is a brilliant diagnostician of self-deception.”

But there was, as his friend Owen Barfield once said, a third Lewis. In addition to the Christian apologist, whose sagacious words delivered over radio waves had been so comforting during England’s darkest hour, and in addition to Lewis the mythmaker, the creator of Narnia and fantastic tales of space travel, there was Lewis the scholar, the Oxford (and late Cambridge) don who spent his days lecturing to students on medieval cosmology and his nights looking up old words in dictionaries. This Lewis, as Louis Markos puts it, “was far more a man of the medieval age than he was of our own” [ From Plato to Christ , 215]. This was the man who read fourteenth-century medieval texts for his spiritual reading, carefully annotating them with pencil; who summed himself up as “chiefly a medievalist”; the philologist, who wrote essays on semantics, metaphors, etymologies, and textual reception; “the distinguished Oxford don and literary critic who packed lecture theatres with his unscripted reflections on English literature” [Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis—A Life , xi]; the schoolmaster who fussed at students for not looking up treacherous words in their lexicons; the polyglot pedant who did not translate his quotations from medieval French, German, Italian, or ancient Latin and Greek in his scholarly books; the man who wrote letters to children recommending that they study Latin until they reached the point they could read it fluently without a dictionary; the critic who, single-handedly, saved bizarre, lengthy, untranslated ancient books from obscurity. Before he was famous as a Christian and writer of fantasy, he was famous among his students for his academic lectures, which bore such scintillating titles as “Prolegomena to Medieval Literature” and “Prolegomena to Renaissance Literature.” Long “before he ever thought of defending Christianity,” he dedicated himself to defending “the beauty and wisdom of the premodern literature of Europe” (Alan Jacobs, Narnian , 165]. It was this professorial Lewis who in a 1955 letter lamented that modern renderings of old poems make up a “dark conspiracy … to convince the modern barbarian that the poetry of the past was, in its own day, just as mean, colloquial, and ugly as our own” [ Letters , 3:649]. This was Lewis the antiquarian, who devoted much—indeed, most—of his life to breathing in the thoughts and feelings of distant ages, and reconstructing them in his teaching and writing. We find him recommending to general audiences that they read one old book for every modern one (as in the epigraph), and advising those seeking spiritual advice to old books. […] In sum, this was C. S. Lewis the medievalist.

Even for the editors of Christian Century , who summed up Lewis as a novelist, essayist, and theologian, it was easy to forget that the man who had become a celebrity Christian had an ardent love for studying the technical features of medieval language (indeed, sound laws that regulate vowel changes!), manuscript transmission, old books of science, and medieval poetic form. To many of Lewis’s readers, it might seem absurd, maybe even irresponsible and escapist to devote the whole of one’s adult life to the study of dead languages (Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Provencal, medieval Italian, or Latin) or reconstructing the details of ancient bestiaries (allegorical readings on the spiritual meaning of animals). Sure, studying New Testament Greek is useful, but trying to understand the subtleties of medieval debates, say, on the exact nature of moon spots (as Dante does in Paradiso 2)? But Lewis, of course, did do exactly that: he devoted the entirety of his adult life to precisely these kinds of academic pursuits. But perhaps of even greater surprise is the fact that these scholarly pursuits were not separate from his personal life. Lewis did not stop thinking about medieval symbolism, cosmology, and allegory when he left the office. Indeed, what is most telling is that even in the midst of the messy and painful affairs of life and grief and loss, his mind habitually returned to the old books for comfort and consolation. For instance, in an intimate letter to Sheldon Van Auken, after his friend had lost his wife, Lewis’s mind could think of nothing better than to recommend his friend read Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in the Loeb edition, with Latin pages facing the English translation. He then followed up with the recommendation of a second medieval book: ‘As you say in one of your postcripts—your love for Jean must, in one sense, be ‘killed’ and ‘God must do it.’ You’d better read the Paradiso hadn’t you? Note the moment at which Beatrice turns her eyes away from Dante ‘to the eternal Fountain,’ and Dante is quite content” [ Letters , 3:616]. Only a few years later, in 1961, when Lewis was suffering from grief over the loss of his own wife, Joy, his mind drifted back to the same passage in Dante. The last line in A Grief Observed is the same he quoted to Van Auken: “I am at peace with God. She smiled, but not at me. Poi si tornò all’eterna fontana ” [ A Grief Observed , 76].

This is what I mean by the “third Lewis” emerging alongside the first two Lewises we know better, the apologist and imaginative writer. This third Lewis is the writer who spent so much time studying medieval tales and arguments, ancient grammar and vocabulary, premodern rhetoric and the rhythmic flow of ancient speech that he could barely formulate an argument, write a letter, offer a word of consolation, or weave a fictional story of his own without opening up the dam and letting all the old ideas and emotions, stored up in his memory by long reading, break forth. Medieval literature, ancient languages, and the premodern way of looking at the universe were not just Lewis’s study or day job, but his passion, his love, his life’s work, his spiritual formation, and even his “vocation.” In his intellectual autobiography, Surprised by Joy , he famously describes three moments in his youth in which he was moved to spiritual longing through reading. He comments, “The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else” [ Surprised by Joy , 17]. The purpose of this book is to explore how this third Lewis is just beneath the surface even in his more appreciated imaginative and devotional writings. We will see that the great medievalist was not a successful modernizer of Christianity and writer of fiction despite the fact that he spent so much time studying old, dusty books, but because of them.

*Jason Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (Downers Grove, PA: IVP Academic, 2022), pp. 1-6.

Three Threefold Groups of Angels...on the First Hierarchy

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 06:15:00 GMT

by Pseudo-Dionysios

Commemoration of St Malachi the Prophet

Anno Domini 2024, January 3

What is the first rank of the heavenly beings, what is the middle, and what is the last?

1. How many ranks are there among the heavenly beings? What kind are they? How does each hierarchy achieve perfection?

Only the divine source of their perfection could really answer this, but at least they know what they have by way of power and enlightenment and they know their place in this sacred, transcendent order. As far as we are concerned, it is not possible to know the mystery of these celestial minds or to understand how they arrive at most holy perfection. We can only know that the Deity has mysteriously granted to us through them, for they know their own properties well. I have therefore nothing of my own to say about all this and I am content merely to set down, as well as I can, what it was that the sacred theologians contemplated of the angelic sights and what they shared with us about it.

2. The word of God has provided nine explanatory designations for the heavenly beings, and my own sacred-initiator has divided these into three threefold groups [Dionysios admits that this triadic arrangement of the nine biblical names is not itself scriptural but is taken from his teacher Hierotheos.]. According to him, the first group is forever around God and is said to be permanently united with him ahead of any of the others and with no intermediary. Here, then, are the most holy “thrones” and the orders said to possess many eyes and many wings, called in Hebrew the “cherubim” and “seraphim.” Following the tradition of scripture, he says that they are found immediately around God and in a proximity enjoyed by no other. This threefold group, says my famous teacher, forms a single hierarchy which is truly first and whose members are of equal status. No other is more like the divine or receives more directly the first enlightenments from the Deity.

The second group, he says, is made up of “authorities,” “dominions,” and “powers.” And the third, at the end of the heavenly hierarchies, is the group of “angels,” “archangels,” and “principalities.”

Concerning the seraphim, cherubim, and thrones, and theirs, the first hierarchy.

1. We accept that this is how the holy hierarchies are ordered and we agree that the designations given to these heavenly intelligences signify the mode in which they take on the imprint of God. Those with a knowledge of Hebrew are aware of the fact that the holy name “seraphim” means “fire-makers,” that is to say, “carriers of warmth.” The name “cherubim” means “fullness of knowledge” or “outpouring of wisdom.” This first of the hierarchies is hierarchically ordered by truly superior beings, for this hierarchy possesses the highest order as God’s immediate neighbor, being grounded directly around God and receiving the primal theophanies and perfections. Hence the descriptions “carriers of warmth” and “thrones.” Hence, also, the title “outpouring of wisdom.” These names indicate their similarity to what God is.

For the designation seraphim really teaches this—a perennial circling around the divine things, penetrating warmth, the overflowing heat of a movement which never falters and never fails, a capacity to stamp their own image on subordinates by arousing and uplifting in them too a like flame, the same warmth. It means also the power to purify by means of the lightning flash and the flame. It means the ability to hold unveiled and undiminished both the light they have and the illumination they give out. It means the capacity to push aside and to do away with every obscuring shadow.

The name cherubim signifies the power to know and to see God, to receive the greatest gifts of his light, to contemplate the divine splendor in primordial power, to be filled with the gifts that bring wisdom and to share these generously with subordinates as a part of the beneficent outpouring of wisdom.

The title of the most sublime and exalted thrones conveys that in them there is a transcendence over every earthly defect, as shown by their upward-bearing toward the ultimate heights, that they are forever separated from what is inferior, that they are completely intent upon remaining always and forever in the presence of Him who is truly the most high, that, free of all passion and material concern, they are utterly available to receive the divine visitation, that they bear God and are ever open, like servants, to welcome God.

2. This, then, is the explanation insofar as we can understand it of why they are called what they are, and I must now say something about how I understand the hierarchy which exists among them. Now I think I have already said enough about the fact that the aim of every hierarchy is always to imitate God so as to take on His form, that the task of every hierarchy is to receive and to pass on undiluted purification, the divine light, and the understanding which brings perfection. […]

4. This, so far as I know, is the first rank of heavenly beings. It circles in immediate proximity to God (Is. 6:2, LXX; Rv. 4:4). Simply and ceaselessly it dances around an eternal knowledge of Him. It is forever and totally thus, as befits angels. In a pure vision it can not only look upon a host of blessed contemplations but it can also be enlightened in simple and direct beams. It is filled with divine nourishment which is abundant, because it comes from the initial stream, and nevertheless single, because the nourishing gifts of God bring oneness in a unity without diversity.

This first group is particularly worthy of communing with God and of sharing in His work. It imitates, as far as possible, the beauty of God’s condition and activity. Knowing many divine things in so superior a fashion it can have a proper share of the divine knowledge and understanding. Hence, theology has transmitted to the men of earth those hymns sung by the first ranks of the angels whose gloriously transcendent enlightenment is thereby made manifest. Some of these hymns, if one may use perceptible images, are like the “sound of many waters” (Ez. 1:24; Rv. 14:2, 19:6) as they proclaim: “Blessed be the glory of the Lord from His place” (Ez. 3:12, LXX). Others thunder out that famous and venerable song, telling of God: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory” (Is. 6:3; Rv. 4:8).

[…] when the first rank has directly and properly received its due understanding of God’s Word from the divine goodness itself, then it passes this on, as befits a benevolent hierarchy, to those next in line. The teaching, briefly, amounts to this. It is right and good that the revered Godhead, which in fact is beyond all acclamation and deserves all acclamation, is known and praised by those minds which receive God, as far as possible. To the extent that they conform to God they are the divine place of the Godhead’s rest, as scripture says [fn. 85: This is an oblique biblical reference involving the imagery of the ark of the covenant. In Is. 66:1 (quoted in Acts 7:49), the mention of the divine “rest” echoes the tradition of the ark (Nm. 10:36; 1 Chr. 6:31; 2 Chr. 6:41) where God is “enthroned on the cherubim” (Ex. 37:7-9; 1 Sm. 4:4; 2 Sm. 6:2; 2 Kgs 19:15; Ps. 80:1, 99:1; and Song of the Three Young Men 42).]. And this first group passes on the word that the Godhead is a monad, that it is one in three persons, that its splendid providence for all reaches from the most exalted beings in heaven above to the lowliest creatures of earth. It is the Cause and source beyond every source for every being and it transcendently draws everything into its perennial embrace.

*Pseudo-Dionysios, The Celestial Hierarchy , trans. Colm Luibheid (New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1987), pp. 160-166.

On Asceticism and Stillness

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 05:17:20 GMT

by Evagrios the Solitary

Commemoration of St Sylvester, Pope of Rome

Anno Domini 2024, January 2

In Jeremiah it is said: “And you shall not take a wife in this place for thus says the Lord concerning the sons and daughters born in this place: … they shall die grievous deaths” (Jer. 16:1-4). This shows that, in the words of the Apostle, “He that is married cares for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife,” and he is inwardly divided, and “she that is married cares for the things of the world, how she may please her husband” (1 Cor. 7:32-34). It is clear that the statement in Jeremiah, “they shall die grievous deaths,” refers not only to the sons and daughters born as a result of marriage, but also to those born in the heart, that is, to worldly thoughts and desires: these too will die from the weak and sickly spirit of this world, and will have no place in heavenly life. On the other hand, as the Apostle says, “he that is unmarried cares for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord” (1 Cor. 7:32); and he produces the fruits of eternal life, which always keep their freshness.

Such is the solitary. He should therefore abstain from women and not beget a son or daughter in the place of which Jeremiah speaks. He must be a soldier of Christ, detached from material things, free from cares and not involved in any trade or commerce; for, as the Apostle says, “In order to please the leader who has chosen him, the soldier going to war does not entangle himself in the affairs of this world” (2 Tim. 2:4). Let the monk follow this course, especially since he has renounced the materiality of this world in order to win the blessings of stillness. For the practice of stillness is full of joy and beauty; its yoke is easy and its burden light.

Do you desire, then, to embrace this life of solitude, and to seek out the blessings of stillness? If so, abandon the cares of the world, and the principalities and powers that lie behind them; free yourself from attachment to material things, from domination by passions and desires, so that as a stranger to all this you may attain true stillness. For only by raising himself above these things can a man achieve the life of stillness.

Keep to a sparse and plain diet, not seeking a variety of tempting dishes. Should the thought come to you of getting extravagant foods in order to give hospitality, dismiss it, do not be deceived by it: for in it the enemy lies in ambush, waiting to tear you away from stillness. Remember how the Lord rebukes Martha (the soul that is over-busy with such things) when He says: “You are anxious and troubled about many things: one thing alone is needful” (Lk. 10:41-42)—to hear the divine word; after that, one should be content with anything that comes to hand. He indicates all this by adding: “Mary has chosen what is best, and it cannot be taken away from her” (Lk. 10:42). You also have the example of how the widow of Zarephath gave hospitality to the Prophet (cf. 1 Kg. 17:9-16). If you have only bread, salt or water, you can still meet the dues of hospitality; for “is not a word better than a gift?” (Eccl. 18:17). This is the view you should take of hospitality. Be careful, then, and do not desire wealth for giving to the poor. For this is another trick of the evil one, who often arouses self-esteem and fills your intellect with worry and restlessness. Think of the widow mentioned in the Gospel by our Lord: with two mites she surpassed the generous gifts of the wealthy. For He says: “They cast into the treasury out of their abundance; but she … cast in all her livelihood” (Mk. 12:44).

With regard to clothes, be content with what is sufficient for the needs of the body. “Cast your burden upon the Lord” (Ps. 55:22) and He will provide for you, since “He cares for you” (1 Pt. 5:7). If you need food or clothes, do not be ashamed to accept what others offer you. To be ashamed to accept is a kind of pride. But if you have more than you require, give to those in need. It is in this way that God wishes His children to manage their affairs. That is why, writing to the Corinthians, the Apostle said about those who were in want: “Your abundance should supply their want, so that their abundance likewise may supply your want; then there will be equality, as it is written: ‘He that gathered much had nothing over; and he that gathered little had no lack’” (2 Cor. 8:14-15; Ex. 16:18). So if you have all you need for the moment, do not be anxious about the future, whether it is one day ahead or a week or months. For when tomorrow comes, it will supply what you need, if you seek above all else the kingdom of heaven and the righteousness of God; for the Lord says: “Seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness; and all these things as well will be given to you” (cf. Mt. 6:33).

Do not have a servant, for if you do you will no longer have only yourself to provide for; and in that case the enemy may trip you up through the servant and disturb your mind with worries about laying in extravagant foods. Should you have the thought of getting a servant to allow your body a little ease, call to mind what is more important—I mean spiritual peace, for spiritual peace is certainly more important than bodily ease. Even if you have the idea that taking a servant would be for the servant’s benefit, do not accept it. For this is not our work; it is the work of others, of the holy Fathers who live in communities and not as solitaries. Think only of what is best for yourself, and safeguard the way of stillness.

Do not develop a habit of associating with people who are materially minded and involved in worldly affairs. Live alone, or else with brethren who are detached from material things and of one mind with yourself. For if one associates with materially minded people involved in worldly affairs, one will certainly be affected by their way of life and will be subject to social pressures, to vain talk and every other kind of evil: anger, sorrow, passion for material things, fear of scandals. Do not get caught up in concern for your parents or affection for your relatives; on the contrary, avoid meeting them frequently, in case they rob you of the stillness you have in your cell and involve you in their own affairs. “Let the dead bury their dead,” says the Lord; “but come, follow me” (cf. Mt. 8:22).

If you find yourself growing strongly attached to your cell, leave it, do not cling to it, be ruthless. Do everything possible to attain stillness and freedom from distraction, and struggle to live according to God’s will, battling against invisible enemies. If you cannot attain stillness where you now live, consider living in exile, and try and make up your mind to go. Be like an astute business man: make stillness your criterion for testing the value of everything, and choose always what contributes to it.

Indeed, I urge you to welcome exile. It frees you from all the entanglements of your own locality, and allows you to enjoy the blessings of stillness undistracted. Do not stay in a town, but persevere in the wilderness. “Lo,” says the Psalm, “then would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness” (Ps. 55:7). If possible, do not visit a town at all. For you will find there nothing of benefit, nothing useful, nothing profitable for your way of life. To quote the Psalm again, “I have seen violence and strife in the city” (Ps. 55:9). So seek out places that are free from distraction, and solitary. Do not be afraid of the noises you may hear. Even if you should see some demonic fantasy [see definition in glossary of The Philokalia], do not be terrified or flee from the training ground so apt for your progress. Endure fearlessly, and you will see the great things of God, His help, His care, and all the other assurances of salvation. For as the Psalm says, “I waited for Him who delivers me from distress of spirit and the tempest” (Ps. 55:8, LXX).

Do not let restless desire overcome your resolution; for “restlessness of desire perverts the guileless intellect” (Wisd. 4:12). Many temptations result from this. For fear that you may go wrong, stay rooted in your cell. If you have friends, avoid constant meetings with them. For if you meet only on rare occasions, you will be of more help to them. And if you find that harm comes through meeting them, do not see them at all. The friends that. you do have should be of benefit to you and contribute to. your way of life. Avoid associating with crafty or aggressive people, and do not live with anyone of that kind but shun their evil purposes; for they do not dwell close to God or abide with Him. Let your friends be men of peace, spiritual brethren, holy fathers. It is of such that the Lord speaks when he says: “My mother and brethren and fathers are those who do the will of My Father who is in heaven” (cf. Mt. 12:49-50). Do not pass your time with people engaged in worldly affairs or share their table, in case they involve you in their illusions and draw you away from the science of stillness. For this is what they want to do. Do not listen to their words or accept the thoughts of their hearts, for they are indeed harmful. Let the labor and longing of your heart be for the faithful of the earth, to become like them in mourning. For “my eyes will be on the faithful of the land, tha they may dwell with me” (Ps. 101:6). If someone who lives in accordance with the love of God comes to you and invites you to eat, go if you wish, but return quickly to your cell. If possible, never sleep outside your cell, so that the gift of stillness may always be with you. Then you will be unhindered on your chosen path.

Do not hanker after fine foods and deceitful pleasures. For “she that indulges in pleasure is dead while still alive,” as the Apostle says (1 Tim. 5:6). Do not fill your belly with other people’s food in case you develop a longing for it, and this longing makes you want to eat at their table. For it is said: “Do not be deceived by the filling of the belly” (Prov. 24:15, LXX). If you find yourself continually invited outside your cell, decline the invitations. For continual absence from your cell is harmful. It deprives you of the grace of stillness, darkens your mind, withers your longing for God. If a jar of wine is left in the same place for a long time, the wine in it becomes clear, settled and fragrant. But if it is moved about, the wine becomes turbid and dull, tainted throughout by the lees. So you, too, should stay in the same place and you will find how greatly this benefits you. Do not have relationships with too many people, lest your intellect becomes distracted and so disturbs the way of stillness.

Provide yourself with such work for your hands as can be done, if possible, both during the day and at night, so that you are not a burden to anyone, and indeed can give to others, as Paul the Apostle advises (cf. 1 Thess. 2:9; Eph. 4:28). In this manner you will overcome the demon of listlessness and drive away all the desires suggested by the enemy; for the demon of listlessness takes advantage of idleness. “Every idle man is full of desires” (Prov. 13:4, LXX).

When buying or selling you can hardly avoid sin. So, in either case, be sure you lose a little in the transaction. Do not haggle about the price from love of gain, and so indulge in actions harmful to the soul—quarreling, lying, shifting your ground and so on—thus bringing out way of life into disrepute. Understanding things in this manner, be on your guard when buying and selling. If possible it is best to place such business in the hands of someone you trust, so that, being thus relieved of the worry, you can pursue your calling with joy and hope.

In addition to all that I have said so far, you should consider now other lessons which the way of stillness teaches, and do what I tell you. Sit in your cell and concentrate your intellect; remember the day of death, visualize the dying of your body, reflect on this calamity, experience the pain, reject the vanity of this world, its compromises and crazes, so that you may continue in the way of stillness and not weaken. Call to mind, also, what is even now going on in hell. Think of the suffering, the bitter silence, the terrible moaning, the great fear and agony, the dread of what is to come, the unceasing pain, the endless weeping. Remember, too, the day of your resurrection and how you will stand before God. Imagine that fearful and awesome judgment-seat. Picture all that awaits those who sin: their shame before God the Father and His Anointed, before angels, archangels, principalities and all mankind; think of all the forms of punishment: the eternal fire, the worm that does not die, the abyss of darkness, the gnashing of teeth, the terrors and the torments. Then picture all the blessings that await the righteous: intimate communion with God the Father and His Anointed, with angels, archangels, principalities and all the saints, the kingdom and its gifts, the gladness and the joy.

Picture both these states: lament and weep for the sentence passed on sinners; mourn while you are doing this, frightened that you, too, may be among them. But rejoice and be glad at the blessings that await the righteous, and aspire to enjoy them and to be delivered from the torments of hell. See to it that you never forget these things, whether inside your cell or outside it. This will help you to escape thoughts that are defiling and harmful.

Fast before the Lord according to your strength, for to do this will purge you of your iniquities and sins; it exalts the soul, sanctifies the mind, drives away the demons, and prepares you for God’s presence. Having already eaten once, try not to eat a second time the same day, in case you become extravagant and disturb your mind. In this way. you will have the means for helping others and for mortifying the passions of your body. But if there is a meeting of the brethren, and you have to eat a second and a third time, do not be disgruntled and surly. On the contrary, do gladly what you have to do, and when you have eaten a second or a third time, thank God that you have fulfilled the law of love and that He Himself is providing for you. Also, there are occasions when, because of a bodily sickness, you have to eat a second and a third time or more often. Do not be sad about this; ;when you are ill you should modify your ascetic labors for the time being, so that you may regain the strength to take them up once more.

As far as abstinence from food is concerned, the divine Logos did not prohibit the eating of anything, but said: “See, even as I have given you the green herb I have given you all things; eat, asking no questions; it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man” (cf. Gen. 9:13; 1 Cor. 10:25; Mt. 15:11). To abstain from food, then, should be a matter of our own choice and an ascetic labor.

Gladly bear vigils, sleeping on the ground and all other hardships, looking to the glory that will be revealed to you and to all the saints; “for the sufferings of this present time,” says the Apostle, “are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18).

If you are disheartened, pray, as the Apostle says (cf. Jas. 5:13). Pray with fear, trembling, effort, with inner watchfulness and vigilance. To pray in this manner is especially necessary because the enemies are so malignant. For it is just when they see us at prayer that they come and stand beside us, ready to attack, suggesting to our intellect the very things we should not think about when praying; in this way the try to take our intellect captive and to make our prayer and supplication vain and useless. For prayer is truly vain and useless when not performed with fear and trembling, with inner watchfulness and vigilance. When someone approaches an earthly king, he entreats him with fear, trembling and attention; so much the more, then, should we stand and pray in this manner before God the Father, the Master of all, and before Christ the King of Kings. For it is He whom the whole spiritual host and the choir of angels serve with fear and glorify with trembling; and they sing in unceasing praise to Him, together with the Father who has no origin, and with the all-holy and coeternal Spirit, now and ever through all the ages. Amen.

*From Philokalia, Vol. 1 (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), pp. 31-37.

The Angels and the Liturgy - Introduction

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 06:32:40 GMT

by Eric Peterson

Commemoration of St Cosmas, Archbishop of Constantinople

Anno Domini 2024, January 2

The Church’s road leads from the earthly to the heavenly Jerusalem; from the city of the Jews to the city of angels and saints. The Church lives out its life between the earthly and the heavenly cities, and this determines its nature. The marks of the Church are conditioned by the fact that Christians have left the earthly Jerusalem behind them, and, having no enduring city upon earth (Heb. 13:14), follow Abraham’s example and seek a city which is to come, whose builder is God (Heb. 11:8-10). “But you are come to mount Sion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the Church of the firstborn who are written in the heavens, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new testament….” (Heb. 12:22 seq.). The Church which approaches the heavenly city is gathering for a festival in which a countless number of angels, citizens of the heavenly city, and the souls of just men made perfect, take part. They assemble in heaven to worship, for the heavenly Jerusalem is not only a city, “an immovable kingdom” (Heb. 12:28), but is also temple and sanctuary into which Christ has entered as the heavenly High Priest (cf. Heb. 9:24-25).

Another description of the contrast between the earthly city and the heavenly city is found in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. Abraham had two sons, one by a bond-woman, the other by a free woman. This is an allegory, considered by St. Paul to apply to the two testaments. Agar is the mother of bondmen, of the Jews who profess allegiance to the earthly Jerusalem; Sara, on the other hand, represents the Jerusalem which is above, the free Jerusalem which is our mother (Gal. 4:21-27). In Philippians 3:20, St. Paul describes with great depth our membership of the heavenly city when he says, “we find our true home in heaven. It is to heaven that we look expectantly for our Soter [Savior], the Lord Jesus Christ.” St. Joh is on the same level when he gazes upon the heavenly city with that of the heavenly temple. While, for example, chapter 24 of the Apocalypse describes the heavenly Jerusalem coming down to earth, chapters 4 and 5 describe the worship of God in heaven. Political and liturgical images are thus intermingled in exactly the same way as in Hebrews. We see clearly that the earthly Jerusalem with its temple worship has been the starting-point for these ideas and images of primitive Christian literature; but the starting-point has been left behind and it is no longer upon earth that Jerusalem is sought as a political power or centre of worship but in heaven, whither the eyes of all Christians are turned. It might be said that as the secular ecclesia of the ancient world is an institution of the city, so the Christian ecclesia is an institution of the heavenly city, of the heavenly Jerusalem. As the secular ecclesia is an assembly of the full citizens of an earthly city, met to carry out juridical acts, so we could define the Christian ecclesia by analogy as the assembly of full citizens of the heavenly city, met to carry out specified liturgical acts—the juridical acts of the Christian ecclesia being liturgical acts also. Thus we see the distinction between the heavenly city and the ecclesia and that the sacraments and the cultus connect the heavenly Jerusalem with the ecclesia. When, for example, St. Paul says that we are children of the free Jerusalem which is above, we are to take this to mean that through Baptism we become children, citizens indeed, of the heavenly city. And when the Epistle to the Hebrews declares that we approach the festive assembly in which countless angels, the citizens of the heavenly city, and the souls of just men made perfect take part, we are to think of this approaching the solemn celebration in heaven in such a way that the liturgy which is celebrated by the ecclesia on earth is seen as a participation in that worship which is offered in the heavenly city by the angels. Only when viewed in this light do the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews come alive with meaning.

Enough has been said to show that the conception outlined above of the relation between the ecclesia and the heavenly city is important for our understanding of the essence of Christian worship; for if the Church has left behind the earthly Jerusalem with its temple, then of necessity it enters, through the mediation of public worship, into a relationship with the inhabitants of the heavenly city. And from Hebrews we learn who these inhabitants are: angels, the citizens of heaven, and the souls of just men now made perfect. All acts of worship would have to be seen, therefore, as a participation by the angels in earthly worship, or conversely, all the worship of the Church upon earth would have to be seen as a participation in that worship which is offered to God in heaven by the angels. Can this view be put forward with assurance? Is such a thesis supported by the evidence of Scripture and the tradition of the Church? The arguments which follow seek to answer this question.

*From Eric Peterson, The Angels and the Liturgy , trans. Ronald Walls (New York: Herder & Herder, 1964), pp viii-xi.

Angels

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 21:52:03 GMT

by Jaraslov Pelikan

Commemoration of the Circumcision of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ

Anno Domini 2024, January 1

Everybody knows what angels look like—those enormous little cherub putti at Saint Peter’s, the figure of Gabriel in a Botticelli Annunciation, the powerful Michael of countless Greek and Slavic icons, Oliver Gant’s angel, as Thomas Wolfe described in Look Homeward, Angel, “held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid face wore a smile of soft stone idiocy.”

Yes, everybody knows what angels look like—everybody except another Thomas, the one from Aquino. For although Thomas Aquinas and the other scholastics have a reputation for claiming to be better acquainted with the habits of angels than they had any right to be, the Thomistic doctrine of angels is actually a carefully circumscribed effort to make systematic sense of this puzzling phenomenon as it had been presented by the Bible and the Christian tradition. What connected human life with the life of the (other) animals was a physical nature; what connected humanity with the Creator was the image of God. But here were beings that biblical monotheism forbade calling gods, but that were not animals or human beings either—and yet they definitely were creatures. Denouncing what it called “angel-worship” (Col. 2:18), the New Testament had clearly insisted that angels and spirits, too, belonged on this side of the boundary line between Creator and creature. The apostle Paul was “convinced that there is nothing in death or life, in the realm of spirits (Greek angeloi) or superhuman powers, in the world as it is or the world as it shall be, in the forces of the universe, in heights or depths [perhaps a reference to the astrological zenith and nadir]—nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39). And so angels needed to be fitted into the order of creatures: they were rational, as God and human beings were rational; they were created, as human beings and animals were created; yet they were not physical, as human beings and animals were physical.

They were, moreover, divided into good and evil angels. Although the narrative of the Fall in the Book of Genesis spoke only of a “serpent” that was “more crafty than any wild creature that the Lord had made” (Gen. 3:1) and did not mention the Devil by name, Christian exegetes had early concluded that the agent of the temptation could not have been a mere reptile, regardless of how crafty, but must have been a fallen angel. All the powers appertaining to angels had here been put into the service of evil. The Latin epigram corruptio optimi pessima (“There is nothing worse than the corruption of the best”), for which contemporary life often seems determined to provide such ample documentation, was apparently invented by the scholastics to cover the case of the fallen angels. As Paradise Lost demonstrates, it is extremely difficult to do justice to this complex of qualities in the evil angels without making them either semidivine or else so simpátici as to dull the moral and religious edge of the entire biblical drama.

Within the Gospel accounts, angels appear at many of the most crucial junctures: an angel announces to Mary that Jesus is to be born (Lk. 1:26-38); an angel strengthens Jesus during the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (Lk. 22:43); an angel announces to the bewildered followers that Jesus has been raised from the dead (Mt. 28:1-7), and again that He has ascended into heaven (Acts 1:10-11). They serve chiefly as messengers from God, but in the Hebrew Bible these messengers could pack a lot of power, as when “the angel of the Lord went out and struck down a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp” (from the army of Sennacherib (2 Kg. 19:35). None of Thomas Wolfe’s “soft stone idiocy” here!

A decisive and influential chapter in the history of the doctrine of angels was contributed by the treatise On the Celestial Hierarchy, composed by the mysterious Christian Neoplatonist who wrote under the pseudonym “Dionysius the Areopagite.” That had been the name of one of the relatively few Athenians whom the apostle Paul managed to convert during his brief visit (Acts 17:34). Quite naturally, he is listed quite early as having become the first bishop of Athens. But early in the sixth century a corpus of writings surfaced, bearing his name and presenting a blend of Christian and Neoplatonic ideas. As the putative disciple of Paul, the author carried an all but apostolic authority; moreover, the ideas he presented corresponded to the deepest intuitions of many Christian thinkers. In the doctrine of angels he found the biblical key to the Neoplatonic theory of the “great chain of being,” which extended between the spiritual-physical being of a created humanity and the spiritual being of a Creator God a hierarchy of spiritual creatures, rank upon rank, up the ladder of heaven. (In the eyes of the bishops and other church authorities it did not harm his cause a bit that the Pseudo-Dionysius wrote a companion treatise, On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, in which the parallels between the church in heaven and the church on earth, therefore between angels and bishops, could be traced.)

Putting all this together, the scholastics came up with an account that located angels along the chain of creatures, as non-physical rational beings that God had made. By embedding them firmly within the natural order, scholastic philosophical theology sometimes spoke in ways that have reminded present-day physicists (at any rate, those who have read Thomas Aquinas) of the qualities now ascribed to quarks and other equally mysterious creaturely forces. As the scholastics pondered the comings and goings of angels in the biblical accounts, moreover, they sought to make sense of their remarkable means of locomotion between the heavens (wherever and whatever those might be) and earth as we know it. As a consequence, medieval angelology must be reckoned as the most ambitious sustained effort in Western intellectual history to imagine what extraterrestrial rational beings might be like—even though they did not possess bodies. In this sense it belongs to the history of scientific speculation as well as to the history of theological and philosophical speculation and to the history of art—even if no one knows for certain just what angels do look like.

*Jaroslav Pelikan, The Melody of Theology: A Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 1-4).

On Angels

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 06:01:23 GMT

by St John of Damascus

Commemoration of St Melania the Younger, Nun of Rome

Anno Domini 2023, December 31

God is the maker and creator of angels, bringing them out of non-being into being, having created them after His own image as an incorporeal nature, like some spirit or immaterial fire, as the divine David says: “who makes His angels spirits and His ministers a fiery flame” (Ps. 103:4), describing their lightness, ardor, warmth, extreme sharpness, and acuity with regard to their longing for God and ministry to Him and their sublimity and deliverance from all material thought.

An angel is therefore a substance that is intellectual, always moving, possessing free will, incorporeal, ministering to God, whose nature has by grace received immortality, and the form and determining of whose essence only the Creator knows. An angel is said to be incorporeal and immaterial in relation to us. For everything in comparison with God, who alone is incomparable, is dense and material, for only the divine is truly immaterial and incorporeal.

An angel, then, is a rational nature possessing intellect and free will that is mutable or changeable with regard to the will of choice. For everything created is also mutable, only that which is uncreated being immutable, and everything rational possesses free will. Therefore, as rational and intellectual, the angelic nature possesses free will, but as created it is mutable, since it has the power to choose and either abide in the good and make progress in it or take a turn for the worse.

An angel is incapable of repentance because it is incorporeal, for a human being has the possibility of repentance on account of the weakness of the body. An angel is immortal not by nature but by grace, for everything that has a beginning naturally has an end. Only God exists eternally or rather, He is beyond eternity, for He who is the creator of time is not subject to time but transcends it.

The angels are secondary spiritual lights that possess their illumination from the first light that has no beginning. They have no need of speech or hearing but communicate their own thoughts and intentions to each other without verbal utterance.

All the angels, then, were created by the agency of the Word and were perfected through sanctification by the Holy Spirit in accordance with the dignity and rank of the illumination and grace in which they share.

They are circumscribed, for when they are in heaven, they are not on earth, and when they are sent to the earth by God, they do not remain in heaven. They are not confined by walls and doors, locks and seals, for they are not limited. I say not limited, because they do not appear to the worthy, to those to whom God wills them to appear, as they really are, but in a different form, in such a way that those who behold them can see them. “For properly speaking, only the uncreated is unlimited by nature, for every created thing is limited by God who created it” ( Doctrina Patrum , Diekamp, 252:23-24).

They have the sanctification of their essence from outside, from the Holy Spirit, prophesy by divine grace, and do not need marriage, precisely because they are not mortal.

Being intellects, they are also in intellectual places, since they are not circumscribed corporeally (for they do not have by nature a bodily form, nor are they extended three-dimensionally), but they are present and active intellectually where they are assigned to be and cannot be present and active in two different places simultaneously.

Whether they are equal or differ from each other with regard to essence we do not know. Only God who created them and who knows all things has knowledge of this. [But we do know that] they differ from each other in their illumination and standing, either possessing their standing in proportion to their illumination, or sharing in illumination in proportion to their standing, and they illuminate each other by the superiority of their rank or nature. And it is clear that the superior impart a share of their illumination and knowledge to the inferior (cf. Dionysios the Areopagite, Celestial Hierarchy 10.2).

They are powerful and ready to fulfil the divine will, and by the swiftness of their nature immediately appear anywhere that the divine sign should command. They watch over parts of the earth and are set in charge of nations and places, as appointed by the Creator, and administer our affairs and help us, and being always around God they are necessarily superior to us in accordance with the divine will and command.

They are reluctant to move towards evil but are not immovable, only now they are also immovable, not by nature but by grace and their devotion to the only good. They see God so far as they are capable of doing so, and have this as their food. They are superior to us because they are incorporeal and are free of any bodily passion, though not indeed impassible for only the divine is impassible. They assume different forms, in accordance with whatever the Lord God commands them to do, and thus appear to human beings and reveal the divine mysteries to them. They occupy themselves in heaven and have one task, which is to praise God and carry out His divine will.

As the most holy, most venerable, and most theologically gifted Dionysius the Areopagite says: “The whole of theology,” that is to say, the divine Scripture, “has declared the heavenly essences to be nine in number, which the divine initiator divides into three triadic ranks. And he says that the first is that which is ever around God, in which the six-winged Seraphim, the many-eyed Cherubim, and the most holy Thrones have been granted to be closely and immediately united with Him, and the second rank is that of the Dominions, Powers, and Authorities, and the third and last rank is that of the Principalities, Archangels, and Angels” ( Celestial Hierarchy 6.2).

Now some say that they were brought into being before all creation. For example, Gregory the Theologian says: ”First he conceived of the angelic and heavenly powers, and the conception was the accomplished work” (Oration 38.9). But others say that this was after the creation of the first heaven. All hold that it was before the creation of humanity. I, for my part, agree with Gregory the Theologian. For it was necessary that spiritual substance should be created first, followed by sensible substance, and then humanity from both.

Those who say that the angels are creators of any substance whatsoever are the mouthpiece of their father the devil. For since they are created beings they are not creators. The maker, controller, and sustainer of all things is God, the only uncreated one, who is hymned and glorified in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

*St John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith , trans. Norman Russell (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2022), pp. 99-102.

Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Matthew

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 06:01:22 GMT

by Erin Doom

Commemoration of St Anysia the Virgin-Martyr of Thessaloniki

Anno Domini 2023, December 30

Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Matthew

By Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

Foreword by Louis Bouyer

Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (Translator and Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of San Francisco) invites us to a “cordial” reading of St. Matthew’s Gospel—cordial as understood by the Church Fathers who, despite being philosophers, theologians, and linguists, “never forgot that, above all … the Word of God intended to strike their hearts and evoke from them a response aimed at striking the Heart of God.” Constantly situating the text within its liturgical context and convinced, like patristic exegetes, that every single word of Scripture “seminally contains the whole Word,” Leiva-Merikakis takes a short Greek phrase, or sometimes a potent individual word, translates it, and proceeds to dance around it, glossing it like a medieval scribe. Indeed, self-described as more scribe than commentator (“one who copies the Word of God and in his enthusiasm cannot refrain from scribbling random thoughts up and down the margins”), these scribblings flow from the pen of a true philologian—a lover of words. Requesting that we play along as he demonstrates how “a detailed etymology, a remark on the symmetry and contrasts within a phrase, the way in which the same word used in proximity in two apparently different contexts establishes a subterranean link between seemingly unrelated passages,” his sole prayer is that the radiance of the Word will shine forth and mold us, that it will “echo in our souls and establish its own rhythm in our thinking, feeling, and even breathing.” Leiva-Merikakis’ short ruminations on the Gospel of St. Matthew invite the Fire of Mercy to lead us on a transforming pilgrimage to the Heart of the Word, providing a taste of what Louis Bouyer has called a “true lectio divina, a meditative reading of the divine Word that is at once rigorously critical and deeply moving.”

Four volumes available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

Abraham begot Isaac...Jacob begot Joseph...

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 03:13:35 GMT

by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

Commemoration of the 14,000 Infants (Holy Innocents) Slain by Herod in Bethlehem

Anno Domini 2023, December 29

Abraham begot Isaac… ~St. Matthew 1:2

Matthew calls his whole book the βίβλος γενέσεως of Jesus Christ, the book of the “genesis” of His ancestors, of His birth, of His coming among us and its manner, which reveals the promise He holds for us. How fitting that the first sentence of the canonical New Testament, the story of man’s re-creation through the grace of Christ, should contain the word “genesis,” which hearkens back to the first creation of the world out of nothingness. The Virgin Mary is called the βίβλος τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς (the “book of the Word of life”) by the Greek Church (idiomelon for Great Vespers of the Feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos, Sep 8). The book of the Gospel, the book of Christ’s origins and life, can be written and proclaimed because God has first written His living Word in the living book of the Virgin’s being, which she has offered to her Lord in all its purity and humility—the whiteness of a chaste, empty page. If the name of Mary does not often appear in the pages of the Gospel as evident participant in the action, it is because she is the human ground of humility and obedience upon which every letter of Christ’s life is written. She is the Theotokos, too, in the sense that she is the book that bears, and is inscribed with, the Word of God. She keeps her silence that He might resonate the more plainly within her.

Christ’s genealogy, His entering the human condition and being born a man like us, is indeed the genesis of redemption. The orderly enumeration of the generations imposes a strict symmetry that draws attention to the providential preparation of Christ’s advent through the centuries: the whole history of Israel is seen in retrospect as having led up to the Savior’s Incarnation and birth. God creates and transforms from what He had already created; He does not contradict Himself, nor does He scrap everything at a troubled moment in order to start again “from scratch.” His Son is born within time from a race of saints, sinners, ruffians, exiles, wise men, poets, quarrelers. Even David, the Hebrew letters of whose name add up to the number fourteen and thus determine the structure of Jesus’ genealogy (three sets of fourteen generations each), was not only a great king, poet, and lover of God but also a great sinner—a murderer and a slave to his lusts.

Generation after generation, the father begets his son. The latter, in the accusative case as the grammatical object of the verb, is always the passive recipient of life. Suddenly, arriving at Christ the Lord, the genealogy changes its narrative mode: Jesus becomes the active subject of the sentence. We do not read here that “Joseph begat Jesus” or even that “Mary gave birth to Jesus,” although this latter statement is certainly true. Matthew wants to emphasize that the birth of Jesus occurs, not simply as a result of human reproduction, “from the will of man,” as St. John says (1:13), but from God and by the deliberate intervention of God. Thus we read (v. 16) that “Jesus, called the Messiah, took his birth from Mary,” as a king undertakes an action with sovereign freedom. Christ, the sun of justice, comes forth from Mary “like a bridegroom from His chamber and like an athlete hopeful to run His course” (Ps. 18:6).

Jacob begot Joseph the husband of Mary, from whom Jesus was born. ~St. Matthew 1:16

The name of the Lord suddenly emerges at the very end of the sentence in the nominative case as free and lordly subject of action, concluding the three lists of fourteen generations each. The nominative [subject] supplants the accusative [object], and divine intervention supplants the order of nature. From within the darkness of the world and the vicissitudes of history, and yet rooted in them, the Word of God leaps forth as if by His own deliberate design. History has been for Him. Both the faith of Abraham and the royalty of David—who sum up the whole genealogy already in verse 1—are united and fulfilled in Christ. While, in human generation, it is always the ancestors who ennoble the name of their descendants, in the case of Christ it is this latest comer into the world who makes even His most obscure ancestor famous and reveals the reason-for-being of the whole line. Who, after all, were Shealtiel and Abiud and Zadok for their names to have been inscribed on the first page of the most extraordinary literary document of all time? And if the Word of God waited for forty-two generations in order to com “when time had taken a downward plunge” ( cursu declivi temporis ), as the Advent hymn has it, it is because God, like a good physician, comes when He is most needed: somehow, to be fully rejuvenated, the world first had to grow old utterly and come to the limit of its own foolish hopes. Christ is sent by the Father into the world “to liberate the human race from its state of decrepitude” (Collect, first Saturday of Advent).

But, at the same time, what tremendous dignity God acknowledges mankind to possess when He reveals to it a mystery that has been contained within the very fiber and flesh of generation after generation! God reveals to man not only the being of God: God reveals man to himself in all his hidden possibilities. Who could have foreseen that a woman of our race could become the mother of the eternal God’s only Son? Who could have suspected humanity’s hidden talent to be able to bear God, not as a cup bears water or as the hand bears a weight, but in the most intimate, physiological sense possible: as a mother bears her child, with everything that implies for the interpenetration of two beings? And so we sing at Midmorning Prayer during Epiphany Week: “The mystery that had been hidden for ages and generations has now become manifest.”

Without knowing it, each of us is a bearer of mystery like Shealtiel, Abiud, and Zadok, even though we are even more anonymous than they. Each of us, too, is caught up in a genealogy, both biological and spiritual, and we each bear the tremendous Mystery that is the personal presence of God among us and within us. As the early Christians like to style themselves, we are “theophores.” In time God does reveal to us, too, what He had hidden in us from the beginning. But who has the patience to await this revelation in silence? Truly, we are almost wholly ignorant of who we are and what promises sleep deep within us.

Joseph is said to be the husband of Mary, “from what Christ was born [ἐγεννήθη].” Christ comes forth sovereignly from Mary. The primacy the fathers hold in every other generation passes here to the woman, the mother, who until now had been treated as mere medium for her husband’s fatherhood. God, for His part, appears as supremely free both in choosing to use human history to prepare His Son’s advent and also in His regal autonomy from the cycle of human generation. Christ is a Jew, and also the one Son of the only God. He belongs to time while not ceasing to be eternal. He is at once mortal and immortal, the holy bearer and personification of God’s mystery of condescension and salvation. (59-61)

*Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, Vol. 1 (Chapters 1-11) (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1996), pp. 57-61.

The Genealogy of Jesus Christ

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 13:00:02 GMT

by Fr. Thomas Hopko

Commemoration of the 20,000 Martyrs Burned in Nicomedia

Anno Domini 2023, December 28

The gospel reading for the divine liturgy on the Sunday before Christmas is “the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham,” taken from the gospel according to Saint Matthew (Mt. 1:1-25). This genealogy lists the generations of people from Abraham to David, to the Babylonian captivity of the people of Israel, to the birth of Jesus. It is a selected genealogy, ending in the appearance of “Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ” (Mt. 1:16). It differs from the genealogy presented in Saint Luke’s gospel which begins with Jesus “being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph,” and goes back all the way not simply to Abraham but to Adam (Lk. 3:23-38).

There are many purposes for presenting the genealogy of Jesus in the gospels, chief among which is the affirmation that Jesus, being in truth the Son of God, as all the gospels testify, has come “in the flesh” as a real human being. This affirmation was critically important in the time of the apostles and the first Christian generations because, unlike today, the temptation of the early period of Christianity was not to deny Jesus’ divinity, but to deny His real and authentic humanity.

As a matter of historical fact, the first Christian heretics were those who said that Jesus was some sort of divine being (how this was explained had many variations and versions) who only appeared to be a true man, but was not really one since “flesh and blood” were taken to be intrinsically degrading if not downright evil. Thus the apostle Paul had to insist that in Jesus, who belongs to the Jews “according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:5), the whole “fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9), and that it is the same Jesus who died and was buried and raised in the flesh as a real man, who is Messiah and Lord (cf. 1 Cor. 15:3-4; Gal. 4:4; Phil. 2:6-11).

The letter to the Hebrews is even more emphatic about the real humanity of Jesus than are the epistles of the apostle Paul already referred to. This letter insists that Jesus is not an angel or some other sort of celestial spirit, but is the Son of God Himself (Heb. 1-2). It insists with equal, if not greater power and pathos, however, that this Son of God was made for a while “lower than the angels,” that being a real human being, “by the grace of God He might taste death for every one” (Heb. 2:9).

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same nature, that through death He might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage. For surely it is not with angels that He is concerned but with the descendants of Abraham. Therefore He had to be made like His brethren in every respect, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make expiation for the sins of the people. For because He Himself has suffered and been tempted, He is able to help those who are tempted. (Heb. 2:14-18)

In the days of His flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to Him who was able to save Him from death, and He was heard for His godly fear. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience through what He suffered; and being made perfect He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him. (Heb. 5:7-9)

The letters of Saint John are the most powerful of all the New Testament scriptures on this point. It seems that the apostle and his community were plagued with people who refused to acknowledge the real incarnation of the Son of God as an authentic human being. The beloved disciple of the Lord soundly condemns them with a violence of conviction that would be shocking to many Christians today.

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already. (1 Jn. 4:1-3)

For many deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh; such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist. Look to yourselves, that you may not lose what you have worked for, but may win a full reward. Any one who goes ahead and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God; he who abides in the doctrine has both the Father and the Son. If any one comes to you and does not bring this doctrine, do not receive him into the house or give him any greeting; for he who greets him shares his wicked work. (2 Jn. 7-11)

Another reason for the genealogies of Jesus in the gospels is to demonstrate that the Lord is indeed the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham, affirmed, for example, in the song of the Virgin Mary in Saint Luke’s gospel (Lk. 1:55), and defended as a theological truth in the writings of the apostle Paul, for example, in his letter to the Galatians where he says that “the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring….which is Christ” (Gal. 3:16). Their purpose is also to demonstrate that Jesus is equally the fulfillment of the promise to king David that one of his sons will sit upon his throne and reign over God’s kingdom which has literally no end (cf. Ps. 89; Lk. 1:32; Heb. 1).

The genealogies in the gospels of Saints Matthew and Luke are made to and from Joseph. This is not to give the impression that Jesus came from Joseph’s seed. Both gospels are absolutely clear on this point. Jesus is born from the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit. The point is rather that Joseph is Jesus’ father according to the law, and it is from the father that one’s lawful descent is to be traced. Jesus’ legal father is “Joseph, son of David” (cf. Lk. 1:27; 2:4), the legal husband of Mary (Mt. 1:20).

One other important point is made in listing the human generations which led to the birth of Jesus. This is the fact that God is faithful to His promises even though His chosen people are often not faithful. Among the people from whom Jesus came are both sinners and heathens. In a word, Jesus comes not only from the righteous and holy, but from the wicked and sinful. And He comes not only from Jews, but from Gentiles. The names of the four women specifically mentioned in Saint Matthew’s list—Tamar, Raham, Ruth, and the wife of Uriah (Bathsheba)—were noted, not to say notorious, Gentiles, including one of David’s own wives, the mother of Solomon. The point to be seen here is one beautifully made in an early Christian hymn quoted in the Bible in the second letter to Timothy:

If we have died with Him,

we shall also live with Him;

If we endure,

we shall also reign with Him;

If we deny Him,

He also will deny us;

If we are faithless,

He remains faithful—for He cannot deny Himself.

(2 Tim. 2:11-13)

This is the wonderful witness of the genealogies of Jesus: If we are faithless, the Lord God remains faithful—for He cannot deny Himself!

Behold, the time of our salvation is at hand.

Prepare yourself, O cavern,

For the Virgin approaches to give birth to her Son.

Be glad and rejoice, O Bethlehem, land of Judah,

For from you our Lord shines forth as the dawn.

Give ear, you mountains and hills

And all lands surrounding Judea,

For Christ is coming to save the people

Whom He has created and whom He loves.

(Vespers of the Sunday before the Nativity)

*Thomas Hopko, The Winter Pascha: Readings for the Christmas-Epiphany Season (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), pp. 71-75. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

Ancestors of the Lord & Genealogy of Christ

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 19:05:44 GMT

by a Monk of the Eastern Church

Feast of St Stephen the Archdeacon & First Martyr

Third Day of Christmas

Anno Domini 2023, December 27

The Ancestors of the Lord

The Sundays of Advent-tide belong to the cycle of the Sundays after Pentecost and have no direct connection with the mystery of the coming of the Lord Jesus expressed by Christmas. This is why the Church, in wanting to prepare the faithful for the great feast of the Incarnation, has added to the readings and to the prayers of the two Sundays which precede Christmas (whatever these Sundays may be in the order of Sundays after Pentecost) other texts which do have a direct bearing on Advent. These, then, are the two “Sundays before Christmas” which are in some way superimposed on the two Sundays after Pentecost with which they coincide. […]

The first of these two Sundays is called “Sunday of the Ancestors of the Lord.” It is celebrated on the second Sunday before the 25th of December—this falls between December 11th and the 17th.

The “Ancestors” are the Patriarchs and the Prophets of the Old Covenant, from Adam to John the Baptist. The Church sings: “Let us rejoice together, we who are friends of the Fathers, in words correspond to any genuine feeling on the part of the majority of believers. Many among us have lost touch with the Old Testament, and neither read nor understand it, and so do not take into account that Jesus Christ is present, though veiled, in all the events and all the texts of the Hebrew Scripture. All is centered on Him. Many do not recognize in Abel the first martyr, and the prototype of the Good Shepherd as well as the Sacrificer; in Melchisedek the type of the eternal priest; in Abraham the spirit of faith and the type of the Father; in Isaac the spirit of sonship and of sacrifice; in Jacob free election, patience service and conversion; in Joseph the great features of the Passion and of Christ’s redemptive work. They forget that through the reading of the Prophets the voice of Jesus Himself speaks to our heart. They are not really “friends of the Fathers” and they do not delight in remembering them. Let us ask our Lord, on this Sunday, to open our understanding to the message of the Old Covenant and to teach us, as He taught the disciples at Emmaus: “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken; … And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself” (Lk. 24:27). […]

The Genealogy of Christ

The second Sunday which is especially consecrated to the preparation for the Nativity is that which immediately precedes the feast of Christmas. It is called “Sunday of the Fathers or of the Genealogy.” It falls between December 18th and 24th.

“Turning our thoughts to Bethlehem, let us lift ourselves in spirit to contemplate the great Mystery which is taking place in the cave …. Now that the time of our salvation draws near…. Prepare thyself, O Bethlehem…,” the choir sings during the service and mention is made of the patriarchs, the prophets, the holy women of the Old Covenant who “through faith shine like the stars.” The Church’s idea, this Sunday, seems to be to bring the righteous who lived before Christ into the joy of the Nativity “inviting them all by praises and divine songs to prepare for the birth of Christ.”

The gospel read at the liturgy (the whole of Matt. 1) traces back the genealogy of Jesus according to the flesh: “The generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; ….” And it continues up to Joseph “the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.” We have read or heard this genealogy many times. We may have the impression that this reading is of purely historical and documentary interest. What can this list of names bring us that has any spiritual import? But each one of these names does have a particular meaning, if we remind ourselves of the story of the person who bore it. What needs to be clearly understood is that the ancestors of Jesus were not all just and holy men. Amongst them are also sinners; those who have committed incest, adultery, murder; an alien woman; the names of Judas, of Thamar, of David and Ruth are filled with spiritual significance. Jesus wanted, humanly, to be linked with “all that,” and to “all those.” He wanted to clear a way for Himself through the sins and crimes of men. And so it is the history of each one of us that He takes upon Himself and overcomes. For each one of us has some of the features of those of Jesus’s ancestors who are the furthest from holiness. In each of us can be found, either dormant or awakened, the sins of the patriarchs and of their children. All the same, however, Jesus must be born in us. We must, in ourselves, overcome and go beyond the misdeeds that certain names in the genealogy of Jesus represent. It is necessary for us to live this genealogy, for us to acquire a personal experience of it, so that through falling and starting afresh we shall eventually reach Joseph and Mary. This does not mean sinning deliberately so that we can identify ourselves more closely with the genealogy of the Lord, but simply means recognizing certain elements of this genealogy in the sins that we do commit, and of uniting ourselves in spirit to the progressive purification which prepared for the birth of Jesus. Thus the genealogy of Christ will become an integral part of our own lives.

The gospel for this Sunday goes on to describe, in a way which is both very precise and very sober, Joseph’s doubts, the message brought to him by the angel and his confident obedience.

The epistle (Heb. 11:9-10, 32-40) praises the faith of the patriarchs: “By faith he [Abraham] sojourned in the land of promise…” Isaac, Jacob, Gideon, Samuel, David, and others are mentioned. The logical conclusion is not reached in this reading, but is found in the first sentence of the following chapter: “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith…” (12:1-2).

*Monk of the Eastern Church, The Year of the Grace of the Lord: A Scriptural and Liturgical Commentary on the Calendar of the Orthodox Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), pp. 55-59. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

On the Lord's Genealogy and on the Holy Theotokos

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 21:58:07 GMT

by St. John of Damascus

Second Day of Christmas

Anno Domini 2024, December 26

IN THE preceding discussions we have, to a limited extent, discussed the holy, supremely praiseworthy, ever-virgin Mary, the Theotokos, setting out the most important point, namely, that she is literally and truly Theotokos and is called such. Now let us complete what still remains to be said. For she was predetermined by the eternal foreknowing will of God, and was symbolized and proclaimed in advance through the Spirit by the various images and words of the prophets, and so at the predetermined time sprouted from the rock of David in accordance with the promises made to him. “For the Lord,” it says, “swore to David in truth and will not set it aside. From the fruit of your belly I shall set one upon your throne” (Ps. 131:11)). And again: His line shall continue forever, and his throne shall be before me like the sun and like the moon that is established forever, and the witness in the sky is trustworthy” (Ps. 88:36-38). And Isaiah: “A shoot shall come forth out of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up from the root” (Is. 11:1).

That Joseph descended from the tribe of David is stated explicitly by both Matthew and Luke, the most holy evangelists (Mt. 1:1-16; Lk 3:23-38). But Matthew traces his descent from David through Solomon, whereas Luke has him descended from Nathan. Both of them are silent about the birth of the holy Virgin.

One needs to know that it was not a custom among the Hebrews or in holy Scripture for the genealogy of the female line to be given. But there was a law that one tribe should not marry into another (Num 36:6-9). And since Joseph, who was a descendent of the tribe of David, was a righteous man (for this is testified about him by the divine gospel [Mt. 1:19]), he would not have taken the holy Virgin in marriage, unless she were descended from the same tribe. It was therefore sufficient to have shown the descent of Joseph.

One also needs to know the following. It was the law that when a man died without issue, his brother was to marry the wife of the deceased and raise up offspring for his brother. The child thus born belonged by nature to the second, that is to say, to the one that had begotten it, but by law to the deceased (Deut. 25:5-6).

So from the line of Nathan the son of David, Levi was the father of Melchi and Panther. Panther was the father of Barpanther, so called. This Barpanther was the father of Joachim, and Joachim was the father of the holy Theotokos. From the line of Solomon the son of David, Matthan took a wife by whom he begot Jacob. When Mathan died, Melchi of the tribe of Nathan, son of Levi and brother of Panther, married Matthan’s wife, the mother of Jacob, and by her had Heli. There were therefore two brothers from the same mother, Jacob and Heli, but Jacob was the tribe of Solomon, whereas Heli was of the tribe of Nathan. Now Heli, the one who was of the tribe of Nathan, died childless. And Jacob, his brother of the tribe of Solomon, took his wife and begot Joseph. Therefore Joseph, although by nature son of Jacob and descended from Solomon, was by law son of Heli descended from Nathan.

Then Joachim married the modest and praiseworthy Anna. But just as the earlier Ann was barren but through prayer and a promise gave birth to Samuel (1 Kg. 1:9-20), so this Anna, too, as a result of intercession and a promise, received the Theotokos from God, that even in this matter she might not fall short of any of her eminent predecessors. Grace, then (for this is the translation of Anna) gave birth to the Lady (for this is what the name Mary means, for she truly became Lady of all creatures, since she was called mother of the Creator). She was born in Joachim’s house at the Sheepgate and was brought to the Temple. Then planted in the House of God and tended by the Holy Spirit, she became, “like a fruitful olive tree” (Ps. 51:10), the abode of every virtue, having put out of her mind every worldly and carnal desire, and thus keeping her soul virginal as well as her body, as was fitting for one who was to receive God in her womb. For since God is holy, he reposes in holy people. She thus shared in holiness and proved worthily to be a holy and wonderful temple of the God Most High.

The enemy of our salvation kept virgins under observation on account of Isaiah’s prophecy. “Behold, the virgin shall conceive in her womb,” he says, “and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us’” (Mt. 1:23; cf. Is. 7:14). Because of this, so that “he who catches the wise in their craftiness” (1 Cor. 3:19; cf. Job 5:12-13) might deceive him who prides himself on his wisdom, the young woman was given by the priests to Joseph in betrothal, as the new book to one who is learned (fn. 16: The scholarly image of “the new book” is a biblical allusion, Isaiah, the prophet of the coming of Christ, was commanded to take a ”new book” and write in it – Is. 8:1, LXX). The betrothal was a protection for the Virgin, and a ruse to lead astray him who kept virgins under observation. “But when the fullness of time had come” (Gal. 4:4), an angel of the Lord was sent to her to announce the conception of the Lord. And it was thus that she conceived the Son of God, the enhypostatic power of the Father, “not by the will of the flesh, or by the will of a man” (Jn 1:13), that is to say, by sexual union and procreation, but by the good will of the Father and the cooperation of the Holy Spirit. She furnished the Creator with the means of being created, and the Fashioner with the means of being fashioned, and the Son of God and God with the means of being enfleshed and becoming human from her pure and undeviled flesh and blood, thus paying the debt of the first mother. For just as the latter was fashioned from the side of Adam without sexual union, so too did the former bring forth the new Adam by the law of conception and of a birth that transcended nature. For He who was from a Father without a mother was brought forth from a woman without a father. And because He was brought forth from a woman, it was by the law of conception, but because this occurred without a father, it was by a birth that transcended nature. And because this occurred at the normal time (for he was born at the end of the nine-month period and had entered on the tenth month) it was by the law of conception. But because it was without pain, it was a birth beyond the law of birth. For as it had not been preceded by pleasure, it was not followed by pain, in accordance with the prophet who said: “Before she was in labor she gave birth” (Is. 66:7), and again: “Before the time of labor came upon her, she escaped and delivered a male” (Ibid.).

And so the Son of God was born from her and became God made flesh, not a God-bearing man, but God enfleshed, not as a prophet anointed by [external] operation but by the presence of the whole of the anointer, so that the anointer became man and the anointed became God, not by a change of nature but by hypostatic union. For the same was both the anointer and the anointed, as God anointing Himself as man. How, then, was she who gave birth to God incarnate from her own person not Theotokos? In reality she is literally and truly Theotokos and Lady and Mistress of all created beings, since she has been called handmaid and mother of the Creator. When He was conceived, He kept her who had conceived Him a virgin. In the same way, when He was born He kept her shut. The conception took place through the sense of hearing but the birth took place through the usual passage through which children are born, even if some invent tales of His being born from the side of the Mother of God. For it was not impossible that He should pass through the gate without breaking its seals.

Thus the Ever-Virgin remained a virgin even after giving birth and in no way had any association with a man until her death. Even if it is written: “he did not know her until she had given birth to her first-born son” (Mt. 1:25; Lk 2:7), one should know that “first-born” is the first to be born even if it is the only child. To be born first does not necessarily imply the birth of others. The word “until” indicates the interval up to the appointed time; it does not exclude the time after it. For the Lord says, “Behold, I am with you all the days until the end of the age” (Mt. 28:30), not implying that He will be separated from us after the end of the age. It is thus that the Apostle says: “And so we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thess. 4:17), meaning after the general resurrection.

For how could she who had given birth to God and been aware of the miracle from subsequent experience have accepted sexual union with a man? Perish the thought! The thinking of such things does not belong to chaste thought, let alone putting them into practice.

Nevertheless, at the time of the Passion this blessed woman, who was considered worthy of gifts that transcended nature, suffered the pains that she had escaped while giving birth. Out of material love she endured heart-rending pain, and seeing the one whom she knew by the manner of His birth to be God put to death as a criminal, she was torn apart in her thoughts as if by a sword. This is the meaning of “and a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Lk. 2:35). But her grief was transformed by the joy of the resurrection that proclaimed the one who had died in the flesh to be God.

St John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith , trans. Norman Russell (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2022), pp. 254-258. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

Murder Must Advertise

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 23:52:21 GMT

by Dorothy Sayers

Feast of the Holy Prophet Joel

Anno Domini 2023, October 19

Sayers worked from 1921 to 1929 at an advertising agency in London, coining slogans and writing ad copy for clients such as Coleman’s Mustard and Guinness Beer. So when she wrote Murder Must Advertise in 1933, she had an insider’s perspective on the way commerce plays on the greed of the consumer, as a drug pusher plays on the cravings of the addict. The book provides a vehicle for her rage against the exploitation. Lord Peter Wimsey gets a job at Pym’s Publicity disguised as “Death Bredon,” a lowly copyeditor, who was found at the bottom of an iron staircase. At night, in the costume of a harlequin, he haunts the jazz-age parties of wealthy drug addicts, “symbolically opposing two card-board worlds.” ~Carole Vanderhoof, introduction to selection in The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers: Selections from Her Novels, Plays, Letters, and Essays (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2018), p. 83. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

“Now, [said Peter,] Mr. Pym is a man of rigid morality—except, of course, as regards his profession, whose essence is to tell plausible lies for money—”

“How about truth in advertising?”

“Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There’s yeast in bread, but you can’t make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising,” announced Lord Peter sententiously, “is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow….”

All over London the lights flickered in and out, calling on the public to save its body and purse: SOPO SAVES SCRUBBING – NUTRAX FOR NERVES – CRUNCHLETS ARE CRISPER – EAT PIPER PARRITCH – DRINK POMPAYNE – ONE WHOOSH AND IT’S CLEAN – OH, BOY! IT’S TOMBOY TOFFEE – NOURISH NERVES WITH NUTRAX – FARLEY’S FOOTWEAR TAKES YOU FURTHER – IT ISN’T DEAR, IT’S DARLING – DARLING’S FOR HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES – MAKE ALL SAVE WITH SANFECT – WHIFFLETS FASCINATE. The presses, thundering and growling, ground out the same appeals by the million: ASK YOUR GROCER – ASK YOU DOCTOR – ASK THE MAN WHO’S TRIED IT – MOTHERS! GIVE IT TO YOUR CHILDREN – HOUSEWIVES! SAVE MONEY – HUSBANDS! INSURE YOUR LIVES – WOMEN! DO YOU REALIZE? – DON’T SAY SOAP, SAY SOPO! Whatever you’re doing, stop it and do something else! Whatever you’re buying, pause and buy something different! Be hectored into health and prosperity! Never let up! Never go to sleep! Never be satisfied. If once you are satisfied, all our wheels will run down. Keep going—and if you can’t Try Nutrax for Nerves! …

To Lord Peter Wimsey, the few weeks of his life spent in unravelling the Problem of the Iron Staircase possessed an odd dreamlike quality, noticeable at the same time and still more insistent in retrospect. The very work that engaged him—or rather, the shadowy simulacrum of himself that signed itself on every morning in the name of Death Bredon—wafted him into a sphere of dim platonic archetypes, bearing a scarcely recognizable relationship to anything in the living world. Here those strange entities, the Thrifty Housewife, the Man of Discrimination, the Keen Buyer and the Good Judge, forever young, forever handsome, forever virtuous, economical and inquisitive, moved to and fro upon their complicated orbits, comparing prices and values, making tests of purity, asking indiscreet questions about each other’s ailments, household expenses, bed-springs, shaving cream, diet, laundry work and boots, perpetually spending to save and saving to spend, cutting out coupons and collecting cartons, surprising husbands with margarine and wives with patent washers and vacuum cleaners, occupied from morning to night in washing, cooking, dusting, filing, saving their children from germs, their complexions from wind and weather, their teeth from decay and their stomachs from indigestion, and yet adding so many hours to the day by labour-saving appliances that they had always leisure for visiting the talkies, sprawling on the beach to picnic upon Potted Meats and Tinned Fruit, and (when adorned by So-and-so’s Silks, Blank’s Gloves, Dash’s Footwear, Whatnot’s Weatherproof Complexion Cream and Thingummy’s Beautifying Shampoos), even attending Ranelagh, Cowes, the Grand Stand at Ascot, Monte Carlo and the Queen’s Drawing-Rooms. Where, Bredon asked himself, did the money come from that was to be spent so variously and so lavishly? If this hell’s dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, re-decorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much? Or would the whole desperate whirlgig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow-grease? He did not know. Like all rich men, he had never paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure forever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. Phantasmagoria—a city of dreadful day, of crude shapes and colours piled Babel-like in a heaven of harsh cobalt and rocking over a void of bankruptcy—a Cloud Cuckooland, peopled by pitiful ghosts, from the Thrifty Housewife providing a Grand Family Meal for Fourpence with the aid of Dairyfields Butter Beans in Margarine, to the Typist capturing the affections of Prince Charming by a liberal use of Muggins’s Magnolia Face Cream.

Among these phantasms, Death Bredon, driving his pen across reams of office foolscap, was a phantasm too, emerging from this nightmare toil to a still more fantastical existence amid people whose aspirations, rivalries and modes of thought were alien, and earnest beyond anything in his waking experience. Nor, when the Greenwich-driven clocks had jerked on to half-past five, had he any world of reality to which to return; for then the illusionary Mr. Bredon dislimned and became the still more illusionary Harlequin of a dope-addict’s dream; an advertising figure more crude and fanciful than any that postured in the columns of the Morning Star ; a thing bodiless and absurd, a mouthpiece of stale clichés shouting in dull ears without a brain. From this abominable impersonation he could not now free himself, since at the sound of his name or the sight of his unmasked face, all the doors in that other dream-city—the city of dreadful night—would be closed to him….

“Do you really believe [said Detective Charles Parker to Wimsey] that the head of this particular dope-gang is on Pym’s staff? It sounds quite incredible.”

“That’s an excellent reason for believing it. I don’t mean in a credo quia impossible sense, but merely because the staff of a respectable advertising agency would be such an excellent hiding-place for a big crook. The particular crookedness of advertising is so very far removed from the crookedness of dope-trafficking.”

“Why? As far as I can make out, all advertisers are dope-merchants.”

“So they are. Yes, now I come to think of it, there is a subtle symmetry about the thing which is extremely artistic, All the same, Charles, I must admit that I find it difficult to go the whole way with Milligan. I have carefully reviewed the staff of Pym’s, and I have so far failed to find any one who looks in the least like a Napolean of crime…. I dare say I could spot [the murderer] without much difficulty—but that’s not what you want, is it? You’d rather have the Napolean of the dope-traffic, wouldn’t you? If he exists, that is.”

“Certainly I should,” said Parker, emphatically.

“That’s what I thought. What, if you come to think of it, is a trifle like an odd murder or assault, compared with a method of dope-running that baffles Scotland Yard? Nothing at all.”

“It isn’t, really,” replied Parker, seriously. “Dope-runners are murderers, fifty times over. They slay hundreds of people, soul and body, besides indirectly causing all sorts of crimes among the victims. Compared with that, slugging one inconsiderable pip-squeak over the head is almost meritorious.”

“Really, Charles! for a man of your religious upbringing, your outlook is positively enlightened.”

“Not so irreligious, either. ‘Fear not him that killeth, but him that hath power to cast into hell’ [Lk. 12:5]. How about it?”

“How indeed? Hang the one and give the other a few weeks in jail—or, if of good social position, bind him over or put him on remand for six months under promise of good behaviour.”

Parker made a wry mouth.

“I know, old man, I know. But where would be the good of hanging the wretched victims or the smaller fry? There would always be others. We want the top people. Take even this man, Milligan, who’s a pest of the first water—with no excuse for it, because he isn’t an addict himself—but suppose we punish him here and now. They’d only start again, with a new distributor and a new house for him to run his show in, and what would anybody gain by that?”

“Exactly,” said Wimsey. “And how much better off will you be, even if you catch the man above Milligan? The same thing will apply.”

Parker made a hopeless gesture.

“I don’t know, Peter. It’s no good worrying about it. My job is to catch the heads of the gangs if I can, and, after than, as many as possible of the little people. I can’t overthrow cities and burn the population.”

“’Tis the Last Judgment’s fire must cure this place,” said Wimsey, “calcine its clods and set its prisoners free” [from Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”].

*Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), ch. 5, pp. 9, 15.

A Panegyric for Dorothy Sayers

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 21:42:40 GMT

by C. S. Lewis

Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist

Anno Domini 2023, October 18

The variety of Dorothy Sayers’ work makes it almost impossible to find anyone who can deal properly with it all. Charles Williams might have done so; I certainly can’t. It is embarrassing because, in our present state of festering intellectual class consciousness, the admission might be taken as a boast. It is nothing of the sort: I respect, though I do not much enjoy, that severe and civilized form, which demands much fundamental brain work of those who write in it and assumes as its background uncorrupted and unbrutalised methods of criminal investigation.

Prigs have put it about that Dorothy in later life was ashamed of her “tekkies” and hated to hear them mentioned. A couple of years ago my wife asked her if this was true and was relieved to hear her deny it. She had stopped working in that genre because she felt she had done all she could with it. And indeed, I gather, a full process of development had taken place. I have heard it said that Lord Peter is the only imaginary detective who ever grew up—grew from the Duke’s son, the fabulous amorist, the scholar swashbuckler, and connoisseur of wine, into the increasingly human character, not without quirks and flaws, who loves and marries, and is nursed by, Harriet Vane. Reviewers complained that Miss Sayers was falling in love with her hero. On which a better critic remarked to me, “It would be truer to say she was falling out of love with him; and ceased fondling a girl’s dream—if she had ever done so—and began inventing a man.”

There is in reality no cleavage between the detective stories and her other works. In them, as in it, she is first and foremost the craftsman, the professional. She always saw herself as one who has learned a trade, and respects it, and demands respect for it from others. We who loved her may (among ourselves) largely admit that this attitude was sometimes almost comically emphatic. One soon learned that “We authors, Ma’am” was the most acceptable key [This expression, attributed to Benjamuun Disraeli, was found to have a soothing effect upon Queen Victoria.]. Gas about “inspiration,” whimperings about critics or public, all the paraphernalia of dandyisme and “outsidership” were, I think, simply disgusting to her. She aspired to be, and was, at once a popular entertainer and a conscientious craftsman: like (in her degree) Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, or Molière. I have an idea that, with a very few exceptions, it is only such writers who matter much in the long run. “One shows one’s greatness,” says Pascal, “not by being at an extremity but by being simultaneously at two extremities.” Much of her most valuable thought about writing was embodied in The Mind of the Maker: a book which is still too little read. It has faults. But books about writing by those who have themselves written viable books are too rare and too useful to be neglected.

For a Christian, of course, this pride in one’s craft, which so easily withers into pride in oneself, raises a fiercely practical .. It is delightfully characteristic of her extremely robust and forthright nature that she soon lifted this problem to the fully conscious level and made it the theme of one of her major works. The architect in The Zeal of Thy House is at the outset the incarnation of—and therefore doubtless the Catharsis from—a possible Dorothy who the actual Dorothy Sayers was offering for mortification. His disinterested zeal for the work itself has her full sympathy. But she knows that, without grace, it is a dangerous virtue: little better than the “artistic conscience” which every Bohemian bungler pleads as a justification for neglecting his parents, deserting his wife, and cheating his creditors. From the beginning, personal pride is entering into the architect’s character: the play records his costly salvation.

As the detective stories do not stand quite apart, so neither do the explicitly religious works. She never sank the artist and entertainer in the evangelist. The very astringent (and admirable) preface to The Man Born to Be King, written when she had lately been assailed with a great deal of ignorant and spiteful obloquy, makes the point of view defiantly clear. “It was assumed,” she writes, “that my object in writing was ‘to do good.’ But that was in fact not my object at all, though it was quite properly the object of those who commissioned the plays in the first place. My object was to tell that story to the best of my ability, within the medium at my disposal—in short, to make as good a work of art as I could. For a work of art that is not good and true in art is not true and good in any other respect.” Of course, while art and evangelism were distinct, they turned out to demand one another. Bad art on this theme went hand in hand with bad theology. “Let me tell you, good people, an honest writer would be ashamed to treat a nursery tale as you have treated the greatest drama in history: and this in virtue, not of his faith, but of his calling.” And equally, of course, her disclaimer of an intention to “do good” was ironically rewarded by the immense amount of good she evidently did.

The architectonic qualities of this dramatic sequence will hardly be questioned. Some tell me they find it vulgar. Perhaps they do not quite know what they mean; perhaps they have not fully digested the answers to this charge given in the preface. Or perhaps it is simply not “addressed to their condition.” Different souls take their nourishment in different vessels. For my own part, I have re-read it in every Holy Week since it first appeared, and never re-read it without being deeply moved.

Her later years were devoted to translation. The last letter I ever wrote to her was in acknowledgement of her Song of Roland, and I was lucky enough to say that the end-stopped lines and utterly unadorned style of the original must have made it a far harder job than Dante. Her delight at this (surely not very profound) remark suggested that she was rather starved for rational criticism. I do not think this one of her most successful works. It is too violently colloquial for my palate; but then, she knew far more Old French than I. In her Dante the problem is not quite the same. It should always be read in conjunction with the paper on Dante which she contributed to the Essays Presented to Charles Williams [Link to “‘…And Telling You a Story’: A Note on the Divine Comedy”]. There you get the first impact of Dante on a mature, a scholarly, and an extremely independent mind. That impact determined the whole character of her translation.

She had been startled and delighted by something in Dante for which no critic, and no earlier translator, had prepared her: his sheer narrative impetus, his frequent homeliness, his high comedy, his grotesque buffoonery. These qualities she was determined to preserve at all costs. If, in order to do so, she had to sacrifice sweetness or sublimity, then sacrificed they should be. Hence her audacities in both language and rhythm.

We must distinguish this from something rather discreditable that has been going on of recent years—I mean the attempt of some translators from Greek and Latin to make their readers believe that the Aeneid is written in service slang and that Attic Tragedy uses the language of the streets. What such versions implicitly assert is simply false; but what Dorothy was trying to represent by her audacities is quite certainly there in Dante. The questions is how far you can do it justice without damage to other qualities which are also there and thus misrepresenting the Comedy as much in one direction as fussy, Miltonic old Cary had done in the other [The Vision; or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante Alighieri, trans. by Rev. Henry Francis Cary (London: William Smith, 1844)]. In the end, I suppose, one comes to a choice of evils. No version can give the whole of Dante. So at least I said when I read her Inferno. But, then, when I came to the Purgatorio, a little miracle seemed to be happening. She had risen, just as Dante himself rose in his second part: growing richer, more liquid, more elevated. Then first I began to have great hopes for her Paradiso. Would she go on rising? Was it possible? Dare we hope?

Well. She died instead; went, as one may in all humility hope, to learn more of Heaven than even the Paradiso could tell her. For all she did and was, for delight and instruction, for her militant loyalty as a friend, for courage and honesty, for the richly feminine qualities which showed through a port and manner superficially masculine and even gleefully ogreish—let us thank the Author who invented her.

*Published in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature , ed. Walter Hooper (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), 91-95.

A Brief Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 21:25:39 GMT

by Alzina Stone Dale

Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist

Anno Domini 2023, October 18

A brief summary of her life may help those who have not read any of the biographies. Born the only child of the Reverend Henry and Helen Mary Sayers in her beloved Oxford, she was four when her family moved to the Fens. While both parents early recognized her intelligence, it was her mother who not only was determined that Dorothy should have a university education but encouraged her to become a professional writer.

It was at Oxford University’s Somerville College that she made the friends and established the pattern of her working life, for Sayers was not a solitary journal keeper but a letter writer who shared her work in progress with all interested friends, eagerly enlisting them in any current project. C. S. Lewis jokingly wrote her that if her letters were ever published she might find that her true fame rested upon them, not her published books. This has not happened yet because there are so many of them: over 30,000 pages in the Wade Center Collection alone. But in them you can hear the unmistakable voice, half poetic, half amused, describing the world about her with a discerning if tolerant eye, and the realistic details that created the ambience she called “particularity,” the characteristic that has made her mysteries, firmly set in time and place, such excellent social history.

Dorothy later described herself as a child as a little prig, but she always showed her redeeming grace—a lively sense of humor. Despite an adult life with truly serious problems, including serving as the chief support for her illegitimate son as well as her “war-wounded” husband, Sayers maintained her energetic and enthusiastic manner, refusing to become a pessimist even when World War II, for which she and her generation felt responsible, broke out. Her innate sense of values, based upon the fundamental assumption of Western civilization, were so much a part of her that, in talking about her as an artistic role model, each of the contributors to this book [Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration] ends by discussing her philosophical point of view.

Out of college Sayers taught, tried publishing, then took a copywriting job in London about the time her first mystery, Whose Body?, appeared in print. Lord Peter Wimsey, created to be her breadwinner, did so nobly. But as she became better known and got her toe inside the stage door, where everyone was a comrade in arms working toward a common goal, her desire to keep churning out a mystery or two each year flagged. Her interest in the Wimseys themselves never ended, but she kept them for her spare time and close friencd, as she, thanks to World War II, became more and more involved in war work. She began to write plays on more obviously religious themes, particularly her magnificent cycle on the life of Christ, which made Him real to the mid-twentieth century. This was followed finally by her great gift to the postwar world, her lively translation of Dante. His work (and personality) fit her own so very well that her friend Barbara Reynolds argues convincingly that it was Dante the writer, not Lord Peter, the fictional lord, who was her ideal man.

When Sayers died suddenly of a stroke on December 17, 1957, she left Paradise unfinished, to be completed by Barbara Reynolds, the latest in the long list of Sayers’s devoted friends.

*Originally published in Alzina Stone Dale, ed., Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration (iUniverse, Inc., 2005), pp. 151-152.

Hall of Men Presents Walter Hooper on Oct. 12

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 09:02:17 GMT

The Hall of Men will gather Thursday evening on the commemoration of St Symeon the New Theologian (one of the saints we've toasted at the Hall!), Anno Domini 2023, Oct. 12.

Derek Hale will present on Walter Hooper.

Walter Hooper (March 27, 1931 – December 7, 2020) was an American writer and literary advisor of the estate of C. S. Lewis. He was also a literary trustee for Owen Barfield from December 1997 to October 2006.

This will be a great segue into our Inklings Festival next weekend. Get all the details and schedule here and be sure to register!

When

The commemoration of St Symeon the New Theologian, Anno Domini 2023, October 12.

Where

The Ladder at 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67214

Schedule

Doors Open at 7 pm

Food is served at 7:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30pm

Presentation and toast by Derek Hale immediately following Convocation.

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

Sermon on the Holy Joachim and Anna, Glorious Parents of the Theotokos Mary

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 16:15:47 GMT

by Kosmas Vestitor

Feast of the Holy & Righteous Ancestors of God, Joachim and Anna

Anno Domini 2023, September 9

YESTERDAY the Nativity festival of the Theotokos glorified the celebration of cosmic joy for us with auspicious hymnody. Today is the day that offers thanksgiving to the progenitors of the Theotokos, through whom the beginning of salvation for everyone has come about. Indeed, the festival of the parents is that of the daughter. For just as a child is glorified too in the glory of its mother, so also is a mother glorified in the blessing of a child. Yesterday thus was a day that was “wonderful in our eyes” (cf. Ps. 117:23), and today there is happiness in remembering the righteous with speeches of praise.

It came to pass in times of old that there was a righteous man from the tribe of Judah named Joachim. He was a man distinguished in holiness and righteousness; a man who was notable in nobility and wealth; a man who was single-minded in his offerings of sacrifices; a man in every way well-pleasing to God; a man of the longings which come from the Spirit. For since he was childless and consumed with desire for a child, he fathered the bride of the Holy Spirit. As a man he truly achieved this, since God hearkened to his prayers and granted him the one who was “beyond all the tabernacles of Jacob” (Ps. 86:2), or to put it another way, the daughter who is worthily deemed higher than all created things in heaven or on earth.

And he had a pious wife, whose name was Anna, who also came from the royal tribe of Judah since she was a descendant of David. She was a woman who rejected all evil; a woman who lived faithfully before God with her husband; a woman who regularly attended the temple of God along with her own spouse, with prayers, fasts, and pleasing, bountiful gifts; a woman who in unanimity of soul and bodily chastity always possessed constancy of understanding with her husband. For in accordance with the formation of the one to whom she was married by God, she preserved indestructibly the bone of her husband, thus safeguarding an attitude of devout benevolence towards him in their union.

For she was not mischievously transformed, like Eve, but was instead joined to her husband as a helper both in the living out of virtues and in daily supplications to God. For the two grew equally weary in their prayer of yearning for a child in the same way that a farmer, together with his wife, when they have worked some barren land, sow the seed and, through prayer, expect to gain a good crop of fruit. Anna lived not as Eve lived with Adam, but as one who shared in thanksgiving and worked with Joachim on spiritual good deeds; and she was truly a “better half” who completed the union with her husband perfectly. For whereas Eve became the producer of pain for the world by means of the fruit of a tree, Joachim’s Anna represented joy for the Creator by means of the fruit of her womb.

It is well known to everyone that Mary the Theotokos was given the good news in the Galilee of the gentiles (cf. Mt. 4:15 for this epithet; Lk. 1:26ff. for story of the Annunciation), in the house of Joseph the carpenter, who had been made the Virgin’s husband in order to ward off the devil’s deception. And again, it is clear that she gave birth to Christ in Bethlehem and that her native land happened to be the same city as that of her mother, just as the oration will demonstrate below. For Mary’s ancestral home was situated near the pool by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, according to the text, where Christ who was also our God raised up and cured the man who had lain as a paralytic for thirty-eight years (cf. Jn. 5:1-9), since He was about to go forth from that house symbolically as the Shepherd of rational sheep. For this reason the grace of baptism is also foreshadowed by the pool of water there, for the illness of chronic deceit that has paralyzed the souls of men, just as in the functioning of limbs, has been healed by purification of the Spirit through water, just as the spiritual bread of life was leavened in the figure of Bethlehem. And here Christ was revealed in the form of an angel to Abraham (cf. Gen. 22:11), and He also wrestled with Jacob in angelic shape (cf. Gen. 32:24). For He is the One who came to bring good news to those who are far away and those who are nearby (cf. Acts 2:39); He is the Gospel of righteousness; He is the One who carried out the commandment of the God and Father by means of angels; He is the “Messenger of great counsel” (Is. 9:6), to whom the Father became Counsellor and said, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness” (Gen. 1:26). He is also the Bread of true life which was predicted in advance by the name of Bethlehem; for “Bethlehem” means “house of bread,” which was baked in the ashes in Abraham’s tent, that is to say, bread which was leavened in secret, or the flesh of the Savior that was begotten from the Virgin and Theotokos, Mary.

It is therefore fitting, on account of these things, to say that the Lord blessed the house of King David on account of his descendant, life-bearing Mary. He blessed the house of the righteous Joachim and Anna on account of their hallowed daughter. He blessed the house of Joseph on account of the bride, the truly pure and ever-Virgin Mother of Christ and Theotokos Mary, who had been entrusted in civil law to him alone.

Hence, and on account of these things, thrice-blessed are the parents of the Mother of God, to whom the whole world is indebted! Blessed are the prophets, who truthfully predicted the Incarnation of Christ through them; the apostles, who were reborn as sons of light through their daughter; the holy martyrs when they received their crowns; the saintly and righteous Christians, as inheritors of good things to come, and even sinners, since they are pitied through the intercessions of the Theotokos.

To them let us cry in thanksgiving: Hail, all pious father of our hope in God, Joachim; may your loins be graced! Hail, all-honored mother of the Mother of our life, Anna; glory be to your womb! Hail, father with a good seed, and farmer of the fruitful offspring! Hail, mother of the great fruit, root of our salvation! Hail, father, vine-dresser of the productive bunch of grapes! Hail, mother, field of gold earth which has yielded a hundredfold (cf. Mt. 19:29; Mk. 10:30; Lk. 8:8)! Hail, father, gardener of the spiritual paradise! Hail, mother, tree with the blameless branch! Hail, father, oyster shell of the spotless pearl! Hail, mother, rock containing pure emerald! Hail, father, source of the life-flowing spring! Hail, mother, water-jug for the thirst of child-bearing!

Our mouths are filled with praise for the special qualities of your holiness, but we are not capable of singing about your duality that is yoked together by God unless we follow the utterance of your descendant according to the flesh, Christ, in blessing you both and say, “Rejoice and be glad, for the reward of the fruit of your womb is in heaven” (cf. Mt. 5:12). For you are the holly ones who were reproached on account of your childlessness and who heard wicked words. But you were made happy after a short time by your child-bearing, and the fact that you have given birth to the Mother of God is sufficient as praise for you!

For the righteous progenitors of the Theotokos were truly perceived in advance as worthy of being related to Christ in flesh and of being honored as belonging to a famous family, by which I mean a kingly and priestly one. For the Theotokos takes her genealogy from both, since the two tribes became intertwined in different ways from the beginning.

For this reason let us then expound the ancestors of the Theotokos as follows: Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, had a brother who was also a priest, called Aggaei, who had died before him. Joseph, the carpenter, took a daughter of this Aggaei in marriage. From her he begat four sons and two daughters, of whom one was James, who was called the brother of Christ and who became the first bishop of Jerusalem. And the name of Joseph’s wife was Salome: not Salome the midwife, but another Salome. After her death, Joseph was engaged to the Theotokos Mary whose maternal line descended from the priest Matthat, who in turn was descended from Solomon, the son of David, as the genealogy according to the Gospel of Luke states (Lk. 3:23-38; Luke actually says that Joseph, not Mary, was descended from Nathan, the son of David [Lk. 1:31]; Matthew, on the other hand, includes Solomon as an ancestor of Joseph [Mt. 1:7]). This Matthat had three daughters by his wife Mary, whose names were Mary, Sobbe, and Anna. Then Mary bore Salome the midwife, Sobbe bore Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, while Anna bore the Theotokos Mary in Bethlehem, who was given the name “Mary” of her grandmother and aunt. As a result, Elizabeth was Anna’s niece and the cousin of the Theotokos. The Gospel affirms each of these things, for on the one hand, with regard to the paternal family of Christ, according to the flesh, it states, “Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work. He was the son, as was thought, of Joseph son of Heli, son of Matthiat” (Lk. 3:23-24), while on the other hand, with regard to his maternal line, it states, “Behold, your relative Elizabeth” (Lk 1:36). On account of these things, glory be to the condescension of God, now and ever, and to the ages of ages. Amen.

*From Wider Than Heaven: Eighth-century Homilies on the Mother of God , tr. and intro. by Mary B. Cunningham (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), pp. 139-144.

A Letter to Her Parents on Drama and Music

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 03:19:03 GMT

by Dorothy Sayers

Feast of the Nativity of Our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary

Anno Domini 2023, September 8

To Her Parents School House

22 October 1911

My dears, …

Look here! We are going to do The Merchant of Venice for a house-play … and I am to play Shylock (!!!)—will you please send me Daddy’s beard [the false beard her father used to wear in his role as Louis XIII in the Musketeers game] and 3 pairs of breeches and your little old brown cloak and a false nose some time before the end of the month—and bag Auntie’s Shakespeare with the pictures of Irving and E. Terry [Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905) and Dame Ellen Terry (1847-1928)] and send it at once, please —I must have a nose—and I can’t get one here, but if you, either of you happen to be in Cambridge or London—oh! I beg and beseech that you will step into a make-up shop and ask for a Jewish (not a comic red) nose, and instructions how to put it on—I’m simply distracted about my wretched nose—is there anything helpful about Shylock in that Life of Edmund Kean [(1787-1833), reputed one of the greatest English actors, famous for his Shakespearean roles, among them that of Shylock.]. Darlings, I’m so sorry to bother you, but I really must—and oh! could you step into the toyshop—Hill’s—in St Ives and get me three-penny worth of grey jute for a moustache?...

The French players are coming on Saturday. They are going to do Les Précieuses Ridicules [ The Pretentious Young Ladies by Molière] and La Poudre aux Yeux [Dust in One’s Eyes by Eugène Marin Labiche]—I don’t suppose I shall be able to speak to M. Roubaud this time, as they are coming to a hall in the town. I do hope Rollan will come his time. I shall weep if he doesn’t—he is so ripping!...

Mr George gave me a song last week “Four by the Clock” [Words by Longellow, set to music by James Albert Mallinson, who composed over 400 songs.]. He stopped me after I had sung him the first verse, and said: “I see you are going to be my prize dictionist—you sing with real musical feeling—you are the only girl I’ve had who sings ‘ Four by the Clock ’—They all say, ‘ Four by the Clock ’—even the composer’s wife does it.” The rest of his lesson was not so complimentary—except that I sang him an exercise, all full of runs, and he said I had such a splendid sense of rhythm—I wish I wasn’t so fond of being praised. I won’t work for people who don’t encourage me!

Miss Eglinger gave a ripping concert yesterday—she sang some topping songs, among others “Who is Sylvia?” and “Cupid and my Campaspe” [A lyric from Alexander and Campaspe , a comedy by John Lyly.]—afterwards somebody asked me “And what is a Campaspe?”

I must stop now, as I’ve a lot of letters to write—give my love to the GYM [Good Young Man—her father’s pupil who was boarding at the rectory.]—I want to come home more than ever—I am dying to break his celibate heart with a hopeless passion. How lucky I wasn’t born beautiful—I should have been an awful flirt.

Ever your devoted

Shylock

Don’t forget my nose !

*Letter from The Letters of Dorothy Sayers: 1899 to 1936 – The Making of a Detective Novelist , chosen and edited by Barbara Reynolds (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 58-59.

An Explanation of the Seven-Fold Prayer Taught by Our Lord Jesus Christ

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 03:03:41 GMT

by St Gennadios Scholarios

Feast of the Nativity of Our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary

Anno Domini 2023, September 8

OUR FATHER who art in heaven, mighty and all-powerful Lord, our creator and tireless provider, giver of the good things of this present age, preparer of future and eternal blessings, we beseech your imperial and supernatural yet fatherly goodness that you would hear us, the least of your servants, who flee to your compassion seeking your succour with faith, hope, and reverence befitting a servant. Though he remained silent, you heard Moses and will hear anyone else who fulfils your will like Moses, or in a manner approaching him [Cf. Origen, Homilies on Exodus, 5: “But meanwhile Moses cries out to the Lord. How does he cry out? No sound of his cry is heard and yet God says to him, ‘Why do you cry out to me?’ I should like to know how the saints cry out to God without a sound. The Apostle teaches, ‘God has given the spirit of his Son in our hearts crying: Abba, Father!’ And he adds, ‘The Spirit himself intercedes for us with indescribable groans.’ And again, ‘he who searches the heart knows what the Spirit desires because he pleads for the saints according to God.’ So, therefore, when the Spirit intercedes with God the cry of the saints is heard through silence.”]. Being far removed from such uprightness and purity, and full of filth and impurity, yet we pray words of petition and supplication that we might find what we seek. Your love toward mankind both gives to us and urges us to ask, as if to ask is also given by your right hand; we knock that the door of mercy might be opened unto us. And all our requests and petitions being summed up in the number seven, we therefore address this very number of petitions to you, or better, your eternal Word and Son, your wisdom and power having composed this prayer and the number of its petitions for us, through him and in him we humbly and. yet boldly address this to you as our one God and creator.

Our Lord and heavenly Father, firstly we beseech you that you would hallow your holy name in us. It is holy in and of itself and eternally from before the world’s creation, and now it is participated in by your creations differently, each according to their differing place in the universal order. It is holy and supremely hallowed in all things, not sharing in any of the meanness of those things that participate in it—found in these either by nature or by disposition, but more so by disposition. These, too, are holy by participation in your holy name in their order before you, their creator, for you made all things good and holy, and, having thus created, you called them good. But some of these, abandoning a good will for perverse desire, become polluted and impure rather than remaining holy. This is what passion does to rational creatures, to whom you gave reason and deliberative ability for their good benefit. As many as are made worse by the gift are evil of their own fault. I myself am one of these, using your holy gifts in ways contrary to your purpose, which has been set out at many times and in many ways. But I beseech you, most-kindly Father, that your holy name be hallowed in me from this moment on, just as it has been hallowed in all your true servants and children, these having first been sanctified in your holy name and by pure participation in your fatherly direction and care. And if I become holy, then your name—always and everywhere all-holy—is hallowed in me.

Our Lord and heavenly Father, secondly, we beseech that your kingdom should come. In the beginning your kingdom prevailed over the whole created order and you reigned over the whole world, but the wickedness and apostasy of those who sided with evil and hostility against you, the lord and father of true subjection, drove these out. After this, your kingdom came into the whole world even more plainly, though not all wanted to accept it, but only those who believed. Accepting it by faith, they yet reject and spurn it by works. Thus, on the one hand, by faith I know your kingdom which extends throughout the whole world and I proclaim it, but my eyes have been dimmed by a personal blindness affected in me by sin toward this present and apparent kingdom, and though it speaks and calls I will not hear. For this reason I beseech you that your kingdom would come also to me, your faithful servant who is yet enslaved to useless works, or, better, to sin. Let my reason be subject to your will, and let your grace illumine it. Bring the passions which reside in me under the rule of reason once and for all. Thus I will be wholly your servant and ruled by you alone. Moreover, this gives me cause to hope in the enjoyment of the otherworldly and heavenly kingdom, for your kingdom in this world, being well-participated in, is a prelude of the former and a path leading toward it.

Our Lord and heavenly Father, thirdly, we beseech you that your will be done in us. Your divine will is done in heaven and on earth by all heavenly and earthly things which yield to it. But of us men who walk in this life according to disposition (something given by you for our good), many are often found disregarding your will. Seeing and knowing it, being foolish, they do not fulfil it. For my part, I am of this sort. But grant me, Father, that my whole will might be conformed to your will from this moment on, and, should I do this by the aid of your grace you will immediately add a second grace unto me, by means of which I will hang my whole self on your will, accept your will in every aspect of my life, and, this being done, I will fall down and worship.

Our Lord and heavenly Father, fourthly, we beseech you to give us this day our daily bread. First, we do not ask for various foods which are for the sake of luxury and not sustenance, but for bread alone, which is the support of the human heart. This is adequate for the day’s needs and sufficient for us, and we are able to sustain both our essence and life by means of it alone. Next, we ask for this today, since today’s bread is what we need. Tomorrow you, the Lord of All and Giver of All, will give even to those children who did not ask, but we will pray in like manner tomorrow and each and every day following in accordance with our obligation. And if you shold ever provide us with more than this, we will receive your providential care readily and joyfully, acquiescing to the needs of the body.

Our Lord and heavenly Father, just as you freed us from our debts, and, you having forgiven us, we became debtors to you to the tune of that great price paid for many sins, fifthly, we beseech you to release us from the price paid solely out of your love for mankind. But we must first forgive our debtors, and then flee boldly to your compassion. What comparison is there between the things our brothers and fellow servants owe us, and what we ourselves owe to the creator, judge, and lord? Your all-good compassion takes our small, reasonable concession and renders it an occasion of great forbearance and longsuffering toward us. But if we do not forgive our brothers their sins, you, O Lord our heavenly father, will not forgive us, nor will we be able to pray effectively for the forgiveness of our own debts, having not first forgiven others. Wherefore this having first been promised and then done by us having been strengthened by grace, we then ask that the forgiveness of our debts be granted to us out of your love for mankind.

Our Lord and heavenly Father, sixthly, we beseech you that you would not lead us into temptation. We ask not to be altogether untempted—for without sorrows it is impossible to enter into eternal life, sorrow being the product and fruit of temptations—but instead we ask not to be led into an immeasurable depth of temptations which would exceed our strength as is wont to happen with those who have been abandoned to these, nor to be encompassed and surrounded by temptation. We ask that you permit us to be tempted in accordance with your will for our benefit, for the sake of our instruction and healing, for neither the depth, nor the multitude, nor the duration of such temptation exceeds our strength. We are near the door and close to the exit, since we find deliverance and escape through repentance, contrition of heart, tears, and the awareness of the causes of the temptation which are connected with your beneficent justice on the one hand, and through certain and faithful hope of deliverance on the other. Asking not to be surrounded by temptation, by means of one word we denote the various and diverse genera or kinds of temptations, amongst which are those temptations that come from the demons. These we pray to be set completely free from, but we do not ask to be released completely from other temptations, but only that they be brief in duration, light, and restrained, and that we be quickly delivered from them.

Seventh, if it is your will, we beseech you that you would deliver us forthwith from this wearisome and wretched body for the benefit of our soul. The speedy release from this represents the loosing from every temptation, since every kind of temptation arises in us in connection with the body. You gave the body that it might be a tool for spiritual progress to those who make wise use of it, but this being rare—indeed, it is a thing very difficult for me on account of my great inattentiveness and carelessness—swift release from it is a worthy prayer. We pray in this manner according to the human mind; in this and the other thing previously mentioned, may your will always be done, for yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory unto the ages. Amen.

* From Ashes and Ruin: Selections from the Writings of St. Gennadios Scholarios , tr. Rev. Dr. John Palmer (Columbia, MO: Newrome Press, 2022), pp. 209-215. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

From Ashes and Ruin: Selections from the Writings of St. Gennadios Scholarios

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 02:21:21 GMT

Foreword by Fr. Maximos Constas

Feast of the Nativity of Our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary

Anno Domini 2023, September 8

GENNADIOS SCHOLARIOS , sometimes called the “last of the Byzantines,” was the first Patriarch of Constantinople after the violent overthrow of the Byzantine state on 29 May 1453. He was a survivor of a once great civilization, the tattered remnants of which were swept away by the conquering armies of Islam. The drastically changed circumstances raised inescapable questions about the nature of one’s identity in such a strange new world. All, or nearly all, the institutions that had defined and supported his sense of self had vanished seemingly overnight. He had become, as it were, a displaced person, a stranger in the city of his birth. We tend to think of cultural dislocation as a distinctive condition of modernity, along with the social, psychological, and spiritual fragmentation that invariably accompanies it. But this condition is not new and has been faced many times throughout the Church’s long and often turbulent history.

Formerly the friend of an emperor but now the slave of a hostile and alien religion, Gennadios asked: “Who am I?” The responses to this question that perhaps came immediately to his mind were immediately rejected. “Even though I speak Greek, I would never call myself ‘Greek,’ because I do not think like them. I also speak Latin, but I am not for that reason a Latin, for neither do I think like them.” He understood clearly that language and ethnicity do not form a sufficiently profound or durable basis on which to build an identity. One’s place of birth likewise mattered little, and with the state reduced to ashes, political identities were equally useless, for what could it possibly mean to call oneself a “Roman” in a world where the Roman Empire no longer existed? What, then, was left? “I want to be named,” Gennadios declared, “according to my religion; and if anyone asks me who I am, I will respond that I am a Christian.” Stripped of the accumulated layers of ethnicity, political ideology, and social, cultural, and regional identities, Gennadios felt that, in many ways, he had returned to a pre-Constantinian moment, when the faithful not only identified themselves as Christians but also experienced a profound identification with Christ himself.

For example, more than one thousand years earlier, at the trial of Justin Martyr and his companions, the governor questioned one of them, saying, “Who are your parents?” To which he replied, “Our true father is Christ, and our mother is our faith in him.” Others refused to give their names, saying only that, “I am a Christian,” or even, “My name is Christ.” And in answer to the question, “Where are you from?” they responded by saying, “We are from Nazareth.” Like Gennadios, they knew that to identify themselves with anything transient and ephemeral—anything merely human—was to forget that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come” (Heb. 13:14).

We see a similar dynamic at work in the life of St. John of Damascus (ca. 675-749 AD). An outstanding theologian, the Damascene produced a compendium or epitome of Orthodox theology, known as On the Orthodox Faith, which is arguably the best known of his works. Unlike earlier systematic summaries, this was not personal but ecclesial, which the Damascene signals with his famous opening statement: “I will say nothing that is my own” (which is itself a quotation from St. Maximos the Confessor). John’s work is a monument of theological precision and clarity, two qualities which were absolutely crucial, since, not unlike Gennadios, John’s readers were living in a different world. After the fall of Syria to the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750 AD), there was no longer a Christian empire or emperor (or culture) to support the local Christian community, which now had to live side-by-side with multiple Christian sects and heretical groups under the control of a military theocracy that John of Damascus understood to be a confused form of heresy, namely, Arianism. Thus, On the Orthodox Faith was written in response to a question about Christian identity and aimed to define what it meant to be a Christian in a non-Christian world. To answer this question successfully, the Christian tradition needed to be organized, clarified, and presented in a way that made it accessible to large numbers of readers who had difficulty finding a foothold in a markedly changing society. The Cappadocian Fathers, who lived in the immediate aftermath of the Constantinian revolution, were also concerned about the formation of Christian identity in that strange new world, but here we must draw our parallel to a close.

--------

While known to scholars and historians primarily as a theological writer, Gennadios was also a pastor who authored many works designed to edify and inspire the faithful. These works touch on virtually all aspects of the life in Christ: from sin and repentance, to questions of free will, faith, prayer, fasting, Almsgiving, participation in church services, the sacraments, and the life of holiness and virtue. His teachings are clear and forthright, filled with spiritual counsel, practical advice, and deeply shaded by Scripture and inspired by the spirit of the Fathers, and thus fulfill the injunction of the Apostle Paul: “Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and encourage with every form of patient instruction” (2 Tim. 4:2). Father John Palmer is to be congratulated for making these texts available in a clear and readable translation, providing us with what is now the largest collection of works by Gennadios Scholarios in English.

* From Ashes and Ruin: Selections from the Writings of St. Gennadios Scholarios , tr. Rev. Dr. John Palmer (Columbia, MO: Newrome Press, 2022), pp. ix-xii. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

Some Books to Read

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 16:37:56 GMT

by Dorothy Sayers

Feast of St Leontus the Martyr

Anno Domini 2023, August 17

Here are a few suggestions for “black-out” reading. They are all books by modern writers, that illuminate some of the questions we have been discussing. A number of them you have probably read; this is just in case you have missed them:

1. Four books about the disintegrated state of mind the world has got into:

J ohn Macmurray: Freedom in the Modern World

This is a series of broadcast talks given a few years ago, and, though written by a philosopher, is quite easy reading. The great point Professor Macmurray makes is that the chief part of our present trouble is caused by fear—the fear of life, and fear of one another.

Peter Drucker: The End of Economic Man

A rather difficult book, that needs and deserves to be read attentively—turn off the Wireless Announcer before getting down to it—but it is the most interesting and original book I have read recently. It deals with the failure of the economic state to provide man with a satisfactory and reasonable world to live in. Incidentally, it offers a really intelligible explanation of that very puzzling thing, the working of totalitarian economics.

J. B. Priestley: Rain upon Godshill

Mainly autobiographical; the passage that is important for our purpose is the long Chapter XIII. In a very stimulating way, Mr. Priestley hauls this country over the coals for its failure to carry out the principles of democracy in its institutions, and for the lack of creative purpose shown by the nation and by individuals.

L. P. Jacks: The Art of Living Together

Originally published under the title “Constructive Citizenship.” The chapters on Skill, Labour, and Leisure should be written in letters of gold on the tables of the heart.

2. Four books about Germany:

Stephen H. Roberts: The House that Hitler Built

This tells in considerable detail about Hitler’s rise to power and the organization of the Nazi state. It is interesting to read this and the next two books in conjunction with Drucker.

Hermann Rauschning: Germany’s Revolution of Destruction

The story of Nazi Germany from the inside. The author was Hitler’s “right-hand man” in Danzig until the Nazi regime reached a point beyond which he could not tolerate it, and he had to quit the country. It is a long book, rather diffusely written, but full of interest, and gives a terrifying picture of the purposeless “marching for marching’s sake” of the over-organized Nazi nation.

G. R. Halkett: The Dear Monster

Another book written from the inside (in spite of his English-sounding name, the writer is a South German by birth), but easier to read and more personal than the last. Halkett gives a very clear picture of the dreadful disintegration of mind and purpose in the Germany of the Weimar Republic, and shows how Hitler was able to take advantage of this to establish his “revolt into authority.”

Erica Mann: School for Barbarians

A documented account, very simply and readably written, of what it actually means, especially for women and children to live under a totalitarian regime. It shows how the “absolutism” of the state breaks up all family life, and how the whole of education is directed to war aims. The author is the daughter of Thomas Mann, the distinguished German novelist, who was driven into exile.

3. Two books which illustrate the difficulties of international understanding:

Bernard Newman: Danger Spots of Europe

An excellent survey of the incredible complications of those territorial questions which look so easy when we view them from an armchair, or imagine they can be settled by “head-counting” and plebiscites. Written by a novelist for the ordinary reader, without technicalities or statistical tables, from observations made on the spot.

A. L. Mackenzie: Propaganda Boom

This book, written in a popular style, shows how the propaganda racket is worked by the totalitarian states; how powerful its influence has been; and how important it is that the democracies should not neglect this “fourth arm” of war.

4. A book about the Empire:

Sir Arthur Willert, B. K. Long and H. V. Hodson: The Empire in the World

Rather a book for reference than for fireside reading; but if you want to realize just how lightly (as regards legal ties) the British Empire is held together, here are the facts.

5. Two books about Science:

A. N. Whitehead: Science and the Modern World

The philosophy of science, by a scientist. This is really stiff reading and no mistake, but is well worth the effort. (It is done in a “Pelican,” so you might risk sixpence on having a good go at it.) A passage of particular interest to us is that in Chapter I which stresses the dependence of scientific method upon that primary act of faith which assumes the universe to be fundamentally rational.

John Macmurray: The Boundaries of Science

The philosophy of science, by a philosopher, showing just why science can never deal with ultimate purpose but only with method, and how, with the examination into psychology, it has reached the limits of the field open to its survey. Rather harder reading than “Freedom in the Modern World,” but not requiring technical knowledge, only resolute thinking.

6. Five books about the Christian view of things:

Essays edited by V. A. Demant: Faith That Illuminates

Do not be put off by the title, which suggests something pious and devotional. This is a very practical collection of essays by both clerical and lay writers, dealing with various problems of today. Read particularly, “Religion and Leisure” by P. E. T. Widdrington, “Religion and Economics” by William G. Peck, and “Religion and Politics” by Maurice Reckitt.

V. A. Demant: The Religious Prospect

Written by the editor of the above. Rather tough going here and there, especially Chapter 5, but an extremely fine statement of the need for an “eternal absolute” and the disastrous results of investing any temporal principle with “total” authority.

Charles Williams: He Came Down from Heaven

A brilliant and exciting little book—though not for those who confuse the mystical with the obscure. I have added it to this list for its beautiful and imaginative treatment of the problem of the “knowledge of good and evil,” and the resolution of evil into good.

Christopher Dawson: Beyond Politics

The above books are by Anglican writers; this is by a member of the Roman Communion. It defines with great clarity the Christian view of the right relations between Church and State, and the relation of History to the standards of Eternity.

A. D. Lindsay: Pacifism as a Principle and Pacifism as a Dogma

This pamphlet by the Master of Balliol clears up many difficulties for the man who instinctively distrusts the doctrine of “total peace,” but does not see how to reconcile war with Christian principles.

*Dorothy Sayers, Begin Here: A War-Time Essay (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1940), pp. 157-160.

**Be sure to register for the 2023 Inklings Festival which will focus on Dorothy Sayers.

On the Most Venerable Dormition of our Exceedingly Pure Lady, Mother of God and Ever Virgin Mary

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 18:06:06 GMT

by St Gregory Palamas

Feast of the Dormition of our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos and Ever Virgin Mary

Anno Domini 2023, August 15

BOTH LONGING and obligation compose my homily today to your charity. It is not just my desire out of love for you and my duty under sacred laws to fill your pious ears with saving words to nourish your souls, but there is also nothing dearer or more necessary for me than to expound with due honor in church the wonders of the ever-virgin Mother of God. This longing, not single but twofold, persuades, beseeches, and encourages me, whereas inescapable duty compels me. Words, however, cannot attain to what is beyond speech, just as eyes cannot stare at the sun. But though it is impossible for us to tell of things surpassing words, we can, by the love of those we extol, sing their praises, and we may use words to pay our debt, and express our longing for the Mother of God in hymns as best we can, without in any way touching the intangible.

2. If “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints” (Ps. 116.15), and “the memory of the just is praised” (Prov. 10.7, LXX), how much more fitting is it for us to celebrate with highest honors the memory of the ever-virgin Mother of God, the Holy of Holies, through whom the saints receive their hallowing? That is exactly what we are doing today by commemorating her holy dormition and passing away, through which, having been made a little lower than the angels (cf. Ps. 8.5), she rose incomparably higher than the angels, archangels, and all the heavenly powers above them, because of her nearness to the God of all (cf. Rom. 9.5), and the marvels written of old which were accomplished in her.

3. On her account there were divine predictions by prophets inspired by God. Miracles foreshadowed the great future wonder of the world, the ever-virgin Mother of God. Nations and circumstances were transformed to make way for the fulfilment of the new mystery concerning her. Spiritual ordinances prefigured in all sorts of ways the truth that was to be. The culmination, or rather the beginning and foundation of subsequent marvelous events, was the accomplishment of God’s promise to Joachim and Anna, the most virtuous people of their day, that, although childless from their youth, they would have a child in their extreme old age, and that their daughter would bear without seed Him whom God the Father had begotten before all ages, outside time. In addition, those who were to become parents in this mysterious way vowed to give back the child, who was to give birth herself even more mysteriously, to the giver of the gift. In accordance with this worthiest of vows, the Mother of God left her father’s house in extraordinary fashion while still an infant, to live in God’s house. For the space of many years she stayed there, strange is it seems, in the Holy of Holies, provided with indescribable nourishment by attending angels: food, which Adam never reached the point of tasting, otherwise he would not have fallen away from life; as was the case with the all-pure Virgin, who now passes from earth to heaven—even though for Adam’s sake and to show herself his daughter, she, like her Son, yielded for a short time to nature [fn: That is to say, the Mother of God also died and was raised on the third day.].

4. After this unutterable nourishment came the mysterious divine plan for the Virgin’s betrothal, the strange, inexplicable greeting of the archangel who flew down from on high, and God’s messages and salutations, which reversed Adam and Eve’s condemnation, and healed the curse which was upon them, turning it into a blessing (Lk. 1:28-38). For the King of all desired the secret beauty of the Ever-Virgin, as David foretold (cf. Ps. 45:11). He bowed the heavens and came down (Ps. 18:9), and overshadowed her (cf. Lk. 1:35), rather, the power of the Most High came to dwell in her in His very person. He did not reveal His presence through darkness and fire, as He did to Moses (cf. Ex. 19:16, 18), nor through a tempest and cloud, as He did to Elijah (cf. 1 Kgs. 18:45), but the unveiled power of the. Most High directly overshadowed the Virgin’s perfectly pure womb with nothing intervening, neither the air of earth or heaven, nor anything visible or invisible. For this was not overshadowing, but pure union.

5. Since anything that overshadows something else naturally gives it its own form and character, what came to pass in the Virgin’s womb was not just union but the formation, out of both the power of the Most High and her all-holy virgin womb, of the incarnate Word of God. The Word of God in the flesh made His abode in her, came forth from her, “and appeared on earth and went about among men.” He made our human nature divine, and bestowed on us, according to the holy apostle, “things the angels desire to look into” (1 Pet. 1:12). Such is the extraordinary honor and all-surpassing glory of the Ever-Virgin, which defeats the mind and speech of all, however angelic they may be. Again, what words can express the events that followed this indescribable birth? Co-operating with, and sharing in the sufferings of, the self-emptying of the Word of God (cf. Phil. 2:7), which was accomplished through her, and led to His exaltation, she was justly glorified and lifted up with Him, constantly adding great gifts to the extraordinary ones already bestowed upon her. Even after He who took flesh from her ascended into heaven, it was as though she was striving to emulate the great works past understanding and speech which He had wrought in her, through patient endurance in all kinds of asceticism, through prayers and exertions for the whole world, and counsels and exhortations for those going to the ends of the earth to preach. She was the sole support and consolation of all who saw or heard her, assisting by various means in the proclamation of the gospel. Thus she showed that her whole life, her behavior, her mind and her words, were utterly devoted to godly striving.

6. As a result of this, her death, too, was life-giving and led to heavenly, immortal life, and its day of remembrance is a joyful holiday and worldwide festival. Not only does it renew the memory of the wonders of the Mother of God, it also commemorates the unheard-of way in which all the holy apostles were gathered from every country to her sacred funeral, the hymns of divine revelation sung on that occasion by these inspired men, the attendance of angels, singing and ministering around her. They escorted her and followed behind, they aided or opposed, protected and defended, and with all their might assisted in deed and song, those who in any way reverenced that body which had held God and is the starting-point of life, the saving remedy of our human race, solemnly chosen from the whole creation. On the other hand, they secretly fought and opposed the Jews when they insulted her and rebelled against God in thought and deed. The Lord of Hosts, meanwhile, the Son of the Ever-Virgin, was invisibly present, honoring His Mother’s departure. Into His hands she entrusted her God-bearing spirit, and through Him her body, her spirit’s companion, was soon translated into a heavenly place of eternal life, as rightly befits her whole life from the very beginning.

7. In ancient times there were many who attained to divine favor, glory, and power. As David says, “How precious also are thy friends unto me, O God! How great is their authority! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand” (Ps. 139:17-18 Lxx). According to Solomon, “Many have acquired riches, and many daughters have acted with power, but she excels and outdoes them all,” to an expression of degree (cf. Prov. 31:29). Standing between God and the whole human race, she alone made God a son of man, and men sons of God, rendered the earth heaven and made mankind divine. She alone among women was declared the Mother of God by nature transcending every nature. Through her unutterable childbearing she became Queen of all creation in this world and beyond, and through herself she raised up those below her, and made her subjects heavenly instead of earthly. She shared in the noblest honor, the most sublime power and the ordination bestowed from heaven through the divine Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14; 2:1-4), and was set high above all, the supremely blessed Queen of a blessed race.

8. Today she has moved from earth to heaven, and now has heaven too as a fitting dwelling-place, a palace meet for her. She has stood on the right hand of the King of all, clothed in vesture wrought with gold, and arrayed in divers colors, as the psalmist and prophet says of her (cf. Ps. 45:9 Lxx); and you should take this garment interwoven with gold to mean her divinely radiant body, adorned with every type of virtue. For at present she is the only one who has a place in heaven with her divinely glorified body in the company of her Son. Earth, the grave and death could not ultimately detain her life-giving body, which has held God and been a more beloved habitation for Him than heaven and the heaven of heavens. For if a soul which has the grace of God dwelling within it goes up to heaven when released from this world, as we believe and is evident on many accounts, how can that body which not only received within it the pre-eternal, only-begotten Son of God, the ever-flowing fount of grace, but was also plainly seen to bear Him, fail to be taken up from earth to heaven? Could she who, when only three years old, before the heavenly child had dwelt within her and been clothed by her in flesh, lived in the Holy of Holies, and who became excellent and truly heavenly even in her body through many great works, afterwards become earth subject to corruption? How could this seem reasonable to people who take a rational view?

9. It was right, therefore, that the body which brought forth the Son should be glorified with Him in divine glory, and that the ark of Christ’s holiness should arise with Him who rose on the third day, as the prophet sang (cf. Ps. 132:8 Lxx). The linen cloths and winding-sheets left behind in the tomb, which were all that those who came to look for her found there, proved to the disciples that she too had risen from the dead, just as was earlier the case with her Son and Lord (cf. Lk. 24:12; Jn. 20:5-7). It was not, however, necessary for her, as it was for her Son and God, to stay for a while longer on earth, so she was taken up directly from the grave to the heavenly realm, whence she sends bright shafts of holy light and grace down to earth, illuminating all the space around the world, and is venerated, admired, and hymned by all the faithful.

*St Gregory Palamas, The Homilies , edited and translated by Christopher Veniamin (Essex, England: Mount Thabor Publishing, 2009), pp. 289-293. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary: Bodily Faith

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 17:44:27 GMT

by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Feast of the Dormition of our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos and Ever Virgin Mary

Anno Domini 2023, August 15

HOW STRANGE it all seems to us! We know nothing of the way the cosmos, of which our earth is a part, is related to a heaven that occupies no localized position. Is not God everywhere? Does He need a special throne room as well, somewhere beyond the stars? We wonder why it is important to attribute such an improbable privilege to the Mother of Jesus, to assert that her body does not belong to the dust from which it was made, like everyone else’s, but—as the old legends depict it—is supposed to have disappeared from its grave, to the amazement of the assembled disciples, leaving roses blooming on the sarcophagus.

Let us press the point: we may be believing Christians, but we hardly know anything about the relationship between death and resurrection. It is a brutal fact that we have before us a dead body, and it must go into the earth or into the fire. Another fact, an uplifting one, is that the Christian lives in the hope of being kept safe in God’s hands after his death; but how, in concrete terms, can we envisage this? From time to time, throughout the Church’s history, people have felt that man—at least the holy man, the man who has lived for God, body and soul—will be brought, whole and entire, into an intimate closeness to God. See, for instance, Giotto’s wonderful painting of the bodily assumption of John, the “beloved disciple.” Then there is that mysterious passage in Matthew 27 concerning the “bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep,” whose graves open on Good Friday and who appear together with Jesus after His Resurrection; the majority of theologians consider it probable that they too were “assumed into heaven.” But what a dark, opaque realm we are getting into! Would not the Church do better to concentrate on the brightly lit center of the Faith and leave this peripheral twilight zone to look after itself?

The question is, however, does not this ancient Christian feast, Mary’s Assumption, belong to the center of the Faith after all? And this applies to the other great Marian feasts too: her conception, her reception of God’s seed (March 25), her motherhood (January 1) and, so that she may be capable of this, her preservation from every stain of sin (December 8). If we are to see this, we must rid ourselves of any prejudice and repugnance we may have toward the “cult of Mary” and try to understand what is really at stake.

Let us try to approach the question from the point of view of the Bible. God’s Covenants in the Old Testament with Abraham, with the patriarchs and with the people of Israel are the basis of all hope for salvation within world history. God binds Himself in an ever-new and ever-closer way to the humanity He has created. Man, originally fashioned out of the clay of the earth but endowed with the breath of God’s own freedom, has always existed in a twofold relationship, to what is below him and what is above him. God binds Himself to man with the aim of forming something indivisible and unique in collaboration with him; namely, He intends to implant His eternal, divine Word in this mortal flesh and so enable this flesh to participate in His own life. Ancient Israel lives in hope and faith, looking toward this point, this messianic point in history. Israel knows well enough—and is made to feel it more and more—how little it responds to God’s plan and expectation, how little it acts as an apt receptacle for the word of God, this word that is always hovering above its head, whether as a promise or as a threat. All the same there grows among the people a movement of penitent humility on the part of “Yahweh’s poor,” hollowing out a vacant space to serve as a receptive womb for the fruitfulness that will come from above. Sarah, the mother of Samson, Hannah, Elizabeth—all these barren women who are given children by God’s grace alone are anticipatory images of what we know as the Incarnation, in Mary, of the Word and Son of God: this is the destination and consummation of the Old Testament development.

Mary, a young girl in an insignificant provincial town, becomes a representative personality. She stands for all the elements that, albeit imperfectly, yearned for the descent of the Word of God among men. Exegetes assure us that the Woman of the Apocalypse, clothed with the sun and with the moon under her feet, encircled by twelve stars and crying out in childbirth, is the epitome of the earthly community of salvation, which, in pains, awaits the Messiah and will actually give birth to Him. This bodily birth, however, will naturally take place through a concrete person, a person in whom the ready obedience and hope of the ancient faith has taken pure and perfect shape but who also sums up and embodies all this world’s longing and expectation. Moreover, the Woman of the Apocalypse, whose child is “caught up to God,” is given a place (in the face of the opposition of the enemy, the dragon) in the earthly desert; the vision goes on to speak of “the rest of her offspring,” those who “bear testimony to Jesus” and whose task is to fight against the demonic powers. This makes it quite clear that the ancient community of salvation, from which the Messiah has come forth, has been transformed into a new community of salvation, the Church. Mary stands as the tangible, personal embodiment of all the energies of salvation history; she stands in an integrating, intermediate position between Israel and the Church; she is, in person, the bodily fruitfulness of the entire people of God.

But now we must go on to understand that the central event of the “Incarnation of the Word of God” could only take place when, at some point or other, the faith, hope and love of the people of God had become so unconditional that there was no longer anything in the receptive womb that would resist the implanting of the divine seed. “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord”—here we see a readiness, a receptivity that is totally unreserved: body, soul and spirit are utterly open, “openings” to God. Here the essential thing is that the body is involved; that the Handmaid’s consent echoes right through her, down to the lowliest and most unconscious fibers of her being; her whole self, in its materiality, from its lowest level upward, makes itself a womb for the Wholly Other, for God’s self-utterance (and hence His “substance”). Never before had this substance taken up its abode within the straitened dimensions of a mortal body.

(The Gospels are our guarantees that this really took place. This man alone, who came from Mary’s womb, “made God known” [Jn. 1:18]. He alone has enabled us to see God through His transparent humanity and has shown us how almighty and how humble, how lofty and how lowly, how just and how loving God is. In His existence—right up to and including the Cross and the Resurrection—He has taken all the irreconcilable images of God that are scattered about in man’s mind and brought them into a unity, a stupendous unity that has fascinated and baffled the world for two thousand years because it will not fit into any of its categories.)

The wonder of this man, however, should not make us overlook the uniqueness of the womb in which a divine-human unity took shape. The intimate relationship between a mother’s whole being and her child is much more profound than former centuries thought. From the mother within whom it grows, the child receives physical, psychic and spiritual being, inseparably interwoven. In Mary’s case, her Son receives from her all that is man’s response, in faith, love and hope, to the Covenant God. So, from the very outset, this receptive womb must be completely oriented to furnishing the Son of God with everything the Covenant requires, so that He, the Son, can become a bodily unity embodying the Covenant.

Jewish thought constituted a preparation for the Incarnation insofar as (unlike Greek thought) it always saw man as a unity of body and soul; it never pursued a one-sidedly spiritualized ascetical ideal or envisaged an immortality of the soul apart from the body. This mode of thought, which is not only biblical but does justice to the nature of man as he is, facilitates our approach to this most mysterious union between God and man that took place in the womb of the Virgin Mary. This human womb was exclusively prepared to allow God’s seed to develop in it without any hindrance; it was like a subterranean mine whence the Son of God could draw all He needed to equip Himself fully as a God-bearing man.

What, therefore, is the Church celebrating today? That a simple human body, inseparably united to its soul, is capable of being the perfect response to God’s challenge and of uttering the unreserved “Yes” to His request. It is a single body—for everything in Christianity is always personal, concrete, particular—but at the same time it is a body that recapitulates all the faith and hope of Israel and of all men on earth. Consequently, when it is taken up into ultimate salvation, it contains the firm promise of salvation for all flesh that yearns for redemption. For all our bodies long to participate in our ultimate salvation by God: we do not want to appear before God as naked souls, “not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Cor. 5:4); and God, who caused bodies to die, “subjecting creation to futility,” has subjected it “in hope” that it “will set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:20f.). So we are celebrating a feast of hope; but, like all the New Testament feasts, it is celebrated on the basis of a fulfillment that has already taken place; that is, not only has the Son of God been resurrected bodily—which, in view of His life and death, is quite natural—but also has the body that made Him man, the earthly realm that proved ready to receive God and that remains inseparable from Christ’s body. Today we see that this earth was capable of carrying and bringing to birth the infinite fruit that had been implanted in her. Today we celebrate the ultimate affirmation and confirmation of the earth.

Contemplating the center of the mystery we are celebrating, we would do well to refrain from speculating about questions that are insoluble; for these speculations lead to abstract regions with no way out. By contrast, if we look at Mary, the towering central point between Israel and the Church, our gaze rests on something utterly concrete; we see our Sister who succeeded in doing for us what, in virtue of her example, we must attempt to emulate, namely, to allow God’s Word to dwell in us bodily. Furthermore, He will never leave the house that has once given Him shelter. Whatever Jesus received from Mary—not only a body, but also the whole power, the whole tradition of the earthly response to God’s word—He incorporates into His divine-human nature, the indissoluble nuptial relationship between God and His world. The Son’s most profound attitude is that of owing Himself to the Father, in a word, Eucharist. All His love for the eternal Father is gratitude that, in its overflowing, brings back to the Father everything the latter has created, now redeemed and transformed. And all His love for His earthly Mother is manifested in giving and showing her what, in God’s plan, she always was: the first creature envisaged in connection with God’s becoming man, worthy to be the first to experience perfect transfiguration in God. She is the model for all men kept safe under her bright mantle.

*From Hans Urs von Balthasar, You Crown the Year with Your Goodness: Sermons through the Liturgical Year , trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp. 186-191. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

Transfiguration: The Highest Mountain Peak

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 16:48:37 GMT

by St Maximos the Confessor

Feast of St Maximos the Confessor

Anno Domini 2023, August 13

2.13. He who is aiming at knowledge, let him establish the foundations of his soul as immovable with the Lord, just as God said to Moses: “But you, stand exactly here, with me” (Deut. 5:31). It must be understood, however, that even among those standing with the Lord there is difference, if only that passage “…there are some among those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God has arrived with power” (Mt. 16:28) is not read cursorily by those eager to learn. For the Lord does not always appear with glory to all who are standing with Him, but rather, He is near the beginners in the shape of a servant (cf. Phil. 2:7), whereas He appears in the shape of God to those who are able to follow Him when He ascends the highest mountain peak of His transfiguration (cf. Mt. 17:1-8), in which shape He was before the existence of the world. It is possible, therefore, that the same Lord does not appear in the same way to all who happen to be with Him; rather, to some He appears in one way, and to others in a different way; in accordance with the measure of the faith in each, clearly He varies the vision.

2.14. When the Word of God becomes altogether radiant and bright in us, His face, too, will radiate just like the sun; then even His garments will appear white (cf. Mt. 17:2); that is, the words of the holy Scripture of the Gospels, clear and distinct, having nothing hidden. But also Moses and Elijah are present with Him (cf. Mt. 17:3); that is, the more spiritual principles of the Law and the Prophets.

2.15. Just as it is written that the Son of Man comes “with His angels in the glory of the Father” (Mt. 16:17), just so the Word of God is transfigured in the worthy with their every progress in virtue, coming “with His angels in the glory of the Father” (Mt. 16:17). For when the more spiritual principles in the Law and the Prophets, which Moses and Elijah through themselves typify, appear with the Lord at the transfiguration of the Lord (cf. Mt. 17:1-3), they preserve the proportion of glory in themselves, revealing the potentiality till then contained in the worthy.

2.16. He who qualifiedly has been initiated into the rationale behind oneness, has necessarily also come to know the rationales behind providence and judgment, which become conjoined to it. It is by this reason also that one reckons it to be right that three tents be made by himself, like saint Peter, for those who were seen (cf. Mt. 17:4); that is, the three aspects of salvation; I mean: that of virtue, and that of knowledge, and that of theology. For the first requires courage in practice and temperance, of which the blessed Elijah was the type; the second requires justice in accordance with natural contemplation, which the great Moses disclosed by himself; and the third requires inviolate perfection in accordance with prudence, which the Lord exhibited. And tents were spoken about because of the fact that there are other greater and more resplendent things than these, regions through which the worthy will pass in the future.

*From St Maximus the Confessor, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology , trans. Luis Joshua Salés (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2015), pp. 115, 117. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

The Nature of Evil, The Fall of Adam, and the Origin of Passions

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 16:48:00 GMT

by St Maximos the Confessor

Feast of St Maximos the Confessor

Anno Domini 2023, August 13

1.2.11. Evil neither was, nor is, nor ever will be an existing entity having its own proper nature, for the simple reason that it has absolutely no substance, nature, subsistence, power, or activity of any kind whatsoever in beings. It is neither a quality, nor a quantity, nor a relation, nor place, nor position, nor activity, nor motion, nor state, nor passivity [ fn. 35: With the exception of “motion,” these terms correspond to Aristotle’s celebrated rules of predication (Aristotle, Categories 1b25-2a4), … ] that can be observed naturally in beings—indeed, it subsists in no way whatsoever in any beings according to their proper nature—for it is neither a beginning, nor a middle, nor an end. But so that I might speak as if encompassing it in a definition, evil is nothing other than a deficiency of the activity of innate natural powers with respect to their proper goal.

1.2.12. Or, again, evil is the irrational movement of natural powers toward something other than their proper goal, based on an erroneous judgment. By “goal” I mean the Cause of beings, which all things naturally desire [ fn. 37: cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1980a … ], even if the evil one—by concealing his envy behind a counterfeit kindness, and by using a ruse to persuade man to redirect his desire to something in creation instead of its Cause—has brought about ignorance of the Cause.

1.2.13. The first man, consequently, being deficient in the actual movement of his natural powers toward their goal, fell sick with ignorance of his own Cause, and, following the counsel of the serpent (Gn. 3:2-6), thought that God was the very thing of which the divine commandment had forbidden him to partake (Gn. 2:16-17) [ fn. 39: In the case of Adam, the evil that is “deficiency” arose from entering into a relationship with created reality before developing the proper cognitive and moral capacity for such a relationship. ]. Becoming thus a transgressor and falling into ignorance of God, he completely mixed the whole of his intellective power with the whole of sensation, and drew into himself the composite, destructive, passion-forming knowledge of sensible things [ fn. 40: The fall, in addition to being a shift of human energy from a spiritual to a biological plane, also brought about the mixture and confusion of intellect and sensation, which mirrors the Christological concerns for an “unconfused union” of the divine and human natures in Christ; … ]. It was thus that he was “ranked among the irrational beasts and came to resemble them” (Ps. 48:12, 20), in every possible way acting for, seeking after, and wishing for the very same things as they, and indeed surpassing them in their lack of reason by exchanging natural reason for something contrary to nature (cf. Rom. 1:23-25).

1.2.14. Thus the more that man was preoccupied with knowledge of visible things solely according to the senses, the more he bound himself to the ignorance of God; and the more he tightened the bond of his ignorance, the more he attached himself to the experience of sensual enjoyment of the material objects of knowledge in which he was indulging; and the more he took his fill of this enjoyment, the more he inflamed the passionate desire of self-love (cf. 2 Tim. 3:2) [ fn. 43: In Chapters on Love 2.8, 2.59; 3.8, 3.57, Maximos defines self-love as “the passion of attachment to the body” and “mindless love for the body” … ] that comes from it; and the more he deliberately pursued the passionate desire of self-love, the more he contrived multiple ways to sustain his pleasure, which is the offspring and goal of self-love. And because it is the nature of every evil to be destroyed together with the activities that brought it into being, he discovered by experience that every pleasure is inevitably succeeded by pain, and subsequently directed his whole effort toward pleasure, while doing all he could to avoid pain, fighting for the former with all his might and contending against the latter with all his zeal. He did this believing in something that was impossible, namely, that by such a strategy he could separate the one from the other, possessing self-love solely in conjunction with pleasure, without in any way experiencing pain. It seems that, being under the influence of the passions, he was ignorant of the fact that it is impossible for pleasure to exist without pain. For the sensation of pain has been mixed with pleasure even if this fact escapes the notice of those who experience it, due to the passionate domination of pleasure, since whatever dominates is of a nature always to be prominent, overshadowing the perception of what is next to it [ fn. 44: Maximos’s dialectic of pleasure and pain has distant roots in Stoic psychology, but is more immediately related to Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity 3 … ].

1.2.15. Thus the great and innumerable mob of passions was introduced into human life and corrupted it. Thus our life became filled with much groaning—a life that honors the occasions of its own destruction and which, out of ignorance, invents and cherishes excuses for corruption. Thus the one human nature was cut up into myriad parts, and we who are of one and the same nature devour each other like wild animals. Pursuing pleasure out of self-love, and for the same reason being anxious to avoid pain, we contrive the birth of untold numbers of destructive passions. For example, if through pleasure we give heed to self-love, we give birth to gluttony, pride, vainglory, grandiosity, avarice, greediness, tyranny, haughtiness, arrogance, folly, rage, conceit, pomposity, contempt, insolence, effeminate behavior, frivolous speech, profligacy, licentiousness, ostentation, distraction, stupidity, indifference, derision, excessive speech, untimely speech, and everything else that belongs to their offspring. If, on the other hand, our condition of self-love is distressed by pain, then we give birth to anger, envy, hate, enmity, remembrance of past injuries, reproach, slander, oppression, sorrow, hopelessness, despair, the denial of providence, torpor, negligence, despondency, discouragement, faint-heartedness, grief out season, weeping and wailing, dejection, lamentation, envy, jealousy, spite, and whatever else is produced by our inner disposition when it is deprived of occasions for pleasure. When, as the result of certain other factors, pleasure and pain are mixed together resulting in depravity—for this is what some call the combination of the opposite elements of vice—we give birth to hypocrisy, sarcasm, deception, dissimulation, flattery, favoritism, and all the other inventions of this mixed deceitfulness [ fn 47: Larchet (SC:529:138, n. 2) states that here Maximos points to three sources of the passions arising from self-love: the search for pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and the combination of these two tendencies, resulting in three categories of passions. He notes thatsuch a theory is original to Maximos and finds no equivalent in earlier patristic literature. ]. But you should know that here I cannot possibly enumerate and explain all of these things in terms of their proper forms, modes, causes, and occasions. When God grants me the strength, however, I shall take up the examination of each of these in a separate discussion.

1.2.16. Even, then, as I said a moment ago, is ignorance of the benevolent Cause of beings. This ignorance, which blinds the human intellect and opens wide the doors of sensation, utterly estranged the human intellect from divine knowledge and filled it with the impassioned knowledge of objects of sense. Partaking unreservedly in the latter solely to indulge his sensations—and discovering through experience, after the manner of irrational beasts, that participation in sensible realities is what sustains the physical nature of the body, and having by this time gone far astray from intelligible beauty and the splendor of divine perfection—man unsurprisingly mistook the visible creation for God (cf. Rom. 1:20-21) and consequently made a god out of creation, since the created order had become necessary for the sustenance and survival of his body. Thus he became enamored of his own body, which was of the same nature as the creation he deemed to be God, and with all his zeal he “worshiped creation rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25), by cherishing and pampering the body alone. For it is not possible for someone otherwise to worship creation if he does not lavish care on the body, just as one cannot worship God if he does not purify his soul by means of the virtues. It was thus with his body that man conducted his corrupting worship of creation, and it was according to the body that he became a lover of his own self, ceaselessly engendering pleasure and pain, always eating from the Tree of Disobedience, which through experience offered to his perception the knowledge of good and evil thoroughly mixed into one (Gn. 2:17).

1.2.17. If perhaps someone were to say that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (cf. Gn. 2:17) is the visible creation, he would not fail to hit the mark of truth, for to partake of it naturally produces pleasure and pain.

1.2.18. Or again, one could say that, insofar as the visible creation contains spiritual principles that nourish the intellect, and, at the same time, possesses the natural potential both to delight the senses and distort the intellect, it was called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That is, when spiritually contemplated it possesses the knowledge of the good, but when it is rejected in a corporeal manner it possesses the knowledge of evil, and to those who partake of it corporeally it becomes the teacher of passions, making them oblivious to divine realities [ fn. 54: Through the contemplation of the logoi, which refer the intellect to God, creation can be seen to “possess knowledge of the good,” but when, on the other hand, through the passions, the mind attends only to creation’s superficial, sensible forms, it “possesses knowledge of evil.” ]. It was perhaps for this reason that God temporarily forbade man to partake of it, rightly delaying for a while his participation in it, so that, through participation in grace, man might first know the. Cause of his own being, and afterwards, by partaking of grace, add impassibility and immutability to the immortality given to him by grace. Having in this way already become God through divinization, man might have been able without fear of harm to examine with God the creations of God, and to acquire knowledge of them, not as man but as God [ fn. 55: Cf. Ambigua to John and Thomas 10.60: “Adam, by means of sense perception, sought to make his own (as one must not) the things of God without God, and before God, and not according to God, which is in any case impossible.” ], having by grace the very same wise and informed knowledge of beings that God has, on account of the divinizing transformation of his intellect and powers of perception [ fn. 56: Divinization does not exclude knowledge of creation, but through God it is known dispassionately, and indeed in the very manner that God knows it, which is to say from the perspective of the logoi, which are God’s eternal intentions for created beings; cf. Amb . 7.24: “God neither knows sensory things by sensation, nor intelligible things by intellection … but <knows them> as His own wills.” ]

1.2.19. Whereas this anagogical interpretation concerning the tree is suitable for everyone, it should be understood that the more mystical and superior sense is reserved for the understanding of mystics, and is honored by us through silence. As for the Tree of Disobedience, I have referred to it now only in passing, wishing to show that ignorance of God made a god out of creation, the worship of which is the self-love that human beings have for their own bodies. It is with respect to this self-love that the experience of pleasure and pain is a kind of mixed knowledge, through which all the impurity of evil was introduced into human life in many different ways and in manifold forms, which no discourse could encompass, since all who share in human nature possess, according to varying degrees of quantity and quality, a vital and active affection for the visible part of that nature, by which I mean the body. Moreover, this affection forces man, as if he were a slave, to contrive all kinds of passions in his desire for pleasure and fear of pain—relative to the times and circumstances, and as his manner of life allows—with the aim of enjoying pleasure in every aspect of his life while avoiding all possible contact with pain [ fn. 58: The perceived good for the body is the sensation of pleasure, while its perceived opposite, pain, is taken to be evil. This reductive and distorted scale of values is sustained by the sensible world, apprehending in separation from God, without whom it becomes like a tree bearing false good and evil. The mind can either know creation on the level of its logoi or through sensation can attach itself passionately to the outward appearances of things for the purposes of sensory pleasure. ]. This affection for the body teaches us to undertake something that can never be accomplished or ever reach the limit it has set for itself. Insofar as the entire nature of physical bodies is corruptible and subject to dissolution, whatever a person does to keep it in a condition of stability, he succeeds only in hastening the body’s corruptibility, for out of fear he does not always wish for the object of his desire, but instead, contrary to all sense and his own free will, he pursues what is not desirable through what is desirable, having become dependent on things that by nature can never be stable. He is consequently subject to change together with those things that break up and scatter the disposition of his soul, which is ceaselessly tossed about like a ship on a sea of perpetual flux and change, while he himself fails to perceive his own destruction, for the simple reason that his soul is completely blind to the truth.

1.2.20. Deliverance from all these evils and the shortest way to salvation, is the true and conscious love of God, along with the total denial of the soul’s affection for the body and this world. Through this denial, we cast off the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain, and being freed from evil self-love we are raised up to knowledge of the Creator. In place of evil self-love, we receive good, intellective self-love, which is utterly separated from affection for the body, and through it we never cease to worship God, ever seeking from Him the sustenance of our soul, because true worship that is pleasing to God is the care of the soul by means of the virtues (cf. Jn. 4:23).

1.2.21. Thus whoever does not desire bodily pleasure and has absolutely no fear at all of pain has become dispassionate with respect to them, and with one accord has put to death all the passions, the self-love that gives birth to pleasure and pain, and all the passions that result from them, as well as ignorance, which is their primary cause. Such a person comes to be wholly under the rule of what is naturally good and beautiful, which is stable, permanent, and always the same, so that he remains uninterruptedly with the good in a state of motionlessness [ fn. 61: “Motionlessness” simultaneously denotes fixity in the good and the cessation of motion on the part of the creature that has reached its end in God; … ]. , and “with unveiled face reflects the glory of God” (2 Cor. 3:18), beholding the divine and unapproachable glory from the radiant splendor shining within himself.

1.2.22. Since reason has shown us the right and easy way (cf. Jn. 14:6), which is followed by those who are being saved, let us deny, as much as we can, the pleasures and pains of this present life, and, with much supplication, let us teach those in our care to do the same, and thus we will be freed, and will free them, from every idea of the passions and from every demonic wickedness. Let our sole aspiration be divine love, and nothing will be able “to separate us from God: neither tribulation, nor distress, nor famine, nor peril, nor sword,” nor anything else mentioned by the holy Apostle in that passage (cf. Rom. 8:35), for through knowledge realized in action, this love will remain within us immutably, and God will grant us eternal, ineffable joy and sustenance of soul. And when we are deemed worthy of this love, we shall acquire an ignorance that preserves us from this world, no longer seeing the world with a carnal mind, as we once did, when the “face” of our senses was “uncovered” (cf. 2 Cor. 3:18. Fn. 65: The “uncovered face of the senses” is the impassioned fascination with the sensible aspect of the world and its surface phenomena. This “uncovering” of sense perception is simultaneously the “covering” or “veiling” of the intellect. Conversely, the more the “face” of the senses is veiled, the more the sensory veils are lifted from creation, enabling the intellect to grasp its inner meaning and purpose.], and we mistook the superficial manifestation of sensible things as “glory,” when in reality it was the source of the passions [ fn. 66: This “preserving” or “saving” ignorance is not the “knowing beyond knowing” that pertains to God, but is rather that mode of the intellect that no longer misapprehends creation through the passions, no longer being fixated on isolated sensations and surface phenomena, thereby allowing creation to become fully transparent to the divine glory; cf. Amb . 10.52, where, like Moses, the purified consciousness “will be made worthy to see and hear the ineffable and supernatural divine fire that exists, as if in a burning bush, within the essence of things.” ]. Instead, with the “uncovered face” of the mind, freed from every covering of sensation, we will “reflect,” through our virtues and spiritual knowledge, the “glory of. God” (2 Cor. 3:18), through which naturally comes about our union with God by grace, raising the intellect far beyond all ignorance and stumbling. For in the same way that, being ignorant of God, we deified creation (which we came to know through the sensory enjoyment of sustaining the body from it), so too, having received the knowledge of God that is actually accessible to thought—since it is from Him that our soul derives its sustenance to exist, to exist well, and to exist eternally [ fn. 68: The triad of “being,” well-being, and eternal well-being,” which structures the nature of human existence and experience, is an essential feature of Maximos’s thought, and receives its fullest expression in Amb . 65.2-3. ]—let us be ignorant of every experience and sensation.

*St Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios , The Fathers of the Church vol. 136, trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), pp. 81-91. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

On the Transfiguration

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 19:55:16 GMT

by St Proclus of Constantinople

Feast of the Transfiguration

Anno Domini 2023, August 6

On the Transfiguration – Oration 8

by St Proclus of Constantinople

Come my friends, today let us attentively apply ourselves to the Gospel treasures so that we can draw out, as usual, a source of riches that can be freely divided out and never used up. Come to that wisest of good guides and let us follow Luke once more to behold Christ going up the high mountain, taking with Him Peter, James and John as witnesses of the divine transfiguration. For it says that the Master took Peter and his companions and ascended a high mountain on which Moses and Elijah conversed with Christ; a high mountain on which the Law and the Prophets conversed with Grace; a high mountain on which Moses sacrificed the paschal lamb and sprinkled the doorposts of the Hebrews with its blood; a high mountain on which Elijah dismembered the ox with those others and consumed the sacrifice with fire passing through the water; a high mountain on which Moses stood who opened and closed the waters of the Red Sea; a high mountain where Elijah stood who opened and shut the clouds of rain; a high mountain so that Peter, James and John might learn that He was the one “to whom every knee shall bend, in heaven, on earth, and in the underworld.” For the Master ascended the mountain taking only three with Him. He did not take them all, and He did not leave them all behind. He did not begrudge the glory to the others, nor did He consider them to be inferior, nor did He do it to distress the other nine. He is the Just One, and all He does is justly done, and He reckoned all of them as one, and made no distinctions among them in His love, for He had made them as one. But because Judas, who was to become the traitor, was unworthy of the divine vision and that awesome appearance, then because of Him He left the others behind too so that Judas would not be the only one left behind, and that future accusations might be forestalled. He brought up these three independent witnesses to His transfiguration, in accordance with the Law, and so that He might make it known spiritually to the others in these three. For He had said: “Righteous Father, guard them that they too may be one just as we are one.” So when Judas saw Andrew, Thomas, Philip and the others kept off the mountain as well as himself, but not complaining or annoyed or protesting about it but rather rejoicing and thinking that they were sharers in the same heavenly grace as those who had gone, then he had absolutely no grounds for complaint that he had ever been slighted in any of the miracles. Nonetheless it was he who kept the purse, and not only was he angry without reason at the woman who anointed Jesus, but he even handed the Master over, shamelessly, to his enemies.

2. Why is it said: “And He was transfigured before them and there appeared to them Moses and Elijah conversing with Him?” Peter, so eager and quick to speak, as always, sees men he had never seen before, conversing with him. And he does not weigh up the immensity of this wonder, and he does not have regard to the marvel of this divine radiance, but cries out that this desert place is good. Then the fishermen become tabernacle-builders; saying to the Savior: “Let us make three tabernacles here; one for you, one for Elijah and one for Moses; not knowing what he was saying.” How kindly does the most-wise Luke excuse him by adding: “not knowing what he was saying.” But Peter, you prince of disciples and leader of the apostles, why did you want to fall down to these mean thoughts and insult divine realities with your human words—talking this way about erecting three tabernacles in the wilderness, and offering the same honor to slaves as to the Master by setting the shrines of the other two on the same level as the tabernacle to Christ? Surely Moses was not conceived of the Holy Spirit as He was? Surely a virgin-mother did not give birth to Elijah as the all-holy virgin Mary gave birth to Him? Surely no one knew Moses as an infant in his mother’s womb as the Fore-runner knew Him? Surely the heavens did not herald the birth of Elijah nor the Magi worship the swaddling bands of Moses? For Moses and Elijah never performed such miracles as these; casting out legions of demons from men, casting out spirits from the recesses of men. For when Moses was angry he struck the sea with his staff and it divided. But Jesus, your Master, walked over the sea and made the depths passable for you, Peter. Elijah entreated and increased the widow’s meal and raised her son from the dead; but the One who took you from being a fisherman to be a disciple, fed thousands from a few loaves and went into Hell to despoil it and carried off those who had lain there throughout the ages. And so, Peter, do not say: “Let us make three tabernacles here.” Do not say: “It is good for us to be here.” Think nothing base, nothing earthly, nothing creeping. Think rather of the things that are above, not the things of earth, as Paul tells us to do. For how is it good for us to be here where the hurtful serpent wounded the first man, and then closed up Paradise; where we heard that our bread is to be eaten in the sweat of our face; where we learned from Cain to groan and tremble on the face of the earth; where there is nothing lasting; where all things are shadows; where all things pass in a moment—so how is it good for us to be here? If Christ intended to leave us here then why did He bend down the heavens and come down? If Christ intended to leave us here why did He share in our flesh and blood? If Christ intended to leave us here why did He stoop down to one who had fallen and raise up his prostrate form? If it is good for us to be upon the earth in vain are you called the Keybearer of Heaven. For what use would you have for the keys of heaven? Moreover, if you long for this mountain then say farewell to the heavens. If you want to build tabernacles you must renounce the title and role of the foundation of the Church. It was not without reason that Christ the Lord was transfigured, but so that He might reveal to us the transfiguration of our natures that is to come, and His second coming, in light, upon the clouds with all the angels. For it is He who “is girded with light as in a robe;” He who is the judge of the living and the dead. This is why He brought Moses and Elijah in among them to stand as seals of the ancient revelations.

3. What more does the great evangelist have to say? “While they were still talking, behold a bright cloud overshadowed them and behold a voice came from the cloud saying: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him.” He says that while Peter was still speaking, the Father confounded him from heaven to this effect: What indeed is all this Peter? Why are you confusing yourself so, and why are you blurting out these nonsenses, saying that this is a good place? Are you out of your mind? Or are you envious of them and do not know what to say? Have you still not learned anything? or understand the unshakeable knowledge of the Sonship? Were you not the one who said: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”? You have looked on so many wonders, Bar Jonah, and are you still a Simon? He set you as the Keybearer of Heaven and have you not yet laid aside your fishing tunic? Look, this is the third time that you have run counter to the Savior’s will, not knowing what to say. For He said to you: “I must suffer,” and you said: “This must never happen to You.” Again He said: “All of you will be scandalized;” and you said: “If all others are, I will not be scandalized.” And see, now do you want to build a tabernacle for Christ, the same as that for Moses and Elijah? A tabernacle for Christ who stretched out the heavens with me? A tabernacle for Him who laid the foundations of the earth with me? A tabernacle for Him who gathered the sea and fixed the firmament? A tabernacle for Him who lit the stars, who set fire in the skies, and made all things with me before the ages? A tabernacle for Him who is of me, and also of you? A tabernacle for a man who is fatherless, and for a god who is motherless? A tabernacle for Him who chose His own tabernacle and accepted a virgin’s womb? And so, because you wished to build three tabernacles, now knowing what to say, I used a bright cloud as my own tabernacle and overshadowed all who were present. I cry out then from the heavens: This is my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased—not Moses or Elijah, but Him. Not the one or the other, only this One. This is the One in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him.

4. Moses I justified but in this One I am well-pleased. Elijah I assumed, but this One I sent out into the virgin, as into heaven; and out from the virgin I sent heaven to Him. For as He said: “No one has gone into heaven except the One who came down from heaven.” In vain, then, would He have come down upon the earth if He intended to remain always upon the earth. In vain would He have emptied Himself, assuming the form of a slave if He had become what you are while not remaining that which He was. And if He had not taken up the Cross, like you, and for the sake of all of you, to redeem the world by His own blood, then the whole Economy would be made futile and the ancient uncertainties of the prophetic words would still be in force. So desist Peter and do not think the thoughts of man, but the things of God. For this is my Beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased. Listen to Him. Twice have I spoken in this voice about Him, when you were present; on this mountain and in the presence of John in the river Jordan. This was so that the ancient prophet might be proved right who cried out: “Thabor and Hermon rejoice in your name.” Whose name?—“This is my Son the Beloved.” For as Paul says: “He has given Him the name above every name.” Perhaps, my dear, you are wondering what it means: Thabor and Hermon shall rejoice in your name? Well learn this sensibly. Thabor is the mountain on which Christ wished to be transfigured, where the Father bore witness to the Son, as you have just heard. And Hermon is a mountain somewhat near the Jordan, from which Elijah was taken up. It is right next to the waters of the Jordan where Christ desired to be baptized, where the Father bore witness again to the Son. On both these mountains the undefiled Father confirmed the Sonship, at both times crying out: This is my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased. Listen to Him. For whoever hears Him hears me also. Those who are ashamed of Him and His words, I shall be ashamed of them in my glory with the holy angels. Listen to Him without deceit or wickedness; without reservations and without indulging curiosity. Seek faith, do not search for phrases. Take up faith, do not bandy words with the Word. That great Paul crushed curiosity well enough when he taught them all, crying out without hesitation: “Oh the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God; How incomprehensible are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways;” to Him be glory to the ages of ages. Amen.

*Translated by John Anthony McGuckin in McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition , Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity Vol. 9 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), pp. 182-187

A Note on Creative Reading

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 23:17:49 GMT

by Dorothy Sayers

Feast of the Seven Holy Youths of Ephesus

Anno Domini 2023, August 4

Reading being one of our principal occupations on long, dark evenings, I should like to explain what I mean by saying that it ought to be done creatively. (Here, by the way, I am on my own special ground, and shall take leave to speak with authority.)

Do not, I implore you, continue in that indolent and soul-destroying habit of picking up a book “to distract your mind” (“distract” is the word for it) or “to knock down time” (there is only too little time already, and it will knock us down soon enough). The only respectable reason for reading a book is that you want to know what is in it.

Do not choose your literature by the half-witted process of asking the young woman at the library for “a nice book” and enquiring anxiously of her, “Shall I like it?” Subscribe to a decently serious paper, read the reviews and order what you think will interest you. (Study the publishers’ lists too, by all means, bearing in mind that the “blurb” is written to sell the book and is therefore not an expression of free criticism. Do not be too much put off either, many a good book has a sickening blurb.)

If the book, when obtained, does not interest you, ask yourself why; and have the elementary politeness to give yourself a sensible answer. Does the subject displease you?—and if so, is it by any chance one of those disquieting things that you “would rather not know about,” though you really ought not to shirk it? Does the author’s opinion conflict with some cherished opinion of your own?—If so, can you give reasons for your own opinion? (Do try and avoid the criticism that begins: “We do not like to think” this, that or the other; it is often so painfully true that we do not like to think.) Or is it that the author is ignorant, illogical or superficial? (Are you sure? Have you taken the trouble to verify his references? Can you support your own view from your reading or experience?) Or is his style dull, obscure, or ugly? Does he write bad English? If you think so, justify yourself by examples and be sure you know why they are bad. (And don’t trust those horrid little manuals all about how to write correct English; they are nearly always wrong or hopelessly pedantic; consult the people who know real literature when they see it, like H. W. Fowler, Quiller-Couch or A. P. Herbert. Language is a live thing; you can’t confine it in little primers.)

If, on the other hand, the book does interest you, don’t leave it at that. Go on and read other books bearing on the subject, and collect illuminating experience of your own; go out and get the experience. See whether, in view of what the books say, you can’t and ought not to do something about it; make the books part of your life. And if the author’s style appeals to you, do make a point of enjoying it. Get the feel of balance in a beautiful sentence, rejoice in the lovely appropriateness of the exact right word and thank your gods that the author had the wit and industry to choose that word, out of a whole dictionaryful of less adequate words, for the express purpose of pleasing you. Entertain yourself by finding other words yourself and discovering why they sound so feeble by comparison.

Pray get rid of the idea that books are each a separate thing, divided from one another and from life. Read each in the light of all the others, especially in the light of books of another kind. Try and see—this is the most fascinating exercise of all—whether a statement in one book may not be a statement of the same experience which another book expresses in quite different terms. (I tried to make a “synthesis” of this kind about biological man and the theological doctrine of the Fall.) Try the experiment of putting a statement of one kind into the terms of another. Try especially putting statements made in old-fashioned language into modern terms. You will often find that things you have taken all your life for incomprehensible dogmas turn out to be perfectly intelligible observations of truth. Take, for instance, those dark pronouncements in the Athanasian Creed that God is uncreate, incomprehensible and eternal, and re-state them like this: “The standard of Absolute Value is not limited by matter, nor limited by space, nor limited by time.” It may seem more acceptable that way. (The third chapter of this book [Sayers, Begin Here , originally published 1940] is, by the way, an expansion of precisely that statement, more or less in those terms.)

Or if you read somewhere a reference to “Aristotle’s three Dramatic Unities—unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action,” do not (as some writers do who should know better) dismiss Aristotle as a tedious old classic of two thousand years ago who tried to tie up dramatic form in red-tape of his own manufacture. What he said was a statement of fact about the plays he had observed to be successful, and he meant exactly what your favourite dramatic critic means when he says: “The interest in this play is too much scattered, and confused with side-issues. There are far too many scenes, and the story drags on over a period of three generations, so that we have to be continually consulting the programme to know what year we have got to.”

Which reminds me: please burn all your book-markers—even the pretty one Aunt Mabel sent you last Christmas (or at least put that one away and only bring it out when she comes to call). You cannot possibly be so bird-witted as to be unable to discover which page you got to by looking at it.

If the author mentions some other books in terms which make it seem important, whether he approves or refutes it, don’t take his word for it: get the other book and read it, and judge for yourself. If he refers to something, or uses some word, which you don’t understand, get a dictionary or work of reference and look it up. (Don’t write and ask the author to explain; he is not required to be an Encyclopaedia, and you will only give him a poor idea of your industry and intelligence.) Especially, examine the sources of what he writes; to read Mr. Somebody’s critical valuation of Milton’s prose or his examination of the economic effects of the Peace-Treaty is quite valueless if you have never read any Milton and do not know what the Peace-Treaty actually said.

Discuss the books you read. If your husband or your wife is bored with your opinions (they very often are), persuade some friend to read the same books and talk them over. By discussion I mean discussion: not just saying, “Oh, I thought it was frightfully interesting, didn’t you?” Nor do I mean exchanging gossip about the author’s personality and private life and saying he must be a delightful (interesting, unpleasant, dangerous, irritating, fascinating, entertaining) person to know. (It is well to remember that the best of a writer’s energies goes into his writing; he may not have much charm or virtue left over for private use. This does not invalidate his opinions; it merely means that he is liable to be disappointing when encountered in person.)

And do please realise that words are not just “talky-talk”—they are real and vital; they can change the face of the world. they are a form of action—“in the beginning was the Word … by Whom all things were made.” Even the spate of futile words that pours out from the ephemeral press and the commercial-fiction-mongers has a real and terrible power; it can become a dope as dangerous as drugs or drink; it can rot the mind, sap the reason, send the will to sleep; it can pull down empires and set the neck of the people under the heel of tyranny. “For every idle word that ye speak ye shall render account at the day of judgment.” I do not think that means that we shall have to pay a fine in a few million years’ time for every occasion on which we said “dash it all” or indulged in a bit of harmless frivol; but I do think it was meant as an urgent warning against abusing or under-rating the power of words, and that the judgment is eternal—that is, it is here and now.

*From Sayers, Begin Here: A War-Time Essay (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1940), pp. 153-156.

On Reading Old Books

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 23:01:26 GMT

by William Hazlitt

Feast of the Seven Holy Youths of Ephesus

Anno Domini 2023, August 4

I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all. It was a long time before I could bring myself to sit down to the Tales of My Landlord, but now that author’s works have made a considerable addition to my scanty library. I am told that some of Lady Morgan’s are good, and have been recommended to look into Anastasius; but I have not yet ventured upon that task. A lady, the other day, could not refrain from expressing her surprise to a friend, who said he had been reading Delphine:—she asked,—If it had not been published some time back? Women judge of books as they do of fashions and complexions, which are admired only “in their newest gloss.” That is not my way. I am not one of those who trouble the circulating libraries much, or pester the booksellers for mail-coach copies of standard periodical publications. I cannot say that I am greatly addicted to black-letter, but I profess myself well versed in the marble bindings of Andrew Miller, in the middle of the last century; nor does my taste revolt at Thurloe’s State Papers, in Russia leather; or an ample impression of Sir William Temple’s Essays, with a portrait after Sir Godfrey Kneller in front. I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living. Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes—one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the merits of either. One candidate for literary fame, who happens to be of our acquaintance, writes finely, and like a man of genius; but unfortunately has a foolish face which spoils a delicate passage:—another inspires us with the highest respect for his personal talents and character, but does not quite come up to our expectations in print. All these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of our reflections. If you want to know what any of the authors were who lived beore our time, and are still objects of anxious inquiry, you have only to look into their works. But the dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.

When I take up a work that I have read before (the oftener the better) I know what I have to expect. The satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. When the entertainment is altogether new, I sit down to it as I should to a strange dish,—turn and pick out a bit here and there, and am in doubt what to think of the composition. There is a want of confidence and security to second appetite. New-fangled books are also like made-dishes in this respect, that they are generally little else than hashes and rifacimentos of what has been served up entire and in a more natural state at other times. Besides, in thus turning to a well-known author, there is not only an assurance that my time will not be thrown away, or my palate nauseated with the most insipid or vilest trash,—but I shake hands with, and look an old, tried, and valued friend in the face,—compare notes, and chat the hours away. It is true, we form dear friendships with such ideal guests—dearer, alas! and more lasting, than those with our most intimate acquaintance. In reading a book which is an old favourite with me (say the first novel I ever read) I not only have the pleasure of imagination and of a critical relish of the work, but the pleasures of memory added to it. It recalls the same feelings and associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have again in any other way. Standard productions of this kind are links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity. They are landmarks and guides in our journey through life. They are pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours. They are “for thoughts and for remembrance!” They are like Fortunatus’s Wishing-Cap—they give us the best riches—those of Fancy; and transport us, not over half the globe, but (which is better) over half our lives, at a word’s notice!

My father Shandy solaced himself with Bruscambille. Give me for this purpose a volume of Peregrine Pickle or Tom Jones. Open either of them any where—at the Memoirs of Lady Vane, or the adventures at the masquerade with Lady Bellaston, or the disputes between Thwackum and Sophia and her muff, or the edifying prolixity of her aunt’s lecture—and there I find the same delightful, busy, bustling scene as ever, and feel myself the same as when I was first introduced into the midst of it. Nay, sometimes the sight of an odd volume of these good old English authors on a stall, or the name lettered on the back among others on the shelves of a library, answers the purpose, revives the whole train of ideas, and sets “the puppets dallying.” Twenty years are struck off the list, and I am a child again. A sage philosopher, who was not a very wise man, said, that he should like very well to be young again, if he could take his experience along with him. This ingenious person did not seem to be aware, by the gravity of his remark, that the great advantage of being young is to be without the weight of experience, which he would fain place upon the shoulders of youth, and which never comes too late with years. Oh! what a privilege to be able to let this hump, like Christian’s burden, drop from off one’s back, and transport one’s self, by the help of a little musty duodecimo, to the time when “ignorance was bliss,” and when we first got a peep at the raree-show of the world, through the glass of fiction—gazing at mankind, as we do at wild beasts in a menagerie, through the bars of their cages—or at curiosities in a museum, that we must not touch! For myself, not only are the old ideas of the contents of the work brought back to my mind in all their vividness, but the old associations of the faces and persons of those I then knew, as they were in their life-time—the place where I sat to read the volume, the day when I got it, the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky—return, and all my early impressions with them. This is better to me—those places, those times, those persons, and those feelings that come across me as I retrace the story and devour the page, are to me better far than the wet sheets of the last new novel from the Ballantyne press, to say nothing of the Minerva press in Leadenhall-street. It is like visiting the scenes of early youth. I think of the time “when I was in my father’s house, and my path ran down with butter and honey,”—when I was a little, thoughtless child, and had no other wishes or care but to con my daily task, and be happy!—Tom Jones, I remember, was the first work that broke the spell. It came down in numbers once a fortnight, in Cooke’s pocket-edition, embellished with cuts. I had hitherto read only in school-books, and a tiresome ecclesiastical history (with the exception of Mrs Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest): but this had a different relish with it,—“sweet in the mouth,” though not “bitter in the belly.” It smacked of the world I lived in, and in which I was to live—and shewed me groups, “gay creatures” not “of the element,” but of the earth; not “living in the clouds,” but travelling the same road that I did;—some that had passed on before me, and others that might soon overtake me. My heart had palpitated at the thoughts of a boarding-school ball, or gala-day at Midsummer or Christmas: but the world I had found out in Cooke’s edition of the British Novelists was to me a dance through life, a perpetual gala-day. The sixpenny numbers of this work regularly contrived to leave off just in the middle of a sentence, and in the nick of a story, where Tom Jones discovers Square behind the blanket; or where Parsons Adams, in the inextricable confusion of events, very undesignedly gets to bed to Mrs Slip-slop.… With what eagerness I used to look forward to the next number, and open the prints! Ah! never again shall I feel the enthusiastic delight with which I gazed at the figures, and anticipated the story and adventures of Major Bath and Commodore Trunnion, of Trim and my Uncle Toby, of Don Quixote and Sancho and Dapple, of Gil Blas and Dame Lorenzo Sephora, of Laura and the fair Lucretia, whose lips open and shut like buds of roses. To what nameless ideas did they give rise,—with what airy delights I filled up the outlines, as I hung in silence over the page!—Let me still recall them, that they may breathe fresh life into me, and that I may live that birthday of thought and romantic pleasure over again! Talk of the ideal ! This is the only true ideal—the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float upon the spring-tide of human life.

Oh! Memory! shield me from the world’s poor strife,

And give those scenes thine everlasting life!

*This is the first third of the essay, found in Hazlitt: Selected Essays , edited by George Sampson (London and New York: The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, 1917), pp. 60-64 of 60-71.

Canon for the Dormition of the Mother of God

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 22:53:21 GMT

by St John of Damascus

Feast of the Seven Holy Youths of Ephesus

Anno Domini 2023, August 4

Ode 1 – First Song of Moses (Ex. 15:1-9)

I open my lips today:

Fill them, O Spirit, with energy

To utter this hymn to the Mother who governs us,

To cry out among the throng of those who praise her,

And join them in singing the wonders we celebrate!

Come, maidens and choristers,

Join with the prophetess Miriam

And raise up your voice in the song of her exodus;

For this virgin now, God’s Mother, who is peerless,

Has come to the goal of her heavenward pilgrimage.

As heaven made womanly,

Heaven itself now has welcomed you

And leads you, most holy one, into its sanctuary;

There you stand beside the King in robes of splendor,

God’s bride, without wrinkle or spot, for all ages.

Ode 3 – Prayer of Hannah (1 Sam. 2:1-10)

All those, Mother of God, who would acclaim you,

O living, undying spring of life,

You strengthen charismatically:

Give them the power to celebrate,

Crowning their minds with glory by

The holy touch of your memory.

Descended from mortals like your brethren,

You showed us an exodus from death,

A pathway supernatural;

Mother of Christ, the source of life,

You have now crossed death’s barrier

To life divine, in reality.

Apostles, evangelists were gathered

Along with the angels from on high

To Sion’s mount, your dwelling-place:

Brought at the nod of Providence—

Rightly, my Queen, and fittingly,

To join the rites of your funeral.

Ode 4 – Prayer of Habakkuk (Hab. 3:1-19)

Lord of highest heaven, Your mysterious will

Stood before the ages: to come to us

Born of a virgin;

Holy Habakkuk exclaimed,

Full of prophetic clarity,

“Glory to Your power and goodness, Lord!”

Shaken with amazement to see on the earth,

Raging through the valleys like animals,

Whirlwinds from heaven,

Living creatures of the King,

He cried, “How great Your handiwork!

Glory to Your power and Your goodness, Lord!”

Taking you to heaven, O Mother of God,

Covering your holy and receptive, God-Welcoming body

With their many-splendored wings,

Angelic hosts surround you,

Shielding you with radiant modesty.

Once her very offspring, mysterious God—

He of whom the heavens gave prophecy—

Died and was buried,

Sharing willingly our lot;

She, too, must share the sepulcher,

She who had conceived Him in purity!

Ode 5 – Prayer of Isaiah (Is. 26:9-20)

The world is revivified,

Seeing your holy majesty;

You, unmarried mother, holy virgin,

Rise now above us, into your heavenly home,

Ascending to life without an end:

Grant to all who sing to you

Everlasting vitality.

Evangelists, waken us,

Sounding your trumpets joyfully!

tongues of many nations, sing her praises,

Tell of her glory; let there be joy in the air,

And let it be radiant with light;

Angels, sing the mystery

Of the death of God’s holy one.

O vessel of Providence,

Truly such praise is justified;

All of your virginity has risen,

Homeward to heaven, completely radiant with God:

For us, you are a source of holy light,

Holding and revealing God

As His mother most glorious.

Ode 6 – Prayer of Jonah (Jonah 2:2-9)

Come here, good friends, let us celebrate,

With all of God’s own faithful and holy ones,

Mary’s great festival;

Come, sing to Christ, who was born of her,

Clapping our hands to praise Him:

Glory to both of them!

From you the flower of life sprang forth,

Not bursting the gates of your virginity;

Source of vitality,

How could your temple immaculate

Ever be made to share in

Death’s dissolution?

You sheltered life as its sanctuary;

Now life without end is your inheritance,

Life is your dwelling-place.

Crossing this river of mortality,

You who call life your offspring,

Share His eternity.

Ode 7 – Prayer of the Three Holy Children (Dan. 3:26-56)

When commanded to adore Him who created them,

Three sons of Israel

Chose, in their courage, to defy even furnaces,

Braving the fire, as they sang exultantly,

“Praised be the God of Abraham; may the Lord be blessed forever!”

Come, young men and gentle maidens, join the festival;

Honor that maiden, the

Mother of God today; come elders and emperors,

Masters and magistrates, join our canticle:

“Praised be the God of Abraham; may the Lord be blessed forever!”

Let the mountains, in the Spirit, blow a trumpet-call,

Fanfares and flourishes;

Joyously dancing like the hills, let the Apostles now

Leap in their revelry; let our banqueting,

Sacred to Mary’s memory, fill this day with consolation.

For the wonderful transition of Your Mother, the

Holy and spotless one,

Calls to our revelry heaven’s company:

Angels and archangels join our festival,

Singing with us the canticle: “May our God be blessed forever!”

Ode 8 – Song of the Three Holy Children (Dan. 3:57-88)

The lads who were cast into the furnace

Were rescued by Mary’s Son, who guides the universe—

Then by a prefiguring, now becoming flesh in her,

Waking the world to victory, inspiring anthems of praise;

O come, acclaim the works of the Savior,

And call Him blessed forever and forever!

Your name, too, O spotless, holy Virgin,

The powers and principalities now celebrate,

Angels with the archangels, thrones and dominions all,

Cherubim, too, and seraphim, aglow with awe-struck, burning acclaim;

So we, mere men and women, dare praise you

And call you blessed forever and forever!

The One who has mysteriously entered

Within you, to take His flesh from your virginity,

He it is who welcomes you, taking your immaculate

Soul in His hands, embracing you—a loving, dutiful Son.

How justly we exalt you, holy Virgin,

And call you blessed forever and forever!

O marvel of marvels past all knowing:

God’s mother and yet a virgin, you are wonderful!

Entering your sepulcher, you leave it as a paradise!

All who today are privileged to gaze in joy at that tomb

Acclaim her, and acclaim Him who made her,

And call them blessed forever and forever!

Ode 9 – Song of the Theotokos (Magnificat: Lk. 1:46-55)

Come now, bring a torch, come join the festivity,

Sons of mortality;

Dance in exultation now, O race of spirits free of our history,

Acclaim the great transition of her who is Mother of God.

Let us greet her: “Hail to you, most holy One,

Virgin Mother of God for eternity!”

Come now to this shrine, this mountain of holiness,

Sion all-glorious;

Today let us celebrate, our faces shining with Mary’s radiance!

For to a greater sanctuary, and to a holier tent

Christ now brings His tabernacle glorious—

To the temple in heaven’s Jerusalem.

Come, people of God, draw near to this sepulcher

Filled with her memory;

Show it veneration with the lips, the eyes, the heart of fidelity,

And in sincere humility, let us now draw from this spring

Of God’s healing, spiritual probity—

Let us drink of God’s gifts at His mother’s tomb.

Take from our hands this solemn processional,

Mother of mysteries!

Keep us in the shade of your protecting hand, from shadows deliver us;

And to our king give victory, to all your people give peace,

To us sinners, pardon and deliverance:

Bring us all to that bliss which we celebrate!

*From On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies , translated by Brian E. Daley (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), pp. 241-246. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

The First Adam and the Last Adam Born of a Virgin

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 19:27:31 GMT

by St Peter Chrysologus

Feast of St Irene the Righteous of Chrysovalantou

Anno 2023, July 28

Sermon 117 on 1 Cor. 15:45-50

THE HOLY Apostle today recounts that two men gave an origin to the human race, namely, Adam and Christ. They are two men alike in body, but different in worth; truly similar in the structure of their members, but truly dissimilar in their own beginnings. “The first man, Adam,” the text says, “became a living soul; the last Adam became a lifegiving spirit.” That first one was made by this last One, from whom he got his soul to be alive. This last One was fashioned by His very Self, that He alone might not await life from another, but give it to all men. The first one was molded from the cheapest earth; the last One came forth from the Virgin’s precious womb. In the case of the former, earth is changed into flesh; in that of the latter, flesh itself is raised up to God.

Why should I say more? This last is the Adam who placed His own image in the first one when He made him. That is why He both plays the same role as the former and receives his name, in order not to let perish, as far as He was concerned, that which He had made to His own image. The first Adam, and the last Adam. That first one has a beginning; this last One has no limit. For, in truth, this last One is Himself first, as He says: “I am the first, and I am the last” (Is. 48.12). “I am the first,’ that is, without a beginning; “I am the last,” assuredly without an end.

“But it is not the spiritual that comes first,” the text says, “but the physical and then the spiritual.” Surely the earth exists before the fruit, but it is not as precious as the fruit. The earth exacts groans and toil, but the fruit gives substance and life. The Prophet rightly glories over such fruit: “Our earth has yielded her fruit” (Ps. 84.18). What fruit? Clearly, that of which he says elsewhere: “Of the fruit of thy womb I will set upon thy throne” (Ps. 131.11).

“The first man,” the text continues, “was of the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven, heavenly.” Where are they who think that the Virgin’s conception and giving birth to her child are to be likened to those of other women (e.g. Cerinthus, Ebion, and the Carpocratians)? For, this latter case is one of the earth, and the Virgin’s is one from heaven. The one is a case of divine power; the other of human weakness. The one case occurs in a body subject to passion; the other in the tranquility of the divine Spirit and the peace of the human body. The blood was still, and the flesh astonished; her members were put at rest, and her entire womb was quiescent during the visit of the Heavenly One, until the Author of flesh could take on His garment of flesh, and until He, who was not merely to restore the earth to man but also to give him heaven, could become a heavenly Man. The Virgin conceives, the Virgin brings forth her child, and she remains a virgin. Consequently, her body is conscious of strength, not pain. By her child-bearing she receives an increase of her integrity, and suffers no harm to her modesty. She is, rather, the witness of her motherhood who suffered none of its customary pains. The new mother marvels at her having a part in heavenly mysteries. Well does she understand that the birth of her Son has nothing which ordinarily occurs among men. If the Magus through His gift acknowledges that God is thus being born, and makes his acknowledgment while he is adoring, think what a Christian ought to feel and believe!

But, let us hear what follows: “As was the earthy man, such are the earthy; and as is the heavenly man, such also are the heavenly.” How will it be possible for those who were not born thus as heavenly men to be found heavenly men? Not through their remaining what they were born, but by continuing to be what they were when reborn. Brethren, that is why the heavenly Spirit by a mysterious injection of His light fecundates the womb of the virginal Mother. He desired to bring forth as heavenly beings those whom an origin from an ancestral stock of earth had brought forth as earthy men, in a wretched state. He wanted to bring them to the likeness of their Creator. So, let us who have already been reborn, and reformed at the image of our Creator, fulfill what the Apostle commands.

“Therefore, even as we have borne the likeness of the earthy, let us bear also the likeness of the heavenly.” Let it be granted that all this was a necessity: that we, formed from earth, could not produce heavenly fruits; that, born from concupiscence, we could not avoid concupiscence; that we, born from the powerful attractions of the flesh, had to carry the base load of its attractions; that we, accepted into this world for our home, were captives to its evils. Yes, let us who have been reborn to the likeness of our Lord (as we mentioned), whom a Virgin conceived, and the Spirit enlivened, and modesty carried, and integrity brought to birth, and innocence nourished, and sanctity taught, and virtue trained, and God adopted as His sons—let us bear the image of our Creator in a perfect reproduction. Let it be a reproduction not of that majesty in which He is unique, but of that innocence, simplicity, meekness, patience, humility, mercy, and peacefulness by which He deigned to become and to be one with us. May the bothersome itch of vices cease, and the fatal allurements of sins be overcome, and damnable rage, the source of crimes, be checked. May all the fog of worldly display be dispelled from our senses. May all the illusion of worldly desire be cast out of our minds. May we desire Christ’s poverty which stores its everlasting riches in heaven. May we preserve complete holiness of soul and body, that we may bear and enhance our Creator’s image in ourselves, in regard not to its size, but to our way of acting.

The Apostle confirms what we have said by his words: “Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood can obtain no part in the kingdom of God.” See how he preaches the resurrection of the body. There, the spirit will possess the flesh, not the flesh the spirit, as the next words make clear: “Neither shall corruption have any part in incorruption.” You see that not the flesh perishes, but the principle of corruption; not the man, but his fault; not the person, but his sin; in order that the man living in God and before Him alone may rejoice over arriving at the end of his sins.

We should devote a complete sermon to the resurrection, brethren. It is not right for us to speak only in passing, and that at the end of our sermon, about that which sends us into the endless ages and everlasting life.

Saint Peter Chrysologus: Selected Sermons and Saint Valerian: Homilies , The Fathers of the Church Vol. 17, translated by George E. Ganss (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1953), pp.199-202. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

The Calming of the Storm

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 19:17:54 GMT

by St Peter Chrysologus

Feast of St Irene the Righteous of Chrysovalantou

Anno Domini 2023, July 28

Sermon 20 on Matthew 8:23-27

BY GOD'S profound design, the passages read in the services of the Church are arranged in a wise order, that they may bring deeper penetration to the learned, and impart wholesome grace of understanding to simple folk.

When Christ got into the boat, the text says, the weather made bold to stir up a great storm. “He got into a boat, and his disciples followed Him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was covered by the waves: but He was asleep.” The sea had offered its heaving back for Christ to walk upon it. Now it leveled its crests to a plain, checked its swelling, and bound up its billows. It provided rocklike firmness, and He would walk across a waterway (cf. Mk. 6:48-52).

Why did the sea heave so, and toss and pitch, even endangering its Creator? Why did Christ Himself, who knows all the future, seem so unaware of the present that He gave no thought to the onrushing storm, the moment of its height, and the time of peril? But, while all the rest were awake, He alone was fast asleep—even then when utter doom threatened Himself and His dear ones. Why all this?

Brethren, it is not a calm sky but a storm which proves a pilot’s skill. When the breeze is mild, the poorest sailor manages the ship, but in the cross winds of a tempest men want the best pilot with all his skill. The disciples’ efforts as seamen, as they saw, had failed. The seas were trying to spend their fury against them, and the waves to swallow them. The twisting winds had conspired against them. So they ran in fear to the very Pilot of the world, the Ruler of the Universe, the Master of the elements. They begged him to check the billows, banish the danger, save them in their despair. At length, His mere command controlled the sea, struck back the winds, stopped the whirlwinds, brought back the calm. Then the men who were crossing the sea perceived, believed, and acknowledged that He is the very Creator of everything.

But, now, let us draw forth the inner meaning of all this. When Christ embarked, in the boat of His Church, to cross the sea of the world, the blasts of the Gentiles, the whirlwinds of the Jews, the tempests of persecutors, the storm clouds of the mob, and the foggy mists of the devils all descended in fury to make one storm over all the world. The waves of kings were foaming, the billows of the mighty seethed, the rage of subjects resounded, nations swirled like whirlpools, sharp rocks of infidelity came into view, groans resounded from Christian shores, the shipwrecks of the fallen-aways were drifting about, and there was one crisis, one shipwreck of all the world. “So the disciples came to the Lord, and woke Him, saying, ‘Lord, save us! We are perishing!’ But He said to them, ‘Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?’” Thus awakened by His disciples, Christ controls the sea, that is, the world; He pacifies the earth, softens the kings, placates the mighty, calms the waves, soothes the nations, and makes the Romans Christians. In their case, too, He brings the one-time persecutors of the Christian name to live out the word of the Christian faith. Christian princes preserve this tranquility, the Church holds it, Christianity possesses it, the Gentile world admires it.

“Then He arose,” the text goes on, “and rebuked the wind and the sea, and there came a great calm.” “And the men marveled, saying, ‘what manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?’” The men who approach the Lord, and awake Him, and humbly beg Him to save them, are His disciples. But other men are pointed out as those who marvel that the elements so obey Christ [Peter is following Origen who believed that the men who marveled were not the disciples, but other men in the same or different ships]. They are indeed men, men of the world, who marvel that the world has thus been converted to obedience to Christ; who are astonished that their temple tops have been cast down like the swells of the waves; who see that the froth of the idols and the whirlwinds of the devils have gone away. The deep and widespread peace of the Christian name throughout the whole world makes these men utterly astonished. And truly, brethren, when Christ was in the sleep of His death, a great storm arose in the Church. But, when He arose from the dead, a great calm was given back to the Church, as has been written.

At present, Christ is asleep in us. Let us awaken Him, by a full groan from our hearts, by our voice of faith, by Christian tears, by deep-felt weeping, by apostolic shouts. Let us cry out: “Lord, save us. We are perishing!” Furthermore, this passage applies very well to our own times. As it has been written: “The north wind is a harsh wind” (cf. Prov. 25:23: “The north wind driveth away rain.” Peter is thinking of north wind as a cold wind, and alluding to barbarian infiltrations from the north.), but by name it is called the “wind at the right” which brings us such wild and bitter nations. So this harsh north wind from the right hurls itself now to the southwest, now to the south, now to the southeast. By its devastating cross winds it confounds the seas, blacks out the sky, wears down the mountains, swallows up cities, mingles provinces together, drives the whole world to one shipwreck. Consequently, the bark of Christ is now raised aloft toward the sky, now sinks into the troughs of fear. At one moment it is under the control of Christ’s strength, at another it is tossed by terror. Now its decks are awash with billows of sufferings, now it makes its way by the oar strokes of divine praises. But let us cry out, dear brethren, again and again: “Lord, save us! We are perishing!”

And, truly, brethren, if we were one, like one human body, if we believed our perishing fellow men to be parts of our very selves, then by afflicting fellow men to be parts of our very selves, then by afflicting ourselves with fasting, by the groans of our prayers, and by copious tears we would cry out unceasingly: “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” Also, we would try to aid ourselves in the persons of our brethren. We would not be looking upon this sea of our blood amid this raging warfare. Neither would we be perceiving already such enormous shipwrecks of bodies and souls. But with humble voice we would be crying out: “Lord, save us! We are perishing!”

However, no compassion, no piety, no fear, no shame whatever, or any remorse are stirring us up to sorrow. It is from God, it is from God that we are beset with evils, that we are always being lashed, that the nations wax strong, the hail falls, the mildew pays its visits, impiety flourishes, diseases stalk uncontrolled, death rages, the earth quakes. Yet, we neither tremble, nor fear, nor turn away from our sins, nor pursue the good. Avarice runs wild, ostentation goes on apace, sin brings pleasure, other men’s goods seem attractive while our own go to ruin. The scourges of God come, but our faults provoke them.

If God is just, He is indeed also merciful toward us. Brethren, let us return to the Lord, that God may return to us. Let us renounce evil, to get good in return. Let us serve the good God, that we may escape servitude to evil nations and wicked powers, through the help of our Lord and Pilot, Christ. His honor and majesty endure without end forever and ever. Amen.

Saint Peter Chrysologus: Selected Sermons and Saint Valerian: Homilies , The Fathers of the Church Vol. 17, translated by George E. Ganss (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1953), pp. 61-65. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

Crossword Puzzle

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 03:05:36 GMT

by Dorothy Sayers

*This crossword puzzle is found in Dorothy Sayers' short story "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will" in Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, Compiled and with an introduction by James Sandoe (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 33-51 (solution found on p. 273).

**Click here for a PDF version to print off (includes both puzzle and clues).

"The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will" opens with Lord Peter’s manservant requesting assistance with a crossword puzzle. We next learn from Lord Peter’s sister Mary that her friend Hannah Marryat has a recently deceased uncle who was “a very rich, curmudgeonly sort … who never gave anyone a penny.” The uncle had written two wills and sent Hannah the following letter about them:

My dear Hannah, When I die—which I propose to do at my own convenience and not at that of my family—you will at last discover my monetary worth. It is, of course, considerably less than you had hoped, and quite fails, I assure you, adequately to represent my actual worth in the eyes of the discerning. I made my will yesterday, leaving the entire sum, such as it is [£250,000], to the Primrose League—a body quite as fatuous as any other in our preposterous state, but which has the advantage of being peculiarly obnoxious to yourself. This will will be found in the safe in the library.

I am not, however, unmindful of the fact that your mother is my sister, and you and she my only surviving relatives. I shall accordingly amuse myself by drawing up today a second will, superseding the other and leaving the money to you. I have always held that woman is a frivolous animal. A woman who pretends to be serious is wasting her time and spoiling her appearance. I consider that you have wasted your time to a really shocking extent. Accordingly, I intend to conceal this will, and that in such a manner that you will certainly never find it unless by the exercise of a sustained frivolity.

I hope you will contrive to be frivolous enough to become the heiress of your affectionate

Uncle Meleager

Thus begins a great “Treasure hunt” for the will. We soon learn that Uncle Meleager “was a great man for acrostics,” or at least until he discovered crossword puzzles. The story continues:

“Crosswords?” said Hannah Marryat, knitting her heavy brows. “Oh, those puzzle things! Poor old man, he went mad over them. He had every newspaper sent him, and in his last illness he’d be trying to fill the wretched things in. It was worse than his acrostics and his jig-saw puzzles. Poor old creature, he must have been senile, I’m afraid. Of course, we looked through them, but there wasn’t anything there. We put them all in the attic.

“The attic for me,” said Lord Peter.

“And for me,” said Mary. “I don’t believe there was anything senile about Uncle Meleager.

[…]

A narrow stair brought them to the “attic,” where the Wimseys flung themselves with enthusiasm upon a huge heap of dusty old newspapers and manuscripts. The latter seemed the likelier field, so they started with them. They consisted of a quantity of crosswords in manuscript—presumably the children of Uncle Meleager’s own brain. The square, the list of definitions, and the solution were in every case neatly pinned together. Some (early efforts, no doubt) were childishly simple, but others were difficult, with allusive or punning clues; some of the ordinary newspaper type, others in the form of rhymed distichs. They scrutinized the solutions closely, and searched the definitions for acrostics or hidden words, unsuccessfully for a long time.

“This one’s a funny one,” said Mary, “nothing seems to fit. Oh! it’s two pinned together. No, it isn’t—yes, it is—it’s only been pinned up wrong. Peter, have you seen the puzzle belonging to these clues anywhere?”

“What one’s that?”

“Well, it’s numbered rather funnily, with Roman and Arabic numerals, and it starts off with a thing that hasn’t got any numbers at all:

Truth, poor girl, was nobody’s daughter;’

She took off her clothes and jumped into the water.

“Frivolous old wretch!” said Miss Marryat.

“Friv—here, gimme that!” cried Lord Peter. “Look here, I say, Miss Marryat, you oughtn’t to have overlooked this.”

“I thought it just belonged to that other square.”

“Not it. It’s different. I believe it’s our thing. Listen:

Your expectation to be rich

Here will reach its highest pitch.

That’s one for you, Miss Marryat. Mary, hunt about. We must find the square that belongs to this.”

But, though they turned everything upside-down, they could find no square with Roman and Arabic numerals.

“Hang it all!” said Peter, “it must be made to fit one of these others. Look! I know what he’s done. He’s just taken a fifteen-letter square, and numbered it with Roman figures one way and Arabic the other. I bet it fits into that one it was pinned up with.”

But the one it was pinned up with turned out to have only thirteen squares.

“Dash it all,” said his lordship, “we’ll have to carry the whole lot down, and work away at it till we find the one it does fit.”

He snatched up a great bundle of newspapers, and led the way out. The others followed, each with an armful. The search had taken some time, and the atrium was in semi-darkness.

“Where shall I take them?” asked Lord Peter, calling back over his shoulder.

“Hi!” cried Mary; and, “Look where you’re going!” cried her friend.

They were too late. A splash and a flounder proclaimed that Lord Peter had walked, like Johnny Head-in-Air, over the edge of the impluvium, papers and all.

“You ass!” said Mary.

His lordship scrambled out, spluttering, and Hannah Marryat suddenly burst out into the first laugh Peter had ever heard her give.

Truth, they say, was nobody’s daughter;

She took off her clothes and fell into the water.

she proclaimed.

“Well, I couldn’t take my clothes off with you here, could I?” grumbled Lord Peter. “We’ll have to fish out the papers. I’m afraid they’ve got a bit damp.”

Miss Marryat turned on the lights, and they started to clear the basin.

“Truth, poor girl—” began Lord Peter, and suddenly, with a little shriek, began to dance on the marble edge of the impluvium.

“One, two, three, four, five, six—”

“Quite, quite demented,” said Mary. “How shall I break it to mother?”

“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen !” cried his lordship, and sat down, suddenly and damply, exhausted by his own excitement.

“Feeling better?” asked his sister acidly.

“I’m well. I’m all right. Everything’s all right. I love Uncle Meleager. Fifteen squares each way. Look at it. Look at it. The truth’s in the water. Didn’t he say so? Oh, frabjous day! Calloo! callay! I chortle. Mary, what became of those definitions.

“They’re in your pocket, all damp,” said Mary.

Lord Peter snatched them out hurriedly.

“It’s all right, they haven’t run,” he said. “Oh, darling Uncle Meleager. Can you drain the impluvium, Miss Marryat, and find a bit of charcoal. Then I’ll get some dry clothes on and we’ll get down to it. Don’t you see? There’s your missing crossword square—on the floor of the impluvium!”

It took, however, some time to get the basin emptied, and it was not till next morning that the party, armed with sticks of charcoal, squatted down in the empty impluvium to fill in Uncle Meleager’s crossword on the marble tiles. Their first difficulty was to decide whether the red squares counted as stops or had to be filled in, but after a few definitions had been solved, the construction of the puzzle grew apace. The investigators grew steadily hotter and more thickly covered with charcoal, while the attentive Mr Bunter hurried to and fro between the atrium and the library, and the dictionaries piled upon the edge of the impluvium.

Here was Uncle Meleager’s crossword square:

Truth, poor girl, was nobody's daughter;

She took off her clothes and jumped into the water.

ACROSS

I.1 Foolish or wise, yet one remains alone, // 'Twixt Strength and Justice on a heavenly throne.

XI.1 O to what ears the chink of gold was sweet; // The greed for treasure brought him but defeat.

I.2 One drop of vinegar to two of oil // Dresses this curly head sprung from the soil.

X.2 Nothing itself, it needs but little more // To be that nothingness the Preacher saw.

I.3 Dusty though my fellows be, // We are a kingly company.

IV.3 Have your own will, though here, I hold, // The news is not a patch upon the old.

XIV.3 Any loud cry would do as well, // Or so the poet's verses tell.

I.4 This is the most unkindest cut of all, // Except your skill be mathematical.

X.4 Little and hid from mortal sight. // I darkly work to make all light.

I.5 The need for this (like that it's cut off short) // The building of a tower to humans taught.

XI.5 "More than mind discloses and more than men believe" // (A definition by a man whom Pussyfoot doth grieve).

II.6 Backward observe her turn her way, // The way of wisdom, wise men say.

VII.6 Grew long ago by river's edge // Where grows today the common sedge.

XII.6 One of three by which, they say // You'll know the Cornishmen alway.

VI.7 Blow upon blow; five more the vanquished Roman shows // And if the foot slip one, on crippled feet one goes.

I.8 By this Jew's work the whole we find, // In a glass clearly, darkly in mind.

IX.8 Little by little see it grow // Till cut off short by hammer-blow.

VI.9 Watch him go, heel and toe, // Across the wide Karroo!

II.10 In expectation to be rich // Here you reach the highest pitch.

VII.10 Of this, concerning nothing, much— // Too often do we hear of such!

XII.10 O'er land and sea, passing on deadly wings, // Pain to the strong, to weaklings death it brings.

I.11 Requests like these, however long they be, // Stop just too soon for common courtesy.

XI.11 Caesar, the living dead salute thee here, // Facing for thy delight tooth, claw, and spear.

I.12 One word had served, but he in ranting vein // "Lend me your ears" must mouth o'er Caesar slain.

X.12 Helical circumvolution // Adumbrates correct solution.

I.13 One that works for Irish men // Both by word and deed and pen.

IV.13 Seven out of twelve this number makes complete // As the sun journeys on from seat to seat.

XIV.13 My brothers play with planets; Cicero, // Master of words, my master is below.

I.14 Free of her jesses let the falcon fly, // With sight undimmed into the azure sky.

X.14 And so you dine with Borgia? Let me lend // You this as a precaution, my poor friend.

I.15 Friendship carried to excess // Got him in a horrid mess.

XI.15 Smooth and elastic and, I guess, // The dearest treasure you possess.

DOWN

1.I If step by step the Steppes you wander through // Many of those in this, of these in those you'll view.

11.I If me without my head you do, // then generously my head renew, // Or put it to my hinder end— // Your cheer it shall nor mar nor mend.

1.II Quietly, quietly, "twixt edge and edge, // Do this unto the thin end of the wedge.

10.II "Something that hath a reference to my state?" // Just as you like, it shall be written straight.

1.III When all is read, then give the world its due, // And never need the world read this of you.

4.III Sing Nunc Dimittis and Magnificat — // but look a little further back than that.

14.III Here in brief epitome // Attribute of royalty.

1.IV Lo! at a glance // The Spanish gipsy and her dance.

10.IV Bring me skin and a needle or a stick— // A needle does it slowly, a stick does it quick.

1.V It was a brazen business when // King Phalaris made these for men.

11.V This king (of whom not much is known) // By Heaven's mercy was o'erthrown.

2.VI "Bid ὀν και ὴμ ὀν farewell?" Nay, in this // The sterner Roman stands by that which is.

7.VI This the termination is // Of many minds' activities.

12.VI I mingle on Norwegian shore, // With ebbing water's backward roar.

6.VII I stand a ladder to renown, // Set 'twixt the stars and Milan town.

1.VIII Highest and lowliest both to me lay claim, // The little hyssop and the king of fame.

9.VIII This sensible old man refused to tread // The path to Hades in a youngster's stead.

6.IX Long since, at Nature's call, they let it drop, // Thoughtlessly thoughtful for our next year's crop.

2.X To smallest words great speakers greatness give; // Here Rome propounded her alternative.

7.X We heap up many with toil and trouble, // And find that the whole of our gain is a bubble.

12.X Add it among the hidden things— // A fishy tale to light it brings.

1.XI "Lions," said a Gallic critic, "are not these." // Benevolent souls—they'd make your heart's blood freeze.

11.XI An epithet for husky fellows, // That stand all robed in greens and yellows.

1.XII Whole without holes behold me here, // My meaning should be wholly clear.

10.XII Running all around, never setting foot to floor, // If there isn't one in this room, there may be one next door.

1.XIII Ye gods! think also of that goddess' name // Whose might two hours on end the mob proclaim.

4.XIII The Priest uplifts his voice on high, // The choristers make their reply.

14.XIII When you've guessed it, with one voice // You'll say it was a golden choice.

1.XIV Shall learning die amid a war's alarms? // I, at my birth, was clasped in iron arms.

10.XIV At sunset see the labourer now // Loose all his oxen from the plough.

1.XV Without a miracle it cannot be— // At this point, Solver, bid him pray for thee!

11.XV Two thousand years ago and more // (Just as we do today) // The Romans saw these distant lights— // But, oh! how hard the way!

On the Words of the Divine Jesus Prayer

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 18:49:24 GMT

by St Mark of Ephesus

Commemoration of St Aquila the Apostle among the 70

Anno Domini 2023, July 14

HOW MUCH more power is possessed by the Prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me,” and what gifts it confers on those who practice it, and to what spiritual state it leads them, it lies beyond our power to say. The words which constitute this Prayer were initially formulated by our Holy Fathers. They did not, however, themselves make up these words, but took them originally from Holy Scripture and from the chief disciples of Christ. Or, to express it better, they received them as an inheritance from the Fathers who were before them, and passed this inheritance on to us. Thus from this alone, for those who have not learnt it from experience, it is clear that this holy Prayer is something divinely inspired and is as it were a sacred oracle. For we believe that Christ spoke through the holy Apostles, and that everything entrusted to them—either to repeat verbally or to write down—constitutes the divine oracles, spiritual revelations and the words of God.

Thus St. Paul, addressing us from the third heaven (cf. 1 Cor. 12:2), states: “No one can say ‘Lord Jesus’ except through the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3). By using the negative words “no one,” St. Paul admirably reveals that the invocation of the Lord Jesus is very sublime and beyond the power of most people. In addition, St. John the Theologian, who speaks of things spiritual “with a voice of thunder,” begins with one of the words that St. Paul provides, and then gives the continuation of the Prayer, as follows: “Every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is from God” (1 John 4:2). Here certainly he makes an affirmative statement, but attributes, as does St. Paul, the invocation and the confession of Jesus Christ to the grace of the Holy Spirit. Then, thirdly, St. Peter, the chief of the Apostles, completes the Prayer. Thus, when our Lord asked His disciples, “Whom do you say that I am?” St. Peter, as usual in his enthusiasm forestalling the other disciples, answered, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” this being revealed to him, as the Savior Himself testified, by the same heavenly Father or—which is the same thing—by the Holy Spirit (cf. Matt. 16:15-17).

Observe, then, how these three holy Apostles follow one another as though in a circle, the one taking up from the other the divine words in such a manner that the last word in the statement of the first is used as the first word in the statement of the second, and the last word in the second is used as the first word in the third. Thus St. Paul says, “Lord Jesus”; St. John, “Jesus Christ”; and St. Peter, “Christ, Son of God.” Thus the last links up with the first as though in a circle, as we said; for there is no difference in saying “Lord” and “Son of God,” since both these titles reveal the divinity of the only-begotten Son of God and affirm that He is of one essence and of equal rank with the Father.

In this manner the blessed Apostles taught us to invoke our Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God and to confess Him through the Holy Spirit; and since these Apostles are three, they are entirely to be trusted, for according to Holy Scripture every statement confirmed by three witnesses is valid (cf. Matt. 18:16; 2 Cor. 13:1; 1 Tim. 5:19).

*Excerpt from The Philokalia: Volume 5 (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 2023), pp. 318-319. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books

Sisters of Sophia presents Dame Cicely Saunders on July 18

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 14:35:06 GMT

The Sisters of Sophia will gather on the Commemoration of Holy Martyr Emilian, Anno Domini 2023, July 18.

Shelly Hardin will present on Dame Cicely Saunders.

Dame Cicely Saunders was an English nurse, social worker, and physician who

devoted her life to changing how medicine and society care for people who are

dying and pioneered the modern hospice movement. Her life is a remarkable

story of how she pursued her goals through the complexity of her personal life,

the skepticism of others, and the deep influence of her faith.

Sisters of Sophia

When
Every third Tuesday

Where
The Ladder
2836 E Douglas, Wichita
Parking available behind Eighth Day Books

Schedule
Food, drink, and fellowship at 6:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation & Lecture at 7:20pm

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join here !

Becoming ALERT

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 03:31:55 GMT

by Arthur Boers - excerpted from his book Living Into Focus

Commemoration of St Kyriake the Great Martyr

Anno Domini 2023, July 7

“Becoming ALERT” by Arthur Boers

Today, many challenges and a good deal of our uneasiness have to do with how we relate to and rely on technology. But what is technology? Edward Tenner matter-of-factly describes technology as “modification of the natural world.”

You and I use technology every day. Even when I try to “get back to the basics” and head to the wilderness, I am immersed in it. Gear and clothes—often surprisingly fancy and expensive—are crucial. I carry insect repellant, sun screen, ibuprofen, and binoculars to enhance both my journey and my comfort. I have a life jacket for safety, a Gore-Tex hat for shade from sun and protection from rain and to retain body heat in the cold, and a nifty water bottle to prevent dehydration. Canoes too are amazingly sophisticated and technological, both in the design and in the materials used in their construction. I like Kevlar canoes, not because I am fascinated with high-tech material, but because they are light and easier to carry on demanding portages. In the wilderness, we are more aware of how vulnerable we are and how crucial proper equipment is for both comfort and safety. Without exaggeration, the right technology can make the difference between life and death.

Make no mistake: we need technology. There is no human culture or civilization without it. Cooking, growing food, clothing, and playing music all involve technology.

Sometimes our understanding of specific forms of technology evolves. Trains adversely affected natives and natural regions out West in the United States and Canada. But now many locals are train aficionados. Alain Botton reminds us that though windmills were once loathed (condemned for theological and aesthetic reasons), they eventually became a cherished part of Dutch heritage—not just on postcards but even celebrated in great works of art, especially Golden Age painters.

Nevertheless, the impact of technology on our lives warrants careful consideration. It is easy to find ourselves in the predicament Martin Luther King Jr. long ago described: “We have allowed our technology to outrun our theology.” We’re not so good at carefully weighing the price of technological progress.

The issue is not technology itself but the reality that we often do not reflect on how we are affected and formed by our use of it. I am not opposed to technology. No one is. Not even the much-maligned, so-called Luddites, nor the romanticized but misunderstood and occasionally mocked Amish. All of us can name many benefits brought to us by technology. Several of my own family members have been seriously ill, and medical know-how and amazing machinery both relieved their pain and prolonged their lives. So, yes, there’s much to celebrate in technological advancement.

However, we should learn to see the full impact of the ways we use technology. Some technological solutions may make problems worse. Communication devices were supposed to bring us closer to family by allowing us to work at home; instead, they often detract from time and attention for spouses and children. Computers and cybercommunication were going to help us become paperless, but we consume growing quantities of paper. Machines grow quieter, but we use more of them and so add to the noise. Devices are increasingly energy efficient, but we employ so many that we end up using more power than ever. While computers and online connections get faster, the time we spend on them keeps going up. The better we are at responding to email, the more we are inundated by it. While it gets easier to assemble meals and food becomes convenient, our society shows greater problems with obesity. People feel safer because of cell phones, but then, without much wilderness savvy and bolstered by an optimistic sense of the connectedness afforded them by their cell phones, they end up taking needless risks. […]

Too often our interactions with technology follow a predictable trajectory: because it is available we use it, then we think it is normal, and finally we expect or even demand that others employ it as well. […] Are we deliberately choosing the ways that we want to live, or are we just carried along with the bad habits of wider society? […]

Many of us overlook that simple day-to-day choices—about cars, microwaves, cell phones, email, internet, television, dishwashers, communication options—have great and detrimental impact on our quality of life. If we do not pay attention to these effects, then chances are that devices will shape us in ways that we would not consciously choose.

How do we begin to get a handle on what ought to concern us?

Six aspects of how technology affects us need vigilance. Whether we’re talking about relatively old-fashioned twentieth-century cars, televisions, or radios, or whether we pay attention to more recent devices (and who can predict what’s next?), these areas need special, constant, and devoted care. They warrant discernment. The realms of concern in our technologically dominated lives today are as follows:’

1. ATTENTION: What is the primary and ongoing focus of our awareness? Screes and virtual relationships? Family and neighbors? Voyeuristic television “reality shows”? Nature and our surrounding environment? Is our capacity to pay attention, dwell, and be aware diminishing? Are we so overwhelmed with information and stimulation that our ability to respond is affected? Are we moving from receptivity to expecting to control what we perceive?

2. LIMITS: What guides our sense of what is appropriate? Do we have the moral strength to recognize when something is beyond the pale and that we need to say no? Or does technology, which makes more and more things possible, including voyeurism, pornography, and gambling, also make all things permissible? Which taboos are worth guarding? How does technology free us from moral constraints and accountability? What is the relationship of technology to addictions? How does technology reinforce addictions? How is technology itself addictive?

3. ENGAGEMENT: How are we coping with life and its challenges? Do we approach our day and those we love with calm anticipation, eager to be and work together? Or do such rushed and harried attention spans lead us into being demanding and curt? How does technology speed encounters, making conflicts and misunderstandings more likely? Does planned and perceived obsolescence contribute to eroding commitments?

4. RELATIONSHIPS: Do our lives include rich networks of loved ones, supportive friends, caring confidants, and casual acquaintances? Are there people who know us in our fullness, care about our hardships, and challenge us to grow in virtue? Or are our lives characterized by growing isolation and loneliness, our relationships dispersed and fragmented? What are the implications of having relationships increasingly mediated by technology while opportunities for face-to-face conversations decline and in-the-flesh friendships decrease? How does technology reinforce casual approaches to relationships, ones that are easy to enter or exit but do not necessarily sustain? What kinds of communities are created by our technology use?

5. TIME: Do we have a sense that there is enough room in our lifestyles for the things that truly matter—work and play, rigor and rest, love and laughter? Or are we too busy to live according to our deepest and highest priorities? Do distracting demands and pressures lure us away from our highest values? How does engagement with technology make us busier? And how does technology erode and displace opportunities to pause and determine, reflect on, and honor ultimate priorities?

6. SPACE: How well connected are we with the geography and places where we are located? Are we rooted in neighborhoods, connected to the earth and our environment? Or is much of our life lived abstractly in “virtual” reality?

This is no arbitrary list. These were relevant concerns earlier last century when people encountered cars and radio and television for the first time. In fact, these were the kinds of questions that various “Old Order” religious groups (Mennonites, Amish, Brethren, Quakers) asked. I have heard people mock Old Order resistance to “progress,” but those groups correctly and perceptively anticipated many looming issues and problems. Such questions are just as relevant today as technologies multiply and rapidly grow more complex. Everywhere I go—previously as a pastor, now as a teacher, writer, and speaker—I hear from folks struggling with these issues. People face dilemmas and are not quite sure how to work with them. They look for direction but do not have a sense of where to go. We have not figure out how to think and talk about such matters.

People of faith have always asked these types of questions and raised these kinds of issues: Where do you look with your eyes, listen with your ears, focus with your minds and imaginations? When to you say yes and when do you say no? How do you relate to others—people, objects, nature, God—in a way that trusts that things move at their appropriate pace? How do you love others, God, nature, and yourself? Where do you invest yourself and your time?

These areas of concern are not completely and neatly separate. They affect and interact with each other. Where I pay ATTENTION influences where I look (LIMITS), whether I am enamored of those who are speedy or appreciate that important matters might go slowly (ENGAGEMENT), how much I prioritize friendships (RELATIONSHIPS), when I choose to listen, pray, or be silent (TIME), and how I relate to physical surroundings and location (SPACE). Each of the six realms is related in many ways to all the others. They are intertwined.

You may have noticed that the areas—ATTENTION, LIMITS, ENGAGEMENT, RELATIONSHIPS, TIME, SPACE—form an acronym: ALERTS. I am the first to admit that this might feel forced or corny, even gimmicky. Still, this is a helpful way to frame our thinking about the issues at hand. This list of six covers key concerns about how we relate to technology on a daily basis.

*Excerpted from Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012), pp. 69-75.

Sisters of Sophia presents Dorothy L. Sayers on June 20

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 17:09:40 GMT

The Sisters of Sophia will gather on the Commemoration of Methodios the Martyr, Bishop of Olympus, Anno Domini 2023, June 20.

Anna Bergen will present on Dorothy Sayers.

Dorothy L. Sayers,(1893-1957) Writer, scholar, poet and playwright, was an incredible woman who operated primary between the two great world wars of the 20th century. Dorothy may be best remembered for her mystery novels, which helped to elevate the entire genre. We will be looking at her life and faith and in particular what her novels tell us about both.

Sisters of Sophia

When
Every third Tuesday

Where
The Ladder
2836 E Douglas, Wichita
Parking available behind Eighth Day Books

Schedule
Food, drink, and fellowship at 6:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation & Lecture at 7:20pm

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join here !

Hall of Men Presents Saint Kyrillos VI on June 22

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 14:47:42 GMT

The Hall of Men will gather Thursday evening on the commemoration of Eusebius, Bishop of Samosata, Anno Domini 2023, June 22.

Kevin Mortimer will present on St. Kyrillos VI.

Saint Kyrillos VI (1902-1971) is considered to be the type of person who comes along only once a century. This would make him the 21st type of person since the advent of our Lord. Kyrillos VI's path was one of personal kenosis (Philippians 2) resulting in theosis (II Peter 1:4). This talk will reflect his singular path of solitude as a hermit monk until he arrived, by the providence of God, to the position of patriarch while retaining his life with God and remaining a stranger to all humanity. The result was sweeping changes in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and miracles on a personal level for those seeking his prayers.

When

The commemoration of Eusebius, Bishop of Samosata, Anno Domini 2023, June 22.

Where

The Ladder at 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67214

Schedule

Doors Open at 7 pm

Food is served at 7:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30pm

Presentation and toast by Kevin Mortimer immediately following Convocation.

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

Hall of Men Presents St. Ephrem the Syrian on May 25

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Thu, 18 May 2023 13:16:57 GMT

The Hall of Men will gather Thursday evening on the commemoration of Therapon the Hieromartyr, Bishop of Cyprus, Anno Domini 2023, May 25.

Michael Simmon will present on St. Ephrem the Syrian.

St. Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373 AD) was a deacon, theologian, poet and hymnographer, and is regarded as the most significant of all of the fathers in the Syriac tradition. Many of his poems and hymns are practical theology in verse and song, and were indispensable to catechesis and dogmatic instruction, not only for the majority of Christians in the region who were illiterate in Ephrem's time, but also for later Christians who found themselves under Islamic and Ottoman rule after the fall of the Byzantium. Ephrem relies heavily on the use of metaphors and symbols to reveal spiritual truths that sit behind/above/below their corresponding physical/material realities. Reacquiring the "luminous eye of faith" as Ephrem puts it, is of critical importance, not only if we are to understand Ephrem and his mystical vision of the natural and spiritual realms, but also if we are to take seriously the renewal of a culture which has become dominated by secular materialism.

When

The commemoration of Therapon the Hieromartyr, Bishop of Cyprus, Anno Domini 2023, May 25

Where

The Ladder at 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67214

Schedule

Doors Open at 7 pm

Food is served at 7:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30pm

Presentation and toast by Michael Simmon immediately following Convocation.

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

Sisters of Sophia presents Gladys Aylward on May 16

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Fri, 12 May 2023 13:28:27 GMT

The Sisters of Sophia will gather on the Commemoration of Theodore the Sanctified, Anno Domini 2023, May 16.

Meaghan Koci will present on Gladys Aylward.

Gladys Aylward was an evangelical missionary to China, and the subject of the movie The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. She loved the people of China - through prison ministry, caring for lepers, and eventually leading 100 orphans to safety on a perilous trip through the mountains during a war. She is a shining example of being willing to serve God, and her impact is still seen today.

Sisters of Sophia

When
Every third Tuesday

Where
The Ladder
2836 E Douglas, Wichita
Parking available behind Eighth Day Books

Schedule
Food, drink, and fellowship at 6:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation & Lecture at 7:20pm

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join here !

Hall of Men Presents Dannie Gingerich on May 11

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Tue, 09 May 2023 21:26:56 GMT

The Hall of Men will gather Thursday evening on the commemoration of the Renewal of Constantinople, Anno Domini 2023, May 11.

Leroy Hershberger will present on Dannie Gingerich.

Should he accept a fabulous offer for his beloved farm? This story from the life of Deacon Dannie Gingerich illuminates Amish ecclesiastical life & thought. There are no images of Dannie, his communion prohibits photographs & images.

When

The commemoration of the Renewal of Constantinople, Anno Domini 2023, May 11

Where

The Ladder at 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67214

Schedule

Doors Open at 7 pm

Food is served at 7:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30pm

Presentation and toast by Leroy Hershberger immediately following Convocation.

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

Hall of Men Presents Sts. John Fisher & Thomas More on April 27

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 16:29:51 GMT

TThe Hall of Men will gather Thursday evening on the commemoration of the Holy Hieromartyr Symeon, Kinsman of the Lord, Anno Domini 2023, April 27.

Dr. Malcolm Harris will present on Sts. John Fisher & Thomas More.

Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher were Renaissance men. Talented and energetic, they contributed to the humanist scholarship of early modern England. More wrote theological and philosophical treatises, while making a career as a lawyer and government official. Bishop John Fisher worked as an administrator at Cambridge, confronted the challenge Martin Luther presented to Christian Europe, and most importantly served as Bishop of Rochester.

When

The commemoration of the Holy Hieromartyr Symeon, Kinsman of the Lord, Anno Domini 2023, April 27

Where

The Ladder at 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67214

Schedule

Doors Open at 7 pm

Food is served at 7:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30pm

Presentation and toast by Dr. Malcolm Harris immediately following Convocation.

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

Sisters of Sophia presents St. Elizabeth of Hungary on April 18

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 13:36:49 GMT

The Sisters of Sophia will gather on the Commemoration of Saints Raphael, Nicholas, Irene, and the Other Newly-revealed Martyrs of Lesbos, Anno Domini 2023, April 18.

Rachel Garton will present St. Elizabeth of Hungary.

Venerated and beloved by Christians worldwide for nearly 800 years, St Elizabeth of Hungary is recognized as a prime example of humility and generosity. Although born to privilege and luxury as a noble, St Elizabeth counted riches as but a distraction to true faith, instead finding her greatest joy in serving the poor. In her short life, she modeled the virtues of simplicity and selflessness to all around her, and left a legacy of devotion to all who seek the face of Christ in those forgotten by the world.

Sisters of Sophia

When
Every third Tuesday

Where
The Ladder
2836 E Douglas, Wichita
Parking available behind Eighth Day Books

Schedule
Food, drink, and fellowship at 6:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation & Lecture at 7:20pm

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join here !

Letter from the President - 2023 Spring Campaign

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 22:13:12 GMT

by Jesse Penna

Feast of St George, Bishop of Mytilene

Anno Domini 2023, April 7

On behalf of Eighth Day Institute’s Board of Directors, I want to give a brief update as we launch a 7-day Spring Campaign. Given the economic realities in our world, coupled with some growing pains for EDI, we have a few announcements we would like to share with Eighth Day Members and the wider EDI community as we navigate and move forward together, believing our best days are ahead of us.

Finances are tight for several reasons. Due to financial pressures in the given economy there are a significant number members who have been forced to decrease or cancel their giving. Furthermore, our CRM system was recently bought out and this has necessitated additional funding for a change that was not planned for in our budget. Will you consider making a donation to help meet our goal of $12,000 in the next seven days to offset some of these unanticipated costs?
We have decided to temporarily suspend the Ad Fontes Academic Week this summer as planned for several related factors. We look forward to having the additional time in the coming months to focus our work on the Inklings Festival and the Symposium. Will you consider making a donation to help meet our goal of $12,000 in order to help us stabilize as an Institute with plans to make our upcoming events the best yet?
We are looking at narrowing our focus as an Institute, and we are excited to role out the upcoming events with themes, speakers, etc in the coming weeks. We do covet your prayers as we continue to clarify and live out our mission of “renewing culture through faith and learning.” Will you consider making a donation to help meet our goal of $12,000 to help us reach our desired focus in the coming months?

Thank you so much for your support!

In Christ,

Jesse Penna, Board President

Hall of Men Presents Xenophon of Athens on March 23

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 21:47:15 GMT

The Hall of Men will gather Thursday evening on the commemoration of The Holy Righteous Martyr Nicon and His 199 Disciples , Anno Domini 2023, March 23.

Dr. Matthew Umbarger will present on Xenophon of Athens.

Xenophon of Athens (430-355 or 354 BC) is Socrates’ lesser-known disciple. In contradistinction to Plato, Xenophon chose a life of adventure as a soldier of fortune, and when he wrote, he preferred to embed the wisdom he had gleaned from his master in historical narratives. Though a pagan, Xenophon’s charming story-telling champions the same virtues that the Church would eventually preach. In fact, I suspect that Our Lord adapted some of Xenophon's sayings and stories into His own preaching and parables.

When

The commemoration of the Righteous Fathers slain at the Monastery of St. Savas, Anno Domini 2023, March 23

Where

The Ladder at 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67214

Schedule

Doors Open at 7 pm

Food is served at 7:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30pm

Presentation and toast by Matthew Umbarger immediately following Convocation.

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

Sisters of Sophia presents St. Helen of Constantinople on March 21

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 17:06:49 GMT

The Sisters of Sophia will gather on the commemoration of James the Confessor, Anno Domini 2023, March 21.

Adela Garton will present St. Helena of Constantinople.

An icon of St. Helena (often alongside her son) can be seen in many homes, churches and cathedrals across the world. Her contribution to the spread of Christianity cannot be overstated. She was the mother of Constantine the Great and is often said to be the earliest Christian pilgrim. She is credited with finding and authenticating the cross on which Christ was crucified.

Sisters of Sophia

When
Every third Tuesday

Where
The Ladder
2836 E Douglas, Wichita
Parking available behind Eighth Day Books

Schedule
Food, drink, and fellowship at 6:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation & Lecture at 7:20pm

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join here !

Hall of Men Presents St. Louis IX, King of France on March 9

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 15:37:32 GMT

The Hall of Men will gather Thursday evening on the commemoration of the Holy Forty Martyrs of Sebastia, Anno Domini 2023, March 9.

The Rev. Mark Lovett will present on St. Louix IX, King of France.

The Most Christian King ruled in submission to justice and righteousness with the conversion of the heathen always in his sight. Louis IX, King of France, St. Louis, held the catholic religion as his most prized, most cherished possession, doing nothing it seemed unless faith and righteousness were driving and guiding him. We give thanks to God for His servant, Louis. Thanks be to God!

When

The commemoration of the Holy Forty Martyrs of Sebastia, Anno Domini 2023, March 9

Where

The Ladder at 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67214

Schedule

Doors Open at 7 pm

Food is served at 7:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30pm

Presentation and toast by Fr. Mark immediately following Convocation.

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

Hall of Men Presents W. H. Auden on Feb 23

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 22:14:47 GMT

The Hall of Men will gather Thursday evening on the commemoration of Polycarp the Holy Martyr & Bishop of Smyrna, Anno Domini 2023, February 23.

Jeff Reimer will present on W. H. Auden.

English poet, playwright, critic, and librettist Wystan Hugh Auden exerted a major influence on the poetry of the 20th century. Auden grew up in Birmingham, England and was known for his extraordinary intellect and wit. His first book, Poems, was published in 1930 with the help of T.S. Eliot. Much of his poetry is concerned with moral issues and evidences a strong political, social, and psychological context. While the teachings of Marx and Freud weighed heavily in his early work, they later gave way to religious and spiritual influences.

When

The commemoration of Polycarp the Holy Martyr & Bishop of Smyrna, Anno Domini 2023, February 23

Where

The Ladder at 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67214

Schedule

Doors Open at 7 pm

Food is served at 7:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30pm

Presentation and toast by Jeff Reimer immediately following Convocation

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

Sisters of Sophia presents Catherine Doherty on February 21

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 17:09:42 GMT

The Sisters of Sophia will gather on the commemoration of Timothy the Righteous, Anno Domini 2023, February 21 for our first topic of the year.

Amy Henry will present on Catherine Doherty.

Former Russian Baroness Catherine de Hueck Doherty (1896-1985) gave up her fortune to care for the poor in the slums of Toronto, New York City, and Chicago. As speaker, social justice warrior, and prolific writer, the fiery Doherty advocated for Christians to live as the poorest of the poor, an undertaking impossible without a deep, kenotic spiritual commitment and love for God and neighbor. A survivor of the Bolshevik Revolution, Doherty converted in 1919 from the Russian Orthodoxy of her childhood to Roman Catholicism, bringing to the west the heart of many Russian concepts like poustinia (desert), sobornost (unity), and strannik (pilgrimage). In her books, Dohtery wrote passionately about the inner life, the spiritual heart, and contemplative prayer. Madonna House, the apostolate she founded in Ontario, Canada in 1947 offers encouragement, spiritual direction, and community for priests and laypersons. The cause for her canonization has been open since 2000.

Sisters of Sophia

When
Every third Tuesday

Where
The Ladder
2836 E Douglas, Wichita
Parking available behind Eighth Day Books

Schedule
Food, drink, and fellowship at 6:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation & Lecture at 7:20pm

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join here !

Erin Doom
Founder & Director, Eighth Day Institute

Hall of Men Presents Johannes Bugenhagen on Feb 9

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 16:46:31 GMT

The Hall of Men will gather Thursday evening on the commemoration of the Leavetaking of the Presentation of Our Lord and Savior in the Temple, Anno Domini 2023, February 9 for our first topic of 2023.

Daniel Snyder will present on Johannes Bugenhagen.

Johannes Bugenhagen, called “Pomeranus”, was a schoolmaster, a teacher, a pastor, and a peacemaker. What could this second row Lutheran reformer, Luther’s confessor, have to do with the present understanding of Churches and schools? The work he undertook in Northern Germany has enduring significance in surprising ways.

When

The commemoration of the Leavetaking of the Presentation of Our Lord and Savior in the Temple, Anno Domini 2023

Where

The Ladder at 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67214

Schedule

Doors Open at 7 pm

Food is served at 7:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30pm

Presentation and toast by Dan Snyder immediately following Convocation

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

Be Promiscuous with the Sign of the Cross!

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 23:32:47 GMT

by James Matthew Wilson

Feast of the Meeting of Christ in the Temple

Anno Domini 2023, February 2

We often hear as a traditional invocation, especially on the lips of Catholic priests, “Let us begin, as we begin all things, in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

But why should we begin all things in this way? What is it about the Sign of the Cross that makes it not only a suitable but a universal commencement?

Martin Luther is well known to have enjoined his people to make the sign of the cross, and for several reasons, the first being that with such a prayer we stand in defiance of the devil. In this sense, it is to put on the shield, the breastplate, the armor of God (Eph. 6:11).

But this can only be a secondary reason, just as the evil of the devil is always a privation and so secondary to the more fundamental reality of the good.

What is the good of the Sign of the Cross from which its significance as sign of defiance follows? For that we must once again turn to St. Paul, in 1 Timothy, where he condemns “deceitful spirits” and “liars” who enjoin a rejection of marriage and abstinence from food. Paul tells us these things “God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.” In response to God’s first initiative of giving what is good, we reply with thanks. Paul continues, “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving; for then it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:2-5).

What God creates is good. He created it for the sake of our returning His goodness with thanks. This act of donation and response, procession and return, forthcoming and offering back is the fundamental answer to the question, “Why creation?” The whole economy of existence is just this circuit of relations.

But Paul does not merely describe the relation of giving and thanking as fundamental to creation, to being as such. Creation itself is transformed by the fulfillment of this relationship. What God has created, has made a good of nature, in being offered back in thanksgiving ceases to be a mere natural good. It becomes a part of the New Creation, it becomes “consecrated.”

We are creatures of God. Through baptism we are consecrated, we ourselves become participants in the New Creation. Through our actions of prayer and thanksgiving, one thing after another, gift after gift, individual after individual, has its own interior nature transformed. By our activity, we set about with food and drink and all things else, consecrating them and making them a part of the New Creation.

If I merely eat and drink, I have natural food to nourish my natural body. But if I pray over my meal in thanksgiving, the whole meal becomes an act of prayer. Every bite, every taste, becomes a hymn of praise to God. The world itself has become different.

The sign of the cross, often spoken, sometimes conferred by a pure gesture of the body, turns our embodied movement into prayer. The body itself becomes a new creation, a participant in the spirit. As we cross ourselves, when walking past a Church, before setting out of doors, before doing something of natural importance—for each of these things existence itself is transformed. What was mere created being becomes itself a consecrated reality.

Be promiscuous with the sign of the cross. Let the shadow of your hand pass over everything, until all of creation, good in its being, has been raised up and consecrated by our thanksgiving and become a fit participant in a new heaven and a new earth.

*Originally delivered at the 13th annual Eighth Day Symposium Festal Banquet on January 13, 2023.

Hall of Men Annual Meeting on January 26

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 19:36:16 GMT

The New Year has begun, and the official "kickoff" to Hall of Men 2023 will be the Annual Meeting at The Ladder Thursday evening.

Over the years we've developed several traditions for this meeting, including the reading of a letter sent early in HoM history by the father of Hall of Men co-founder George Elder–an impassioned appeal to adjust the Hall of Men meeting days to resolve a most grievous scheduling conflict. This retelling of a humorous, but essential, part of the history of our fellowship has become one of many favorite EDI traditions.

And for those of you who were unable to be with us at the Symposium banquet, I'll also offer a brief toast to St Paul of Thebes who we celebrated at the banquet.

For the full 2023 schedule of meetings and heroes being presented, click here . And we are always looking for volunteers to bring food for our meetings. Take a look at that schedule of meetings and let me know if you can bring food to one of them (you can respond to this email).

Come ready to inaugurate another year of celebrating our heroes, reflecting on what it means to be men of faith and courage, and working toward the renewal of our culture.

When: The Commemoration of St Symeon the Elder of Mount Sinai, Anno Domini 2023, January 26

Where: The Ladder

Schedule: Doors open at 7 pm; food served at 7:30 pm; Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30 pm; annual meeting immediately following Convocation.

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

Accept with Faith the Great Mystery of the Birth of the Lord: Mary in the Writings of St Peter Chrysologus

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 19:26:43 GMT

by Fr Félix López, S.H.M.

Feast of St Melania the Younger, Nun of Rome

Anno Domini 2022, December 31

Peter was born in Imola, Italy, around the year 380. He later received his formation from the bishop of the city, Cornelius, whom he had always greatly esteemed. In the year 424 he was elected Bishop of Ravena, a city that was also home to the emperor of the West. Since traces of paganism still remained in his diocese, he strove to [fully] establish the Catholic faith, and worked with such enthusiasm in converting the faithless that when he died, very few non-believers remained in the city.

He was concerned about the unity of the Church and fidelity to the See of Peter. He combatted Eutyches and other heresies of the time, such as Arianism and Nestorianism. He was a close friend of Pope Leo the Great. He was known for being a good shepherd to his flock, dedicating himself to the needs of his faithful, caring for their Christian life, recommending weekly reception of Communion, inspiring them with his own example, and forming them through his splendid preaching which has been handed down to us. He has been recognized as one of the most famous orators of the Church, winning him the name of Chrysologus, which means “golden word.” He was proclaimed a Doctor of the Roman Church by Pope Benedict XIII in the year 1729. Peter died in Imola on July 30 of the year 451, and his relics can be venerated today in the crypt of the Church of St. Cassian in Imola.

In his sermons, he placed central importance on the mystery of the Incarnation, and for this reason Mary’s virginal conception and birth would have a very relevant role. The entire Mariological discourse of Peter Chrysologus was developed around the topic of the virginal fecundity of Mary, which he expressed in a summarized manner: “Virgin, she conceived; Virgin, she gave birth; Virgin, she remained” (Sermon. 117, 1). Such a perception made him not only place prominence on the perpetual virginity of Mary, but also on the divinity of Christ, manifested in the conception and birth.

The concept of virginity places emphasis on Mary’s participation in the integrity and holiness of God Himself. Thanks to this participation, she was able to give birth to Christ without having to submit to the laws of corruption: “Virgin, grace and not nature has made you Mother; devotion has wanted you to be called Mother, although integrity did not allow it; in the conception and the birth [of your Son] modesty has grown, chastity has increased, integrity has been strengthened, virginity has been consolidated, all virtues have remained intact” (Sermon. 142, 7).

Pausing to reflect on the significance of the word, the Bishop of Ravena points out the particular relationship between virginity and integrity, in both a physical and moral sense. "Just as the corrupt human nature has a connection with corruption as a result of sin, so the virginal nature has a connection with integrity" (cf. Sermon. 153, 2). If God is the source of integrity, then the Son of God, by becoming Incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary, not only preserved His Mother’s integrity, but was also the cause of its growth (cf. Sermon. 142, 7). This idea also appears in Lumen Gentium 57, where it draws from a liturgical text from the seventh century, which affirmed that Jesus, being born of Mary, “did not diminish His mother’s virginal integrity but sanctified it.”

The events of the virginal conception and birth are considered by Chrysologus to be unusual and extraordinary. These events, transcending the laws of human nature, make manifest that God is their author: “When a virgin conceives, when a virgin gives birth and remains a virgin, it is not a normal occurrence, but a prodigy; ...it is not an event common to many, but a unique event; it is an event that is divine, not human” (Sermon. 148, 1).

The Bishop of Ravena was aware of the uniqueness of this event that is impossible to verify in human history. For that reason, the divine event remains hidden, inaccessible to the human intellect; it is a mystery. The virginal conception and birth are, for him, mysteries of faith. Man, who relies on the capacity of his intellect, cannot comprehend the divine mystery. It is only accessible by means of faith: “Because everything is possible for God, but for you it is impossible to attain even the smallest works of God, then do not investigate about the Virgin’s conception; rather, believe. Accept with faith the great mystery of the birth of the Lord” (Sermon. 141, 3).

Another interesting aspect of St. Peter Chrysologus’ theology was to allow the mystery of the Resurrection to be re-read in light of the mystery of Mary’s virgin birth. . The tomb becomes the womb that conceives the dead and gives birth to one who lives: “Here, the order of things is changed; here, the grave devours death, not the dead; the dwelling place of death becomes the abode of life; a new form of womb conceives one who is dead and gives birth to one who lives” (Sermon. 74, 5). The fact that the Risen One left the tomb without breaking its seal allows the author to compare this event to the Virgin Mary’s integrity during the birth of Christ. Both events highlight Christ’s divinity: «Es una manifestación de la divinidad haber dejado intacta a la Virgen después del parto. Es una manifestación de la divinidad el salir del sepulcro con el cuerpo» [It is a manifestation of the divinity to have left behind intact the Virgin after birth. It is a manifestation of the divinity to leave the tomb with a body.] (Sermon. 75, 3). The tomb was the womb of the Resurrection. The tomb and the womb of Mary gave birth to Christ. The tomb gave birth to Christ to eternal life; the Virgin gave Him birth to earthly life.

There is one more particular aspect of the rich theology of this author that we would like to point out. For him, the mystery of the virginal conception and birth become a category of interpretation of the mystery of the Church. Just like Mary, the Church is also Virgin and Mother. She gives birth to her children by means of the sacraments. That is how she becomes a mother while remaining at the same time a virgin. The baptismal font becomes the womb of the Church which, thanks to the action of the Holy Spirit, becomes fruitful. In this baptismal font the mystery of the virginal birth of Christ is renewed: “Behold, brethren, the reason why the Heavenly Spirit, with the mysterious outpouring of His light, makes the virginal womb of the font fruitful, to give birth as heavenly creatures and bring them into the likeness of their Creator” (Sermon. 117, 4)

The Word of God Did Not Abandon His Creatures Who Are Hurtling to Their Own Ruin

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 19:08:09 GMT

by St Athanasius the Great

Feast of St Melania the Younger, Nun of Rome

Anno Domini 2022, December 31

The Word of God did not abandon the human race, His creatures, who are hurtling to their own ruin. By the offering of His body, the Word of God destroyed death which had united itself to them; by His teaching, He corrected their negligences; and by His power, He restored the human race.

Why was it necessary for the Word of God to become incarnate and not some other? Scripture indicates the reason by these words: “It was fitting that when bringing many heirs to glory, God, for whom and through whom all things exist, should make their leader in the work of salvation perfect through suffering.” This signifies that the work of raising human beings from the ruin into which they had fallen pertained to none other than the Word of God, who had made them in the beginning.

By the sacrifice of His body, He put an end to the law which weighed upon them, and He renewed in us the principle of life by giving us the hope of the resurrection. For if it is through ourselves that death attained dominance over us, conversely, it is through the incarnation of the Word of God that death has been destroyed and that life has been resurrected, as indicated by the Apostle filled with Christ: “Death came through one person; hence the resurrection of the dead comes through another person also. Just as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will come to life again.”

It is no longer as condemned that we die. Rather, we die with the hope of rising again from the dead, awaiting the universal resurrection which God will manifest to us in His own time, since He is both the author of it and gives us the grace for it.

*On the Incarnation 10.14

Behold a New & Wondrous Mystery

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 18:59:18 GMT

by St John Chrysostom

Feast of St Melania the Younger, Nun of Rom

Anno Domini 2022, December 31

The following sermon preached by St. John Chrysostom is the first extant Christmas sermon we have. It was preached in Antioch in 386, the same year Augustine became a Christian.

Behold a new and wondrous mystery.

My ears resound to the Shepherd’s song, piping no soft melody, but chanting full forth a heavenly hymn. The Angels sing. The Archangels blend their voice in harmony. The Cherubim hymn their joyful praise. The Seraphim exalt His glory. All join to praise this holy feast, beholding the Godhead here on earth, and man in heaven. He who is above, now for our redemption dwells here below; and he that was lowly is by divine mercy raised.

Bethlehem this day resembles heaven; hearing from the stars the singing of angelic voices; and in place of the sun, enfolds within itself on every side, the Sun of justice. And ask not how: for where God wills, the order of nature yields. For He willed; He had the power; He descended; He redeemed; all things yielded in obedience to God. This day He who is, is Born; and He who is, becomes what He was not. For when He was God, He became man; yet not departing from the Godhead that is His. Nor yet by any loss of divinity became He man, nor through increase became He God from man; but being the Word He became flesh, His nature, because of impassability, remaining unchanged.

And so the kings have come, and they have seen the heavenly King that has come upon the earth, not bringing with Him Angels, nor Archangels, nor Thrones, nor Dominations, nor Powers, nor Principalities, but, treading a new and solitary path, He has come forth from a spotless womb.

Since this heavenly birth cannot be described, neither does His coming amongst us in these days permit of too curious scrutiny. Though I know that a Virgin this day gave birth, and I believe that God was begotten before all time, yet the manner of this generation [being born of a virgin] I have learned to venerate in silence and I accept that this is not to be probed too curiously with wordy speech.

For with God we look not for the order of nature, but rest our faith in the power of Him who works.

What shall I say to you; what shall I tell you? I behold a Mother who has brought forth; I see a Child come to this light by birth. The manner of His conception I cannot comprehend.

Nature here rested, while the Will of God labored. O ineffable grace! The Only Begotten, who is before all ages, who cannot be touched or be perceived, who is simple, without body, has now put on my body, that is visible and liable to corruption. For what reason? That coming amongst us he may teach us, and teaching, lead us by the hand to the things that [humans] cannot see. For since men believe that the eyes are more trustworthy than the ears, they doubt of that which they do not see, and so He has deigned to show Himself in bodily presence, that He may remove all doubt.

Christ, finding the holy body and soul of the Virgin, builds for Himself a living temple, and as He had willed, formed there a man from the Virgin; and, putting Him on, this day came forth; unashamed of the lowliness of our nature.

For it was to Him no lowering to put on what He Himself had made. Let that handiwork be forever glorified, which became the cloak of its own Creator. For as in the first creation of flesh, man could not be made before the clay had come into His hand, so neither could this corruptible body be glorified, until it had first become the garment of its Maker.

What shall I say! And how shall I describe this Birth to you? For this wonder fills me with astonishment. The Ancient of days has become an infant. He who sits upon the sublime and heavenly Throne, now lies in a manger. And He who cannot be touched, who is simple, without complexity, and incorporeal, now lies subject to the hands of [humans]. He who has broken the bonds of sinners, is now bound by an infants bands. But He has decreed that ignominy shall become honor, infamy be clothed with glory, and total humiliation the measure of His Goodness.

For this He assumed my body, that I may become capable of His Word; taking my flesh, He gives me His spirit; and so He bestowing and I receiving, He prepares for me the treasure of Life. He takes my flesh, to sanctify me; He gives me His Spirit that He may save me.

Come, then, let us observe the Feast. Truly wondrous is the whole chronicle of the Nativity. For this day the ancient slavery is ended, the devil confounded, the demons take to flight, the power of death is broken, paradise is unlocked, the curse is taken away, sin is removed from us, error driven out, truth has been brought back, the speech of kindliness diffused, and spreads on every side, a heavenly way of life has been implanted on the earth, angels communicate with [humans] without fear, and [humans] now hold speech with angels.

Why is this? Because God is now on earth, and man in heaven; on every side all things commingle. He became Flesh. He did not become God. He was God. Wherefore He became flesh, so that He whom heaven did not contain, a manger would this day receive. He was placed in a manger, so that He, by whom all things are nourished, may receive an infants food from His Virgin Mother. So, the Father of all ages, as an infant at the breast, nestles in the virginal arms, that the Magi may more easily see Him. Since this day the Magi too have come, and made a beginning of withstanding tyranny; and the heavens give glory, as the Lord is revealed by a star.

To Him, then, who out of confusion has wrought a clear path, to Christ, to the Father, and to the Holy Spirit, we offer all praise, now and forever. Amen.

May God's Kingdom Come: A Letter from the President

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 06:43:23 GMT

by Jesse Penna

Feast of St Gideon the New Martyr of Mount Athos

Anno Domini 2022, December 30

Brothers and Sisters in Christ!

Greetings to you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. May God have mercy on us as we seek to walk in His Kingdom in the days to come. And may God’s kingdom come, and His will be done in the work of Eighth Day Institute on earth as it is in heaven.

The EDI community continues to exist because of your support, so before I make any kind of request, I want to say THANK YOU for your support of EDI . I often say that the church wouldn’t function without volunteers who desire to serve God and others, and the same is true for EDI: we would not exist in the way that we do if you did not support us. So if you don’t hear anything else at all, please hear my heartfelt and deep thanks for your support that keeps our work moving forward. God willing, we will continue to move forward together for many more years to come.

I write to you offering one final appeal from the Board of Directors along with a few unique opportunities for your consideration on behalf of Eighth Day Institute. I recognize that you are receiving a lot of these year-end appeals for various organizations during this time. Furthermore, I know you have received several appeals from EDI board members, so I will be brief.

I want to begin by highlighting 3 unique opportunities for your consideration:

1. We are looking for sponsors for our speakers for the upcoming Symposium . Would you be willing, or know someone, be it a church or a small group, or various individuals who might be willing to sponsor a speaker for our upcoming symposium? With sponsorship would come some additional time and perks related to the following speakers:

Protestant: Jake Meador

Orthodox: Fr. John Strickland

Catholic: James Matthew Wilson

2. We are working on a substantial grant proposal, and are wondering if there is anyone in our EDI community who writes grants or knows someone who writes grants that might be willing and able to give some unpaid time over the next month to help us write a grant that could potentially be a “turning point” for the life of EDI?

3. With the upcoming Symposium, we plan to have a members only reception at the end of the Symposium. We would like for you to come with your questions and thoughts concerning EDI as we consider together the state of the organization. If you are a member, please plan to join us on January 14, at 5:30 p.m. at St George Orthodox Christian Cathedral.

If you have an interest or any leads on sponsoring a speaker, know of any potential grant writers, or have any questions or comments ahead of the symposium related to EDI, please feel free to call me at 316-641-9961 or email me at: jesse@efcmaym.org .

As an organization we need to raise $56,750 to end the year with a balanced budget. Will you give generously to help us meet our year-end goal of raising these funds to put us in a place of stability as we move into a new year and as we get ready for our 13 ^th annual Symposium? Please make your donation today here.

If you haven’t registered yet for the Symposium, please do so here . The Symposium is a great event to bring a friend to for face-to-face conversations you can’t have anywhere else. If you haven’t invited a friend to join you, please do. The banquet is also a great space for someone to get a taste of EDI if attending the Symposium is not possible. Please do consider registering and bringing a friend to the banquet which functions as a stand-alone fundraiser for EDI . The banquet is Friday, January 13 at 6:00 p.m. at St. George. Who has never been to an EDI event, that you could invite to join you at the banquet? You can register for the Festal Banquet by clicking here .

As we end 2022 and move into 2023 as an organization, I do pray that 2023 will be the year that we turn a corner and take the next step “To help the Church (i.e., members of the Christian community) learn how to be Christian in the modern age, ‘that all may be one,’ and, as a result renew the culture.” May God help us all as we continue to expose Christians to tradition and history seeking to create encounters with “the other.” As we continue to value tradition, education, community, ecumenism and cultural renewal, may God’s Kingdom come, and His will be done in our ongoing, collective work of Eighth Day Institute.

On behalf of Erin Doom and the Board of Directors,

Jesse Penna, President

Common Objects of Love

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:27:01 GMT

by St. Augustine of Hippo

Feast of 14,000 Infants Slain by Herod in Bethlehem

Anno Domini 2022, December 29

If we say that a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love, then, in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love. Yet whatever it loves, if only it is an assemblage of reasonable beings and not of beasts, and is bound together by an agreement as to the objects of love, it is reasonably called a people; and it will be a superior people in proportion as it is bound together by higher interests, inferior in proportion as it is bound together by lower. According to this definition of ours, the Roman people is a people, and its weal is without doubt a commonwealth or republic. [In section 21 of this same chapter, Augustine cites Cicero’s De Republica to define a republic “as the weal of the people” and “the people” as “an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of right and by a community of interests. And what he means by a common acknowledgment of right he explains at large, showing that a republic cannot by administered without justice.”] But what its tastes were in its early and subsequent days, and how it declined into sanguinary seditions and then to social and civil wars, and so burst asunder or rotted off the bond of concord in which the health of a people consists, history shows, and in the preceding books I have related at large. And yet I would not on this account say either that it was not a people, or that its administration was not a republic, so long as there remains an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of love. But what I say of this people and this republic I must be understood to think and say of the Athenians or any Greek state, of the Egyptians, of the early Assyrian Babylon, and of every other nation, great or small, which had a public government. For, in general, the city of the ungodly, which did not obey the command of God that it should offer no sacrifice save to Him alone, and which, therefore, could not give to the soul its proper command over the body, nor to the reason its just authority over the vices, is void of true justice.

The City of God , Bk. 19, Ch. 25

Liberalism & the Trivialization of Friendship

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:14:23 GMT

by Ken Myers

Feast of the 14,000 Infants Slain by Herod in Bethlehem

Anno Domini 2022, December 29

My remarks this morning will focus more on the reasons for the loss or corruption of friendship than on what friendship is and how we might best cherish it. But I trust that my possibly gloomy diagnostic survey will be more than balanced by the wonderful topics in the other sessions today and tomorrow.

When I learned that the theme of this year’s symposium was “Friendship,” I was at first a bit perplexed about what I might have to say about the subject. It’s not one to which I’d devoted a lot of sustained reflection. But as I thought more about it, I realized that a few fundamental themes related to friendship have interested me for a long time. Given the work I do, I have thought a lot about the nature of conversation and about communication more generally. And surely conversation and communication are key components of friendship.

I often tell people that my undergraduate degree was in communications, with an emphasis in film theory and criticism. That’s not quite true. Technically, the department I was in at the University of Maryland was designated the Department of Speech and Dramatic Art. I learned recently that in 1901, my department’s predecessor was born as the Department of Public Speaking. And for six short years before the First World War it was identified as the Department of Oratory. (I bet there is no such department anywhere today.)

When I graduated in 1974, my department was offering specialized degrees in rhetoric, in speech therapy, and in drama, as well as in broadcast and film studies. So while my diploma does not display the word “communications,” I was studying various arts of communication, including the art of listening —in my junior year, I took a three-credit course on the theories and practice of listening. I’ve come to appreciate the fact that public life today would be much better served if more attention was given to listening than to talking.

Today, that part of my alma mater is known simply as the Department of Communication—a singular, not a plural noun, which possibly suggests something larger than rhetoric and media studies. The idea of communication is, after all, a capacious one. It has a theological register, as when theologians speak of the communicable attributes of God or of the Eucharist— Holy Communion —as the communication of Grace through the real presence of Christ. And, as I’ve suggested, communication is also a fundamental aspect of friendship , especially but not exclusively through the gift of conversation, in which selves—not just ideas—are communicated.

Communication is also a central aspect of community and hence a concern of politics properly understood. When the ideas of “communication” and “politics” are juxtaposed, many people might assume that what is suggested are matters of public discourse, public relations, or even propaganda and “fake news.” But politics is not just a matter of the conduct or practice of governing; it concerns the formation and sustaining of the political communities that governments serve and protect. Politics is first about communities, about societies, and then about government. Politics—like friendship—is sustained by conversation about common concerns. It is because of that fact (among other things) that a strong relationship between friendship and politics was long recognized in the West. The modern exaltation of the state over society has caused us to identify politics exclusively as the science of governing—of securing, maintaining, and exercising power—and in the process, political thought has reduced the scope and significance of friendship.

That narrowing of the definition of politics can be challenged if we recover an appreciation for the connections between community and communication, two ideas that are connected in various New Testament passages. In I Corinthians, St. Paul uses Greek word koinonia in two different senses. In chapter 10 verse 16, speaking of the bread and cup in the Eucharist, koinonia has a verbal sense of “sharing” or “communion” or “participation.” In chapter 1, verse 9, St. Paul writes that his readers were called into the koinonia of God’s Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Here, koinonia has the concrete sense of “fellowship” or community. When that Greek word was translated into Latin in the Western Church it was rendered both communicatio and communitas . As Oliver O’Donovan has observed, “Those who are partners to communication ( koinonia in the verbal sense) form a community ( koinonia in the concrete sense).” A community is a sphere in which things are communicated—held in common rather than in private, as ours rather than yours of mine.

We tend to think of communication as a process that involves ideas—the sort of process studied in a department of public speaking—but in its larger sense, we can speak of any kind of good—material or spiritual—being communicated. So communication is a dynamic force evident politics, friendship, and grace—and in ways that are more than lexical or conceptual.

• • •

In The City of God , Augustine observed:

A people, we may say, is a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love. There can be as many different kinds of people as there are different things for them to love. Whatever those things may be, there is no absurdity in calling it a people if it is a gathered multitude, not of beasts but of rational creatures, united by agreeing to share what they love. The better the things, the better the people; the worse the things, the worse their agreement to share them.

A people constituted by common objects of love is, as Oliver O’Donovan puts it, “capable of common action, susceptible to common suffering, participating in a common identity.” Members of a people can speak as a “we,” not just an “I.” Members of a community may love one another , but that is a second step, a consequence of a shared love of something other than the members themselves. As John Von Heyking notes, “Our love of common objects transforms into love of each other as our habits and predispositions intermingle to the point where we cannot conceive of those common objects of love independently of those we share them with.”

And so, communities understood this way are, in a sense, friendships writ large, since friendships too are grounded in common loves. C. S. Lewis famously distinguished lovers from friends by observing that “Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed ion some common interest. . . . Two friends delight to be joined by a third and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to be become a real friend.” Lewis quotes the blessed souls depicted by Dante as they exclaim “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” Friendship is thus an analogue of the Heavenly Community in which the multitude of the blessed “increases the fruition which each has of God.”

Friendship is an analogue of the Church . Ordered by Love, and gifted to one another by what Augustine calls a kind of divine lottery, all true human communities are imperfect, incomplete but nonetheless real anticipations of the Church’s life in its fulfillment. One reason such a claim may sound implausible is that modern politics has undermined the centrality of sharing of common objects of love, by insisting that the point of government is to protect the rights of individuals within the society governed to love what they want to love. And so in modern societies, all organs of community that attempt to nurture allegedly well-ordered loves for what ought to be loved are squashed in the name of individual freedom. Modern states thus enforce what Pope Benedict called a dictatorship of relativism.

In an essay on Aristotle’s view of how friendship encourages the growth of moral excellence, philosopher Robert Sokolowski provides a helpful summary of how friendships form:

We first act with others in regard to more mundane, ordinary tasks: we work with someone in an office or factory, we play golf with someone, we attend classes together. Such friendships may be useful and pleasant and as such they are more under our control. Then, gradually, we realize that we and the other person can deal not only with such ‘superficial’ things, but that we begin to ‘face life together.’ We begin to cope with the deeper contingencies and situations that arise in life. We begin to deal with the kinds of things that our moral virtues (our courage, temperance, generosity, justice) are concerned with. We find that we can deliberate and choose with the other person in regard to the obligations, difficulties, and projects that define us as human beings and not just as employees or consumers. A ‘hand in glove’ cooperation becomes possible that can arise for us with only a few people in a lifetime. The kind of reciprocal trust, disclosure, and benevolence that constitutes a noble friendship gradually takes shape.

Aristotle argued that friends so bonded could assist each other to gain self-knowledge and thus to become intellectually and morally virtuous. Like Plato, Aristotle argued that this process of stimulating intellectual and moral virtues primarily takes the form of conversation, of speaking with one another, of communication. John Von Heyking writes that “This vision of friendship informs Aristotle’s understanding of politics. The aim of politics is living well in a polity governed by justice, which justice is practiced by citizens in prohairetic [or virtue-forming] friendship. Friendship and politics are mutually dependent.” Life in the larger community requires virtuous citizens, whose affections have been trained to love the Good within friendships. And the polity was committed for protecting space within the network of social institutions in which such friendships could thrive.

Let me insert somewhat parenthetically a recommendation of a wonderful book by Josef Pieper called Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power , which contains a short essay on the dangers of speech that is uttered for the sake of obtaining power rather than for orienting us properly to reality. The essay is an analysis of Plato’s critique of sophistry, and much of what Pieper discusses concerns protecting the health of conversation and thus has great relevance to the topic of friendship. I’ll mention more about this tomorrow, but for now share one short paragraph. Pieper writes:

[W]ord and language form the medium that sustains the common existence of the human spirit as such. The reality of the word in eminent ways makes existential interaction happen. And so, if the word becomes corrupted, human existence itself will not remain unaffected and untainted.

The well-being of communities no less than the vitality of friendships depends on healthy, honest, non-manipulative language. Unfortunately, the rhetorical landscape we live in today does little to instruct us in the use of language that nurtures perception of the truth about things, including the truth about ourselves. And so our relationships are less likely to be the schools of virtue they could be.

Robert Sokolowski nicely summarizes Aristotle’s insight concerning how friendships can become schools of virtue, an insight that is developed later by Augustine and Aquinas.

Perfect friendship, friendship of the highest kind, requires that each of the friends wishes and performs the good of the other friend. He wills the good of his friend; that is, he takes the good of the friend as his own good. When I act with and for a friend, I act in such a way that what is good for the friend, as such, is wished for and done as my own good. His good, as good for him, has become my good, and he acts in the same manner toward me. The good each of us seeks is not just our own individual good but the good in common and the good for the other. If my friend and I are accomplishing something as friends, I am not just trying to do something that benefits me; I am trying to do something that benefits him as well, and I do it precisely as benefiting him. Its being good for him has become good for me. I have enlarged my sense of what is good for me. I wish not only things that benefit me individually, but also things that benefit others (my friends), and I wish those things precisely as benefiting them. This expansion of my desire for the good, this ‘intersubjectivizing’ of the good by me, means that I have become more virtuous, more human, more perfect as an agent.

Of course, Aristotle assumed that the Good was an objective reality. What is good for my friend isn’t merely a subjective preference of his or mine or ours, just as, rightly understood, the common good for a community does not consist in maximizing the capacity for each individual to pursue his or her own idiosyncratic understanding of “what’s good for me.” For Aristotle, what is good for my friend is a particularized expression of the transcendent Good.

When Christian thinkers took up the idea of friendship and the relationship of these schools of virtue to the life of political communities, they enlarged the scope and consequences of such shared life in light of the eschatological promise of the Church, the City of God. As Oliver O’Donovan notes, “Christian moral reason differed from antique moral reason in understanding community not as the context for practical satisfaction, but as the essential content of it. It achieved its overcoming of the polis, in other words, not by elevating the individual subject over the community, but by accepting community in a commanding position among the moral purposes of agency, a change made possible by the re-foundation of community in Christ.” In other words, the life of the Church was not simply the setting for moral growth, it was recognized as the goal of moral growth. Becoming perfected together—united by one Lord in one faith and one hope as the Bride of Christ together— this is the Good toward which all other goods aim. Friendship and politics are thus both elevated and diminished: diminished because they are mere hints of the greatest good that is to come, elevated because—as was true for John the Baptist — even to be a herald of something so glorious is an awesomely high calling. And so Aquinas could say “[A]mong all worldly things there is nothing which seems worthy to be preferred to friendship.”

But if Aquinas could say it, why can’t we?

Early in the chapter on Friendship in The Four Loves , C. S. Lewis observes that, in modern society, Friendship has come to be regarded “as something quite marginal; not a main course in life’s banquet; a diversion; something that fills up the chinks of one’s time.” The other two of the first three loves Lewis discusses—Affection and Eros—still get a lot of recognition and attention. But, he claimed, “very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value [to Affection or Eros] or even a love at all. I cannot remember that any poem since [Tennyson’s] In Memoriam , or any novel, has celebrated it. Tristan and Isolde, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, have innumerable counterparts in modern literature: David and Jonathan, Pylades and Orestes, Roland and Oliver, Amis and Amile, have not. To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. We admit of course that besides a wife and family a man needs a few ‘friends.’ But the very tone of the admission, and the sort of acquaintanceships which those who make it would describe as ‘friendships,’ show clearly there talking about what they are talking about has very little to do with that Philia which Aristotle classified among the virtues or that Amicitia on which Cicero wrote a book.”

Lewis then goes on to speculate about why Friendship has been demoted or trivialized. His first suggestion is that few people experience real friendship, so few people value it. Furthermore, we can live without friendship: “Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship.”

Lewis observed that most modern people assume that the most significant aspects of human life are those which (as Lewis phrases it) can produce certificates of an animal origin and of survival value. Friendship cannot be so certified, and so is regarded as not fundamental to human being. Friendship is thus not seen to be as natural as Eros or Affection.

The collectivist tendency in modern societies is also, according to Lewis, a factor in the emoting of the significance of Friendship, since in Friendship true individuality (but not individualism) is valued. And finally, he writes, “Some forms of democratic sentiment are naturally hostile to it because it is selective and an affair of the few.” Friendship seems elitist or exclusive in an age of egalitarian inclusiveness.

Lewis then claims that Friendship is treated with such dismissive or suspicious prejudice in modern culture that many people assume “that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual,” a form of Eros not recognized. Modern people can’t imagine an intense and intimate love between two men or between two women that doesn’t reveal or conceal a fundamentally sexual attraction. And he spends several pages deconstructing that claim.

When I re-read this book recently, I was surprised that although Lewis commented on the modern trivialization of friendship, he did not mention what I think is the most remarkable aspect of that trivialization: the near-complete ignoring of friendship in modern political theory. Although he mentions Aristotle and Cicero as champions of the virtue of friendship, he neglects to mention that in both instances—and in Antiquity generally—friendship was regarded as a public more than a private matter.

In a recent anthology on friendship and politics, John Von Heyking says that “Throughout the greater part of the history of political philosophy, friendship has occupied a central place in the conversation. If we draw on conventional historical distinctions, friendship perennially figured as the sine qua non of discussions among ancient and medieval political thinkers regarding good political order and the good human life.”

Horst Hutter, in his 1978 book Politics as Friendship , demonstrates that “Western political speculation finds its origin in a system of thought in which the idea of friendship is the major principle in terms of which political theory and practice are described, explained, and analyzed.” And writing on the place of friendship in the political theology of the Reformers, Thomas Heilke—until recently a professor of political science at the University of Kansas—exclaims that in the ancient world, long before Aristotle formalized a theory of friendship, it was universally portrayed as a vital part of civic life, and therefore a central concern when reflecting on the dynamics of human life together. He concludes that “there is no instance in any treatment of [the] story of friendship in a purely private matter. None. In all cases, from the myth of Gilgamesh to the epics of Homer, through the poems of Theognis [6 ^th Century B.C.], to the tragedies of Sophocles and all points between, friendship always has public, political connotations and implications.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer once quipped that Aristotle deals with justice in a single book, but friendship fills two books in his Ethics , while friendship receives no more than a single page’s discussion in Kant.

Lewis was right to see a general neglect of Friendship in modern thinking. Reading the Friendship chapter in The Four Loves certainly conveys how this neglect has unfortunate consequences for personal life. But the consequences of this neglect within modern politics is not, I think, adequately recognized. One of the principal factors in the decline of importance given to friendship acknowledged by Lewis is that modern political and social theory banished friendship to private precincts where it would have no public significance. The modern understanding of what a society is and what the aims of political authority are—indeed, what human persons are imagined to be—no longer require the capacities that are nurtured by friendship.

In the best premodern thought about politics, there was no wall of separation between public and private, between material and spiritual, between politics and morality. The virtues and vices of persons were not assumed to be “their own business” and of no public consequence. Political communities were bodies, and the health of the body was tied to the health of its members.

Modern politics claims to separate public from private, envisioning government as a neutral, amoral machine that impersonally directs shared life in a way that maximizes the freedom of individuals to live however they want to. Government serves to protect us from one another, since persons are assumed to be essentially self-interested and in competition with one another.

But while public life is supposed to be insulated from the concerns of private life, the barrier between them seems to provide one-way blockage; the understanding of human nature and freedom that is presupposed in public life doesn’t remain restricted in the public sphere, and has come to inform the imaginations of many in their private lives. Liberalism doesn’t just marginalize friendship, claiming indifference to its virtues and resource. Liberalism reconfigures friendship, indeed it redefines (formally or informally) the logic of all relationships, remaking them in its own image. The Supreme Court’s recent redefinition of marriage was the most dramatic instance of such a totalizing project.

As John Von Heyking observes, “not only have the bonds of friendship been eviscerated, the bonds between individuals generally have taken on a completely different hue. We commonly characterize the individual’s relationship with others in terms of the contract. In fact, the liberal principle that society is grounded in a contract reaches into other areas of life to the point that we regard all our relationships in similar terms. We come to our private relationships, our loves and friendships, with the same desire to get a good bargain as we do when we purchase a car or computer. We network, we schmooze, and we realize the ‘autonomous self,’ the ideal to which much of contemporary liberalism seeks.”

It may be that the increasingly pornographic character of contemporary life—the sense of desperation for erotic connection and fulfillment which demands the government’s help in eliminating barriers to such projects—is a response to the lonely dissatisfaction felt by ever more fully autonomous selves.

Theologian David L. Schindler introduced his recent collection of essays, Ordering Love , with the assertion that “modern culture marginalizes love. The logical tendency of modernity, in its dominant liberal form, is to look on love as at best a matter of piety or good will, and not as the very stuff that makes our lives and the things of the world real, the basic order of our lives and of all things.” The fracturing mentioned in the title of this seminar is not simply a byproduct of sociological changes ushered in by political and technological developments. Fragmentation and division are an effect of the Fall, but they are reinforced and in a sense celebrated by a view of the world that marginalizes love and hence trivializes friendship.

The loss of concern for friendship in thinking about politics—about the ordering of public life—is an important diagnostic symptom of the sources of the social and political confusion that is increasingly evident not only in the U.S. but in the modern West in general. Oliver O’Donovan has commented that the crisis of modern politics—which is producing numerous angry backlash movements—is often described as an expression of anger on the part of people who feel excluded. But in fact, it is an expression of a deeper discontent, of a sense that modern politics has come to be perceived as completely morally unintelligible. Citizens perceive at some level that political institutions in their fundamental configuration are not doing justice to their humanity. But most citizens lack an adequate well-articulated description of their humanity to recognize the true, systemic failure of modern politics. Because we are trained to think in individualistic terms, we lack a vocabulary to express how politics has become corrupted by a loss of vision for the good of communities.

In his 1996 book, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology , O’Donovan said that “Christians believe that community is good for individuals; but they do not believe society exists solely to serve individuals’ private purposes. Social existence could never be accounted for as an instrument for private purposes, since private purposes have no intelligibility apart from social existence.” I think O’Donovan here is implying that something is intelligible if it can be described, explained, or defended within some context. But according to modern political thought, societies are constructed from detached pre-social individuals. “Shorn of all prior contexts, natural or social, which could make him intelligible, [the individual assumed by liberalism] makes his appearance as a naked will, a pure originator.” A pure originator : not a person striving to live in accord with a given order of good, but one who asserts arbitrarily what the good is for him.

O’Donovan goes on to observe that “Once society is thought of as an agreement [that is, a social contract] between competing wills, the cloud of competition never lifts from it.” Moreover, “Because the normal content of political communication . . . has come to be the conflict of competing wills, speech has lost its orientation to deliberation on the common good and has come to serve the assertion of competing interests.”

I’m reminded here of a quip in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue . MacIntyre points out that modern political communities have eliminated the possibility of being “a shared understanding both of the good for man and of the good of that community [in which] individuals identify their primary interests with reference to those goods.” As a result, “[M]odern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.”

Modern liberalism tells us that we are beings whose nature and dignity are honored—beings who will be happy —when we are entirely free from any constrictions in the pursuit of our desires. We will be happy when we get to define what happiness is on our own terms. If we assume this, if in our bones we believe this to be true, and we find that we are not happy, then we assume that we just aren’t free enough. And government is given the task to expand further our freedom.

But what if happiness depends on submitting to an understanding of happiness that we do not invent? What if we can only be free when we honor an understanding of freedom rooted in certain truths about our nature, an understanding shared by and received from our community? What if our true freedom is not a freedom from others, but a freedom fulfilled through others in self-giving, reciprocal relationships?

Friendship has disappeared from political theories because those theories presuppose an individualistic conception of freedom. As John Von Heyking notes, “whereas liberalism and its offspring liberal democracy promise the individual liberty, the cost of this liberty is often isolation. Loneliness, or as Joshua Mitchell refers to it, ‘brooding withdrawal,’ therefore becomes one of the central experiences people have as liberal democratic citizens. This phenomenon is often recognized and painfully experienced by immigrants and visitors from outside North America and Europe, especially Muslims.”

In his more recent book, Finding and Seeking , Oliver O’Donovan points out that “If talk of freedom is to have substance, it must imagine how it can be exercised in a sustainable social order. . . . Freedom requires goals; it needs to fulfill itself in and through fulfilling them. . . . There must be a further horizon to freedom, something which freedom to pursue these goals is itself freedom ‘for.’ That further horizon is social. . . . Individual freedom shrinks if it lacks the capacity to imagine itself part of a wider common agency. It must look for the kingdom of God.”

In referencing the Kingdom of God here, O’Donovan introduces a perspective that is present in all of his work in theological ethics: We can’t think Christianly about ethics, about the moral life, without thinking eschatologically. What makes Christian ethics Christian is the fact of the Resurrection, the fact that the moral order of Creation has been confirmed, restored, and set on a path of fulfillment by Christ’s being raised from the dead. We ought not speak about anything—including friendship or politics—without acknowledging how the fact of the Resurrection has put history on a path of glorious fulfillment. We know something about the ends of history and the ends of human life that the pre-Christian Ancients could not know. We know that the true meaning of Freedom, the true meaning of our humanity and of human communities, is revealed in the announcement of the coming of God’s rule, a rule that is actualized in the community of friends we call the Church. The purposes of God for history and in the history between the comings is communal, it is a new social reality ordered by love. As O’Donovan writes in his most recent book, Entering into Rest , “Community alone can tell us of the universal order yet to arrive.”

We human beings are not best understood as bearers of rights, sovereign choosers whose freedom requires an expansion of choices. We are rather grateful recipients whose freedom is ordered and actuated by love, is be known in relationship, in imitation of the love exchanged within the Trinity.

In The Desire of the Nations O’Donovan wrote that “Freedom . . . is not conceived primarily as an assertion of individuality, whether positively, in terms of individual creativity and impulse, or negatively, in terms of ‘rights’, which is to say immunities from harm. It is a social reality, a new disposition of society around its supreme Lord which sets it loose from its traditional lords.”

In conclusion, I will confess that my interest in Christian political theology is relatively new, and was energized significantly as we lived through the surreal election year of 2016. I began asking myself: “Is what we’re living through a sign of the failure of our political structures, or is it the logical outcome of a system with critical design flaws? I have come to believe that a more hopeful future requires the radical revision of some basic beliefs about public life: about the relationship between state and society, about the purposes of government, and about how the ordering of temporal affairs accounts for the full reality of what we are as human persons. These and other relevant questions are finally theological questions, even if they aren’t always acknowledged as such.

A number of thinkers more experienced and wiser than I have suggested that we have a very hard time imagining radically different paradigms for political life. I think that what we need to jumpstart our imaginations is a renewed understanding of and—more importantly— the practice of friendship. As John Milbank has noted, “the main reality of all human association, including political association is . . . to do with friendship, as both Plato and Aristotle taught; it is to do with benevolent generosity as they taught in common with Confucius in the Far East. It is to do with a reciprocal sharing of all that is good. Only secondarily is it about organising the distribution of material goods and about designing laws which are always somewhat arbitrary, yet should reflect as far as possible non-arbitrary justice.”

If Western societies are to recover the possibility of ordering public life around a common understanding of the good, of being real communities anticipating the Heavenly Community, I think it can only happen as friendships are formed and flourish, bearing witness to the priority and ultimacy of love in human life. I hope that this Symposium serves to encourage and energize such friendships.

*Originally presented by Ken Myers, founder and producer of Mars Hill Audio, in 2018 at the 8th annual Eighth Day Symposium at St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral in Wichita, KS.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, & Quarantine Notebook: What Writing Taught Me About Our Divided Times - Plenary I

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 22:56:24 GMT

By James Matthew Wilson

During the first months of the pandemic, I wrote a series of news-article poems recording the events, public and private, of the period. They were published serially in Dappled Things magazine and together constitute a narrative that, even at their most private or domestic, constitute a record of the American experience as a whole. The concrete fruit was a book-length poem; the intellectual fruit was a new and deepened perspective on the divisions in our country and the strange commonality Americans experience in and through that division. I will reflect on the composition of the poem and also on another long poem written through international disaster, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets , which also sought to be a national poem in a time of division and destruction.

Presentation at 10:00am on Friday, January 13 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall

A World without Beauty: von Balthasar, Plato, & the Ordering of the Soul - Plenary IV

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 22:52:57 GMT

By James Matthew Wilson

In a few paragraphs, the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar diagnosed the emptiness of the modern age, an emptiness produced by the elimination of beauty as an attribute of reality. We’ll reflect on von Balthasar’s bold claims and have a look at Plato’s great “palinode” in the Phaedrus , where we see with a clarity and concision still unrivaled how and why human life is ordered by, to, and through beauty.

Presentation at 2:00pm on Saturday, January 14 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall

From the Abyss of Anthropological Despair: Three Cases of Fear & Fortitude in Modern Christendom - Plenary III

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 22:50:03 GMT

By Fr John Strickland

I will open by introducing the anthropological pessimism of “late-medieval” Western piety as a crisis of heavenly immanence and then present the way in which Petrarch, in his text Secretum , handled the fear it provoked—by secularizing Christendom’s imperative toward personal transformation. Next, I’ll jump forward in time to the “desecration of the world” that occurred during the so-called Enlightenment to frame a second case of anthropological fear and fortitude: the poet Percy Shelley’s project of cosmological reenchantment (using works like Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ). Finally, I’ll sketch the rise of totalitarian ideologies as context for Albert Camus’s struggle against anthropological despair from The Plague to The Fall . My goal is to present the history of modern Christendom as a cause of agony not only for Christian intellectuals but for secularists like the “father of humanism” (Petrarch) and a pair of atheists as well.

Presentation at 10:00am on Saturday, January 14 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall

The Presence of Reality & the Reality of Fear: Natural Theology and Christian Hope - Plenary II

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 20:05:17 GMT

By Jake Meador

Whether you consider the latest statistics on our nation’s mental health or simply listen to the people in your life, it is clear that ours is a moment of intense fear and anxiety. In part this anxiety arises from the radical uncertainty of our moment. Having turned away from any form of thick identity that obstructs individual choosing, we now find ourselves uncertain who we are, what the good life is, or what it means to be good. Still further, we are troubled by the uncertainty and opaqueness of the world we are rapidly moving toward. All that remains, we think, is the individual person, existing as a kind of “point of aggression” amidst a hostile and indifferent world. This entire way of imagining reality is foreign to the truth of Scripture and wisdom of the church, however. The faith teaches us that we are embedded members of a coherent creation, not detached points of aggression existing in space. If we wish to regain some sense of footing in the world, we would do well to begin by considering what the world actually is.

Presentation at 1:30pm on Friday, January 13 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall

On Richard Wilbur's "A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra" - Fri. Breakout

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 23:15:34 GMT

By James Matthew Wilson

The most perfect American poem of the twentieth century is surely Wilbur’s “Baroque Wall Fountain.” In an age where the secularity of the fine arts seemed final, Wilbur achieved a perfect vision of the Christian understanding of the person and the world, one that summons all of us to change our lives.

Presentation at 11:30am on Friday, January 13 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall

The Dream of a Ridiculous Superman: Dostoevsky's Demons & the Problem of a Christendom without Christ - Sat. Breakout

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 23:13:05 GMT

By Fr John Strickland

The title comes from a chapter section of my most recent book, The Age of Nihilism . We’ll focus on the novelist’s critique of secularism and atheism and introduce Nietzsche as a foil (even though, amazingly, the former never read the latter). Discussion will be based on the novel’s censored chapter “Stavrogin’s Confession.” Click here for access to this chapter . Here is a link to the section we’ll focus on in this discussion .

Presentation at 11:30am on Saturday, January 14 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall

Christian Presence in an Anxious Age - Sat. Breakout

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 23:05:48 GMT

By Jake Meador

To hear many Christians talk about our moment is to come away with the idea the chief source of our cultural and social problems is political. As a result, no small number of Christ’s followers dedicate a great deal of their time and mental energy to attempting to win political victories. But this strategy is mostly wrongheaded because the underlying spiritual crisis that produces the political crisis is actually anxiety. When we miss this point, we end up becoming trapped ourselves in the spiritual crisis, adopting our own postures of anxiety in response to the anxiety of others. In this breakout, we’re going to briefly summarize how W. H. Auden, Jody Bottom, Edwin Friedman, and Mark Sayers treat the problem of anxiety before discussing together how Christians can adopt a non-anxious presence within their communities.

Presentation at 11:30am on Saturday, January 14 in St George Cathedral Chapel

"Longing to Be Clothed..." But How Long? The Vicarious Anxiety of Christ & Our Anxiety - Fri. Breakout

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 23:04:02 GMT

By Christian Kettler

We groan, “longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling,” Scripture says. This chaos is made particularly acute by anxiety. Anxiety can be the pain of the present, but also the fear of the future. We may fear the past, but only in the sense that it may be repeated (Kierkegaard). The Christian is confronted by the biblical admonitions not to be anxious (Matt 6:25-26; Luke 12:22; Phil 4:6: 1 Pet 5:7). But these admonitions can often create even more anxiety, particularly as we face the inevitability of death. Not just our impending death, but the death of someone we love can create the anxiety of what Ernest Becker calls “the denial of death,” even among pious Christians.

‘Jesus Christ interrupts us, not just with pious platitudes or future promises, but His present action. This is the vicarious anxiety of Christ . This is taking seriously the biblical teaching of his uniting with our humanity, who we really are, in the incarnation. His humanity is connected with our fallen humanity, yet without sinning Himself (Heb 2:14-18; 4:14-16; 7:23-25). He has taken upon Himself, not just our guilt, but also our anxiety, as we see in Gethsemane and the cross. His anxious humanity has been crucified and resurrected. We participate in that, even now. Therefore, faith should be our only response to this grace. But even this faith is based on the previous and continual faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, our High Priest even now in heaven (Heb 8:1).

Presentation at 11:30am on Friday, January 13 in St George Cathedral Chapel

Understanding Our Current Cultural Moment: Two Book Reviews on Unmediated Interpersonal Communication for Cultural Renewal

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 22:31:01 GMT

by Joshua Sturgill

Feast of St Stephen the Archdeacon and First Martyr

Anno Domini 2022, December 27

I'd like to recommend two books for understanding our current cultural moment. They're not new, but if you haven't read them, push them to the top of your list. The first is Technopoly by Neil Postman, and the second is The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. Postman looks at the unpredictable effects of technology on society. McGilchrist begins with deep research into the neurological functions of the human brain and then compares his findings with the character of many cultures throughout history.

Among the many things these books have in common is their conclusion that for a culture to be healthy, interpersonal communications must be direct, honest and compassionate. The more media or technologies come between people, the more troubled a society becomes—less personal, less humane.

What we commonly call "culture" may become a thing of the past if face-to-face communications are lost. So the appeal I'm about to make stands on doubly shaky ground. I'm sending it as an email (rather than putting pen to paper or making a visit), and I'm asking your support for a face-to-face community which might not be your community.

We have a pile of ambiguities here: the war of print with electronic media, the instantaneous availability of images and information, the misuse of words like virtual, friend or society .

These are ambiguities which can and should be discussed. And this is where the Eighth Day Institute most proves its necessity. Our mission requires both maintaining a local community and seeking to foster community in faraway places through as many means as possible.

If you come to our events, you'll find discussions, friendships, and a genuine society. If you are an online subscriber, our hope is that you find fuel for your own, local fire.

I teach high school, and one of my favorite parts of the job is that I give a half-hour lecture every Wednesday morning on any topic. I like series, so for the first two months of this school year, I spoke about definitions of what it means to be human from around the world. For these talks, I was able to draw from the writings of Church Fathers and on discussions I've had with other EDI patrons.

For the second two months, I'm taking over-used, under-considered phrases like "science and technology" or "sanity" and giving an extended etymology for them. This week, the phrase was "social media." Socius : ally or companion; Medius : between or middle. "Social Media" has only been in use since 2008. But it's now ubiquitous. So ubiquitous, in fact, that we rarely consider that the phrase is an oxymoron.

Socius, associate, social—these words refer to intimate community and interdependence. Medius, medium, mediator—these words describe what comes between people or things. In other words, a true society needs no outside media. Yet who considers that every online encounter involves a host of corporations, advertisers, psychologists, designers—all mediating our communications?

If a complete break with technology is not possible, a decisive down-sizing is. We need a re-directing of our attention and energy toward what makes for stable, peaceful culture. Neil Postman and Iain McGilchrist understand this too well. Saints and Fathers of the ages encourage us to slow down, breathe, study, and share our lives with each other, unmediated.

Likewise, EDI is working to lessen the Medius and increase the Socius, wherever and whenever we can. Consider joining the EDI community and help us spread the word!

* Joshua Alan Sturgil l, M.Div., M.A. has worked with Eighth Day Books and the bookstore community for more than twenty years. He is a member of St. George Orthodox Cathedral, and currently teaches philosophy and literature at Northfield School in Wichita, KS. Frequent travels for Eighth Day take him to conferences and workshops nationwide. Joshua is the author of two poetry volumes, most recently Now A Major Motion Picture, published by Darkly Bright Press. He holds a masters in divinity from Sangre de Cristo Seminary, and a master of arts in Far Eastern classics from St. John's College, Santa Fe. Joshua was a founding member of the Eighth Day Institute, serving as its first board vice president. Among his many hopes for EDI is the formation of a catechetical academy, where students (young and old) can come together for extended periods of study and conversation.

Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection & the Shaping of Community

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 21:46:53 GMT

Reviewed by Eighth Day Books

Feast of the Ten Martyrs of Crete

Anno Domini 2022, December 23

Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community by Oliver O’Donovan

In Common Objects of Love Oliver O’Donovan, widely respected as one of today’s wisest and most articulate Christian ethicists, takes readers on a journey of thought. Yet this journey, he warns, does not “circle comfortably around its subject like a pleasant afternoon stroll, but sets out for a far country.” The purpose of the journey is to trace “what unifies a multitude of human agents into a community of action and experience sustained over time.” The book’s central theme, which arises out of Augustine’s idea that we know only as we love, is that moral reflection, or the identification of objects of love, has effect in organized community. This perspective provides a fruitful resolution to the traditional Aristotelian dichotomy of theoretical and practical reason and directs us as to how we may think “from truths of Christian faith to conclusions in Christian action.” O’Donovan’s interest in this theme lies especially with its political possibilities, as he explores how love is key to the organization and coherence of political society. Beginning with some lighthearted puzzles about teaching ethics, O’Donovan explores a series of related historical and current issues—the iconoclastic controversy of the ninth century, the nature of ethical deliberation, the deleterious role of publicity in late-modern liberal society, and more—and he offers some reflections on the events of September 11, 2001. It is with John of Patmos, finally, that O’Donovan brings his journey of thought to an evangelical conclusion, one that rests on the narrative of the fall and redemption of society and of the vindication of created order in the coming of God;s kingdom. Originating as the 2001 Stob Lectures delivered at Calvin College and Seminary, Common Objects of Love provides a thought-provoking look at social and political behavior as it is—or should be—informed by Christian love.

80 pp. paper $14.50

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Is Your Body Pure & Full of Faith?

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 23:36:44 GMT

by St Ambrose of Milan

Feast of St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan

Anno Domini 2022, December 7

RADIANCE OF the Father’s glory

Bringing forth light out of light,

Light of light and source of all light,

Daylight, illuminating days.

True sun, come down upon us,

Shining with brightness eternal,

And pour forth into our minds

The Holy Spirit’s brilliance.

Let us pray to the Father, too,

Father of eternal glory,

Father of all-powerful grace,

To rid us of seductive sin

And to fill us with energy,

Blunt the tooth of the envious,

Support us in times of hardship

And give us grace to endure.

May He guide and control our minds

In bodies pure and full of faith;

May our faith be fervent, burning strong,

Far from the poisons of deceit.

Let our nourishment be Christ,

Let our refreshment be the faith,

Let us with joy drink in the Spirit

Who inebriates us soberly.

May this day be spent joyfully:

May our purity be like the dawn,

May our faith be like the noontide,

May our minds never know the dusk.

As dawn moves steadily on her course

May the Dawn entire advance,

In the Father the Son entire,

In the Word the Father entire.

—St Ambrose of Milan, Splendor paternae gloriae

The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 22:39:57 GMT

by Eighth Day Books

Feast of St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan

Anno Domini 2022, December 7

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) by Mark Bauerlein

The author, Emory University English professor and former director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, is not saying that “the Millennials”—those youth who’ve grown up in the Digital Age—are less intelligent than their predecessors. He is saying that due to their digital environment, they are working with a much smaller store of acquired knowledge, contrasting the dizzying quantity of information available online with that which has actually been embraced and mastered. Bauerlein collaborated with Dana Gioia in publishing the influential NEA report Reading at Risk , which combined careful research and a sense of urgency about the rapid decline of reading in America, especially among the young. The omnipresence of numerous screens—television, PC’s, laptops, iPads, tablets, increasingly sophisticated cell phones—and their facilitating unceasing immersion in texting and social media during all waking hours, has steadily pushed aside time devoted to reading or attendance to serious music, theater, or fine art. Bauerlein reports the sad collusion between avant-garde educators and the digital media industry to dethrone the book from its traditional place at the center of the school and the library, assuming that digital reading on laptops and tablets is equivalent to reading books. Citing study after survey after anecdote to back up his dark vision of the increasingly desiccated nature of youth literacy and general historical and cultural awareness, Bauerlein warns of a threat not only to the quality and workplace preparedness of the graduates of our schools, but to the vitality and coherence of our communities and of democracy itself.

253 pp. paper $17.00

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Preface to The Dumbest Generation

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 22:17:43 GMT

by Mark Bauerlein

Feast of St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan

Anno Domini 2022, December 7

When The Dumbest Generation first came out, in May 2008, response in the media was swift and judgmental. Feature articles appeared in Newsweek , The Boston Globe , the Chicago Tribune , The Times of London , Haaretz (Israel), Superinteressante (Brazil), and The Weekly Telegraph (Serbia), and reviews in The Wall Street Journal , The New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , the Toronto Globe and Mail , while eighty or so radio and TV hosts conducted interviews. Each effort made more or less deftly outlined the topic, and many landed hard on yea or nay. A blank and broad question lay on the table: Do the digital diversions of the young cut kids off from history, civics, literature, fine art? Does mounting screen time dumb them down?

I think yes, others say no, but I never expected to vanquish the other side and end the debate. The realistic goal was to open the issue to some sober skepticism, to blunt the techno-zeal spreading through classrooms and libraries, shopping malls and children’s bedrooms. It was to counter the sanguine portraits of informed and agile teens at the keyboard with dismaying survey results and illustrations of youth insulation and ignorance, kids shunning books and vaunting their digital nativity. We won’t know the full intellectual impact of text messaging, Web 2.0, Facebook, and the rest for many years, and it will show up in distant measures such as the money firms spend on writing coaches for employees, the number of students in remedial classes, popular demand that politicians elevate their rhetoric, and whether the vocabulary level of newspapers inches downward or upward.

That evidence remains to be seen, but at least we can say that the general take on digital technology has expanded and diversified. In the past year, several books have joined The Dumbest Generation to set the purpose and uses of the tools in a critical spotlight. They include works by Andrew Keen ( The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy ), Susan Jacoby ( The Age of American Unreason ), Lee Siegel ( Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob ), Nicholas Carr ( The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google ), Maggie Jackson ( Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age ), and Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis ( Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion ), and several other popular and academic studies. Together they form an imposing countervailing force, an alliance to slow the headlong rush to technologize learning, reading, writing, and social and intellectual life. They have forced a better, more reflective attitude toward the future, an appreciation of the wondrous things gained, yes, but also a sensitivity to precious goods and practices lost.

The Dumbest Generation also postulates an attitude toward the past, however, and several commentators picked up on it with a curt objection. “Here we go again,” they remarked, “an aging schoolmaster knocking the kids. The old ones did it when Elvis arrived, and now they do it because of Grand Theft Auto. We’ve heard the grievance many times, the lament of graying folks, so let’s not take it too seriously.” A fair criticism, if an easy one, and it actually points to what may be the great social consequence of the digital advent. It turns on, precisely, the relationship of generations and the duties of elders. For, we all agree, one responsibility of adults in our society is to acquaint the rising generation to a civic and cultural inheritance. They have the experience and the perspective that come with aging; the young do not. Teenagers live in the present and the immediate. What happened long ago and far away doesn’t impress them. They care about what occurred last week in the cafeteria, not what took place during the Great Depression. They heed the words of Facebook, not the Gettysburg Address. They focus on other kids in English class, not leaders in Congress.

Maturity follows a formula: The more kids contact one another, the less they heed the tutelage of adults. When peer consciousness grows too fixed and firm, the teacher’s voice counts for nothing outside the classroom. When youth identity envelops them, parent talk at the dinner table only distracts them. The lure of school gossip, fear of ridicule, the urge to belong—they swamp the minds of the young and stunt their intellectual growth.

Kids need a reprieve and a retreat. For them to grow up into mindful citizens and discerning consumers, then, adolescents must break the circuit and think beyond the clique and the schoolyard. But they can’t do it themselves—peer pressure is too strong—and so adults must help draw them away. Adult content, civic and historical stuff, makes the current events of high school less commanding. Mentors can provide instruction in bigger things: the op-ed page, actions of Congress, the heroism of Martin Luther King, Jr., what transpired in the gulag, what the First Amendment says, the fate of Adam and Eve … Mentors steer young minds toward deeper wisdom and young tastes toward finer consumptions. The story of heroes and villains from history sets the eminences of senior year in bracing relief. The eloquence of Emily Dickinson nicely explodes the favored patter of the hallways.

Yet how can adults impart it when peer-to-peer contact extends to every minute and every space of the day and night? That’s the threat digital tools pose to parents and teachers. Equipped with BlackBerry and laptop, sporting a flashy profile page and a blog, teenagers pass words and images back and forth 24/7. The bedroom is no longer a sanctuary, it’s a command center. E-mails, text messages, blog postings and comments, phone calls, tweets, feeds, photos, and songs pour in every evening, and if kids don’t respond, they fall behind. Even when logged off and disconnected, they sense that a buddy (or nemesis) may be talking about them, passing around an image, setting a rendezvous, amplifying gossip, or leaving a message. An edifying case happens in the 2008 film American Teen , a documentary tracking five kids through senior year in high school in Warsaw, Indiana. At one point, an excitable girl sends her boyfriend a topless photo of herself, not realizing it will bounce to others in the network. Two girls grab it and with sadistic, masterful glee circulate it through every connection they know, and by the next morning when the girl comes to class, every kid in school has her image downloaded and shared. The lesson strikes home: Peer contact never ends, and digital tools are as essential and ordinary as food and air and sleep.

This is the new habitus of the Digital Age. Youths undergo an intense awareness of one another, a high-pressure social feeling. The stakes are high—is anything worse than exclusion?—and so they have to tune in, to manage that omnipresence. They don’t really enjoy it, for when they leave my class and flip open the cell, they register concern, not glee. But if they don’t check in, they don’t know whether something big might have happened. Peer pressure long preceded the microchip, of course, but email, cell phones, and the rest have cranked it up to critical levels, fostering an all-peers-all-the-time-network. Communication is horizontal, centered on a narrow age bracket, while parents and teachers hover outside the loop, baffled by the immersion.

If parents and teachers don’t contain it, if they don’t find occasional substitutions for it, it will only get worse. The natural inclinations of the young flow toward one another, and each new tool speeds them faster on their way. Late-teens and early-twenty-somethings stand at a delicate threshold that marks the most important intellectual growth of their life. They have passed the basic skills of elementary and middle school, and now they acquire the higher knowledge and understanding requisite to good citizenship and tasteful consumption. These are the years in which they read good books, discuss great ideas, judge past events, and form moral scruples. If it doesn’t happen in high school, in college, and in the home at this time, it probably never will. Once in the workplace, raising kids, paying bills, and doing laundry, people don’t have time, energy, or guidance to ponder the Federalist Papers or read The Divine Comedy. Every hour on MySpace, then, means an hour not practicing a musical instrument or learning a foreign language or watching C-SPAN. Every cell-phone call interrupts a chapter of Harry Potter or a look at the local paper. These are mind-maturing activities, and they don’t have to involve Great Books and Big Ideas. They have only to cultivate habits of analysis and reflection, and implant knowledge of the world beyond.

They mark the opportunity costs of digital diversions, and as they accumulate over the months, the costs rise higher than they seem at any one moment. The Dumbest Generation counts them up and sounds an alert. It doesn’t invoke an ideal past of multitudes of studious kids preferring Shakespeare to cartoons and activist kids debating the size of government. That never existed and never will. What did exist, though, was a climate in which the voices of elders and the value of history and civics, books and ideas, exercised more pressure on the young. Teen social life had a limit, and in those other hours the forces of adulthood were felt, if resented. When I was sixteen, I went to school and hung out with friends, and after school I played some basketball, hung out some more, and headed home. When I crossed the threshold and sat down to dinner, social life was over. I listened to my parents converse about money, work, the household, travel plans, while Walter Conkite reported on Vietnam and Watergate. I didn’t like them and didn’t want to talk to them, but I couldn’t reach under the table with my handheld and connect with buddies. I couldn’t go up to my room, flip open the laptop, and blog about the new biology teacher. Leisure options were fewer, and without ready access to friends, things like books, libraries, museums, and homework enjoyed a larger presence.

That’s what has changed. The Digital Age has embroiled the young in a swirl of social groupings and contests, and it threatens their intellectual development. This is not a benign evolution of old media into new media, traditional literacy into e-literacy. It is a displacement. Digital tools have designs on the eyes and ears of the kids, and they pursue them aggressively. Once youths enter the digital realm, the race for attention begins, and it doesn’t like to stop for a half-hour with a novel or a trip to the museum. Digital offerings don’t like to share, and tales of Founding Fathers and ancient battles and Gothic churches can’t compete with a message from a boyfriend, photos from the party, and a new device in the Apple Store window. Parents and teachers have a new rival in the lives of kids: not just a circle of friends, but a spreading glossy marketplace of communications technology with a certified youth meaning. Put them together—the e-tools and the collective will of teens—and they look invincible.

*From Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (New York: Penguin Group, 2009), vii-xii.

"Now in Flesh Appearing" - Nativity Feast on Dec 30

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 20:52:05 GMT

12th Annual Nativity Feast for Members

Dear Eighth Day Members (and their guests)!

Join us on Friday evening, December 30th, at Immanuel Lutheran Church to celebrate our twelfth annual Feast of the Nativity. This year's reflections will be based on the theme "Word of the Father, Now in Flesh Appearing."

Tickets are $25 each and include a place at the feast itself!

As usual, prayer, reflections, and carols will fill the evening air. As with all good feasts, we'll start things off gathered around the table with food and drink. And of course, Christmas Ale will be flowing.

Not a member yet? Visit this page to see our membership levels .

Friday, December 30 Anno Domini 2022

Immanuel Lutheran Church
(South Doors)
909 S. Market St.
Wichita, KS 67211

Schedule:
6:00 p.m. Doors Open at Immanuel Lutheran Church

6:30 p.m. Welcome & Dinner

7:30 p.m. Music, Hymns, Reflections, and Prayers

8:30 p.m. Christmas Carols

This event is for Eighth Day Members Only!

Hall of Men Presents St. Ambrose of Milan on Dec. 8

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 15:15:08 GMT

The Hall of Men will gather Thursday evening on the commemoration of the Forefeast of the Conception by St Anna of the Most Holy Theotokos, Anno Domini 2022, December 8 for our last topic of 2022.

Derek Brown will present on St. Ambrose of Milan.

St. Ambrose, (339-397) the bishop of Milan, later canonized as a saint in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church, and deemed a "Doctor of the Church," is noteworthy not only for his for his contributions to theology, liturgy, and pastoral theology, but also that he was not yet a baptized Christian when we was acclaimed bishop. The crowds were soon justified in their choice, as Ambrose was an exemplary model of someone sanctifying their secular talents, education, and experience for use in ministry.

When

The commemoration of the Forefeast of the Conception by St Anna of the Most Holy Theotokos, Anno Domini 2022, December 8

Where

The Ladder at 2836 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67214

Schedule

Doors Open at 7 pm

Food is served at 7:30pm

Eighth Day Convocation at 8:30pm

Presentation and toast by Derek Brown immediately following Convocation

Membership Required?
No, but do consider joining the community! Learn more and join today here .

Why Does Suffering Befall Us?

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 18:43:28 GMT

by Bishop Irenei

Feast of Our Holy Father Clement, Pope of Rome

Anno Domini 2022, November 24

Why? Why do certain agonies befall us?

One of the most perplexing questions that faces us is that of why God might permit us to suffer in certain ways or circumstances. Indeed, a substantial portion of the grief and despair that is often associated with suffering comes not from the actual elements of the suffering itself (i.e., from physical pains of the body or the mind), but from the question that arises in our soul when the suffering becomes acute: “Why, O Lord, are You letting this happen to me?” The desire to have an explanation , to seek a cause-and-effect rationale for what might seem unjust or unfair, and certainly unpleasant, produces a mental anguish that can be as strong as any physical ailment that actually inflicts us—and at times can even overpower it.

Philosophers and theologians have struggled with seeking answers to this “problem of evil” for millennia. Why do the good suffer? Why does an all-powerful and all-merciful God permit grief and sorrow to exist? Why cannot He Who orders all things, order His creation so that there is no suffering, nor pain, nor any agony? And there have been myriad “answers” to this problem posed over the centuries: some defeatist, some optimistic; some rationalistic, some more spiritual. There are issues of human freedom at stake; there are matters of deception by evil powers; there are questions of coming-into-being and going-out-of-it; and there are “solutions” to the problem of evil and suffering that can be drawn out of all these elements.

But none of these ultimately satisfies, because what we are dealing with is—as others before have said—not really a “problem” in any traditional sense. Problems are fundamentally things that have “solutions.” They presuppose situations that can be fixed, dilemmas that can be solved. But suffering is not a “problem” in this way; it is a mystery. It is a strange effect of life in a world that is in the hands of God, yet also in ours. It has no “solution,” no inspiringly compelling explanation (though we can, of course, account theologically for its existence). Instead, suffering is something that we address, not by accounting for it or “solving” it, but by entering into the experience of it, and allowing that experience to be redeemed and become redemptive.

Suffering befalls us, therefore, not always as a mathematical or logical consequence to anything we have done; and God permits this to be so, not out of an arbitrariness or a lack of love. Suffering has the power, despite its origin so often in tragedy, to draw us into a better character of life—and this God permits, for He knows that it can change us. If Christ is truly the “cornerstone” of our life, then we are given strength and stability in the very circumstances that might otherwise overwhelm us. That which might grind us to powder (Matt. 21:44; Lk. 20:18), instead becomes that by which we are built up into something greater.

This is a lesson learned long ago in the Church. In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers we read, “Abba Poemen believed that the only time you could observe a person’s true character was when that person was tempted.” Do you see how the saint perceives temptation, not as being intrinsically detrimental to our spiritual life, but in fact something that can reveal the true state of our heart? The encounter with temptations, even if these include great spiritual and physical suffering, can disclose to us that which remains hidden away when “all is well” and we are comfortable with our lives. Suffering opens the reality of the heart—what is good within it, as well as what is bad and requires healing. In such a circumstance the life of the Gospel is tested and made perfect—for that which is tested is tried, and that which is tried becomes stronger, like iron in the forge (cf. Is. 48:10), and the weakness of man’s nature is made mighty and capable of bearing the grace of God.

The positive opportunities brought by suffering, moreover, do not come only through specific, deliberate trials that God may place on our path through fore-ordained actions. Even certain accidents (a term which many Christians people fear to use, but which the saints do not), which bring suffering in their wake, have the power to awaken us to the stirrings of a deeper life.

St. Herman of Alaska, who experienced both tremendous sufferings as well as a great many tragedies in his missionary works, wrote:

A terrible accident has a power to awaken us to the realization of the existence of various calamities and dangers surrounding us, from which the Providence of God preserves us. At the same time it convincingly persuades us to acknowledge our own infirmity and weakness, and to seek the Father’s protection and His most powerful defense, which affirms us in the Wisdom and the Word of God, which came down from above by the will of the Heavenly Father under a curtain of flesh like ours, woven by the Divine Might from the Immaculate Virgin, for our salvation. He became man and taught us to pray that we be not led into temptation. This reminds us from what Father we have our existence, and this in turn should make us seek our heavenly Fatherland and our eternal inheritance. (Letter to Baranoff, 1809)

Thus, says the saint, God allows even the unfortunate accidents of life in this broken world to afflict us—for good. We must see in St. Herman’s example, in particular, the powerful witness of his faith and experience. This was a man who had seen the power of God in ways that, to many, seem almost mythical: holding back the sea, staving off fires and winds, and so on. But even for one who had with his own eyes beheld such things, St. Herman is profoundly aware of our sinful insensitivity to God’s constant work in our lives. We take “peace and calm” for granted, and fail to see how every second of peace is a gift of God; how every instant, every fraction of a moment of calm and tranquility, is a divine protection afforded by Christ and the ever-ready intercessions of His holy Mother. The arrival of some accidental calamity, St. Herman says, invites us to become more readily aware of how fragile, and how precious, is the life of peace offered us by God. It is an invitation to make every moment of our lives one in which the seeking of our heavenly Fatherland is front and center of our attention.

Some suffering, we must readily acknowledge, comes to us neither by the Lord’s personal design, nor by accident, but by the work of others. The demons never tire in their efforts to drive us from God by magnifying our sufferings and distorting our response to them. But even suffering that has its source in the demons can be redemptive!

St. Maximus the Confessor speaks eloquently of this:

There are said to be five reasons why God allows us to be assailed by demons. The first is so that, by attacking and counterattacking, we should learn to discriminate between virtue and vice. The second is so that, having acquired virtue through conflict and toil, we should keep it secure and immutable. The third is so that, when making progress in virtue, we should not become haughty but learn humility. The fourth is so that, having gained some experience of evil, we should “hate it with perfect hatred” (cf. Ps. 138:22, LXX). The fifth and most important is so that, having achieved dispassion, we should forget neither our own weakness nor the power of Him who has helped us. (Four Hundred Texts on Love, Second Century, 67)

When the demons attack, St. Maximus says, even though their aim is our destruction and the despair of soul that would rend us away from God through personal rebellion, fear and the rejection of love, nevertheless even in these moments God has not released His grip on us. The pain which comes through such assaults might utterly destroy us if we were left unaided in meeting it; but God takes the assaults of the demons and allows them to teach us to distinguish good from evil, to love what is good through the experience of its opposite, to be humbled and learn to crave humility rather than pride (for it is our pride that opens the door to the demons’ influence in the first place), and in all things to see how the power of God sustains us and lifts us up.

We see, my beloved ones, that suffering befalls us for many reasons and from many sources. Some suffering comes from God, Who rebukes and chastises those whom He loves (cf. Ps 11:5 KJV); some comes from the world; some from ourselves; some from the demons. But whatever its origin, the suffering that we receive in faith is that which can save us. Think of it! Even the devil’s worst threat—that of suffering and torment and pain and grief—is something that God can turn into redemption and grace!

We should remember the words of St. Dorotheos of Gaza, who said: “Even if we cannot endure much labor because we are weak, let us be set on humbling ourselves” ( Discourses and Sayings ). To be humbled by suffering is not a curse; it is a thing to be received with thanksgiving—and we receive it as such not simply for romantic reasons of exercising trust and hope, but because we learn from our Fathers that it can bring us true repentance and draw us closer to God’s love. This is a love that overpowers the soul-destroying potential of any suffering, and instead renders it a thing that brings us more firmly into His embrace. It matters not what form the suffering takes. Or what intensity. Pain, agony, grief and death may try to rend us from our Maker’s arms, but the love of God is only received more strongly in these moments of trial. As the Apostle St. Paul so famously said:

If God be for us, who can be against us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, “For Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:31, 35-39)

*Chapter 4 from Strength in Weakness (Safford, AZ: St Paisius Monastery, 2020), pp. 33-42. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

On True Character by Abba Poemen

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 17:19:16 GMT

Abba Poemen believed that the only time you could observe a person’s true character was when that person was tempted.

Thanksgiving & Backyard Ultras: A Note from the Director on God's Orchestrations & the Power of Prayer

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 20:01:27 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Gregory, Bishop of Agrigentum

Anno Domini 2022, November 23

As my second annual College Hill Pseudo-Backyard Ultra approaches, I must confess that, for several reasons, I’m approaching it in fear and trembling.

First, I’ve already failed two 100-mile attempts this year. Given, one was in 24-degree weather with almost three times the amount of ascent as this run, and the other was seven times the amount of ascent, plus cold, rain and hail-storms, thunder and lightning, chasing cut-off times, and a knee that was increasingly injured over the course of the 77 miles I completed (I missed cutoff at that point). Nevertheless, on record I have two big, fat DNFs (Did Not Finish).

Second, I’ve barely given my knee enough time to heal from the last attempt on Sep. 16. But there’s more to this one, which I’ll share in a bit.

Third, it’s going to be cold and, through at least half of the run, rainy/icy/snowy. I’ve already been beat by cold with hypothermia once…it’s no fun and I have a bit of PTSD just thinking about it.

Fourth, I’m doing this to raise funds for Eighth Day Institute, specifically to help EDI achieve its fall campaign goal of 100 new members. Given inflation, the state of the economy, and so many other unknowns in our crazy world today, I’m fully cognizant of how large of a goal this is.

And finally, I HATE FAILURE.

As intimidated as I am today thinking about the 26-30 hours I’ll be running this weekend, I’m also grateful to have the day of Thanksgiving immediately precede such a daunting task. In light of this important holiday, I’d like to express my gratitude and, by way of that gratitude, tell you two stories about last year’s run.

But before those two stories, two important notes of gratitude:

First, to all the current Eighth Day Members: thank you so much for your generous and faithful support. EDI only exists because of you. We are almost 100% funded by individuals like you who make sacrificial gifts to keep our doors open, so we can organize events, publish great content, and facilitate the cultivation of friendships and conversations you can’t have anywhere else.

Second, I can’t tell the two stories about last year’s race without expressing gratitude to the many people who showed up at my home to either run with me or to cheer me on. I want to especially thank Jake Ramstack for spontaneously taking charge of my home aid-station and the pop-up crew who arrived, taking care of me through the cold night and guiding me all the way to the finish, with fireworks and all.

Now for the stories.

First, I’m grateful for the way God orchestrates events. Jake and crew created a home-made finish line for me, along with a full-on fireworks spectacle. It was an awesome experience. But it quickly turned sour when a neighbor (whom no one on our block recognized) stopped to complain, cussing us out in front of all our children. She claimed she was worried we were going to burn her house down; so worried, in fact, that she proceeded to call the fire department. The fire department arrived within five minutes or so. But what she intended as trouble was turned on its head. When the fire crew saw the aid station, they started asking us questions about what we were up to. And, as it turned out, their crew chief Carlos was an experienced ultra-runner. So while I was huddled up under covers in the tent, beginning a long process of recovery, the fire crew surrounded me with Carlos telling me all kinds of stories about his races, gear, and general advice for ultra-running. Meanwhile, the kids all got to take tours of the fire truck. And then, for icing on the cake, a couple weeks later while visiting REI, lo and behold there was Carlos asking me if I needed any help—he is also an REI employee. And of course, more ultra-running talk/advice ensued…and a friendship was born. Talk about “conversations you can’t have anywhere else!”

Second, I’m grateful for my next-door neighbor Gary Gensch and the power of prayer. The week before the race last year, my left knee started giving me problems. I was having a hard time going up and down steps. And the day before the run, when I was setting up my home aid-station, Gary noticed me limping around my front yard. He asked me what was going on and when he found out I planned to run 88 miles, incredulously he asked me how in the world I thought I was going to be able to run that far with a limp. I told him I had some holy oil and that I planned to anoint my knee later that evening to ask God’s healing. A couple hours later, I received a text from Gary asking if he could come over to pray for my knee. Of course I accepted his request. But what I didn’t expect from my Protestant brother was the arrival with his own holy oil, which he had procured in Israel at the tomb of St. Lazarus! Even more surprising was the fact that it was a small bottle of Nard with a Russian Orthodox icon of Mary Magdalen anointing Jesus with the same oil. Gary proceeded to read that Gospel account (Jn. 12), followed by the passage in James on praying over the sick and anointing them with oil “in the name of the Lord” (James 5:14). When I stood up, my knee was completely healed. And I went on to run 88 miles the following day with zero knee problems!

Jump forward to my last 100-mile attempt back in September. Early in the race, on the first steep descent, both my knees started hurting me. The pain became progressively worse throughout the race. After the race my right knee healed fairly quickly, but my left knee took several weeks before I was able to even begin walking on it. Shortly thereafter, I ran into Gary, once again in my front yard, and I expressed my frustration with my knee. I told him I wanted him to pray for it again. He grabbed me, gave me a big—and long—bear hug, and then told me he would pray for my knee. I said, “No, Gary. I mean anoint it with oil and pray for it!” He told me he would be glad to and that we needed to figure out a time. As I walked away, I realize my knee was not hurting. A couple days later I asked him if he had prayed for my knee during that long bear hug…of course he had!

As we approach Thanksgiving, let us be grateful to our Holy and Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, from whom all blessings flow.

Let us be grateful for the way God orchestrates circumstances. For, as St Paul tells us, “we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”

And let us be grateful for good neighbors and the power of prayer.

Have a happy and blessed day of Thanksgiving!

In Christ,

Erin “John” Doom

Suffering Ordained by God

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 21:20:24 GMT

by Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra

Feast of St Plato the Great Martyr of Ancyra

Anno Domini 2022, November 18

Whether we wish to or not, we are going to experience suffering. God will ask us to make many sacrifices and expect many deprivations in our life. How will we be able to endure them all? In the same what that David did, namely, “for the sake of the words of your lips” (Ps. 16:4). It is enough for me to know, O Lord, that this is what You have asked for; that this is what You have willed for me. There is only one way to explain our difficulties: they are exactly the things that God wants us to experience and endure, and so “for the sake of the words of Your lips I have kept ways that are hard” (Ps. 16:4). David senses that, not only has the law been ordained by God, but so too have his sufferings, which are likewise expressions of the divine will.

The psalmist must discover and accept the proper relation to his suffering. If he can do this, he will have transformed his suffering so that in the end his only reality will be God. But if he continues to resist his suffering, refusing to find his salvation in it, his anguish will continue unabated. The question is ultimately this: will he offer himself as a voluntary sacrifice to the will of God, or not?

It follows, then, that the experience of suffering consists essentially of a conflict, for this is the moment when the soul is passing, as it were, through the “Clashing Rocks” of ancient mythology. In this dangerous passage, the soul has to make a choice, and the outcome will either break it into pieces or enable it to sail to its destination in God. And the choice comes down to this: will the soul accept or reject suffering? Will it make this suffering its own, or struggle against it, seeing it as something alien to itself?

Spiritual health is not found in the avoidance of suffering, but in its joyful acceptance. The psalmist’s dilemma lies precisely in whether or not he will accept his sufferings or reject them, which is another way of saying that the choice he needs to make is whether to accept or deny God.

Baffled to Fight Better: Job and the Problem of Suffering - A Florilegium

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 21:12:22 GMT

by Oswald Chambers

Feast of the Holy Martyr Romanus

Anno Domini 2022, November 18

1. The Ordeal of Despair (Job 1:20-21)

Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

Facing facts as they are produces despair, not frenzy, but a real downright despair. The man who thinks must be pessimistic; thinking can never produce optimism. The wisest man that ever lived said that “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” The basis of things is not reasonable, but wild and tragic, and to face things as they are brings a man to the ordeal of despair. Ibsen presents this ordeal, there is no defiance in his presentation, he knows that there is no such thing as forgiveness in Nature, and that every sin has a Nemesis following it. His summing up of life is that of quiet despair because he knows nothing of the revelation given of God by Jesus Christ.

“Blessed are they that mourn.” Our Lord always speaks from that basis, never from the basis of the “gospel of temperament,” When a man gets to despair he knows that all his thinking will never get him out, he will only get out by the sheer creative effort of God, consequently he is in the right attitude to receive from God that which he cannot gain for himself.

2. The Inherited Baffling (Job 3:23-26)

The sense of being baffled is common, and Job is feeling completely baffled by God’s dealing with him.

Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in? … I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came. (Job 3:23, 26)

We may not experience the sense of being baffled by reason of any terrific sorrow, but if we really face the teachings of Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount honestly and drastically, we shall know something of what Job was going through. The teachings of Jesus Christ may produce despair, because if He means what He says, where are we in regard to it? “Blessed are the pure in heart”—blessed is the man who has nothing in him for God to censure. Can I come up to that standard? Yet Jesus says only the pure in heart can stand before God. The New Testament never says that Jesus Christ came primarily to teach men: it says that He came to reveal that He has put the basis of human life on Redemption, that is, He has made it possible for any and every man to be born into the Kingdom where He lives (see John 3:3). Then when we are born again His teaching becomes a description of what God has undertaken to make a man if he will let His power work through him. So long as a man has his morality well within his own grasp he does not need Jesus Christ—“For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners,” said Jesus. When a man has been hard hit and realizes his own helplessness he finds that it is not a cowardly thing to turn to Jesus Christ, but the way out which God has made for him.

There is a passion of pessimism at the heart of human life and there is no “plaster” for it; you cannot say, “Cheer up, look on the bright side”; there is no bright side to look on. There is only one cure and that is God Himself, and God comes to a man in the form of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus Christ’s Redemption the way is opened back to yesterday, out of the blunders and blackness and baffling into a perfect simplicity of relationship to God. Jesus Christ undertakes to enable a man to withstand every one of the charges made by Satan. Satan’s aim is to make a man believe that God is cruel and that things are all wrong; but when a man strikes deepest in agony and turns deliberately to the God manifested in Jesus Christ, he will find Him to be the answer to all his problems.

3. Agnosticism (Job 9-10)

Pour forth and bravely do your part,
O knights of the unshielded heart!

Forth and forever forward!—out

From prudent turret and redoubt,

And in the mellay charge amain,

To fall but yet to rise again.

R. L. Stevenson

Agnosticism is not always the deplorable thing it is imagined to be. An acknowledged intellectual agnosticism is a healthy thing; the difficulty arises when agnosticism is not acknowledged. To be an agnostic means I recognize that there is more than I know, and that if I am ever to know more, it must be by revelation.

[…]

Look at the world through a microscope or a telescope and you will be dwarfed into terror by the infinitely minute or the infinitely great; both are appalling. When you touch the cosmic force, apart from the blinkers of intellect, there is a wild problem in it. Nature is wild, not tame. No man is capable of solving the riddle of the universe because the universe is mad, and the only thing that will put it right is not man’s reason, but the sagacity of God which is manifested in the Redemption of Jesus Christ. A Christian is an avowed agnostic intellectually; his attitude is, “I have reached the limit of my knowledge, and I humble accept the revelation of God given by Jesus Christ.

4. The Rehabilitation of Faith in God
As the Source and Support of All Existence

Then Job answered the Lord, and said, I know that Thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from Thee. (Job 42:1-2)

To rehabilitate means to reinstate, to restore to former rank. The problem all through the Book of Job is that the teaching of the creed and Job’s implicit faith in God do not agree, and it looks as if he is a fool to hang on to his belief in God. In this last chapter we see everything rehabilitated, put back into rank, by means of Job’s personal relationship to God. That is what will happen as the result of this war—many a man’s faith in God will be rehabilitated. The basis of things must always be found in a personal relationship to a personal God, never in thinking or feeling.

Job says, “I cannot find any rest in your reasonings or in my own, and I refuse to blink the facts in order to make a rational statement.” Job had perfect confidence in the character of God though he did not understand the way He was taking. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” We sometimes wrongly illustrate faith in God by the faith of a business man in a cheque. Faith commercially is based on calculation, but religious faith cannot be illustrated by the kind of faith we exhibit in life. Faith in God is a terrific venture in the dark; I have to believe that God is good in spite of all that contradicts it in my experience. It is not easy to say that God is love when everything that happens actually gives the lie to it. Everyone’s soul represents some kind of battlefield. The point for each one is whether we will hang in, as Job did, and say “Though things look black, I will trust in God.”

5. Disguise of the Actual (Job 42:7-17)

That man seeks a little thing to do,

Sees it and does it:

This high man, with a great thing to pursue,

Dies ere he knows it.

That low man goes on adding one to one,

His hundred’s soon hit:

This high man, aiming at a million,

Misses an unit.

That, has the world here—should he need the next

Let the world mind him!

This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed,

Seeking shall find him.

~Robert Browning

Our actual life is a disguise, no one expresses what he really is. Job could not express actually, either before or after his suffering, what he really was. The “great Divine event” to which we look forward is when the earth will actually express itself as the work of God, and saints will actually express themselves as the sons of God. Meanwhile, actual appearances do not express the real things.

All through Job has maintained his belief that God is honorable; he declares that the friends’ credal statement of God was not adequate because they have said things he could disprove from his own experience. “Why I am suffering, I do not know; but your explanation does not satisfy me. Though He slay me, though I am knocked to pieces really, I believe that God is honorable, a God of love and justice, and I will wait for Him, and one day it will be proved, that my faith was right.” That is the sublime reach of Job’s faith. Now God takes it in hand to deal with the friends.

The Scourge of Reality

The Lord said to Eiphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken. of Me the thing that is right, as My servant Job hath. (Job 42:7)

[…] If the Reality of God is a scourge to a man who has never pretended to be religious, it must be ten times more so to a man who has been a religious teacher, who has said to people, “I can tell you why you suffer.” “I can tell you why God has allowed this war, and what He is doing with the British Empire.” When such a man comes up against eternal realities and hears God say, “You have not spoken the thing which is true of Me,” the scourge must be appalling (cf. John 15:2-6). Eliphaz had spoken the truth abstractly, but he had misrepresented God all through. God is not an abstract truth; He is the Eternal Reality, and is discerned only by means of a personal relationship.

When one is found out by Eternal Reality the danger is to become defiant or despairing. When the friends were scourged by God they took the right attitude and did not get into despair. If the scourge of Eternal Reality comes, see that it leaves you face to face with God, not with yourself.

The Surgery of Events Reaction

Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to My servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and My servant Job shall pray for you: for him will I accept. (Job 42:8a)

We only see along the line of our prejudices—our evangelical or un-evangelical prejudices, the prejudices of our belief or of our agnosticism; we cannot see otherwise until events operate on us. The surgery of events is a most painful thing. It has taken a devilish thing like this war to root up the prejudices of men who were misrepresenting God to themselves. A prejudice is a foreclosed judgment without having sufficiently weighed the evidence. Not one of us is free from prejudices, and the way we reveal them most is by being full of objection to the prejudices of other people. If we stick obstinately to any line of prejudice, there will come the surgery of events that will shift us out of it. Watch that you do not make an issue with God; it is a dangerous thing to do.

The surgery of events brought the friends out of their prejudices. All along they had said to Job, “You are wrong, we can prove it, you are a bad man, and it is a wonder to us that God does not strike you dead.” But the surgery of events brings them to their knees in utter humiliation. “Go to my servant Job,” God says, “and he shall pray for you.” “Go through the issue, or you will never get to Me.” Think of the humiliation of it!

*Excerpted from Baffled to Fight Better in The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House Publishers, 2000), pp. 43-86.

100 Miles for 100 Members

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 23:08:52 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Gregory the Wonderworker & Bishop of Neo-Caesarea

Anno Domini 2022, November 17

From Sep 2021 thru Sep 2022, I ran four 50ks, one 100k, one pseudo-backyard ultra of 88 miles (pseudo because I ran 3.67 instead of official 4.167 mile laps), and attempted one 50-miler and two 100-milers. With my second marathon mixed in, I ran over 500 miles in races. Not bad for my first year of ultra running (or maybe really bad and/or totally insane?).

At my first 100-mile attempt in February (Rocky Raccoon), I bowed out at mile 74 with hypothermia (I climbed 5000 ft in this TX race, compared to 3100 ft in my neighborhood 88-miler). At the 50-mile attempt in July (Pikes Peak Ultra), I missed cutoff at mile 22 but they allowed me to finish a long 50k (I ended up running 40.1 miles and climbed 8,900 feet). At the second 100-mile attempt in September (Run Rabbit Run), I was forced out by time at mile 77 (this one I climbed 15,000 feet…and destroyed my left knee which forced a six-week break from running). That means I’ve got two big fat DNFs (Did Not Finish) on my official running record.

As much as I hate to lose, the improvements I experienced over the course of one year of ultrarunning have been dramatic. Thus, instead of being dragged down by failures, those huge gains have enabled me to keep a positive attitude by viewing those DNFs as mere stepping stones.

I can’t wait for redemption at Rocky Raccoon and Run Rabbit Run. I look forward to running other more iconic races such as Leadville 100 , Western States Endurance Run 100 , and UTMB 100 . I know it sounds crazy, but I also look forward to even longer runs: Cowboy 200 , Bigfoot 200 , Tahoe 200 , Moab 240 , and Cocodona 250 (and yes, those races are 200, 240, and 250 miles!). Come June I’ll be doing a practice run for these longer runs at a 72-hour race here in Kansas called The Sticks (organized by great folks at Ultraverse Supplements , whose Proxima C Endurance Fuel I’ve been using; they also organized the first 100k I ran). In the meantime, I still need to finish 100 miles, which is precisely what I’m going to do on November 25-26.

Last November I ran 88 miles to raise funds for Eighth Day Institute on Giving Tuesday. Until then I had only completed two marathons, two 50ks, and one 100k (barely!). If friends had not spontaneously appeared as a pop-up crew to take care of me at the aid station in my front yard—led by Jake Ramstack, they fed me, clothed me for the cold, and each lap literally lifted me out of my chair and pushed me back onto the road to run more—and if others had not arrived to run a lap or two (or six in the case of Oscar Repreza…that’s basically a marathon!), I am 100% confident I would not have been able to finish those 88 miles.

It's that time of year again and I intend to make this a tradition. Since I failed to reach the 100 mile mark twice this year, and since Eighth Day Institute’s fall campaign goal is to recruit 100 new members, I’m going to run 100 miles for 100 members in what I'm dubbing "Dr. Doom's College Hill Pseudo-Backyard Ultra."

I’ll start running at noon next Friday (the day after Thanksgiving, on November 25, 2022). Last year I ran 3.67 mile laps; this year I’m running 3.92 mile laps; next year I’ll run the official backyard ultra 4.167 mile laps. If I can stay on schedule like I did last year (1 lap every hour), I’ll finish 25.5 hours later around 1:30 pm on Saturday, November 26. More important than staying on schedule, however, is finishing my first 100-miler and recruiting 100 new Eighth Day members (we've already recruited 19 of them!).

I’d love for you to be a part of this crazy—but in my humble opinion, also wonderful—endeavor. Here are at least five ways you can participate: 1) pace me, i.e., run a lap or two with me; 2) crew me, i.e., take care of me between laps; 3) cheer me on (last year, this included fireworks and lots of folks at my front yard aid station); 4) support my effort by becoming an Eighth Day Member here ; and/or 5) spread the word by either sharing this page or the same post on our Facebook page .

For those of you who can join me at any point during the 25.5 hours or more next Friday and Saturday, in addition to the aid tent and supplies for me, I’ll have in my front yard a table and chairs, a keg of beer (and wine or any other drink of choice, if requested), and an outdoor portable forced air heater, all for visitors to experience Eighth Day “conversations you can’t have anywhere else.”

If you have any questions or don’t know my home address, email me or text me at 316.573.8413.

Be Not Afraid

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 22:21:55 GMT

by Origen

Feast of St Menas of Egypt

Anno Domini 2022, November 11

And then the disciples “having crossed over came to the land Gennesaret” (Matt. 14:34), of which word, if we knew the interpretation, we might gain some assistance in the exposition of the present passage. And observe, since God is faithful, and will not suffer the multitudes to be tempted above that they are able (cf. 1 Cor. 10:13), in what way the Son of God constrained the disciples to enter into the boat, as being stronger and able to get as far as the middle of the sea, and to endure the trials by the waves, until they became worthy of divine assistance, and saw Jesus and heard Him when He had gone up, and to cross over and come to the land Gennesaret; but as for the multitudes who, because they were weaker, did not make trial of the boat and the waves and the contrary wind, them He sent away, and went up into the mountain apart to pray (Matt. 14:22, 23). To pray for whom? Was it perhaps to pray for the multitudes that, when they were dismissed after the loaves of blessing, they might do nothing opposed to their dismissal by Jesus? And for the disciples that, when they were constrained by Him to enter into the boat and to go before Him unto the other side, they might suffer nothing in the sea nor from the contrary wind? And I would say with confidence, that, because of the prayer of Jesus to the Father for the disciples, they suffered nothing when sea and wave and contrary wind were striving against them. The simpler disciple, then, may be satisfied with the bare narrative; but let us remember, if ever we fall into distressful temptations, that Jesus has constrained us to enter into their boat, wishing us to go before Him unto the other side; for it is not possible for us to reach the other side, unless we have endured the temptations of waves and contrary wind. Then when we see many difficulties besetting us, and with moderate struggle we have swum through them to some extent, let us consider that our boat is in the midst of the sea, distressed at that time by the waves which wish us to make shipwreck concerning faith or some one of the virtues; but when we see the spirit of the evil one striving against us, let us conceive that then the wind is contrary to us. When then in such suffering we have spent three watches of the night—that is, of the darkness which is in the temptations—striving nobly with all our might and watching ourselves so as not to make shipwreck concerning the faith or some one of the virtues,—the first watch against the father of darkness and wickedness, the second watch against his son “who opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or thing that is worshipped” (2 Thess. 2:4) and the third watch against the spirit that is opposed to the Holy Spirit [Origen seems to oppose the Divine Trinity with an evil trinity], then we believe that when the fourth watch impendeth, when “the night is far spent, and the day is at hand” (Rom. 13:12) the Son of God will come to us, that He may prepare the sea for us, walking upon it. And when we see the Word appearing unto us we shall indeed be troubled before we clearly understand that it is the Saviour who has come to us, supposing that we are still beholding an apparition, and for fear shall cry out; but He Himself straightway will speak to us saying, “Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid” (Matt. 14:27). And if, warmly moved by His “Be of good cheer,” any Peter be found among us, who is on his way to perfection but has not yet become perfect, having gone down from the boat, as if coming out of that temptation in which he was distressed, he will indeed walk at first, wishing to come to Jesus upon the waters; but being as yet of little faith, and as yet doubting, will see that the wind is strong and will be afraid and begin to sink; but he will not sink because he will call upon Jesus with loud voice, and will say to Him, “Lord, save me” (Matt. 14:30).then immediately while such a Peter is yet speaking and saying, “Lord save me,” the Word will stretch forth His hand, holding out assistance to such an one, and will take hold of him when he is beginning to sink, and will reproach him for his little faith and doubting (Matt. 14:31). Only, observe that He did not say, “O thou without faith,” but, “O thou of little faith,” and that it was said, “Wherefore didst thou doubt,” as he had still a measure of faith, but also had a tendency towards that which was opposed to faith.

Statement on Cultural Freedom

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 21:40:45 GMT

by W. H. Auden

Feast of Saints Victor & Stephanie

Anno Domini 2022, November 11

Cultural Freedom, as I understand the words, is to Culture what Oecumenicity is to Religion.

A genuine cultural oecumenicity cannot be achieved, either by the imposition of the values of one culture upon all the others, nor by boiling them all together into a tasteless soup of generalities.

Differences exist—it is highly desirable, probably, that they should—and honest discourse requires that all parties be frank about them. But true discourse demands certain rules of debate, of which the most essential seem to me to be as follows:

Differences must be discussed in a dialectical spirit, not an eristic. We must be prepared to believe that our opponents are as concerned with a common truth as ourselves. Debate between parties who regard each other as malevolent or lunatic is not possible.
We must always remember that the verb “to tolerate” is transitive. Too often we come to a debate prepared to tolerate but with no intention of being tolerated.
One of the principle purposes of debate is to discover what the parties to it really mean by the words they use. As a general rule, our opponents do not believe what we imagine they believe, and vice versa.
A Conference on Cultural Freedom or any other topic cannot be organised without public meetings and public speeches. These have, of course, a value in themselves, but their main purpose should be that of bringing a number of individual persons together in the same place at the same time, and so providing them with the physical opportunity for impromptu private discourse.

*Congress for Cultural Freedom News, June 1960

The Cross by Nicholas Berdyaev

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 18:03:26 GMT

Nihilism does not understand the mystery of the Cross, the meaning of suffering, and that is why it fails as a religion.

The Child in the Midst

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 20:04:12 GMT

by George MacDonald

Feast of the Holy Protection of the Theotokos

Anno Domini 2022, October

And He came to Capernaum: and, being in the house, He asked them, “What was it that ye disputed among yourselves by the way?” But they held their peace: for by the way they had disputed among themselves who should be the greatest. And He sat down, and called the twelve, and saith unto them, “If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all.” And He took a child, and set him in the midst of them: and when He had taken him in His arms, He said unto them, “Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me; and whosoever shall receive me, receiveth not me, but Him that sent me”. ~Mark 9:33-37.

Of this passage in the life of our Lord, the account given by St. Mark is the more complete. But it may be enriched and its lesson rendered yet more evident from the record of St. Matthew:

Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

These passages record a lesson our Lord gave his disciples against ambition, against emulation. It is not for the sake of setting forth this lesson that I write about these words of our Lord, but for the sake of a truth, a revelation about God, in which His great argument reaches its height.

He took a little child—possibly a child of Peter; for St. Mark says that the incident fell at Capernaum, and “in the house,”—a child therefore with some of the characteristics of Peter, whose very faults were those of a childish nature. We might expect the child of such a father to possess the childlike countenance and bearing essential to the conveyance of the lesson which I now desire to set forth as contained in the passage.

For it must be confessed that there are children who are not childlike. One of the saddest and not least common sights in the world is the face of a child whose mind is so brimful of worldly wisdom that the human childishness has vanished from it, as well as the divine childlikeness. For the childlike is the divine, and the very word “marshals me the way that I was going.” But I must delay my ascent to the final argument in order to remove a possible difficulty, which, in turning us towards one of the grandest truths, turns us away from the truth which the Lord had in view here.

The difficulty is this: Is it like the Son of man to pick out the beautiful child, and leave the common child unnoticed? What thank would he have in that? Do not even the publicans as much as that? And do not our hearts revolt against the thought of it? Shall the mother’s heart cleave closest to the deformed of her little ones? And shall “Christ as we believe Him” choose according to the sight of the eye? Would He turn away from the child born in sin and taught iniquity, on whose pinched face hunger and courage and love of praise have combined to stamp the cunning of avaricious age, and take to His arms the child of honest parents, such as Peter and his wife, who could not help looking more good than the other? That were not He who came to seek and to save that which was lost. Let the man who loves his brother say which, in his highest moments of love to God, which, when he is nearest to that ideal humanity whereby a man shall be a hiding-place from the wind, he would clasp to his bosom of refuge. Would it not be the evil-faced child, because he needed it most? Yes; in God’s name, yes. For is not that the divine way? Who that has read of the lost sheep, or the found prodigal, even if he had no spirit bearing witness with his spirit, will dare to say that it is not the divine way? Often, no doubt, it will appear otherwise, for the childlike child is easier to save than the other, and may come first. But the rejoicing in heaven is greatest over the sheep that has wandered the farthest—perhaps was born on the wild hill-side, and not in the fold at all. For such a prodigal, the elder brother in heaven prays thus—“Lord, think about my poor brother more than about me, for I know Thee, and am at rest in Thee. I am with Thee always."

Why, then, do I think it necessary to say that this child was probably Peter’s child, and certainly a child that looked childlike because it was childlike? No amount of evil can be the child. No amount of evil, not to say in the face, but in the habits, or even in the heart of the child, can make it cease to be a child, can annihilate the divine idea of childhood which moved in the heart of God when He made that child after His own image. It is the essential of which God speaks, the real by which He judges, the undying of which He is the God.

Heartily I grant this. And if the object of our Lord in taking the child in His arms had been to teach love to our neighbour, love to humanity, the ugliest child He could have found, would, perhaps, have served His purpose best. The man who receives any, and more plainly he who receives the repulsive child, because he is the offspring of God, because he is his own brother born, must receive the Father in thus receiving the child. Whosoever gives a cup of cold water to a little one, refreshes the heart of the Father. To do as God does, is to receive God; to do a service to one of His children is to receive the Father. Hence, any human being, especially if wretched and woe-begone and outcast, would do as well as a child for the purpose of setting forth this love of God to the human being. Therefore something more is probably intended here. The lesson will be found to lie not in then humanity , but in the childhood of the child.

Again, if the disciples could have seen that the essential childhood was meant, and not a blurred and half-obliterated childhood, the most selfish child might have done as well, but could have done no better than the one we have supposed in whom the true childhood is more evident. But when the child was employed as a manifestation, utterance, and sign of the truth that lay in his childhood, in order that the eyes as well as the ears should be channels to the heart, it was essential—not that the child should be beautiful but—that the child should be childlike; that those qualities which wake in our hearts, at sight, the love peculiarly belonging to childhood, which is, indeed, but the perception of the childhood, should at least glimmer out upon the face of the chosen type . Would such an unchildlike child as we see sometimes, now in a great house, clothed in purple and lace, now in a squalid close, clothed in dirt and rags, have been fit for our Lord’s purpose, when He had to say that His listeners must become like this child? when the lesson He had to present to them was that of the divine nature of the child, that of childlikeness? Would there not have been a contrast between the child and our Lord’s words, ludicrous except for its horror, especially seeing He set forth the individuality of the child by saying, “this little child,” “one of such children,” and “these little ones that believe in me?” Even the feelings of pity and of love that would arise in a good heart upon further contemplation of such a child, would have turned it quite away from the lesson our Lord intended to give.

That this lesson did lie, not in the humanity, but in the childhood of the child, let me now show more fully. The disciples had been disputing who should be the greatest, and the Lord wanted to show them that such a dispute had nothing whatever to do with the way things went in His kingdom. Therefore, as a specimen of His subjects, He took a child and set him before them. It was not, it could not be, in virtue of his humanity, it was in virtue of his childhood that this child was thus presented as representing a subject of the kingdom. It was not to show the scope but the nature of the kingdom. He told them they could not enter into the kingdom save by becoming little children—by humbling themselves. For the idea of ruling was excluded where childlikeness was the one essential quality. It was to be no more who should rule, but who should serve; no more who should look down upon his fellows from the conquered heights of authority—even of sacred authority, but who should look up honouring humanity, and ministering unto it, so that humanity itself might at length be persuaded of its own honour as a temple of the living God. It was to impress this lesson upon them that He showed them the child. Therefore, I repeat, the lesson lay in the childhood of the child.

But I now approach my especial object; for this lesson led to the enunciation of a yet higher truth, upon which it was founded, and from which indeed it sprung. Nothing is required of man that is not first in God. It is because God is perfect that we are required to be perfect. And it is for the revelation of God to all the human souls, that they may be saved by knowing Him, and so becoming like Him, that this child is thus chosen and set before them in the gospel. He who, in giving the cup of water or the embrace, comes into contact with the essential childhood of the child—that is, embraces the childish humanity of it, (not he who embraces it out of love to humanity, or even love to God as the Father of it)—is partaker of the meaning, that is, the blessing, of this passage. It is the recognition of the childhood as divine that will show the disciple how vain the strife after relative place or honour in the great kingdom.

For it is In my name . This means as representing me ; and, therefore, as being like me . Our Lord could not commission any one to be received in His name who could not more or less represent Him; for there would be untruth and unreason. Moreover, He had just been telling the disciples that they must become like this child; and now, when He tells them to receive such a little child in His name, it must surely imply something in common between them all—something in which the child and Jesus meet—something in which the child and the disciples meet. What else can that be than the spiritual childhood? In my name does not mean because I will it . An arbitrary utterance of the will of our Lord would certainly find ten thousand to obey it, even to suffering, for one that will be able to receive such a vital truth of His character as is contained in the words; but it is not obedience alone that our Lord will have, but obedience to the truth , that is, to the Light of the World, truth beheld and known. In my name , if we take all we can find in it, the full meaning which alone will harmonize and make the passage a whole, involves a revelation from resemblance, from fitness to represent and so reveal. He who receives a child, then, in the name of Jesus, does so, perceiving wherein Jesus and the child are one, what is common to them. He must not only see the ideal child in the child he receives—that reality of loveliness which constitutes true childhood, but must perceive that the child is like Jesus, or rather, that the Lord is like the child, and may be embraced, yea, is embraced, by every heart childlike enough to embrace a child for the sake of his childness. I do not therefore say that none but those who are thus conscious in the act partake of the blessing. But a special sense, a lofty knowledge of blessedness, belongs to the act of embracing a child as the visible likeness of the Lord himself. For the blessedness is the perceiving of the truth—the blessing is the truth itself—the God-known truth, that the Lord has the heart of a child. The man who perceives this knows in himself that he is blessed—blessed because that is true.

But the argument as to the meaning of our Lord’s words, in my name , is incomplete, until we follow our Lord’s enunciation to its second and higher stage: “He that receiveth me, receiveth Him that sent me.” It will be allowed that the connection between the first and second link of the chain will probably be the same as the connection between the second and third. I do not say it is necessarily so; for I aim at no logical certainty. I aim at showing, rather than at proving, to my reader, by means of my sequences, the idea to which I am approaching. For if, once he beholds it, he cannot receive it, if it does not shew itself to him to be true, there would not only be little use in convincing him by logic, but I allow that he can easily suggest other possible connections in the chain, though, I assert, none so symmetrical. What, then, is the connection between the second and third? How is it that he who receives the Son receives the Father? Because the Son is as the Father; and he whose heart can perceive the essential in Christ, has the essence of the Father—that is, sees and holds to it by that recognition, and is one therewith by recognition and worship. What, then, next, is the connection between the first and second? I think the same. “He that sees the essential in this child, the pure childhood, sees that which is the essence of me,” grace and truth—in a word, childlikeness. It follows not that the former is perfect as the latter, but it is the same in kind, and therefore, manifest in the child, reveals that which is in Jesus.

Then to receive a child in the name of Jesus is to receive Jesus; to receive Jesus is to receive God; therefore to receive the child is to receive God Himself.

That such is the feeling of the words, and that such was the feeling in the heart of our Lord when He spoke them, I may show from another golden thread that may be traced through the shining web of His golden words.

What is the kingdom of Christ? A rule of love, of truth—a rule of service. The king is the chief servant in it. “The kings of the earth have dominion: it shall not be so among you.” “The Son of Man came to minister.” “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” The great Workman is the great King, labouring for his own. So he that would be greatest among them, and come nearest to the King Himself, must be the servant of all. It is like king like subject in the kingdom of heaven. No rule of force, as of one kind over another kind. It is the rule of kind , of nature , of deepest nature—of God . If, then, to enter into this kingdom, we must become children, the spirit of children must be its pervading spirit throughout, from lowly subject to lowliest king. The lesson added by St. Luke to the presentation of the child is: “For he that is least among you all, the same shall be great.” And St. Matthew says: “Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Hence the sign that passes between king and subject. The subject kneels in homage to the kings of the earth: the Heavenly King takes His subject in His arms. This is the sign of the kingdom between them. This is the all-pervading relation of the kingdom.

To give one glance backward, then:

To receive the child because God receives it, or for its humanity, is one thing; to receive it because it is like God, or for its childhood, is another. The former will do little to destroy ambition. Alone it might argue only a wider scope to it, because it admits all men to the arena of the strife. But the latter strikes at the very root of emulation. As soon as even service is done for the honour and not for the service-sake, the doer is that moment outside the kingdom. But when we receive the child in the name of Christ, the very childhood that we receive to our arms is humanity. We love its humanity in its childhood, for childhood is the deepest heart of humanity—its divine heart; and so in the name of the child we receive all humanity. Therefore, although the lesson is not about humanity, but about childhood, it returns upon our race, and we receive our race with wider arms and deeper heart. There is, then, no other lesson lost by receiving this; no heartlessness shown in insisting that the child was a lovable—a childlike child.

If there is in heaven a picture of that wonderful teaching, doubtless we shall see represented in it a dim childhood shining from the faces of all that group of disciples of which the centre is the Son of God with a child in His arms. The childhood, dim in the faces of the men, must be shining trustfully clear in the face of the child. But in the face of the Lord Himself, the childhood will be triumphant—all His wisdom, all His truth upholding that radiant serenity of faith in His father. Verily, O Lord, this childhood is life. Verily, O Lord, when Thy tenderness shall have made the world great, then, children like Thee, will all men smile in the face of the great God.

But to advance now to the highest point of this teaching of our Lord: “He that receiveth me receiveth Him that sent me.” To receive a child in the name of God is to receive God Himself. How to receive Him? As alone He can be received—by knowing Him as He is. To know Him is to have Him in us. And that we may know Him, let us now receive this revelation of Him, in the words of our Lord Himself. Here is the argument of highest import founded upon the teaching of our master in the utterance before us.

God is represented in Jesus, for that God is like Jesus: Jesus is represented in the child, for that Jesus is like the child. Therefore God is represented in the child, for that He is like the child. God is child-like. In the true vision of this fact lies the receiving of God in the child.

Having reached this point, I have nothing more to do with the argument; for if the Lord meant this—that is, if this be a truth, he that is able to receive it will receive it: he that hath ears to hear it will hear it. For our Lord’s arguments are for the presentation of the truth, and the truth carries its own conviction to him who is able to receive it.

But the word of one who has seen this truth may help the dawn of a like perception in those who keep their faces turned towards the east and its aurora; for men may have eyes, and, seeing dimly, want to see more. Therefore let us brood a little over the idea itself, and see whether it will not come forth so as to commend itself to that spirit, which, one with the human spirit where it dwells, searches the deep things of God. For, although the true heart may at first be shocked at the truth, as Peter was shocked when he said, “That be far from thee, Lord,” yet will it, after a season, receive it and rejoice in it.

Let me then ask, do you believe in the Incarnation? And if you do, let me ask further, Was Jesus ever less divine than God? I answer for you, Never. He was lower, but never less divine. Was He not a child then? You answer, “Yes, but not like other children.” I ask, “Did He not look like other children?” If He looked like them and was not like them, the whole was a deception, a masquerade at best. I say He was a child, whatever more He might be. God is man, and infinitely more. Our Lord became flesh, but did not become man. He took on Him the form of man: He was man already. And He was, is, and ever shall be divinely childlike. He could never have been a child if He would ever have ceased to be a child, for in Him the transient found nothing. Childhood belongs to the divine nature. Obedience, then, is as divine as Will, Service as divine as Rule. How? Because they are one in their nature; they are both a doing of the truth. The love in them is the same. The Fatherhood and the Sonship are one, save that the Fatherhood looks down lovingly, and the Sonship looks up lovingly. Love is all. And God is all in all. He is ever seeking to get down to us—to be the divine man to us. And we are ever saying, “That be far from thee, Lord!” We are careful, in our unbelief, over the divine dignity, of which He is too grand to think. Better pleasing to God, it needs little daring to say, is the audacity of Job, who, rushing into His presence, and flinging the door of His presence-chamber to the wall, like a troubled, it may be angry, but yet faithful child, calls aloud in the ear of Him whose perfect Fatherhood he has yet to learn: “Am I a sea or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me?”

Let us dare, then, to climb the height of divine truth to which this utterance of our Lord would lead us.

Does it not lead us up hither: that the devotion of God to His creatures is perfect? that He does not think about Himself but about them? that He wants nothing for Himself, but finds His blessedness in the outgoing of blessedness.

Ah! it is a terrible—shall it be a lonely glory this? We will draw near with our human response, our abandonment of self in the faith of Jesus. He gives himself to us—shall not we give ourselves to Him? Shall we not give ourselves to each other whom He loves?

For when is the child the ideal child in our eyes and to our hearts? Is it not when with gentle hand he takes his father by the beard, and turns that father’s face up to his brothers and sisters to kiss? when even the lovely selfishness of love-seeking has vanished, and the heart is absorbed in loving?

In this, then, is God like the child: that He is simply and altogether our friend, our father—our more than friend, father, and mother—our infinite love-perfect God. Grand and strong beyond all that human imagination can conceive of poet-thinking and kingly action, He is delicate beyond all that human tenderness can conceive of husband or wife, homely beyond all that human heart can conceive of father or mother. He has not two thoughts about us. With Him all is simplicity of purpose and meaning and effort and end—namely, that we should be as He is, think the same thoughts, mean the same things, possess the same blessedness. It is so plain that anyone may see it, everyone ought to see it, everyone shall see it. It must be so. He is utterly true and good to us, nor shall anything withstand His will.

How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God in the measures of the low and showy, not the lofty and simple humanities! Nearly all of them represent Him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand He is, and making it the business of His being and the end of His universe to keep up His glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take His name in vain. They would not allow this, but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this. Brothers, have you found our king? There He is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There He is at table with the head of a fisherman lying on his bosom, and somewhat heavy at heart that even he, the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand Him well. The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep were—no, not a truer, for the other is false, but—a true type of our God beside that monstrosity of a monarch.

The God who is ever uttering Himself in the changeful profusions of nature; who takes millions of years to form a soul that shall understand Him and be blessed; who never needs to be, and never is, in haste; who welcomes the simplest thought of truth or beauty as the return for seed He has sown upon the old fallows of eternity, who rejoices in the response of a faltering moment to the age-long cry of His wisdom in the streets; the God of music, of painting, of building, the Lord of Hosts, the God of mountains and oceans; whose laws go forth from one unseen point of wisdom, and thither return without an atom of loss; the God of history working in time unto Christianity; this God is the God of little children, and He alone can be perfectly, abandonedly simple and devoted. The deepest, purest love of a woman has its well-spring in Him. Our longing desires can no more exhaust the fulness of the treasures of the Godhead, than our imagination can touch their measure. Of Him not a thought, not a joy, not a hope of one of His creatures can pass unseen; and while one of them remains unsatisfied, he is not Lord over all.

Therefore, with angels and with archangels, with the spirits of the just made perfect, with the little children of the kingdom, yea, with the Lord Himself, and for all them that know Him not, we praise and magnify and laud His name in itself, saying Our Father . We do not draw back for that we are unworthy, nor even for that we are hard-hearted and care not for the good. For it is His childlikeness that makes Him our God and Father. The perfection of His relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defects, all our evils; for our childhood is born of His fatherhood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to him, “Thou art my refuge, because Thou art my home.”

Such a faith will not lead to presumption. The man who can pray such a prayer will know better than another, that God is not mocked; that He is not a man that He should repent; that tears and entreaties will not work on Him to the breach of one of His laws; that for God to give a man because he asked for it that which was not in harmony with His laws of truth and right, would be to damn him—to cast him into the outer darkness. And he knows that out of that prison the childlike, imperturbable God will let no man come till he has paid the uttermost farthing.

And if he should forget this, the God to whom he belongs does not forget it, does not forget him. Life is no series of chances with a few providences sprinkled between to keep up a justly failing belief, but one providence of God; and the man shall not live long before life itself shall remind him, it may be in agony of soul, of that which he has forgotten. When he prays for comfort, the answer may come in dismay and terror and the turning aside of the Father’s countenance; for love itself will, for love’s sake, turn the countenance away from that which is not lovely; and he will have to read, written upon the dark wall of his imprisoned conscience, the words, awful and glorious, Our God is a consuming fire .

First sermon in Series 1 of 3 in Unspoken Sermons . Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

The Fantastic Imagination

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 19:17:10 GMT

by George MacDonald

Feast of St Matrona the Righteous of Chios

Anno Domini 2022, October 20

That we have in English no word corresponding to the German Mährchen , drives us to use the word Fairytale , regardless of the fact that the tale may have nothing to do with any sort of fairy. The old use of the word Fairy , by Spenser at least, might, however, well be adduced, were justification or excuse necessary where need must .

Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, "Read Undine : that is a fairytale; then read this and that as well, and you will see what is a fairytale." Were I further begged to describe the fairytale , or define what it is, I would make answer, that I should as soon think of describing the abstract human face, or stating what must go to constitute a human being. A fairytale is just a fairytale, as a face is just a face; and of all fairytales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful.

Many a man, however, who would not attempt to define a man , might venture to say something as to what a man ought to be: even so much I will not in this place venture with regard to the fairytale, for my long past work in that kind might but poorly instance or illustrate my now more matured judgment. I will but say some things helpful to the reading, in right-minded fashion, of such fairytales as I would wish to write, or care to read.

Some thinkers would feel sorely hampered if at liberty to use no forms but such as existed in nature, or to invent nothing save in accordance with the laws of the world of the senses; but it must not therefore be imagined that they desire escape from the region of law. Nothing lawless can show the least reason why it should exist, or could at best have more than an appearance of life.

The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms--which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. When such forms are new embodiments of old truths, we call them products of the Imagination; when they are mere inventions, however lovely, I should call them the work of the Fancy: in either case, Law has been diligently at work.

His world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible. To be able to live a moment in an imagined world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those broken, we fall out of it. The imagination in us, whose exercise is essential to the most temporary submission to the imagination of another, immediately, with the disappearance of Law, ceases to act. Suppose the gracious creatures of some childlike region of Fairyland talking either cockney or Gascon! Would not the tale, however lovelily begun, sink once to the level of the Burlesque--of all forms of literature the least worthy? A man's inventions may be stupid or clever, but if he does not hold by the laws of them, or if he makes one law jar with another, he contradicts himself as an inventor, he is no artist. He does not rightly consort his instruments, or he tunes them in different keys. The mind of man is the product of live Law; it thinks by law, it dwells in the midst of law, it gathers from law its growth; with law, therefore, can it alone work to any result. Inharmonious, unconsorting ideas will come to a man, but if he try to use one of such, his work will grow dull, and he will drop it from mere lack of interest. Law is the soil in which alone beauty will grow; beauty is the only stuff in which Truth can be clothed; and you may, if you will, call Imagination the tailor that cuts her garments to fit her, and Fancy his journeyman that puts the pieces of them together, or perhaps at most embroiders their button-holes. Obeying law, the maker works like his creator; not obeying law, he is such a fool as heaps a pile of stones and calls it a church.

In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new forms, and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He must not meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit of man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent. It were no offence to suppose a world in which everything repelled instead of attracted the things around it; it would be wicked to write a tale representing a man it called good as always doing bad things, or a man it called bad as always doing good things: the notion itself is absolutely lawless. In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey--and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.

"You write as if a fairytale were a thing of importance: must it have meaning?"

It cannot help having some meaning; if it have proportion and harmony it has vitality, and vitality is truth. The beauty may be plainer in it than the truth, but without the truth the beauty could not be, and the fairytale would give no delight. Everyone, however, who feels the story, will read its meaning after his own nature and development: one man will read one meaning in it, another will read another.

"If so, how am I to assure myself that I am not reading my own meaning into it, but yours out of it?"

Why should you be so assured? It may be better that you should read your meaning into it. That may be a higher operation of your intellect than the mere reading of mine out of it: your meaning may be superior to mine.

"Suppose my child ask me what the fairytale means, what am I to say?"

If you do not know what it means, what is easier than to say so? If you do see a meaning in it, there it is for you to give him. A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.

But indeed your children are not likely to trouble you about the meaning. They find what they are capable of finding, and more would be too much. For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.

A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it not an allegory. He must be an artist indeed who can, in any mode, produce a strict allegory that is not a weariness to the spirit. An allegory must be Mastery or Moorditch.

A fairytale, like a butterfly or a bee, helps itself on all sides, sips every wholesome flower, and spoils not one. The true fairytale is, to my mind, very like the sonata. We all know that a sonata means something; and where there is the faculty of talking with suitable vagueness, and choosing metaphor sufficiently loose, mind may approach mind, in the interpretation of a sonata, with the result of a more or less contenting consciousness of sympathy. But if two or three men sat down to write each what the sonata meant to him, what approximation to definite idea would be the result? Little enough--and that little more than needful. We should find it had roused related, if not identical, feelings, but probably not one common thought. Has the sonata therefore failed? Had it undertaken to convey, or ought it to be expected to impart anything defined, anything notionally recognisable?

"But words are not music; words at least are meant and fitted to carry a precise meaning!"

It is very seldom indeed that they carry the exact meaning of any user of them! And if they can be so used as to convey definite meaning, it does not follow that they ought never to carry anything else. Words are live things that may be variously employed to various ends. They can convey a scientific fact, or throw a shadow of her child's dream on the heart of a mother. They are things to put together like the pieces of dissected map, or to arrange like the notes on a stave. Is the music in them to go for nothing? It can hardly help the definiteness of a meaning: is it therefore to be disregarded? They have length, and breadth, and outline: have they nothing to do with depth? Have they only to describe, never to impress? Has nothing any claim to their use but definite? The cause of a child's tears may be altogether undefinable: has the mother therefore no antidote for his vague misery? That may be strong in colour which has no evident outline. A fairtytale, a sonata, a gathering storm, a limitless night, seizes you and sweeps you away: do you begin at once to wrestle with it and ask whence its power over you, whither it is carrying you? The law of each is in the mind of its composer; that law makes one man feel this way, another man feel that way. To one the sonata is a world of odour and beauty, to another of soothing only and sweetness. To one, the cloudy rendezvous is a wild dance, with a terror at its heart; to another, a majestic march of heavenly hosts, with Truth in their centre pointing their course, but as yet restraining her voice. The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.

I will go farther. —The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is—not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself. The best Nature does for us is to work in us such moods in which thoughts of high import arise. Does any aspect of Nature wake but one thought? Does she ever suggest only one definite thing? Does she make any two men in the same place at the same moment think the same thing? Is she therefore a failure, because she is not definite? Is it nothing that she rouses the something deeper than the understanding--the power that underlies thoughts? Does she not set feeling, and so thinking at work? Would it be better that she did this after one fashion and not after many fashions? Nature is mood-engendering, thought-provoking: such ought the sonata, such ought the fairytale to be.

"But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"

Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things; what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there! One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is a layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time things that came from thoughts beyond his own.

"But surely you would explain your idea to one who asked you?"

I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one. Any key to a work of imagination would be nearly, if not quite, as absurd. The tale is there not to hide, but to show: if it show nothing at your window, do not open your door to it; leave it out in the cold. To ask me to explain, is to say, "Roses! Boil them, or we won't have them!" My tales may not be roses but I will not boil them.

So long as I think my dog can bark, I will not sit up to bark for him.

If a writer's aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to be understood, but to escape being misunderstood; where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. Let fairytale of mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again. Caught in a hand which does not love its kind, it will turn to an insignificant ugly thing, that can neither flash nor fly.

The best way with music, I imagine, is not to bring the forces of our intellect to bear upon it, but to be still and let it work on that part of us for whose sake it exists. We spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed. He who will be a man, and will not be a child, must--he cannot help himself--become a little man, that is, a dwarf. He will, however need no consolation, for he is sure to think himself a very large creature indeed.

If any strain of my "broken music" make a child's eyes flash, or his mother's grow for a moment dim, my labour will not have been in vain.

Published in The Gifts of the Child Christ and Other Stories & Fairy Tales , edited by Glenn Edward Sadler. Available for purchase from Eighth Day Books.

George MacDonald

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 19:55:50 GMT

by C. S. Lewis

Feast of St Joel the Prophet

Anno Domini 2022, October 19

All that I know of George MacDonald I have learned either from his own books or from his biography ( George MacDonald and His Wife) which his son, Dr. Greville MacDonald, published in 1924; nor have I ever, but once, talked of him to anyone who had met him. For the very few facts which I am going to mention I am therefore entirely dependent on Dr. MacDonald

We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in character and errors in thought which result from a man’s early conflicts with his father. Far the most important thing we can know about George MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to reach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central.

His father appears to have been a remarkable man—a man hard, and tender, and humorous all at once, in the old fashion of Scotch Christianity. He had had his leg cut off above the knee in the days before chloroform, refusing the customary dose of preliminary whisky, and “only for one moment, when the knife first transfixed the flesh, did he turn his face away and ejaculate a faint, sibilant whiff .” He had quelled with a fantastic joke at his own expense an ugly riot in which he was being burned in effigy. He forbade his son to touch a saddle until he had learned to ride well without one. He advised him “to give over the fruitless game of poetry.” He asked from him, and obtained, a promise to renounce tobacco at the age of twenty-three. On the other hand he objected to grouse shooting on the score of cruelty and had in general a tenderness for animals not very usual among farmers more than a hundred years ago; and his son reports that he never, as boy or man, asked him for anything without getting what he asked. Doubtless this tells us as much about the son’s character as the father’s and should be taken in connection with our extract on prayer. “He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.” The theological maxim is rooted in the experiences of the author’s childhood. This is what may be called the “anti-Freudian predicament” in operation.

George MacDonald’s family (though hardly his father) were of course Calvinists. On the intellectual side his history is largely a history of escape from the theology in which he had been brought up. Stories of such emancipation are common in the nineteenth century; but George MacDonald’s story belongs to this familiar pattern only with a difference. In most such stories the emancipated person, not content with repudiating the doctrines, comes also to hate the persons, of his forebears, and even the whole culture and way of life with which they are associated. Thus books like The Way of All Flesh come to be written; and later generations, if they do not swallow the satire wholesale as history, at least excuse the author for a one-sidedness which a man in his circumstances could hardly have been expected to avoid. Of such personal resentment I find no trace in MacDonald. It is not we who have to find extenuating circumstances for his point of view. On the contrary, it is he himself, in the very midst of his intellectual revolt, who forces us, whether we will or no, to see elements of real and perhaps irreplaceable worth in the thing from which he is revolting.

All his life he continued to love the rock from which he had been hewn. All that is best in his novels carries us back to that “kaleyard” world of granite and heather, of bleaching greens beside burns that look as if they flowed not with water but with stout, to the thudding of wooden machinery, the oatcakes, the fresh milk, the pride, the poverty, and the passionate love of hard-won learning. His best characters are those which reveal how much real charity and spiritual wisdom can coexist with the profession of a theology that seems to encourage neither. His own grandmother, a truly terrible old woman who had burnt his uncle’s fiddle as a Satanic snare, might well have appeared to him as what is now (inaccurately) called “a mere sadist.” Yet when something very like her is delineated in Robert Falconer and again in What’s Mine’s Mine , we are compelled to look deeper—to see, inside the repellent crust, something that we can wholeheartedly pity and even, with reservations, respect. In this way MacDonald illustrates, not the doubtful maxim that to know all is to forgive all, but the unshakeable truth that to forgive is to know. He who loves, sees.

He was born in 1824 at Huntly in Aberdeenshire and entered King’s College at Aberdeen in 1840. In 1842 he spent some months in the North of Scotland cataloguing the library of a great house which has never been identified. I mention the fact because it made a lifelong impression on MacDonald. The image of a great house seen principally from the library and always through the eyes of a stranger or a dependent (even Mr. Vane in Lilith never seems at home in the library which is called his) haunts his books to the end. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the “great house in the North” was the scene of some important crisis or development in his life. Perhaps it was here that he first came under the influence of German Romanticism.

In 1850 he received what is technically known as a “Call” to become a Minister of a dissenting chapel in Arundel. By 1852 he was in trouble with the “deacons” for heresy, the charges being that he had expressed belief in a future state of probation for heathens and that he was tainted with German theology. The deacons took a roundabout method to be rid of him, by lowering his salary—it had been £150 a year and he was now married—in the hope that this would induce him to resign. But they had misjudged their man. MacDonald merely replied that this was bad enough news for him but that he supposed he must try to live on less. And for some time he continued to do so, often helped by the offerings of his poorest parishioners who did not share the views of the more prosperous Deacons. In 1853, however, the situation became impossible. He resigned and embarked on the career of lecturing, tutoring, occasional preaching, writing, and “odd jobs” which was his lot almost to the end. He died in 1905.

His lungs were diseased and his poverty was very great. Literal starvation was sometimes averted only by those last moment deliverances which agnostics attribute to chance and Christians to Providence. It is against this background of reiterated failure and incessant peril that some of the following extracts can be most profitably read. His resolute condemnations of anxiety come from one who has a right to speak; nor does their tone encourage the theory that they owe anything to the pathological wishful thinker—the spes phthisica —of the consumptive. None of the evidence suggests such a character. His peace of mind came not from building on the future but from resting in what he called “the holy Present.” His resignation to poverty (see Number 274 ) was at the opposite pole from that of the stoic. He appears to have been a sunny, playful man, deeply appreciative of all really beautiful and delicious things that money can buy, and no less deeply content to do without them. It is perhaps significant—it is certainly touching—that his chief recorded weakness was a Highland love of finery; and he was all his life hospitable as only the poor can be.

In making these extracts I have been concerned with MacDonald not as a writer but as a Christian teacher. If I were to deal with him as a writer, a man of letters, I should be faced with a difficult critical problem. If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly MacDonald has no place in its first rank—perhaps not even in its second. There are indeed passages, many of them in this collection, where the wisdom and (I would dare to call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even burn away the baser elements in his style: the expression becomes precise, weighty, economic; acquires a cutting edge. But he does not maintain this level for long. The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling. Bad pulpit traditions cling to it; there is sometimes a nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid ornament (it runs right through them from Dunbar to the Waverly Novels), sometimes an oversweetness picked up from Novalis. But this does not quite dispose of him even for the literary critic. What he does best is fantasy—fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art—the art of myth-making—is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version— whose words —are we thinking when we say this?

For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone’s words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told this story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident. What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all—say by a mime, or a film. And I find this to be true of all such stories. When I think of the story of the Argonauts and praise it, I am not praising Apollonius Rhodius (whom I never finished) nor Kingsley (whom I have forgotten) nor even Morris, though I consider his version a very pleasant poem. In this respect stories of the mythical type are at the opposite pole from lyrical poetry. If you try to take the “theme” of Keats’s Nightingale apart from the very words in which he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form and content can there be separated only by a false abstraction. But in a myth—in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters—this is not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, “done the trick.” After that you can throw the means of communication away. To be sure, if the means of communication are words, it is desirable that a letter which brings you important news should be fairly written. But this is only a minor convenience; for the letter will, in any case, go into the wastepaper basket as soon as you have mastered its contents, and the words (those of Lemprière would have done) are going to be forgotten as soon as you have mastered the Myth. In poetry the words are the body and the “theme” or “content” is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes—they are not much more than a telephone. Of this I had evidence some years ago when I first heard the story of Kafka’s Castle related in conversation and afterwards read the book for myself. The reading added nothing. I had already received the myth, which was all that mattered.

Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not consciously made by individuals at all. But every now and then there occurs in the modern world a genius—a Kafka or a Novalis—who can make such a story. MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know. But I do not know how to classify such genius. to call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory since it can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words—nay, since its connection with words at all turns out to be merely external and, in a sense, accidental. Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts. It begins to look as if there were an art, or a gift, which criticism has largely ignored. It may even be one of the greatest arts; for it produces works which give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged acquaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the works of the greatest poets. It is in some ways more akin to music than to poetry—or at least to most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt. It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and “possessed joys not promised to our birth.” It gets under out skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives.

It was in this mythopoeic art that MacDonald excelled. And from this it follows that his best art is least represented in this collection. The great works are Phantastes , the Curdie books, The Golden Key , The Wise Woman , and Lilith . From them, just because they are extremely good in their own kind, there is little to be extracted. The meaning, the suggestion, the radiance, is incarnate in the whole story: it is only by chance that you find any detachable merits. The novels, on the other hand, have yielded me a rich crop. This does not mean that they are good novels. Necessity made MacDonald a novelist, but few of his novels are good and none is very good. They are best when they depart most from the canons of novel writing, and that in two directions. Sometimes they depart in order to come nearer to fantasy, as in the whole character of the hero in Sir Gibbie or the opening chapters of Wilfred Cumbermede . Sometimes they diverge into direct and prolonged preachments which would be intolerable if a man were reading for the story, but which are in fact welcome because the author, though a poor novelist, is a supreme preacher. Some of his best things are thus hidden in his dullest books: my task here has been almost one of exhumation. I am speaking so far of the novels as I think they would appear if judged by any reasonably objective standard. But it is, no doubt, true that any reader who loves holiness and loves MacDonald—yet perhaps he will need to love Scotland too—can find even in the worst of them something that disarms criticism and will come to feel a queer, awkward charm in their very faults. (But that, of course, is what happens to us with all favorite authors.) One rarer, and all but unique, merit these novels must be allowed. The “good” characters are always the best and most convincing. His saints live; his villains are stagey.

This collection, as I have said, was designed not to revive MacDonald’s literary reputation but to spread his religious teaching. Hence most of my extracts are taken from three volumes of Unspoken Sermons . My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help—sometimes indispensable help toward the very acceptance of the Christian faith.

I will attempt no historical or theological classification of MacDonald’s thought, partly because I have not the learning to do so, still more because I am no great friend to such pigeonholing. One very effective way of silencing the voice of conscience is to impound in an Ism the teacher through whom it speaks: the trumpet no longer seriously disturbs our rest when we have murmured “Thomist,” “Barthian,” or “Existentialist.” And in MacDonald it is always the voice of conscience that speaks. He addresses the will: the demand for obedience, for “something to be neither more nor less nor other than done” is incessant. Yet in that very voice of conscience every other faculty somehow speaks as well—intellect, and imagination, and humor, and fancy, and all the affections; and no man in modern times was perhaps more aware of the distinction between Law and Gospel, the inevitable failure of mere morality. The Divine Sonship is the key-conception which unites all the different elements of his thought. I dare not say that he is never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence his Christlike union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined. The title “Inexorable Love” which I have given to several individual extracts would serve for the whole collection. Inexorability—but never the inexorability of anything less than love—runs through it like a refrain; “escape is hopeless”—“agree quickly with your adversary”—“compulsion waits behind”—“the uttermost farthing will be exacted.” yet this urgency never becomes shrill. All the sermons are suffused with a spirit of love and wonder which prevents it from doing so. MacDonald shows God threatening, but (as Jeremy Taylor says) “He threatens terrible things if we will not be happy.”

In many respects MacDonald’s thought has, in a high degree, just those excellences which his period and his personal history would lead us to expect least. A romantic, escaping from a drily intellectual theology, might easily be betrayed into valuing mere emotion and “religious experience” too highly: but in fact few nineteenth-century writers are more firmly catholic in relegating feeling to its proper place. (See Numbers 1, 27, 28, 39, 351 .) His whole philosophy of Nature ( Numbers 52, 67, 150, 151, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 285 ) with its resolute insistence on the concrete, owes little to the thought of an age which hovered between mechanism and idealism; he would obviously have been more at home with Professor Whitehead than with Herbert Spencer or T. H. Green. Number 285 seems to me particularly admirable. All romantics are vividly aware of mutability, but most of them are content to bewail it: for MacDonald this nostalgia is merely the starting point—he goes on and discovers what it is made for. His psychology also is worth noticing: he is quite as well aware as the moderns that the conscious self, the thing revealed by introspection, is a superficies. Hence the cellars and attics of the King’s castle in The Princess and the Goblins , and the terror of his own house which falls upon Mr. Vane in Lilith : hence also his formidable critique ( 201 ) of our daily assumptions about the self. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the function—a low and primitive, yet often indispensable function—which he allows to Fear in the spiritual life ( Numbers 3, 5, 6, 7, 137, 142, 143, 349 ). Reaction against early teachings might on this point have very easily driven him into a shallow liberalism. But it does not. He hopes, indeed, that all men will be saved; but that is because he hopes that all will repent. He knows (none better) that even omnipotence cannot save the unconverted. He never trifles with eternal impossibilities. He is as golden and genial as Traherne; but also as astringent as the Imitation .

So at least I have found him. In making this collection I was discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the affiliation. Honesty drives me to emphasize it. And even if honesty did not—well, I am a don, and “source-hunting” ( Quellenforschung ) is perhaps in my marrow. It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought—almost unwillingly, for I had looked at the volume on that bookstall and rejected it on a dozen previous occasions—the Everyman edition of Phantastes . A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist-deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. Now Phantastes was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was. I was only aware that if this new world was strange, it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later and with the help of many other books and men. But when the process was complete—by which, of course, I mean “when it had really begun”—I found that I was still with MacDonald and that he had accompanied me all the way and that I was now at last ready to hear from him much that he could not have told me at that first meeting. But in a sense, what he was now telling me was the very same question that he had told me from the beginning. There was no question of getting through to the kernel and throwing away the shell: no question of a gilded pill. The pill was gold all through. The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live. I should have been shocked in my teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was goodness. But now that I know, I see there was no deception. the deception is all the other way round—in that prosaic moralism which confines goodness to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the sweet air blowing from “the land of righteousness,” never reveals that elusive Form which if once seen must inevitably be desired with all but sensuous desire—the thing (in Sappho’s phrase) “more gold than gold.”

It is no part of my aim to produce a critical text of MacDonald. Apart from my unconscious errors in transcription, I have “tampered” in two ways. The whole difficulty of making extracts is to leave the sense perfectly clear while not retaining anything you do not want. In attempting to do so, I have sometimes interpolated a word (always enclosed in brackets) and sometimes altered the punctuation. I have also introduced a capital H for pronouns that refer to God, which the printer, in some of my originals, did not employ; not because I consider this typographical reverence of much importance, but because, in a language where pronouns are so easily confused as they are in English, it seems foolish to reject such an aid to clarity.

Preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology – 365 Readings (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), pp. xxiii-xxxix. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

The Function of Fear

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 18:49:52 GMT

by George MacDonald

Feast of St Cosmas the Hagiopolite

Anno Domini 2022, October 14

#3: Divine Burning

He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakable may remain: He is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God.

#5: The Unawakened

Can it be any comfort to them to be told that God loves them so that He will burn them clean? … They do not want to be clean, and they cannot bear to be tortured.

#6: Sinai

And is not God ready to do unto them even as they fear, though with another feeling and a different end from any which they are capable of supposing? He is against sin: insofar as, and while, they and sin are one, He is against them—against their desires, their aims, their fears, and their hopes; and thus He is altogether and always for them . That thunder and lightning and tempest, that blackness torn with the sound of a trumpet, that visible horror billowed with the voice of words, was all but a faint image … of what God thinks and feels against vileness and selfishness, of the unrest of unassuageable repulsion with which He regards such conditions.

#7: No

When we say that God is Love, do we teach men that their fear of Him is groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more…. The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear.

#137: Perseverance

To believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream: to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for Godless repose:—these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength, strength but a form of joy, joy but a form of love.

#142: The Beginning of Wisdom

Naturally the first emotion of man toward the being he calls God, but of whom he knows so little, is fear. Where it is possible that fear should exist, it is well it should exist, cause continual uneasiness, and be cast out by nothing less than love…. Until love, which is the truth toward God, is able to cast out far, it is well that fear should hold; it is a bond, however poor, between that which is and That which creates—a bond that must be broken, but a bond that can be broken only by the tightening of an infinitely close bond. Verily God must be terrible to those that are far from Him: for they fear He will do, yea, He is doing with them what they do not, cannot desire, and can ill endure.

#143: “Peace in Our Time”

While they are such as they are, there is much in Him that cannot but affright them: they ought, they do well, to fear, Him…. To remove that fear from their hearts, save by letting them know His love with its purifying fire, a love which for ages, it may be, they cannot know, would be to give them up utterly to the power of evil. Persuade men that fear is a vile thing, that it is an insult to God, that He will none of it—while they are yet in love with their own will, and slaves to every movement of passionate impulse, and what will the consequence be? That they will insult God as a discarded idol, a superstition, a falsehood, as a thing under whose vile influence they have too long groaned, a thing to be cast out and spit upon. After that how much will they learn of Him?

#349: Fear

Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure.

From C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology – 365 Readings (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books .

On Having One's Own Way

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 18:35:14 GMT

by George MacDonald

Feast of St Cosmas the Hagiopolite

Anno Domini 2022, October 14

#201: On Having One’s Own Way

The liberty of the God who would have his creatures free, is in contest with the slavery of the creature who would cut his own stem from his root that he might call it his own and love it; who rejoices in his own consciousness, instead of the life of that consciousness; who poises himself on the tottering wall of his own being, instead of the rock on which that being is built. Such a one regards his own dominion over himself—the rule of the greater by the less—as a freedom infinitely larger than the range of the universe of God’s being. If he says, “At least I have it in my own way!”, I answer, you do not know what is your way and what is not. You know nothing of whence your impulses, your desires, your tendencies, your likings come. They may spring now from some chance, as of nerves diseased; now from some roar of a wandering bodiless devil; now from some infant hate in your heart; now from the greed of lawlessness of some ancestor you would be ashamed of if you knew him; or, it may be now from some far-piercing chord of a heavenly orchestra: the moment comes up into your consciousness, you call it your own way, and glory in it.

From C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology – 365 Readings (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). Available for purchase from Eighth Day Books .

On Nature

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 18:25:53 GMT

by George MacDonald

Feast of St Cosmas the Hagiopolite

Anno Domini 2022, October 14

#52: The Body

It is by the body that we come into contact with Nature, with our fellowmen, with all their revelations to us. It is through the body that we receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of beauty, of science. It is through the body that we are both trained outward from ourselves, and driven inward into our deepest selves to find God. There is glory and might in this vital evanescence, this slow glacierlike flow of clothing and revealing matter, this ever uptossed rainbow of tangible humanity. It is no less of God’s making than the spirit that is clothed therein.

#67: Things

The man who for consciousness of well-being depends upon anything but life, the life essential, is a slave; he hangs on what is less than himself…. Things are given us—this body, first of things—that through them we may be trained both to independence and true possession of them. We must possess them; they must not possess us. Their use is to mediate—as shapes and manifestations in lower kind of the things that are unseen, that is, in themselves unseeable, the things that belong, not to the world of showing, but the world of being, the world that cannot be shaken, and must remain. These things unseen take the form in the things of time and space—not that they may exist, for they exist in and from eternal Godhead, but that their being may be known to those in training for the eternal; these things unseen the sons and daughters of God must possess. But instead of reaching out after them, they grasp at their forms, regard the things seen as the things to be possessed, fall in love with the bodies instead of the souls in them.

#150: Nature

In what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most , for their show is the face of far deeper things than they…. It is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of them. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it—just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work. The body of man does not exist for the sake of its hidden secrets; its hidden secrets exist for the sake of its outside—for the face and the form in which dwells revelation: its outside is the deepest of it. So Nature as well exists primarily for her face, her look, her appeals to the heart and the imagination, her simple service to human need, and not for the secrets to be discovered in her and turned to man’s further use.

#151: The Same

By an infinite decomposition we should know nothing more of what a thing really is, for, the moment we decompose it, it ceases to be, and all its meaning is vanished. Infinitely more than astronomy, even, which destroys nothing, can do for us, is done by the mere aspect and changes of the vault over our heads. Think for a moment what would be our idea of greatness, of God, of infinitude, of aspiration, if, instead of a blue, far withdrawn, light-spangled firmament, we were born and reared under a flat white ceiling! I would not be supposed to depreciate the labors of science, but I say its discoveries are unspeakably less precious than the merest gifts of Nature, those which, from morning to night, we take unthinking from her hands. One day, I trust, we shall be able to enter into their secrets from within them—by natural contact…

#184: The Uses of Nature

What notion should we have of the unchanging and unchangeable, without the solidarity of matter? … How should we imagine what we may of God without the firmament over our heads, a visible sphere, yet a formless infinitude? What idea could we have of God without the sky?

#185: Natural Science

Human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God’s science, works with its back to Him, and is always leaving Him—His intent, that is, His perfected work—behind it, always going farther and farther away from the point where His work culminates in revelation.

#187: Nature

The truth of the flower is, not the facts about it, be they correct as ideal science itself, but the shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk—the compeller of smile and tear…. The idea of God is the flower: His idea is not the botany of the flower. Its botany is but a thing of ways and means—of canvas and color and brush in relation to the picture in the painter’s brain.

#188: Water

Is oxygen-and-hydrogen the divine idea of water? God put the two together only that man might separate and find them out? He allows His child to pull his toys to pieces: but were they made that he might pull them to pieces? He were a child not to be envied for whom his inglorious father would make toys to such an end! A school examiner might see therein the best use of a toy, but not a father! Find for us what in the constitution of the two gases makes them fit and capable to be thus honored in forming the lovely thing, and you will give us a revelation about more than water, namely about the God who made oxygen and hydrogen. There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen; it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyze. The water itself, that dances and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst—symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus—this lovely thing itself, whose very witness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace—this live thing which, if I might, I would have running through my room, yea, babbling along my table—this water is its own self its own truth, and is therein a truth of God. Let him who would know the truth of the Maker, become sorely athirst, and drink of the brook by the way—then lift up his heart—not at that moment to the Maker of oxygen and hydrogen, but to the Inventor and Mediator of thirst and water, that man might foresee a little of what his soul might find in God.

#189: Truth of Things

The truth of a thing , then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man’s imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing.

#285: Nature

If the flowers were not perishable, we should cease to contemplate their beauty, either blinded by the passion for hoarding the bodies of them, or dulled by the hebetude of commonplaceness that the constant presence of them would occasion. To compare great things with small, the flowers wither, the bubbles break, the clouds and sunsets pass, for the very same holy reason (in the degree of its application to them) for which the Lord withdrew from His disciples and ascended again to His Father—that the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, the Soul of things, might come to them and abide with them, and so, the Son return, and the Father be revealed. The flower is not its loveliness, and its loveliness we must love, else we shall only treat them as flower-greedy children, who gather and gather, and fill hands and baskets from a mere desire of acquisition.

From C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology – 365 Readings (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books .

On Feelings

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 18:00:47 GMT

by George MacDonald

Feast of the Holy Martyrs Nazarius, Gervasius, Protasius, & Celsus

Anno Domini 2022, October 14

#1: Dryness

That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge.”

#27: Religious Feeling

In the higher aspect of this first temptation, arising from the fact that a man cannot feel the things he believes except under certain conditions of physical well-being dependent upon food, the answer is the same: A man does not live by his feelings any more than by bread.

#28: Dryness

And when he can no longer feel the truth, he shall not therefore die. He lives because God is true; and he is able to know that he lives because he knows, having once understood the word that God is truth. He believes in the God of former vision, lives by that word therefore, when all is dark and there is no vision.

#39: Troubled Soul

Troubled soul, thou are not bound to feel but thou art bound to arise. God loves thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when thou wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last. Try not to feel good when thou art not good, but cry to Him who is good. He changes not because thou changest. Nay, He has an especial tenderness of love toward thee for that thou art in the dark and hast no light, and His heart is glad when thou doest arise and say, “I will go to my Father.” … Fold the arms of thy faith, and wait in the quietness until light goes up in thy darkness. For the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee of something that thou oughtest to do, and go to do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. Heed not thy feeling: Do thy work.

#351: Two Silly Young Women

They had a feeling, or a feeling had them, till another feeling came and took its place. When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go; when it was gone they felt as if it had never been; when it returned, they felt as if it had never gone.

From C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology – 365 Readings (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books .

Contentment by George MacDonald

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 17:20:27 GMT

Let me, if I may, be ever welcomed to my room in winter by a glowing hearth, in summer by a vase of flowers; if I may not, let me think how nice they would be, and bury myself in my work. I do not think that the road to contentment lies in despising what we have not got. Let us acknowledge all good, all delight that the world holds, and be content without it.

The Task of Philosophy by Martin Heidegger

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 20:24:43 GMT

In our contemporary history, the words of Marx have never been more relevant; he tells us that the task of philosophy can no longer be to explain the world but to change it. If we wish to change the world, however, we must know to what end we would change it, and that, in turn, only philosophy can tell us.

Cultural Renewal: The Nature of Our Mission

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 21:37:45 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Polychronios the Martyr

Anno Domini 2022, October 7

One PERSON (St Paul) led to conversion of three PERSONS (a business woman from Asia Minor, a slave girl who was a professional fortuneteller, and Paul’s jailer), which led to the conversion of a CONTINENT (Europe), which led to the conversion of a CIVILIZATION (Western Civ).

Western man and the Western way of life is the fruit of Christian culture. Unfortunately, that fruit (i.e., Western Christian culture) is in decay. And I agree with the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson who says we must admit it’s our own fault because we have not been faithful to that Christian tradition. It is thus our duty to renew that tradition. To do so, each and every one of us must daily make decisions that will contribute to either the renewal or the degeneration of Christian culture. Listen to Dawson:

the fate of nations and civilizations must always be found in the heart of man and in the hand of God. There is no limit to the efficacy of faith and to the influence of these acts of spiritual decision which are ultimately the response of particular men to God’s call, as revealed in particular historical and personal circumstances.

…It is a commonplace to say that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, yet what we are asserting is simply that individual acts of spiritual decision ultimately bear social fruit.

For the great cultural changes and the historic revolutions that decide the fate of nations or the character of an age are the cumulative result of a number of spiritual decisions—the faith and insight, or the refusal and blindness, of individuals. No one can put his finger on the ultimate spiritual act which tilts the balance and makes the external order of society assume a new form. In this sense we may adapt Burke’s saying and assert that the prayer of some unknown Christian or some unrecognized and unadmitted act of spiritual surrender may change the face of the world.

So cultural renewal depends on the spiritual decisions of individuals. It depends on people like the recipients of the St. John of Damascus Award: Warren Farha (Orthodox), Christian Kettler (Protestant), and Jeri Holladay (Catholic). And it depends on people like me and you.

But cultural renewal also takes time…a LONG TIME. If we are serious about cultural renewal we have to be committed to the long haul. It’s going to require perseverance, fortitude, patience, persistence, sacrifice…qualities embodied by our SJDA recipients, qualities we too must embrace and embody.

Finally, cultural renewal requires a commitment to the life of the mind. Listen to Dawson again (this was written in 1960!):

The return from a secular civilization to a Christian way of life no doubt involves a reversal of many historical forces that transcend the limits not only of our personal experience but even of our particular society. But in spite of the modern totalitarian tendency to control the development of culture by the external methods of legislation and international organization and the control of parties and political police, it is still the individual mind that is the creative force which determines the ultimate fate of cultures. And the first step in the transformation of culture is a change in the pattern of culture within the mind, for this is the seed out of which there spring new forms of life which ultimately change the social way of life and thus create a new culture.

I occasionally receive feedback suggesting EDI is too intellectual or academic. If Christopher Dawson is correct in suggesting that the “mind is the creative force which determines the fate of cultures,” and I believe he is, then the fulfillment of our mission to renew culture actually depends upon our “intellectual” or “academic” work.

Let me end by repeating Dawson’s last sentence: “The first step in the transformation of culture is a change in the pattern of culture within the mind…” So again, if we agree with Dawson, cultural renewal begins with a transformation of the mind. This is exactly what St. Paul says in his epistle to the Romans (12:2): “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

This is the mission that the life and work of the St. John of Damascus Award recipients have embodied. This is the mission that your life and work must embody. This is the mission of Eighth Day Institute. And it’s our goal to help you fulfill that mission.

Will you help us fulfill our mission? Our fall campaign goal is to recruit 100 new members as a first huge step toward our 10-year goal of 1,000 new members...all toward the end of hiring more staff so we can more effectively fulfill our vital mission of renewing culture through faith and learning.

If you’re not yet a member, will you please consider joining the community today ?

If you’re already a member, thank you so much for your support. Will you please help us recruit new members. We’d surpass our fall goal if each of you would heed our campaign motto for members: “every member recruit a member!”

This is a very short, adapted version of a speech Erin Doom presented at the 2022 St. John of Damascus Award ceremony honoring Jeri Holladay. You can read the full presentation here .

On Cultural Renewal: Director's Address at 2022 St John of Damascus Award

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 21:28:16 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Polychronios the Martyr

Anno Domini 2022, October 7

Before presenting the third annual St. John of Damascus Award (SJDA), I’d like to say a few words about St. John of Damascus—you really should know who he is and why we named this award after him. I’d also like to briefly turn to two Catholics who have been important to me as I continuously—maybe better put, obsessively—reflect on the EDI mission of “cultural renewal.”

Let me prepare the introduction to St. John of Damascus with an expression from the first Catholic. Charles Taylor is an immensely important and prolific philosopher. It’s in his grand magnum opus, A Secular Age , that we encounter an important expression: “impersonal order.” This is one of the numerous ways he describes the world in which we live today. Our secular age is characterized by an “impersonal order.” And this flies in the face of the historic Christian tradition.

Christianity is a religion of persons, beginning with the Trinity. This is what the early Church, especially the Cappadocians (St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. Gregory of Nyssa), hammered out theologically in the fourth century. We worship a Triune God who is three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These three persons are in eternal communion. And we are made in their image. That is to say, we are created to be persons in communion.

One of our past Symposium speakers, James K. A. Smith, correctly placed memory at the heart of the Eighth Day mission to renew culture. Memory is vital for cultural renewal. And memory is integral to the Christian tradition. It’s why the church celebrates the lives of the saints. We remember them to spur us on in our faith.

I want to supplement that emphasis on memory by arguing that personhood—persons in communion—is just as central to our mission of renewing culture.

It’s why we have an image of Jesus here. It’s why we also have an image here of His mother, the Theotokos (literally “Bearer of God,” i.e., the Virgin Mary). It’s why we have an image of St. John of Damascus. It’s why we have an image of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea.

And it’s why we have an image of the Holy Trinity (based on the O.T. story of the hospitality of Abraham).

It’s at the heart of almost everything we do at Eighth Day Institute: remembering our faith and its history, remembering the heroes of our faith, remembering PERSONS.

And it’s why this evening we are honoring the PERSON of Jerillyn Holladay.

Now, who was the person of St. John of Damascus. He’s one of my great heroes. He’s my patron saint. He’s the patron saint of EDI. You can learn a bit more about him in this handout. Let me here just say four quick things about this 8th century Damascene monk, two of them directly from this "About" page on our website :

He was a true philosopher. A philosopher, according to the Greek etymology, is one who loves wisdom. And according to St. John, true wisdom is God. Therefore, he concludes, the true philosopher is the one who loves God.
He was also a true theologian. This is based on a definition offered by the 4th century desert father Evagrius Ponticus: “A true theologian is one who prays, and one who truly prays is a theologian.”
He was the great defender of icons. He defended the color painted representation of PERSONS: the PERSON of Christ, the PERSON of the Theotokos, and the PERSONHOOD of all the saints. There are many books to recommend on St. John of Damascus, but his Three Treatises on the Divine Images is a great place to start…after reading the handout, of course!
Finally, he embodies EDI’s mission of cultural renewal. More specifically, he embodies Fr. George Florovsky’s call for a Neopatristic Synthesis. By that, we mean a return to the early Church Fathers as a way to creatively and ecumenically engage the pressing issues of our secular age.

And that leads me to the second Catholic influence on me, the historian Christopher Dawson.

I was somehow introduced to him during work on my Masters degree at WSU. I only know this because I recently found a paper I wrote about Dawson for that degree. At the time I was working at Eighth Day Books so I’m guessing I should be thanking Warren Farha for introducing me to him.

Dawson’s 1960 book T he Historic Reality of Christian Culture: A Way to the Renewal of Human Life should be read by all Christians. But alas, it’s been long out of print (and used copies are rare and not inexpensive). The remainder of this reflection will simply be several passages from the first chapter of this important book.

Early in the first chapter, Dawson discusses the complexity and profundity of the first introduction of the Christian faith in Europe:

When St. Paul sailed from Troy in obedience to a dream and came to Philippi in Macedonia, he did more to change the course of history and the future of European culture than the great battle which had decided the fate of the Roman Empire on the same spot more than ninety years before. Yet nothing that he did was notable or even visible from the standpoint of contemporary culture. He incurred the hostility of the mob, he was sent to prison and he made at least three converts: a business woman from Asia Minor, a slave girl who was a professional fortuneteller, and his jailer. These were the first European Christians—the forerunners of uncounted millions who have regarded the Christian faith as the standard of their European way of life.

All this took place, as it were, underneath the surface of culture. The only people who seem to have realized the importance of what was happening were the half-crazed slave girl and the hostile mob at Philippi and Salonica, the riffraff of the market place, who attacked St. Paul as a revolutionary, one who turned the world upside down and taught there was another king than Caesar—one Jesus (p. 15).

So one PERSON led to conversion of three PERSONS which led to the conversion of a CONTINENT which led to the conversion of a CIVILIZATION!

Dawson next compares modern culture to the ancient Roman world and then addresses the loss of Christian culture, for which he argues we bear the blame and have a duty to overcome…a duty that echoes the mission of EDI:

The Roman world was living in the tradition of the pagan past, and Christianity came to it as a new revelation and the promise of new life. But today it is Christianity that seems to many a thing of the past, part of the vanishing order of the old Europe, and the new powers that are shaping the world are non-Christian or even anti-Christian.

It is no wonder that the conscience of Christians is uneasy. On the one hand there are those who still retain an internal bond with the Christian culture of the past, and a deep love and reverence for it; and in that case they must feel that something in the nature of a national apostasy has occurred and that they bear some share of the guilt. And on the other hand there are those who have lost contact with that social tradition and who know only the new secularized world. These are likely to feel that the Christian culture of the past failed because it was not really Christian and that it is for us and our successors to discover or create for the first time a new way of life that will be truly Christian.

I believe both these points of view are fundamentally true. They represent the two aspects of the problem of Christian culture in our time, and they are wrong only in so far as they are one-sided. I do not think it is possible to deny the fact of Christian culture, as an objective social reality. It is hardly too much to say that it is Christian culture that has created Western man and the Western way of life. But at the same time we must admit that Western man has not been faithful to this Christian tradition. He has abandoned it not once, but again and again. For since Christianity depends on a living faith and not merely on social tradition, Christendom must be renewed in every fresh generation, and every generation is faced by the responsibility of making decisions, each of which may be an act of Christian faith or an act of apostasy (pp. 16-17).

So we must acknowledge that we’ve not been faithful to the Christian tradition, that we have repeatedly abandoned it. This is precisely why we find ourselves in a decadent culture. And it’s our duty to renew that tradition. To do so, EACH OF US MUST MAKE DECISIONS, decisions that will contribute to either the renewal or the degeneration of Christian culture.

In Dawson’s words elsewhere, “The spiritual achievement of today finds its social expression in the cultural achievements of tomorrow, while today’s culture is inspired by the spiritual achievement of yesterday or the day before (15).… The creative activity which is the essence of the Christian life takes place far below the surface of culture; and the same thing is true of the spiritual failures and apostasies which are the other side of the picture (17).”

Now, my favorite part:

But to the Christian the hidden principle of the life of culture and the fate of nations and civilizations must always be found in the heart of man and in the hand of God . There is no limit to the efficacy of faith and to the influence of these acts of spiritual decision which are ultimately the response of particular men to God’s call, as revealed in particular historical and personal circumstances. Burke wrote very truly and finely that the so-called laws of history which attempt to subordinate the future to some kind of historical determinism are but the artificial combinations of the human mind. There always remains an irreducible element of mystery. “A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn have changed the face of the future and almost of Nature.”

But to Christians the mystery of history is not completely dark, since it is a veil which only partially conceals the creative activity of spiritual forces and the operation of spiritual laws. It is a commonplace to say that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, yet what we are asserting is simply that individual acts of spiritual decision ultimately bear social fruit . We admit that in the case of the Church and we have admitted it so long that it has become a platitude. But we do not for the most part realize that it is equally true in the case of culture and history.

No doubt any great change of culture, like the conversion of the Roman world or the secularization of Western Christendom, is a process that extends over centuries and involves an immense variety of different factors which may belong to different planes of spiritual reality (pp. 18-19).

So cultural renewal depends on individuals, on PERSONS. It depends on people like the recipients of the St. John of Damascus Award: Warren Farha (Orthodox), Christian Kettler (Protestant), and now Jeri Holladay (Catholic). And it depends on people like me and you. It depends on each and every one of our “individual acts of spiritual decision” which will undoubtedly bear fruit in some fashion sometime in the unknown future. It will be the “cumulative result” of all of our “spiritual decisions—the faith and insight, or the refusal and blindness” of individual PERSONS.

But cultural renewal also takes TIME…a LONG TIME. If we are serious about cultural renewal we have to be committed to the long haul. It’s going to require fortitude, persistence, patience…qualities embodied by our SJDA recipients, qualities we too must embrace and embody.

Cultural renewal also requires a commitment to the life of the mind. Let me finish with one last paragraph from Dawson (remember, this was written in 1960!):

Let me re-read that last sentence: “The first step in the transformation of culture is a change in the pattern of culture within the mind , for THIS IS THE SEED out of which there spring new forms of life which ultimately change the social way of life and thus create a new culture.”

According to Dawson, a change in the pattern of culture within the mind leads to cultural renewal. This is exactly what St. Paul says in his epistle to the Romans (12:2): “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

This is the mission of EDI. And this is the mission that the life and work of Jeri Holladay has embodied.

Now for the AWARD…with my toast.

I met Jeri at EDB, of course!!!

While peddling books from behind the counter at EDB, I was also formulating and peddling the ideas that would give flesh to what is now EDI.

And like so many other friends I made from behind that counter, Jeri had to listen to me constantly—obsessively—talking about a gap-year program, about a return to the Fathers, about cultural renewal.

We hit it off from the beginning…two minds passionate about theology, the Fathers, and the pursuit of God, or in the words of one of Jean Leclercq’s book titles, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God —it happens to be available for purchase at Eighth Day Books .

And so she’s been alongside me for the entire ride of the evolution of EDI.

She was a part of the creation of EDI, serving as a founding board member back in 2008.

She had a key role in the formulation of our original bylaws…she founded the Gerber Institute and that experience gave her important insights into how we should shape our organization to protect it from the slippery forces of modernity.

She was SO important for our annual Eighth Day Symposium. She served on the committee that made it happen and helped us come up with so many of the speakers and themes. To this day she continues to be a sounding board for me in the planning of both the Symposium and Ad Fontes.

She’s also been one of the more prolific contributors to our Eighth Day blogs. When I searched for her reflections on our current website I was surprised by how few of them there were. I knew she had contributed more. After some digging, sure enough, there were more on our old website that have yet to be transferred. Out of the nine posts I have from Jeri, eight of them are biblical reflections. I’ll work on getting those onto the current site and at some point in the near future will send them to Eighth Day Members.

Jeri is a dear friend and I’m extremely honored to be able to present her with this third annual St. John of Damascus Award.

Come on up Jeri so I can present you the award! Let’s all raise our glasses to Jeri:

My toast to you is this banquet, this icon of St. John of Damascus, this plaque with a passage from St. John of Damascus that describes you and your work.

To Jeri Holladay, my friend, the “Prayerful & Faithful,” and based on those eight biblical reflections, I want to add “Biblical”—to my “Prayerful, Faithful, and Biblical Theologian & Friend.”

Cheers!

Walking

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 19:48:33 GMT

by Henry David Throeau

Feast of St Gregory the Illuminator, Bishop of Armenia

Anno Domini 2022, September 30

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering : which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre ,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer ,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The Chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker—not the Knight, but Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit . Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.

“When he came to grene wode,
In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngynge.

“It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
That I was last here;
Me Lyste a lytell for to shote
At the donne dere.”

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago. I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for—I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one’s self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing—and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours—as the swinging of dumbbells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man’s swinging dumbbells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough—that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. “They planted groves and walks of Platanes,” where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works—for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveler thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great road—follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs—a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa which together with via , a way, or more anciently ved and vella , Varro derives from veho , to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere . Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain . This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town.

the old marlborough road
Where they once dug for money,
But never found any;
Where sometimes Martial Miles
Singly files,
And Elijah Wood,
I fear for no good:
No other man,
Save Elisha Dugan—
O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits
Who hast no cares
Only to set snares,
Who liv’st all alone,
Close to the bone
And where life is sweetest

Constantly eatest.
When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to travel,
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.

Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it;
It is a living way,
As the Christians say.
Not many there be
Who enter therein,
Only the guests of the
Irishman Quin.

What is it, what is it
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?

Great guide-boards of stone,
But travellers none;
Cenotaphs of the towns
Named on their crowns.
It is worth going to see
Where you might be.
What king
Did the thing,
I am still wondering;
Set up how or when,
By what selectmen,
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
They’re a great endeavor
To be something forever;
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveller might groan,
And in one sentence
Grave all that is known
Which another might read,
In his extreme need.

I know one or two
Lines that would do,
Literature that might stand
All over the land
Which a man could remember
Till next December,
And read again in the spring,
After the thawing.

If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode
You may go round the world
By the Old Marlborough Road.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle—varies a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. “The world ends there,” say they; “beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea.” It is unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds—which, in some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead—that something like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails—affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that disturbance into account.

“Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.”

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar,

“And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.” Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther—farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says—“As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World.... The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant.” When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, “then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” So far Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger Michaux, in his “Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,” says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, “‘From what part of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.”

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente frux . From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of Canada, tells us that “in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.... The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader.” This statement will do at least to set against Buffon’s account of this part of the world and its productions.

Linnaeus said long ago, “Nescio quae facies laeta, glabra plantis Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of American plants”; and I think that in this country there are no, or at most very few, Africanae bestiae , African beasts, as the Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the center of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveler can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on man—as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky—our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains—our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveler something, he knows not what, of laeta and glabra , of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say—

“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the river in the light of today, and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff—still thinking more of the future than of the past or present—I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic age itself , though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce or arbor vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughterhouse pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure—as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush, to which I would migrate—wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper’s coat emits the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the merchant’s or the scholar’s garments. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants’ exchanges and libraries rather.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man—a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields.”

Ben Jonson exclaims—

“How near to good is what is fair!”

So I would say—

“How near to good is what is wild !”

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog—a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda ( Cassandra calyculata ) which cover these tender places on the earth’s surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there—the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora—all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even graveled walks—to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that meager assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my front yard? It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveler Burton says of it—“Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.... In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.” They who have been travelling long on the steppes of Tartary say—“On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.” When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest woods the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum . There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood covers the virgin mould—and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibers of men’s thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness—and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilized nations—Greece, Rome, England—have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American “to work the virgin soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.” I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions—“Leave all hope, ye that enter,”—that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian’s cornfield into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with plow and spade.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in “Hamlet” and the “Iliad,” in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the mallard—thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself—and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets—Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakspeare, included—breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green-wood—her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library—ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent—others merely sensible , as the phrase is—others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.” The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights—any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes—already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud Whoa ! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried, “Whoa!” to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says—“The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put.

When looking over a list of men’s names in a foreign language, as of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child’s rigmarole— Iery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, as cheap and meaningless as Bose and Tray , the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called “Buster” by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travelers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.

Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niépce, a Frenchman, discovered “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect—that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal, “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe.” But he observed that “those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them.” Hence it has been inferred that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge— Gramática parda , tawny grammar—a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers—for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes—Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: ‘Ως τì νοών, ου κείνον νοήσεις—“You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law-maker. “That is active duty,” says the Vishnu Purana, “which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist.”

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories, how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others, appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more to to live for, ay, and to die for, than they have commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without his hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return.

“Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveller of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?”

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Kόσμος, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me—to whom the sun was servant—who had not gone into society in the village—who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor—notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum—as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste—sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts , those gra-a-ate men you hear of!

We hug the earth—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me—it was near the end of June—on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets—for it was court-week—and to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thoughts. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament—the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early, and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world—healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at any rate,”—and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before—where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.

The month after his death from tuberculosis, in May 1862, The Atlantic published “Walking,” one of his most famous essays, which extolled the virtues of immersing oneself in nature and lamented the inevitable encroachment of private ownership upon the wilderness.

Of Roe and Rage

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 20:08:01 GMT

by Fr Paul O'Callaghan

Feast of the Seven Holy Youths of Ephesus

Anno Domini 2022, August 4

It has been an eventful session at the Supreme Court. Among other decisions, many of us were surprised to see Roe v. Wade reversed. We shouldn’t have been.

It is difficult to find a more glaring example of bad jurisprudence and garbled reasoning than the Roe v. Wade ruling—with its preposterous finding that the U.S. Constitution guarantees a woman’s right to kill her pre-born child—other than the Dred Scott decision.

If you haven’t read Roe v. Wade, I encourage you to do so. You can read it here . You’ll know what I mean.

But Roe v. Wade didn’t stand alone. It was one of a long chain of Supreme Court decisions that discovered novel rights and imposed prohibitions against laws and practices that had stood in some cases for centuries.

For example, at one point every state in the Union had laws forbidding abortion. Only a few years ago, no state permitted same-sex marriage. But then voila—a right to such is found in the Constitution.

What you can’t legislate—adjudicate.

This has been the successful strategy of the secular Left for over a half century. This is the reason we hear cries these days to pack the Supreme Court. In that point of view, the task of the Court is not to interpret the constitution fairly, rationally, and impartially. It is to advance the Leftist agenda.

Look back at the track record.

1962 : School prayer forbidden—a practice that had been a commonplace for 170 years.

1963 : Bible reading in schools forbidden.

1965 : A right to practice contraception was discovered in the Constitution and state laws forbidding it were struck down.

1973 : Roe v. Wade.

1985 : The Court struck down an Alabama law providing for a minute of meditation or personal prayer at the beginning of the school day.

1992 : The Court forbade clergy led prayer at school commencement exercises.

2000 : The Court forbade student-led prayer at football games.

2002 : The court struck down existing state laws forbidding same sex relations.

2015 : The Court discovered a right to same-sex marriage in the Constitution.

The point isn’t whether one agrees or disagrees with any of these particular decisions. It is that the Court hijacked the ability of the people to legislate concerning these matters, as the Left imposed its agenda upon the nation by judicial fiat.

What you can’t legislate—adjudicate.

The same thing is happening here in Kansas. The state Supreme Court has decided that the Kansas Constitution, written in 1859, forbids the citizens of this state from passing any laws restricting abortion. The faultiness of their reasoning is only exceeded by the overreach of their authority.

It must be understood that the secular space of our society doesn’t exist in a moral vacuum. It must be morally informed from somewhere. In the American past, biblical morality occupied that place. In the American present, freedom of individual self-expression is the presiding norm. Many Americans consider this to be the most sacred moral value—particularly with regard to sexuality.

As a result of the Court’s reversal of Roe, we have been promised that this will be a “Summer of Rage.” Why is rage the response?

There are a number of reasons.

Most obviously, due to this decision, abortion services are going to be more difficult to access in various locations. Some people are angry about that.

A second reason is that abortion is big business. Some abortion providers are facing declining, or even the elimination of their source of revenue, and are not happy about it. As the saying goes, if you want to understand, follow the money.

A third reason is that the decision struck a huge blow to the Left’s heretofore successful strategy of using the Court to implement its agenda. Radicals on the Left are outraged that their ideology will have to be tried in the court of public opinion and decided by the electorate, rather than simply being imposed on the body politic. This must have infuriated those who believed that the Supreme Court could always be counted on to advance the Leftist cause.

Next, many adult Americans have the emotional maturity of spoiled children. We’re all familiar with the “entitlement mentality.” If you’re told you can’t have what you want, throw a temper tantrum. Someone says something you don’t like? Pitch a fit. Things don’t go the way you’d like? Flail away in paroxysms of anger. Hence the rage reaction.

Yet I believe that all the above factors are overshadowed by a much more influential reason for the rage. This decision was a blow to the ideology of sexualism which has become both ubiquitous and triumphant in American society. Sexualism asserts that sexuality is the most fundamental, essential, aspect of human existence. No other aspect of our humanity defines us so vitally. Thus, as a corollary, nothing can be allowed to interfere with the sacred right to sexual expression—not even pregnancy. Allowing states to regulate abortion potentially complicates the unrestrained expression of sexual freedom, and that infuriates those beholden to the sexualist agenda.

It is indeed startling to behold the progression of the pro-choice movement from the Clinton-era “safe, legal, and rare” to the point where we now see protest signs saying, “I love abortion.” And we hear of women “celebrating their abortions.” Such can only be labeled for what it is—demonic.

The rage response can only be understood within the greater context of sexualism. As of this writing, a bill is advancing through Congress to codify same-sex marriage as the law of the land, in advance of any potential move by the Court to reverse that (bad) decision. The transgender agenda maintains the emphasis that sexuality is one’s most defining characteristic, and that discovering one’s “gender identity” is a critical element of one’s personhood. Our federal government actively promotes homosexuality. The push to sexualize children earlier and earlier in schools is unrelenting. Sexualist ideology is all-pervasive and inescapable.

Back in the 1950s and 60s the sexual revolution blithely furthered a popularized and somewhat misappropriated Freudianism that asserted “It’s all about sex.” Sexualism has progressed unchecked ever since to the monstrous status it has achieved presently. What is the response, then, when it is challenged in any way? Predictably, rage.

The Monster Behind the Massacres

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 04:08:16 GMT

by Fr Paul O'Callaghan

Feast of St Mary Magdalene, the Holy Myrrh-bearer and Equal to the Apostles

Anno Domini 2022, July 22

I’ll begin with a personal observation. I’ve noticed in recent months that public flags seem to be at half-mast almost all the time. I wonder at times what loss or tragedy is being mourned. “What is it now?” Sometimes I can’t come up with the answer. But of course, during the week of May 25, 2022, there was no reason to wonder. The same is true of the week that followed the Highland Park massacre.

When I was a child, flags flying at half-mast were rare and noteworthy. What is different between then and now? What has changed? Why are we seeing one mass shooting after another in recent years?

In a press conference following the tragic Uvalde massacre, Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott observed that for 60 years in Texas, 18-year-olds have been able to legally purchase guns. Back then mass school shootings were unheard of. What has changed?

In my college town of Chico, CA—a small, semi-rural community back in the 1970’s—many of the local high school boys had rifle racks in the back of their pickups. They would leave them parked with their rifles racked up in plain view. No one thought anything of it. There were no school shootings. What is different between then and now? What has changed?

We must look deeply into the question of why this is happening—over and over again—innocent kids and their brave teachers, among others, being slaughtered.

Ramsha Afridi writes, “… (I)n my view, people are now looking for simple solutions to a problem which likely has more complicated answers. Not many have acknowledged that perhaps such tragedies are in part due to problems much deeper rooted in modern-day America” ( https://www.revolver.news/2022/06/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-existential-crisis-society-salvador-ramos/ All Afridi quotations are from this article).

There is no single answer that explains it all. But I think we can identify several factors that play into it. And they are spiritual and moral.

In chapter 9 of the gospel of John, we find Jesus saying, “‘For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind.’ Then some of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these words, and said to Him, ‘Are we blind also?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, “We see.” Therefore your sin remains’” (vv. 39-41).

I propose that we have become blind to ourselves. We have forgotten who we are. We—meaning the popular American mindset—have lost sight of ourselves. How did this transpire?

For decades now in America, messaging —from the media, from Hollywood, in advertising, and in pop psychology—has been to “follow your passions,” “express yourself,” “indulge your appetites,” “fulfill your fantasies,” “do what you feel.” In pop psychology, to do so is called “being authentic.”

“Being authentic” means one ought freely express and indulge his impulses, desires, and appetites. Doing so is to be true to oneself and failing to do so is to be false to oneself—it is to be “inauthentic.” Thus controversial transexual swimmer Lia Thomas expressed it well in the context of athletics: “Trans people don’t transition for athletics. We transition to be happy and authentic and our true selves” ( Western Journal , June 8 2022). One’s “true self” is what one feels. If a man feels like a woman, then he IS a woman.

Some readers may be old enough to remember the Bob Newhart Show, a 1970’s sitcom. Bob played a psychotherapist who ran group therapy sessions. One of the premises of these session was that the participants had to be authentic. This meant that everyone in the group had to express exactly what they thought of the others, no matter how rude or offensive it might be to them. In the show, this led to many funny moments. As a relationship strategy, it is disastrous. Yet the show portrayed a developing trend in psychotherapy that presaged a growing cultural shift toward the non-moralistic validation of the self.

Thus in the time since, many modern Americans have come to live by no other standard than their own individual feelings, impulses, and desires. The general acceptance of the “authenticity” principle has led to a pervasive narcissism in American popular culture. Individual self-expression has become an overriding moral value.

This is what lies behind the current trend in outrageous grooming, clothing, accessorizing, and body art. By these means, a person proclaims his true identity to the world. One’s natural appearance is only raw material to be reconfigured by artificial means into an act of expressiveness. In a fresh twist of existentialism, people have come to believe they are their own creations. On top of this, social media entices users to become exhibitionists, displaying their self-creations to the world. What belongs to the self is inherently valuable and is to be asserted with pride.

During the 21 ^st century, this trend has become most significant in the arena of sexuality. In fact, popular media advocates forming one’s identity around sexual passions. Pick your preferred letter from the alphabet soup, hang it on a placard around your neck, and proclaim to the world that you are your sexual proclivities. We have heard it multiple times over: “This is who I am.” Your sexual desires constitute your identity.

The notion that human beings are to be defined solely by individual subjective criteria, i.e., feelings and desires—and most notably by sexuality—leads to innumerable absurdities and travesties. Ben Shapiro comments at length:

This perspective is absolutely incoherent. Ironically, this incoherence is exposed by the conflict between the different letters within the alphabet soup of the supposedly sexually marginalized. The case for tolerance of lesbian and gay Americans used to be that biological drives should not be regulated by society at large, because such drives were inborn and innate; that idea at least had the merit of internal consistency.

Now, however, that idea has been jettisoned for its logical opposite, the belief that biology has no hold on us whatsoever, and that we ought to be free to define ourselves in opposition to our own biology, changing our gender and sexual orientation at will (i.e., on the basis of our feelings).

… And yet here we are, told … that we must ignore the internal contradictions of left-wing sexual ideology, and simply pretend the incoherence away. We are told that we ought to stand for women’s rights by the same people who insist that Lia Thomas is a woman; we are told that one need not be a biological female to be a lesbian; we are told that biology dictates behavior, but that biology must never be used as an identifier.

None of this makes one whit of sense. But we ought to be proud of it, because after all, it liberates us to celebrate our inner sense of authenticity, free of society’s strictures. (Ben Shapiro, The Daily Signal , June 1)

Such an untethered subjectivism is mind-boggling. From an Orthodox Christian anthropology, it incorporates the most egregious error imaginable. Nothing could be further from the mind of Christ, the Apostles and Fathers. In Orthodoxy Christianity, we call such desires “passions.” Fallen creatures that we are, our passions are inherently disordered. They are forces active within us, but they are NOT who we are. They are hardly the seat of our identity. A person is so much more than his passions.

Who are we? What is our fundamental identity? Human beings are creatures made in the image of God; we are called to grow into the actual likeness to God by communion with Him and the cultivation of godliness. The Apostle Paul denotes Christians as adopted sons and daughters of God. The Christian calling is to purify our persons from the operations of the passions, not to indulge them, that we may become “partakers of the divine nature” (cf. 2 Peter 1:4). “And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24). “Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure” (1 John 3:2-4).

It should be noted that popular acceptance of the notion of authenticity is hardly limited to matters of sexuality. It is pervasive. Think back to the riots that characterized the summer of 2020. We all observed the burning, looting, destruction, violence, and larceny. Yet many in the media were quick to justify it. How? The destructiveness was a legitimate expression of rage on the part of oppressed people. The rioters were expressing their feelings. They were being authentic. How could they possibly be condemned? Of course, little concern was expressed for property owners and those who had been assaulted by rioters.

A noteworthy effect of this psychology of authenticity on the general population has been a lack of impulse control. We have been conditioned to obey our impulses. “If it feels good, do it!” is the mantra. Yet as the media relentlessly promotes self-indulgence of every kind, at the same time they preach and fret to us about “unhealthy lifestyles,” the “obesity epidemic,” the “opioid crisis,” AIDS and STDs, and the explosion of violence, all of which are directly related to what they continually promote: the unbridled indulgence of the passions.

The message has not been lost on the socially marginalized and emotionally damaged. Thus, if you’re boiling with rage because your grandmother won’t let you do what you want, or because your mom is too busy with her boyfriend, if you’re filled with loathing at yourself, at life, and everything in this world, then of course, you too have the right to be authentic and to express your feelings. You should act out your rage. So you decide to take yourself out and a lot of innocent people with you. “They are going to have to pay for my pain,” as in the case of the Tulsa shooter who murdered his surgeon and several others because his back was hurting badly after surgery.

Living as we do in a culture charged with adherence to authenticity and self-expression, we have forgotten the once universally acknowledged truth: good character and virtue can only be built on the foundation of self-restraint. But in popular culture, self-restraint is considered “repression.” Thus, we’re told that if one represses passions and desires, he becomes unhappy, anxious, unstable, and neurotic. Yet in fact the opposite is true. The person who has achieved self-mastery is the happiest person in the world. We call many such people saints.

With overwhelming success, media, academic, and political elites have promoted a godless philosophy that has caused us to become blind to who we are—creatures created in the image of God, called to grow into His actual likeness. As a result, we have exchanged our divine destiny for a “mess of pottage,” choosing to identify ourselves with the passions of the flesh and reveling in them. Is it any wonder that we behold rational society unraveling all around us?

In the Revelation to John, Jesus says: “You say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’—and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:14). Do not these words apply to modern America?

Ramsha Afridi comments: “The truth is that the growing complexities in modern day America are dismantling the cultural foundations of what its society was once built upon. It is undeniable that American culture is in decay.”

A fundamental reason for this is that American popular culture has become blind to God and His Law. In our passionate pursuit of pleasure, we have attained the lot of all hedonists: we have lost our moral compass.

What does a moral compass indicate? That which is right and that which is wrong. What is the name of that compass? God’s law. Like any compass, it is precisely directive: for example, Thou shalt not steal; Thou shalt not commit adultery; Thou shalt not kill.

Such commandments are absolutes, and when properly understood and nuanced, they are true for everybody everywhere. This is called objective morality .

Yet this compass was tossed out a long time ago in our post-Christian media, academic, and political culture. What was it replaced with? Subjective morality . What is right or wrong is what you feel is right or wrong. There is no absolute moral law to which we all are bound. In addition, many Americans have jettisoned belief in God’s judgment and the danger of hell. For them, then, there are no ultimate consequences for their actions—even if it is the random murder of innocents.

Is there a great moral gap between dismemberment abortions, partial birth abortion, and infanticide? Between infanticide and outright murder? If there is a right to kill your preborn child, what does that tell us about the value of human life in general?

Rep. Billy Long, a Missouri Congressman, says the killing of 63 million babies in abortions has destroyed the respect for human life that existed prior to Roe v. Wade. Long told the the Missouri-based radio station The Eagle 93.9 that guns aren’t the issue. He criticized proponents of gun control for “trying to blame an inanimate object for all of these tragedies.”

“When I was growing up in Springfield, you had one or two murders a year,” said Long, who is running for the U.S. Senate. “Now we have two, three, four a week in Springfield, Missouri. So something has happened to our society,” he continued. “I go back to abortion, when we decided it was OK to murder kids in their mothers’ wombs. Life has no value to a lot of these folks.”

There is a direct link from one to the other. It is called the culture of death. Whether one human being lives or dies is entirely dependent upon the choice of another who has the power to kill. This is what it means to be “pro-choice.” “I have the right to choose whether or not to kill an innocent human being.” Thus we see that option being foisted upon the innocent every day, whether inside or outside the womb.

After the Uvalde tragedy, media pundits were quick to cry out for more government programs for the mentally ill as a preventative to such incidents. Yet there is no hard evidence that Salvador Ramos suffered from mental illness. In the therapeutic society, it is often assumed that anyone who would commit such a crime must be mentally ill. Yet such an assumption fails to distinguish mental illness from moral illness.

At the root of this moral illness is the massive Love Deficit that pervades American society. An Evangelical minister once told me, “Peace means knowing that you are loved.” Yet today, far too many Americans have no peace, because they have known little to no love. Having grown up surrounded by narcissistic individuals—in many cases their parents—their emotional and ethical growth has been tragically stunted. Those who are unloved are incapable of giving love.

Jeremy Cahnmann, who coached Highland-Park shooter Robert Crimo III in an afterschool sports program at Lincoln Elementary School, recalled the following: "I remember the parents more than him because they were kind of a problem. There wasn't a lot of love in that family." A neighbor of Crimo echoed Cahnmann’s observation: "The signs were there for a long time. There were always police cars at the house. The parents were arguing, fighting all the time.”

Allie Beth Stuckey commented, “There is nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing to do and no one to live for. This has been true in every place for all of time. Our young men are drowning in idleness, purposelessness, and godlessness, and we’re paying for it.”

Thus, an ever-increasing number of Americans are random isolated individuals searching for an identity, often full of anger and self-loathing, perhaps having given up on the hope of ever being valued and loved. This is why see so many examples of bizarre forms of grooming and dressing today. Many young people are desperately grasping to create an identity for themselves, an overwhelming existential burden for those not granted one out of a nexus of loving relationships. This is why there is a current trend for young people to identify as “gay” or “trans.” Adopting such a label gives them a similitude of an identity.

Many isolated individuals have lost all connection to parents, siblings and other relatives—in some cases, to anyone at all. “Elder orphans,” who have no relatives or loved ones, now increasingly populate nursing homes. We see our streets filled with abandoned human beings camping on sidewalks in cities far from their places of origin, with no relationships except to the other addicts and mentally ill with whom they congregate.

Ramsha Afridi writes, and I quote at length:

This shift from an established family structure to a more atomized way of living is now an unavoidable part of life for many young people. Various studies have consistently revealed consequences manifesting in the most devastating ways.

Generation Z, despite being born in an era of technological and social advancement, is the loneliest generation in history. Up to a staggering 56% of generation Z have stated they have felt lonely multiple times during their childhood, according to the Pew Research Center.

Therefore it’s no surprise that Generation Z is also the most depressed. According to the APA’s 2020 Stress in America Survey, Generation Z were most likely to report signs of depression and psychological distress.

This means that more than ever, there is an immense lack of stable familial and community support in American society for which Generation Z seems to be paying a heavy price by being the age group most likely to have been brought up in a single-parent setting compared to previous generations.

According to evolutionary psychologists this malady of loneliness felt in childhood is reported known to follow through to adulthood, where such individuals are likely to report feeling more socially disconnected and alienated than those who did not report feeling lonely as children.

Humans are social creatures, and we have an evolutionary imperative to connect and function in accordance with a solidarity that stretches back for as long as Homo Sapiens have existed as a species.

Since time immemorial, we humans have hunted, farmed, and established social cohesion as a way of averting threats and looking after one another. This biological imprint has not vanished, establishing a social order without community spirit has negative foreseen and unforeseen consequences.

In contrast, the culture of individualism is touted by both the American Right and the Left. The Right typically valorizes “rugged individualism” in which each person must be free to achieve his own goals, visions, and dreams without interference from others, and if he fails the consequences are entirely his own. The Left emphasizes the necessity of a governmental social safety net that sets individuals free from providing for basic necessities in order to pursue personal goals, dreams, and visions. The general social impact trends toward a narcissistic individualism that sees all things in relation to self and an incapacity for true consideration for others.

Narcissistic individualism has given us a generation of human beings the likes of which has never been seen on the face of the earth. Afridi continues, “Ultimately, the new age culture of individualism is manifesting in young people who have no sense of purpose nor core values—only the latest technology, television program, or consumer product to worship or yearn for.”

Afridi continues:

Nearly one quarter of American children now reside in a single-parent living arrangement. It seemed that the Texas school shooter, Salvador Ramos, was one of such children. He did not reside with his father; in fact, he had not met his father since the pandemic began in 2020.

It appears Salvador Ramos may have also felt he lacked an adequate amount of love, care, and support. His father, after speaking to the Daily Beast, revealed: “My mom tells me he probably would have shot me too because he would always say I didn’t love him.”

Evolutionary considerations aside, her point is incontestable: the natural way of raising children is in a network of relations consisting of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and other community members. In such a setting, one’s identity as a member of the clan is a given, as one is inculcated in the history, traditions, values, origin stories, and transcendental orientation of the group. Above all, the cords that bind the group are infused with love, care and support for its children. Without love, what kind of human beings are we?

Afridi summarizes, “Despite this widespread crisis, no institution has yet adequately focused on the decay of familial and communal integrity—or acknowledged its long-term impact. Could it be possible that by not addressing this issue, the problem is metastasizing into random acts of violence, like we saw this week in Texas, committed by easily-influenced individuals with no moral formation and guidance?”

At this point, the prophecy of the Apostle Paul comes to mind: “But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2 Tim. 3:1-4) Does not this description fit much of what we see in the contemporary American character?

Afridi goes on:

Since the post-modern takeover of American society, we have witnessed family breakdown at an unprecedented rate. According to the Pew Research Center, two-parent households have been on the decline, while divorce filings have been steadily increasing.

Paradoxically, despite a time where mental health is championed by celebrities and social media personalities, we are more aware of it than ever. However, the younger generation is ironically suffering an epidemic of a mental health crisis.

The decline of the American family, collapsing marriage rates and the dissolution of traditional two-parent households, heinous economic conditions, and an empty culture of brand and commodity-worship could be contributing towards cultural decay and the isolation of youth.

Young people more than ever are growing up in a culture which lacks true sentimental value.

We may not know the real motivations of the shooter, but what we do know is that we must address the deep-seated cultural breakdown lingering in twenty-first century post-modern America before it’s too late.

And as America continues to decline and its core institutions collapse, the more its youth will pay the price by descending into a nihilistic, meaningless culture.

In conclusion, I repeat the gospel quote from John 9. There Jesus says, “‘For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind.’ Then some of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these words, and said to Him, ‘Are we blind also?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, ”We see.” Therefore your sin remains’” (vv. 39-41).

To the extent that we imagine ourselves to be wiser, better educated, and more sophisticated than previous generations, and yet at the same time blind to the most elementary truths of morality and human nature on account of our pride, we repeat the error of the Pharisees. If because of our self-imposed blindness we fail to behold the monster behind the massacres, our sin remains, and many innocents will suffer.

The Rise of Modern Scientific Culture & Modern Social Unrest

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 17:55:02 GMT

by Christopher Dawson

Feast of St Aquila the Apostle among the 70

Anno Domini 2022, July 14

The Rise of the Modern Scientific Culture

A ferment of change, a new principle of movement and progress entered the world with the civilization of modern Europe.

The development of the European culture was, of course, largely conditioned by religious traditions the consideration of which lies outside the limits of this inquiry. It was, however, not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that the new principle, which characterized the rise of modern civilization, made its appearance. It was then that there arose—first in Italy and afterwards throughout Western Europe—the new attitude to life that has been well named Humanism. It was, in fact, a reaction against the whole transcendent spiritualist view of existence, a return from the divine and the absolute to the human and the finite. Man turned away from the pure white light of eternity to the warmth and color of the earth. He rediscovered nature, not, indeed, as the divine and mysterious power that men had served and worshipped in the first ages of civilization, but as a reasonable order which he could know by science and art, and which he could use to serve his own purpose.

“Experiment,” says Leonardo da Vinci, the great precursor, “is the true interpreter between nature and man.” Experience is never at fault. What is at fault is man’s laziness and ignorance. “Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things for the price of work.”

This is the essential note of the new European movement; it was applied science, not abstract, speculative knowledge, as with the Greeks. “Mechanics,” says Leonardo again, “are the Paradise of the mathematical sciences, for in them the fruits of the latter are reaped.” And the same principles of realism and practical reason are applied in political life.

The state was no longer an ideal hierarchy that symbolized and reflected the order of the spiritual world. It was the embodiment of human power, whose only law was Necessity.

Yet no complete break was made with the past. The people remained faithful to the religious tradition. Here and there a Giordano Bruno in philosophy or a Machiavelli in statecraft gave their whole-hearted adhesion to Naturalism, but for the most part both statesmen and philosophers endeavored to serve two masters, like Descartes or Richeleiu. They remained fervent Christians, but at the same time they separated the sphere of religion from the sphere of reason, and made the latter an independent autonomous kingdom in which the greater part of their lives was spent.

It was only in the eighteenth century that this compromise, which so long dominated European culture, broke down before the assaults of the new humanists, the Encyclopedists and the men of the Enlightenment in France, England, and Germany. We have already described the attitude of that age to religion—its attempt to sweep away the old accumulation of tradition and to refound civilization on a rational and naturalistic basis. And the negative side of this program was, indeed, successfully carried out. European civilization was thoroughly secularized. The traditional European polity, with its semi-divine royalty, its state Churches and its hereditary aristocratic hierarchy, was swept away and its place was taken by the liberal bourgeois state of the nineteenth century, which aimed, above all, at industrial prosperity and commercial expansion. But the positive side of the achievement was much less secure. It is true that Western Europe and the United States of America advanced enormously in wealth and population, and in control over the forces of nature; while the type of culture that they had developed spread itself victoriously over the old world of Asia and the new world of Africa and Oceania, first by material conquest, and later by its intellectual and scientific prestige, so that the great oriental religion-cultures began to lose their age-long, unquestioned dominance over the daily life and thought of the peoples of the East, at least, among the educated classes.

Progress and Disillusionment the Meaning of Modern Social Unrest

But there was not a corresponding progress in spiritual things. As Comte had foreseen, the progressive civilization of the West, without any unifying spiritual force, and without an intellectual synthesis, tended to fall back into social anarchy. The abandonment of the old religious traditions did not bring humanity together in a natural and moral unity, as the eighteenth-century philosophers had hoped. On the contrary, it allowed the fundamental differences of race and nationality, of class and private interest, to appear in their naked antagonism. The progress in wealth and power did nothing to appease these rivalries; rather it added fuel to them, by accentuating the contrasts of wealth and poverty, and widening the field of international competition. The new economic imperialism, as it developed in the last generation of the nineteenth century, was as grasping, as unmoral, and as full of dangers of war, as any of the imperialisms of the old order. And, while under the old order the state had recognized its limits as against a spiritual power, and had only extended its claims over a part of human life, the modern state admitted no limitations, and embraced the whole life of the individual citizen in its economic and military organization.

Hence the rise of a new type of social unrest. Political disturbances are as old as human nature; in every age misgovernment and oppression have been met by violence and disorder, but it is a new thing, and perhaps a phenomenon peculiar to our modern Western civilization, that men should work and think and agitate for the complete remodeling of society according to some ideal of social perfection. It belongs to the order of religion, rather than to that of politics, as politics, were formerly understood. It finds its only parallel in the past in movements of the most extreme religious type, like that of the Anabaptists in sixteenth-century Germany, and the Levellers and Fifth-Monarchy Men of Puritan England. And when we study the lives of the founders of modern Socialism, the great Anarchists and even some of the apostles of national Liberalism like Mazzini, we feel at once that we are in the presence of religious leaders, whether prophets or heresiarchs, saints or fanatics. Behind the hard rational surface of Karl Marx’s materialist and socialist interpretation of history there burns the flame of an apocalyptic vision. For what was that social revolution in which he put his hope but a nineteenth-century version of the Day of the Lord, in which the rich and the powerful of the earth should be consumed, and the princes of the Gentiles brought low, and the poor and disinherited should reign in a regenerated universe? So, too, Marx, in spite of his professed atheism, looked for the realization of this hope, not, like St. Simon and his fellow-idealist Socialists, to the conversion of the individual and to human efforts towards the attainment of a new social idea, but to “the arm of the Lord,” the necessary, ineluctable working-out of the Eternal Law, which human will and human effort are alike powerless to change or stay.

But the religious impulse behind these social movements is not a constructive one. It is as absolute in its demands as that of the old religions, and it admits of no compromise with reality. As soon as the victory is gained, and the phase of destruction and revolution is ended, the inspiration fades away before the tasks of practical realization. We look in vain in the history of United Italy for the religious enthusiasm that sustained Mazzini and his fellows, and it took very few years to transform the Rousseauan idealism of revolutionary France, the Religion of Humanity, into Napoleonic and even Machiavellian realism.

The revolutionary attitude—and it is perhaps the characteristic religious attitude of modern Europe—is, in fact, but another symptom of the divorce between religion and social life. The nineteenth-century revolutionaries—the Anarchists, the Socialists, and, to some extent, the Liberals, were driven to their destructive activities by the sense that actual European society was a mere embodiment of material force and fraud— magnum latrocinium [great robbery], as St. Augustine says—that it was based on no principle of justice, and organized for no spiritual or ideal end; and the more the simpler and more obvious remedies—republicanism, universal suffrage, national self-determination—proved disappointing to the reformers, the deeper became their dissatisfaction with the whole structure of existing society. And, finally, when the process of disillusionment is complete, this religious impulse that lies behind the revolutionary attitude may turn itself against social life altogether, or at least against the whole system of civilization that has been built up in the last two centuries. This attitude of mind seems endemic to Russia, partly, perhaps, as an inheritance of the Byzantine religious tradition. We see it appearing in different forms in Tolstoy, in Dostoevsky, and in the Nihilists, and it is present as a psychic undercurrent in most of the Russian revolutionary movements. It is the spirit which seeks not political reform, not the improvement of social conditions, but escape, liberation—Nirvana. In the words of a modern poet (Francis Adams), it is

To wreck the great guilty temple,

And give us Rest

And in the years since the war, when the failure of the vast machinery of modern civilization has seemed so imminent, this. view of life has become more common even in the West. It has inspired the poetry of Albert Ehrenstein and many others.

Mr. D. H. Lawrence has well expressed it in Count Psanek’s profession of faith, in The Ladybird (pp. 43-4).

I have found my God. The god of destruction. The god of anger, who throws down the steeples and factory chimneys.

Not the trees, these chestnuts, for example—not these—nor the chattering sorcerers, the squirrels—nor the hawk that comes. Not those.

What grudge have I against a world where even the hedges are full of berries, branches of black berries that hang down and red berries that thrust up? Never would I hate the world. But the world of man— I hate it.

I believe in the power of my dark red heart. God has put the hammer in my breast—the little eternal hammer. Hit—hit—hit. It hits on the world of man. It hits, it hits. and it hears the thin sound of cracking.

Oh, may I live long. May I live long, so that my hammer may strike and strike, and the cracks go deeper, deeper. Ah, the world of man. Ah, the joy, the passion in every heartbeat. Strike home, strike true, strike sure. Strike to destroy it. Strike. Strike. To destroy the world of man. Ah, God. Ah, God, prisoner of peace.

It may seem to some that these instances are negligible, mere morbid extravagances, but it is impossible to exaggerate the dangers that must inevitably arise when once social life has become separated from the religious impulse.

We have only to look at the history of the ancient world and we shall see how tremendous are these consequences. The Roman Empire, and the Hellenistic civilization of which it was the vehicle, became separated in this way from any living religious basis, which all the efforts of Augustus and his helpers were powerless to restore; and thereby, in spite of its high material and intellectual culture, the dominant civilization became hateful in the eyes of the subject oriental world. Rome was to them not the ideal world-city of Virgil’s dream, but the incarnation of all that was anti-spiritual—Babylon the great, the Mother of Abominations, who bewitched and enslaved all the peoples of the earth, and on whom, at last, the slaughter of the saints and the oppression of the poor would be terribly avenged. And so all that was strongest and most living in the moral life of the time separated itself from the life of society and from the service of the state, as from something unworthy and even morally evil. And we see in Egypt in the fourth century, over against the Hellenistic city of Alexandria, filled with art and learning and all that made life delightful, a new power growing up, the power of the men of the desert, the naked, fasting monks and ascetics, in whom, however, the new world recognized its masters. When, in the fifth century, the greatest of the late Latin writers summed up the history of the great Roman tradition, it is in a spirit of profound hostility and disillusionment: Acceperunt mercedem suam [they have received their reward], says he, in an unforgettable sentence, vani vanam [vanity of vanities; cf. Augustine, Sermon 12 on Ps 118].

This spiritual alienation of its own greatest minds is the price that every civilization has to pay when it loses its religious foundations, and is contented with a purely material success. We are only just beginning to understand how intimately and profoundly the vitality of a society is bound up with religion. It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture. The great civilizations of the world do not produce the great religions as a kind of cultural by-product; in a very real sense, the great religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest. A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.

What then is to be the fate of this great modern civilization of ours? A civilization which has gained an extension and wealth of power and knowledge which the world has never known before. Is it to waste its forces in the pursuit of selfish and mutually destructive aims, and to perish for lack of vision? Or can we hope that society will once again become animated by a common faith and hope, which will have the power to order our material and intellectual achievements in an enduring spiritual unity?

Excerpted from “Religion and the Life of Civilization” in Enquiries into Religion and Culture (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), pp. 89-94. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books. Originally published in 1933 by Sheed and Ward. This essay was originally published in William Loftus Hare, ed., Religions of the Empire: A Conference on Some Living Religions within the Empire (London: Duckworth, 1925), pp. 455-469.

Contemplating America: Our Threatened Democracy

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 20:28:33 GMT

by Fr Paul O'Callaghan

Feast of St Kyriake the Great Martyr

Anno Domini 2022, July 7

My brother and sisters in Christ, this is a weekend during which we “celebrate America.”

The liberties that are enshrined in our Constitution give us much to be thankful for: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and most importantly, freedom of religion.

And yet on the other hand, I suggest to you that perhaps this is a time for us to “contemplate America,” rather than “simply celebrate America.”

We hear much today about threats to our democracy. Interestingly, both the Right and the Left accuse each other of doing this very thing.

President Trump is currently under investigation for fostering the January 6 so-called insurrection. The Biden campaign has been accused of massive election fraud, and President Biden for opening our borders to massive unregulated immigration, in order get these immigrants on the federal dole, making them reliable Democrat voters with the goal of achieving a one-party system.

We’re told alternately that “white supremacy,” “climate change,” Vladimir Putin, and other phenomena are “the greatest threat to our democracy.”

And so the accusations are traded back and forth between the Right and Left.

However, when the Supreme Court returned the question of abortion legislation to the democratic process , we heard the cries and threats of a “summer of rage” to come.

Why the rage? Is this not a threat to democracy?

Is there a threat to our democracy? What is the greatest threat to our democracy?

To assist in this contemplation of America, as I have in the past, I’m going to quote the Founding Fathers of our nation rather than the Fathers of the Church.

I want to recall to you some of the fundamental principles of that founding, principles that are forgotten, ignored, or distorted by many today.

Let’s begin with George Washington, the “father of our country”:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports . . . reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.

Not only is morality inseparable from religion, but both are essential to our national character. John Adams put it this way:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Constitutional government, then, depends on the sound moral character of the population; and thus, in the words of James Madison,

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

Yet there are those today who advocate not only freedom of religion, but freedom from religion . It is amply demonstrated by a stream of Supreme Court decisions reaching back over the past 60 years that have increasingly restricted any public expression of faith. We can describe this as freedom from religion . But is this what the founding fathers had in mind?

What happens, then, to a nation where the influence of sound religion declines, where morality is seen as something antiquated that we can do without, or something we can each make up for ourselves, where virtue is seen as something for the naïve and silly?

A favorite quote of Jefferson’s from Montesquieu tells us:

When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. (written by Thomas Jefferson in his Common Place Book ).

What rules then in the place of religion, morality, and virtue? Simply put—raw ambition, greed, and lust. Vice and wickedness take over in the population.

Jefferson goes on:

It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. . . . degeneracy in these is a cancer which soon eats into the heart of its laws and constitution.

John Adams adds:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, … would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net.

In the final analysis then, our sacred liberties are threatened whenever liberty is understood as license. Liberty places critical restrictions on the power of government to infringe inalienable rights; license says, “I am free to do whatever I want.” Many Americans today understand liberty as precisely license—and the harvest is one of moral degeneracy.

Thus it is clear from the Founding Fathers that moral degeneracy is the greatest threat to democracy, and thus our liberties. Why?

Benjamin Franklin explains it:

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

Patrick Henry expands on that thought:

Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.

Samuel Adams puts it succinctly: [M]en will be free no longer than they remain virtuous.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, when we survey the moral progress of our nation since the time of our founding fathers, there are bright spots—the of abolition of slavery, the elimination of institutional racism, the expansion of women’s rights and roles in society, and so on … yet there is much cause for concern.

In this regard, the prophecy of the Apostle Paul comes to mind:

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. (2 Tim. 3:1-4)

Does not this description fit much of what we see in the contemporary American character? If such be true, then our democracy is indeed in grave danger.

What is the greatest threat to our democracy?

I close with the words of Daniel Webster:

Our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be on any other foundation than religious principle, nor any government be secure which is not supported by moral habits. . . . [I]f we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us, that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity.

May God preserve our democracy from such an end.

* Originally presented to St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral in Wichita, KS on July 3, 2022. The "patristic" quotes are from a compilation from years ago that were intended for use in homilies; they were never intended for publication which explains the absence of citations.

A Brief Commentary on the Paschal Canon

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 19:16:20 GMT

by Andrew Louth with St Nikodimos the Hagiorite

Synaxis of the Twelve Holy Apostles

Anno Domini 2022, June 30

Ode 1: Song of Moses (Tone 1)

Irmos: The day of resurrection, let us be radiant, O peoples, Pascha, the Lord’s Pascha; for from death unto life, and from earth unto heaven, Christ our God has brought us over, as we sing the triumphant song.

Troparion 1: Let us purify our senses and then we shall see in the light unapproachable of the Resurrection Christ shining forth, and we shall clearly hear Him say “Rejoice!”, as we sing the triumphant song.

Troparion 2: Let the heavens, as is fitting, rejoice, and let the earth be glad; now let the universe entire, both seen and unseen, celebrate the feast; for Christ has risen, Christ our eternal joy.

Nikodimos points out how the irmos is constructed by John from two passages from Gregory Nazianzen’s two homilies for Easter, his first homily (on Easter and his lateness) and the last. From the first homily John takes the opening words: “The day of resurrection, … let us be radiant.” From the last homily, John takes, “Pascha, the Lord’s Pascha”; in fact, as Nikodimos points out, in Gregory’s original homily, his words are: “The Lord’s Pascha, Pascha, and again I say Pascha, in honour of the Trinity.” John also takes from Gregory the explanation of the word pascha , derived not from the Greek word, paschein , to suffer, but from the Hebrew, pesach , “Passover,” referring to the passing over from Egypt to Canaan, but spiritually “to the passage from below to above, and the procession and ascent to the land of the promise.” This makes the link with the first ode, Moses’ song of deliverance after crossing the Red Sea. A few words and an idea from Gregory provide John with the materials for his first irmos , which sets the tone for the whole canon.

According to Nikodimos, the first of the troparia is based on the notion that human kind is a twofold being, with both bodily and spiritual senses: a theme close to John’s heart, as we have seen. More precisely, Nikodimos finds in Gregory’s last homily the notion that the paschal sacrifice is offered “for the purification of the senses.” Only if purified can we see Christ “the light unapproachable of the Resurrection.”

For the second troparion, Nikodemos again refers us to Gregory Nazianzen, this time his homily on the Theophany, where he quotes Psalm 95:11: “let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad,” and to the last homily for the rejoicing of the whole cosmos, seen and unseen. The whole universe, seen and unseen, refers either to the angels and human kind, or perhaps, Nikodemos suggests, even to the inanimate elements. We have seen that John, in common with other Fathers such as Maximos, affirms the truly cosmic dimension of Christ’s victorious resurrection.

The tone of triumph and rejoicing that runs through these troparia chimes in well with the theme of the biblical ode they accompany, the Song of Moses: “I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously, the horse and the rider He has thrown into the sea. My strength and my song, He has become my salvation!” (Exod. 15:1-2). These are themes that are fresh in the memories of those who hear and sing this canon, for the Song of Moses is part of the vesperal liturgy of Holy Saturday.

Ode 3: Song of Anna

Irmos: Come, let us drink a new drink, not one wondrously brought forth from a barren rock, but incorruption’s source, which pours out from the sepulchre of Christ, in whom we are established.

Troparion 1: Now all things have been filled with light, both heaven and earth and all things beneath the earth; let all creation sing to celebrate the rising of Christ, by which it is established.

Troparion 2: Buried yesterday with you, O Christ, and today, as you arise, I am raised with you. I was crucified with you; O Saviour, grant me glory with you in your kingdom.

The third ode is the Prayer of Anna. The reference to the “new drink” is possibly meant to recall that when Eli, finding Anna in the Temple, accused her of being drunk, she replied, “I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord” (1 Kgd. 1:15). More immediately it relates to the water Moses struck from the rock during the desert wandering (Num. 20:10-11), but this is “incorruption’s source,” echoing (or more probably the origin of) the communion hymn during Easter: “Receive the body of Christ, taste the immortal source, Alleluia.” “In whom we are established” is a reference to the beginning of Anna’s song: “My heart is established in the Lord” (1 Kgd. 2:1).

The first troparion returns to the cosmic theme, introduced in the first ode. With the Resurrection, light has come, not just to heaven and earth, but also to the region beneath the earth, Hades, which was redeemed by Christ’s descent there on Holy Saturday. Here we have a first allusion to the theme of the icon of the Resurrection, in which Christ is seen, breaking the gates of Hades, and bringing out those imprisoned there, beginning with Adam and Eve.

The second troparion, as Nikodimos points out, is derived from a passage in Gregory’s first homily: “Yesterday I was crucified with Christ, today I am glorified with Him; yesterday I died with Him, today I am given life with Him; yesterday I was buried with Him, today I am raised with Him.” But John has altered the order, unhistorically placing the burial before crucifixion. The reason, Nikodimos suggests, is that John is concerned with what happens to us, with whom resurrection precedes glorification. This sharing with Christ in burial and crucifixion has three references, Nikodimos suggests: first, to our ascetic burial with Christ through the Lenten Fast; secondly, to Christ’s identification with us in the Incarnation; and thirdly, to those baptized during Easter night.

Ode 4: Prayer of Avvakum (Habakkuk)

Irmos: Now let the prophet Avvakum inspired by God keep godly watch as sentinel with us; let him point out an angel bearing blazing light, who with resounding voice declares, “Today is salvation for the world; for Christ has risen, as Omnipotent.”

Troparion 1: As a firstborn son, Christ appeared as a “male,” opening the virgin womb; as our food He is called “lamb”; as our Pascha free from stain unblemished He is named, and is designated, “perfect,” as He is true God

Troparion 2: As a. yearling lamb, blessed for us, the good crown, of His own free will and for all Christ our God was sacrificed, the Passover which purifies; from the tomb once again the fair Sun of Justice has shone for us.

Troparion 3: God’s forebear David dancing leaped before the sacred Ark; shadow was the Ark, but now seeing the fulfilment of the types, and full of God, let us God’s holy people rejoice; for Christ has risen as Omnipotent.

The fourth ode is the Prayer of Avvakum (or Habakkuk). But, as is often the case in the canons, the reference is more immediately to where Avvakum was standing when he made his prayer, which is found in Habakkuk 2:1: “I will stand on my watch, and get up on a rock” (LXX). But, as Nikodimos notes, John arrives at this reference by way of the opening of Gregory’s last homily. Gregory opens by quoting Avvakum’s words about standing at his watch, and says what he sees today, that is the day of Pascha: a vision of a man raised on the clouds, looking like an angel, with his clothes shining like lightning, crying out in a loud voice, “Today is salvation for the world…. Today, Christ is risen from the dead, let us be raised with Him.”

The first troparion dwells on Christ our Pascha, sacrificed for us (cf. 1 Cor. 5:7). The paschal lamb was to be “without blemish, male, a year old” (Exod. 12:5); John glosses this with Exodus 34:19, about the male that opens the womb belonging to God. He also recalls another passage from Gregory’s Easter homily: “for us the lamb is eaten.” With these references, John puts together his troparion, meditating on Christ’s sacrifice.

The second troparion continues this theme, laying stress on the voluntary nature of Christ’s sacrifice. Again, John draws on Gregory’s Easter homily, where he says of Christ as the paschal sacrifice: “a year old, like the sun of justice, setting out from there [heaven], circumscribed in His visible nature, and returning to Himself, and the ‘blessed crown of goodness,’ being on every side equal to Himself and alike; and not only this, but also as giving life to the circle of the virtues, gently mingled and mixed with each other, by the law of love and order.” Here are all John’s themes for this troparion. There is also a play on words, as Nikodimos points out, in that the word translated as “good” in the troparion, is pronounced exactly like the word Christ (christos/chrēstos).

The last troparion refers to David dancing before the ark (2 Kgd. 6:16-19). David celebrated what was simply a shadow of what was to come; Christians celebrate the fulfilment. “Full of God, let us rejoice”: for this Nikodimos refers to a passage in Gregory’s homily for the Theophany: “Let us celebrate, not as for a pagan festival, but divinely, not in a worldly manner, but in a manner that transcends the world.”

Ode 5: Prayer of Isaias

Irmos: Come let us arise in the early dawn, and instead of myrrh, the hymn of praise we shall offer to the Master; Christ Himself we then shall see, the risen Sun of Righteousness, who causes life to dawn for all.

Troparion 1: Seeing your measureless compassion, those who were straitly contrained by the bindings and cords of Hades, pressing forward to the light, O Christ, they. move with joyful steps, loudly they greet an eternal Pasch.

Troparion 2: Let us go out bearing torches, and meet Christ as He comes from the sepulchre like a Bridegroom; with the Angels’ festive ranks, together let us celebrate, feasting with them the saving Passion of God.

The fifth ode, the Prayer of Isaias, begins, “By night my spirit watches for you, O God” (Isa. 26:9 (LXX)). John’s mind naturally goes to the myrrh-bearing women, the first witnesses of the Resurrection. The watching by night of the vigil, in which this canon is sung, is related to women coming to the sepulchre “in the early dawn” (Luke 24:1).

Isaias’s prayer closes by celebrating the redemption of the dead: “the dead shall be raised, those in the graves will come out, and those on earth shall rejoice” (Isa. 26:19). This theme is picked up in the troparia, the first of which returns to the theme of the redemption of Hades; John sees those who were bound pressing forward to Christ, as they are depicted in the icon of the Anastasis. The theme of rejoicing is tied to that of a wedding banquet, a favourite symbol of the coming of the Kingdom in the Gospel parables. Christ’s tomb becomes a bridal chamber, from which He emerges as in the verse of the psalm (Ps. 18:6). The bride He has made His own is the Church.

Ode 6: Prayer of Jonas

Irmos: You went down to the deepest parts of the earth, and the everlasting bars you shattered, which held imprisoned those fettered there; O Christ, on the third day, like Jonas from the whale, you arose from the sepulchre.

Troparion 1: Unbroken you preserved the seals, O Christ, in your rising from the tomb, nor injured the locks of the virgin womb in your birth, and have opened to us the portals of Paradise.

Troparion 2: My Saviour, living victim, and as God unsacrificed, yet to the Father willingly offering yourself, you raised with yourself all Adam’s race, in your rising from the sepulchre.

The sixth ode is the Prayer of Jonas from the belly of the whale. The Lord’s reference to the “sign of Jonas,” the prefiguring of His death and resurrection after three days by Jonas’s three days in the whale (Matt. 12:29-30), provides the obvious link between the ode and the Resurrection, the subject of the Easter canon. Jonas himself says, “I went down into the earth, whose bars held me fast eternally” (Jonas 2:7 (LXX)), thus comparing his fate with descent into Hades. It is this that John picks up here: for Christ went down into the “deepest part of the earth” and shattered the bars that held fast those in Hades. Again, in this irmos, it is the theme of the Resurrection icon to which John returns.

The first troparion draws a parallel between Christ’s rising from the sepulchre without breaking the seals and His being born from the Virgin Mother of God without harming her virginity, her virginitas in partu, which the Fathers saw prefigured in the gate of the Temple in Ezekiel’s vision, which “shall remain shut, … for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it” (Ezek. 44:2), as Nikodimos points out. By passing through what remains sealed, Christ has opened for us the gates of Paradise.

The second troparion again draws on Gregory’s second Easter homily, this time a passage in which Gregory is comparing Christ’s sacrifice with sacrifices of the Old Covenant. These latter were not useless, a mere shedding of blood, “but the great and, if I may say so, in its first [i.e., divine] nature, unsacrificed sacred offering [athyton hiereion, exactly as in the troparion] was mingled with sacrifices of the law, and was a purification not for a small part of the world, nor for a brief period of time, but for the whole cosmos and for ever.” John picks up Gregory’s reference to cosmic salvation with his reference to “all Adam’s race.”

Ode 7: Prayer of the Three Holy Children

Irmos: He who of old freed the young men from the furnace, becoming human suffers as a mortal, and through suffering He clothes the mortal with the glory of incorruption, the only blessed and most glorious God of our fathers.

Troparion 1: With fragrant myrrh, godly minded women hastened after you; the One they sought with tears as mortal man they adored with joy as the Living God; good tidings they then proclaimed of the mystical Pasch to your disciples, O Christ.

Troparion 2: Now as a corpse death lies before us and we feast, Hell’s destruction, and the first-fruits of the new eternal life: as we leap for joy, we sing praises to the cause, the only blessed and most glorious God of our fathers.

Troparion 3: How truly holy and all festive this night of salvation, night yet full of light, the herald of the day of light, night the messenger which proclaims the Resurrection, in which the timeless light from the sepulchre shone bodily for all.

The seventh ode is the Prayer of the Three Children (or young men) from the burning fiery furnace, where Nebuchodonosor (Nebuchadnezzar) had condemned them. The angel of the Lord appeared to them (whom Nebuchodonosor saw as a fourth man “like a son of God”), and made the centre of the furnace like a “whistling wind of dew” (Dan. 3:50 (LXX)). For the Fathers, the angel of the Lord was the Word of God, so John sees the saving of the three children as an earlier act of salvation by the Word, who later became incarnate, and through suffering gives human kind incorruption.

The first troparion returns to the myrrh-bearing women, only this time, as Nikodimos points out, they are understood in the light of the Song of Songs: “your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is oil poured out; therefore your maidens love you. Draw me after you, let me run after the fragrance of your oils” (Cant. 1:3). They are seeking with tears the one they love. Finding Him risen as God, they take the good tidings to His disciples. The second troparion continues this meditation: the women were seeking a corpse, but discovered the death of death.

The final troparion returns to celebration of the night, the night of salvation, the night of the Resurrection. Nikodimos again refers to a passage from Gregory’s second Easter homily in which Gregory contrasts yesterday, “beautiful” with its celebrations with candles and fires, with today, “even more beautiful,” since we celebrate the Resurrection itself, “no longer as something hoped for, but already happened and drawing the whole world to itself.” Nikodimos comments on how the Church begins the day in the evening, so that the day moves from darkness to light.

Ode 8: Song of the Three Holy Children

Irmos: This is the chosen and holy day, the first of all Sabbaths, it is the Queen and Lady, the Feast of Feasts, and the Festival it is of Festivals, on which we bless Christ to all the ages.

Troparion 1: Come, let us share the new fruit of the vine, of gladness divine, on this resplendent and refulgent day of the rising of Christ, on this day of the Kingdom of Christ our Lord, which praises we sing to Him as God to all the ages.

Troparion 2: Lift your eyes around you, O Sion, and see, for behold they have come like beacons blazing forth with light divine from the West and from the North, from the East and from the Sea, your children come to you, blessing Christ in you to all the ages.

Troparion 3: Father almighty, Word of God, and Spirit, nature united in trinity of persons, transcending being, and transcending Godhead, into you we have been baptized, and we bless you to all the ages.

The Song of the Three Children is a song in which all creation is called on to praise God. This gives John the cue for these verses, which develop the theme of praise. The irmos is drawn from Leviticus 24:36, which speaks of the “eighth day [as] a chosen and holy day for you”; Gregory’s second Easter homily, which praises Easter as “the feast of feasts and the festival of festivals”; and a passage from his homily on New Sunday where he says that “the queen of hours pays homage to the queen of days and bestows on her all that is most beautiful and pleasant.”

The first troparion starts with a reference to the “fruit of the vine,” of which Jesus said to His disciples at the Last Supper, “I shall not drink again, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matt. 26:29). The Father’s kingdom is the Resurrection, says Nikodimos, following the interpretation of John Chrysostom. The second troparion picks up more directly the theme of the ode, seeing people coming from the four corners of the earth to praise Christ. The final troparion recalls the Lord’s final command in Matthew’s Gospel (28:19) to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Trinity. It is worth noting that the irmos and all the troparia end by praising God or Christ “to the ages,” which underlines the eschatological nature of the Resurrection.

Ode 9: Songs of the Mother of God and of Zacharias

Irmos: Enlightened, be enlightened, O New Jerusalem, for the glory of the Lord has risen upon you, dance now, O Sion, rejoice and be glad, you too rejoice, all pure Mother of God, as He arises, to whom you gave birth

Troparion 1: O divine! O beloved! O your sweetest voice! True the promises you made to us, to be with us evermore, even, O Christ, until time finds its end; this we possess as an anchor of hope, and we, the faithful, rejoice therein.

Troparion 2: O Pascha, great Pascha, great and most sacred Pascha, Christ! O Wisdom, O Word of God, and Power of God! Grant us, O Lord to partake of you yet more clearly in the day which has no evening, of your Kingdom.

The final ode consists of the two New Testament odes, the Song of the Mother of God and the Song of Zacharias, the father of St. John the Forerunner. The opening word—“Enlightened, be enlightened” ( Phōtizou, phōtismos )—very likely contains a reference to baptism, the sacrament of phōtismos , or enlightenment (as it is frequently called in the Fathers: John himself mentions this aspect of baptism in Expos . 82.57), which was anciently celebrated as part of the Easter Vigil. The beginning of the irmos is from Isaiah 50:1, interpreted as looking beyond the end of the exile (its historical reference) to the lasting redemption of the Resurrection. It is an occasion for dancing and rejoicing. The word for “rejoice” is cognate with that used in the Magnificat (“my spirit has rejoiced in God my saviour”: Luke 1:44), which leads John to call on the “all-pure Mother of God” to rejoice in the Resurrection. The first troparion is an ecstatic recalling of the promise of Christ recorded at the end of Matthew, already alluded to in the last troparion of the previous ode. The final troparion John draws from the conclusion of Gregory’s second Easter homily: “But, O Pascha, great and sacred and cleansing the whole cosmos—for I will speak to you as to a living person! O Word of God, and Light and Life and Wisdom and Power! I rejoice in all your names.” And calling upon the Pascha, John prays to “partake of you yet more clearly in the day which has no evening, of your Kingdom.” The canon begins acclaiming the “day of resurrection,” which foreshadows the “day without evening” of the Kingdom.

*Canon translated by Fr Ephrem Lash, The Services for the Holy and Great Sunday of Pascha (Manchester: Saint Andrew’s Monastery, 2000), 5-16; slight modifications and commentary by Fr. Andrew Louth in St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 258-274.

Paschal Canon

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 18:52:55 GMT

by St John of Damascus

Synaxis of the Twelve Holy Apostles

Anno Domini 2022, June 30

Ode 1: Song of Moses (Tone 1)

Troparion 2: Let the heavens, as is fitting, rejoice, and let the earth be glad; now let the universe entire, both seen and unseen, celebrate the feast; for Christ has risen, Christ our eternal joy.

Ode 3: Song of Anna

Irmos: Come, let us drink a new drink, not one wondrously brought forth from a barren rock, but incorruption’s source, which pours out from the sepulchre of Christ, in whom we are established.

Troparion 1: Now all things have been filled with light, both heaven and earth and all things beneath the earth; let all creation sing to celebrate the rising of Christ, by which it is established.

Troparion 2: Buried yesterday with you, O Christ, and today, as you arise, I am raised with you. I was crucified with you; O Saviour, grant me glory with you in your kingdom.

Ode 4: Prayer of Avvakum (Habakkuk)

Ode 5: Prayer of Isaias

Ode 6: Prayer of Jonas

Troparion 1: Unbroken you preserved the seals, O Christ, in your rising from the tomb, nor injured the locks of the virgin womb in your birth, and have opened to us the portals of Paradise.

Troparion 2: My Saviour, living victim, and as God unsacrificed, yet to the Father willingly offering yourself, you raised with yourself all Adam’s race, in your rising from the sepulchre.

Ode 7: Prayer of the Three Holy Children

Ode 8: Song of the Three Holy Children

Irmos: This is the chosen and holy day, the first of all Sabbaths, it is the Queen and Lady, the Feast of Feasts, and the Festival it is of Festivals, on which we bless Christ to all the ages.

Ode 9: Songs of the Mother of God and of Zacharias

*Translated by Fr Ephrem Lash, The Services for the Holy and Great Sunday of Pascha (Manchester: Saint Andrew’s Monastery, 2000), 5-16; slight modifications made by Fr. Andrew Louth in St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 258-274.

Orthodox Funeral Hymns

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 03:31:41 GMT

by St John of Damascus

Synaxis of the Twelve Holy Apostles

Anno Domini 2021, June 30

Tone 1: Where is the pleasure in life which is unmixed with sorrow? Where the glory which on earth has stood firm and unchanged? All things are weaker than shadow, all more illusive than dreams; comes one fell stroke, and Death in turn, prevails over all these vanities. Wherefore in the Light, O Christ, of Your countenance, the sweetness of Your beauty, to him (her) whom You have chosen grant repose, for You are the Friend of Mankind.

Tone 2: Like a blossom that wastes away, and like a dream that passes and is gone, so is every mortal into dust resolved; but again, when the trumpet sounds its call, as though at a quaking of the earth, all the dead shall arise and go forth to meet You, O Christ our God: on that day, O Lord, for him (her) whom You have withdrawn from among us appoint a place in the tents of Your Saints; yea, for the spirit of Your servant, O Christ.

Tone 2: Alas! What an agony the soul endures when from the body it is parting; how many are her tears for weeping, but there is none that will show compassion: unto the angels she turns with downcast eyes; useless are her supplications; and unto men she extends her imploring hands, but finds none to bring her rescue. Thus, my beloved brethren, let us all ponder well how brief is the span of our life; and peaceful rest for him (her) that now is gone, let us ask of Christ, and also His abundant mercy for our souls.

Tone 3: Vanity are all the works and quests of man, and they have no being after death has come; our wealth is with us no longer. How can our glory go with us? For when death has come all these things are vanished clean away. Wherefore to Christ the Immortal King let us cry, “To him (her) that has departed grant repose where a home is prepared for all those whose hearts You have filled with gladness.”

Tone 4: Terror truly past compare is by the mystery of death inspired; now the soul and the body part, disjoined by resistless might, and their concord is broken; and the bond of nature which made them live and grow as one, now by the edict of God is rest in twain. Wherefore now we implore Your aid grant that Your servant now gone to rest where the just that are Yours abide, Life-bestower and Friend of Mankind.

Tone 4: Where is now our affection for earthly things? Where is now the alluring pomp of transient questing? Where is now our gold, and our silver? Where is now the surging crowd of domestics, and their busy cries? All is dust, all is ashes, all is shadow. Wherefore draw near that we may cry to our immortal King, “Lord, Your everlasting blessings vouchsafe unto him (her) that now has gone away. bringing him (her) to repose in that blessedness which never grows old.”

Tone 5: I Called to mind the Prophet who shouted, “I am but earth and ash.” And once again I looked with attention on the tombs, and I saw the bones therein which of flesh were naked; and I said, “Which indeed is he that is king? Or which is soldier? Which is the wealthy, which the needy? Which the righteous, or which the sinner?” But to Your servant, O Lord, grant that with the righteous he (she) may repose.

Tone 6: My beginning and foundation was the form; bestowing Word of Your commandment; for it pleased You to make me by compounding visible and invisible nature into a living thing. Out of earth was my body formed and made, but a soul You gave me by the Divine and Life-creating in-breathing. Wherefore, O Christ, to Your servant in the land of the living, in the courts of the righteous, do You grant repose.

Tone 7: Bring to his (her) rest, O our Savior, You giver of life, our brother (sister) whom You have withdrawn from this transient world, for he (she) lifts up his (her) voice to cry: “Glory to You.”

Tone 7: When in Your own image and likeness You in the beginning did create and fashion man, You gave him a home in Paradise, and made him the chief of your creation. But by the devil’s envy, alas, beguiled to eat the fruit forbidden, transgressor then of Your commandments he became; wherefore back to earth, from which he first was taken, You did sentence him to return again, O Lord, and to pray You to give him rest.

Tone 8: Weep, and with tears lament when with understanding I think on death, and see how in the graves there sleeps the beauty which once for us was fashioned in the image of God, but now is shapeless, ignoble, and bare of all the graces. O how strange a thing; what is this mystery which concerns us humans? Why were we given up to decay? And why to death united in wedlock? Truly, as it is written, these things come to pass by ordinance of God, Who to him (her), now gone gives rest.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.

The death which You have endured, O Lord, is become the harbinger of deathlessness; if You had not been laid in Your tomb, then would not the gates of Paradise have been opened; wherefore to him (her), now gone from us give rest, for You are the Friend of Mankind.

Both now and ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

Virgin chaste and holy, Gateway of the Word, Mother of our God, make supplication that his (her) soul find mercy.

We Believe in One God

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 03:05:03 GMT

by St John of Damascus

Synaxis of the Twelve Holy Apostles

Anno Domini 2022, June 30

WE THEREFORE believe in one God, who is a single principle without beginning, uncreated, unbegotten, both indestructible and immortal, eternal, uncircumscribed, unlimited, infinitely powerful, simple, uncompounded, incorporeal, without flux, without passion, immutable, changeless, source of goodness and justice, intellectual light, inaccessible, a power unknowable by any standard of measurement, but measured only by His own will—for He can do anything that He wishes—a single principle productive of all created things both visible and invisible, that sustains and preserves all things, exercises providential care over all things, exercises dominion authority, and sovereignty over all things by an everlasting and immortal kingdom, a single principle that contains nothing contrary, that fills all things, that is not contained by anything, but rather itself contains the sum total of all things and sustains them and possesses them beforehand, that pervades all essences without suffering defilement, and transcends all things, and is detached from every essence since it is superessential and beyond beings, beyond the divine, beyond the good, beyond fulness, and is set apart from all principles and classes as a whole, and is superior to every principle and class, since it is more than essence, life, word, and concept; it is light itself, goodness itself, life itself, essence itself, since it does not have its being, or anything in the category of existents, from another, being the source itself of the being of that which exists, of the life of that which lives, of the rationality of that which participates in reason, and is the cause in all things of every good and of their form before their coming to be; it is one essence, one divinity, one power, one will, one energy, one principle, one authority, one dominion, one sovereignty, known and worshipped in three perfect hypostases that are believed in and adored in a single act of worship by the whole of rational creation and that are united without confusion and divided without separation, which is also a paradox. We believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in whom we have also been baptized; for it is thus that the Lord commanded the Apostles to baptize, "baptizing them," He said, "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

From Chapter 8, "On the Holy Trinity," in An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith . Available for purchase from Eighth Day Books.

Three Treatises on the Divine Images by St John of Damascus

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 02:44:11 GMT

An Eighth Day Books Review

Synaxis of the Twelve Holy Apostles

Anno Domini 2022, June 30

An Eighth Day Books Review of Three Treatises on the Divine Images by St. John of Damascus; translated by Andrew Louth

Perhaps no name is more synonymous with the subject of early Christian art than the eighth-century monk, John of Damascus. Renowned in both East and West for his profound yet clearly-expressed theology, St. John remains our most accessible defender of Christ glorified in His Church, and this desire is foundational to each of the treatises presented here. He is careful to explain what is meant by “image” and “worship”, and he makes a distinction between different forms of veneration. Without St. John’s contribution, the political and social concerns of the late Byzantine Empire could have eclipsed the humble beauty and proper use of art in Christian life. Christian iconography is not idolatrous, says St. John, but biblical and an integral part of our apostolic heritage. (A new translation, by the leading scholar of the Damascene monk in the English-speaking world.)

163 pp. paper $18.00

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A Christian Theory of Images: Accept the Icon or Reject Reality

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 02:28:42 GMT

by Erin Doom

Synaxis of the Twelve Holy Apostles

Anno Domini 2021, June 30

St John of Damascus, the great eighth century defender of icons, is the patron saint of Eighth Day Institute. He is also my personal patron saint.

When iconoclasm erupted in the Byzantine Empire in 726 A.D., St John had already been a monk living in the Judean wilderness for two decades. Outside of the Byzantine Empire and thus free to respond with no fear of retribution, he penned three defenses of icons. It is in these apologies that we find the first formulation of a coherent theory of images.

St John begins by defining the term image: “An image is a likeness depicting an archetype, but having some difference from it.” An archetype is defined as an original that has been imitated. A son, for example, is an image of his father, an imitation or likeness of the archetype.

St John next explains the purpose of an image: “Every image makes manifest and demonstrates something hidden . . . the image was devised to guide us to knowledge and to make manifest and open what is hidden”

With the term image defined and its purpose set forth, St. John goes on to enumerate the various types of images – six in all.

First, there is a natural image in the Godhead itself: “The Son is a living, natural and undeviating image of the Father, bearing in Himself the whole Father, equal to Him in every respect, differing only in being caused.” For those of us who know the scriptures, two verses come to mind immediately: Colossians 1:15 tells us the Son is the image of the invisible Father. And Hebrews 1:3 tells us the Son is brightness of God’s glory, the express image of His person.

Second, there are images in God of things to come: “There are in God paradigms of what He is going to bring about, that is His will that is before eternity and thus eternal.” Every good builder and architect knows that they need to have a plan—a paradigm or image—of the finished product in order to execute well. This is precisely the illustration St John provides: “if one wants to build a house, its form is described and depicted first in the mind.” God has an image of where history is leading; the image of history was already formulated in the mind of God before time ever existed.

Third, according to St. John: “There are images of invisible and formless things, that provide in bodily form a dim understanding of what is depicted.” Images, analogies, metaphors help us understand invisible spiritual realities. St. Paul teaches this in his epistle to the Romans: “the invisible things of God, since the creation of the world, have been clearly perceived through the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). St John offers four illustrations for the Trinity, what he calls “created things intimating to us dimly reflections of the divine”: “There is an image of the holy Trinity, which is beyond any beginning, in the sun, its light and its ray, or in a fountain dwelling up and the stream flowing out and the flood, or in our intellect and reason and spirit, or a rose, its flower and its fragrance.” Icons themselves also serve this purpose of providing images of invisible things. The famous fifteenth-century Russian icon of the hospitality of Abraham by Andrei Rublev depicts the three angels who visited Abraham at the Oak of Mamre (Gen. 18:1-8). This particular icon is more commonly referred to as the icon of the Trinity because it helps us understand the Trinity as a communion of three persons.

Fourth, St John tells us there are images of the future that describe things to come. The Old Testament is filled with these. The burning bush, for example, is an image of the Virgin Mary bearing the living God in her womb without being consumed by His divinity. The holy of holies in the Temple is another image of the Virgin Mary who would become a temple of the living God, and hence an image of what we are to become: living temples of God.

Fifth, St John continues, “There are said to be images of the past, either the memory of a certain miracle, or honor, or shame, or virtue, or vice…” This type of image comes in two forms: “through words written in books, as God engraved the Law on tablets and ordered the lives of men beloved of God to be recorded; and through things seen by the sense of sight, as when He ordered the jar and the rod to be placed in the ark as a memorial.” So whether in words or objects or paintings, this type of image is meant to inspire us. They are “for the benefit of those who behold them later, so that they may flee what is evil and be zealous for what is good.”

Finally, man is an image of God. As we know from the creation account in Genesis, every human being is created in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:27).

So there are six types of images:

Imagery in the Godhead itself with the Son as an image of the Father
Images in the mind of God of things to come
Images of invisible realities
Images of the future
Images of the past
Imagery in humanity with man created in the image of God

Why does St John take the time to enumerate these six types of images before he even begins to talk about the icon? What is St John up to here? He’s making an essential point that is foundational to a proper understanding of the icon. EVERYTHING is characterized by images. From the uncreated Godhead to the created cosmos and all of humanity, images are built in everywhere. Simply put, we cannot escape them.

If we think of images hierarchically, at the top of the ladder we find the supreme image in the Son of God as the image of the Father. So what do we find at the bottom of that hierarchical ladder? A humble piece of wood with colors painted on it to portray the scenes from Scripture, the life of Christ, and the lives of the saints: an icon. As humble as this image may be, however, it nevertheless remains an integral part of the very nature of reality that is image-filled. Fr. Andrew Louth, the translator of St John’s three defenses, explains this best:

“Reality echoes reality . . . images establish relationships between realities . . . The Image, in its different forms, is always mediating, always holding together in harmony. Images in the form of pictorial icons fit into this pattern, in a quite humble way. But to deny the icon is to threaten the whole fabric of harmony and mediation based on the image.”

St John therefore concludes: “Either destroy every image and establish laws against the One who ordered that these things should be” or accept the way things are: Images are built into very structure of the cosmos, including both God and humanity, and the icon is merely one small and humble part of it. To deny the icon is to deny both created and uncreated reality.

St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology by Andrew Louth

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 21:06:13 GMT

An Eighth Day Books Review

Feast of St Agrippina the Martyr of Rome

Anno Domini 2022, June 23

An Eighth Day Books Review of St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology by Andrew Louth

When a theologian sings, a special order of attention is due: his teaching has been transmuted into praise. St. John of Damascus (+ ca. 750), whose writings are often (if erroneously) marked as the close of the Patristic Age, gave us not only some of the greatest dogmatic treatises of all time but also some of the most magnificent hymnography: the Paschal canon, the funeral canon, the canons on the Transfiguration and the Dormition of the Mother of God. Strangely, scholarly attention to him in the English-speaking world has been almost non-existent, a lack that this important study grandly remedies. The eminent British patristic scholar Andrew Louth gives us here a thorough examination of the life and theological contribution of the Damascene, defining his methodology, summarizing his descriptions of Christian heresies (including Islam), central theological themes (the Trinity, Creation and Humankind, the Incarnation, the defense of icons), and providing a portrait of St. John as homilist and poet. St. John has often been accused of being a slavish imitator of the “more original” theological work of earlier Fathers, but Louth’s epigraph to his book (attributed to a certain Zissimos Lorenzatos)—“Originality means to remain faithful to the originals”—and the massive scholarship that follows, prove the hollowness of the claim. We will risk a stock description, simply because in this case it is so true: Louth’s work is a monument of Patristic scholarship.

346 pp. paper $65.00

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Sin

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 18:13:37 GMT

by St John of Damscus

Feast of Sts Manuel, Sabel, & Ishmael the Martyrs of Persia

Anno Domini 2022, June 17

94. Why God created those whom he foreknew would sin and not repent

God in His goodness brings what exists out of non-being into being and has foreknowledge of what will happen. If, then, they were not going to exist, they were neither going to be evil, nor would they be foreknown to be evil. For knowledge is of what exists, and foreknowledge is necessarily of what is going to exist. For existence comes first and then being either good or evil. but if those who were going to exist through God’s goodness were prevented from coming into existence because they were going to be evil through their own deliberate choice, then evil would have prevailed over God’s goodness. Everything that God makes He most certainly makes as good. Each of us becomes good or evil by our own deliberate choice. Even if the Lord said: “It would have been better for that one not to have been born” (Matt. 26:24), He did not say it in disparagement of His own creation but because evil had happened to His creature through that creature’s own deliberate choice and indolence. For the creature made the Creator’s benefaction useless to itself through the indolence of its own will. It is as if someone who had been entrusted with wealth and authority by a king were to rebel against his benefactor. He would rightly be overpowered and punished if the king saw that he was persisting in his rebellion to the end.

95. On the law of God and the law of sin

The divine is good and supremely good, as is also its will. For what is good is what God wills. A law ( nomos ) is the commandment that teaches this, that by abiding in it we may be in light. The transgression of this commandment is sin. The latter is brought about through the assault of the devil and our own unforced and voluntary consent. This too is called a law.

Therefore when the law of God enters our mind it draws it towards itself and pricks our conscience. Our own conscience is also called a law of our mind. Moreover, the assault of the evil one, that is to say, the law of sin, enters the members of our flesh and attacks us through it. For once we have voluntarily transgressed the law of God and have consented to the assault of the evil one, we have allowed it entry, having sold ourselves to sin. Hence our body is easily induced to sin. And so the scent and sensation of sin stored up in our body, that is to say, the body’s desire and pleasure, is also called a law in the members of our flesh.

Thus on the one hand the law of my mind, that is to say, my conscience, is in harmony with the law of God, that is to say, the commandment, and desires it. But on the other hand, the law of sin, which is to say, the assault that comes about through the law that is in my members, which is to say, the desire and inclination and movement of the irrational part of the soul, fights against the law of my mind, that is to say, my conscience, and takes me prisoner, even though I desire the law of God and love it and do not desire sin, and by a blending, through the softness of pleasure and the desire of the body and the irrational part of the soul, as I have said, leads me astray and persuades me to become a slave to sin. But “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (for He assumed flesh but in no way did He assume sin) “He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in those who walk not according to the felsh but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3-4). For “the Spirit helps us in our weakness” (Rom. 8:26) and gives strength to the law of our mind against the law that is in our members. For the text, “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26), teaches us what we should pray for. In consequence, it is impossible to fulfill God’s commandments except through patience and prayer.

*St. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith , Chs. 94-95, translated by Norman Russell (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2022), pp. 277-279.

The Transgression of Adam and Our Redemption by Jesus Christ

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 16:54:01 GMT

by St Symeon the New Theologian

Feast of St Justin the Philosopher and Martyr and His Companions

Anno Domini 2022, June 1

1. In what consisted the transgression of Adam?

The first-created Adam, being in Paradise, fell, at the instigation of the serpent, into pride; and having dreamed of being a god, as the devil told him, he tasted of the tree from which God had commanded him not to eat. For this he was given over to great chastisements—to corruption and death, for the humbling of his pride. But when God condemns for something, He gives also a sentence, and His sentence becomes deed and an eternal chastisement which has come from the decree of God.

But think now: Adam sinned with a great sin because he did not believe the words of God, but believed the words of the serpent. Compare God and the serpent, and you will see how great was the sin of most-wise Adam. In his great wisdom he had given names to all the animals (Gen. 2:19-20). But when with his whole soul he believed the serpent and not God, then the Divine grace which had rested on him stepped away from him, so that he became the enemy of God by reason of the unbelief which he had shown to His words. Adam thought that God envied him and did not wish that he also should know good and evil; and he thought that God had commanded him not to taste of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and evil in order that he might not become a god like unto God Who had created him. And he tasted, and immediately he knew his nakedness, and instead of becoming a god he became corruptible, and as corruptible, mortal.

2. How by reason of his transgression did all men become corruptible and mortal?

And behold, as you see, the sentence of God remains forever as an eternal chastisement. And all of us men became both corruptible and mortal, and there is nothing that might set aside this great and frightful sentence. And when there is no possibility to set aside this sentence, then what benefit is there in wisdom or in wealth, or in power, or in the whole world? For this reason the Almighty Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, came so as to humble Himself in place of Adam. And truly He humbled Himself, even to the death of the Cross. The word of the Cross, as the Scripture says, is this: “Cursed is everyone that hangeth upon a tree” (Gal. 3:13).

Adam, without having any need for this, took from the fruit of that tree (from which God had commanded him not to taste, threatening him that if he should only taste of it he should die); he tasted and died. One should know that since a man has a body and a soul, therefore he has two deaths also: one, the death of the soul, and the other, the death of the body. Likewise, there are also two immortalities, one of the soul and one of the body, even though both of them are in one man, for the soul and the body are one man.

Thus, in soul Adam died immediately, as soon as he had tasted; and later, after 930 years, he died also in body. For, as the death of the body is the separation from it of the soul, so the death of the soul is the separation from it of the Holy Spirit, by Whom God Who had created him had been pleased that man be overshadowed, so that he might live like the angels of God, who, being always enlightened by the Holy Spirit, remain immovable towards evil. Later, for this reason, the whole human race also became such as our forefather Adam became through the fall—mortal, that is, both in soul and body. Man such as God had created him no longer existed in the world. And there was no possibility that anyone should become such as Adam was before the transgression of the commandment. But it was necessary that there should be such a man.

3. How did the merciful and man-loving God, through the dispensation of the incarnation, deliver the human race from corruption and death?

And thus God, desiring to have such a man as He had created Adam in the beginning, sent in the latter times to the earth His Only-begotten Son, and He came and was Incarnate, accepting a perfect humanity, so as to be perfect God and perfect man, and thus the Divinity had a man worthy of It.

And behold the Man! Such a One there has never been, there is not, and there shall never be. But why did Christ become such a one? In order to keep the law of God and His commandments, and so as to enter into battle with and conquer the devil. Both the one and the other occurred in Him by themselves; for if Christ is that very God Who gave the commandments and the law, then how could He not keep that law and those commandments which He Himself had given? And if He is God, as He is in truth, then how is it possible for Him to be deceived or deluded by any trickery of the devil? The devil, to be sure, being blind and senseless, rose up against Him with warfare. But this was allowed so that there might be performed a certain great and fearful mystery, namely, so that Christ, the Sinless One, should suffer, and through this Adam, who had sinned, might receive forgiveness. For this also, in place of the tree of knowledge, there was the Cross; in place of the stepping of the feet by which our first ancestors walked to the forbidden tree, and in place of their stretching out of their hands in order to take of the fruit of the tree, there were nailed to the Cross the innocent feet and hands of Christ; in place of the tasting of the fruit, there was the tasting of gall and vinegar, and in place of the death of Adam, the death of Christ.

And then what happened? Christ lay in the grave three days, for the sake of the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, so as to show that even though He alone, the Son, became Incarnate and suffered, still the dispensation is the work of the All-Holy Trinity.

And in what does this dispensation consist? One Person of the Holy Trinity, namely the Son and Word of God, having become Incarnate, offered Himself in the flesh as a sacrifice to the Divinity of the Father, and of the Son Himself, and of the Holy Spirit, in order that the first transgression of Adam might be benevolently forgiven for the sake of this great and fearful work, that is, for the sake of this sacrifice of Christ, and in order that by its power there might be performed another new birth and re-creation of man in Holy Baptism, in which we also are cleansed by water mingled with the Holy Spirit. From that time people are baptized in water, are immersed in it and taken out from it three times, in the image of the three-day burial of the Lord, and after they die in it to this whole evil world, in the third bringing out from it they are already alive, as if resurrected from the dead, that is, their souls are brought to life and again receive the grace of the Holy Spirit as Adam had it before the transgression. Then they are anointed with Holy Myrrh, and by means of it are anointed with Jesus Christ, and are fragrant in a way above nature. Having become in this way worthy of being associates of God, they taste His Flesh and drink His Blood, and by means of the sanctified bread and wine become of one Body and Blood with God Who was Incarnate and offered Himself as a sacrifice.

After this is it no longer possible that sin should reign and tyrannize over them, for they are gods by grace. Since Adam had fallen under the curse, and through him all people also who proceed from him, therefore the sentence of God concerning this could in no way be annihilated; and therefore Christ was for us a curse, through being hung upon the tree of the Cross, so as to offer Himself as a sacrifice to His Father, as has been said, and to annihilate the sentence of God by the superabundant worth of the sacrifice. For what is greater and higher than God? Just as in this whole visible creation there is nothing higher than man (for everything visible was created for man), so also God is incomparably higher than everything created, and nothing can enter into comparison with Him, not the whole visible and invisible creation.

Thus God, Who is incomparably higher than the whole visible and invisible creation, accepted human nature, which is higher than the whole visible creation, and offered it as a sacrifice to His God and Father. Being shamed by such sacrifice (I speak thus), and honoring it, the Father could not leave it in the hands of death. Therefore He annihilated His sentence and resurrected from the dead first of all and at the beginning Him Who had given Himself as a sacrifice for the redemption and as a replacement for men who are of the same race as Himself; and afterwards, in the last day of the end of this world, He will resurrect also all men. Moreover, the souls of those who believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in this great and fearful sacrifice, God resurrects in the present life; and a sign of this resurrection is the grace of the Holy Spirit which He gives to the soul of every Christian, as if giving a new soul. Such a soul of a Christian is called “trustworthy” (or “faithful”), because to it is entrusted the Holy Spirit of God and it has accepted Him—the Spirit of God Who is life eternal, since the Holy Spirit is eternal God who proceeds from the eternal God and Father.

4. And in what consists the mystery and the three-day burial of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ?

Inasmuch, therefore, as the Cross has become as it were the altar of this fearful sacrifice—for on the Cross the Son of God died for the fall of man—therefore the Cross is justly revered and worshipped and depicted as the sign of the common resurrection of all men, so that those who bow down before the wood of the Cross might be delivered from the curse of Adam and receive the blessing and grace of God for the doing of every virtue. For Christians the Cross is magnification, glory, and power: for all our power is in the power of Christ Who was crucified; all our sinfulness is mortified by the death of Christ on the Cross; and all our exaltation and all our glory are in the humility of God, Who humbled Himself to such an extent that He was pleased to die even between evil-doers and thieves. For this very reason Christians who believe in Christ sign themselves with the sign of the Cross not simply, not just as it happens, not carelessly, but with all heedfulness, with fear and with trembling and with extreme reverence. For the image of the Cross shows the reconciliation and friendship into which man has entered with God.

Therefore the demons also fear the image of the Cross, and they do not endure to see the sign of the Cross depicted even in the air, but they flee from this immediately knowing that the Cross is the sign of the friendship of men with God, and that they, as apostates and enemies of God, being far from His Divine face, do not have any longer freedom to draw near to those who have become reconciled with God and united with Him, and they can no longer tempt them. And if it seems that they tempt certain Christians, let everyone know that they battle against those who have not properly understood the exalted mystery of the Cross.

But those who have understood this mystery and in very fact have known in experience the authority and power which the Cross has over demons, have likewise understood that the Cross gives the soul strength, power, meaning, and divine wisdom. These with great joy cry out: “Far be it from me to glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world is crucified to me and I unto the world” (Gal. 6.14). And thus, inasmuch as the sign of the Cross is great and fearful every Christian has the duty to make it with fear and trembling, with reverence and heedfulness, and not simply, and not as it happens, simply out of habit and carelessly: for according to the degree of the reverence which one has towards the Cross, he receives corresponding power and help from God. To Him may there be glory and dominion forever. Amen.

* From St Symeon the New Theologian, The First-Created Man , selected and translated from Russian by Fr. Seraphim Rose (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2001), pp. 43-49

Heart Speaks to Heart: A Toast to St John Henry Newman

Fri, 27 May 2022 18:23:22 GMT

by Joshua Papsdorf

Feast of St John the Russian of Evia

Anno Domini 2022, May 27

St. John Henry Newman has countless wonderful quotations that one could use to open a reflection, but the first one that came to my mind when Erin asked if I would do a short reflection was from Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. In introducing the idea of doctrinal development he explains: “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Of course, the principle is not just applicable to living doctrines; the same is true of living persons, particularly St. Newman himself. He is a man famous for many reasons, but none more so than the most significant change in his own life, his entrance into the Catholic Church.

What I want to do now is take just a few minutes to unpack this idea of perfection through change to make the case for using St. John Henry Newman as a model as we begin this Florovsky-Newman Week conference. And let me say at the outset, that I am not a Newman scholar. My own engagement with Newman has been episodic and really more connected with my personal history than my academic work. But, I have always found Newman to be a wonderful dialogue partner, and a number of key themes from his work have become permanent features of how I approach life and my own work as a professor and theologian. I also think they are very fitting principles for all of us to follow in our time together.

The first feature I want to highlight is his relentless pursuit of the truth. In basically every phase of his life and career, Newman is striving to get at the truth, and his tenaciousness was matched only by the breadth of his methods. He was a gifted researcher who immersed himself in the early Church and the Fathers long before it was “cool” (at least within the Catholic world). In addition to his seminal Essay on the Development of Doctrine where we can see the fruit of his vast reading through Church history, he also wrote works focusing on patristics, particularly the Arian controversy and Athanasius. But he didn’t only scour the libraries for truth, he analyzed his own mind, and thought itself, producing the Grammar of Assent , a work full of insights into the very nature of knowledge and belief. And, on top of his pursuit of truth in the library and in philosophical contemplation, he pursued it out in the real world, in the theological and philosophical conversation and controversies of his day. Throughout his career, Newman was an active participant in a wide range of debates, from his time as a pamphleteer in the Oxford Movement to his wrestling with the decrees of Vatican I as a Catholic priest and ultimately cardinal.

Which brings me to the second characteristic I’d like to highlight, the integration of Newman’s thought and life as a whole. Newman was not just an academic who pursued truth from 9-5 within the neat confines of his office and department. Newman taught that all knowledge is connected and that it should all be centered on, and animated by, our knowledge and love of God. This is beautifully expressed in another famous work, his Idea of a University . For Newman there was only one ultimate Truth, but it is not exclusive to any particular discipline or field. Rather, he argues that we need all of the disciplines together in order to pursue it properly. And that is true on both the corporate and individual levels. A university needs all of its departments to join together, and theology needs the insights of science, history, and literature in order to function properly. So too, as individuals, we need a broad grounding in, and engagement with, a range of fields in order to avoid falling into a view of the truth that is distorted by our own limited perspective and preferences. Newman lived this out in a way that most of us could only admire from afar. When he wasn’t writing historical monographs or penetrating analyses on the nature of belief, he was composing beautiful hymns, writing historical fiction, engaging in public debate in the leading journals of his day, and founding universities in Ireland.

And that’s the second type of integration that is so remarkable in Newman. It’s not just that different areas of study within our minds, or universities, need to be integrated. But also, our intellectual pursuit of truth should be integrated with our lives as a whole. Newman doesn’t just write about the importance of a proper education, he actual works on founding a university. He doesn’t just analyze the history of doctrinal development, he jumps into the fray of his own day and takes up his position. And, most famously, he doesn’t just reflect on the nature of belief in academic terms, he wrestles with his own belief and when he becomes convinced that he needs to change, he follows through on that conviction despite enormous costs.

Which brings me to the next key feature, the strength of his convictions. And with due credit to all his other outstanding characteristics, personally I am most struck by this simple fact. When Newman became convinced of a truth, he followed through on it regardless of the consequences. Like many other converts, this made a real impact on me personally as I read his Apologia Pro Vita Sua in the midst of my own entry into the Catholic Church during grad school. But, it was only fairly recently that I was truly struck by the immensity of Newman’s sacrifice. Most converts face challenges in explaining their decisions to family and friends. But, for Newman the stakes were much higher. He was sacrificing a prestigious and comfortable career, fame and respect in British society; basically, the entire lifestyle of the Oxford academic that had been his life’s goal and comfort for many years. It would have been so easy to stake out a compromise, like some other members of the Oxford movement did, and keep all the respect and trappings of Oxford life while striking a quasi-Catholic tone within the Church of England. But Newman’s convictions wouldn’t allow it.

And that’s only the most famous of his conscientious stands. Once he was within the Catholic Church, Newman continued to stand by his convictions, even when it was unpopular. He argued against the most powerful British Catholic of his day, Cardinal Manning, on the issue of papal infallibility. Newman didn’t disagree with the essential idea, but he thought the decree was inopportune and that the ultra-conservative interpretation of the doctrine was untenable. His stand on the issue certainly exacted a toll in the Catholic world of his day, and it is likely that it cost him a delay of many years in the process of his canonization.

But, Newman’s position was not one of intellectual pride or stubbornness. Nor was it even just a case of commitment to individual integrity. Rather, it flowed from Newman’s commitment to the cause of dialogue, both ecumenical and evangelical. Beyond the historical and theological issues, Newman was concerned about the impact the decree might have on hearts of women and men and that it might prove an obstacle in their pursuit of the truth. And that brings me to the final characteristic of Newman I want to highlight: his heart for the salvation of others. When Newman was made a cardinal he took the motto: Cor ad cor loquitur— heart speaks to heart. And to illustrate this, prominently featured on his Coat of Arms are three bright red hearts.

Now for all that I’ve said about the virtues of Newman, if you’ve read him at all you are hardly going to think of him as a warm and cuddly sort of guy. Newman’s work is full of a certain type of passion, but it is not typically thought of as emotional or sentimental. If you set up a sort of theological matching game and asked people to choose a motto and coat of arms to match with his work, I doubt that many people would choose the option that’s all about hearts. That really seems like it should belong to someone like St. Francis or St. Therese, not the brilliant Oxford academic. And yet it is his motto, and I think he chose it because it, in fact, expresses his own heart. What motivates all of the academic tomes, public lectures, and debates in leading periodicals of the day is a real desire to speak to the hearts of his readers. To the end of his life Newman was convinced that the best way for us to seek the truth is in partnership and dialogue with others as we all seek the truth united by a shared belief in God as both the ultimate goal and the foundation of our work.

And so, if you haven’t read much of St. John Henry Newman, I hope his pursuit of the truth, the integration of his life and work, his courageous conviction, and love of others will inspire you to do so. And if you have read Newman, I hope this reminder of his virtues will encourage you to go back to him. Personally I find him to be an inspiring model for my life as a Christian and academic. And, I think he is a wonderful model for all of us as we embark on these next few days in shared pursuit of the truth. I humbly ask for his intercession with the desire that we won’t simply try to win debates but rather that we will truly have heart speak to heart.

*Originally presented at Festal Banquet for the 2021 Florovsky-Newman Week (now called Ad Fontes Academic Week).

An Eastern Father for Western Chrisians: Athanasius's On the Incarnation as a Story Worth Telling

Fri, 20 May 2022 16:32:50 GMT

by Carl R. Trueman

Feast of St Lydia of Philippi, Equal to the Apostles

Anno Domini 2022, May 20

Teaching elective theology courses at a traditional Christian liberal arts college offers both joys and challenges. Perhaps the most obvious joy is that all of the students in class actually want to be there. Enthusiasm for the subject can thus be presupposed. The challenges are numerous. The most obvious is making doctrines that many will intuitively regard as so arcane as to be irrelevant appear as vitally important to a vibrant understanding of the faith as they truly are—dyothelitism is a good example. Another is the ecumenical nature of the audience: typically my classes are dominated by Protestants from various church backgrounds but there are always a small number of other traditions represented, usually Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic. This means that it is vital both to speak respectfully of traditions with which I have significant disagreements but also to encourage students from across the Christian spectrum to take the ideas and insights of others seriously as a means of enriching their own faith and grasping something of the beauty of the Christian faith as a whole.

One such area is Christology. Now, Protestant Christology, at least in its confessional forms as found in the Lutheran Book of Concord, the Anglican Articles, the Presbyterian Westminster Confession, and the Reformed churches Three Forms of Unity, is unabashedly Nicene and Chalcedonian. Yet the soteriological focus of Protestantism, particularly in its popular evangelical variety, has tended to focus on the atonement, particularly in terms of penal substitution, in a manner that can at times be misread as making the Incarnation merely instrumental to Christ’s death. Further, this emphasis can tend to make forgiveness of sins the essential heart of the gospel in a manner that tends to neglect other important aspects of the Bible’s testimony to Christ’s work. This perhaps is not always the case with the Resurrection, but it is certainly an accurate statement of Protestantism’s general lack of concern with the Transfiguration, the descent into the realm of the dead, and the Ascension.

A second area, connected to the first, is the overarching emphasis on sin as the problem afflicting the fallen human race. Any good Protestant knows that dealing with sin via the death of Christ is critical. Yet the Bible is clear that humans face a twofold problem. The moral issue is surely sin. But there is an existential problem too, that of death itself. And this is where Protestant students find help from the eastern tradition. Indeed, over years of teaching I have found that Athanasius’s little book, On the Incarnation , has proved immensely useful to Protestants seeking to enrich their own understanding of Christ’s work in a manner that is not typical of the evangelical resources to which they typically look for guidance.

The work helps on a number of levels. First, it is existentially engaging. The most painful experiences in life are surely those associated with the death of a loved one. Young students may not have been touched directly by such—although any class will always have a number for whom bereavement is not simply an abstraction—but all know that sooner or later death will take the life of someone close to them and leave them painfully and permanently reduced. Forgiveness of sin is vital; but knowing that death has been overcome is a powerful source of home in the midst of grief. And Athanasius’s literary testimony to the conquest of death in and through Christ is one of the most stunning statements of Christian doctrine ever penned.

This leads to the second point. On the Incarnation makes it clear to the reader that the classic doctrine of God is crucial to the church’s faith. Of course, it was written in the midst of the passionate and intense discussions surrounding the status of the Logos that dominated the middle decades of the fourth century. From a teacher’s perspective it is surely the single most concise statement of why those debates were not mere semantic quibbles but went to the heart of the identity of God and the question of whether Christ could actually save. The book is therefore vital to teaching students that doctrine, particularly the doctrine of God, is of immense practical importance. But it is also engaging because it drives home the dynamic power of God in fulfilling the promise of Ezekiel 34—that He Himself would be the shepherd of the sheep and rescue them from all evil.

This then brings us to the third point: in this text, Athanasius draws out the significance of the whole of Christ’s life for salvation. This is not something Protestantism at the level of its confessions has neglected. The use of the humiliation/exaltation motif in theology, along with that of the threefold nature of the mediatorial office, is a staple of sophisticated Protestant thought. But the popular Protestantism that is found in the pew has often been more at home with a simple focus on the death and resurrection of Christ as saving, with the Lord’s prior life fulfilling primarily didactic or exemplary purposes. The realization that the incarnate life of Christ involves the Logos manifesting Himself in human flesh and dealing with death on its own territory, so to speak, broadens the focus to the whole of the incarnate action of Christ, not simply the cross.

And that brings us to the fourth point: the realization that in the Incarnation it is not God who changes but it is the unchanging God who acts to bring humanity into a new relationship with Himself, and this is something my students find transformative. It is this, more than anything, that presses together the transcendent incomprehensibility of God and the grace of the amazing condescension of that God as He grasps that flesh which exists within space and time. This demands a complete reconceptualization both of the relationship of God to creation and of God to salvation. It requires that students reorient their thinking from a God who is there to serve as an empathetic therapist to a God who does not exempt us from the sufferings of this vale of tears but who yet crushes death beneath His feet.

One student told me last year that he had spent time reading Athanasius’s little treatise to his dying grandfather. It had, he told me, proved inestimably encouraging to both of them—to his grandfather, in knowing that the existential threat he now faced so imminently had already been decisively addressed by Him who made heaven and earth and rules by the Word of His power; and to himself for reminding him that what his grandfather was about to experience, and what awaited him at the end of his life, was not the end. God Himself had taken human flesh, died, and emerged victorious on the other side, holding the keys to Death and Hades. Athanasius, he declared, told a story worth telling. And it is one for which Western Christians can be truly grateful to the great Eastern Father.

Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

St Irenaeus and The Da Vinci Code

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Wed, 04 May 2022 19:02:12 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Hilary the Wonderworker

Anno Domini 2022, May 4

Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code , released in April 2003, was an immediate success, debuting in the number one spot on the New York Times best-seller list and remaining number one or two for the vast majority of sixty weeks. It has been so popular and publicized that it now has over 70 million copies in print and is being translated into over forty languages. Why such a stir over a novel?

The surface plot of Brown’s book is a bit shocking when compared with the traditional understanding of the Biblical Jesus. The novel portrays Jesus and Mary Magdalene as married with children, Mary Magdalene as the chief apostle instead of Peter, the Catholic Church as an oppressive institution that has suppressed these facts for 2000 years, and Jesus as a good man who was deified by Constantine in 325 A.D. While this spin may cause a huge shock factor and thus create a Harry Potteresque publishing phenomenon, there is more to the story than meets the eye.

Another explanation for Brown’s success may be found beneath the surface of the plot in its pervading gnostic message. While the book is written as a novel, Brown clearly has a point he is trying to communicate and one that, according to him, is researched and based on fact (fn 1: see www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_code/faqs.html . The novel also has a disclaimer page titled “Fact” where Brown claims that “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”). This “researched,” “factual” and “accurate” message is presented as a secret and special knowledge ( gnosis : Greek for knowledge) that has been hidden from the public and is only now being made available to those willing to accept an alternate account of history. However, there is nothing new, exciting or secret about Brown’s message, as most readers believe it to be. In fact, many of his ideas date back to an ancient system of religious thought known as Gnosticism.

Gnosticism, while difficult to precisely define (fn 2: Harvard professor Karen King explains the difficulties and complexities of defining Gnosticism: “The problem, I argue, is that a rhetorical term has been confused with a historical entity. There was and is no such thing as Gnosticism, if we mean by that some kind of ancient religious entity with a single origin and a distinct set of characteristics. Gnosticism is, rather, a term invented in the early modern period to aid in defining the boundaries of normative Christianity. Yet it has mistakenly come to be thought of as a distinctive Christian heresy or even as a religion in its own right.” What is Gnosticism ?, Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2003, p. 2. See also Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category , Princeton Univ. Press, 1996), according to James A. Herrick in The Making of the New Spirituality ,

manifests itself in the veneration of secret spiritual knowledge, the elevation of spiritual elites in possession of such knowledge, a denigration of time and history, a tendency to view the physical realm as evil and a corresponding tendency to view human embodiment with suspicion…In its most elemental form, gnosticism is the systematic spiritual effort to escape the confines of history and physical embodiment through secret knowledge ( gnosis ) and technique (magic)…Thus, Henri-Charles Puech has called Gnosticism “a ‘revolt’ against all myths and belief systems which purport to give time some indwelling meaning (pp. 178-179).

As a result, any “myth” or “belief system” that honors time and history, or allows the physical nature of humanity and the earth to have any real significance, is an enemy of Gnosticism. Thus, traditional Christianity and its historical message of a beginning and end of time, as well as its positive emphasis upon the physical world (fn 3: In the creation story of Genesis, upon completion God looks upon the fruit of his labors and says it is very good (Gen. 1:31). Additionally, Christianity holds the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ as a fundamental and essential tenet to their faith, thus giving an even greater role to the physical body.), has been one of gnosticism’s greatest enemies for nearly 2000 years.

The clash between Christianity and Gnosticism dates back to the very beginnings of the Christian Church. There are hints of the initial stages of this controversy in the first epistle of John (fn 4: 1 John 1:1, 4:2: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands…By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God”), written sometime toward the end of the first century A.D. However, the controversy really came to the fore in the second century when the bishop of Lyons, armed with ink and parchment, set out to expose and refute the expanding influence of Gnostic teachings.

Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, is considered by many to be the first systematic theologian and thus the most important Christian personality between the apostles and the towering third century Alexandrian genius named Origen. Sometime between 175 and 189 A.D., Irenaeus penned five books against the Gnostics, collectively titled On the Detection and Refutation of Knowledge Falsely So Calle d and more commonly known as Against Heresies . In the first book, Irenaeus sets out “[i]n the manner of a surgeon performing a major operation…to lay bare the nerves and sinews and so take us to the very heart of the Gnostic heresy,” (fn 5: H.B. Timothy, The Early Christian Apologists and Greek Philosophy Exemplified by Irenaeus, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria , Van Gorcum & Comp. B.V., 1973, p. 23), meticulously describing the errors of the Valentinian Gnostics and their predecessors. Using logic and rational proofs, Irenaeus continues his operation in book two as he attempts to demonstrate the absurdity and falsity of Gnostic doctrines. Pressing on in books three and four, Irenaeus turns to the words of Jesus’ apostles in the third book and then to the sayings and parables of Jesus in the fourth book for proofs against Gnosticism. Finally, wrapping his operation up in the fifth book, Irenaeus zooms in to the heart of the matter by arguing for the salvation and resurrection of the body, thus implying the goodness of matter, a point sharply denied by the Gnostics. Viewed as one massive masterpiece, according to the historian Robert Grant, Irenaeus

built up a body of Christian theology that resembled a French Gothic cathedral, strongly supported by columns of biblical faith and tradition, illuminated by vast expanses of exegetical and logical argument, and upheld by flying buttresses of rhetorical and philosophical considerations from the outside (fn 6: Irenaeus of Lyons , Routledge, 1997, p. 1),

resulting in a treatise that proved to be very popular among anti-gnostic Christians.

Despite its popularity, Irenaeus’ original Greek text was mysteriously lost and never recovered, posing a common but serious problem for ancient historians. The Greek text appears to have been available in the sixth century to translators of an Armenian version, in the eighth century evidenced by excerpts in John of Damascus’ text Sacra Parallela , and even up until the ninth century when Photius read a copy at Baghdad—it has been suggested that this copy was possibly lost when Baghdad was sacked in 1258 (fn 7: Dominic J. Unger, St. Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies Vol. 1 Book 1, Mahwah, NJ: 1992, p. 12).

When an ancient text is lost or destroyed, such as this treatise, the next step is to locate other sources that may have portions of the original text copied. What we do have today of Irenaeus’ original Greek text comes from various writers who quoted extended Irenaean passages in their own works. Most of book one is available, thanks to Epiphanius, who makes it clear when he is copying verbatim and when he is merely summarizing. We also have a number of sections in two other treatises on heresies, one by Hippolytus and the other by Theodoret of Cyrus. Eusebius also preserves portions of Irenaeus’ original text, plus a bonus of two Irenaean letters! Additionally, there are several passages preserved in St. John of Damascus’ Sacra Parallela and Catenae , as well as fragments in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus 405 (fn 8: This is the oldest fragment of the text, dated to the end of the second century and originating from Egypt.) and Jena papyrus (fn 9: Unger, p. 11). As to the remaining portions of the text, which are quite considerable, we are dependent upon the next best source of lost texts: later preserved translations.

There are nine surviving manusripts of Irenaeus’ work, all Latin translations dating from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries (fn 10: Clermont manuscript, ninth century; Voss manuscript, 1494; Holmiensis A 140 manuscript, end of fifteenth century; Arundel manuscript, 1166; Vatican manuscript Latin 187, 1429; Vatican manuscript Latin 188, 1447 –55; Vatican Ottobonensis manuscript Latin 152, 1429 – 1440; Vatican Ottobonensis manuscript Latin 1154, 1530; and Salamanca manuscript Latin 202, pre-1457). These sources too, however, do not end the complication of deciphering an authentic, original text. Though not all complete texts, they are all based on an earlier Latin translation made sometime between the third and fourth centuries. This translation seems to have been made by someone who did not have a solid grasp on Latin. Scholars note that this Latin translation appears to be a literal word for word translation of the original Greek text, often times even preserving the syntactical construction of the original Greek. However, resorting to a literal word-for-word translation is not necessarily a negative point because in the end it has proved helpful in the reconstruction of the original Greek text.

Once a trustworthy text has been established, the problem of interpretation comes to the fore. This is typically a problem initially even for the translator. In an effort to make a text understandable in another language, the translator often times ends up interpreting the text instead of translating it. However, this does not seem to be as much of a problem with Irenaeus’ text, due to the translator’s limited grasp of Latin and the resulting literal translation. Nevertheless, ever since Irenaeus’ writings were translated, his ideas have been interpreted and applied by scholars, both monks and academics. Leaving aside any medieval interpretations of Irenaeus, let us turn to some more recent studies of his thought and writings.

One of the most pervasive themes to continuously arise in Irenaeus’ writings is his staunch defense of the incarnation of Jesus. As previously mentioned, one of the core Gnostic tenets is the denigration of the physical world, claiming that anything material is necessarily evil. Thus, according to the Gnostics, and particularly the docetist group (from the Greek word dokein , which means to seem or appear), Jesus could not have had a physical body. Instead, he only seemed or appeared to have a physical body and thus it was the Gnostic Jesus who merely appeared to die on a cross. Flying in the face of the core Christian belief that Jesus came as a real human person, died a real physical death, and resurrected in a real physical body, Irenaeus adamantly affirms the reality of the human nature of Jesus. In book five he articulates the importance of the physical realm when he reminds his readers that Paul

constantly uses the terms flesh and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, sometimes to show that he was a man (for the Lord himself called himself the Son of man) and sometimes to confirm the salvation of our flesh. For if the flesh were not to be saved the Word of God would not have become flesh (John 1:14) and if the blood of the just were not to be requited the Lord would not have had blood (fn 11: Against Heresies : Book 5, 14.1 in Grant 1997, p. 168).

While Irenaeus’ theological and philosophical motivation, focusing on the incarnation, is agreed upon by most, if not all, scholars (fn 12: See Eric Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyons , Cambridge University Press, 2001; Timothy, 1973, pp. 23 – 39; Gerard Vallee, A Study in Anti-Gnostic Polemics: Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius , Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 1981, pp. 9 – 40; Grant, 1997; and Gustaf Wingren, Man and the Incarnation: A Study in the Biblical Theology of Irenaeus , Muhlenberg Press, 1959), there has been an argument that Irenaeus had more than mere theological / philosophical motives for his treatise.

Gerard Vallee argues in his Study in Anti-Gnostic Polemics that Irenaeus also had socio-political motives for his treatise against the Gnostics (fn 13: cf. pp. 24 –33). Vallee argues that Irenaeus, despite his reputation as a peaceful and permissive pastor, drew the line with the Gnostics due to their threat of disrupting the unity and authority of the church. According to Vallee, upholding the reputation of the church in a society that already distrusted it (indeed, Christians had already experienced a wave of persecutions in Rome) was one of Irenaeus’ major responsibilities. Irenaeus perceived the Gnostics as disruptive and revolutionary, a radical and socially subversive group that needed to be squashed. And so Irenaeus set out to do just that. Successful as he was, however, Gnosticism has continued to be a persistent force with which Christianity has had to deal with over and over again. Nevertheless, Vallee credits Irenaeus for marginalizing Gnosticism, arguing that

In retrospect, the fact that Irenaeus came forward at this time and in the way he did helped Christianity save its identity in the Greco-Roman melting pot. That in turn prevented Christianity from being a marginal movement in the Western world (fn 14: Ibid., p. 33).

Though Christianity did eventually triumph, it has been argued by many for a long time that there was a group within Christianity that was marginalized and thus drawn toward Gnosticism both then and now.

Daniel Hoffman argues in his book, The Status of Women and Gnosticism in Irenaeus and Tertullian, that although Gnosticism has traditionally been presented as much more sympathetic to women than Christianity, there is an abundance of Gnostic texts that would indicate the contrary (fn 15: Hoffman 1995, p. 77: “Exeg. Soul 133,5 says that ‘women led astray the man’ [NHL, 195]; Treat. Seth 65,24-25 warns, ‘Do not become female, lest you give birth to evil’ [NHL, 385]; and The Teachings of Silvanus [NHC VII,4] 93,9-13 mentions that ‘if you cast out of yourself the substance of the mind, which is thought, you have cut off the male part and turned yourself to the female part alone’ [NHL, 385].”). Hoffman goes on to present a strong case demonstrating that “women in second century orthodoxy groups were more highly regarded than in the corresponding Gnostic groups” and even “had a comparatively high status” within orthodox Christian groups (fn 16: Ibid., p. 80). Taking into consideration literary, artistic, and epigraphical evidence, including Irenaeus, as well as more recent studies that have changed the perceived landscape of women’s roles in the early church, Hoffmann emphasizes their involvement in the Christian church as teachers, evangelists, prophetesses, deaconesses, widows, virgins, martyrs, and house church matrons. Though, Hoffmann’s position is definitely controversial, he presents a strong case and brings to light evidence that has all too often been ignored, thus fulfilling his duty as a historian.

Ever since the discovery of a library of fourth century papyrus manuscripts at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945, consisting of 52 treatises in twelve codices and eight leaves from a thirteenth, there has been a revived interest in Gnosticism. The battle between Christianity and Gnosticism, initially brought to the fore by Irenaeus, has been replayed many times since then. From the Gnostic Cathars and Bogomils of the twelfth century, to a renewed fascination with Gnosticism in the twentieth century, demonstrated by the popularity of books like Elaine Pagels’ Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas , as well as the publishing phenomenon of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code , the ideas and teachings of Gnosticism have proven to be a formidable force.

Irenaeus’ work, however, has served the Christian church well over the last two millennium. Hammering out the central importance of the incarnation against docetist Gnostics, playing a pivotal role in the triumph of Christianity over Gnosticism, and even providing a role, though limited, and great respect for women, Irenaeus’ importance for the Christian Church cannot be overestimated. Nor, on the other hand, can his importance in the field of Gnosticism be neglected. In fact, the discoveries at Nag Hammadi have only served to confirm the reliability of Irenaeus’ account in Against Heresies as an accurate source for the wide array of Gnostic teachings flourishing in the first and second centuries.

Indeed, is this not the very goal of our chosen field of study, to constantly strive to paint as accurate a picture as possible of any given period or person, continuously collecting any new evidence to either add new details to our picture, or if need be, to repaint the picture altogether. Anything less is a slippery slope surrounded by all sorts of dangers and this was all too evident in Irenaeus’ day, just as it is in ours. The punk rock band Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols sing it well, “If nothing [is] true, everything [is] possible.”

Originally written in 2004 for a graduate history course with Dr. Craig Miner at Wichita State University.

2022 Newman Lecture: Newman on Hypocrisy & Holiness in the Life of a Christian

Wed, 04 May 2022 17:12:19 GMT

by Stephanie A. Mann

John Henry Cardinal Newman, before his canonization in 2019, may have been studied mostly for his controversial works like the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine , The Letter to the Duke of Norfolk , or classics like the Apologia pro Vita Sua and Idea of a University . However, as his cause for canonization progressed (and succeeded on October 13, 2019), there has been an increasing interest in his spiritual influence as an Anglican preacher in the Parochial and Plain Sermons and as the founder of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in England.

This annual Newman lecture will focus on his efforts as the Vicar of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford to help his congregation free themselves from the corruptions of what he called the “Religion of the Day” and their comforts as part of the establishment in England to lead true Christian lives, loving God fully, and avoiding the besetting sin of hypocrisy.

The continuity of that effort will also be briefly explored through some of his Meditations and Devotions, prepared for the boys of the Oratory School in Birmingham.

2022 Newman Lecture presented by Stephanie A. Mann at 9 am on Thursday, June 2 at Newman University, Gerber Room 105.

STEPHANIE A. MANN has carved out a niche as a specialist on the English Reformation, on the Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales, St. John Henry Newman, and historical apologetics for national Catholic media like EWTN TV and Radio, Ave Maria Radio, Crisis Magazine, Catholic World Report, and the National Catholic Register. Her book, Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation, is available from Eighth Day Books. This summer she is teaching THEO 6543 - John Henry Newman and the New Evangelization at Newman University. She belongs to a group that meets monthly to read a Newman sermon out loud to experience and meditate upon his insights into the Christian life.

O Ye Dry Bones

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 03:51:49 GMT

by Fr. Georges Florovsky

Palm Sunday in East; Easter in West

Anno Domini 2022, April 17

“O Ye Dry Bones” ~Ezekiel 37

A GLORIOUS VISION was granted to the Prophet. By the hand of the Lord the prophet Ezekiel was taken to the valley of death, a valley of despair and desolation. There was nothing alive there. There was nothing but dry bones, and very dry they were indeed. This was all that had been left of those who were once living. Life was gone. And a question was put to the Prophet: “Can these dry bones live again? Can life come back once more?” The human answer to this question would have been obviously, no. Life never comes back. What is once dead, is dead forever. Life cannot come out of dust and ashes. “For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again” (2 Sam. 14:14). Death is an ultimate ending, a complete frustration of human hopes and prospects. Death comes from the sin, out of the original Fall. It was not a divine institution. Human death did not belong to the Divine order of creation. It was not normal or natural for man to die. It was an abnormal estrangement from God, who is man’s Maker and Master—even the physical death, i.e. the separation of soul and body. Man’s mortality is the stigma or “the wages” of sin (Rom. 6:23).

Many Christians today have lost this Biblical conception of death and mortality and do regard death rather as a release, a release of an immortal soul out of the bondage of the body. As widely spread as this conception of death may actually be, it is utterly alien to the Scriptures. In fact, it is a Greek, a gentile conception. Death is not a release, it is a catastrophe. “Death is a mystery indeed: for the soul is by violence severed from the body, is separated from the natural connection and composition, by the Divine will. O marvel. Why have we been given over unto corruption, and why have we been wedded unto death?” (St. John of Damascus in the “Burial office”). Dead man is no man anymore. For man is not a bodyless spirit. Body and soul belong together, and their separation is a decomposition of the human being. A discarnate soul is but a ghost. A soulless body is but a corpse. “For in death there is no remembrance of Thee, in the grave who shall give Thee thanks” (Ps. 6:5). Or again: “Wilt Thou shew wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and praise Thee? shall Thy loving-kindness be declared in the grave? or Thy faithfulness in destruction? shall Thy wonders be known in the dark? and Thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness” (Ps. 88:10-12). And the Psalmist was perfectly sure: “and they are cut off from Thy hand” (v.5). Death is hopeless. And thus the only reasonable answer could be given, from the human point of view, to the quest about the dry bones: No, the dry bones will never live again.

But the Divine reply was very different from that. And it was not just an answer in words, but a mighty deed of God. And even the Word of God is creative: “for He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast” (Ps. 33:9). And now God speaks again and acts. He sends His Spirit and renews the face of the earth (Ps. 104:30). The Spirit of God is the Giver of Life. And the Prophet could witness a marvelous restoration. By the power of God the dry bones were brought again together, and linked, and shaped, and covered over again with a living flesh, and the breath of life came back into the bodies. And they stood up again, in full strength, “an exceedingly great congregation.” Life came back, death was overcome.

The explanation of this vision goes along with the vision itself. Those bones were the house of Israel, the chosen People of God. She was dead, by her sins and apostasy, and has fallen into the ditch which she made herself, was defeated and rejected, lost her glory, and freedom, and strength. Israel, the People of Divine Love and adoption, the obstinate, rebellious and stiff-necked people, and yet still the Chosen People . . . And God brings her out of the valley of the shadow of death back to the green pastures, out of the snare of death, of many waters, of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay.

The prophesy has been accomplished. The promised deliverance came one day. The promised Deliverer, or Redeemer, the Messiah, came in the due time, and His name was Jesus: “for He shall save His people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). He was “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of Thy people Israel.”

And then something incredible and paradoxical happened. He was not recognized or “received” by His people, was rejected and reviled, was condemned and put to death, as a false prophet, even as a liar or “deceiver.” For the fleshly conception of the deliverance held by the people was very different from that which was in God’s own design. Instead of a mighty earthly Prince expected by the Jews, Jesus of Nazareth came, “meek and lowly in heart.” The King of Heaven, the King of Kings Himself, came down, the King of Glory, yet under the form of a Servant. And not to dominate, but to serve all those “that labor and are heavy laden,” and to give them rest. Instead of a charter of political freedom and independence, He brought to His people, and to all men indeed, a charter of Salvation, the Gospel of Eternal Life. Instead of political liberation He brought freedom from sin and death, the forgiveness of sins and Life Everlasting. He came unto His own and was not “received.” He was put to death, to shameful death, and “was numbered with the transgressors.” Life put to death. Life Divine sentenced to death by men—this is the mystery of the Crucifixion.

Once more God has acted. “Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain; Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that He should be holden of it” (Acts 2:23-24, the words of St. Peter). Once more Life came out of the grave. Christ is risen, He came forth out of His grave, as a Bridegroom out of His chamber. And with Him the whole human race, all men indeed, was raised. He is the first fruits of them that slept, and all are to follow Him in their own order (1 Cor. 15:20, 23). “That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 5:21).

The prophesy of Ezekiel is read in the Orthodox Church at Matins on Great Saturday, at that glorious office at which believers are invited to keep a watch at the grave of the Lord, at that sacred and holy Grave out of which the Life sprung abundantly for all creation. In the beautiful hymns and anthems, appointed for the day, the “encomia,” one of the most precious creations of the devotional poetry, this tremendous mystery is depicted and adored: Life laid down in the grave, Life shining forth out of the grave. “For lo, He who dwelleth on high is numbered among the dead and is lodged in the narrow grave” (The Canon, Ode 8, Irmos). The faithful are called to contemplate and to adore this mystery of the Lifebearing and Lifebringing tomb.

And yet, the old prophesy is still a prophesy, or rather both a prophesy and a witness. Life came forth from the grave, but the fulness of life is still to come. The human race, even the redeemed, even the Church itself, are still in the valley of the shadow of death.

The house of the New Israel of God is again very much like dry bones. There is so little true life in all of us. The historical path of man is still tragic and insecure. All of us have been, in recent years, driven back into the valley of death. Everyone, who had to walk on the ruins of once flourishing cities, realizes the terrible power of death and destruction. Man is still spreading death and desolation. One may expect even worse things to come. For the root of death is sin. No wonder that there is, in many and diverse quarters, a growing understanding of the seriousness of sin. The old saying of St. Augustine finds anew echoes in the human souls: Nondum considerasti quanti ponderis sit peccatum , “you never understand of what weight is the sin” [This line is not by Augustine but from Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus homo? Bk. 1, Ch. 21; Florovsky often cited patristic passages from memory but didn’t always cite them perfectly]. The power of death is broken indeed. Christ is risen indeed. “The Prince of Life, who died, reigns immortal.” The spirit of God, the Comforter, the Giver of Life, has been sent upon the earth to seal the victory of Christ, and abides in the Church, since Pentecost. The gift of life, of the true life, has been given to men, and is being given to them constantly, and abundantly, and increasingly. It is given, but not always readily “received.” For in order to be truly quickened one has to overcome one’s fleshly desires, “to put aside all worldly cares,” pride and prejudice, hatred and selfishness, and self-complacency, and even to renounce one’s self. Otherwise one would quench the Spirit. God knocks perpetually at the gate of human hearts, but it is man himself who can unlock them!

God never breaks in by violence. He respects, in the phrase of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, “the ancient law of human freedom,” once chartered by Himself. Surely, without Him, without Christ, man can do nothing. Yet, there is one thing that can be done but by man—it is to respond to the Divine call and to “receive” Christ. And this so many fail to do.

We are living in a grim and nervous age. The sense of historical security has been lost long since. It seems probably that our traditional civilization may collapse altogether and fall to pieces. The sense of direction is also confused. There is no way out of this predicament and impasse unless a radical change takes place. Unless . . . In the Christian language it reads—unless we repent, unless we ask for a gift of repentance . . . Life is given abundantly to all men, and yet we are still dead. “Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin. Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby you have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye” (Ez. 18:30-32).

There are two ways. “See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life” (Deut. 30:15, 19).

Let us choose life . . . First, we have to dedicate all our life to God. and to “receive” or accept Him as our only Lord and Master, and this not only in the spirit of formal obedience, but in the spirit of love. For He is more than our Lord, He is our Father. To love Him means also to serve Him, to make His purpose our own, to share His designs and aims. “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I heard of my Father I have made known unto you” (Jn. 15:15).

Our Lord left to us His own work to carry on and to accomplish. We have to enter into the very spirit of His redeeming work. And we are given power to do this. We are given power to be the sons of God. Even the Prodigal son was not allowed to lose his privilege of birth and to be counted among the hirelings. And even more, we are members of Christ, in the Church, which is His Body. His life is indwelt unto us by the Holy Spirit.

Thus, secondly, we have to draw closer together and search in all our life for that unity which was in the mind of our Blessed Lord on His last day, before the Passion and the Cross: that all may be one— in faith and love, one—in Him.

The world is utterly divided still. There is too much strife and division even among those who claim to be of Christ. The peace among nations and above all the unity among Christians, this is the common bounden duty, this is the most urgent task of the day. And surely the ultimate destiny of man is decided not on the battlefields, nor by the deliberations of the clever men. The destiny of man is decided in human hearts. Will they be locked up even at the knocking of the Heavenly Father? Or will man succeed in unlocking them in response to the call of the Divine Love?

Even in our gloomy days there are signs of hope. There is not only “darkness at noon,” but also lights in the night. There is a growing search for unity. But true unity is only that in the Truth, in the fulness of Truth. “Make schisms to cease in the Church. Quench the ragings of the nations. Speedily destroy, by the might of the Holy Spirit, all uprisings of heresies” (The Liturgy of St. Basil). The life is given abundantly.

We have to watch—not to miss the day of our visitation, as the Israel of old had missed hers. “How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not” (Matt. 23:37). Let us choose life, in the knowledge of the Father and His only Son, our Lord, in the power of the Holy Spirit. And then the glory of the Cross and Resurrection will be revealed in our own lives. And the glorious prophesy of old will once more come true. “Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel . . . Then shall you know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord” (Ez. 37:12, 14).

*First published as editorial in St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly 1 no. 3-4 (Spr-Sum 1953), pp. 4-8. Reprinted in Creation and Redemption , Collected Works of Georges Florovsky Vol. 3, pp. 11-18; and in The Patristic Witness of Georges Florovsky , eds. Brandon Gallaher & Paul Ladouceurk (T&T Clark, 2019), pp. 347-351.

Scrutonian Oikophilia: Antidote to Oikomachia

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 01:41:37 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St. Mary of Egypt

Anno Domini 2022, April 1

Our inaugural issue of The Christian News-Letter was dedicated to the memory of Sir Roger Scruton. In addition to a cursory presentation of his life and his view of conservatism, I introduced his concept of oikophobia , which he defines as an “educated derision that has been directed towards historical loyalties by our intellectual elites, who have tended to dismiss all ordinary forms of patriotism and local attachment as forms of racism, imperialism or xenophobia of which it accuses the world.” He goes on to say that he means more than mere fear (Gk. phobia ) of home (Gk. oikos ), but repudiation of home. I suggested that instead of calling it oikophobia , we should call it oikomachia : not just fear of home but fighting (Gk. machia ) home. We don’t just live in a secular age, one in which Christianity is just one option among many (and often the most difficult option), but also in an age of oikomachia , one that is fighting against the local home, family, and nation in favor instead of transnational institutions and “enlightened universalism against local chauvinism.”

There are a number of responses that can be offered against oikomachia . The most obvious one is the very opposite: oikophilia , love of home. And as Scruton’s biographer Mark Dooley has suggested, the huge diversity of subjects on which Scruton has written in his hundreds of scholarly articles, scores of magazine and newspaper columns, two operas, two novels, a book of poetry, and at least 50 other books are unified by one theme. Whether he’s writing on philosophy, religion, architecture, aesthetics, opera, the environment, globalization, animals, fox hunting, sex, dance, poetry, culture, West civilization, England, politics, the human body, wine, literature, psychology, history, Islam, Lebanon, terrorism, screens, death, music, or beauty, you’ll find some element of oikophilia in all of them.

So what is oikophilia ? Let’s see how Sir Roger explains it. He offers the most explicit and thorough explanation in his book How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism . Here’s one of his many descriptions:

Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by an attitude of oikophilia : the love of the oikos , which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile. The oikos is the place that is not just mine and yours but ours (227).

Here’s another longer Scrutonian description of oikophilia , a little later in the same book:

Oikophilia leans naturally in the direction of history and the conservation of the past: not from nostalgia, but from a desire to live as an enduring consciousness among things that endure. The true spirit of conservation sees the past not as a commercialized “heritage,” but as a living inheritance, something that lasts because it lives in me. To exist fully in time is to be aware of loss and to be working always to repair it. It is to listen as “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose garden.” The past lives in us as a place of untaken pathways, of decisions and commitments, and it is by experiencing the world thus that we acquire the sense of stewardship. We come to see that this present moment is also past, but the past of someone else, who has yet to be (234-235).

Home. The people in our home. The surrounding settlement. History. Conservation of the past. The past as a living inheritance. These are themes dear to the work and mission of Eighth Day Institute. They also remind me of Scruton’s encapsulation of conservative thinking, which he borrows from Edmund Burke: respect for the dead, the “little platoon,” and the voice of tradition. Scruton’s elaboration of these three principles, which I’ve labeled oikophilic conservatism, is so good I’ve included it next in this issue of the Eighth Day Moot . I hope you’ll read it. But first, one last Scrutonian description of oikophilia , again from How to Think Seriously About the Planet :

Oikophilia originates in our need for nurture and safety, but it spreads out across our surroundings in more mysterious and less self-serving ways. It is a call to responsibility, and a rebuke to calculation. It tells us to love, and not to use; to respect, and not to exploit. It invites us to look on things in our “homescape” as we look on persons, not as means only, but as ends in themselves. It absorbs and transforms many subsidiary motives, two of which deserve our attention, since they have inspired almost all the major conservation movements of recent times: love of beauty and respect for the sacred. Since the Enlightenment, aesthetic taste and natural piety have stood vigil over our surroundings, and held back the hand that was raised to destroy them. […] for thinkers like Burke, Kant, Rousseau, Schiller and Wordsworth, the beautiful and the sacred were connected, to be rescued together from the human urge to exploit and destroy (253).

We now have five characteristics of oikophilia : respect for the dead, little platoons, the voice of tradition, aesthetic taste (i.e. beauty), and natural piety (i.e. respect for the sacred). And all five of them are key ingredients in the Scrutonian antidote we desperately need to overcome the oikomachia of our secular age which is creating a widespread delusion of the self.

Let me come to an end with one last passage from Sir Roger Scruton, one that more explicitly relates to part of the focus of our Symposium theme, the self:

The final end of every rational being is the building of the self—of a recognizable personal entity, which flourishes according to its own autonomous nature, in a world which it partly creates. The means to this end is labor, in the widest sense of that term: the transformation of the raw materials of reality into the living symbols of human intercourse. By engaging in this activity, man imprints on the world, in language and culture as well as in material products, the marks of his own will, and so comes to see himself reflected in the world, an object of contemplation, and not merely a subject whose existence is obscure to everyone including himself. Only in this process of “imprinting” can man achieve self-consciousness. For only in becoming a publicly recognizable object (an object for others) does a man become an object of knowledge for himself. Only then can he begin to see his own existence as a source of value, for which he takes responsibility in his actions, and which creates the terms upon which he deals with others who are free like himself (Philosopher on Dover Beach, 46).

Commenting on this passage, Scruton’s biographer Mark Dooley ponders: “how else can a person become conscious of who he is and where he belongs, except through building, making and decorating that small patch of earth he calls ‘home’?”

At the most fundamental level, then, building our own “home” is synonymous with building our self. And the construction of a holy self inevitably leads to the construction of a good and beautiful community, to little platoons like the Eighth Day community. That’s also essentially what St. Seraphim of Sarov said: Save your own soul and thousands will follow.

And it reminds me of two passages with which I’ll conclude. First, Alisdair MacIntyre’s famous conclusion to his book After Virtue , which was part of the inspiration of Rod Dreher’s earlier book The Benedict Option . And second, a passage by Fr. Georges Florovsky on the creative vocation of man and his task of re-orienting the cultural process, or in EDI-speak, cultural renewal.

Alisdair MacIntyre on constructing local forms of community : It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds of hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict. ( After Virtue , 2nd ed., p. 263)

Fr. Georges Florovsky on the creative vocation of man and the task of cultural renewal : The “Modern Man” fails to appreciate and to assess the conviction of early Christians, derived from the Scripture, that Man was created by God for a creative purpose and was to act in the world as its king, priest, and prophet. The fall or failure of man did not abolish this purpose or design, and man was redeemed in order to be re-instated in his original rank and to resume his role and function in the Creation. And only by doing this can he become what he was designed to be, not only in the sense that he should display obedience, but also in order to accomplish the task which was appointed by God in his creative design precisely as the task of man. As much as “History” is but a poor anticipation of the “Age to come,” it is nevertheless its actual anticipation, and the cultural process in history is related to the ultimate consummation, if in a manner and in a sense which we cannot adequately decipher now. One must be careful not to exaggerate “the human achievement,” but one should also be careful not to minimize the creative vocation of man. The destiny of human culture is not irrelevant to the ultimate destiny of man. […] Christianity accepted the challenge of the Hellenistic and Roman culture, and ultimately a Christian Civilization emerged. […] [W]e have to face the age-long accumulation of genuine human values in the cultural process, undertaken and carried in the spirit of Christian obedience and dedication to the truth of God. What is important in this case is that the Ancient Culture proved to be plastic enough to admit of an inner “transfiguration.” Or, in other words, Christians proved that it was possible to re-orient the cultural process, without lapsing into a pre-cultural state, to re-shape the cultural fabric in a new spirit. (“Faith and Culture” in Christianity and Culture , Collected Works II, pp. 20-21, 24-25)

Cheers to MacIntyre and Florovsky, to the task of forming holy selves in the 21st century, and to constructing new forms of community within which the moral life can be sustained so that morality and civility might survive our current barbaric and dark age of oikomachia so that we might re-orient the current cultural process, that we might fulfill our mission of renewing culture through faith and learning.

The Triumph of Oikomachia: In Memoriam Sir Roger Scruton

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 22:53:06 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St. Mary of Egypt

Anno Domini 2022, April 1

Scrutopia

Shortly after the 10th annual Eighth Day Symposium in 2019, a Symposium attendee and Eighth Day member strongly encouraged me to apply to Scrutopia, a ten-day immersion experience in the philosophy and outlook of Sir Roger Scruton in and around Sir Roger’s home in the British Cotswolds near historic Malmesbury. The kicker was the Eighth Day member wanted to cover all my expenses. So I applied, was accepted, and a few months later was off to England for a once-in-a-lifetime educational experience.

The aim of Scrutopia is to “assemble a group of around 25 committed people, with a shared interest in culture and all that is involved in passing it on.” I was one of 18 of those committed people who came from all over the world (Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, Sweden, and five of us from the U.S.A.). Most afternoons we visited historic ancient and medieval sites such as Stone Henge, Old Sarum (iron age hillfort), Salisbury Cathedral where we saw the Magna Carta, Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury, and the Chedworth Roman Villa. On two different occasions we visited (and toured) Sunday Hill Farm where Sir Roger and his wife Sophie live and work. We met their horses, sat in their library for a classical concert, visited one of the farm’s mossy ponds that is famed for Iris Murdoch diving in for a swim, and feasted on local produce from Fernhill Farm and Brinkworth Dairy. And in good Eighth Day style, each evening concluded with lots of wine and conversation; one of those evenings included a gala dinner with a talk by James Gray MP. (Scruton has written a book on wine— I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine —in which he uses the ancient symposium for the following argument: “A good wine should always be accompanied by a good topic, and the topic should be pursued around the table with the wine. As the Greeks recognized, this is the best way to consider truly serious questions.”)

Until this trip I had barely heard of Scruton and hadn’t read a single thing by him. Now he’s one of my great heroes. And that’s why this inaugural issue of the annual Christian News-Letter is dedicated to the memory of Sir Roger Scruton. So who is this 21st century knight?

Roger Scruton the Man

The life and career of Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020) was truly remarkable. His bibliography is massive which includes books, essays, and editorials, covering topics as wildly diverse as philosophy (what he was formally trained in), wine, politics, farming, conservatism, fox-hunting, architecture, music, sex, the environment, his beloved England, Lebanon, and many more. He founded and edited The Salisbury Review from 1982-2001. He has also written three novels, a book of poetry, and two operas. The honors and honorary doctorates he received are too numerous to list. He helped organize underground seminars for persecuted intellectuals in Prague through the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, which he helped establish. He also founded the Jagiellonian Trust in 1982 to do similar work in Poland and Hungary. His opposition to communism in the 1980s landed him in jail in 1985 in Czechoslovakia. According to Mark Dooley, in his excellent book Conversations with Roger Scruton ,

Roger Scruton gives concrete substance to his convictions and has often suffered as a result. This was most apparent in his work on behalf of the dissidents of Eastern Europe during the communist enslavement—work acknowledged by Václav Havel when in 1998, as president of the Czech Republic, he awarded Scruton the Medal for Merit (First Class) for his services to the Czech people, and also by the jury of the Lech Kaczyński Award, when they honored Scruton in 2015 for his intellectual courage and friendship to Poland during the 1980s.

He was proclaimed an “undesirable person” by European communists who, after jailing him, expelled him altogether from the Eastern Bloc. The Pet Shop Boys sued him for libel in the 1990s. In 2005 the Guildhall School of Music and Drama performed his full opera “Violet.” In 2016 he was knighted by Queen Elisabeth. Two years later, in 2018, he was appointed chair of the British government’s new Building Better, Building Beautiful commission. But the following year, based on a tweet that took a few of his words out of context from an interview, he was accused of homophobia and Islamaphobia, fell victim to cancel culture, and was fired from the position; threats were even made to remove his knighthood. But then tragedy struck in 2019 when he was diagnosed with cancer (just weeks before my trip to Scrutopia) that took his life within six months (d. 12 January 2020). Dooley concludes in his biographical study of Scruton, Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach (I highly recommend you read this, along with The Roger Scruton Reader , also edited by Dooley), “In short, Roger Scruton is one of the most accomplished public intellectuals to have emerged in the latter half of the seventeenth century. And yet he has at best been ignored, and at worst reviled.” Sir Roger Scruton is a man after my own heart.

Roger Scruton the Conservative

By training Sir Roger Scruton is a philosopher. But he is probably better known as a champion of conservatism. While watching protesters from his apartment window in the streets of Paris in May 1968 he says he realized he was a conservative. But what does he mean by that word conservative? He’s written numerous books explaining it but here I’ll just offer two of his definitions from his book How to Be a Conservative . He says the kind of conservatism that he defends

tells us that we have collectively inherited good things that we must strive to keep. In the situation in which we, the inheritors of both of Western civilization and of the English-speaking part of it, find ourselves, we are well aware what those good things are. The opportunity to live our lives as we will; the security of impartial law, through which our grievances are answered and our hurts restored; the protection of our environment as a shared asset, which cannot be seized or destroyed at the whim of powerful interests; the open and enquiring culture that has shaped our schools and universities; the democratic procedures that enable us to elect our representatives and to pass our own laws—these and many other things are familiar to us and taken for granted. All are under threat. And conservatism is the rational response to that threat. […]

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. (viii-ix)

He concludes that conservatism “is not about what we have lost, but about what we have retained, and how to hold on to it” (ix).

Retaining and holding on to it. That’s the hard part. It takes a long time, a great deal of work, and usually much difficulty and suffering to build things of value like communities, nations, civilizations, civil and religious institutions, legal and economic systems. The sad reality is that such things of value that take so long to build up under great difficulty can be destroyed so easily, and often times at lightning pace. Regrettably, many of the values of Western Civilization are currently under attack and being destroyed all too quickly. And Sir Roger had a term for such destruction.

Oikophobia or the Triumph of Oikomachia

Rod Dreher recently reported the “queering” of Santa Claus in a Norwegian postal service commercial. It shows Santa Claus and a full-grown man embracing and kissing, followed by the message: “In 2022, Norway marks 50 years of being able to love whoever we want.” Dreher asks why the children of Norway need a queer Santa. He continues:

What’s the point of bringing the culture war to children’s Christmas traditions? It’s because they—LGBTs and their straight allies—cannot allow any territory to go uncontested. There can be no neutral ground. All things must be infused with revolutionary order. This is a manifestation of soft totalitarianism.

Dreher concludes, “We in the West are ruled by people who hate its traditions, hate its ancestral religion, hate its history, and hate many of the people who live within it.”

This is exactly what Sir Roger Scruton tirelessly opposed. He even coined a term for it: oikophobia . He’s written about it in many places but writes extensively about it in his book Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet . Here are several short excerpts:

[ Oikophobia is an] educated derision that has been directed towards historical loyalties by our intellectual elites, who have tended to dismiss all the ordinary forms of patriotism and local attachment as forms of racism, imperialism or xenophobia of which it accuses the world. I do not mean fear of home, however, but the repudiation of home—the turning away from the claims and attachments that identify an inherited first-person plural. (247)

Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes […] But oikophobia is also a stage to which some people—intellectuals especially— tend to become arrested. (247)

What is normally meant by “political correctness” is the repudiation of rooted American values, and a pronounced tendency to blame America and its success for all that is wrong with the world. In all its versions oikophobia gives rise to what I call a “culture of repudiation,” which spreads through school and academy all but unresisted by the guardians of traditional knowledge. (248)

Oikophobes define their goals and ideals against some cherished form of membership—against the home, the family, the nation. In the political arena, therefore, they are apt to promote transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws and regulations that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or by the institutions of the UN, and defining their political vision in terms of universal values that have been purged of all reference to the particular attachments of real historical communities. In their own eyes, oikophobes are defenders of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oikophobe that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. Oikophobes seek a fulcrum outside their society by which all its foundations might be overturned. (249)

Since the Greek word phobia merely indicates fear, I would adapt Scruton’s term and say that oikomachia has triumphed. The Greek word machia means a fight or battle. We live in an age that is fighting against all the values that have been built up over the last three thousand years. So while Charles Taylor has described our era as a secular age, by which he means an age in which Christianity is only one option among many (and also one of the most difficult options), following Scruton I would add that we also live in an oikomachic age.

Oikophilia & Eternal Rest

What is to be done? What would Sir Roger Scruton say? The short answer is oikophilia . You can learn more about it by reading the rest of this Christian News-Letter . The longer answer will be in the Director’s Desk in the next issue of the Eighth Day Moot (Symposium 2022). In the meantime, following my tradition of ending my Director’s Desk pieces with a patristic passage, I’ll leave you with a prayer by St. Basil that is appropriate for the new year of 2022 and also reminds us where our true home is:

O Master, Lord Jesus Christ our God, You have led us to the present hour, in which, as You hung upon the life-giving Tree, You made a way into Paradise for the penitent thief, and by death destroyed death. […] Help us lay aside our old ways so that we may be clothed with new resolve and may dedicate our lives to You, the Master and Benefactor, so that by following Your commandments, we may come to the eternal rest which is the abode of all those who rejoice. For You are the true joy and exultation of those who love You, O Christ our God, and to You we ascribe glory, together with the Father who is without beginning, and Your all-holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen. ~Ninth hour prayer of St Basil the Great

Imitating the Saints

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 23:53:13 GMT

by Archimandrite Vasileios

THE SAINTS saw the true light. They gained spiritual health. They were freed from themselves. They enjoyed the freedom of the age to come. They are satiated with grace. They trust in God's love. They have seen what end everything is leading to. They have reached the point of saying consciously: “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace (Lk. 2:29)” (p. 13).

And God the Word goes outside Himself and comes to dwell in all through His intense longing, that all may become partakers of His grace and His divinity. He does not come to advertise the wealth of His divinity and reveal our worthlessness and poverty. Instead, He becomes poor, though He was rich, so that by His poverty we might become rich (2 Cor. 8:9). He becomes man and takes on everything that is ours, apart from sin, so as to give us everything that is His, apart from identity in essence. So that all may become sons of God [glorified creatures] by grace.

This self-emptying, as a work of unfathomable love, is a theophany—a revelation of the truth of God as a communion of persons who love each other.

This is the gospel of the new creation, the message of life which the Fathers [and Saints] proclaim by their existence. They show the way of existence. And they teach you how to live …

They allow everything to move freely. They wait for the other person to find his own rhythm, to find his path. They sacrifice their lives, in the likeness of the God-man, for the life of the other. They pour out grace. They hide their virtue out of modesty. They know that everything true is given from above. They have given to God what little they had. And they have received everything. They receive it constantly, they accept it without ceasing. And they cannot bear the abundance of life. They want to withdraw to the sidelines, to be quiet, to vanish, to calm down, not to be commented on. All they want is for others to live.

[. . .] The root of their being is watered by mystical streams [. . .] They contract—“He must increase, and I must decrease” (Jn. 3:30)—in order for divine love to circulate, to flow, to pour forth. For the earth to be watered. For the shadow to be illuminated. For the sorrow of the world to be comforted, to be turned to rejoicing.

They sought first the Kingdom of God, and everything else was given them as a free gift. They are not simply thinkers, orators, writers, poets. They are free people, true, real; they are united with God. They moved spontaneously. They expressed themselves honestly. They loved humility. They were filled with wisdom. They became golden-mouthed orators, theologians, poets, architects of the word. They developed hidden talents. Their being shone out of them. They did not learn things divine, they experienced them; they underwent them. These things changed them, deified them. They have become a revelation of God—in other words, a true revelation of man. They show what man is, and what he is able to become. [. . .] Each one, in his own personal way, reveals the same Truth… (pp. 8-9) .

[…] there are no ancient or modern people. There are only true or false people.

A saint, a true person, is always living, regardless of whether he is ancient or contemporary, learned or illiterate. The power of the truth and the vitality of the Spirit does away with distances in time and differences in “education.” It passes right through the created and visible with uncreated grace, making even the clothing of a holy person’s words to shine like light (cf. Mt. 17:2). A simple elder from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, who wandered round the wilderness like a wild animal (Abba Bessarion, 12), has no less grace and daring in faith than someone like Maximus the Confessor. [Nor than] a humble believer today who really has the grace of Pentecost . . . and . . . manifests God’s love for mankind and his own pure heart with a comforting word or a smile (pp. 19-20).

*Excerpted from Archimandrite Vasileios, The Light of Christ Shines upon All through all the Saints , pp. 13, 18-20. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

The Hall of Men: A Local Fellowship Hall Where the Men Break Bread, Tap the Keg, & Toast Their Heroes

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 19:37:13 GMT

by Barry Owens

THE MEETING is about to come to order here at the Hall of Men, where heroism is celebrated and masculinity is encouraged. The men, seated at an oak table that nearly fills the room, push away their soup bowls.

“Gentlemen,” says George Elder, raising his glass at the head of the table.

He offers a toast, drawn from a tale from the Battle of Maldor, where the Vikings overran the English at Essex in 991 A.D. During the battle a swordsman stood to rally his fellow soldiers after their leader had fallen, or so the story goes. In his toast, Elder quotes from a poem that preserves the moment in lore.

“Let us all remember the speeches we have made so often over our mead, when we stood in the hall boasting upon a bench—heroes about hard fighting. Now, let the man who is bold prove that he is so. Boldness is of no use, unless it is proved.”

There is a hearty “here-here” from the table and a clink-clink of beer mugs.

“George, that should be out motto,” says College Hill Resident Erin Doom, remarking on the toast. Doom hosts the Hall of Men, offering a home for the 12-foot-long table (“It wouldn’t fit in my house,” says Elder) and the men who regularly gather there.

Gary Gensch, also a College HIll resident, has another suggestion following the toast.

“Next time we should smash the glasses together,” he says, “that would be more manly, more Viking.”

It is hard to imagine a more masculine atmosphere than you’ll find at the Hall of Men, which is not a secret society so much as it is a fellowship group for select, well, men.

There is no hint of a woman’s touch in the raw, commercial space where tales of heroism are told late into the night over sips of some home-brewed-beer and cider, and pipe smoke sometimes swirls in the air. A naked bulb illuminates the buffet, an old wooden television cabinet in a back room where on this night there sits two pots of stew and a butcher knife to cut the bread.

“It is kind of the best environment for good masculinity, if you will,” said Scott Spradlin, who was making his third visit to the Hall. “I think we’re all here to have our minds challenged a little bit, to think about our devotional life, but we’re also free to sit and gab, eat some good grub, and have some homemade beer.”

Most of those that attend the meetings are Christian—some devoutly so—but it is not a requirement for invitation.

Doom has hopes of one day opening a pub and coffee house in the space, a place where discussions, debate, lectures and film series can continue even when the Hall of Men is not in session.

Like Elder, Doom is scholarly—both are instructors at Northfield School of the Liberal Arts—and talk around the table can get heady.

“We’re not just coming to drink beer,” Doom says. “There is definitely a formal, productive element to the night.”

There is a lecture on a hero presented at each meeting and the presenter is asked to provide an image, as well. Those heroes then find a place on the wall, which Doom hopes to one day see filled. Joshua Sturgill, an Uptown resident and employee of Eighth Day Books, spoke about his hero, St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco. He left time for a Q & A session afterward.

“I’m a teacher,” says Doom. “I want people to learn.”

So far, most of the heroes highlighted in the hall have been Christian Orthodox saints. But Doom is committed to keeping the meetings ecumenical.

“Part of my goal is to say, Hey, listen, we have a lot of things in common. Let’s get to know one another, enjoy each other’s company, and stand together for what we believe in,” he says.

When Doom heard what his friend Elder had done at Clemson University—he built the table to facilitate the regular gathering of his friends that grew into the Hall of Men—a partnership was born. Elder moved his table into the space (and built a kegerator for the meetings). Doom went on Facebook, looked up a few old friends, and sent out invitations.

“We’re going to get together, we’re going to drink beer, we’re going to eat, we’re going to talk about a hero, we’re going to pray, and we’re going to hang out,” was the message. “We had over 20 guys the very first night,” Doom says.

Elder perhaps best explains the appeal of this muscular sort of Christian fellowship.

“The Vikings tried to take from the English everything that they had,” he says. “But in the end, the Vikings get converted to Christianity and they bring with them this delightful sort of tradition of really strong, manly fellowship in which men grab each other and wrestle each other to the ground. They might even hit and bite each other. Some people consider that unchristian, but what I think is that people need to remember that Christianity is not a safe, simple sort of religion. We serve a God who is powerful, a God who is sometimes even violent. I wanted to recover a more full sense of that.”

Then Elder excused himself to bid adieu to a departing friend.

“Take care,” the fellow says, reaching for a handshake. Elder pulls him in for a bear hug, complete with a growl.

*Originally published in The College Hill Commoner, January 2009

The Hall of Men: A Concise History

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 18:59:59 GMT

by Erin Doom

While attending Clemson University in the early 2000s, George Elder made an important decision. Instead of patronizing local college bars, he set out to recreate the atmosphere of a traditional pub. In addition to providing hand-crafted beers, public houses have historically functioned more like a community center where local citizens gather to debate the important issues of their day. In fact, it was in pubs during the early colonial period that Americans debated whether or not they should declare their independence from England. With this tradition in mind, George hand-crafted a twelve-foot-long table, built a kegerator with an intricately designed, hand-carved casing, and prominently displayed an image of one of his heroes in his garage. In other words, George converted his garage into a pub-like space ready for manly debate and discussion. Soon thereafter, young men began meeting regularly to feast on a home-cooked meal with home-brewed beer and a short presentation on a hero. Each meeting ended with toasts and stimulated great discussion about how men should live as Christians in 21st century America. Thus began the Hall of Men.

After graduating from Clemson, many garage-filled and hero-challenging feasts later, George returned to his home in Wichita, Kansas. When George told me he was looking for a new home for his table and wanted to continue the Hall of Men, I was intrigued. But when he described the format, especially how they displayed an image of the hero, I was totally sold. I had recently become an Orthodox Christian and St. John of Damascus’ seventh-century defense of icons had been a crucial text in my conversion (that’s another story to be told). Not only was the main hall in The Ladder a perfect fit for George’s table, but the emphases on home economy, craftsmanship, and the emulation of heroes all contributed to the fulfillment of the stated objectives of Eighth Day Institute (then called St. John of Damascus Institute). An immediate partnership was thus born and well over a decade later the tradition of the Hall of Men continues to thrive in Wichita.

On the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, men gather at The Ladder for a feast of food, fellowship, teaching, and pipes & pints. Doors open at 7:00 p.m., food is served around 7:30, and the evening events officially begin around 8:30 with the Eighth Day Convocation: prayers, hymn, reading from the Fathers, Gospel reading, Christ’s prayer for unity in John 17, Nicene creed, and Lord’s Prayer. Immediately following convocation there is a short presentation on a hero whose life inspires us to be more like Christ, thereby promoting the renewal of our culture. For a glimpse of the great cloud of witnesses who surround us at each meeting, CLICK HERE to see a notebook that contains all the heroes who have been presented. And we hope to soon have a year-by-year gallery of the heroes here on our website with a short summary of their lives. But more importantly, we hope you can join us in person sometime soon. If you’re too far away from Wichita, you should consider starting your own chapter (more information on how to do this forthcoming in 2022).

Notes for a Young Man

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 00:32:35 GMT

by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Feast of St Gregory the Theologian

Anno Domini 2022, January 25

Autumn 1928

Presumably for his student and charge Karl-Heinz Köttgen

Two people met once on a country road. They didn’t know each other. One had already traveled that way once before, not long before the other; the other didn’t know where the road led. They understood each other without speaking; what was then more natural than that they continued on together, the one who seemed to ask about the way, and the other who was so glad to be taking that road again. They continued along together—how long? only until the road led the one away from the side of the other?—or perhaps for a long time yet, a long time, perhaps without them even realizing it?

Along the way, one of them asks: Where is our journey taking us? the other: Each day tells the other… [fn 3]

On Joy

You possess a fortunate talent, and I believe you can be glad. Be glad as much as you can; joy makes us strong, for it comes into us as a hand full of light from eternity. Being genuinely glad means seeing God in everything and his love, wherever things look cheerful and friendly but also wherever things are not quite as you would like them to be; and that is not very easy. Be glad as much as you can.

Remaining Pure and Maturing

You have no doubt seen a rock crystal before, or a clear mountain lake through whose water one can see all the way to the bottom. We call such things pure because light can penetrate and shine through the crystal, through the water. We call people pure if the light of God penetrates and shines through their entire being. Do you believe it is good to be pure? But do you also know that it is good to be mature? Remaining pure and becoming mature…. You already understand this now, and you will come to understand it ever more and ever more deeply. You know well that life is always trying to soil us, trying to make us base and common, and that it also often succeeds in doing this. You know that there are bad friends who drag sacred and serious things down into the dirt, friends who want you to hang out with them. They are in danger of losing the most precious gift human beings have, purity. Being pure means being clear, being upright, means taking control of one’s thoughts so they cannot run away from us. Purity of body is also closely related to purity of the heart. One must take joy in purity; indeed, one must have a passion for what is pure so that one cannot be dragged down into the muck. Remaining pure means remaining a child, even after you have become a man. My dear young man, strengthen your yearning for purity. Jesus says: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God" (Mt. 5:8).

Work

You believe that work is an unpleasant change from play; but you are growing up and must come to understand that we work for ourselves, not for someone else. Work is the means through which people make something out of themselves. Every work should basically be work on yourself. Do you know that in prison the most terrible punishment is for a prisoner to be deprived of work? Work gets you through difficult hours, comforts you and calms you; work is the last thing a stinking person can cling to. Woe to those who have not learned to work; be grateful to those who taught it to you.

Be hard toward oneself, gentle toward others; think of Jesus. Truth is from God; God loves truth. If you speak what is false, you are against God. Be clear and true. The struggle against untruth is difficult, and most people succumb; be better than most of those others and be victorious!

You know that the picture of the knight with the defiant expression, proceeding well armed through a dark valley between death and the devil toward a bright castle of the sun. Be like this knight, who is intent on attaining life and purity, who takes up the battle against the powers of darkness, whose weapons [fn 6]

Whoever would become a whole man must have been a whole child, a whole boy. Everything you are, be totally; everything you do, do totally. Being a boy means being a young sculptor who is beginning to shape the image of his inner person, of his heart, who is chiseling the unhewn stone and giving it the shape he sees before him, a sculptor who is shaping himself. Before everyone there stands an image … take the chisel and begin cutting, even if it hurts.

Being a boy means being a young smith who with all his energy forges the glowing iron; your heart is still malleable and glowing and soft. Don’t miss the opportunity! Tomorrow may be too late! Forge the iron as long as it is hot. Be a strong boy against yourself.

You need a friend. Seek him among your peers. If you want to have a friend and want to be a good friend yourself, you must be able to sacrifice, sacrifice some of your own will, some of your own wishes. You must be able to forgive, forgive when your friend does something harsh to you, when he hurts your feelings. You must be able to love your friend just as he is, with all his faults, to bear him up and support him with your love. You must be able to be loyal, in the face of gossip by those who like to blab, those who are envious, hateful, to be loyal to your friend no matter what. If you want to have a friend, you must be able to pray for him, to present his life along with your own before God and ask God to help your friendship, for your friend will need that. Only if your friendship has its basis in God can you call it “friendship.”

You must be able to trust your friend; you must be able to confide in him completely, in both happy and difficult times. He will participate in your happiness and in your pain, will be glad with you and help you bear the burdens that are too heavy for you. The one who lives the life of the other, though you should both live your lives in God; then you will be friends.

Look people in the eye and you will know what they are about. Take note of how people laugh. Listen to how people speak about their parents. Listen to how they speak of God.

On Being Alone

Every day, put a few minutes aside to be alone, and think about the coming day or the day that has just passed, about the people you have met. Also think about yourself and about what you are lacking. But never brood excessively by yourself; rather let the One who also knows your secrets participate in your solitude. Each of us has things we never utter, things we conceal like a beloved treasure within our solitude. Only God knows them; hence draw God into your solitude.

On Prayer

The power of a human being is prayer. Accustom yourself to prayer already as a young boy. Prayer is drawing breath from God; prayer means surrendering and consecrating one’s life to God; prayer means confiding in God. When you lie down to sleep in the evening, fold your hands and become quiet within and call on God to come to you, and then tell God how you have spent the day, whether it was sanctified or whether it tainted you, whether you spent it in love or anger, in peace or hatred, in good and evil, in purity and dirt. And then pray for your soul that God make it holy and pure; be ashamed of evil and rejoice in the good. Then before God’s eyes mention the names of those who love you; thank God for giving you your mother and father, for giving you friends who love you, and ask God to abide with them all.

And if sometime you have something you don’t want to confide in anyone, then know that God does, after all, see everything and know everything, and go to Him and pour out your restless heart to Him at night, when everything is quiet and is sleeping, and God will give you rest. My dear boy, we have sometimes spoken about praying; do not forget it and don’t be led astray. Through prayer you will become strong; you will become a man .

Tears are one of the most sublime things a person has. Hence don’t waste them.

The beginning, the end [fn10]. Reverence.

Fn 3: Ps. 19:3. Allusion to the final verse of Tersteegen’s evening hymn that Bonhoeffer mentions as his “favorite verse” in his farewell sermon in Barcelona. Life as a sojourn and attuning one’s heart to what is eternal remain key eschatological images for Bonhoeffer.

Fn 6: This section of the text breaks off here. Albrecht Dürer’s 1513 copper engraving Knight, Death, and the Devil , to which Bonhoeffer is alluding, was one of the most popular picture motifs in the middle-class German household.

Fn. 10: Perhaps an allusion to the headstone inscription of Fritz Reuter: “The beginning, the end, O Lord, they are yours, the span between them, life, was mine. And if I was lost in the darkness, and didn’t know where I was, with you, Lord, there is clarity, and light is your house.” Reuter, the nineteenth-century writer, was one of the authors whose work was read aloud during the evening readings in the Bonhoeffer family. Hence Bonhoeffer consciously cited Reuter and the inscription on his headstone even before his American diary entry of June 11, 1939.

Reprinted from Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 10: Barcelona, Berlin, New York, 1928-1931 , trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), pp. 551-555.

The Mind as Upper Room: Furnished to Receive the Great Word

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 19:37:00 GMT

by St. Maximus the Confessor

Feast of St Maximus the Confessor

Anno Domini 2022, January 21

Question 3

In the Gospel, who is the man in the city carrying a jar of water (and why water?), to whom Christ sent the disciples, commanding them to find and follow him? And who is the master of the house? And why do the Evangelists keep silent regarding his name? And what is the great upper room furnished and prepared, in which the fearsome mystery of the divine supper is accomplished? [cf. Lk. 22:7-13 and Mk. 14:12-16]

Response

3.2. Not only did Scripture keep silent regarding the name of the man to whom the Savior sent the two disciples for the preparation of the Passover, but it also kept silent regarding the name of the city to which they were sent. According to my initial understanding, I take this to mean that the city signifies the sensible world, to which were sent—like disciples and forerunners of God the Word, preparing His mystical feast with human nature—the law of the First Testament and the law of the New Testament. Through practical philosophy, the former [i.e., the Old Testament] cleanses nature from every defilement, while the latter, through initiation into the mysteries of contemplation, cognitively elevates the intellect to kindred visions of intelligible realities. This is proven by the fact that the two disciples were Peter and John, for Peter is a symbol of ascetic practice, and John is a symbol of contemplation.

3.3. This is why it is fitting that the first man to meet them was the one carrying the jar of water, for this man in himself signifies all those who, through practical philosophy, carry the grace of the Spirit on the shoulders of the virtues, a grace that they preserve, as if in an earthenware jar, by means of the “mortification of the members of their body that are on the earth” (cf. Col. 3:5), and which through faith purifies them of defilement. After him, there is the second man, the “master of the house” (Lk. 22:11), who showed the disciples the furnished upper room. In himself he is an example of all those who in contemplation have furnished the height of their pure and noble minds with cognitive thoughts and doctrines, as if the mind were an upper room, furnished in a divinely fitting manner for the reception of the Great Word. The house signifies the settled state of piety, toward which the practical intellect progresses, striving after virtue. The master of the house, who dwells in it as if it were his by nature, is the intellect illumined by the divine light of mystical knowledge, which is why, together with the practical intellect [i.e., intellect oriented toward or engaged in ascetic practice], it is made worthy of the supernatural presence and feast of the Word and Savior.

3.4. Thus we are speaking of one man here but also of two, if, that is, the one who is described as carrying the jar of water is different from the one who is called the master of the house. Perhaps they are one, as I said, on account of the unity of human nature, but also two, on account of the division of this nature in terms of piety, that is, into those living the practical life and those living the contemplative life, who, once they are joined together by the Spirit, are called and made one by the Word.

3.5. [Some manuscripts subtitle this section as “A contemplation of the house”] If, however, someone wishes to take all that has been said and apply it to each and every particular man, he will not have gone outside the truth. From this point of view, the city is each particular soul, to which the principles of virtue and knowledge, like disciples of God the Word, are always being sent. The one who carries the jar of water signifies the way of life and thinking that patiently carries on the shoulders of self-control, without ever putting it down, the gift of faith received in baptism. The house is the condition and habit of the virtues, built up, as if from stones, from many different solid and virile manners of life and thought. The upper room is the broad and spacious mind with its suitability for knowledge, adorned with divine visions of mystical and ineffable doctrines. [cf. For similar interpretation of upper room, see Origen, Homilies on Jeremiah 19.13.4] The master of the house is the intellect that has been widened in light of the splendor of the virtuous house and by the sublimity, beauty, and grandeur of knowledge. It is in such an intellect that the Word wishes to indwell and to offer Himself for communion, together with His disciples—that is, with the primary spiritual notions of nature and time. For the true Passover is the passage of the Word to the human intellect, a passage in which the Word of God is mystically present and grants His fullness to all those who are worthy, by making them share in the good things that are proper to Him.

*Translated by Fr. Maximos Constas in St. Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 100-103. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books .

Live Not By Lies

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 18:34:14 GMT

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Feast of St Gregory of Nyssa

Anno Domini 2022, January10

THERE WAS a time when we dared not rustle a whisper. But now we write and read samizdat and, congregating in the smoking rooms of research institutes, heartily complain to each other of all they are muddling up, of all they are dragging us into! There’s that unnecessary bravado around our ventures into space, against the backdrop of ruin and poverty at home; and the buttressing of distant savage regimes; and the kindling of civil wars; and the ill-thought-out cultivation of Mao Tse-tung (at our expense to boot)—in the end we’ll be the ones sent out against him, and we’ll have to go, what other option will there be? And they put whomever they want on trial, and brand the healthy as mentally ill—and it is always “they,” while we are helpless.

We are approaching the brink; already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble: “But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.”

We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence. We have lost our strength, our pride, our passion. We do not even fear a common nuclear death, do not fear a third world war (perhaps we’ll hide away in some crevice), but fear only to take a civic stance! We hope only not to stray from the herd, not to set out on our own, and risk suddenly having to make do without the white bread, the hot water heater, a Moscow residency permit.

We have internalized well the lessons drummed into us by the state; we are forever content and comfortable with its premise: we cannot escape the environment , the social conditions; they shape us, “being determines consciousness.” What have we to do with this? We can do nothing.

But we can do—everything!—even if we comfort and lie to ourselves that this is not so. It is not “they” who are guilty of everything, but we ourselves, only we !

Some will counter: But really, there is nothing to be done! Our mouths are gagged, no one listens to us, no one asks us. How can we make them listen to us?

To make them reconsider—is impossible.

The natural thing would be simply not to reelect them, but there are no re-elections in our country.

In the West they have strikes, protest marches, but we are too cowed, too scared: How does one just give up one’s job, just go out onto the street?

All the other fateful means resorted to over the last century of Russia’s bitter history are even less fitting for us today—true, let’s not fall back on them! Today, when all the axes have hewn what they hacked, when all that was sown has borne fruit, we can see how lost, how drugged were those conceited youths who sought, through terror, bloody uprising, and civil war, to make the country just and content. No thank you, fathers of enlightenment! We now know that the vileness of the means begets the vileness of the result. Let our hands be clean!

So has the circle closed? So is there indeed no way out? So the only thing left to do is wait inertly: What if something just happens by itself ?

But it will never come unstuck by itself , if we all, every day, continue to acknowledge, glorify, and strengthen it, if we do not, at the least, recoil from its most vulnerable point.

From lies.

When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.

And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies ! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me !

And this is the way to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies. For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.

We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!

This is the way, then, the easiest and most accessible for us given our deep-seated organic cowardice, much easier than (it’s scary even to utter the words) civil disobedience à la Gandhi.

Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.

And thus, overcoming our temerity, let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries? And from that day onward he:

Will not write, sign, nor publish in any way, a single line distorting, so far as he can see, the truth;
Will not utter such a line in private or in public conversation, nor read it from a crib sheet, nor speak it in the role of educator, canvasser, teacher, actor;
Will not in painting, sculpture, photograph, technology, or music depict, support, or broadcast a single false thought, a single distortion of the truth as he discerns it;
Will not cite in writing or in speech a single “guiding” quote for gratification, insurance, for his success at work, unless he fully shares the cited thought and believes that it fits the context precisely;
Will not be forced to a demonstration or a rally if it runs counter to his desire and his will; will not take up and raise a banner or slogan in which he does not fully believe;
Will not raise a hand in vote for a proposal which he does not sincerely support; will not vote openly or in secret ballot for a candidate whom he deems dubious or unworthy;
Will not be impelled to a meeting where a forced and distorted discussion is expected to take place;
Will at once walk out from a session, meeting, lecture, play, or film as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda;
Will not subscribe to, nor buy in retail, a newspaper or journal that distorts or hides the underlying facts.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the possible and necessary ways of evading lies. But he who begins to cleanse himself will, with a cleansed eye, easily discern yet other opportunities.

Yes, at first it will not be fair. Someone will have to temporarily lose his job. For the young who seek to live by truth, this will at first severely complicate life, for their tests and quizzes, too, are stuffed with lies, and so choices will have to be made. But there is no loophole left for anyone who seeks to be honest: Not even for a day, not even in the safest technical occupations can he avoid even a single one of the listed choices—to be made in favor of either truth or lies, in favor of spiritual independence or spiritual servility. And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.

For us, who have grown staid over time, even this most moderate path of resistance will not be easy to set out upon. But how much easier it is than self-immolation or even a hunger strike: Flames will not engulf your body, your eyes will not pop out from the heat, and your family will always have at least a piece of black bread to wash down with a glass of clear water.

Betrayed and deceived by us, did not a great European people—the Czechoslovaks—show us how one can stand down the tanks with bared chest alone, as long as inside it beats a worthy heart?

It will not be an easy path, perhaps, but it is the easiest among those that lie before us. Not an easy choice for the body, but the only one for the soul. No, not an easy path, but then we already have among us people, dozens even, who have for years abided by all these rules, who live by the truth.

And so: We need not be the first to set out on this path, Ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands—they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands—we will not recognize our country!

But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—we do it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.

And if from this also we shrink away, then we are worthless, hopeless, and it is of us that Pushkin asks with scorn:

Why offer herds their liberation?
.....................
Their heritage each generation
The yoke with jingles, and the whip.

Solzhenitsyn penned this essay in 1974 and it circulated among Moscow’s intellectuals at the time. It is dated Feb. 12, the same day that secret police broke into his apartment and arrested him. The next day he was exiled to West Germany. Translation from Russian by Yermolai Solzhenitsyn.

Prayer for the Giving of Rings

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 23:31:16 GMT

Orthodox Service of Marriage

Afterfeast of Theophany

Anno Domini 2022, January 7

O Lord our God, Who didst accompany the servant of the patriarch Abraham into Mesopotamia, when he was sent to bring back a wife for his lord Isaac; and Who by means of the drawing of water, didst reveal to him that he should betroth Rebecca: Do Thou, the same Lord, bless also the betrothal of these Thy servants, ______ and ______, and confirm the promise that they have made. Establish them in the holy union which is from Thee. For, in the beginning, Thou didst make them male and female, and by Thee the woman is joined unto the man as a helper and for the procreation of the human race. Therefore, O Lord our God, Who hast sent forth Thy truth upon Thine inheritance, and Thy covenant unto Thy servants our fathers, Thine elect from generation to generation: Look upon Thy servant, ______, and Thy handmaid, ______, and establish and make firm their betrothal in faith and in oneness of mind, in truth and in love. For Thou, O Lord, hast declared that a pledge should be given and confirmed in all things. By a ring power was given to Joseph in Egypt; by a ring was Daniel glorified in the land of Babylon; by a ring was the uprightness of Tamar was revealed; by a ring our heavenly Father showed His bounty upon His Son; for He said: Bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry. By Thine own right hand, O Lord, Thou didst arm Moses in the Red Sea; by Thy true word the heavens were established, and the foundations of the earth were made firm; and the right hands of Thy servants shall also be blessed by Thy mighty word and by Thine upraised arm. Therefore, O Master, bless now this putting-on of rings with Thy heavenly blessing, and let Thine angel go before them all the days of their life.

For Thou art He Who blesses and sanctifies all things, and unto Thee are due all glory, honor, and worship: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages.

Love of Husband and Wife Is a Force that Wields Society Together

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 23:12:58 GMT

by St. John Chrysostom

Synaxis of John the Holy, Glorious Prophet, Baptist, & Forerunner

Anno Domini 2022, January 7

A certain wise man, when enumerating which blessings are most important included “a wife and husband who live in harmony” (Sir. 25:1). In another place he emphasized this: “A friend or a companion never meets one amiss, but a wife with her husband is better than both” (Sir. 40:23). From the beginning God in His providence has planned this union of man and woman, and has spoken of the two as one: “male and female He created them” (Gen. 1:27) and “there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). There is no relationship between human beings so close as that of husband and wife, if they are united as they ought to be. [...] Can you see now how close this union is, and how God providentially created it from a single nature? He permitted Adam to marry Eve, who was more than sister or daughter; she was his own flesh! God cause the entire human race to proceed from this one point of origin. He did not, on the one hand, fashion woman independently from man; otherwise man would think of her as essentially different from himself. Nor did He enable woman to bear children without man; if this were the case she would be self-sufficient. Instead, just as the branches of a tree proceed from a single trunk, He made the one man Adam to be the origin of all mankind, both male and female, and made it impossible for men and women to be self-sufficient. [...] Can you see now how close this union is, and how God providentially created it from a single nature? He permitted Adam to marry Eve, who was more than sister or daughter; she was his own flesh! God cause the entire human race to proceed from this one point of origin. He did not, on the one hand, fashion woman independently from man; otherwise man would think of her as essentially different from himself. Nor did He enable woman to bear children without man; if this were the case she would be self-sufficient. Instead, just as the branches of a tree proceed from a single trunk, He made the one man Adam to be the origin of all mankind, both male and female, and made it impossible for men and women to be self-sufficient.

[...] The wisdom of Christ, so great and forceful, is sufficient, especially in the matter of the wife’s subjection. “A man shall leave his father and mother,” he says; but he does not say, “he shall dwell with,” but instead, “he shall cling” to his wife, thus demonstrating the closeness of the union, and the sincerity of the love. And Paul is not satisfied even with this, but goes further, explaining the subjection of the wife in the contest of the two being no longer two. He does not say “one spirit” or “one soul” (union like this is possible for anyone), but he says “one flesh.” The wife is a secondary authority, but nevertheless she possesses real authority and equality of dignity while the husband retains the role of headship; the welfare of the household is thus maintained. Paul uses the example of Christ to show that we should not only love but also govern, “that she might be holy and without blemish” (v. 27). The word “flesh” and the phrase “shall cling” both refer to love, and making her “holy and without blemish” refer to headship. Do both these things and everything else will follow. Seek the things which please God, and those which please man will follow soon enough. Instruct your wife, and your whole household will be in order and harmony. Listen to what Paul says: “If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home” (1 Cor. 14:35). If we regulate our households in this way, we will also be fit to oversee the Church, for indeed the household is a little Church. Therefore, it is possible for us to surpass all others in virtue by becoming good husbands and wives.

*Reprinted in Eighth Day Moot 3.1. Excerpted from Homily 20 on Ephesians 5:22-33 in St John Chrysostom, On Marriage and Family Life , translated by Catherine P. Roth and David Anderson (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 43-64. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

What Is Man?

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 22:44:44 GMT

by Eric Gill

Synaxis of John the Holy Glorious Prophet, Baptist, & Forerunner

Anno Domini 2022, January 7

Christ Crowned by Eric Gill

¶ What then, about man, and what kind of being is he?

And in attempting to answer this question we shall not take into account the teachings of men of Science.

For though the word Science properly means knowledge, the scientist is not, and generally does not profess to be, a man who knows what is what.

Scientific knowledge, at the best, is, and can be, no more than the results, more or less accurately recorded, of more or less inaccurate observation.

Assuming that a foot-rule be in some sense more or less reliable as an instrument of measurement, I can tell you how many inches it is from here to there—assuming that the words “here” and “there” have some real meaning.

Assuming that the interval between one sunrise and the next has some measurable uniformity, or some measurable variability, I can tell you how many days have passed since the war began—assuming that the words “now” and “then” are intelligible.

But it is obvious, and it is admitted, that the results of such calculation have nothing to do with the meaning of anything, and that when we ask: what is man? we are not asking anything that any scientist by means of his science could tell us.

We do not want to know how tall or broad a man is, or how many years he can live under the sun. We want to know what he is, and why.

We know he is mostly made of water, but we do not know what water is, except that it is composed of oxygen and hydrogen; but we do not know what they are.

And if we pull a man to pieces and discover all the chemicals and tabulate all their several chemical formulae, we know less what he is than ever.

Neither microscope nor measuring-rod, neither balances nor crucibles can tell us, or even begin to tell us, the first thing we want to know.

We know ourselves much better than men of science can. That is the starting-point. That is where we must begin.

And, starting from there, we know this:

Man is matter and spirit—both real and both good. We do not know what matter is or what spirit is—we only know that one is measurable and that the other is not—and we know that man is both measurable and immeasurable.

And we know that we know. We know ourselves—however dimly and erroneously and inadequately—and we know things that are not ourselves—again dimly, erroneously, and inadequately.

Perhaps, in our blindness, we exaggerate the separateness of ourselves and other things—perhaps in the end “me” and “not me” cease to have any meaning or significance.

Perhaps in the end we find that there is only one being, and that we live only in him and by him.

Even so, truth is that which is knowable, and we know ourselves to be beings made for truth.

¶ And the good is that which is desirable. Man is a being which desires.

In seeking to know things, we reach out to them in order to become one with them.

Prompted, provoked, moved, and stirred by desire, we reach out to things in order to possess them.

Thus we desire what we know; and only what we know can we desire.

The activity of desire we call will, and thus knowing and willing are two movements of the soul, of man himself.

And the will is free.

Knowledge is not free—we can only know what is, and there is no such thing as free thought—but willing implies choice, and in choosing we know ourselves to be free.

We know ourselves to be responsible creatures. We know ourselves to merit praise or blame.

And we know these things in the unquenchable light of nature. We have not learnt it in books or been taught it by lecturers.

On the contrary, so far as books and lecturers go, evidence for such knowledge is difficult to obtain.

In the maze of inexorable cause and effect it is wellnigh impossible to discover where and when the freedom of the will is to be found.

For though we know ourselves to be free, we also know ourselves to be bound by countless causes outside outside our cognizance, and nearly all our thoughts and actions are at least conditioned by heredity and circumstance.

In spite of this, we know ourselves responsible, how much? how little? and that that responsibility is the mark of humanity; it is that which marks us off from all other animals. Deny responsibility, and you deny man.

¶ And man is a creature who loves.

Faith is knowledge; by faith we know.

Hope and desire are fellows; we do not desire without hope or hope without desire. We do not will without hope or hope against our wills.

Faith, hope, and love—these three; but the greatest of these is love.

By knowledge we possess things;

By will we reach out to them;

By love we draw them to ourselves that we may be possessed by them.

But perhaps we must distinguish here. The natural and instinctive attraction we feel towards things, whether of sight or sound, touch or taste or smell, is good; for these things are in themselves good, and to possess them, in due order, is necessary to a normal life.

And the desire of man and woman for one another is good, and its fulfilment in union and procreation is—who does not know it?—the highest natural good (and this in no “high-brow” sense, but in all its fleshly and sensual accompaniment, its sweetness and jocundity).

Nevertheless the love we are speaking of, and which the apostle was speaking of, is not precisely that love.

This sensual love, this human love, is rather the symbol, and that other is its prototype:

By love we draw the beloved to us! This does not seem to be true when we consider human lovers and the human love of natural things.

But that is because we confuse love with lust, with desire, with appetite—even with the joyful and lawful lust and desire and appetite which we rightly have for one another, and which we rightly have for all good things.

When we think of natural human love, we think, perhaps, rather of the chase than of the surrender, and for men (who have written most about love) the error is most easy; for men do, in a manner, seem to imitate the Divine Lover.

For this reason it is said that love is greatest; for by love we surrender to God, and He gives Himself to us.

We draw the beloved to ourselves; yes, and we draw God Himself; He is, so to say, compelled to take us—because we have loved Him.

Eat, drink, and be merry, then, brothers and sisters. Be fruitful and multiply. Use your bodies and enjoy all the good things of the earth in peace—the tranquility of order. But hold fast to the truth—the truth which has made us free, the freedom with which Christ has made us free.

Such, then, is man: a creature who knows and wills and loves; a rational being, responsible for his acts—no mere receptacle of knowledge, knowing without desiring, no mere instrument only desiring to possess—but, made in the image of God (child of God and, if he will, heir also), a creature who loves.

No lower view of man will satisfy him, no other view is relevant to our theme.*

*In support, I quote the following: “ Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus ; truth is the equating of intelligence and reality. . . . The mind is potentially all things; it becomes what it knows. Nor is this process of becoming, intellectually, something other than ourselves to be understood in anything less than its literal meaning. . . . By our mind we overpass the boundaries of selfhood and are lost in the things we contemplate. . . . In knowledge joined with love we have the only lasting riches. . . . Knowledge as distinct from learning, is concerned with things, res, and only with words in so far as the symbolize things.” (Aelred Graham, O.S.B., The Love of God , Longmans, pp. 66, 67.)

**Reprinted in Eighth Day Moot 3.1. Excerpted from Eric Gill, Christianity and the Machine Age , The Christian News-Letter Books, No. 6. (London: The Sheldon Press, 1940), pp. 20-26.

New Year's Address

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 16:22:46 GMT

by Václav Havel

Feast of St Basil the Great

Anno Domini 2021, January 1

My dear fellow citizens,

For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.

I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods which are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers’ state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available. A country that once could be proud of the educational level of its citizens spends so little on education that it ranks today as seventy-second in the world. We have polluted our soil, our rivers and forests, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe. Adult people in our country die earlier than in most other European countries.

Allow me a little personal observation: when I flew recently to Bratislava, I found time during various discussions to look out of the plane window. I saw the industrial complex of Slovnaft chemical factory and the giant Petržalka housing estate right behind it. The view was enough for me to understand that for decades our statesmen and political leaders did not look or did not want to look out of the windows of their airplanes. No study of statistics available to me would enable me to understand faster and better the situation into which we had gotten ourselves.

But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. Only a few of us were able to cry out loud that the powers that be should not be all-powerful, and that special farms, which produce ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools, children’s homes, and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer them to all. The previous regime—armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology—reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone. It cannot do more than slowly but inexorably wear down itself and all its nuts and bolts.

When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows. I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—though naturally to differing extents—responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators.

Why do I say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last forty years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed to us. On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt the duty that each of us faces today, namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably, and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would also be wrong to expect a general remedy from them only. Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.

If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts.

In the effort to rectify matters of common concern, we have something to lean on. The recent period—and in particular, the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution—has shown the enormous human, moral, and spiritual potential and civic culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is not wise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical, and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake from their shoulders in several weeks and in a decent and peaceful way the totalitarian yoke. And let us ask: from where did the young people who never knew another system take their desire for truth, their love of free thought, their political ideas, their civic courage and civic prudence? How did it happen that their parents—the very generation that had been considered as lost—joined them? How is it possible that so many people immediately knew what to do and none of them needed any advice or instruction?

I think that there are two main reasons for this hopeful face of our present situation: first of all, people are never just a product of the external world, but are also always able to relate themselves to something superior, however systematically the external world tries to kill that ability in them; second, the humanistic and democratic traditions, about which there had been so much idle talk, did after all slumber in the unconsciousness of our nations and ethnic minorities, and were inconspicuously passed from one generation to another so that each of us could discover them at the right time and transform them into deeds.

We had to pay, however, for our present freedom. Many citizens perished in jails in the fifties, many were executed, thousands of human lives were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of talented people were forced to leave the country. Those who defended the honor of our nations during the Second World War, those who rebelled against totalitarian rule, and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another. Independent courts should impartially consider the possible guilt of those who were responsible for the persecutions, so that the truth about our recent past is fully revealed.

We must also bear in mind that other nations have paid even more dearly for their present freedom and that indirectly they have also paid for ours. The rivers of blood which flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany, and not long ago in such a horrific manner in Romania, as well as the sea of blood shed by the nations of the Soviet Union, must not be forgotten. First of all because every human suffering concerns every other human being; but more than this: they must also not be forgotten because it is those great sacrifices which form the tragic background of today’s freedom, and of the gradual emancipation of the nations of the Soviet bloc. They also form the background of our own newfound freedom: without the changes in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and the German Democratic Republic, what has happened in our country could scarcely have happened. In any event, it would not have followed such a peaceful course.

The fact that we enjoyed optimal international conditions does not mean that anyone else has directly helped us during the recent weeks. In fact, after hundreds of. years, both our nations have raised their heads high of their own initiative without relying on the help of stronger nations or powers. It seems to me that this constitutes the great moral asset of the present moment. This moment holds within itself the hope that in the future we will no longer suffer from the complex of those who must always be expressing their gratitude to somebody. It now depends only on us whether this hope will be realized, and whether our civic, national, and political self-confidence will be awakened in an historically new way.

Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident in the best sense of the word is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies, and regretting its own guilt. Let us try to introduce this kind of self-confidence into the life of our community and, as nations, into our behavior on the international stage. Only thus can we restore our self-respect and our respect for one another as well as the respect of other nations.

Our state should never again be an appendage or a poor relation to anyone else. It is true we must accept and learn many things from others, but we must do this again as their equal partners who also have something to offer.

Our first president wrote: “Jesus, not Caesar.” In this he followed our philosophers Chelčicky and Comenius. I dare to say that we may even have an opportunity to spread this idea further and introduce a new element into European and global politics. Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding the power of spirit and ideas. It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics.

Masaryk based his politics on morality. Let us try in a new time and in a new way to restore this concept of politics. Let us teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of a desire to contribute to the happiness of the community rather than of a need to cheat or rape the community. Let us teach ourselves and others that politics can be not only the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals, and pragmatic maneuvering, but that it can even be the art of the impossible, namely, the art of improving ourselves and the world.

We are a small country, yet at one time we were the spiritual crossroads of Europe. Is there any reason why we could not again become one? Would not it be another asset with which to repay the help of others that we are going to need?

Our home-grown mafia of those who do not look out of plane windows and who eat specially fed pigs may still be around and at times may muddy the waters, but they are no longer our main enemy. Even less so is our main enemy the international Mafia. Our main enemy today is our own bad traits: indifference to the common good; vanity; personal ambition; selfishness; and rivalry. The main struggle will have to be fought on this field.

There are free elections and an election campaign ahead of us. Let us not allow this struggle to dirty the so far clean face of our gentle revolution. Let us not allow the sympathies of the world which we have won so fast to be equally rapidly lost through our becoming entangled in the jungle of skirmishes for power. Let us not allow the desire to serve oneself to bloom once again under the fair mask of the desire to serve the common good. It is not really important now which party, club, or group will prevail in the elections. The important thing is that the winners will be the best of us, in the moral, civic, political, and professional sense, regardless of their political affiliations. The future policies and prestige of our state will depend on the personalities we select and later elect to our representative bodies.

[…]

In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will not only look out of the windows of his airplane but who, first and foremost, will always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well.

You may ask what kind of a republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just, in short, of a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social, or political.

The most distinguished of my predecessors opened his first speech with a quotation from the great Czech educator Comenius. Allow me to round off my first speech with my own paraphrase of the same statement:

People, your government has returned to you!

*“New Year’s Address” was Havel’s first major public address as president of Czechoslovakia. It was delivered on New Year’s Day of 1990 and broadcast on Czech and Slovak Radio and Television. It was widely published abroad. This translation appeared in The Spectator, January 27, 1990, and was published in Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990 (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 390-396.

Oikophilia is Iēsouphilia

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 21:54:08 GMT

by Hans Boersma

Feast of St Melania the Younger, Nun of Rome

Anno Domini 2021, December 31

NOTHING IS as debilitating as homelessness. Home is where the heart is. Not to have a home is to have one’s heart ripped out. Nothing is worse than being homeless, for nothing is worse than losing one’s heart. To be uprooted and displaced means to be removed from life itself.

Advent reminds us that all of us are homeless. Israel is a vine, Psalm 80 explains, which God carefully planted in the promised land. After an initial period of flourishing (“The mountains were covered with its shade, the mighty cedars with its branches. It sent out its branches to the sea and its shoots to the River.”)—God gave his vineyard over to its enemies: “Why then have you broken down its walls, so that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit? The boar from the forest ravages it, and all that move in the field feed on it.” God’s people deported and the vineyard destroyed, the home is gone.

“You have hidden Your face from us,” laments Isaiah, “and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities” (Is. 64:7). “Make Your name known to Your adversaries … that the nations might tremble at Your presence!” (64:2). Just as in Psalm 80, so in Isaiah 64, God’s people are in Babylon. They have lost their home. They have lost their heart. Both the psalmist and prophet cry out to God from the excruciating pain of homelessness.

The longing for a particular place is palpable in the cries of Asaph and Isaiah. But both the psalmist and the prophet urge the exiles to look for more than simply a return to the physical plot of land from which they have been banished. If the saying is true—“the home is where the heart is”—then Jesus Himself is our true home. We are home when Jesus shows His face to us.

“Let Your face shine, that we may be saved” is the repeated refrain of Psalm 80. “Turn again, O God of hosts! Look down from heaven, and see” (80:14). “Rend the heavens and come down,” cries the prophet (Is. 64:1). “You have hidden Your face from us” (64:7). “Please look, we are all Your people” (64:9). We are home when Jesus shows His face to us. For Christians, oikophilia (love of home) is Iēsouphilia (love of Jesus).

Pope Benedict XVI, in his book Jesus of Nazareth , explains that the “place” where the cloud took Jesus in His Ascension is “God’s right hand.” Asking what this expression means, the pope comments: “It does not refer to some distant cosmic space, where God has, as it were, set up His throne and given Jesus a place beside the throne. God is not in one space alongside other spaces.” The longing of Christians in exile is not primarily for physical place of security. Our longing is fulfilled when we see Jesus coming in clouds with power and glory (cf. Mk. 13:26).

At no time of the Christian year do we experience our homelessness more acutely than at Advent. Holding out for Christmas, we cry out for Jesus to end our exile—to be our final home.

*Lectionary Readings for the first Sunday of Advent: Ps. 80; Is. 64:1–9; 1 Cor. 1:3–9; Mk. 13:24–37

**Hans Boersma is Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Professor of Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary.

The Oaks in Winter: An Excerpt

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 21:46:40 GMT

by Michael O'Brien

Feast of St Melania the Younger, Nun of Rome

Anno Domini 2021, December 31

The sharpest trials are the finest furbishing,

The most tempestuous weather is the best seedtime.

A Christian is an oak flourishing in winter.

The words of the 17th-century religious poet Thomas Traherne have stayed with me ever since I first read them twenty-five years ago. I have never forgotten them because they express in a few potent phrases a fundamental element of our Faith: we are a people who stand as a sign of hope, and a sign of contradiction, in the midst of this confused world.

I know a little about the climate of England, where the poet wrote these lines, but I assume the British oak must be famous for standing sturdy against the North Atlantic rain; must shake its arms in defiance against the occasional fall of swift-melting snow. The poet’s metaphor is a powerful one, and I have always loved it, though it lacks a certain accuracy for those of us who live in sub-Arctic regions. We too have oaks, the kings of the eastern woodlands, but they do not exactly flourish in our sort of winter.

A few weeks ago I went hiking with our children on a high hill that overlooks the valley in Ontario where we live. We approached the summit of a rocky cliff that faces the village. Above us on the crest there was a stand of oaks thrashing their burgundy leaves against a cloudy sky. They were among the last trees to retain their foliage, for the winds had combed the surrounding forests, tearing away the blanket of stunning color which covers it for a few weeks each year.

In late autumn everything is stripped down to its essential form. On this particular day the rolling muscles of the earth were uncovered, the arteries of creek and river were laid bare; the light in the sky was alternately cruel and exhilarating, slate-grey with occasional gashes of cerulean blue.

A hawk flew over, soaring on updrafts. A few last yellow birch leaves twirled by on a crosswind. It was stark and beautiful—so beautiful in fact that the children abandoned their customary galloping and noisemaking, and were content to sit and to see, to gaze with deep draughts of long looking.

We sat on the edge of the cliff for a long time, and after awhile we prayed together for the people of the valley, for the many good enterprises bustling there, for our own needs, for the Church, and for families throughout the world. As we prayed, a gust of wind burst through the winds behind us. It was strangely warm, despite the cold day, and it carried the intoxicating smells of the ending year. Within that pungent aroma was the smell of acorns, containing messages about death and rebirth. Along with it came the underlying sense that written into creation are “words” from our Creator, for God has designed all living things, even the simplest, to bear a kind of witness to larger truths. An acorn, a maple key, pips in a pine cone, even the lowly mustard seed—tiny, deceptively simple—contain a vast library of meaning. A seed is so much more than just a code for replicating itself, more than an investment in a distant Spring. More than just a statement of faith on the part of a tree, a biological equivalent to the virtue of hope. A seed is a kingdom, a world really. It has the future wrapped tightly in every cell, waiting to unfold; entire forests lie buried in each small kernel.

God is lavish. Many seeds are dropped onto the soil. Many do not sprout. Yet beneath the appearance of waste nothing is wasted, nothing lost. Giant trees crash to the forest floor, decompose and become the soil out of which the saplings arise. Similarly, in human affairs, movements are created, rise, do a work of God in the world, decline, go back into the soil, and provide the rich humus out of which new life springs. Generations come and go. Sun and rain, winter and summer, seed time and harvest. Always the Word of God remains constant. His people are called over and over, generation after generation, back into this constancy, back to this mysterious fluid stability—the only real security worth having.

It is important to remember this, especially now, for we are entering a period of extreme instability in the human order. The might of the earth are moving towards absolute power in an effort to establish control over what they perceive to be the chaos of the human condition. It is a harsh period, for winter seizes the hearts of many. Love grows cold. Honesty declines. Crime reaches epic proportions. Marriage is picked to pieces by analysts; the relations between men and women have become horribly complicated, fraught with tension, riddled with ideology. The family farm has given way to the factory farm. The village to the metropolis. The craftsman to the mega-machine. The shop to the corporation. Men hurl their malice upon each other in high-tech wars, though the machete is still in use here and there. Millions of children die unseen within the death-chambers of our clinics and hospitals, accomplishing, for sheer numbers, what Auschwitz, Bosnia, and Rwanda could not begin to do. Belief in human life falters, hearts are pumped full of dread. Theorists discuss ways in which the death of billions of human beings can be accomplished effectively, humanely—billions of miracles, billions of mysteries eliminated. And thus, more and more people are drawn into despair on one hand or sensualism on the other, searching for the merest hint of the great fire of Love—He who longs for them to turn to Him, if they would only believe.

Pope John Paul II often pleaded with the peoples of the West, most urgently in his encyclical Centesimus Annus , to turn away from their massive consumption, their omni-economies, their addiction to comfort heaped upon comfort; all those things that secretly contribute to the piling of victim upon victim in the dark places of our society, and which openly push us all toward another end of things. He asked us to build more human -size economies, more responsible ways of living, to create a civilization of love in the midst of what he called a “culture of death.” He asked the impossible of us, because it is precisely the impossible to which we are called.

The Holy Father spoke often of the coming of the third millennium, and he did not want us to wait passively for it. He saw it as a time for a new evangelization, as seed time, as a time of flourishing. But he knew also that there will be a death involved, a death to our selfishness. Advent, placed so strategically at the dying of the year, is good training for this. We must not be like the ancient pagans who watched the coming of winter with a kind of terror-stricken obsession, mesmerized by the specter of death, enslaved to death, sacrificing their children to the insatiable appetite of death. During Advent, we learn to gaze into the growing dark with Spring in our eyes. Impossible? Yes, it is. But Christians must always keep an icon of the impossible in their hearts as a model of the true shape of reality, so much bigger than our terrors.

This is the time to recall that Mary’s womb contained the impossible, the unthinkable. In that sacred little room of hers was nurtured the seed that would save the world from darkness. Encoded there, as if on a double helix, were the martyrs and mystics, the cathedrals and the statues, the Christian East and West, the songs of the monks, the encyclicals, the poems, the millions of children who might not otherwise have been. Is it any wonder that we are fond of her? Is it any wonder that at Christmas we think of her so much? Is it so odd that we should call her Mother?

Joseph too—small, hidden man from the least of villages—he contained the heart of the true father, and made it possible for a new world to come into being. Joseph, foster father to a fatherless world, living icon of the Father, remained open to messages and thus helped make it possible for God to come as man. His obedience protected the very existence of the child. His vigilance, his justice, his love, made it possible for the child to grow as man. What a marvel this is, and what a scandal. Why all this weakness? Why the poverty, the smallness, the hiddenness? It does not make sense: God born in a cold time. Heaven come down to earth in a season of peril. The savior of Israel revealed as powerlessness during the final ruin of the nation of Israel. For those people, our elders in the faith, it was the End. Therein lies the puzzle, the paradox, and the scandal: He came at the worst possible moment, let us say even the impossible moment, and the world, which was powerful and sick unto death, burning and dying in its sins, was born again.

It is hard to get your mind around it. It has to be heard again and again: God’s strength is to be found in weakness. Nazareth of Galilee was the place where that small, clear, indestructible message was first lived. It is lived again and again in each generation, often in the face of overwhelming odds. Civilizations rise and fall. Saints and tyrants, kings and poor men are born, grow old, and die. Cultures, theories, opinions, fashions, theologies, movements, rise up and disappear again. That is why our faith can never be merely a system of religious thought, a set of ethics or a beautiful culture, as necessary as those are. When everything is stripped down to its essential form, our faith is a belief in Jesus, true God and true Man, the only Christ, dwelling in the heart of His Church, He who was, who is, and who is to come. That is why our home is the universal Church, the throne on which He reigns, a Church that is within time and yet outside of time. That is why we can say that the Church is a billion people gathered to worship the Eucharistic Presence in glorious Saint Peter’s, and, at the same time, a battered priest dressed in rags saying a clandestine Mass in a concentration camp.

The Church passes through eras in which she glories in the summer’s triumph, and other periods when she goes down into the cold earth, apparently beaten. It may well be that her highest glory is to be found precisely there, hidden beneath a carpet of leaves, to all appearances dead, but very much alive, waiting for Spring.

*From the opening pages to “The Oaks in Winter” by Michael O’Brien in The Family and the New Totalitarianism (2019) with introduction by Jessica Hooten Wilson. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

Enjoyment of Christmas

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 21:29:19 GMT

by Kathleen Bliss

Feast of St Melania the Younger, Nun of Rome

Anno Domini 2021, December 31

The Supplement to this News-Letter is a long one, and to some of our readers the subject may seem an unusual choice for a Christmas number, since it is not customary to talk about the suffering of humanity at a time when most people are thinking, or trying to think, of gifts and gaiety.

There are many inner frames of mind in which to celebrate Christmas. One is to make it a time of make-believe, when for a moment we forget what the world is like and enjoy ourselves after our own fashion. If we are religious we can heighten the enjoyment of getting out of the everyday world for a bit by using the Christmas story and its traditional re-telling in song and worship to transport us to a Bethlehem long ago, where the star shines down and shepherds see a vision of angels and wise men bring gifts. It is some sort of a compensation for the lack of any guiding star or any vision of angels on our daily path through the world if for a few days we can contrive to re-live these things in the imagination. The other way of celebrating Christmas is, instead of allowing ourselves wholly to be carried back two thousand years, somehow to experience an Incarnation brought onwards two thousand years into this present world so filled with sorrow and foreboding.

Perhaps it will be thought that in our view the good Christian should never cease from thinking about the miseries of the world and should take even his pleasures as gloomily as he can. That is far from what we mean. If we could never escape, never read detective novels, never give ourselves up to the pleasures of idleness or to sheer enjoyment, we should end up not good but mad. God has made a world where there are almost inconceivable possibilities of suffering, dread, and all-pervading death, and has spangled it all over with objects and experiences of sheer delight. But the world has taken Christmas and has made it a time for suspending everyday experience. Yes, it will even accept visions and angels and stars and shepherds and wise men as part of the paraphernalia, with their nostalgic reminders of a lost age of faith. What is truly affronting to the mind which has lost faith is not so much a suggestion that years ago learned sages and astrologers saw a star and worshipped a Child, but the suggestion that perhaps a scientist in his work might become aware of the Dayspring from on High. Shepherds, perhaps because exceedingly few of us have ever known one personally, are for us the very archetypes of kindly care (is there a single detective novel, one wonders, in which the guilty party turns out to be a shepherd?): it is not so very unimaginable, therefore, that these faraway and unreal people should see visions, but who expects their successors weaving wool in Bradford to be startled by the news that a Child is born? We have surrounded Christmas with escapes and jollifications, and in the process, even for some of Christians, the very central heart and core of Christmas, the over-powering mystery of God made Man and come among us, slips from our grasp and becomes—though we hardly dare acknowledge it—just one of the things we tell ourselves at Christmas time, and honestly wish we believed in more than we do. We have not celebrated Christmas, if in Church or at home we have succeeded in summoning before the eyes of our imagination the picture of the stable, the Child, the Mother, and have made ourselves there present, by an act of the imagination. It is indeed a part of the truth of the Incarnation that God became a man, became that particular baby lying in that particular manger. But He also became Man and took on our mortal flesh. He shared not only the particular experiences, in His earthly ministry, of two not very well adjusted sisters in their country home, of a ruler with a thirst for truth, of a loose-living woman by a well, but also He is, in a sense which we catch only in moments of adoration, or when some experience of life deals hardly with us, present as Man in all the sufferings of men. We worship the Jesus Who was born in Bethlehem in the days of Herod the King, but the picture is not the one of harmony and simplicity which we should like to make it. At His very birth innocent blood is shed, and the cries of a hundred stricken mothers mingle with the songs of Hallelujah. Even if we are among those who find it difficult to give the full weight of historicity to a narrative so mingled with the imagery of Old Testament prophecy, we can at least admit that this is true of life, that men make joy and slaughter out of God’s gifts.

If we sit down quietly to read not just our favourite parts of the story of the birth of Jesus, but the whole of it, the simple yet strange narrative of Matthew and Luke, the penetration into the inner meaning of the mystery in St. John, the prophecies which place it as the culmination of a long series of thoughts, acts, and sufferings which prepared for it, then we allow the Bible to say something to us, and the Incarnation, instead of being a picture painted on its pages whose colours, true enough, will never fade, but whose figures will never move towards us however lovingly we gaze at it, becomes a movement of God to us here and now. Suddenly we hear with the cries of the innocents, the shrieks of several thousand Chinese refugees as the boat sinks under them and the waters swallow up their hope of escape for ever. The homeless family flying to a foreign land seems to gather into its sorrow and its determination the sorrows of the homeless throughout the earth. Far from the necessity of sympathizing with and reaching out a hand to the burden of sorrow which rests upon our fellow men, this drawing near of the Incarnation to us begins to give us, towards the sufferings of men, a new sensitivity.

In a remarkable novel published this year [1948], called The Plague , Albert Camus describes an imaginary outbreak of bubonic plague in the town of Oran, seen through the eyes of the town’s medical officer. Camus is a secular existentialist, and his novel shows how a group of different men and the crowd of the population at large respond to the horror of the plague’s developing fury. The doctor, assisted by the quiet presence of his old mother, plods steadily forward on his duty; a Parisian journalist caught there bends every nerve to bring about an illegal escape, and turns down the offer of a passage through the blockade when it finally comes. The central figure, whom none of his friends can place in any profession or any class, works doggedly but with a certain detachment, partaking yet observing. Just before his death he reveals to the doctor the motive spring of his life. He is overwhelmed by the thought of human suffering, and especially by the suffering that is inflicted on men by their fellows. He is determined to pit his life against this suffering. His ambition is to be a saint. But he does not believe in God: in fact, he says that if there were a God he would not feel called upon to strive against suffering or to give up his own desires, for if there were a God it would be His business to deal with this, the outstanding feature of the world He is supposed to have made. It is a novel that Christians ought to read.

There has also just come to this country from France a film which is a little masterpiece on the same theme. It is the story of St. Vincent de Paul, under the title Monsieur Vincent . Seventy-five million francs were contributed by a hundred thousand French people to finance its making. The figure of St. Vincent is human and compelling. He, too, is drawn to find his life work among the poor in a ministry to suffering. But the strength of his life comes not from his making a few thrusts and stabs against a torturing scheme of things: all he sees, all to which he ministers, is made bearable by the thought of the divine mercy on which his life is stayed. And when a comparison is made it is not the Christian saint but the secular saint who seems a little overdrawn, a little more than human, and stretches our credulity as we ask whether it is possible for a mortal man to attempt with his bare hands to push back an avalanche without growing embittered against the forces which make his task unfinishable.

*First half of The Christian News-Letter editorial by Kathleen Bliss (22 December, 1948). The second half, “The Christian Hope,” is published here.

On Universities & the Renewing of the Mind

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 19:08:08 GMT

by Erin Doom

Forefeast of the Nativity of Our Lord & Savior Jesus Christ

Anno Domini 2021, December 23

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What Is a University?

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 18:09:39 GMT

by St John Henry Newman

Forefeast of the Nativity of Our Lord & Savior Jesus Christ

Anno Domini 2021, December 23

A University is a place of concourse, whither students come from every quarter for every kind of knowledge. You cannot have the best of every kind everywhere; you must go to some great city or emporium for it. There you have all the choicest productions of nature and art all together, which you find each in its own separate place elsewhere.

In the nature of things, greatness and unity go together; excellence implies a center. And such, for the third or fourth time, is a University; I hope I do not weary out the reader by repeating it. It is the place to which a thousand schools make contributions; in which the intellect may safely range and speculate, sure to find its equal in some antagonist activity, and its judge in the tribunal of truth. It is a place where inquiry is pushed forward, and discoveries verified and perfected, and rashness rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with knowledge. It is the place where the professor becomes eloquent, and is a missionary and a preacher, displaying his science in its most complete and most winning form, pouring it forth with the zeal of enthusiasm, and lighting up his own love of it in the breasts of his hearers. It is the place where the catechist makes good his ground as he goes, treading in the truth day by day into the ready memory, and wedging and tightening it into the expanding reason. It is a place which wins the admiration of the young by its celebrity, kindles the affections of the middle-aged by its beauty, and rivets the fidelity of the old by its associations. It is a seat of wisdom, a light of the world, a minister of the faith, an Alma Mater of the rising generation. It is this and a great deal more, and demands a somewhat better head and hand than mine to describe it well.

Such is a University in its idea and in its purpose; such in good measure has it before now been in fact. Shall it ever be again? We are going forward in the strength of the Cross, under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin, in the name of St. Patrick, to attempt it.

What We Could Call a University

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 18:02:09 GMT

by Wendell Berry

Forefeast of the Nativity of Our Lord & Savior Jesus Christ

Anno Domini 2021, December 23

We humans are part of a life that is possible only because all living things have it somehow in common, and we do not, we probably cannot, understand how it works. We are not superior to it, we cannot in any final sense own or control it, we cannot fully appreciate it, we cannot be grateful enough for it. It is ourselves , not our machines, who must recognize its beauty, its preciousness, and its mystery. If we don’t, we won’t take care of it. We will destroy it.

I could say, I suppose, that a part of my purpose in Life is a Miracle was to try to put science in its place. It offends and frightens me that some people now evidently believe that the long human conversation about life will sooner or later be conducted exclusively by scientists. This offends me because I believe it rests upon a falsehood. It frightens me because I believe that such falsehoods—the falsehoods of radical oversimplification—damage life and threaten to destroy it.

I think, of course, that science has a place, but I don’t think it has a superior place. To start with, I don’t think science is superior to any of its subjects—not to the merest laboratory mouse. I don’t think any art or scholarly discipline is superior to its subject. The human conversation has had moments of light—light, always, is potential in it—and yet it is a conversation conducted mostly in the dark. It is a conversation limited by human limits, a conversation that is or ought to be humble, because it is humbling, full of bewilderment and trouble. It is not going to be ended by anybody’s discovery of some ultimate fact.

Science is not superior to its subjects, nor is it inherently superior to the other disciplines. It becomes markedly inferior when it becomes grandiose in its own estimate of itself. In my opinion, science falsifies itself by seeing itself either as a system for the production of marketable ideas or as a romantic quest for some definitive “truth of the universe.” It would do far better to understand itself as a part of a highly diverse effort of human thought, never to be completed, that might actually have the power to make us kinder to one another and to our world.

And so I think that science has its proper and necessary place in a conversation with all the other disciplines, all being equal members, with equal time to talk, and no discipline talking ever except to all the others, whatever the market in “jobs” or “intellectual property,” so that our whole humanity, in all its parts and concerns, might speak and be spoken for in the one meeting—which we could call, maybe, if we had it, a university.

On the Renewing of the Mind: Reflections on the Calling of Christian Intellectuals

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 15:58:53 GMT

by Robert W. Jenson

Forefeast of the Nativity of Our Lord & Savior Jesus Christ

Anno Domini 2021, December 22

During the time set aside to compose this essay, I confirmed Allan Bloom’s suspicions about my intellect by following the crowd and reading his book. Especially in the middle section it is a much better book than I expected.

The Closing of the American Mind is a meditation on the state of American intellect, over against two landmark and remarkably paired diagnoses of Western history. The one is Nietzsche’s: that the outcome of philosophy, of the West’s multimillennial effort to be reasonable—and indeed that there is no reason to be anything else that we are not already. If history is not to halt in bourgeois self-satisfaction, we will therefore have to tap irrational passion and arbitrary decision precisely to move us to reason. The other is de Tocqueville’s suspicion that the regime founded on reason, the democratic republic, must prove inhospitable to the actual exercise of the reason on which it is founded.

Professor Bloom judges that de Tocqueville’s fears have been fulfilled. The nation built on Enlightenment has not merely become ignorant and unthinking, or even anti-intellectual in Richard Hofstadter’s sense, but is becoming incapable of thought. I have to say I agree, and that such diagnoses do not seem to me prejudiced by sentiment for good old days. Bloom argues also that Nietzschian profundity, imported into the Lockean nation, has with appalling irony come to provide the justifying ideology of our superficiality. The derivations he traces in this connection have been much controverted among the symposiasts and reviewers, but I cannot turn aside to that discussion.

Now—if de Tocqueville is as right as Bloom thinks, that would seem to be a historical confirmation of Nietzsche's position. Vice versa, if Nietzsche is right, then de Tocqueville's prediction was not a warning but a prophecy. And both of these are, I think, what Bloom in fact believes—which would seem to leave Nietzsche as the only true guide. Yet what may come of acting on Nietzsche's kerygma has already been tested in Europe, and none of us will favor further experiments on those lines. In this interesting situation, Bloom can suggest only a last-ditch defense of the liberal regime, for however long this proves possible. Huddling around the embers is his image.

The place of defense or huddling is to be, despite everything, the "university," a term that he so uses as to encompass many institutions not officially so denominated; indeed it is first of all the colleges of liberal arts, in or out of "universities," that he has in mind. The university must again become the place where reason can be advocated against the hostility of reason's regime. It must be the haven, for the sake of democracy, of dissatisfaction with democracy, the place where all those questions are asked that democratic folk need to hear but that are natural only to aristocratic and monarchic regimes. It must administer Nietzsche straight, to awake us from the sleep induced by Nietzsche diluted.

It may reasonably (!) be doubted that academia can perform the Münchhausen trick that Bloom proposes for it. How exactly are we to persuade a society as hostile to reason as Bloom says ours is to license a privileged class whose sole function is to be rational? And how are the deep thinkers to be studied seriously when it is known that they are being used as calculated medicines for the health of the regime they abominate?

It is the insight of the whole line from Rousseau to Nietzsche that reason undoes itself because it undoes God, without whom reason—as every other interesting virtue—is groundless. And Bloom hammers this point home. But with respect to it he has no proposal. The university is to be democracy's temple, but it is to house no God. The Closing of the American Mind ends very much as did another recently influential book, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue . MacIntyre ended by saying that what our civilization must have to survive is something like the Benedictine order. Many who read this wondered how there could be Benedictines without St. Benedict, or a saint without God. MacIntyre appears to have read his own book and wondered the same things, whereupon he reconverted to the faith.

In one part of Bloom's book the scholarship is demonstrably slipshod: his account of the university's origin. Most certainly, even the "modern" university was not created from nothing by the decision of Enlighteners to extend Aristotle's educational program to the many, in the unlikely case that there ever was such a decision. Bloom seems to have stopped reading with Aristotle, not to have started again until Machiavelli, and to have hypothesized what happened between from thin air.

The Enlightenment may have conceived the university as the place of "reason." But in its medieval origins and in some strands of its self-understanding to this day, the university is not a universitas rationis , a world of reason , but a world of letters , a universitas litterarum , the gathering into one place and one discourse of all those arts whose substance is books and argument . In the university's founding period, instruction was thus accomplished by the minute examination of texts and by the institution of debates; and anyone who has examined the record of one of those debates or read a medieval commentary on Aristotle will not suppose that this method was in any way inferior to the methods inaugurated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as to openness, dedication to logic, or pedagogical impact. The university may properly and faithfully be conceived, alternatively to liberalism's conception, as the place of discourse, of the word .

Reason as the Enlightenment understood it is a sheer capacity and as such an individual endowment. The Enlightenment proposed to establish a regime by harnessing the elemental passions to reason, by turning them into rights ; also passions and rights are private possessions. Thus if reason and rights are our foundation, we are bound to individualism; then our choice is indeed between clinging to Locke and capitulating to Nietzsche.

And in that case, bowdlerized Nietzsche will surely win in the end, nor is it easy to see how a university founded on reason and rights can do anything but exacerbate the problem. Foundationally, however, the university was not the place of reason but the place of discourse; and the word is no one's private endowment. It is the ontological status of community and of the word in which community is constituted that was forgotten by the Enlightenment—and has not been remembered by Professor Bloom.

For some generations, topics such as this have been discussed on the assumption that we know what an "intellectual" is—or "the liberal arts" or "the university" or whatever—and have only to consider how Christians can be called to this field. I have begun with Bloom in order to summon witness for the bankruptcy of this assumption. I doubt that the traditional way of putting the question was ever appropriate; it is anyway now antique. If there ever was a separately definable "intellectual" office or community or fate out there, to which believers might be called, there is none now. If we have a calling, it is not to join a predefined intellectual enterprise but to reinvent one. And there is nothing preposterous about the notion, since we invented the West's intellectual enterprise in the first place. For of course, that the word has ontological status—so that the arts of the word might together make a universe—is an insight from the Bible.

III

Mediterranean antiquity's specific ideal of knowledge would never by itself have made the university. The organ of truth, in the classic tradition, is the "mind's eye"; knowledge is theoria , seeing . Every self-interpretation of the knowing subject takes one of the senses as its metaphor; Western antiquity's metaphor was sight. And the thing about sight is, it objectifies the other.

It is a point I have found illuminating in many contexts: we have flaps on our eyes and none on our ears, and we can easily aim our eyes and only with great difficulty aim our ears. Which is to say: I control what I see but can always be surprised by what I hear. It is with the eye that I fix the other in space and time, that I nail down what you/it are/is, so as to be able to get back to you/it. It is, oppositely, by the ear that you grab me, also when I'm trying to overlook (!) you. An ideal of knowledge that takes sight for its metaphor makes the other the object of knowledge but does not solicit reciprocity, does not offer the knowing subject to be the object of the other.

That is, to knowledge for which sight is the metaphor, the response or solicitation of the other is not constitutive . In the final versions of Greek reflection, which became the theology of all late antiquity's cults, this ideal of knowledge is paradigmatically and foundationally instantiated in Aristotle's Unmoved Mover under various aliases. This God is a sheer act of vision, wholly agent and not at all sufferer, receiving and expecting nothing from what is seen—if, indeed, it is acknowledged that anything other than itself comes within its purview. The philosopher king, reentering the cave for the good of its inhabitants, asks them no question.

There was originally a countervailing factor: the actual practice of philosophy. Whether Parmenides or Heraclitus indulged in other discourse than description of what they had seen we do not know, but for the sophists and Socrates and Plato, who were not coming from vision but trying to be on their [way] to it, conversation was the daily work. It was the Socratic conviction that the way to vision is by question and answer, and that real questions have to be actually asked, which rescued Greek theoria from the inhumanity that was always its temptation.

Thus it was philosophy as practice in which the gospel, when it appeared on the scene of antiquity, found both a rival and an ally. The gospel is a message, and its reflection therefore an argument; the first Christian theologians were simply journeymen philosophers who had found new matter. The difference between Christian theology and pagan antiquity's theology is that the latter, for all that it consists in talk, leads to silence, is the handmaiden of cognition as pure seeing, while Christianity's talk leads precisely to more talk, to the purification and enlivening of a message. And also the gospel's ideal of knowledge is instantiated, in the God who is His own word.

Pagan antiquity had many and very talkative circles of seekers. But what they sought was silence. A "university," per contra, is a universitas litterarum , an independent world founded on and for discourse, a world in which discourse is its own justification, which some enter never to leave, and which initiates also those who are to leave into precisely the talkative callings. The university was founded by believers, to have a place in which to exegete their Book and argue interpretations of their message. Just so, no book and no argument could be foreign to it. In particular, the practice of ancient philosophy and the books that documented it were simply adopted, now in service of speech rather than of silence.

When the Enlightenment revolted against theology in the name of reason, it thus revolted also against philosophy as anciently practiced, since it was theology by which that practice was now carried on. Thus in the Enlightenment's understanding and practice of "reason," the countervailing factor is gone. Reason becomes what even Aristotle did not make it: sheerly the individual's ability to see truth. And for that, the university is, when push comes to shove, not really needed at all. It is that last point that Professor Bloom's book—to make one last reference to it—finally lays before us, willy-nilly.

Christians' calling to intellect is the calling to nurture the word, to tend books and foster argument. This was always the case, but in our present circumstances we must be unwontedly clear about it. We serve a talkative God, who does not even seem to be able to do without a library. In His service, we will be concerned for talk and libraries. And some of us will have the privilege of spending a lot of time at that concern; if anyone wishes to call these "Christian intellectuals," there is no great reason to inderdict [ sic ] the label.

The model and origin of our care of books is the church's care of that library called the Bible. I understand that this is backward to the usual conceptions, but the usual conceptions, if they were ever appropriate, are anyhow now mere anachronisms. So I will reverse the usual conception, and inquire first what the church does with the Bible and second what the university might therefore do with its books.

The church, first, reads the Bible liturgically . The writings that are canon for the church and that together we call the Bible are recited in the gathered community, to shape its imagination, suggest its argumentative warrants, cast its moral vision. The university, the community of Western intellect, also has a canon of writings. It is not quite so clearly marked as the canon of Scripture—though the contrast must not be overplayed, since also the canon of Scripture is intrinsically open—but it will serve; at least its center is indicable. In a living university, the sheer shared experience —never mind interpretation or understanding !—of such as Plato and Augustine and Newton would be the foundation of everything else. That experience is now indeed embers, but the embers need blowers, not huddlers. Christians are the only ones around who have clear and arguable and imperative reason to blow on them.

Second, the church researches the Bible, it labors on its book with the kind of reading that is misleadingly called "historical-critical method" as if with old texts there were some other. We persistently ask, What did the author say ? What really happened ? These are life-and-death questions for the believer. The first need not commit the famous "intentional fallacy"; we cannot ask what the author intended to say, but we must ask what she/he in fact got—past tense!—said. Neither is the second question hopeless of answer, nor does it lead us necessarily into historical relativism, though there is no opportunity here to retrace theology's long and in my judgement hopeful struggle with "hermeneutics."

Christianity did not invent such reading, but only for Christianity does salvation ride on it. Thus the techniques that we all assume and that created the nineteenth-century German university, still more or less our model, were all invented to deal with the Bible—if in many cases only to get clear of it. In a living university, a certain historicism would always infuse the various undertakings; not even natural science would regard its own history and great texts as beside its enterprise. A world that forgot historical-critical reading would be one in which the church could not live; our calling here is imperative.

Finally, the church looks to the Bible for paradigms of its reflection, of "theology." The church is to preach the gospel and all its thinking is about what to say to be doing that. But "the gospel" is simply a label for what the apostles said. So while the apostles' theology, that is, the thinking they did to form their message, may not have been and for the most part was not very good theology, we can at least be sure it was theology. The theological authority of Scripture is fundamentally methodological: we look to it to see what the reflective labor was like that we are now to undertake.

When the university has been healthy, it has looked to its books in much the same way. In the high medieval period, reverence for Aristotle did not mean unwillingness to disagree with him; it meant that he was the master of analysis, to whom those who sought to analyze should be apprenticed. In the eighteenth century, the authority of Newton and Locke did not mean there was no more to be discovered; it meant precisely that if one did as they did one might discover as much as or more than they did. The fundamental collapse of the university in our time is that it does not know what specifically it is to do, and it does not know what it is to do because the triumph of Enlightenment reason deprives the university of its drillmasters, including the Enlighteners. Here, too, Christianity may have a word of quite specific comfort: do not be afraid to look to Western intellect's masters and see what they did.

So much—in this essay—for the Book and books. Discourse does not consist in books, it consists in argument using books. Christians' calling to nurture argument can be very bluntly and so quickly stated. Since the message we have for the world contradicts everything the world could possibly suppose, argument is guaranteed whenever we show up—unless we have forgotten ourselves. It is not Nietzsche who will effectively challenge our current discoursive sloth, or rather, it is Nietzsche precisely in that the challenge he made was a version—an unbelieving and despairing, but nonetheless faithful version—of the Christian challenge. Proclamation of the meaninglessness of the world will not now startle anyone—if it really ever did; the claim that a first-century Palestinian is the meaning of things is another matter.

I do not mean that direct proclamation of the gospel is our calling to the intellect—though a bit more of that could hardly hurt. But those involved in the gospel's general argument with the world will necessarily fall afoul also of whatever are the self-evidences of their special "disciplines." I have arrived at my next and last main matter.

The title of this essay is "The Renewing of the Mind." The title is intended in a double sense. In the one sense, it refers to our calling to re-establish the intellectual enterprise, as I have just been discussing that calling. The other sense depends more directly on the passage from Paul's letter to Rome from which my title is a citation. "Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your minds" (Rom. 12:2). The passage's location is significant: Romans 12:1-3 is Paul's capsule description of Christian existence, a thesis set at the beginning of the whole parenetic section of his most reflective writing.

The word translated "mind" is that same big word of antique reflection, " nous ." A survey of its appearances in Paul's writings quickly makes his use apparent. Paul's " nous " is not theoria ; rather, it is much the same as Kant's "judgment" or Jonathan Edwards' "sense of the heart." " Nous " is moral choice that is not mere—that is, arbitrary—choice but is precisely as moral choice the discernment of what is really out there. To use Edwards' favorite example, borrowed by him from a long tradition: if I "like" honey, that is my choice, and yet my taste for honey registers reality, for honey does in fact taste good.

It is characteristic of the modern West to suppose that knowledge of facts and choice of goods are two separate acts, so that knowledge is morally irrelevant and choice of the good arbitrary; when I first began to teach philosophy, I regarded this as a dogma beyond challenge. But of course the whole previous tradition supposed that the two must be somehow united, that somewhere in the structure of personhood there must be a grasp on reality that is inseparably knowledge of fact and choice of good, that is precisely taste for what is good. Such was Paul's " nous ."

But if there is such a thing as judgment, it must guide all intellectual activity, since it is their unity. Vice versa, the dogma that there cannot be any such thing as judgment is the foundation of dogma of the intellectual tradition that is dying around us. Christians' calling to renew argument is guaranteed success if only we are faithful. For we must invariably dissent from the founding dogma of the—barely—existing intellectual world.

Paul's summary of the Christian life is that it consists in the "renewing" ( anakainosis ) of judgment. Paul does not ask how judgment is possible in the first place, not being much of a philosopher. But what he thinks does appear. The transformed judgment has as its object " to agathon kai euareston kai teleion " [the good, the well-pleasing, and the perfect] which are epexegetical upon "the will of God." And indeed and of course the reality of God is the necessary condition of an act of. mind that as choice of the good is also knowledge of the fact. That I choose "such-and-such is good" is in itself a fact only about me; that the Creator chooses so is a fact about the facts. Within an intellectual enterprise that either denies God or relegates Him to the fringes, judgment is indeed not possible.

Christians' calling to renew judgment—and just so, under the circumstances, to renew argument—will require us to speak of God, right out loud. In our time we are called to renew the "apologetic" enterprise, not so much to enable converts as to tell why judgment is after all possible, since there is God.

Continuing with exegesis of Paul: renewal of mind takes place as a transformation, of which only the terminus a quo [end from which] is explicitly named in our text. We are to wean our judgment, our taste, from conformity to "this world" ( tw aioni toutw ) . Paul does not need to name the terminus ad quem [end to which]; it is the Kingdom of God, the "world to come." A "world," an aion , is a temporal whole, not so much one big thing as one big history—one narrative, to use the currently fashionable word. Each temporal whole has a schema , a pattern of how things go in it, the lines of which our judgment can bend to, or not. Since an aion is a temporal whole, its schema is determined by what it seeks. In Paul's understanding, what this aion seeks is hate, the perfected encapsulation of each thing in what it already is. But there is to be a miracle; what will in fact come of this age is a new one. And what that age will seek is love, the perfected opening of each thing to the future the other is for it.

We do not live in the coming age. But we can already bend our judgment to its temporal contours, since in the resurrection we see what the scheme of that age will be. At least Paul says we can, and that this bending is the whole substance of Christian life. Besides supposing that judgment is possible and that it is the mind's controlling unity, Christians suppose that we rightly judge when we judge each item and sector of reality by how it opens to the love that is to come of it.

Only when—believers will say—we consider how, for example, the polity will finally undergo revolution into mutuality can we claim to know it. Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out the peculiarity that the social sciences have found no "laws" in the proper sense at all, yet are not discredited thereby. He suggests there can be only one explanation: the predictions made by these disciplines are not of that sort at all, they are not of the sort that can be falsified by one contrary event. Of what sort are they then? Readers of the Bible can hardly refrain from suggesting: perhaps they are prophecies, to be verified or falsified conclusively only by the character of the Kingdom when it comes. A renewal of argument where such opinions turn up would seem assured.

For another and historical example, Jonathan Edwards, a far more careful reader of Newton than all his contemporary vulgar Enlighteners put together, proposed that the physical world is the intersubjectivity of universal personal communion between God and created persons and between the latter, that the physical world is what God thinks in order to think a community that can include others than himself. Edwards argued that such an interpretation sticks closer to the actual features of Newtonian science than does interpretation by the metaphor of the machine, which was dominant around him. Moreover, if that is so, then what it is to be physical is malleable to transformations of relations in the universal community. The saints, Edwards once speculated, "will be able to see from one side of the universe to the other" since they will not see "by such slow rays of light that are several years travelling..." ( Miscellanies , 926).

Perhaps such thoughts may not seem quite so ridiculous as they once did; the boundary between science and its philosophical self-interpretation is not nearly so plainly marked as formerly. Why should such speculation be barred from physics classrooms? And how do we know that the movement of science itself must be immune to them?

Or again, whatever are the "humanities?" Somehow, they are the disciplines that study humanity, yet are not social sciences. But what can that distinction mean? In practice, the humanities seem to comprise the several activities of interpretation of the arts, plus about half of what historians do. Perhaps this is not so unsensible a grouping, and perhaps those made contrary by the gospel may have something to say to it.

Western reflection has traditionally—prior to romanticism, which opens other questions—traced the fissure in human life as running between the true and the good, what is and what ought to be, and has looked to the beautiful as the possible reconciliation. The arts are thus interpreted as judgment in action—we may think of Kant's interpretation of the beautiful as serendipitous good or of Aquinas' interpretation of it as truth's attraction. If now the good is eschatological, if the good is the aion to come, the arts are the presence of the future, the enacted "groaning" and "longing" of creation for what it is not but will be. Christian interpreters might tell of the arts in such terms; and such telling and the telling of history would not go ill together. On such a basis, there might even be reason to practice and teach the humanities.

I could continue with examples—or anyway, someone could. But instead one final point must be made. Christians' calling to the intellect, whether because of its nature or because of our present situation, is not an individual calling. It is communities that can be dedicated to discourse and to the renovation of judgment. And a dedicated community is an institutionalized one: it is institutions like universities and colleges that might undertake to reinvent the West's intellectual enterprise.

It is the enterprise as such that needs to be reinvented, the total discourse of the university that we are called to renew. Readers will divine that I conclude with the traditional insistence on what is usually and disastrously named "interdisciplinary" discourse, and with the not quite so traditional insistence on its institutionalization. But perhaps there is one difference between my insistence and that which we have so often heard, which may even make mine a bit more plausible.

The failure of good resolutions to get the disciplines together is easily explained: for the most part, they are given nothing to do together except to be together, or they are given some momentous "topic" artificially invented for the purpose. But Christians are now called to nothing less than the reinstitution of that common discourse within which and only within which our several "disciplines" can exist at all—at least, as human undertakings. We have decidedly urgent "interdisciplinary topics": restoration of the liturgical, scholarly, and paradigmatic experience of the books by which the university lives, and the institution of a university-saving argument between the prejudices of modernity and the truth of the gospel.

*Originally published in The Cresset VI, no. 4 (February 1988): 10-16. Reprinted in Jenson, Essays in Theology of Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1995), 163-174. Available for purchase from Eighth Day Books.

The Adventurous Life of the Intellect: A Letter from the President

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 22:57:14 GMT

by Fr. Dr. Geoffrey Boyle

Forefeast of of the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ

Anno Domini 2021, December 21

Fr. Dr. Geoffrey Boyle offering a toast at the Feast of St Patrick at The Ladder

On behalf of the board for the Eighth Day Institute, grace and peace to you in Christ!

It’s been a wild year for the Eighth Day Institute. Director Doom took a much needed and much deserved three-month sabbatical. We hired an office and database manager, who has done a spectacular job of keeping us all on track. We laid new flooring in the bathroom and kitchen, added a significant number of bookshelves upstairs, and finally replaced the beer fridge! And that’s not even mentioning the incredible turnout to our Inklings Festival, the stimulating baptismal conversations at the Florovsky-Newman Week, and the ongoing rhythmic drive of the Hall of Men, which regularly offers new faces, new stories, new conversations. Oh, and did I mention that this all went on despite the looming threats of Covid-19?

What EDI has to offer is so real and so human that we can’t not continue to do what we’re doing. We need these stories and lectures, the dinners and toasts, the feasts and pub crawls. We need to be able to stay up until well-past midnight arguing the finer points of Apostolic Succession. We need to add Arthur Machen to our repertoire of Inklings and Francis Thompson to our wall of heroes. But what makes EDI what it is, is that it recognizes above all else that we need one another—face-to-face, pushing and challenging each other in love and devotion to Christ and His Church. And that’s what EDI is all about.

Our goal is to keep providing the space and theme for these real and human encounters of faithful joy. This next year we’re carrying on with our three flagship events: Symposium (Jan 12-15), Ad Fontes (June 1-4, formerly called Florovsky-Newman Week), and the Inklings Festival (Oct 21-23). Symposium registration is live and it’s filling up! The theme is “ Sex & Lies: Delusions of the Self in the 21 ^st Century ” and our speakers include Rod Dreher, Carl Trueman, Jennifer Roback-Morse, Hans Boersma, and others. Be sure to join us!

We also love our three Feasts: Nativity (Dec 30), St. Patrick (March 19), and St. John of Damascus (Aug 5). If you’re in town, be sure not to miss these.

Finally, I want to say a word about our publications. Complementing our desire for real and human gatherings is a content that forms and fills that gathering. We are inordinately blessed by the members of EDI who continue to write for us, present at our events, and/or read and critique us. This stimulation of the mind flows from faith, not against it. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “We have got to make them see that conversion is the beginning of an active, fruitful, progressive and even adventurous life of the intellect” (“The Thing,” Collected Works III:299). To that end, we intend to offer three print editions of the MOOT, tied to each of our flagship events. And at the end of the year—in fact, it’s right now at the printer—is our Christian News-Letter. These publications, along with the web content that continues to accrue in the weekly emails and the archives, are offered as a further stimulant to the adventurous life of the intellect. God willing, they’ll even thrust you into a real and human conversation, whether you particularly appreciated the writing or not.

It’s this real and human life that we’re after and we think you are too. Thank you to all who continue to support the work of EDI! If you’re not yet a member, consider supporting EDI financially at one of the tiers noted on our website . If you're a member, consider offering an extra donation to our year-end campaign . And if you’ve never made your way to the Ladder, I’ll be there January 27th for the next Hall of Men. Hope to see you there.

Peace to you and joy in Christ our life,

Fr. Dr. Geoffrey R. Boyle

President of The Eighth Day Institute

The House of Christmas

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 23:48:03 GMT

by G. K. Chesterton

Feast of the Holy Prophet Haggai

Anno Domini 2021, December 16

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

Homesick at Home

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 23:41:38 GMT

by G. K. Chesterton

Feast of the Holy Prophet Haggai

Anno Domini 2021, December 16

One, seeming to be a traveller, came to me and said, “What is the shortest journey from one place to the same place?”

The sun was behind his head, so that his face was illegible.

“Surely,” I said, “to stand still.”

“That is no journey at all,” he replied. “The shortest journey from one place to the same place is round the world.” And he was gone.

White Wynd had been born, brought up, married and made the father of a family in the White Farmhouse by the river. The river enclosed it on three sides like a castle: on the fourth side there were stables and beyond that a kitchen-garden and beyond that an orchard and beyond that a low wall and beyond that a road and beyond that a pinewood and beyond that a cornfield and beyond that slopes meeting the sky, and beyond that—but we must not catalogue the whole earth, though it is a great temptation. White Wynd had known no other home but this. Its walls were the world to him and its roof the sky.

This is what makes his action so strange.

In his later years he hardly ever went outside the door. And as he grew lazy he grew restless: angry with himself and everyone. He found himself in some strange way weary of every moment and hungry for the next.

His heart had grown stale and bitter towards the wife and children whom he saw every day, though they were five of the good faces of the earth. He remembered, in glimpses, the days of his toil and strive for bread, when, as he came home in the evening, the thatch of his home burned with gold as though angels were standing there. But he remembered it as one remembers a dream.

Now he seemed to be able to see other homes, but not his own. That was merely a house. Prose had got hold of him: the sealing of the eyes and the closing of the ears.

At last something occurred in his heart: a volcano; an earthquake; an eclipse; a daybreak; a deluge; an apocalypse. We might pile up colossal words, but we should never reach it.

Eight hundred times the white daylight had broken across the bare kitchen as the little family sat at breakfast. And the eight hundred and first time the father paused with the cup he was passing in his hand.

“That green cornfield through the window,” he said dreamily, “shining in the sun. Somehow, somehow it reminds me of a field outside my own home.”

“Your own home?” cried his wife. “This is your home.”

White Wynd rose to his feet, seeming to fill the room. He stretched forth his hand and took a staff. He stretched it forth again and took a hat. The dust came in clouds from both of them.

“Father,” cried one child. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” he replied.

“What can you mean? This is your home. What home are you going to?”

“To the White Farmhouse by the river.”

“This is it.”

He was looking at them very tranquilly when his eldest daughter caught sight of his face.

“Oh, he is mad!” she screamed, and buried her face in her hands.

He spoke calmly. “You are a little like my eldest daughter,” he said. “But you haven’t got the look, no, not the look which is a welcome after work.”

“Madam,” he said, turning to his thunderstruck wife with a stately courtesy. “I thank. you for your hospitality, but indeed I fear I have trespassed on it too long. And my home—”

“Father, father, answer me! Is not this your home?”

The old man waved his stick.

“The rafters are cobwebbed, the walls are rain-stained. The doors bind me, the rafters crush me. There are littlenesses and bickerings and heartburnings here behind the dusty lattices where I have dozed too long. But the fire roars and the door stands open. There is bread and raiment, fire and water and all the crafts and mysteries of love. There is rest for heavy feet on the matted floor, and for starved heart in the pure faces, far away at the end of the world, in the house where I was born.”

“Where, where?”

“In the White Farmhouse by the river.”

And he passed out of the front door, the sun shining on his face.

And the other inhabitants of the White Farmhouse stood staring at each other.

White Wynd was standing on the timber bridge across the river, with the world at his feet.

And a great wind came flying from the opposite edge of the sky (a land of marvellous pale golds) and met him. Some may know what that first wind outside the door is to a man. To this man it seemed that God had bent back his head by the hair and kissed him on the forehead.

He had been weary with resting, without knowing that the whole remedy lay in sun and wind and his own body. Now he half believed that he wore the seven-leagued boots.

He was going home. The White Farmhouse was behind every wood and beyond every mountain wall. He looked for it as we all look for fairyland, at every turn of the road. Only in one direction he never looked for it, and that was where, only a thousand yards behind him, the White Farmhouse stood up, gleaming with thatch and whitewash against the gusty blue of morning.

He looked at the dandelions and crickets and realised that he was gigantic. We are too fond of reckoning always by mountains. Every object is infinitely vast as well as infinitely small.

He stretched himself like one crucified in an uncontainable greatness.

“Oh God, who hast made me and all things, hear four songs of praise. One for my feet that Thou hast made strong and light upon Thy daisies. One for my head, which Thou hast lifted and crowned above the four corners of Thy heaven. One for my heart, which Thou hast made a heaven of angels singing Thy glory. And one for that pearl-tinted cloudlet far away above the stone pines on the hill.”

He felt like Adam newly created. He had suddenly inherited all things, even the suns and stars.

Have you ever been out for a walk?

---------------

The story of the journey of White Wynd would be an epic. He was swallowed up in huge cities and forgotten: yet he came out on the other side. He worked in quarries, and in docks in country after country. Like a transmigrating soul, he lived a series of existences: a knot of vagabonds, a colony of workmen, a crew of sailors, a group of fishermen, each counted him a final fact in their lives, the great spare man with eyes like two stars, the stars of an ancient purpose.

But he never diverged from the line that girdles the globe.

On a mellow summer evening, however, he came upon the strangest thing in all his travels. He was plodding up a great dim down, that hid everything, like the dome of the earth itself.

Suddenly a strange feeling came over him. He glanced back at the waste of turf to see if there were any trace of boundary, for he felt like one who has just crossed the border of elfland. With his head a belfry of new passions, assailed with confounding memories, he toiled on the brow of the slope.

The setting sun was raying out a universal glory. Between him and it, lying low on the fields, there was what seemed to his swimming eyes a white cloud. No, it was a marble palace. No, it was the White Farmhouse by the river.

He had come to the end of the world. Every spot on earth is either the beginning or the end, according to the heart of man. That is the advantage of living on an oblate spheroid

It was evening. The whole swell of turf on which he stood was turned to gold. He seemed standing in fire instead of grass. He stood so still that the birds settled on his staff.

All the earth and the glory of it seemed to rejoice round the madman’s homecoming. The birds on their way to their nests knew him, Nature herself was in his secret, the man who had gone from one place to the same place.

But he leaned wearily on his staff. Then he raised his voice once more.

“O God, who hast made me and all things, hear four songs of praise. One for my feet, because they are sore and slow, now that they draw near the door. One for my head, because it is bowed and hoary, now that Thou crownest it with the sun. One for my heart, because Thou hast taught it in sorrow and hope deferred that it is the road that makes the home. And one for that daisy at my feet.”

He came down over the hillside and into the pinewood. Through the trees he could see the red and gold sunset settling down among the white farm-buildings and the green apple-branches. It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone out from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son.

He came out of the pinewood and across the road. He surmounted the low wall and tramped through the orchard, through the kitchen garden, past the cattle-sheds. And in the stony courtyard he saw his wife drawing water.

*Originally published in G. K. Chesterton, The Coloured Lands (London: Sheed and Ward, 1938), pp. 233-238.

Running the Race

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 22:33:45 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Lucia the Virgin Martyr

Anno Domini 2021, December 13

This slightly extended (and late) issue of Microsynaxis concludes the Giving Tuesday “Running for Renewal” campaign. The four pieces below barely scratch the surface of the content I have on running and faith. (I have eight meditations, eight essays, and sixteen quotes, and am toying with the idea of converting the material into a book.)

Check out the material below and please do consider contributing to the campaign , which closes at midnight tonight.

Memberships are still discounted: $88 for Friend, $440 for Patron, and $880 for Pillar. In addition to the normal perks, you’ll also receive a two-day pass to the Symposium, the inaugural issue of The Christian News-Letter , and a pound of the Eighth Day Winter Blend coffee. And if you live in or near Wichita, you’ll be able to attend the members only Nativity Feast.

Click here for registration and more information about the Nativity Feast .

Click here for registration and more information about the Symposium .

Now dig in. And may it renew your soul so you can help renew your city and our culture!

In Christ,
Erin “John” Doom
Founder & Director, Eighth Day Institute

1. Bible: Hebrews 12:1-11
Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, ² looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. ³ For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls. ⁴ You have not yet resisted to bloodshed, striving against sin. ⁵ And you have forgotten the exhortation which speaks to you as to sons:

“My son, do not despise the chastening of the Lord,
Nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by Him;
⁶ For whom the Lord loves He chastens,
And scourges every son whom He receives.”

⁷ If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom a father does not chasten? ⁸ But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons. ⁹ Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected, and we paid them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? ¹⁰ For they indeed for a few days chastened us as seemed best to them, but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness. ¹¹ Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

2. Essays et al: "Let Us Run with Patience the Race That Is Set Before Us" by Mark Mosley
Dr. Mosley was my first running buddy back in 2019. He has always had to run much slower with me, but he was patient enough to join me for my first half marathon and my first full marathon. And he joined me for 7.34 of the 88 miles I recently ran. I love his writing and in between laps at the backyard ultrathon I asked him to write a reflection on running. Within a day or two, he sent me this great piece. Here’s a sample from the middle of his reflection:

I have chosen five elements of the Olympic race which are essential features to illustrate the life of salvation in Christ:

1) You will suffer. The race is a difficult struggle.

2) You are not guaranteed a victory. You must finish the race well. (You will not find support for “once saved, always saved” in this illustration.)

3) You must maintain hope in order to endure with patience. You must run with intensity while running relaxed. Keep your eyes ahead of you (and your mind above you) while letting your body move in a way for which it has been properly trained.

4) Part of the trust and hope comes from knowing the set path that you are running. This is a race set before us. While the specifics of the race may be unknown, the course and the goal are not created on the fly by the participant. You know what you are in for with the set path.

5) The “sin” of running is not running with pain and injury (this is expected and even anticipated for the athlete). Neither is the failure of the race due to not training as well as you should have (however ill-advised that may be). Rather the “sin” that leads to death is about how you ran the race— were you “running off course?”; did you “miss the mark?”; and did you “make your own way?” “The way” is not about your running form, or infractions of the race—it is staying on the right path till the finish line. The crown of victory is placed and the good news of the Son of God is spread throughout the kingdom only when the athlete crosses the finish line with the words, “Well done my good and faithful servant.”

Read the whole thing here .

3. Essays et al: "A Theology of Everything" by Chris Kettler and "Why I Run: Eight Theses Toward a Theology of Running" by Erin Doom
I also asked my friend Chris Kettler to write a short, two-paragraph meditation on why there should be a “theology of everything.” You can read his response here .

As a preliminary stab at thinking about a theology of running, I’ve put together eight brief theses. You can read them here .

Let Us Run with Patience the Race That Is Set Before Us

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 21:37:40 GMT

by Mark Mosley

Feast of St Lucia the Virgin Martyr

Anno Domini 2021, December 13

Wherefore seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and every sin which does so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us. ~Hebrews 12:1

Jesus Was Not a Jogger

Jesus was not a jogger. There was no place in the Hebrew imagination or the ancient Jewish teaching for the idea of running a race. The idea of running a race, and the training of an athlete to compete in that race, comes from the Greek mind of the Olympics, which are believed to have originated among the Greeks in 776 B.C. They began with just a single 600-foot race called the stadion . When Greece was conquered by Rome in 146 B.C., Romans joined the Greek athletes in the games every four years; it was called the Olympiad. During the compilation of the Septuagint (Hebrew Bible in Greek in the 3rd century B.C.) and during the lifetime of Jesus (first century A.D.), the Jewish people would have known about the Olympics and running races, but they held no place in their cultural imagination.

The Olympics Were Religious

One should not use the modern Olympics (introduced in 1896) as the lens by which we use the Olympic metaphor of running a race found in the writings of the New Testament (Hebrews 12:1; I Corinthians 9:24-26; Galatians 2:2; 2 Timothy 4:7; Acts 20:24).

The ancient Olympic games were a pagan religious festival. They were named after the highest mountain in Greece, Mount Olympos, which in Greek mythology was the home of the twelve Olympic deities. The games were dedicated to Zeus, possibly in reference to him winning the battle over Chronos (time). The athletes ran under the banner of Nike, the goddess of victory. It was their pagan religious connection that caused the ancient Olympic games to be ended in 393 A.D. by Emperor Theodosius I who had converted to Christianity.

The Olympics Were Militaristic

There was a direct connection between running a race and winning a military battle. One of the primary Olympic races, the hiplitodromos , was run in military armor. The race participants, like military soldiers, had to be male, Greek (later Roman), and free born. Women, slaves, and foreigners were disallowed (though scholars debate some exceptions). There was only one winner and he was crowned with an olive wreath of victory. The victor held a palm leaf in his hand during their ceremonial crowning. This is the same symbolism we see when Roman soldiers returning from victorious battle would be hailed in a procession of citizens lining the streets waving palm branches for their military victory (sounding familiar?). And the emperor, referred to as the Son of God, would put out an edict of victory and peace which was called the evangelion or “the good news.” In English, we call this “good news” the gospel by which we evangel ize. The gospel is in its original etymology a military-political term by which the peace of the kingdom (empire) was proclaimed by the sovereign leader for victory over the enemy.

Running the Race and the Christian Gospel

Given what has been described thus far, a Christian then might be confused (if not scandalized) by the use of a pagan religious festal event with warlike imagery to serve as the literary palate upon which to paint a picture of salvation and the Christian life. Why use this imagery?

The most obvious answer might be because it was a metaphor that a predominately gentile Hellenistic community would immediately and completely understand. The gymnasium was at the heart of Greek life. Athletic games were woven into the Greco-Roman fabric of a Pax Romana . The Olympics were a religious festival thanking the gods with warlike images that mimic victories which kept the peace of the Empire. The athlete in this social milieu was both a type of soldier and patriotic demigod. Athletes training at the local gymnasium, baths, and thermae would have merchants bottling their oily sweat and selling it as some kind of perfumed sports collectable! (In fact, perhaps like no other time in history, our contemporary American cult of sport is eerily similar.)

However, just because a metaphor is useful for description does not necessarily make it appropriate. Why would the Apostle Paul and the writers of the New Testament use such a disturbing and seemingly inappropriate metaphor? I have chosen five elements of the Olympic race which are essential features to illustrate the life of salvation in Christ:

1. You will suffer. The race is a difficult struggle.

2. You are not guaranteed a victory. You must finish the race well. (You will not find support for “once saved, always saved” in this illustration.)

3. You must maintain hope in order to endure with patience. You must run with intensity while running relaxed. Keep your eyes ahead of you (and your mind above you) while letting your body move in a way for which it has been properly trained.

4. Part of the trust and hope comes from knowing the set path that you are running. This is a race set before us . While the specifics of the race may be unknown, the course and the goal are not created on the fly by the participant. You know what you are in for with the set path.

5. The “sin” of running is not running with pain and injury (this is expected and even anticipated for the athlete). Neither is the failure of the race due to not training as well as you should have (however ill-advised that may be). Rather the “sin” that leads to death is about how you ran the race —were you “running off course?”; did you “miss the mark?”; and did you “make your own way?” “The way” is not about your running form, or infractions of the race—it is staying on the right path till the finish line. The crown of victory is placed and the good news of the Son of God is spread throughout the kingdom only when the athlete crosses the finish line with the words, “Well done my good and faithful servant.”

The Sacredness of the Run

To use a “pop cultural icon” in the first century to illustrate a previously unknown or misunderstood Christian idea is perhaps justifiable because of its intent, even if the image is a bit shocking; but the early Christian leaders, writers of the New Testament, the early Church Fathers, and the entire monastic life adopts this image of the athlete training and running the race as a central Christian image . Running a race has been transfigured into an icon of holy instruction and life. Why use a thoroughly pagan descriptor of your oppressor to write the theological concept of the salvific life of every Christian? Here is where Christianity takes what is pagan and transforms the cultural event into an entirely different and sacred illustration:

1. You are the athlete. Your salvation does not come by inheritance, or membership, or entitlement, or talent, or position in society, or even just by proper training— you must personally run the race of your life well.

2. The Christian athlete that runs includes females, includes slaves, includes immigrants as well as the poor, orphaned, and widowed. In fact it puts the least of these as the pace runners, because they know about suffering—they understand the gift of being able to participate in a race they don’t deserve to win. In humility, you stay behind the runners that the world places in the back.

3. You do not run for you. You do not run alone. You are “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses” of the living and the dead. Your team carries you every step. You have trained with the assembly of the Holy. Your “gymnasium” has been the altar of the Almighty God and His Twelve Apostles whose flame burns eternally and is sent out as good news from the mountain of the heavenly City. This is not your private race—it is “the race that is set before us .” You cannot be an athlete without a citizenship and a legitimate team to run the Olympic race. You cannot be a Christian by yourself. You without a Church is simply you and not the Church.

4. The invitation to run the race is a free gift. None of us deserve the favor of the Sovereign to be crowned at the finish line. This gift of grace should not be taken lightly. Rather we should train as if our life depends upon it. We should subject our bodies to every conceivable training method to prepare us for the suffering of the race.

The Spiritual Athlete Trains with an Ascetic Life

It is no coincidence, that the word asceticism means “athlete.” We are all called to train as spiritual athletes. Our methods of training which include regular prayer, fasting, and almsgiving have been set before us by the ascetics and Holy men and women of the Church throughout history that have already run this race and won! Our running equipment and even our spiritual armor has been set before us with the Holy Scriptures, the lectionary, the psalter, the order of worship, the sacraments, etc. And while the running gear and training methods should never be conflated with the race itself, no athlete in their right mind or their coaches would say that proper equipment and training is somehow counter-productive to running the race well. Your race and finishing it well will be the fruition of training well.

The spiritual athlete who wakes up early and drinks daily from the water of the word, and is nourished by feeding the poor instead of the desires of his/her own stomach, and suffers voluntarily in small increments by giving away their money, time, and talents is the spiritual athlete who is training wisely to run the race of the saved life as they cross the finish line of life. Voluntary suffering is the training exercise for the inevitable involuntary suffering that this world brings. The cross of Christ is the beginning, middle, and end of that race. The cross that purchases the ticket for us to run, is the same cross we must carry through the race, in a procession to the end with the Holy assembly of God, His angels, saints, and spiritual “team.” This suffering comes as no surprise for the well-trained athlete—it has been exercised daily. We maintain endurance with patience because we have hope that the race can be won, because in Christ, we press on with the knowledge that it has already been won.

Why I Run: Eight Theses Toward a Theology of Running

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 21:27:28 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Lucia the Virgin Martyr

Anno Domini 2021, December 13

1. Running is Christ-Strengthening : I have the sort of personality that loves—no thrives on—a good challenge. Running 13.1 miles, then 26.2 miles, then 31 (first 50k back in Sep) and 62 miles (first 100k last month), and now 88 miles. I absolutely love the challenge of running these long distances. Pushing through all the trials and pain of 62 miles has taught me that in and with Christ I truly can do just about anything I put my mind to. Over the last couple of races, Philippians 4:13 has come so alive. I clung to it as I set off on my longest run yet.

2. Running requires Continual Learning : Running is a constant experiment in figuring out how to improve, how to run longer, how to deal with pain, what went wrong, what changes need to be made for next run. On every race I’ve run, I’ve had to troubleshoot. My first 50k, for example, I was staying at an Airbnb and I got up at 4 am to drive to the race but found myself blocked in the driveway by two vehicles. I had to pound on the door of a complete stranger for about 15 minutes to wake them up and get them to move their cars. In hindsight, I’m grateful I was blocked in because I would have left my running gear behind if I hadn’t gone back into the Airbnb. Or today, for example, I forgot I hadn’t used my water bottle and spent the first five minutes of the very first lap trying to get the wrapper off only to pull the whole thing apart. I was eventually able to get it back together. The point is that I love learning which is not only key to running, but also vital to the Christian faith, for as Fr Florovsky tirelessly preached, Christ took on our full humanity, including the human mind. And so His redemption of humanity includes the redeeming of our minds. And again, in Florovsky’s words, “as disciples we are students and thus have a duty to learn.”

3. Running gives Focus and Creativity : I am easily distracted. Running is teaching me how to focus on one thing instead of a million. For me it has been a world of silence in the midst of a world of distractions and noise. That space for silence and focus has also frequently spurred creativity.

4. Running offers Communion with God : Running has catapulted my prayer life. Long runs give you hours alone…just me and God. And the trail runs provide those hours in nature, which for me has been yet another way of being in communion with God.

5. Running is a Form of Asceticism : Asceticism comes from two Greek words: 1) askoumai which denotes something a man practices aiming for a certain goal; and 2) askein which simply means to exercise. So Christian asceticism are those practices or exercises that submit the body to the soul thereby aiming toward the goal of holiness and theosis. Running has been a great practice at establishing discipline and teaching my body to submit to my mind and soul.

6. Running requires Perseverance and Suffering : If you run long distances, it’s going to be hard and you’re going to hurt. You can’t avoid the pain. And you will want to quit. About half way into the 88-mile run I concluded that a theology of running is really just a theology of suffering. When I was a young teenager my dad and I memorized the book of James. The thing that has stuck with me the most from that exercise is the opening verses of the book (vv. 2-4): “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” That’s a message that completely contradicts the American way of life. But I believe it to be true. We ought not expect to be comfortable. We have to be ready and willing to die to ourselves, to embrace pain and suffering, to embrace the cross, to participate in Christ’s suffering through our own…that’s the message of the gospel. And running long distances, persevering and feeling the pain, is for me a way to practice that.

7. Running is a Form of Vigil : If you run long enough distances, you’ll have to run through the night. On my first 100k I started in the morning, ran all day, and then into the night, finally finishing around 3 am. On the 88-mile run, I ran through the entire night. On both occasions, when I wasn’t accompanied by a fellow runner, those dark hours alone were times for prayer. St. Isaac the Syrian has an entire homily devoted to the power of a vigil, i.e., of praying at night. Here’s one line: “Prayer offered up at night possesses a great power, more so than the prayer of the daytime. All the righteous prayed during the night… There is nothing which even Satan fears so much as prayer that is offered during vigilance at night.”

8. Running requires Community : You can only run so far before you’re going to need help. You just can’t run really long distances without assistance. You may have seen aid stations for a marathon where volunteers provide water and Gatorade. Aid stations on a long trail run take that to a whole other level. Volunteers not only provide hydration, but they also have all sorts of food options for you. When you’re burning 400-500 calories every hour, you have to put calories back in to be able to keep going. It’s also not uncommon to get a bit disoriented—it happened to me when I stopped in at an aid station at mile 50—and those volunteers can be life-saving. Some runners bring their own crew to help them out at critical junctures in a long race. And they’ll often have a pacer join them in the latter portion of the race. Again, the mind is not able to think as clearly when you’ve been running that long so pacers can be very helpful in various ways. As it was not good for man to be alone in the garden, it is not good for a runner to be alone on a long run.

A Theology of Everything

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 18:40:30 GMT

by Christian D. Kettler

Feast of St Lucia the Virgin Martyr

Anno Domini 2021, December 13

“Whoever looks at Jesus Christ sees in fact God and the world in one. From then on they can no longer see God without the world, or the world without God.” So wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer late in life in his Ethics (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works Volume 6, p. 82). What seems obvious is a conundrum of either one of two problems. Either we are obsessed with “God” so that “theology” is simply filled with concepts that we call “doctrine” but unconnected to our often hurting lives and the wider world. Or we have an equally reductionistic view of “the world” that is susceptible to what Bonhoeffer called the “phraseological”: concepts we think consist of “the world” such as “the true,” “beauty,” “good,” “freedom,” “justice,” and especially today, “equality,” and “inclusion,” that we think can be understood without God, or as Bonhoeffer points out, reality ( Letters and Papers from Prison , To Eberhard Bethge, April 22, 1944, New Greatly Enlarged Edition, p. 275). This is a “theology of everything,” that demands to be a theology, that is, radical thinking about the living God in Jesus Christ, but also, because of Jesus Christ, “the world,” being not afraid but called to be incarnational, taking on topics of the world.

Christ as the Image God is an emphasis found in both the Eastern Christian tradition, such as the patristic writers, and in the Protestant Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams has recently pointed out in his book, Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition (pp. 123-124). “The divine word of invitation,” such as found in Isaiah, is that which forms personal identity, not our achievements in our natural lives. There is a place for definite human agency as participation in the agency of the eternal Son’s obedience to the Father through the Spirit, a thoroughgoing Trinitarianism. Thus, the early Christian confession, “Jesus is Lord” (Rom 10:9) is not just an affirming of Jesus’ power, but of his filial relation to the Father, that we now share in, in the midst of the world in which we live, and in whom we are.

On Patience

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 22:07:09 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of the Holy Prophet Zephaniah

Anno Domini 2021, December 3

My plan to write posts about running during the 88-mile run earlier this week was stupid and didn’t work at all. I totally under-estimated how difficult it would be, both during and afterwards. The impact of running on concrete for that long destroyed me physically. After seven ice baths and 48 hours, I was finally able to start walking yesterday, although my right foot is still too swollen to fit into a shoe. Besides the brutal punishment to my body, two other consequences ensued: 1) I still have a good amount of content on running related to the faith that I will share early next week; and 2) Microsynaxis and the members-only Synaxis issues are two days late. In order to get them both out before the weekend, I’m sending the full members-version of Synaxis out to everyone. If you’re not a member, please do consider joining our community so you can receive the full version like the one below on a monthly basis. Normally the full version would include my Director’s Desk, but this time that will be one of the pieces on running which will come out early next week.

Did you know that on Dec. 5, 88 years ago this Sunday, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed? As Wikipedia notes, “Despite the efforts of Herber J. Grant, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the 21 Utah members of the constitutional convention voted unanimously on that day to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment, making Utah the 36th state to do so, and putting the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment over the top in needed voting.” Here’s a short quote from Chesterton on the topic: “Prohibition has actually worked the good, in spite of so malignantly and murderously willing the evil. And the good is this: the restoration of legitimate praise and pride for the creative crafts of the home.” That’s from his piece “A Plea for Prohibition” which can be read in full here . Cheers to the repeal of prohibition!

Now, before the rest of today’s content on the theme of patience, here are a number of quick announcements/save the dates:

If you haven’t already supported the 88-mile “Running for Renewal” campaign, please consider donating today . $88 or more and you’ll get the Eighth Day Winter blend coffee, The Christian News-Letter , and a 2-day pass to the Symposium ($150 value!). This week-long campaign is in lieu of Giving Tuesday and our annual budget depends on us meeting our goal of $20,000. We've raised $4,127 so far .
The members-only Feast of the Nativity will be at Trinity Lutheran Church on Thursday evening, December 30. The theme is “Let No Tongue Be Silent: Hymns to the Incarnate God.” Registration and more details will be coming soon.
There are two great reading groups you should consider joining:
The weekly Cappadocian group which is primarily for pastors and those involved in ministry. It’s led by Cameron Combs and if you’re interested you can contact him here .
The monthly Oratio, Meditatio, Tentatio Theological Reading Group which is open to anyone. It’s led by Fr. Geoff Boyle whom you can contact here .
There is also a new weekly theological study group forming under Dr. Chris Kettler which will focus on theological anthropology. It will begin in January and if interested you can email Dr. Kettler here .

Now dig in. And may the content below renew your soul so you can help renew your city and our culture!

In Christ,

Erin “John” Doom

Founder & Director

1. Bible: A Florilegium on Patience

Psalm 27:14 : Wait on the Lord; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the Lord!

Psalm 30:5 : For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for life; weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

Psalm 37:7 : Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him.

Psalm 40:1 : I waited patiently for the Lord; and He inclined to me, and heard my cry.

Proverbs 14:29 : He who is slow to wrath has great understanding, but he who is impulsive exalts folly.

Isaiah 30:18 : Therefore the Lord will wait, that He may be gracious to you; and therefore He will be exalted, that He may have mercy on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him.

Lamentations 3:25-26 : The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

Romans 8:25 : But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance.

Romans 12:12 : Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer.

Romans 15:5 : Now may the God of patience and comfort grant you to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus.

1 Corinthians 13:4 : Love suffers long and is kind.

Galatians 6:9 : And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.

Ephesians 4:2 : With all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love.

Hebrews 10:36 : For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise.

James 1:2-4 : My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

James 5:7-8 : Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain. You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.

2. Liturgy: December as a Month of Copious Feasts

December is full of wonderful feast days for Christ, His Mother, and the saints. On Dec. 25 we not only have the Feast of the Nativity of Christ, but also the Adoration of the Magi, the Commemoration of the Shepherds in Bethlehem who were watching their flocks and came to see the Lord, the Commemoration of the 14,000 Holy Infants/Innocents slain by Herod on Dec. 29, and the Feast of St Nicholas the Wonderworker, Archbishop of Myra on Dec. 6. On Dec. 9 we celebrate the Conception by St. Anna of the Most Holy Theotokos and on Dec 26 the Synaxis of the Holy Theotokos. For obvious reasons we also celebrate a number of Old Testament prophets: Nahum the Prophet on Dec. 1, Habakkuk the Prophet on Dec. 2, Zephaniah the Prophet on Dec. 3, the Holy Prophet Haggai on Dec. 16, and Daniel the Prophet and the Three Holy Youths on Dec. 17. Several female saints are also celebrated: St. Barbara the Great Martyr on Dec. 4, Hannah the Righteous, Mother of Samuel the Prophet on Dec. 9, St. Lucia the Virgin Martyr on Dec. 13, the Martyr Susannah the Deaconess on Dec. 15, St. Juliana of Nicomedia and Her 630 Companion Martyrs on Dec. 21, St. Anastasia the Great Martyr on Dec. 22, St. Eugenia the Righteous Nun-Martyr of Rome and those with her on Dec. 24, St. Anysia the Virgin-Martyr of Thessoloniki on Dec. 30, and St. Melania the Younger, Nun of Rome on Dec. 31. Along with the other martyrs already listed, many others are celebrated in December; to name a few: the feast of St. Stephen the Archdeacon and First Martyr on Dec. 27, the 20,000 Martyrs burned in Nicomedia on Dec. 28, the Holy Martyr Diogenes on Dec. 5, Nicholas the New Martyr on Dec. 6, Athenodoros the Martyr of Mesopotamia on Dec. 7, Narses the Martyr of Persia on Dec. 9, Menas, Hermogenes, & Eugraphos, Martyrs of Alexandria on Dec. 10, the Holy New Martyr Peter the Aleut on Dec. 12, and the Ten Martyrs of Crete on Dec. 23. Then there are a few of the more known saints: St John of Damascus on Dec. 4, St. Ambrose of Milan on Dec. 7, and St Ignatius the God-Bearer and Bishop of Antioch on Dec. 20. Finally there are Stylites, Athonites, and a poet: St. Daniel the Stylite of Constantinople and St. Luke the New Stylite of Chalcedon on Dec. 11, St. Theophanes the Poet on Dec. 27, St. Simon the Myrrhbearer & Founder of Simonopetra on Mt Athos on Dec. 28, and St. Gideon the New Martyr of Mount Athos on Dec. 30. As I said, what a rich and wonderful month December is, one that in the words of the 6-7th century St. John Moschos, is “a copious and accurate collection” from which we can “gather up the spiritually beneficial deeds of the fathers.”

3. Fathers: Tertullian on Patience

The titles for two sections from Tertullian’s treatise on patience should be enough to tease you into reading them (if you didn’t already in last week’s Microsynaxis ): “God Himself as an Example of Patience” and “Jesus Christ in His Incarnation & Work a More Imitable Example Thereof.” Read them here .

4. Poetry: Two Poems on Patience

I love the final lines of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s great poem “Patience Taught by Nature”:

But so much patience, as a blade of grass

Grows by contented through the heat and cold.

Read the whole thing here .

And then there’s George MacDonald’s short poem “Hope and Patience," which you can read here .

5. Books & Culture: Gilbert Meilaender's Review Essay of David Baily Harned’s Patience: How We Wait Upon the World by

Despite the recent revived interest in “virtue ethics,” there hasn’t been much serious reflection upon particular virtues. Here is a book of over 200 pages dedicated exclusively to patience, one that Meilaender says “probably needs to be read and pondered rather than summarized.” Nevertheless, Meilaender offers some summary, including this sample toward the beginning:

a reader is led from thinking about the patience of God as displayed in the Bible … to early Christian thought as displayed in Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine … to the characteristically medieval emphases of Gregory the Great, Aquinas, and Thomas Kempis … and finally to Calvin, Jeremiah Burroughs, and Kierkegaard—men who, though quite separated in time, represent perspectives shaped by the Reformation. Drawing on these chapters Harned then characterizes a fourfold shape of patience: as endurance (suffering without discontent), forbearance (bearing with the faults of others), expectancy (a willingness to wait), and perseverance (constancy). We can understand the virtue better by considering its “adversaries,” which are also fourfold: impatience and apathy (the extremes of which patience is the mean), boredom, and displacement (loss of touch with one’s purpose in life).

Read the whole review here at First Things and then purchase a copy from Eighth Day Books.

6. Essays et al: Athonite Monk on Patience

An Athonite monk clarifies the meaning of patience in the opening lines of this short reflection:

Read the whole thing here .

7. Essays et al: Homily on James 1 by Pope Francis

In 2018 Pope Francis gave a homily on James 1:1-11. His initial description of patience sounds very similar to the one given by the Athonite Monk above:

what does patience mean in life and in the face of trials? It’s certainly not easy to understand. Christian patience is neither “resignation” nor an attitude of “defeat.” Rather, it is a virtue of those who are on the journey, those who are moving forward, rather than stopping and becoming closed off.

Here's a bit more:

this patience St James speaks about is not simply a “counsel” for Christians. If we look at the history of salvation, we can see the "patience of God, our Father," who has led and carried His "stubborn people" forward each time they strayed one way or the other. And the Father shows this patience, too, to each one of us, “accompanying us,” and “waiting” for the right time. God also sent His Son, that He might “enter into patience,” “taking up His mission,” and offering Himself decisively in His Passion.

Read the homily here .

8. Essays et al: Essay on Halik’s Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us

Back in the June 9, 2020 issue of Microsynaxis , the Books and Culture section offered several short passages from a book I had just encountered by Thomáš Halík: Patience with God . I stated there that I intended to review it. That was my plan for this issue but I couldn’t find my copy of the book. The EDI library has always been a mess, but more of an organized chaos that I could mostly manage. While on sabbatical the EDI board made major improvements at The Ladder, including new bookshelves; the ONLY downside is the organized chaos of books became total chaos. Getting our amazing library of books organized and shelved is a project in the works. Since I couldn’t find my copy I found a two of four reviews from a 2011 Symposium on the book.

Here’s a short excerpt from Sandra A. Yocum’s review, which summarizes Halík’s message, one that is extremely timely for our polarized culture:

Tomáš Halík invites his readers into the gospel story of Zacchaeus because he finds there an account of “us.” Like the best of Benedictine lectio divina or Ignatian spirituality exercises, Halík wants us to enter fully into the story of a little man “on the fringes” of his society. He wants us to sit with Zacchaeus in his tree, feel simultaneously his marginalization and his attraction to Jesus. He wants us to make that exhilarated climb down with Zacchaeus to respond to Jesus’ in calling him by name. Finally and most importantly, he asks us to find in Zacchaeus our contemporaries who dwell in “the zone of questions and doubts.” These contemporaries may, like the author, be believers, or they may, like many in his post-Communist Czech Republic, be atheists. Yet, they—or perhaps more accurately—we may share a surprisingly common identity as seekers on the margins of a world in which center stage is given to the battle between an aggressive and dogmatic secularism and an equally aggressive and dogmatic religious fundamentalism. He is right to entitle this invitation Patience with God .

You can read the whole review here .

And here is a longer excerpt from Brian D. Robinette’s review, which echoes the end of the previous passage. This is extremely intriguing to me because Halík sounds similar to the way Florovsky would describe the Church’s mission in his neopatristic synthesis, so long as the “new type of faith/nonfaith dialogue” remains grounded in the Patristic Synthesis/Tradition. Here’s Robinette:

Supposing we were to look for a more recent example [than Karl Rahner] that pursues this pastoral task [of rendering Christian life intelligibly and with intellectual honesty] in an especially probing way, in a manner that exhibits a deep commitment to the heart of Christian faith while engaging atheism sympathetically and with uncommon intimacy, and in a way that wears its considerable theological sophistication lightly enough to speak to the “outsider” of faith—all with a personally disarming voice that instantly draws the reader into conversation with its author; supposing this, we will do no better than Tómaš Halík’s Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us .

A professor of philosophy and sociology at Charles University in Prague and a Catholic priest secretly ordained in the late 1970s and active in the underground church during Communist Czechoslovakia, Halík is on quite familiar terms with cultural and even politically sanctioned atheism. While the end of the Communist regime allowed long-suppressed religious sensibilities to reawaken and percolate, still today the Czech Republic is home to one of the most agnostic and atheistic populations in the world. So when Halík adopts the figure of Zacchaeus to represent those who remain “on the fringes” and who “keep their distance” from religious faith, he is speaking out of a milieu where Zacchaeuses abound.

“I like Zacchaeuses,” Halík tells us. “I think I have been given the gift of understanding them.” Such understanding is not merely studied, for Halík confesses that he too has sensed God’s absence, has at times felt estranged from the church he loves and formally represents, and in fact often finds more in common with those skeptical of religious belief than those of his own Christian faith. Halík’s instinct to inhabit the “gray zone between religious certainty and atheism” is a way of preserving a spirit of seeking, and in this way participating in Jesus’ own ministry of those at the periphery. “Blessed are the distant,” or “Blessed are you on the fringes,” is how Halík summarizes Jesus’ mission. Such is not a tactical contrivance to “convert” Zacchaeus, but a desire to understand and enter into fellowship with him. Salvation comes to the house of Zacchaeus, though we are never told whether he becomes a disciple, or to what extent he converted from his previous way of life. Halík takes the Lucan silence (19:1-10) as an opportunity to play out imaginatively a variety of apocryphal endings to the story, including one in which Saint Zacchaeus becomes “the patron and protector of the eternal seekers” by watching over “their patience in the anteroom of faith.” Insisting that the future of Christian faith very much depends upon its ability to “win over” the Zacchaeuses in our midst, Halík is clear that this implies, among other things, that those who have a more definitive sense of who or what is “inside” and “outside” the church will need to rediscover Jesus’ creative confusion of boundaries. What we need is “a new type of faith/nonfaith dialogue,” a new agenda for theology, a “different hermeneutical circle: “it is necessary to read scripture and live the faith also from the standpoint of our profound solidarity with people who are religiously seeking, and, if need be, with those who experience God’s hiddenness and transcendence “from the other side.”

Read the whole review here .

Director’s Desk for Members: “Why I Run: Toward a Theology of Running” – coming early next week with additional content on running

Why I Ran for 24 Hours Straight

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 17:45:05 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Habakkuk the Prophet

Anno Domini 2021, December 2

Did you or your children ever Jump Rope for Heart? If so, you know the drill: you go to family and friends and you go door-to-door to your neighbors collecting pledges for a P.E. competition. If you know you can jump rope for a long time, you know you have a chance of winning a big prize while supporting a good cause.

So long story short: that was my idea behind running 88 miles in 24 hours. And it turned out to be simultaneously the most difficult and most amazing experience of my life.

For those of you who don’t know, I recently completed a Backyard Ultra which means that I ran 3.67 miles every hour for 24 hours.

Why would I do such a thing?

I love running and I believe wholeheartedly in the mission and work of Eighth Day Institute. So I thought combining these two passions into a Backyard Ultra would be a fun and creative way to approach Giving Tuesday this year.

I truly believe the work and mission of EDI has become increasingly more important every single year of our 15-year existence. And I believe it’s more important today than ever before. If you agree, if you think our culture needs renewed, if you’ve experienced our work and believe bringing all Christians together for a dialogue of love and truth to overcome divisions is an important contribution to that renewal, please donate today .

Anybody who donates $88 ($1/mile) or more will receive a pound of our annual Eighth Day Winter Blend of coffee and the 2021 issue of The Christian News-Letter ( see contents here ), and a pass for two days of the Symposium ($150 value!). Plus, you’ll get to register for the annual members-only Nativity Feast.

In Christ,

Erin “John” Doom

Founder & Director, Eighth Day Institute

P.S. I’m so grateful to those who joined me for laps: Dr. Mark Mosley for 2 laps, Gary Gensch for 2 laps, Dr. Charles Telfer for a lap, Bill Young for a lap, John Gleason for two laps, my brother Brian for a lap, my brother Jordan for a lap, my sister-in-law Natalie for a lap, Meghan Koci for a lap, my 11-year-old son Elijah for two laps, and Oscar Repreza for a whopping six laps (basically a marathon from 10pm – 4am!!!).

And then there was the pop-up aid-station crew. On my sixth lap, as I was coming into the home stretch passing my friend Jake Ramstack’s house, he was waiting in his driveway with his daughters to cheer me on. They led me the rest of the route home with sparklers in hand. When I returned on the seventh lap, Shailesh Mark and Gary Gensch were there with Jake to accompany me the last block to the tent with sparklers and smoke bombs. At the end of the eighth lap Alex Kice and Joshua Sturgill joined them in running me into the tent. My wife and kids returned home from soccer practice about this time and they joined the support team, cheering me on, taking pictures and videos, and washing and drying wet and sweaty gear so I could warm up in between laps. It had evolved into an official crew with Jake leading the charge of taking care of me, making sure I had enough food and hydration, keeping me warm, and getting me back onto the road on time.

The sacrifice and support of all those runners, crew members, and neighbors was truly exceptional and humbling.

An Eighth Day Institute Backyard Ultra

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 00:09:47 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Clement of Rome and Peter of Alexandria

Anno Domini 2021, November 24

As attacks on Western Civilization intensify daily, Eighth Day Institute stands firmly on the rock of Christ, His Church, and its ancient traditions. The work and mission of Eighth Day Institute is needed more than ever. We boldly uphold our mission to “bring all Christians together for a dialogue of love and truth by returning to the common heritage of ancient Christianity and the Western tradition through events and publications to overcome divisions and renew culture through faith and learning.” By sponsoring the 24 laps/hours (for total of 88 miles) Director Doom will run, you’ll be affirming that mission and supporting the work of Eighth Day Institute.

EVENT DETAILS

On Nov 29, I’m going to start running in my home’s “backyard,” i.e. the College Hill neighborhood. I’ll depart from and return to my home for each loop.

I’m going to complete a 3.67 mile loop every hour on the hour for at least 24 hours
I’m accepting pledges for miles completed but I must complete the loop within the hour for it to count. So, if I complete 12 loops but fail to return in time for the 13th loop, the total miles will be 44 (12 x 3.67 = 44miles).
My goal is to do 24 loops which, yes, that means 24 hours and 88 miles. It took me 20 hours to run 62 miles in my first 100k seven weeks ago. You'll soon be able to read about that experience here.
You can also make a flat donation if that’s your preference . I appreciate all forms of pledge support for this campaign that will support Eighth Day Institute’s important work of renewing culture through faith and learning.

My fundraising goal is $20k but I’m hopeful we can beat that. Obviously the more people pledge the less I theoretically have to run but I’m going after at least 88 miles no matter what.

Q&A

Q: I want to help but am not sure how much to pledge.

A: Start with a dollar. If I pull this off then you’ve donated $88 at the most and, if you’re not an EDI member, EDI will throw in a Friend membership. Having never done more than 62 miles and knowing what 62 miles feels like, it’s going to be a HUGE SACRIFICIAL effort to hit the goal. Pledging less than a dollar per mile is also fine…every penny counts! You can make a pledge or tax-deductible donation here .

Q: Can I pledge more than a dollar?

A: Of course! Hopefully you understand the format and what each dollar pledged can mean. I’m really hoping and praying for a solid number of pledges in the $5 or more range. $5 for 88 miles is $440 (and an Eighth Day Patron membership for new members). $10 and 88 miles is $880 and a Pillar membership for new members .

Q: What else can I do to help?

A: Three things:

Send and share this page or the pledge / race site page ( https://pledgeit.org/running-for-renewal ) to friends who you think might be interested in supporting Eighth Day Institute’s mission “to bring all Christians together for a dialogue of love and truth by returning to the common heritage of ancient Christianity and the Wester tradition through events and publications to overcome divisions and renew culture through faith and learning.” I’ve set a modest goal of 88 pledges to keep the theme of 88 pledges for 88 miles. But I’m really hoping to beat that pledge count.
Join me for a loop. I’d love to have your company. Sign up for a lap (or laps) here and email me at erin@eighthdayinstitute.org so I can send you my address.
Stop by my house any time and cheer me on. I’ll be arriving from each loop around 10-15 minutes before each hour. I’ll even supply beer to encourage you to join me! Email me at erin@eighthdayinstitute.org and I’ll send you my address.

Q: What will I get in return?

A: If you pledge $88 or more, a pound of Eighth Day Winter blend coffee from Local Roasters (our neighbors in Wichita). And if you’re not already an Eighth Day Member, $88 gets you a discounted Friend membership, $440 gets you a discounted Patron membership, and $880 gets you a discounted Pillar membership. You can check membership perks out here .

Q: Realistically, how many miles will you run?

A: I don’t know. 62 miles was REALLY hard to pull off in 20 hours. While it was on rolling hills, it was also on dirt trails, which are much easier on the feet than the roads in my neighborhood (but I will have three hills in my loop). I’m also fighting some new knee pain. So the only thing I know is that just about every lap is probably going to hurt. And everything over 25 miles is going to be an exercise in sheer mental toughness to pull off “one more loop.” I'm sacrificing my body...will you sacrifice your pocketbook?

Q: Are you going to sleep?

A: NO! I’m hoping to have some company both during the loops and during my 5-15 minute breaks between laps at my front-yard “aid station.” I plan on being on my own for most of the time but company will not only help pass the time but will also keep me motivated to keep pressing on. You can sign up to run a lap (or some laps) with me here . Since I’m starting each loop on the hour every hour, I’ll have some time to refuel, change gear, rest my legs, etc.

Q: Where can I get updates so I know how much I’m donating?

A: There will be updates on the EDI Facebook page throughout the days of Nov 29-30 (not so much during the night). Once I’m done I’ll post a final update and will include that update in our series of Giving Tuesday emails.

Q: What happens after I make my pledge?

A: You will receive a confirmation email from “Pledge It” which states a final invoice will be shared after the conclusion of the event and after the miles completed have been submitted. You can then follow along our campaign and get periodic updates.

If you’ve read this far, I’m DEEPLY GRATEFUL for your interest. I’ll be even more grateful if you’ll support Eighth Day Institute by making a pledge, sharing this campaign with friends, and contributing to our goal!

Patience Is God's Nature

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 22:19:41 GMT

by Tertullian

Feast of St Clement of Rome and St Peter of Alexandria

Anno Domini 2021, November 24

God Himself an Example of Patience

To us no human affectation of canine equanimity, modelled by insensibility, furnishes the warrant for exercising patience; but the divine arrangement of a living and celestial discipline, holding up before us God Himself in the very first place as an example of patience; who scatters equally over just and unjust the bloom of this light; who suffers the good offices of the seasons, the services of the elements, the tributes of entire nature, to accrue at once to worthy and unworthy; bearing with the most ungrateful nations, adoring as they do the toys of the arts and the works of their own hands, persecuting His Name together with His family; bearing with luxury, avarice, iniquity, malignity, waxing insolent daily: so that by His own patience He disparages Himself; for the cause why many believe not in the Lord is that they are so long without knowing that He is angry with the world.

Jesus Christ in His Incarnation & Work a More Imitable Example Thereof

And this species of the divine patience indeed being, as it were, at a distance, may perhaps be esteemed as among things too high for us; but what is that which, in a certain way, has been grasped by hand (1 Jn. 1:1) among men openly on the earth? God suffers Himself to be conceived in a mother’s womb, and awaits the time for birth; and, when born, bears the delay of growing up; and, when grown up, is not eager to be recognized, but is furthermore contumelious to Himself, and is baptized by His own servant; and repels with words alone the assaults of the tempter; while from being Lord He becomes Master, teaching man to escape death, having been trained to the exercise of the absolute forbearance of offended patience. He did not strive; He did not cry aloud; nor did any hear His voice in the streets. He did not break the bruised reed; the smoking flax He did not quench: for the prophet—nay, the attestation of God Himself, placing His own Spirit, together with patience in its entirety, in His Son—had not falsely spoken. There was none desirous of cleaving to Him whom He did not receive. No one’s table or roof did He despise: indeed, Himself ministered to the washing of the disciples’ feet; not sinners, not publicans, did He repel; not with that city even which had refused to receive Him was He angry (Lk. 9:51-56), when even the disciples had wished that the celestial fires should be immediately hurled on so contumelious a town. He cared for the ungrateful; He yielded to His ensnarers. This were a small matter, if He had not had in His company even His own betrayer, and steadfastly abstained from pointing him out. Moreover, while He is being betrayed, while He is being led up as a sheep for a victim (for so He no more opens His mouth than a lamb under the power of the shearer), He to whom, had He willed it, legions of angels would at one word have presented themselves from the heavens, approved not the avenging sword of even one disciple. The patience of the Lord was wounded in (the wound of) Malchus. And so, too, He cursed for the time to come the works of the sword; and, by the restoration of health, made satisfaction to him whom Himself had not hurt, through Patience, the mother of Mercy. I pass by in silence (the fact) that He is crucified, for this was the end for which He had come; yet had the death which must be undergone need of contumelies likewise? Nay, but, when about to depart, He wished to be sated with the pleasure of patience. He is spitted on, scourged, derided, clad foully, more foully crowned. Wondrous is the faith of equanimity! He who had set before Him the concealing of Himself in man’s shape, imitated nought of man’s impatience! Hence, even more than from any other trait, ought you, Pharisees, to have recognized the Lord. Patience of this kind none of men would achieve. Such and so mighty evidences—the very magnitude of which proves to be among the nations indeed a cause for rejection of the faith, but among us its reason and rearing—proves manifestly enough (not by the sermons only, in enjoining, but likewise by the sufferings of the Lord in enduring) to them to whom it is given to believe, that as the effect and excellence of some inherent propriety, patience is God’s nature.

*Translated by S. Thelwall. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3.

Patience as Perseverance and Endurance

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 17:58:15 GMT

by A Monk of Athos

Feast of St. Gregory the Wonderworker & Bishop of Neo-Caesarea

Anno Domini 2021, November 17

I talk a great deal about patience, but this is because it is so essential to authentic Christian spirituality, and so thoroughly misunderstood. Most people have the idea that patience means “waiting.” Fair enough, that is an element of patience. But this gives the impression that patience is a passive thing, simply not acting, and waiting for God to do something. But at its core, the word υπομονή (traditionally translated into English as patience) means something closer to staying power, perseverance, remaining grounded or centered. The real test of patience isn’t waiting, but how a person reacts when the pressure is on. When your spouse snaps at you; the kids are screaming, being openly disobedient, and creating a mess; the business deal falls through; the committee meeting devolves into dissension and arguing. What do you then? If in those situations, if you calmly and persistently keep doing what you know you should do, that is real patience. If when the pressure is on, the temptations and trials rise like might waves, and your words, actions and demeanor are a witness to the grace of Christ which is in you, that is real patience. There will be times when patience is simply sitting by and waiting for the storm to pass without doing anything. But more often, it is the marathon runner in the last two miles of the race, when his muscles are aching and the fatigue is striking at the marrow, and he stays calm and collected and simply keeps running, that is real patience.

In reality, it is a very different thing than how most people envision it. But I give you my word, if you work with God on this one, and allow Him to work real patience into your life, there is no limit to what He can do with you. As James says, “let patience have its perfect work in you, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” The other side of patience is when you fail...and at times you are simply going to fail. It is impossible to bear one’s cross and follow after Christ and not stumble and fall; for Christ Himself showed us this by falling three times. And so, here, patience simply means getting up. You get up, you humbly ask for God’s forgiveness, you ask the forgiveness of others, when necessary. You get up, you pick up your cross, and you keep going and that too is real patience. Forgive me, for me to say anything more, would be undue, for I too am a sinner, and fall every day.

On Inklings, Beer, & Lying

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 23:27:36 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Orestes the Martyr of Cappadocia

Anno Domini 2021, November 10

Two weekends ago, in conjunction with the 33rd anniversary of Eighth Day Books, we celebrated the Inklings for the seventh year in a row. It was an amazing weekend. If you missed it you really should plan on attending next year. It’s always the weekend after the annual Touchstone conference (either the third or fourth weekend of October).

In light of our recent Inklings Festival, today’s issue of (Micro)Synaxis is focused thematically on the Inklings and beer. But I’ve also thrown in a preview of one of the readings for the Symposium seminar on “Lust and Lies” (Jan. 12-13, 2022) plus two bonuses: an old piece on why EDI and EDB celebrate the Inklings and a brief report on my sabbatical.

Speaking of the Symposium, get the details and register here today with your discount code (you should have received your code in the email with the content of this issue of Synaxis). The price for the seminar, which is not applicable for the discount, will increase on Dec. 1. Also, the banquet is only included in the all-access price until Dec 1 when the early bird registration rate ends.

One final announcement: Save the date for this year’s Giving Tuesday on November 30. I’ve got some fun plans in the works for this year that I’ll be announcing next week.

Now dig in.

1. Bible: St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 4:9-16

Brethren, God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death; because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men. We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the off-scouring of all things. I do not write this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me.

2. Liturgy: Synaxis of the Archangel Michael & the Other Bodiless Powers: Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Salaphiel, Jegudiel, & Barachiel

On Monday, November 8, the Church commemorated the aforementioned angels. Here’s a description of this feast, along with the festal hymns, from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America:

All the Angels, according to the Apostle Paul, are ministering spirits, sent forth to minister to them who shall be heirs of salvation (Heb. 1:14). God set them as overseers of every nation and people, and guides to that which is profitable (Deut. 32:8); and while one Angel is appointed to oversee each nation as a whole, one is also appointed to protect each Christian individually. He commands them to guard them that hope on Him, that nothing should harm them, neither should any evil draw nigh to their dwelling (Ps. 90:10-12). In the Heavens they always behold the face of God, sending up to Him the thrice-holy hymn and interceding with Him in our behalf, seeing they rejoice over one sinner that repents (Is. 6:2-3; Matt. 18:10; Lk. 15:7). In a word, they have served God in so many ways for our benefit, that the pages of Holy Scripture are filled with the histories thereof. It is for these reasons that the Orthodox Catholic Church, wisely honoring these divine ministers, our protectors and guardians, celebrates today the present Synaxis that is, our coming together in assembly for their common feast to chant their praises, especially for the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, who are mentioned in the Scriptures by name. The name Michael means “Who is like God?” and Gabriel means “God is mighty.” The number of Angels is not defined in the divine Scriptures, where Daniel says that thousands of thousands ministered before Him, and ten thousands of ten thousands attended upon Him (Dan. 7:10). But all of them are divided into nine orders which are called Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, Dominions, Powers, Authorities, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.

Apolytikion of Synaxis of the Archangels, Fourth Tone : O Commanders of the Heavenly Host, we the unworthy beseech you, that through your entreaties you will fortify us, guarding us in the shelter of the wings of your ethereal glory, even as we fervently bow before you crying: “Deliver us from all danger, as Commanders of the Powers on high!”

Kontakion of Synaxis of the Archangels, Second Tone : Chief Commanders of God; ministers of divine glory; guides for men and leadership of the Incorporeal; as Chief Commanders of the Incorporeal, plead for our welfare and for great mercy.

3. Fathers: "On Lying" by St. Augustine

Our pre-Symposium Seminar on January 12-13, 2022, will explore the theme of “Lust and Lies in the Bible (Ezekiel), the Fathers (St. Augustine), the Liturgy (TBA), and Literature (TBA).” Here’s a small sample from St Augustine’s treatise “On Lying.”

The Seminar is limited to 10 participants so if you want to join us for an amazing experience of discussing great texts together, a sort of group lectio divina , register today here .

4. Poetry: “The Rolling English Road” by G. K. Chesterton

I can’t recall if it was a Symposium or an Inklings Festival, but I do recall Dr. Ralph Wood leading us through this anti-Prohibition poem (originally titled “A Song of Temperance Reform”). Instead of linking directly to the poem, I found a good article on it in The Guardian , which ends with the full poem. Check it out here . And you’ll get more on Chesterton’s view on prohibition in the next piece, also by Ralph Wood.

5. Books & Culture: The Flying Inn by Ralph Wood

At our second annual Eighth Day Symposium, back in 2012, Dr. Ralph Wood gave a great lecture on G. K. Chesterton’s book, The Flying Inn . The full title for the lecture was “The Flying Inn: Chesterton on Alcohol and the Sacramental Imagination.” Here are two of the opening paragraphs:

Chesterton worried about the way in which the modern world often elevates the minor virtues while flattening the major ones. I think we’re going to wind up banning smoking, for example—we’ve almost done so already. I’m no advocate of tobacco (although my father was a great lover of cigars), and I object to the ruined flavor of food when it must be tasted through tobacco fumes. But the banning of smoking in restaurants, and in many other public places, is too easy a virtue. Like the outlawing of trans-fats from New York eateries, it encourages us to think we have made large moral accomplishments when, in fact, we have dealt only with peccadilloes.

Consider this story from a university professor who returned to his office late one night. As he got out of his car in the parking lot, he saw a sign that read, “This is a smoke-free campus.” He entered his own departmental building, and there he encountered a similar notice: “This is a smoke-free building.” He exited the elevator into the hallway leading to his office, and it too was declared tobacco free: “Smoking is absolutely prohibited.” When at last he arrived at the commons area outside his office, there was a sign affixed to the door. “Please do not disturb,” it read, “we’re having sex.” You can’t smoke anywhere on the campus of a major university, but you can have sex in the commons area of a Humanities department late at night, just don’t disturb.

Later in the lecture Wood suggests that Chesterton’s critique of Islam in The Flying Inn is an equally relevant critique of our own secular culture. And the heart of that critique is the loss of a sacramental imagination. It’s a brilliant and timely lecture. And it’s a perfect read to prep you for the next piece by Arthur Machen. You really should read Wood's piece here . And if you haven't read The Flying Inn yet, be sure to get your copy from Eighth Day Books.

6. Essays et al: “A Plea for Prohibition” by G. K. Chesterton

Now that you’ve hopefully read two pieces of anti-Prohibition literature—a Chesterton poem and an essay on Chesterton’s novel The Flying Inn—here is a hilarious Chesterton essay which also critiques Prohibition, provoked by Chesterton’s study of Prohibition in America. The conclusion is fantastic, a sort of Hall-of-Menish defense of micro brewing and home brewing:

But the private brews differ very widely; multitudes are quite harmless and some are quite excellent. I know an American university where practically every one of the professors brews his own beer; some of them experimenting in two or three different kinds. But what is especially delightful is this: that with this widespread revival of the old human habit of home-brewing, much of that old human atmosphere that went with it has really reappeared. The professor of the higher metaphysics will be proud of his strong ale; the professor of the lower mathematics (otherwise known as high finance) will allege something more subtle in his milder ale; the professor of moral theology (whose ale I am sure is the strongest of all) will offer to drink all the other dons under the table without any ill effect on the health. Prohibition has to that extent actually worked the good, in spite of so malignantly and murderously willing the evil. And the good is this: the restoration of legitimate praise and pride for the creative crafts of the home.

This being the case, it seems that some of our more ardent supporters might well favour a strong, simple and sweeping policy. Let Congress or Parliament pass a law not only prohibiting fermented liquor, but practically prohibiting everything else. Let the Government forbid bread, beef, boots, hats and coats; let there be a law against anybody indulging in chalk, cheese, leather, linen, tools, toys, tales, pictures or newspapers. Then, it would seem by serious sociological analogy, all human families will begin vigorously to produce all these things for themselves; and the youth of the world will really return.

Read the whole essay here .

7. Essays et al: “Let Us Keep the Tavern” by Arthur Machen

Arther Machen, the hero of our 2021 Inklings Festival, is slowly being rediscovered thanks to the hard work of Christopher Tompkins and his Darkly Bright Press. This short piece is an apologia for the tavern. Here's a short sample:

If a man can discover an old English inn, and in it a hunk of bread, a good cheese, and a pint of honest ale, he may boast truly that he has lunched very well. Provided, of course, in the first place, that the inn or Tavern does not call itself “Ye Olde Red Loin” or “Ye Olde” anything else: “Ye,” it has been observed by the judicious, has a tendency to make the beer too weak and the cheese too strong. But if the tavern be genuine and the food and drink be genuine, then I say that he who lunches thus lunches well.

Read the entire short piece here . And then go to Eighth Day Books and purchase the book in which it is printed: Dreamt in Fire: The Dreadful Ecstasy of Arthur Machen (Darkly Bright Press, 2021).

8. Essays et al: “Alcohol, Drunkenness, & Drinking” by G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton is the king of quotes on alcohol and beer. If you’ve ever seen any there’s a good chance they come from this piece. Here are a few samples:

1. Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer’s day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented. The fact that beer has a very slight stimulating quality will be quite among the smallest reasons that induce him to ask for it. In short, he will not be in the least desiring alcohol; he will be desiring beer. But, of course, the question cannot be settled in such a simple way.

2. All the human things are more dangerous than anything that affects the beast—sex, poetry, property, religion. The real case against drunkenness is not that it calls up the beast, but that it calls up the Devil.

3. For in so far as drinking is really a sin it is not because drinking is wild, but because drinking is tame; not in so far as it is anarchy, but in so far as it is slavery. Probably the worst way to drink is to drink medicinally. Certainly the safest way to drink is to drink carelessly; that is, without caring much for anything, and especially not caring for the drink.

4. I believe that if by some method the local public-house could be as definite and isolated a place as the local post-office or the local railway station, if all types of people passed through it for all types of refreshment, you would have the same safeguard against a man behaving in a disgusting way in a tavern that you have at present against his behaving in a disgusting way in a post-office: simply the presence of his ordinary sensible neighbors. In such a place the kind of lunatic who wants to drink an unlimited number of whiskies would be treated with the same severity with which the Post Office authorities would treat an amiable lunatic who had an appetite for licking an unlimited number of stamps.

Read the whole piece here .

Member Bonuses:

A. From the Archives: “Why Treasure Pipe-Smoking, Beer-Loving Englishmen? An Appreciation of C. S. Lewis & Friends” by Erin Doom

This single paragraph from a piece written six years ago is even more timely today:

Wright’s review singles out one of the “powerful refrains” running throughout Lewis’ book: “faith matters more than feelings; faithfulness to the high and hard standards of Christian behavior matters more than doing what you feel like at the time.” This was penned at a time when, in the words of Wright, “Lewis was swimming against a strong tide of popular romantic existentialism.” It’s only been eight years since Wright’s review and the tide is significantly stronger. It is precisely in this environment that we so desperately need the “high and hard standards of Christian behavior,” what Lewis also calls mere Christianity.

The essay was originally written as a sort of defense for why EDI was organizing the inaugural Inklings Festival. Read the whole thing here .

B. Director’s Desk: A Brief Report on Director Doom’s Sabbatical

Click here to read this brief report .

On Lying and Keeping the Tavern

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 21:49:09 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Orestes the Martyr of Cappadocia

Anno Domini 2021, November 10

Speaking of the Symposium, learn more and register here today to take advantage of the early bird registration rate . Prices will increase on Dec 1. Become an Eighth Day Patron and you'll save 50% off registration, along with many other perks. Become an Eighth Day Pillar and you can attend our three featured events for free, plus the other perks.

One final announcement: Save the date for this year’s Giving Tuesday on November 30. I’ve got some fun plans in the works for this year that I’ll be announcing next week.

Now dig in.

1. Bible: St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 4:9-16

2. Fathers: "On Lying" by St. Augustine

Our pre-Symposium Seminar on January 12-13, 2022, will explore the theme of “Lust and Lies in the Bible (Ezekiel), the Fathers (St. Augustine), the Liturgy (TBA), and Literature (TBA).” Click here to read a small sample from St Augustine’s treatise “On Lying.”

The Seminar is limited to 10 participants so if you want to join us for an amazing experience of discussing great texts together, a sort of group lectio divina , learn more and register today here .

3. Books & Culture: “Let Us Keep the Tavern” by Arthur Machen

Read the entire short piece here . And then go to Eighth Day Books and purchase the book in which it is printed: Dreamt in Fire: The Dreadful Ecstasy of Arthur Machen (Darkly Bright Press, 2021).

Become an Eighth Day member today to begin receiving the upgraded version of Synaxis . The full version of this issue for all Eighth Day members contains the additional following content:

4. Liturgy: Synaxis of the Archangel Michael & the Other Bodiless Powers: Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Salaphiel, Jegudiel, & Barachiel

5. Poetry: "The Rolling English Road" by G. K. Chesterton

6. Essays et al: "The Flying Inn: Chesterton on Alcohol & the Sacramental Imagination by Ralph Wood

7. Essays et al: "A Plea for Prohibition" by G. K. Chesterton

8. Essays et al: "Alcohol, Drunkenness, & Drinking" by G. K. Chesterton

Bonuses:

A. From the Archives: "Why Treasure Pipe-Smoking, Beer-Loving Englishmen? An Appreciation of C. S. Lewis & Friends" by Erin Doom

B. Director's Desk: "A Brief Report on Director Doom's Sabbatical" by Erin Doom

Alcohol, Drunkenness, & Drinking

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 01:43:24 GMT

by G. K. Chesterton

Synaxis of the Archangel Michael & the Other Bodiless Powers: Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Salaphiel, Jegudiel, & Barachiel

Anno Domini 2021, October 8

I suppose that there will be some wigs on the green in connection with the recent manifesto signed by a string of very eminent doctors on the subject of what is called ‘alcohol’. ‘Alcohol’ is, to judge by the sound of it, an Arabic word, like ‘algebra’ and ‘Alhambra’, those two other unpleasant things. The Alhambra in Spain I have never seen; I am told that it is a low and rambling building; I allude to the far more dignified erection in Leicester Square. If it is true, as I surmise, that ‘alcohol’ is a word of the Arabs, it is interesting to realize that our general word for the essence of wine and beer and such things comes from a people which had made particular war upon them. I suppose that some aged Moslem chieftain sat one day at the opening of his tent and, brooding with black brows and cursing in his black beard over wine as the symbol of Christianity, racked his brains for some word ugly enough to express his racial and religious antipathy, and suddenly spat out the horrible word ‘alcohol’. The fact that the doctors had to use this word for the sake of scientific clearness was really a great disadvantage to them in fairly discussing the matter. For the word really involves one of those beggings of the question which make these moral matters so difficult. It is quite a mistake to suppose that, when a man desires an alcoholic drink, he necessarily desires alcohol.

Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer’s day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented. The fact that beer has a very slight stimulating quality will be quite among the smallest reasons that induce him to ask for it. In short, he will not be in the least desiring alcohol; he will be desiring beer. But, of course, the question cannot be settled in such a simple way. The real difficulty which confronts everybody, and which especially confronts doctors, is that the extraordinary position of man in the physical universe makes it practically impossible to treat him in either one direction or the other in a purely physical way. Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head. In neither case can we really argue very much from the body of man simply considered as the body of an innocent and healthy animal. His body has got too much mixed up with his soul, as we see in the supreme instance of sex. It may be worth while uttering the warning to wealthy philanthropists and idealists that this argument from the animal should not be thoughtlessly used, even against the atrocious evils of excess; it is an argument that proves too little or too much. Doubtless, it is unnatural to be drunk. But then in a real sense it is unnatural to be human. Doubtless, the intemperate workman wastes his tissues in drinking; but no one knows how much the sober workman wastes his tissues by working. No one knows how much the wealthy philanthropist wastes his tissues by talking; or, in much rarer conditions, by thinking. All the human things are more dangerous than anything that affects the beast—sex, poetry, property, religion. The real case against drunkenness is not that it calls up the beast, but that it calls up the Devil. It does not call up the beast, and if it did it would not matter much as a rule; the beast is a harmless and rather amiable creature, as anybody can see by watching cattle. There is nothing intoxicating or even particularly lively about beasts. We hear of mad bulls, but they are not mad through delirium tremens; nor does their dislike of scarlet originate in a resolution not to look upon the wine or upon anything else when it is red. We hear of mad dogs, and we even hear that they dislike water; but this dislike is not due to the same cause which creates a similar prejudice in so many human beings. Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness—or so good as drink.

The pronouncement of these particular doctors is very clear and uncompromising; in the modern atmosphere, indeed, it even deserves some credit for moral courage. The majority of modern people, of course, will probably agree with it in so far as it declares that alcoholic drinks are often of supreme value in emergencies of illness; but many people, I fear, will open their eyes at the emphatic terms in which they describe such drink as considered as a beverage; but they are not content with declaring that the drink is in moderation harmless: they distinctly declare that it is in moderation beneficial. But I fancy that, in saying this, the doctors had in mind a truth that runs somewhat counter to the common opinion. I fancy that it is the experience of most doctors that giving any alcohol for illness (though often necessary) is about the most morally dangerous way of giving it. Instead of giving it to a healthy person who has many other forms of life, you are giving it to a desperate person, to whom it is the only form of life. The invalid can hardly be blamed if by some accident of his erratic and overwrought condition he comes to remember the thing as the very water of vitality and to use it as such. For in so far as drinking is really a sin it is not because drinking is wild, but because drinking is tame; not in so far as it is anarchy, but in so far as it is slavery. Probably the worst way to drink is to drink medicinally. Certainly the safest way to drink is to drink carelessly; that is, without caring much for anything, and especially not caring for the drink.

The doctor, of course, ought to be able to do a great deal in the way of restraining those individual cases where there is plainly an evil thirst; and beyond that the only hope would seem to be in some increase, or, rather, some concentration of ordinary public opinion on the subject. I have always held consistently my own modest theory on the subject. I believe that if by some method the local public-house could be as definite and isolated a place as the local post-office or the local railway station, if all types of people passed through it for all types of refreshment, you would have the same safeguard against a man behaving in a disgusting way in a tavern that you have at present against his behaving in a disgusting way in a post-office: simply the presence of his ordinary sensible neighbors. In such a place the kind of lunatic who wants to drink an unlimited number of whiskies would be treated with the same severity with which the Post Office authorities would treat an amiable lunatic who had an appetite for licking an unlimited number of stamps. It is a small matter whether in either case a technical refusal would be officially employed. It is an essential matter that in both cases the authorities could rapidly communicate with the friends en famille of the mentally afflicted person. At least, the postmistress would not dangle a strip of tempting sixpenny stamps before the enthusiast’s eyes as he was being dragged away with his tongue out.

*Originally published in The Illlustrated London News, 20 April, 1907.

Let Us Keep the Tavern

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 01:10:05 GMT

by Arthur Machen

Feast of St Nektarius the Wonderworker, Metropolitan of Pentapolis

Anno Domini 2021, November 9

When, in an ancient legend, Hiram the master-builder, was slain by the treacherous craftsmen, the supreme word—or secret—of masonry perished with him. Consequently the temple that Hiram was building, though almost finished, could never be finished absolutely, and the Lost Word has not yet been recovered. It will be found, perhaps, on the day on which the missing letters of the Great Name are restored; and then, as the Kabbalists truly say, there shall be compassions on every side.

In the meantime, as I have understood, the Masons do as best they can with a substituted word. It is not the true word, nor does it pretend to be the true word. It is a makeshift, the best obtainable under present conditions, and, no doubt, it has done as well as could be expected.

As a matter of fact, this mystery of the substituted word goes through the whole of life. There are people in the arts who do not possess genius, but managed to turn out highly respectable and interesting tales and pictures by dint of hard work and careful cultivation of their talents. So in war, so in games. There is the ban soldier, the ban cricketer. These are rare, but a man by taking pains can no doubt make himself a safe and solid soldier, or a safe and solid cricketer. And if one cannot get the best—the real thing—it is, no doubt, wise to put up with the second best. There is a great deal to be said for substitutes.

This is true even of such minor matter as lunch. I have the ideal lunch in my mind: a sardine or two, a few radishes, a little bread and butter. Then an omelette fines herbes , a small fish, exquisitely fried, fresh from the Loire, a cutlet and fried potatoes, a slice or two of paté de lièvre , a plate of those fragrant tous les mois strawberries with sugar and cream in a bit of gruyère.

We will drink with this simple but agreeable meal a bottle of Barsac, and afterwards we will have our coffee and fine champagne in the garden court of the Pheasant at Tours, sitting amidst flowers by the fountain, under the shade of the broad-leafed plane tree.

This is my Lost Word in the article of luncheon; but what an admirable substitute may be found for it. If a man can discover an old English inn, and in it a hunk of bread, a good cheese, and a pint of honest ale, he may boast truly that he has lunched very well. Provided, of course, in the first place, that the inn or Tavern does not call itself “Ye Olde Red Loin” or “Ye Olde” anything else: “Ye,” it has been observed by the judicious, has a tendency to make the beer too weak and the cheese too strong. But if the tavern be genuine and the food and drink be genuine, then I say that he who lunches thus lunches well.

But it will be remarked that here there is no pretense of make-believe in the substituted word. Bread and cheese and beer do not pretend that they are omelettes, cutlets, or white wine. They stand up boldly as good things in their way, without subterfuge or concealment. It is the curse of too many substitutes that they are full of false pretenses.

Look at the people called Vegetarians. I think I could eat with them—now and then—if they would only be honest. If the Vegetarian would only say: “I can give you a bowl of lentil soup, guaranteed velvety, smooth, guileless of all gritty offenses against the palate, and then some first-rate floury potatoes, grown in dry, warm soil, mashed up with salt, black pepper, and real butter, and a fine bit of Stilton to finish up with”: then, I say, I would keep his fast with him.

But your vegetarian has the profoundest distrust in the attractive power of vegetables. He begins to lie with the soup. He calls it “Vegetable Hare Soup.” He equivocates as he passes his sickly “Mock Galatine of Chicken.”

He is ridiculous with his “Nut Cutlets,” shameless with his “Fruitarian Roast Turkey.” His whole bill of fare is like a tale told by an idiot to an idiot: it is a vainer delusion than the Barmecide’s feast. Here, in short, we have the vicious make-shift, the corrupted rather than the substituted word; as we have it again in those horrible products, unfermented wine and non-alcoholic—or “Control”—beer.

And this brings me to an announcement that I saw in The Times a few days ago. The Lord Mayor of London—may the Saints send him a better occupation—is to preside at a conference to be held in the course of the autumn on the subject of “The Provision of Alternatives to the Liquor Tavern.” In other words the misguided persons concerned in the conferences are going to try to find a substitute for the tavern; for one of the most ancient and honorable institutions in the whole estate of man.

Some would say that Church and State synthesize humanity in a condition of well-being. I would rather say Church and Tavern. There is a great deal to be said against even the good State; there is nothing to be said against the good tavern.

Not that I deny that it is possible to find a tolerable substitute for the tavern; but the method is difficult. You must take first of all a burning sun, a fiery sky, a land of rock and sand and thirsty desolation. Then by the stony road, with its thorns and thistles, bring your caravan of travelers parched with the fires of the air and the earth. Finally, make a well of cold, bubbling water to thrill up shining through the ardent rock. Then it will be said: de torrente in via bibet: ergo exultabit caput —he shall drink of the brook by the way: therefore shall he lift up his head. That is the only substitute for the tavern.

But these conferencing people—of “14 Christian denominations,” by the way—I know what they want. They want a large dreary room, very high, with walls distempered in bilious green, and furniture in pale pitchpine. They want tablecloths covered with stale mustard stains. They want shelves full of “Pops Ale,” “Cork-ho, “Vinto,” “Pipso,” and other flagitious and offensive beverages. They want to dispense coffee of such forlorn and shabby nastiness that a French beggar would spit it out of his mouth: and Conscientious Cocoa—"Pacifist” Brand.

*Originally published in the Evening News: August 22, 1917. Reprinted in Dreamt in Fire: The Dreadful Ecstasy of Arthur Machen (Darkly Bright Press, 2021) Pages 192-194. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.

A Plea for Prohibition

Sun, 07 Nov 2021 01:22:19 GMT

by G. K. Chesterton

Feast of St Paul the Confessor, Patriarch of Constantinople

Anno Domini 2021, November 6

AFTER a careful study of the operations of Prohibition in America, I have come to the conclusion that one of the best things that the Government could do would be to prohibit everything.

That the story of Mephistopheles, the fiend who tempted Faust, is in reality an allegory of the story of Prohibition in America, is admitted by all serious scholars whose authority carries weight in the modern world. Critics admiring the sarcasm of Mephistopheles have repeatedly referred to his humour as ‘dry’ — a term now impossible to separate from its political content. The promise of the devil to produce a new and youthful Faust, in place of the old one, is obviously an allusion to the promise of the Prohibitionists to produce a new and fresh generation of American youth, unspoiled by the taste of alcohol. The allegory is not only clear about the sort of things that Prohibition promised, but is especially clear about the sort of things that Prohibition really performed. One of the things, for instance, which Mephistopheles really performed (if I remember rightly) was to make holes in a tavern table and draw out of the dead timber some magic hell-brew of his own, saying something like,

Wine is sap and grapes are wood;
This wooden board yields wine as good.

Could there possibly be a more self-evident and convincing reference to the abuse arising from wood alcohol? Any critic who would evade so crushing a conclusion, as if it were a coincidence, must be indeed lacking in the logic that has lent stability and consistency to the Higher Criticism. When the fiend describes himself as “the spirit who denies,” it is plain enough that we are to read it in the sense of one who denies people the use of spirits. But the conclusive argument to my mind, in the light of all the circumstances both in literature and life, is the fact that Mephistopheles distinctly says of himself: “I am he who always wills the bad and always works the good.”

That Prohibition and Prohibitionists willed the bad no righteous or Christian person will doubt for a moment. That Prohibition and Prohibitionists eventually work the good may appear for the moment more doubtful. And yet there is one sense in which Prohibition has already worked some good; and may yet work very much more good. Wood alcohol is not in itself a happy example; and no judicious wine-taster will expect to find the best vintages in a liquid drawn by a devil out of a dinner-table. But there really is already in America a large number of people who are producing drinks in an equally domestic fashion; and drinks for their own dinner-tables if not out of them. It is not by any means true that all this home-made drink is poison. The presence of the devil is plain enough in the pleasing scheme of the American Government to poison all the alcohol under its control, so that anybody drinking it may be duly murdered; but murder has become almost the ordinary official method of the enforcement of a teetotal taste in beverages.

*Originally published in Sidelights on New London and New Yorker and Other Essays (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932).

A Brief Note on Director Doom's Sabbatical

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 02:47:36 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of St Raphael of Brooklyn

Anno Domini 2021, November 6

The history of Eighth Day Institute goes back to 2006 when we offered our first two classes: 1) Latin; and 2) The Bible and the Fathers. That was over fifteen years ago. My history with Eighth Day goes back even further to 1998 when I began working at Eighth Day Books (in its original Clifton Square location). All told, I’ve been involved with Eighth Day endeavors for almost a quarter of a century. That’s a long time, especially in an age in which the typical employee stays at a job for about four years, according to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I’m a bibliophile so working at Eighth Day Books came natural. I’m not an administrator so developing Eighth Day Institute did not come so natural. Eighth Day Books was easy; I was, after all, just an employee whose sole responsibility was to sell books. Eighth Day Institute has been difficult; now I was the founder and sole employee with all of the responsibilities on my shoulders. Fifteen years of giving it all I had and just barely surviving year after year just plain wore me out. It also distracted me from my primary mission of being a good husband and father as the priest of my home.

So back in June, heeding the advice of a counselor and two good friends, I asked the EDI board of directors for a sabbatical. I needed time to renew my soul, time to be with my wife and kids, time to temporarily step away from books and events, and time to get out of the way of EDI’s ongoing development. And to my unexpected surprise, the board immediately voted to grant me a three-month sabbatical.

What did I do for three months, you may be wondering. First and foremost, I did something I’ve never really done: I spent lots and lots of time with my wife and kids. It’s actually what I mostly did. And it was the most important thing I could have done. I recently explained it to an Eighth Day Member by saying that I had three months to begin practicing the habit of being present at home, a practice vitally important for me to be able to continue being present after returning to EDI this past month.

I also took my 18-year-old daughter Hannah on a retreat to New Mexico with four friends, including EDI board members Jesse Penna and Joshua Sturgill…and with llamas! We hiked and camped in the Valle Vidal area of the Carson National Forest, otherwise known as the Yosemite of the Southwest. We had daily prayer together, one full day of silence, and we spent time reading, meditating on, and discussing three great books: The Way of the Heart by Henri Nouwen, Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and The Way of a Pilgrim (a good Eighth Day ecumenical selection: one Catholic, one Protestant, and one Orthodox). It was an incredibly invigorating time of renewal that reminded me of how important annual retreats are, a practice that was an annual habit for every year of my marriage until I started EDI. It also offered a special time to spend with my daughter before she left home to begin her new college life at the University of Tulsa, where she joins my oldest son.

Thank God for the EDI board of directors who so graciously and courageously provided this life-giving sabbatical. It was an incredible blessing for me and my family. But it was also a huge boost for EDI. As many of you know, EDI long ago outgrew me. This sabbatical forced me to get out of the way of its ongoing development, of which the board of directors has so brilliantly taken charge.

Many thanks to all of the EDI directors!!! You have increased the health of our organization by leaps and bounds and I’m thrilled to see how God will continue to use us to promote the renewal of culture through faith and learning!

And finally, many thanks to all of the EDI members. None of our events or publications would be possible without your faithful and generous support. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

In Christ,

Erin “John” Doom

P.S. The one other thing I did during this sabbatical was take running to a whole new, and slightly crazy, level. But you’ll have to wait for the next issue of Synaxis/Microsynaxis to hear about that.

On Lying

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 14:54:32 GMT

by St. Augustine of Hippo

Feast of Galaktion & His Wife Episteme, the Martyrs of Emesa

Anno Domini 2021, November 5

5. But whether a lie be at sometimes useful, is a much greater and more concerning question. Whether, as above, it be a lie, when a person has no will to deceive, or even makes it his business that the person to whom he says a thing shall not be deceived although he did wish the thing itself which he uttered to be false, but this on purpose that he might cause a truth to be believed ; whether, again, it be a lie when a person willingly utters even a truth for the purpose of deceiving; this may be doubted . But none doubts that it is a lie when a person willingly utters a falsehood for the purpose of deceiving: wherefore a false utterance put forth with will to deceive is manifestly a lie . But whether this alone be a lie , is another question. Meanwhile, taking this kind of lie, in which all agree, let us inquire, whether it be sometimes useful to utter a falsehood with will to deceive. They who think it is, advance testimonies to their opinion, by alleging the case of Sarah, who, when she had laughed, denied to the Angels that she laughed: of Jacob questioned by his father, and answering that he was the elder son Esau : likewise that of the Egyptian midwives, who to save the Hebrew infants from being slain at their birth, told a lie , and that with God's approbation and reward: and many such like instances they pick out, of lies told by persons whom you would not dare to blame, and so must own that it may sometimes be not only not blameworthy, but even praiseworthy to tell a lie . They add also a case with which to urge not only those who are devoted to the Divine Books, but all men and common sense, saying, “Suppose a man should take refuge with you, who by your lie might be saved from death, would you not tell it? If a sick man should ask a question which it is not expedient that he should know , and might be more grievously afflicted even by your returning him no answer, will you venture either to tell the truth to the destruction of the man's life, or rather to hold your peace, than by a virtuous and merciful lie to be serviceable to his weak health?” By these and such like arguments they think they most plentifully prove, that if occasion of doing good require, we may sometimes tell a lie .

6. On the other hand, those who say that we must never lie, plead much more strongly, using first the Divine authority, because in the very Decalogue it is written, “You shall not bear false witness ”; under which general term it comprises all lying: for whoever utters anything bears witness to his own mind. But lest any should contend that not every lie is to be called false witness , what will he say to that which is written, “The mouth that lies slays the soul .” And lest any should suppose that this may be understood with the exception of some liars, let him read in another place, “You will destroy all that speak leasing.” Whence with His own lips the Lord says, “Let your communication be yea, yea; nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these comes of evil .” Hence the Apostle also in giving precept for the putting off of the old man, under which name all sins are understood, says straightway, “Wherefore putting away lying, speak ye truth .”

7. Neither do they confess that they are awed by those citations from the Old Testament which are alleged as examples of lies. For there, every incident may possibly be taken figuratively, although it really did take place; and when a thing is either done or said figuratively, it is no lie. For every utterance is to be referred to that which it utters. But when anything is either done or said figuratively, it utters that which it signifies to those for whose understanding it was put forth. Whence we may believe in regard of those persons of the prophetical times who are set forth as authoritative, that in all that is written of them they acted and spoke prophetically ; and no less, that there is a prophetical meaning in all those incidents of their lives which by the same prophetic Spirit have been accounted worthy of being recorded in writing. As to the midwives, indeed, they cannot say that these women did through the prophetic Spirit, with purpose of signifying a future truth , tell Pharaoh one thing instead of another (albeit that Spirit did signify something, without their knowing what was doing in their persons ), but they say that these women were according to their degree approved and rewarded of God . For if a person who is used to tell lies for harm’s sake comes to tell them for the sake of doing good, that person has made great progress. But it is one thing that is set forth as laudable in itself, another that in comparison with a worse is preferred. It is one sort of gratulation that we express when a man is in sound health, another when a sick man is getting better. In the Scripture , even Sodom is said to be justified in comparison with the crimes of the people Israel . And to this rule they apply all the instances of lying which are produced from the Old Books, and are found not reprehended, or cannot be reprehended: either they are approved on the score of a progress towards improvement and hope of better things, or in virtue of some hidden signification they are not altogether lies.

Dreadful Ecstasy: A Short Introduction to Arthur Machen

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 14:59:15 GMT

by Christopher Tompkins

Feast of St James the Apostle, Brother of our Lord

Anno Domini 2021, October 23

For us odd and misfortunate fellows who search through the hazy fields of unjust obscurity, there is nothing more thrilling than finding a glittering gem, and after being stunned by its brilliance, simultaneously singing its providential discovery while grumbling against the injustice of its heretofore hiddenness. And what a gem Arthur Machen is! Not that he was ever entirely lost, but he has never been fully discovered. It seems when one rereads a Machen story, even for the umpteenth time, the question returns: Why is this refreshingly unique author not more well known ?

Again, it must be said that Arthur Machen has never been entirely forgotten. Since his original splash in the 1890’s, his work has influenced novelists including Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Stephen King, as well as poets such as John Betjeman. His admirers include such diverse figures as Oscar Wilde and T. S. Eliot. Even today, he commands respect from certain horror aficionados. This is for good reason, for he wrote chilling tales which strike not only at the heart of the reader, but at the ontological foundation of the human person. However, then and now, Arthur Machen’s circle has been small.

And this is a shame, for Machen’s corpus of work resembles rings on a disturbed pond, each story a ripple on the surface of a mirror, briefly upsetting the illusion about us before slipping away. The placidity returns, but somehow we remember the ripple and what it briefly suggested to us.

Machen is a rare writer who can hold two truths in the same moment. While composing stories in the familiar frightening vein, he could also weave pieces saturated with holy dread, that delicate and difficult art of describing man becoming undone in the face of absolute Love—that is, God revealing Himself. This paradoxical bright darkness sets Machen apart from so many better known and even technically superior writers of his generation.

Such a curious course had been charted by Machen consciously and openly. In his volume on literary criticism, Hieroglyphics (1902), he states quite clearly his aim in both reading and writing:

Yes, for me the answer comes with the one word, Ecstasy. If ecstasy be present, then I say there is fine literature… there will be that withdrawal from the common life and the common consciousness…

Arthur Machen presents us with a dreadful ecstasy , one that we at Darkly Bright Press intend to explore through a series of printed editions of his lesser known work, critical articles, and original research. For books currently available, please visit our website here .

The Local Option: A Review of The Curiosities of Ale

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 14:25:14 GMT

Reviewed by Arthur Machen

Feast of St James the Apostle, Brother of our Lord

Anno Domini 2021, October 23

The Curiosities of Ale reviewed by Arthur Machen

Originally printed in Walford’s Antiquarian , April 1887, pp. 229-232

Reprinted in Machen, A Reader of Curious Books (Darkly Bright Press, 2020), 29-32; available at Eighth Day Books.

It is clear that Aeschylus the Athenian had but a poor opinion of the virtues of ale; at all events, in his “Supplies” we find a character thus expressing himself:—

But the stout inmates of this brave old land

Ye will not find ale-bibbers.

The “brave old land” in question is Egypt; and with Egypt Mr. Bickerdyke begins his Institutes of Ale. Four thousand years ago, if the records “hid under Egypt’s pyramid” lie not, the land of the Nile was convulsed by a kind of Local Option movement, which resulted in a wholesale closing of beer-shops. Truly “the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be,” but beer-shops, so far, seem in no peril of becoming extinct. Mr. Bickerdyke makes but the brief stay of a paragraph in Egypt, and before long we find ourselves in Medieval England, the happy hunting-ground of the antiquarian. Divers weighty questions have to be propounded, and, if possible, resolved. A kind of beery mist rises like a veil before us, into which we peer, and vainly endeavor to discern the date of the bringing in of hops. In a letter of donations under the hand of the great King Pepin we find mention of a “humularia,” or hop-gardens, and it seems probable that hops were known, though not generally used, in Saxon times. Naturally there is a good deal about the regular clergy, commonly called “the old monks,” who have somehow acquired the reputation of being Pantagruelists before Pantagruel. However that may be, it seems certain that they had a great reverence for ale, and were sticklers for their daily allowance, requiring both quality and quantity to be above suspicion, or perhaps we should say, above proof. Awful legends are told in the monastic annals concerning the turpitude of one Roger Norreys, known as “The Wicked Abbot of Evesham.” His monks bore with him and his sins for some while, but at last, on his compelling them “to drink ale little stronger than water,” they revolted, and petitioned the Archbishop. Roger, however, seems to have taken good care to drink of the strong himself, and resembled in this point the abbot of the rhyme:

Bonum vinum cum sapore

Bibit Abbas cum Priore,

Sed conventus de pejore

Semper solet bibere.

[Good wine with flavor

The Abbot drinks with the Prior,

But the the worse, the monastic community

Is always used to drinking.]

The old maxim was that the cellarer “ Pater debet esse totius congregationis ” [should be father of the whole convent]; a touching proof of the high estimate in which the office was held. Full particulars are given in this admirable work of the exact allowance of ale served out to the monks, both on ordinary days and on the high days when everybody was busily engaged in “doing the great O”—that is, nothing. Next we have the witness of the poets concerning ale, from the author of “Piers the Plowman,” Chaucer and Taylor, the water poet, to the nameless quire of ballad-makers. Their testimony may be summed up in the words of one of them:

Mas Mault he is a gentleman,

And hath been since the world began; Never yet knew I any man

That could match with Master Mault.

The various species of Church ales furnish Mr. Bickerdyke with another topic. These Church ales seem to have been a very sensible method of raising money, and appear to the main to have been free from scandal. In the seventeenth century, however, “some melancholy swains” persuaded the English people that

The morrice-idols, Whitsun-ales can be

But prophane reliques of a jubilee.

They passed away therefore, like many a goodly old observance, from the English life, but are still dear to the antiquary’s heart. In reading Mr. Bickerdyke’s book we are often moved to sigh over the degenerate days in which we live. Take, for instance, this list of the contents of a gentleman’s cellar in the twelfth century:

In promptuario sive in celario sunt cadi, utres, dolea, ciphi, vina, scicera, cervicia, mustum, claretum, nectar, medo sive ydromellum, piretum, vinum rosetum, vinum falernum, vinum girofilatum.

[In the storeroom or in the cellar there are barrels, bottles, casks, cups, wine, strong cider, ale, partially fermented grape must, claret, nectar, mead or ydromellum (sweet liquor wort), perry, rose wine, falernum wine, garihofilac wine.]

What gentleman could now refresh his guest with a glass of vinum girofilatum ? Too often we fear, in these days of reduced rents, the list might stand thus: “ In celario sunt cadi ,” all serving merely to illustrate the lines:

Quo semel est imbuta recens servabit odorem

Testa diu.

[The first scent you pour in a jar lasts for years.]

And what would have been said by the Dissenters if 300 tuns of ale, 100 tuns of wine, and “one pynt of hypocrass” had been consumed at the enthronement of the Archbishop of Canterbury? Yet in the days of Edward IV, a mere Archbishop of York thus entertained his guests. Much curious lore has been gathered and stored in these “Curiosities” on the matter of signs. Firstly we have the bush (which good wine needs not), then the ale-stake, or ale-pole, and lastly the painted or figured sign, sometimes seen combined with the primitive bush. The most elaborate sign on record is that of the White Hart at Norwich, mentioned by Sir Thomas Brown in 1663. It was in 1655, and is said to have cost £1,000. There were on it “a great many stories as of Charon and Cerberus, Actaeon and Diana,” and this masterpiece of carved and painted work remained undestroyed till the end of the last century. A poor wit; a member of the “shoe-black seraph” gild of authors, was once staying at the White Horse, on the old Bath road, and having (we may safely assume) eaten of the fat and drunken of the strong, had to spend such another quarter of an hour as that memorable in Rabelaisian story. But the landlord was generous and forgave the author his score, and he, in return, wrote large beneath the sign (naming other inns in the neighborhood):

My White Horse shall beat the Bear,

And make the Angel fly;

Shall turn the Ship quite bottom-up,

And drink the Three Cups dry.

By the kindess of Messrs. Field & Tuer we are able to give two of the cuts which quaintly adorn “The Curiosities of Ale and Beer,” and our readers may rest assured, that if these but meagerly represent the illustrations, our remarks do scarcely more justice to the letterpress. The Athenaeum, in reviewing the work, declared that it ought to have been dedicated to “the most noble and illustrious tosspots and thrice precious profligates” of Rabelais’ Prologue; and so say we, for these “Curiosities” are “fair, goodly books, stuffed with high conceptions.”

Saving the Shire: Ascetic Renunciation and Love of Home in J. R. R. Tolkien

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 14:00:47 GMT

by Richard Rohlin

Feast of the Holy Martyred Youths of Ephesus

Anno Domini 2021, October 22

1. Consolation and Dwelling in the Land

I think that one of the saddest things about the modern world... is that people live in a tiny time-slice of the present moment which they carry forward with them, but nothing remains... and there’s nothing in their experience which reverberates down the centuries, because the centuries to them are completely dark—just unillumined corridors from which they stagger with just a single sliver of light.

It was with these words that Sir Roger Scruton began an interview, conducted by Journalist Wim Kayzer for the Dutch public access television program “Beauty and Consolation.” The whole interview is beautifully conducted, and somehow deeply humane in a way rarely encountered in American programming. My favorite part is the first 20-30 minutes, in which we encounter Scruton playing the piano, smoking a cigar in his study, and most delightfully of all, getting ready for and participating in a traditional English country fox hunt. Kayzer seems partially curious, partially baffled by the ritual of the fox hunt, and Scruton extemporaneously answers his questions about it from the back of a beautiful dun mare, dressed in full hunting regalia (coat, boots, and all):

The consolation [of the hunt] for me is... a return to some kind of natural condition of a sort which civilized man has detached himself from. My theory is that the search for beauty is actually an attempt to rediscover that condition which we were in, once, before separating ourselves from the natural order, and hunting for me is part of... being part of one’s species, and not existing as an individual only. All of our unhappiness and alienation comes as a part of attempting to be an individual above everything else, whereas consolation comes when man relaxes into a sense of something greater than oneself, that is, one’s species’ life, and the whole history and eternity that represents. And you do that in conjunction with animals, because they exist in that species’ life.

Scruton goes on to explain that by consolation, he means something beyond “physical comfort,” an experience of “transcendental homecoming” that validates our experiences of suffering and alienation in the world, of “being at peace with the world and with each other.” This, he argues, has become increasingly difficult to find in the nomadic civilization in which many of us find ourselves:

Modern people have been “nomadized” by their civilization. They’ve been set in motion by, first of all, the ease of movement from place to place, the ease of movement from one emotional relationship to the next, the ease of movement simply from room to room and thought to thought, from entertainment to entertainment—nothing stills them or keeps them in place for long enough. Yet all the time this movement is occurring, the hunger is growing more and more urgently within them to bring it to a stop, to stand back, to be one with things, to be where they are, resting, to be “dwelling in the land” as Heidegger would have put it, attached to the place which is theirs and at peace with the people who are theirs. This is something absolutely essential to us, and it goes deep into our species’ being...

This sense of home—which Scruton would later term “ oikophilia , the love and feeling of home” in his book How to Think Seriously About the Planet: A Case for Environmental Conservatism —is something which we cannot make for ourselves: it must be given to us, passed down to us, I might dare to say, traditioned to us. At least twice during this interview, Scruton ties this back to Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling in the land.” And while Scruton is no great fan of Heidegger, he believes this to be “one of the few things he got right”: That we can only dwell in the land if we build, and only if we build can we truly live with each other. It is on these grounds that Scruton finds modern architecture largely hideous “because it is an architecture for nomads, who sweep through it as though blown on the wind.”

Home is not just any place. It is the place that contains the ones you love and need; it is the place that you share, the place that you defend, the place for which you might still be commanded to fight and die. Oikophilia is the source of many of our most generous and self-sacrificing gestures. It helps soldiers in battle to give their lives for the benefit of their ‘homeland’; it animates the place where children are raised, and in which parents make a gift of what they have been given; and it enables neighbours to overlook differences of religion and culture for the sake of their common home. ... Things seen in the light of oikophilia are not to be exploited, surrendered or exchanged ( How to Think Seriously, 239, 256).

At several points during this portion of the interview, Scruton identifies the animals involved in the hunt—the horses, the hounds, and even the foxes—as already possessing the “consolation” or sense of “dwelling in the land,” because they lack the alienation which comes from an over-emphasis upon one’s own individuality. Repeatedly, Scruton mentions “closeness to the land,” appealing to man’s primordial, even animal, impulses. The problem with this of course—as Scruton well knows—is that man’s lower desires, what we might call the “passions,” are extremely unreliable, and do not lead us to the life of virtue, peace, and beauty which Scruton idealizes.

To answer this, Scruton suggests that there are three basic ways people try to “relate to the animal in us”: the Way of the Ascetic, which Scruton sees as a renunciation of the animal in us and therefore of our environment and of “dwelling in the land”; the Way of Indulgence, allowing our animal passions to swamp and dominate us (which Scruton sees as being the predominating form today, especially in young people), which leads ultimately to pain and what Scruton calls “nomadization,” as we—like animals—become incapable of building and therefore “dwelling in the land” with each other. The solution, as Scruton sees it, is the Way of the Architect: to use “the animal in us” to give added poignancy to our existence as a self-conscious being, and to build it up into something more architectural than it would otherwise be. As an example, Scruton cites the elevation of erotic love in the late Middle Ages into the literature and culture of courtly love and romantic poetry.

This basic tension here, one which has been articulated in various ways by theologians, philosophers, and ascetics could be summarized for our own day and age thus: Having a body—and living in that body—is an essential part of what it means to be a human being, necessary for any sense of “home” which we may then love. Our culture of internet use, entertainment, philosophy, and even (these days) medical practice seems largely concerned with a crypto-Gnostic effort to get our minds out of our bodies, leading to the tragedy of nomadic minds, constantly in motion, as described by Scruton. The problem is that the obvious solution—living more for our appetites and so pleasing our bodies—paradoxically increases our dissipation and dis-integration, and leads exactly to those things which war against the home:

oikophobia (the repudiation of the home), from technophilia (the urge to obliterate the home with functional appliances), [and] consumerism (the triumph of instrumental reasoning that turns somewhere into anywhere), [as well as] the desire to spoil and desecrate, is one of the permanent diseases of human nature ( ibid ., 27).

It is a paradox present in an oft-quoted line from The Hobbit , one which used to be painted on the wall of one of my favorite restaurants in my home town (though it has since been replaced by a ghastly mural): “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” It’s a wonderful quote, especially for those of us who like Tolkien (and Scruton) feel that the pursuit of greed, and the constant busy-ness of our society (all of which amounts to a love of hoarded gold) has led to the alienation, and ultimately to the destruction, of something vital about our humanity. This quote carries within it the idea that a return to nature, to wholesome food, to fox hunting, to folk songs, and a Wendell Berry-esque vision of country living holds the solution to our pain, that these things will bring about the “merrier world” for which we long.

Or does it? Nobody ever quotes the rest of Thorin’s declaration. The exchange between Bilbo and Thorin, which takes place at Thorin’s death bed, goes like this:

Bilbo knelt on one knee filled with sorrow. "Farewell, King under the Mountain!" he said. "This is a bitter adventure, if it must end so; and not a mountain of gold can amend it. Yet I am glad that I have shared in your perils—that has been more than any Baggins deserves."

"No!" said Thorin. "There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell! "

In the time that remains to me this evening, I would like to suggest to you two things: the first is that since almost the day of the publication of The Hobbit , we have misunderstood what this quote means. The second is that Scruton is right about architecture but wrong about asceticism: it not only remains available as a tool to modern people, but it is the necessary tool if we are to cultivate any sense of oikophilia which can be communicated to future generations, if we are in fact to build, to “dwell in the land.” And I believe Tolkien shows us the way.

2. In a Hole in the Ground

“In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit.” Here at the very beginning of The Hobbit we see the identification between the titular character and his home, the Hobbit hole (which we are quickly told is neither nasty, nor dirty, nor wet, but is in fact a hobbit-hole—and that means comfort). It is important to understand that at the beginning of the Hobbit-stories (by which I mean The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings ; there were earlier Middle-earth stories, but most people’s exposure began when the hobbits came in) there is no Shire, no Hobbits-as-Shire-folk. There is really just The Hobbit , and that Hobbit does not have a homeland, just a home. Thus all Bilbo’s home-longing, all of his oikophilia , is in relation to the physical location of the hobbit-hole and the physical sensations associated with it, such as the smell of eggs and bacon (mentioned at least seven times throughout the text of the Hobbit: there apparently seems to be something iconic about that particular meal in relation to Bilbo’s home life).

Our story begins with Bilbo already living the pre-industrial, “close to the land” existence that many of us long for: not a nomad at all, but someone who has the kind of leisure to spend his morning standing in front of his newly painted front door smoking a long-stemmed pipe. We might here ask the question: is Bilbo “dwelling in the land” at the beginning of the story? Does he really have a cultivated sense of “love of home?” The answer seems to be no, for at the beginning of the story Bilbo is not yet a whole person, only two halves of a person: on his father’s side, he is the son of a respectable Hobbit from a respectable family of hobbits, the Baggins, who “never had any adventures. On his mother’s side, he is the son of the fabulous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took:

It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbit-like about them,—and once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up; but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses...

But the Took side in Bilbo is presented as being deeply atrophied, if not altogether absent, a completion of his character and personhood just waiting for a chance to come out. “The chance never arrived,” we are told,

until Bilbo Baggins was grown up, being about fifty years old or so, and living in the beautiful hobbit-hole built by his father... until he had in fact apparently settled down immovably.

Bilbo is, in other words, alienated from himself; perhaps not as severely as we experience now in the dissipation of our modern world, but the cozy hobbit-hole and the comforts of his life stop short of making him into what we might call a “whole person.”

Here, if architecture were the real solution (as Scruton suggests), there would be no need for what happens next, no need for any quest. After all, Bilbo is already leading the idyllic life for which so many of us pine. The hobbit-hole is built, and all that remains is for Bilbo to inhabit it. But, as the resulting conversation with the mysterious and even dangerous character of Gandalf shows, there are problems associated with this sedentary life which prevent it from being a real source of consolation for Bilbo: his perspective is too short, too parochial, such that even the relatively minor inconveniences (compared to what he will later experience) of unexpected party guests and life without pocket handkerchiefs are enough to fill him with consternation. To put it another way: if what you have built cannot weather even very minor storms, the character you have developed is not restful , but only sheltered .

Thorin’s aphorism begins with food and song and ends with hoarded gold; the main narrative arc of the Hobbit begins with food and song and ends with hoarded gold. But the food and song of The Unexpected Party is not, after all, aimed primarily at Bilbo’s comfort, but rather has the opposite effect. It makes the Baggins part of his nature deeply uncomfortable, while simultaneously stirring up the Tookish half with a desire for adventure:

As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick...

What we see here is an interruption of Bilbo’s life by Gandalf, one which brings him through the early stages of ascetic renunciation: the emptying of his larders through hospitality (which, if it is not an ascetic act, it is not really hospitality), the leaving home “without hat or pocket handkerchief,” and the many little things without which he will have to do before he reaches his journey’s end. In fact, the narrator as much tells us that this interruption and its accompanying “losses” constitute the whole theme of the story:

This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours' respect, but he gained-well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

It’s worth thinking about the various peoples that Bilbo meets along the way: the Elves of Rivendell, Beorn, and the Wood-elves are all strange from Bilbo’s perspective (one could say they are on the margins of his experience), but they are themselves centered, rooted, and have a profound sense of belonging to the place where Bilbo finds them. Even Beorn, who comes from somewhere else , has an almost Bombadil-like authority to name the things in his domain. The Carrock [etymologically this means rock + stone, a portmanteau of two equivalent words from Old English and Welsh] is called the Carrock because that is what Beorn calls it. The Wood Elves too have a profound sense of belonging to Mirkwood, and even if they are antagonistic towards Thorin & Company, Bilbo is keenly aware that this is because he and the dwarves are the interlopers, intruding into the environment to which the Elves naturally belong. This seems to have something to do with his decision to stand with the Elvenking in the Battle of Five Armies in the second-to-last chapter of the book. The elves, after all, are “good people,” which is never synonymous with “nice” in Tolkien’s legendarium.

It is with this in mind that we must look closely at the character of Gollum. Even before The Lord of the Rings , when Gollum’s backstory was retconned to share his origin with the hobbits, he functions within the pages of The Hobbit very much as an anti-Bilbo. Like Bilbo, Gollum likes a good meal (though he prefers fish and the occasional young “squeaker” goblin to bacon and eggs). Like Bilbo, Gollum has a home (though his is an island in the middle of a subterranean lake, and almost certainly full of worms). And like Bilbo, Gollum’s relative isolation and quiet (I won’t say peace and quiet) is interrupted by an unexpected guest—in this case Bilbo himself. The relationship between the two of them runs deep, so that Bilbo was named “burglar” by Gandalf but “thief” by Gollum, a title which both Smaug and Thorin will later apply to Bilbo as well. And, most relevant for our purposes, Golum has a home, but it is one in which he is not really at home .

Gollum does not even belong beneath the mountain to the same degree that the goblins belong beneath the mountain. I’m not saying that Bilbo and Gollum’s experiences were strictly equivalent—practically the first thing we learn about Bilbo’s hobbit-hole is that it has none of the things which define Gollum’s dwelling. But there acquisitiveness and inhospitality in Gollum—a greedy hunger, a deadly suspicion of visitors—which are exaggerations of Bilbo’s natural passions, which fortunately for everyone involved give way to his good manners. There is a “tunnel-vision” (if you will pardon the pun) in Gollum that is an exaggeration of Bilbo’s shortsightedness and parochial tendencies. Tolkien will develop all of these themes, as well as the close parallels between the Bagginses (in this case Frodo) and Gollum.

Is Gollum “dwelling in the land?” He has a space he calls his own, one which he has built for himself despite some tremendous difficulties, notably the fact that he shares a cave system with an entire city of goblins. But it is clear enough—at least in the post- Lord of the Rings version of the story, in which Tolkien retconned the entire Riddles in the Dark chapter to increase the importance of the One Ring to the story—it is clear enough that it is Gollum’s own obsession with the ring, his inability to relinquish it, has led to his being mastered by his passions (represented by his murderous tendencies and unabating hunger, two things which for Gollum are often the same thing). In Gollum, then, we find the most extreme version of what Scruton has called the “nomad,” the double-minded man of St. James’ epistle, who is driven here and there by his passions (and the double-mindedness of Gollum/Smeagol will in fact be one of the defining aspects of his betrayal in The Lord of the Rings ). The sedentary “Baggins” part of Bilbo’s hobbit-nature is not enough to correct this, because Gollum represents an excess, a disease, of hobbit-nature.

I said a moment ago that Bilbo passes through a series of ascetic renunciations: these seem to be involuntary right until he loses the buttons off of his waistcoat, which seems nicely (I do not say intentionally) symbolic of all of the missed meals and general denial of his appetites which he has had to undergo up to that point in the quest. From that point forward, the Tookishness seems to take over for Bilbo, so that by the time Thorn and Company get out of Mirkwood they have all come to rely on Bilbo for the solution to most of their problems. Bilbo robs the spiders of their dinner and learns burglary in the halls of the Elvenking, before finally going on to face Smaug. And this brings us to what I believe to be the defining moment in Bilbo’s character:

Then the hobbit slipped on his ring, and warned by the echoes to take more than hobbit's care to make no sound, he crept noiselessly down, down, down into the dark. He was trembling with fear, but his little face was set and grim. Already he was a very different hobbit from the one that had run out without a pocket-handkerchief from Bag-End long ago. He had not had a pocket-handkerchief for ages. He loosened his dagger in its sheath, tightened his belt, and went on.

"Now you are in for it at last, Bilbo Baggins," he said to himself. "You went and put your foot right in it that night of the party, and now you have got to pull it out and pay for it! Dear me, what a fool I was and am!" said the least Tookish part of him. "I have absolutely no use for dragon-guarded treasures, and the whole lot could stay here for ever, if only I could wake up and find this beastly tunnel was my own front-hall at home!"

...

It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did . The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. At any rate after a short halt go on he did; and you can picture him coming to the end of the tunnel, an opening of much the same size and shape as the door above. Through it peeps the hobbit's little head. Before him lies the great bottommost cellar or dungeon-hall of the ancient dwarves right at the Mountain's root. It is almost dark so that its vastness can only be dimly guessed, but rising from the near side of the rocky floor there is a great glow. The glow of Smaug!

Bilbo’s various struggles and increasing acts of courage since he lost the buttons off his waistcoat culminate in his decision to go forward into the dragon’s lair. This is not only the “Took” side that loves adventure, but the steady, stolid, “Baggins” side. With the various acts of asceticism the Baggins side has undergone, we see what was once merely sedentary transformed into something solid. This final transformation makes possible what is perhaps Bilbo’s greatest feat as a burglar: stealing the Arkenstone of Thrain, only to immediately relinquish it to Bard and the Elvenking in order to bring an end to a bloody dispute over treasure. Note that this act earns once and for all not just the title of “burglar” but “honest burglar.” And it is what ultimately allows Bilbo to return home. It is in this context that we must again revisit the dying words of Thorin Oakenshield, King Under the Mountain:

Note that it is not the Took side of Bilbo which is glad to have shared in Thorin’s perils—it is “more than any Baggins deserves.” Bilbo has courage (the mature form of Tookish curiosity and love of adventure) and wisdom (the mature form of Baggins earthiness and practicality), both now blended in measure. And this brings us, finally, to what I hope may be a more insightful understanding of Thorin’s aphorism: If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world . The quest began with Bilbo leaving food, cheer, and song behind specifically for the purpose of reclaiming hoarded gold. Now, any medievalist can tell you that gold occupies a higher rung on the symbolic ladder than food and drink. In that sense, leaving the comforts of home for the treasures at the end of the journey could be read as symbolic of the ascetic journey. I suspect that if the story had been written in the Middle Ages (unless it was written by an Icelander), that is how it would have ended.

If the quest began this way, it ends in the opposite fashion: with Bilbo handing over something far more valuable than hoarded gold (the Arkenstone of Thrain, the Heart of the Mountain) in exchange for preserving food, cheer, and song—not as luxuries, but as the basic necessities of human existence for the Lake-men and for others, for whom the hoard of Smaug means the chance to rebuild in the face of certain disaster. And it is in this way too, not by finding a treasure, but by giving one away, that Bilbo is able to bring his own quest (almost) to an end, making possible the journey home.

Gold is not the evil, here. Hoarded gold is. And by relinquishing it in in a final act of asceticism, I would argue that Bilbo regains at last the real value of his hobbit-hole. He returns from his quest and comes home to a home that is not only worth building, but actually needs rebuilding , as his acquisitive neighbors have carried almost everything away in his absence. Does Bilbo now “dwell in the land?” I can’t speak for Heidegger, but I think that we can say that by Scruton’s definition, he does. Bilbo has succeeded as both an ascetic and an architect: his journey has disciplined his animal appetites and now he is able to build from them something more than what they were before. We don’t see a lot about his life after the quest, at least in The Hobbit , but what we do see is, I think, telling:

Indeed Bilbo found he had lost more than spoons—he had lost his reputation. It is true that for ever after he remained an elf-friend, and had the honour of dwarves, wizards, and all such folk as ever passed that way; but he was no longer quite respectable... He was quite content; and the sound of the kettle on his hearth was ever after more musical than it had been even in the quiet days before the Unexpected Party... He took to writing poetry and visiting the elves; and though many shook their heads and touched their foreheads and said "Poor old Baggins!" and though few believed any of his tales, he remained very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long.

Bilbo has come into his own. He inhabits his home as a member of a species, in relation to other species. And if he is not quite respectable among other people who have not made the kinds of journeys he has, he has forever won the love and friendship of elves, dwarves, wizards, and “all such folk”—not as a celebrity, but as “only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all.”

"Thank goodness!" said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.

3. To Save the Shire

Almost every theme which has its genesis in the pages of The Hobbit grows to maturity in the pages of The Lord of the Rings . I will go out on a limb here and say that I consider The Lord of the Rings to be the most widely read, and probably the most important work of ascetical literature written in the twentieth century. The story itself is self-consciously ascetic, concerned not with finding a treasure, but with losing it.

...where am I to go? And by what shall I steer? What is to be my quest? Bilbo went to find a treasure, there and back again; but I go to lose one, and not return, as far as I can see.

When our story begins, we find the initial picture of the Shire has continued from the last paragraph or so of The Hobbit , and is not really the idyllic pre-industrial paradise we would all like it to be, if by that we mean that industrialism and technophilia are the origin of all of our human problems. Without spending too much time on specific examples, within the first few chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring , we learn that the hobbits of the Shire are xenophobic, given to overeating, and capable of a host of minor offenses ranging from showing up uninvited to someone else’s party to petty larceny. I’m not saying the Shire isn’t a lovely place—obviously it is and obviously it is beloved enough by the main characters of the book for them to consider it worth saving. But it is exactly in that context that we learn that simply trying the “architectural” approach has led the hobbits of the Shire to stagnation:

I should like to save the Shire, if I could—though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again... this would mean exile, a flight from danger into danger, drawing it after me. And I suppose I must go alone, if I am to do that and save the Shire. But I feel very small, and very uprooted, and well—desperate. The Enemy is so strong and terrible.

This short speech of Frodo’s is vital to understanding his character in The Lord of the Rings , and for keeping track of the “hobbit” threads which are eventually wound amongst the doings of dwarves, wizards, elves, and the long-lost kings of men whom they encounter. And I would suggest that it is also the measure by which the success or failure of Frodo’s quest may be measured: by Frodo’s own admission, it seems to me, saving the rest of Middle-earth would not really matter to Frodo if the Shire were lost in the process. I think we are right to see in this an ascetical oikophilia , a love of home which is willing to sacrifice everything—even the ability to enjoy the home itself—in order to preserve it. This is a self-forgetting love, something stronger even than the drive that sent Odysseus from the arms of an immortal goddess in search of his own home and his own wife.

Frodo’s goal is to save the Shire—this, in spite of the very real character defects of the Shire-folk, and their indulgence of their animal passions. They need an “earthquake or an invasion of dragons” to wake them from their slumber. But rather than awake and expose them to this danger, Frodo takes the “nomadization” of the Shire upon himself. He is willing to be “small, uprooted, and desperate” in the face of the enemy so that the Shire can continue to remain safe and comfortable . Both Bilbo and Frodo begin with a gift that they do not want: the name of “Burglar” in the former case, and the One Ring, in the latter. Bilbo goes to earn his gift; Frodo goes to lose his.

If you are perhaps on the fence about my argument that The Lord of the Rings reads as an ascetic journey, consider how Tolkien uses the calendar: Many people before me have observed that the Fellowship leaves Rivendell on December 25—Christmas Day—and that the quest is completed when the Ring is destroyed on March 25—the Feast of the Annunciation, but also the traditional date ascribed to the Crucifixion. The quest therefore begins on Christmas and ends on Good Friday. It is not too hard to see what Tolkien is doing there. Exactly forty days before March 25 (reckoning inclusively) is the day that the Fellowship leaves Lothlorien—when Frodo, having been fortified for his journey and with the blessing of the Lady, and provisioned with the bread of elves (if not angels), begins his journey into the literal desert which will strip away everything he has carried with him up to that point. Frodo’s quest, from Lorien forward, is first and foremost a Lenten journey, and it ends in a seeming defeat.

Of the quest itself, I will say little here. We all know the story (at least, I hope we do), and my focus tonight is on home: on leaving home for the sake of home, and on finding it again at the end of the quest. But as an ascetic manual, it is hard to beat. Frodo’s struggle against the Ring seems real to us, and even down to his eventual defeat under the sheer spiritual weight of the thing. Even in defeat. Especially in defeat.

Does Frodo save the Shire? If we’ve only seen the Peter Jackson films, or if (more likely) we’ve allowed those films to cast a spell on us that has slowly eroded our memory of the books, we might forget that Frodo seemed to fail. He has gone to a great deal of trouble to save the Shire, and yet when he returns he finds it has been spoiled—not by the Ring at all, as it turns out, but by the selfishness and acquisitiveness of its inhabitants.

Now I know some of you will be thinking “it was Sharky that did it!” and you’d be right. But Sharky (Saruman) was only taking advantage of bad actors in the Shire, people like Ted Sandyman and Lotho Sackville-Baggins, who were willing to sell out their home to all of those traditional enemies of oikophilia that Scruton identifies: technophilia (the urge to obliterate the home with functional appliances); the old mill is torn down and replaced with an industrial monstrosity; consumerism (followed very quickly by “sharing” that mostly just steals from the fruits of the hobbits’ labor); and the desire to spoil and desecrate (the Party Tree is torn down just for the sheer spite of it). All of these evils, if they are not being perpetrated by actual hobbits by the time Frodo and his friend return, were at least begun by them, and the rest of the Shire—timid, sedentary, afraid—are powerless to intervene.

At least, until Frodo returns to rouse them. Quite literally armed with what they have learned along the way, the four hobbits together are more than enough to raise the Shire and deal with Saruman and his ilk. Curiously, Gandalf seems to view this as the whole point of the Quest of the Ring:

"...You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for. Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you..."

This is a strange thing for Gandalf to say if we do not read with Home in mind, if we do not, in fact, take Frodo at his word. He desired to save the Shire. All of the pain and loss he and the other hobbits endured on their journey was to that end. You know the story: Saruman is killed (though not by Frodo), and the Shire is saved.

"I shan’t call it the end, till we’ve cleared up the mess," said Sam gloomily. "And that’ll take a lot of time and work."

Sam does clean up the mess, and this is where the architecture comes in. From the ruins of what the Shire has become, Sam turns it into a garden—in fact, a much more beautiful garden than the fantasies of power the Ring had given him in Cirith Ungol—and something more beautiful is born. In place of the Party Tree, there is a Mallorn tree—the only one ever to grow West of the Mountains and East of the Sea. We even see the typical hobbit love for food and good living not just renewed, but somehow purified, like the feast that comes after a long fast, so that the following year young hobbits practically bathe in strawberries and cream, and forever after good vintage in the Shire is known as “Proper fourteen-twenty.” “And no one was ill, and everyone was pleased, except those who had to mow the grass.”

And yet at the end of the story, there is still one more renunciation to be made:

"...I have been too deeply hurt, Sam [to stay in the Shire]. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them...”

Frodo has to leave the Shire—to be healed, and ultimately, to die.

What I have been trying to say in a roundabout way is this: Except a seed falls to earth and dies, it will bear no fruit. Or put another way: whoever keeps his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Or to put it another way: He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. The Gospels are full of such hard sayings, and yet the effect of the Gospels for more than 2,000 years has been to shape men and women who do in fact love their lives, their fathers and mothers, their sons and daughters—who love, in other words, their homes.

This is the strange, most basic paradox of the Gospel which Our Lord models for us when He humbles Himself, and makes Himself of no reputation, and becomes obedient unto death—even the death of the Cross. And yet it is on the basis of this that all the beauty of Christendom has been built. Within that great “cathedral” there is room and enough for “food and song,” just as there is room for romantic love, but these things were built on the bones of the martyrs.

Scruton says that our idea of the sacred is at the heart of our idea of home. Architecture, I would argue, follows asceticism, and if we are going to create a sense of oikophilia which is worth passing down to our children, it must begin with self-denial. The monk leaves the world for the sake of the world; the Christian fasts for the sake of his body; the Shire is saved, but not for Frodo.

I think it fitting to close this talk with the story of St. Lucian, who was martyred A.D. 312 and whom the Church commemorated yesterday:

St. Lucian was in prison with several of his disciples and other Christians. On the eve of Theophany, Lucian longed, on such a great Christian feast, to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ, for he knew that his death was imminent. Seeing this sincere desire, God Almighty arranged that some Christians pass bread and wine into the prison. When the Feast of Theophany dawned, Lucian called all the Christian prisoners to stand in a circle around him and said to them: "Surround me and be the Church." He had no table, chair, stone, or wood in the prison upon which to celebrate the Divine Liturgy. "Holy Father, where shall we place the bread and wine?" they asked Lucian. He lay down in their midst and said: "Place them on my chest, let it be a living altar for the Living God!" And thus the Liturgy was celebrated correctly and prayerfully on the chest of the martyr, and all received Holy Communion. (From the Prolog from Ohrid .)

I love this story. In it, sacred suffering gives birth to sacred space, asceticism to architecture. I’m not sure whether this is a vision of home that Frodo would recognize—but I think Frodo would.

*Inklings lecture delivered by Richard Rohlin at the sixth annual Inklings Festival in October of 2020.

Our True and Final Home: An Inklings Walking Tour Toast

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 20:16:26 GMT

by Richard Rohlin

Feast of the Seven Holy Martyred Youths of Ephesus

Anno Domini 2021, October 22

One of the most beautiful ideas that belongs to Tolkien is the idea that all of our creative endeavors in this life will have a place in the life of the age to come, even if that place is “as like and unlike” as we ourselves hope to be versus what we are now. This is an idea that he talks about in his famous essay On Fairy Stories , but Tolkien is a better storyteller and poet than he is an essayist. One of the stories that most beautifully explores this idea is his short story Leaf, by Niggle . It is the story of Niggle, a perfectionist painter who not very successful, partly because of his tendency (like Tolkien) to “niggle” at his work, and partly because he always ends up having to interrupt his work to help take care of his short-sighted, prosaic, grumpy neighbor by the name of Parish. Niggle’s great painting, alas unfinished, is a tree, of which eventually only a single leaf survives. In the end, both Niggle and Parish die, and Niggle passes through a painful purgatorial period in a hospital, followed by a workhouse, during which time the wounds of life are healed and the selfishness is worked out of him. Only then, they are sent to some sort of “valley of the shadow of life,” where the remainder of their work is carried out in a paradisical garden reminiscent of the place the shades visit in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce . But here, there is work to do.

In this garden, Niggle finds his own tree, the one he had spent his whole life painting—here it is completed, and real, and growing beyond his own imagination. But there is much work to do yet, and Niggle and Parish set to work together, ordering and beautifying, until the time comes for them to move on:

As their work drew to an end they allowed themselves more and more time for walking about, looking at the trees, and the flowers, and the lights and shapes, and the lie of the land. Sometimes they sang together; but Niggle found that he was now beginning to turn his eyes, more and more often, toward the Mountains.

The time came when the house in the hollow, the garden, the grass, the forest, the lake, and all the country was nearly complete, in its own proper fashion. The Great Tree was in full blossom.

"We shall finish this evening," said Parish one day. "After that we will go for a really long walk."

They set out next day, and they walked until they came right through the distances to the Edge. It was not visible, of course: there was no line, or fence, or wall; but they knew that they had come to the margin of that country. They saw a man, he looked like a shepherd; he was walking towards them, down the grass-slopes that led up into the Mountains.

"Do you want a guide?" he asked. "Do you-want to go on?"

For a moment a shadow fell between Niggle and Parish, for Niggle knew that he did now want to go on, and (in a sense) ought to go on; but Parish did not want to go on, and was not yet ready to go.

"I must wait for my wife," said Parish to Niggle. "She'd be lonely. I rather gathered that they would send her after me, some time or other, when she was ready, and when I had got things ready for her. The house is finished now, as well as we could make it; but I should like to show it to her. She'll be able to make it better, I expect: more homely. I hope she'll like this country, too." He turned to the shepherd. "Are you a guide?" he asked. "Could you tell me the name of this country?"

"Don't you know?" said the man. "It is Niggle's Country. It is Niggle's Picture, or most of it: a little of it is now Parish's Garden."

"Niggle's Picture!" said Parish in astonishment. "Did you think of all this, Niggle? I never knew you were so clever. Why didn't you tell me?"

"He tried to tell you long ago," said the man; "but you would not look. He had only got canvas and paint in those days, and you wanted to mend your roof with them. This is what you and your wife used to call Niggle's Nonsense, or That Daubing."

"But it did not look like this then, not real," said Parish.

"No, it was only a glimpse then," said the man; "but you might have caught the glimpse, if you had ever thought it worth while to try."

"I did not give you much chance," said Niggle. "I never tried to explain. I used to call you Old Earth-grubber. But what does it matter? We have lived and worked together now. Things might have been different, but they could not have been better. All the same, I am afraid I shall have to be going on. We shall meet again, I expect: there must be many more things we can do together. Good-bye!" He shook Parish's hand warmly: a good, firm, honest hand it seemed. He turned and looked back for a moment. The blossom on the Great Tree was shining like flame. All the birds were flying in the air and singing. Then he smiled, and nodded to Parish, and went off with the shepherd.

He was going to learn about sheep, and the high pasturages, and look at a wider sky, and walk ever further and further towards the Mountains, always uphill. Beyond that I cannot guess what became of him. Even little Niggle in his old home [his life on earth] could glimpse the Mountains far away, and they got into the borders of his picture; but what they are really like, and what lies beyond them, only those can say who have climbed them.

This, then, is the second Inklings toast: Let us drink to the poor labors of our hands in this world under the sun, which are only shadows of what they may yet be in the great Kingdom of God. Let us drink to the Mountains, and to what lies beyond: our True and Final Home.

*Delivered at the sixth annual Inklings Festival Walking Tour in the year of our Lord 2020.

Synaxis: Special Edition on Baptism for 2021 Florovsky-Newman Week

anthonyjacobs205@gmail.com (Anthony Jacobs) — Mon, 31 May 2021 17:41:17 GMT

by Erin Doom

Feast of the Holy Apostle Hermas of the Seventy

Anno Domini 2021, May 31

Fresco of Baptism of Christ at Sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo, Mount Gargano, Italy

By Ioan Popa (Romanian, 1976-) and Camelia Ionesco-Popa (Romanian, 1979-)

1. Bible: Matthew 28:1-7, 16-20
Now after the Sabbath, as the first day of the week began to dawn, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb. 2 And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat on it. 3 His countenance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow. 4 And the guards shook for fear of him, and became like dead men.

5 But the angel answered and said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here; for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. 7 And go quickly and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead, and indeed He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see Him. Behold, I have told you.”

16 Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had appointed for them. 17 When they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some doubted.

18 And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.

2. Liturgy: Mozarabic Baptismal Rite
This evening, at the second session of our seminar, we’ll be discussing this 6th-century baptismal service. The first action in this service is significant: an exorcism of the enemy of the human race. This is still part of the Orthodox baptismal practice. Here’s that opening exorcism:

The infant is handed to the priest to be exorcized and the priest to whom he is handed blows upon him three times in the face, and says this exorcism:

I exorcize you, unclean spirit, enemy of the human race, by God the Father Almighty, who “made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is” (Ex. 20:11), and by Jesus Christ His Son, and by the Holy Spirit. All you armies of the devil, every power of the adversary, every violent clash of the enemy, every blind disordered phantasm, be rooted out and put to flight from this creature, that by the remission of all his/her sins he/she may become a temple of the living God; through the justification of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, who shall come to judge the world by fire. Amen.

Read the entire service here . And better yet, fill that last seminar seat and join us for the discussion this evening !

3. Fathers: St Pacian of Barcelona
At each Eighth Day Seminar, the session on the Fathers includes a reading from both an eastern Father and a western Father. For the Baptism Seminar, tomorrow evening we’ll be discussing St Gregory of Nyssa (east) and St Pacian of Barcelona (west). Here’s an excerpt from a homily by St Pacian which offers a patristic perspective on baptism:

Someone, perhaps, will object: The sin of Adam deservedly passed to posterity because they were born his descendants. But how are we born from Christ so that we can be saved through Him? If you stop thinking in terms of the flesh you will understand our birth from Christ and His paternity in our regard. In these last days Christ took a soul and body in the womb of Mary. It is this flesh which He has come to save. He did not abandon it in hell, but joined it to His own spirit, making it His own. This is the marriage of the Lord, joined to the flesh of man—a great mystery uniting the two—Christ and the Church—in one flesh (cf. Eph. 5:32). This marriage, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, come down from heaven, has given birth to the people of God. Thanks to a heavenly seed inserted in the substance of our souls, we take form in the womb of our (spiritual) mother and, once we issue from her womb, we are vivified in Christ. And so the Apostle says: “The first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45). It is also by His priests that Christ engenders life in the Church, as the Apostle confirms: “for in Christ Jesus did I beget you” (1 Cor. 4:15). It is the seed of Christ, that is to say the Spirit of God, which produces through the priest’s hands the new man, conceived in the womb of his mother and born in the baptismal font under the auspices of faith. In fact he who does not believe and is not prepared to be born of Christ, he who has not received His Spirit will not appear integrated in the Church.

A new birth through baptism! We must, then, believe in the possibility of our (spiritual) birth. Philip in fact said, “If you do believe, you may be baptized” (Acts 8:37). We must receive Christ so that He may give us birth, as John the Apostle says, “But to as many as received Him He gave the power of becoming sons of God” (Jn. 1:12). But this cannot be brought about without the bath of water and the sacrament of anointing which the bishop administers. The bath of water purifies us from our sins. The holy anointing pours down the Holy Spirit on us. This double blessing we obtain through the actions and words of the bishop.

Read the entire homily here .

4. Poetry: Holy Baptism by John Keble
Since this week’s events commemorate St John Henry Newman, I found a poem on baptism by John Keble, a friend of Newman and fellow leader with him of the Oxford Movement. Read the poem "Holy Baptism" by John Keble here.

5. Books & Culture: Of Water and Spirit by Schmemann: An Eighth Day view
If I had to choose one unwieldy book to read about the early Christian tradition of baptism, it would be Schmemann’s Of Water and Spirit . Read this short review by Eighth Day Books and then buy a copy from them!

And now, in conclusion, check out the following three excellent reflections on our theme of baptism:

6. Essays et al: “Sons of Abraham” by Jeri Holladay
https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/sons-of-abraham

7. Essays et al: “The Dread Terror of Baptism” by Matthew Umbarger
https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/the-dread-terror-of-baptism

8. Essays et al: “Water, Spirit, Divine Order: The Old Testament Background for a New Testament Teaching” by Matthew R. Miller

https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/water-spirit-divine-order

Holy Baptism

Mon, 31 May 2021 04:35:15 GMT

by John Keble

Feast of St Macrina, Grandmother of St Basil the Great

Anno Domini 2021, May 30

Where is it mothers learn their love?
In every Church a fountain springs
O'er which th' Eternal Dove
Hovers out softest wings.

What sparkles in that lucid flood
Is water, by gross mortals eyed:
But seen by Faith, 'tis blood
Out of a dear Friend's side.

A few calm words of faith and prayer,
A few bright drops of holy dew,
Shall work a wonder there
Earth's charmers never knew.

O happy arms, where cradled lies,
And ready for the Lord's embrace,
That precious sacrifice,
The darling of His grace!

Blest eyes, that see the smiling gleam
Upon the slumbering features glow,
When the life-giving stream
Touches the tender brow!

Or when the holy cross is signed,
And the young soldier duly sworn,
With true and fearless mind
To serve the Virgin-born.

But happiest ye, who sealed and blest
Back to your arms your treasure take,
With Jesus' mark impressed
To nurse for Jesus' sake:

To whom—as if in hallowed air
Ye knelt before some awful shrine—
His innocent gestures wear
A meaning half divine:

By whom Love's daily touch is seen
In strengthening form and freshening hue,
In the fixed brow serene,
The deep yet eager view.

Who taught thy pure and even breath
To come and go with such sweet grace?
Whence thy reposing Faith,
Though in our frail embrace?

O tender gem, and full of Heaven!
Not in the twilight stars on high,
Not in moist flowers at even
See we our God so nigh.

Sweet one, make haste and know Him too,
Thine own adopting Father love,
That like thine earliest dew
Thy dying sweets may prove.

Mozarabic Baptismal Rite

Mon, 31 May 2021 04:27:36 GMT

Feast of St Macrina, Grandmother of St Basil the Great

Anno Domini 2021, May 30

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The Dread Terror of Baptism

Mon, 31 May 2021 01:11:17 GMT

by Matthew Umbarger

Feast of St Macrina, Grandmother of St Basil the Great

Anno Domini 2021, May 30

Baptism of St Paul by Ananias of Damascus

Perhaps it was the summer of 1980. I know that I was extremely young, maybe five years old. We were still sitting in Thayer Christian Church’s old, white building on Main Street, the one that was torn down decades ago. The service had virtually ended. I was antsy and restless, because I knew that when we had sung a hymn after the sermon, I could usually get out of the pew and run around a bit. But this Sunday was different. An older child, a girl who was always kind to me, walked up the aisle. Now I was curious. What was she doing?

Our minister said a few words of explanation. The girl (Mary, we’ll call her) had been to church camp that week and had decided to make a commitment to become a Christian. This morning, Mary would be baptized. And then, our minister’s tone deepened, and he became grave as he pronounced: “In a few minutes, Mary will be buried with Christ in baptism. And when she comes up out of the water, she will be a new creation. The old Mary will be dead and gone.”

I was horrified. And yet, everyone around me seemed to be filled with joy. What madness was this? The kind, elderly folks in the pews all around me were beaming in anticipation of the murder about to take place. Even Mary was smiling. My mother tried to make sure that I could get a good view, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to watch.

The dreadful minutes unfolded in all of the slowness that childhood temporality creeps. The congregation sang all four verses of a worn-out hymn. Mary had to change into her baptismal gown, of course. So I had time in which to grow more anxious. I squirmed and shivered. My head was sweating. I contemplated television heroics, intervening somehow to save Mary. I wanted to scream.

Finally, Mary reappeared at the front of the church, in the baptistry, as though emerging onto a stage for a surreal drama. Her father was with her. Her father! Would he, then,
be the instrument of Mary’s destruction? He was smiling. So was she.

He solicited her confession of faith. Yes, she believed that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” And then he took her hands in his right hand, covered up her nose and mouth with them, and pushed her backwards into the water of the baptistry. I thought that she must drown in there. Hadn’t the preacher said something about “a watery grave”?

But then she was back up, smiling, and hugging her father. I was confused. She looked very much alive. Was it then no more than a bath? But everyone was behaving as though something very significant had just occurred.

In a few more years, I myself was ready to follow Mary into the baptistry. I didn’t understand everything, and my motives were not ideal. I was a sensitive boy of seven years old, and I was terrified of going to hell, after attending a vacation Bible school full of fire and brimstone preaching. When I came home afterwards, my parents arranged a visit with our minister, John Presko (may his memory be for a blessing), because I was a quivering mess. Brother Presko’s solution for my fear was simple and direct: you need to be born again in the waters of baptism. Then you will be bound for heaven and have no need to worry about going to hell.

I begged for my parents to have me baptized as soon as possible. The date was set (I think it was Sunday, August 12, 1984). I fretted during the few days that I had to wait for baptism, worried that some accident would befall me, and I would wind up damned after all. Finally, the day arrived, and my father did the honors, in water that chilled me to the bone.

Terror of hell compelled me into those cold waters. But I can remember another dread gripping me. I was only seven years old, but I took very seriously what was about to happen. And part of that was a death. I had since seen others besides Mary get baptized. I knew that physically, at least, they were all happy and whole afterwards. But I had the profound faith of a child in the words of Scripture, and Brother Presko had read with me only a few days before these words from Romans 6:

3. Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? 4. We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

I wanted that “newness of life.” But I shuddered when I contemplated that it required death, of some sort, to get there. Everyone seemed to stress the happy results of baptism. But if those were real, the death was, too. And naturally enough, I didn’t want to die.

But into the water I went, and up from the water I came, apparently safe and sound. I can remember my father asking for my good confession. I can remember his rough hands covering my face and pushing me under. I can remember the hug in the water afterwards. I can remember hurriedly drying off and receiving congratulations in the foyer. It was all relatively painless. So much for death.

These days I am tempted to laugh at this naïve version of myself. Except on spiritually lucid days, when I realize that my adult sight is dulled and can no longer clearly perceive the realities conveyed in these metaphorical symbols. There is a reason that St. Paul chooses the terrible metaphor of death and burial for baptism, one that projects itself beyond the simple truth of ending one way of life and beginning another. Baptism is an execution of the old, fleshly humanity and its inherited concupiscence. Baptism doesn’t just end a pre-Christian life; it puts an end to living for one’s self.

Baptism doesn’t hurt. Unlike physical death, the suffering of baptismal death follows after. But it indeed follows. Because the old, dead, sinful humanity, like a zombie emerging from the grave, insists on asserting its authority against that of the Lord.

The New Testament uses the metaphor of death in other places. St. Paul famously tells us that he has been “crucified with Christ” in Galatians 2:

19. For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God. 20. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Paul’s disciple, St. Luke, records Jesus’ instruction to “carry our cross daily.”

23. And he said to all, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. 24. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it. 25. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?” (Luke 9:23-25).

Those passages obviously have something to do with one another. For Christ to live mystically in me means that I have to die. That happened in Baptism. And yet, it still has to happen again. My zombie-self has to be executed routinely on the cross I carry as I follow Jesus.

This ongoing execution takes place by virtue of that same Baptism. The only way for the ongoing process of self-immolation to proceed is by revisiting our Baptismal promises.

For the historical Church, at least, we actually refer to the Sacrament of Confession as a “second Baptism.” (See, for instance, Pope Francis’s comments from his general audience on November 13, 2013, “Confession Is Like a Second Baptism.”) We also re- encounter our Baptism liturgically in various fashions through the Church year, especially on Easter, when the priest sprinkles the congregation with holy water. In a lesser sense, the regular, devotional use of holy water does the same thing.

These are important, grace-giving gifts, whose significance I dare not diminish. But there is a more fundamental aspect of living our Baptism that we all must come to terms with. Spiritual events happen within historical time, but they are not bound by it. Baptism is efficacious because it actually brings the baptized into union with Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan, with His Passion on the Cross, with His burial in the Tomb, and with His Resurrection. It is supra-temporal because Jesus’ divine nature is supra-temporal. And here is the marvelous thing. Because it is supra-temporal in respect to Jesus’ life in historical time, it is also supra-temporal in respect to my own life in historical time. It’s not so much that I was baptized. I am baptized. I was baptized on August 12, 1984. But that is an ongoing reality to which I return in prayer, time and again.

In the same letter that Paul talks of being buried with Christ in His death, he describes this death as an ongoing, present-tense process: “if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live” (Rom. 8:13). The only way this can happen is through the grace of Baptism. The “deeds of the body,” the zombie-self, keeps crawling out of the grave. By claiming the promise of our Baptism over and over, we kick it back in, submerging it purposefully in the death we died with Jesus; nay, in the death we are dying with Jesus.

Baptism is scary business. It is death. Death is never pleasant. Baptism is joyous, but God save us from treating it as a sentimental, nice event. It is the beginning of a life of suffering. It is the execution of the fleshly self.

Sons of Abraham

Mon, 31 May 2021 00:45:21 GMT

by Jeri Holladay

Feast of St Macrina, Grandmother of St Basil the Great

Anno Domini 2021, May 30

In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea. … But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit that befits repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” (Matt. 3:1-12)

“You brood of vipers!” Not exactly what the political and religious elite would expect to hear. But then, St. John the Baptist wasn’t your ordinary preacher. It is doubtful he ever opened with a cheery, “Good morning, everyone!”

Why had they come? To see a wild man dressed in animal skins? To see a holy man who might arouse the masses? Perhaps they had come to observe and judge him, to signal their superior virtue to the other benighted souls presenting themselves for a baptism of repentance.

St. John wastes no time in cutting them down to size. Don’t count on your pedigree to save you or the fact that you are circumcised. Don’t count on your ritual purity or the punctilious way you keep to the letter of the Law. No, even now the axe is laid to the root. Unless you actually live as sons of Abraham in the fullest sense, don’t expect his paternity to save you.

What does it mean, to be a son of Abraham? First, Abraham lived by faith. Not only faith as believing (although it includes that) but faith as doing. “By faith Abraham obeyed” (Heb. 11:8). The obedience of faith led Abraham out of his secure home in Ur to wander the wilderness in search of the homeland promised to him by the voice he had heard. We rightly believe this was the voice of God. But Abraham couldn’t possibly have had the same certitude. It was perilous to obey, but he stepped out in faith. And while he went out hoping to find a new homeland, neither he nor the patriarchs who died after him ever saw this great nation concretely realized. “They all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar…” (Heb. 11:13).

Second, Abraham loved nothing and no one more than God. Once Sarah had at long last borne their son Isaac, Abraham might have relaxed in the conviction that the great nation was finally getting off the ground. But no. “God tested Abraham, and said to him, ‘Abraham! … Take your son, your only-begotten son Isaac, whom you love, and … offer him … as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I will tell you.’” (Gen. 22:1-2). Can it be true that God would bring Abraham so far and then cut off his hope?

Look at Abraham’s response. He did not argue with God or bargain with him as he had before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18:16-19:29). His response is not just yes, but as Jon Levinson translates it from the Hebrew, “Ready” (Levinson, 126). Ready to carry out God’s will without hesitation.

Isaac was not just any child. Actually, Abraham had fathered another child—Ishmael (Gen. 16)—and would later have more children by his wife Keturah (Gen. 25:1-6). But Isaac was the Beloved Son, the Chosen Son, and the Son of Promise. Everything rested on Isaac. This test threatened to end it all. “If Abraham had failed to heed, he would have exhibited not so much a lack of faith in the promise as a love for Isaac that surpassed even his fear of God. … The aqedah, in short, tests whether Abraham is prepared to surrender his son to the God who gave him” (Levinson, 126).

Let that sink in. The Aqedah was a test of complete and total obedience that would cost everything. Or so Abraham could only have thought. Not only would Abraham’s heart be broken with Isaac’s death, but the promise would come to an end. There could be no possibility of a future nation springing from his own loins. His years of wandering would go down in total failure. The heir to his property would be a servant, and that would be the end of it. Hindsight always gives 20-20 vision. We know that God intervened. Abraham had no such guarantee.

Abraham and Isaac made the three-day journey into the wilderness and prepared to offer the sacrifice. At the last minute, an angel intervened, telling Abraham that the ram/lamb in the thicket could be used as a substitutionary holocaust. The Christological Typology is rich here, as is the Typology of the Passover. Both Isaac and the Lamb are Types of Christ. And later in the Paschal Mystery, God will accept the holocaust of the Beloved Son without substitution, as the Lamb whose blood takes away the sins of the world.

Are the Pharisees and Sadducees aware that being sons of Abraham involves a complete obedience of faith and a love for God that supersedes any other love in their life? Probably not. But they are probably not alone in this misconception.

St. John was preparing his hearers for Christ and His baptism, a baptism in the Holy Spirit and fire. The sacrament of baptism Christens the soul, infusing grace and making the recipient a partaker of the divine nature. It enables the recipient to respond to Christ with the obedience of faith and the ability to love God above all things, as Abraham did at the very foundations of salvation history. The soul is called to active participation in this grace for the gift to reach fruition. Christians who think of baptism the way the Sadducees and Pharisees thought of their Abrahamic sonship might listen to what St. John had to say to them: “Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Matt. 3:10).

Even better, we might heed what Jesus said: “He who loves father or mother, son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and he who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses it will find it” (Matt 10:37). As St. John Paul taught, we are called to the total gift of self, however that presents itself in the course of our lives. Nothing less will do. Are we ready?

Water, Spirit, Divine Order

Sun, 30 May 2021 23:34:40 GMT

The Old Testament Background for a New Testament Teaching

by Matthew R. Miller

Feast of St Macrina, Grandmother of St Basil the Great

Anno Domini 2021, May 30

Christians, despite their differences, acknowledge that the doctrine of baptism is built on key texts from the New Testament. Passages in Acts record the fact of baptism. Other passages in the New Testament, while perhaps not addressing Christian baptism directly, have been marshaled as evidence for the effect of baptism, or what baptism accomplishes. [1] Some of these passages include John 3:5, Titus 3:5, and the accounts of Jesus’ baptism. In John 3:5, Jesus says that unless someone is born by water and spirit he will not enter into the Kingdom of God. In Titus 3:5, Paul writes that God saved us by the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit. In all the synoptic accounts of Jesus’ baptism, the Spirit descends upon him as he comes out of the water. These New Testament passages connect water, spirit, and a divine order, which can be seen as re-creation (2 Cor 5:17). [2] The connection between these three terms assumes an Old Testament background, for these three terms occur at key places in the Old Testament narrative. If this Old Testament background is not understood, then these passages can and will be misinterpreted. [3] Such misinterpretations have negative consequences for the doctrine of baptism.

I intend to explore The Old Testament background for the concepts of water, spirit, and divine order. The Old Testament juxtaposes these 3 words at critical junctures in salvation history. Specifically, I explore Genesis 1, Genesis 8, Exodus 14—15, and Ezekiel 36. After exploring these passages, I tender some conclusions about how the background of these passages informs these key New Testament texts and the doctrine of baptism. I will not attempt a full exegesis of each passage, nor will I attempt to resolve the entirety of the baptism debate within the small scope of this paper. Instead, I will limit myself to some observations that are pertinent to the discussion.

Genesis 1 and Genesis 8

The creation account of Genesis 1—2 sets the stage for the entire Bible. These chapters set forth God’s created order, which is the goal toward which redemption moves. [4] Genesis 1 and Genesis 8 read parallel to each other. They begin with the earth covered in water. The Spirit/wind moves over the waters. [5] The result is creation: in Genesis 1, light is created, initiating the ordering of the cosmos. The rest of this chapter shows God bringing order to the primeval forces of chaos. [6] Genesis 1 does not contain the background of divine judgment since humanity has not yet fallen into sin, but it still shows God imposing order on the cosmos. In each passage, water and spirit appear together, followed by a creative act of God. Since order suggests sovereignty, we may say that creation is the domain of God’s rule.

Genesis 8 contains parallels with Gen 1. In 8:2, land appears as the waters subside due to the wind passing over the waters. Genesis 8 follows divine judgment. The parallels suggest that God’s redemptive acts signify a re-creation, that is, a re-ordering of a world thrown into chaos through human sin. Noah and his family escape to God’s restored order by passing through the waters of death and judgment over which the wind blows. Deliverance to God’s restored order is redemption. Through this deliverance, God upholds His covenant with creation and with Noah. [7]

Exodus 14—15

Exodus 14 contains the crossing of the Red Sea. This event serves as the culmination of God’s redemption of Israel from Egypt. This redemptive act becomes the standard by which God’s future redemptive acts will be measured, especially during the time of the exile (cf. Isaiah 43:16–20; Jeremiah 16:14–15; 23:7–8). At this key moment, we find the juxtaposition of water, wind, and divine order.

In Exodus 14:21, Moses stretches out his hand over the Red Sea. A strong wind blows and parts the sea, revealing dry ground. Israel is able to pass through on dry ground, sundering their connection to the Egyptians, who are drowned in the waters (14:28–29). The Song of Moses makes God’s agency more explicit, stating that God blew with His wind (15:10). The possessive element in this verse connects Exodus 15:10 to Genesis 1:2, where the wind/spirit of God hovers over the waters.

Like Genesis 1, these passages in Exodus connect water (the Red Sea), wind, and divine order. In this case, the new order is the birth of the nation of Israel. Like Genesis 8, judgment is in the background: the Egyptians are drowned in the waters. The juxtaposition of wind and water results in the redemption of Israel. The result of this redemptive act is entrance into the covenant at Sinai (Exodus 19—24). Through redemption Israel was brought into God’s order. As Noah was delivered to God’s domain through the waters of judgment, so also Israel is redeemed for God through the waters of the Exodus.

Ezekiel 36

The next significant passage is Ezekiel 36:22–32. In this passage Ezekiel prophesies Israel’s return from exile. The return from exile results in a new covenant. The parallels between Ezekiel 36:26–27 and Jeremiah 31:33 make this connection clear. For Jeremiah, the New Covenant includes the internalization of God’s law. Ezekiel states that God will give Israel a heart of flesh and cause her to walk in His statutes. God promises to sprinkle clean water on the people (36:25). He also promises to put His spirit within the people (36:26–27). As a result, they will forsake their idols and the disorder brought about by their sin (36:25, 29). Within the near context, water, Spirit, and a restored divine order are in view.

In the subsequent chapter the nature of the new divine order is pictured. While water is not present in Ezekiel 37, the Spirit is, resulting in the restoration of Israel. The absence of water should not be seen as a concern since it appeared previously in Ezekiel 36. The restoration in view is the resurrection of the dead. As God imposed order on chaos in Genesis 1, so God restores what was lost through the chaos of sin and judgment in Ezekiel 36. Ezekiel continues the juxtaposition of water, wind, and divine order.

Conclusion

The Old Testament juxtaposes water, wind, and divine order at key junctures in salvation history. This juxtaposition first occurs in Genesis 1:2, inaugurating God’s reign and the creation covenant. In each subsequent occurrence the co-occurrence of these words signals God’s redemptive acts. In these occurrences salvation occurs through judgment as God re-orders what was thrown into chaos by human sin.

With the Old Testament background in view, the significance of the New Testament passages becomes clearer. In John 3:5 Ezekiel 36 is likely in view. [8] While Jesus would not have been speaking to Nicodemus about Christian baptism, His words serve as a basis for the significance of Christian baptism. [9] With Ezekiel 36 as the background, we realize that God brings the baptizand through judgment into God’s New Covenant order. Additionally the question of “regeneration” (παλιγγενεσία) is partially answered by the Old Testament background. The word definitely refers to the new creation in Matt 19:28, since personal ontological change is nowhere mentioned in the context. This fits with what is seen in the Old Testament. The new creation is the place where Christ sits on His throne and brings divine order to fruition. In the key passage of Titus 3:5, it appears best to read παλιγγενεσία in the same sense as in Matthew 19:28: baptism effects a change in status by bringing the baptizand through the waters of God’s judgment into the safety of the New Covenant in Christ. Therefore, a personal ontological change is less in view than an objective, covenantal status change. [10] Baptismal regeneration, then, is entrance into the God’s New Covenant order by water and the Holy Spirit. Membership in the New Covenant, confirmed by faith in Christ, results in union with Christ in His death and resurrection (Rom 6:1–11).

The Old Testament background of these terms informs New Testament discussions of these terms when they are juxtaposed. As a result, the Old Testament background should inform the discussion of Christian baptism. Such a brief survey will by no means resolve the nuances of the baptism debate. But, if we are properly informed and agree on the terms and their significance, discussion will be more fruitful.

[1] The Nicene Creed alludes to Acts 2:38 respecting the remission of sins as one of the effects of baptism. The Book of Common Prayer (Huntington Beach, CA: Anglican Liturgy Press, 2019), 162, includes references to Ephesians 2:1, 8–9; John 3:5, and Matt 28:18–20. The Eastern Church cites John 3:5 when discussing the effects of baptism. See Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007), 376. At the other end of the spectrum, Baptists do not view baptism as conveying any effects, emphasizing instead that it is the proper response to salvation. See Millard Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006), 1106. Both sides, however, build their doctrine of baptism on passages other than those recording the mere fact of baptism.

[2] Jesus’ baptism was not for His redemption, as the context makes clear. Rather, Jesus identifies with those who are being baptized by John and confessing their sins.

[3] As an initial example, some take John 3:5 as referring to natural birth and subsequent spiritual birth, viewing "water" as amniotic fluid in contrast to spiritual birth. D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 191.

[4] O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1980), 67–87. I am setting aside questions of composition history, such as the Documentary Hypothesis, and basing my conclusions on the received canonical text.

[5] In Hebrew, as in Greek, spirit and wind are represented by the same word. Hamilton rightly argues that, since a creative act is in view, Gen 1:2 should be translated with spirit rather than wind. Victor Hamilton, Genesis 1—17 , (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 114.

[6] Hamilton, Genesis , 108–9. Hamilton notes parallels between the Hebrew words תֹּהוּ וָבֹהוּ in Isaiah 34:13 and Jeremiah 4:23. In Jeremiah 4:23–28, the judgment on the land takes the shape of an un-creation, a return from order to chaos. See John Thompson, Jeremiah , (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 230. Hamilton also notes the use of תֹּהוּ in Isaiah 45:18 to refer to chaos.

[7] Robertson, Christ of the Covenants , 110. Also William Dumbrell, Covenant and Creation: A Theology of Old Testament Covenants (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1984), 15–26. Dumbrell notes that the covenant with Noah presupposes a previous covenant with Adam.

[8] Carson, John , 195.

[9] Contra Carson, John , 196. Carson places a division between baptism and the radical transformation in view in John 3. This distinction begs the question which is at the center of the baptism debate: does baptism effect a change or is it an outward token of a change effected? It would appear, with Ezekiel 36—37 as the background of John 3, that baptism does effect a radical change in the baptizand. The question then becomes what sort of change baptism effects. It is also worth noting that Jesus changes from the second person singular pronoun to the second person plural while speaking to Nicodemus. This change from singular to plural places Nicodemus as the representative of the whole nation. It also demonstrates a canonical consciousness on the part of John. While the original conversation would not necessarily pertain to Christian baptism, by the time John was written Christian baptism could easily be in view.

[10] Personal ontological change is not necessarily excluded here, and the word itself can suggest a break with the past and the beginning of a new life. See Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, with a Revised Supplement. 9th edition, revised by Henry Stuart Jones and Frederick McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1291. It is simply that the background of the Old Testament does not speak directly to an ontological change.

A Spanish Homily on Baptism

Sun, 30 May 2021 23:02:19 GMT

by St Pacian of Barcelona

Feast of St Macrina, Grandmother of St Basil the Great

Anno Domini 2021, May 30

I wish to reveal to you how we were reborn and renewed in baptism. I will speak, brethren, in the words of our Lord, lest you should possibly think that because of the elegance of my words I was indulging in literary effects. My object is merely to help you understand the doctrine of this mystery. My sole desire is to teach you, for I seek not my own glory. Glory belongs to God alone.

Concern for you is what prompts me, and especially for those of you preparing for baptism, and I ask myself if it is possible for me to succeed in analyzing such a happy event.

I will reveal to you, then, the original state of paganism and the spiritual transformation wrought by faith and the pardon of God given in baptism. And if these words penetrate your hearts, as I hope, then you will admit that no previous sermon was so beneficial for you as this one.

Man Before Baptism

Understand, then, dearly beloved children, the state of death in which man was placed before baptism. You surely know that ancient account of Adam’s return to his parent earth, and of the condemnation which imposed the law of everlasting death upon him, and how death reigned over all his descendants in virtue of the same law from Adam to Moses. But under Moses one people was chosen, namely the seed of Abraham, to see if they would be capable of keeping the law of justice. Meantime we were all held under the bondage of sin that we might be the prey of death, destined to eat of the husks and be the keeper of animals, that is to accomplish unclean works under the influence of the bad angels. Under their rule it was not permissible to do or to know justice; to obey such rulers was in the nature of things. Now listen to how we were liberated from their power and from this death.

After Adam sinned, as I have said, he was delivered to death by the Lord’s words, “Dust you are, and unto dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19). This condemnation was transmitted to the whole human race. For all had sinned at the prompting of nature as the Apostle says, “as by one man sin entered, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all men in whom all have sinned” (Rom. 5:12). Such, then, was the reign of sin and it led us in captive chains to death—death that would last forever. Nor was anyone conscious of this sin before the time of the Law, as the Apostle tells us: “For until the law was” promulgated sin was not imputed, that is, was not apparent; it revived with the coming of the Law (Rom. 5:13). Now it was clearly seen, yet the intervention of the Law was of no avail because practically no one observed it. The Law said, “you shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not covet.” However, covetousness and all its attendant vices endured, and so before the Law sin killed with a sheathed sword, while after the Law it was unsheathed in broad daylight.

What hope remained for man? Without the Law he perished because he could not recognize sin. Under the Law he perished because he ran into sin with open eyes. Who then could free him from death? Hear the words of the Apostle, “Unhappy man that I am who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” And he adds, “The grace of God by Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 7:24-25).

The Work of Salvation

What is grace? It is the remission of sins. Grace, then, is a gift. Christ has come and taken human nature, and this nature He has restored to God, pure and free from the domination of sin. Isaiah says, “The virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel. He shall be living on milk and honey by the time he learns to reject the bad and choose the good” (Is. 7:14-15). And again, about the child himself, “he had done no wrong nor spoken any falsehood” (Is. 53:9). With this guarantee of innocence Christ first undertook to restore our dignity and to do so in sinful flesh; then the devil, the father of the sin of disobedience, who had formerly deceived the first man, began to be impatient, to be agitated and in trepidation. For he was going to be vanquished by the abrogation of the law of sin, by which alone he had held sway, or could hold sway, over man. He armed himself for a spiritual showdown with the sinless one. But his first attack showed the same speciousness as his victorious assault on Adam in the garden. As if he were solicitous about the power of heaven he said, “If you are the Son of God, say that these stones be made bread” (Matt. 4:3). The tempter hoped that He would yield to the temptation out of shame so as to conceal that He was the Son of God. And lo, the devil does not keep silent, but suggests that He cast Himself down on high, saying that He would be received by the hands of the angels to whose care He was entrusted by the Father to be carried on their shoulders, lest He should dash His foot against a stone. The Lord would be able to prove that the Father took these precautions about Him and the devil pressed Him to place His reliance on them.

The serpent, again crushed, as if he were retreating from the contest, promises the same kingdoms of the world which he had promised to Adam. But in all these combats the enemy got the worst of it, subjugated by a power from on high, as the prophet said in addressing the Lord, “You will reduce the hostile and rebellious, and I will look on Your heavens, the work of Your hands” (Ps. 8:3-4).

The devil ought to have yielded; but he does not give up yet. He suborns the scribes and Pharisees and the whole clique of his impious accomplices, resorting to his well-known stratagems, and excites them to anger. Therefore they resorted to different methods and hypocritical poses, hoping, like the serpent, to deceive the followers of the Lord. When this was of no avail they finally attacked openly like brigands with the excruciating torments of the passion. Their hope was that, under the distress of humiliation or grief, He would do or say something unjust, thus destroying the humanity which He bore and His soul would be abandoned in hell. For His enemies had but one desire, to hold Him as a sinner: “Now the sting of death is sin” (1 Cor. 15:56), says the Apostle. Christ kept good: “who did not sin, neither was deceit found in His mouth” (Is. 53:9; 1 Pet. 2:22), as we have said already. This was also proved true when He was led to punishment. This was then His victory, to be condemned in spite of His innocence. In fact, the devil had received all power over sinners, and this same power he had claimed over the Just One. This was his great mistake, to arrogate in regard to the Just One rights which the Law had not recognized as his. Whence the word of the prophet to the Lord: “that you may be justified in your sentence, vindicated when you condemn” (Ps. 50:6).

According to the words of the Apostle, “He has discarded the Principalities and Powers. He made a public spectacle of them and led them as captives in His triumphal procession” (Col. 2:15). This is why “God has not abandoned his soul to the nether world and has not let His Holy One see death” (Ps. 15:10). That too is why, trampling underfoot the sting of death, He raised Him in His own flesh the third day, to reconcile human flesh with God and restore it to eternity, after the defeat and death of sin.

But if He alone conquered, what did it profit the others? Listen briefly. The sin of Adam had passed to the whole human race: “as by one man sin entered into this world and by sin death: and so death passed upon all men” (Rom. 5:12). The justice of Christ, then, had to pass on all the human race. And just as Adam had caused the destruction of his descendants by sin, so Christ, by His justice, would bring life to the whole race. The Apostle makes the point, saying: “For as by the disobedience of one man, many were made sinners; so also by the obedience of one many shall be made just … as sin has reigned to death, so also grace might reign by justice unto life everlasting through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 5:19, 21).

The New Adam

So, it is the whole man that is reborn and renewed in Christ, “in order that, just as Christ has arisen from the dead through the glory of the Father so we also may walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4), in other words, we must reject our former vices, namely service of idols, cruelty, fornication, luxury, and the other vices of flesh and blood in order to practice a new Christian morality by the Spirit—faith, purity, innocence, chastity. “Therefore, even as we have borne the likeness of the earthy, let us bear also the likeness of the heavenly …. The first man was of the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven, heavenly” (1 Cor. 15:49, 47).

If we act in this manner, dearly beloved brethren, we shall die no more. For even if we are dissolved in this bodily life, we will live in Christ as He Himself has assured us, “He who believes in me, even if he die, shall live” (Jn. 11:25). In a word, we are assured, on God’s word, that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the saints of God live. For God says concerning them, “Now He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him” (Lk. 20:38). And the Apostle says of himself, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain. I desire to depart and to be with Christ” (Phil. 1:21). And elsewhere he says, “Always full of courage, then, and knowing that while we are in the body we are exiled from the Lord for we walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:6-7).

This, dearly beloved, is the burden of our faith: “If with this life only in view we have had hope in Christ, we are of all men the most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19). Earthly life, as you yourselves see, for man and beast, domestic animals, and the birds of the air is of the same span, or even longer for the animals. What is special to man is what Christ has given him through His Spirit—that is, life everlasting, on condition, however, that he sin no more. For just as death is the penalty of sin, and virtue the way to avoid it, so life is conserved by virtue and lost by vice. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is life everlasting in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).

Remember above all else, little ones, that as we have said already, all races once given over to the principalities and powers of darkness are now freed through the victory of Jesus Christ our Lord. It is He who has redeemed us, “forgiving us all our sins, cancelling the decree against us, which was hostile to us. Indeed, He has taken it completely away, nailing it to the cross. Disarming the Principalities and Powers, He displayed them openly, leading them away in His triumphal procession” (Col. 2:13-15). He released the captives and broke our bonds, as David has said, “The Lord sets captives free; the Lord gives sight to the blind; the Lord raises up those that were bowed down” (Ps. 145:7, 8). And in another place he says, “You have loosened my bonds. I will offer to you the thank-offering” (Ps. 115:7, 8).

The Life of the Baptized

Freed from our chains, when we rally round the standard of the Lord through the sacrament of baptism, we renounce the devil and his angels whom we previously served. Let us not serve them any longer, delivered as we now are by the blood and the name of Christ. For if, in the future, someone forgets himself and does not take any account of his salvation, but returns to the service of devils and to “the weak and needy elements” (cf. Gal. 4:9), he will carry again his old fetters, that is to say, the chains of sin. “And the las state of that man becomes worse than the first” (Lk. 11:26), because the devil will chain him more firmly, like a captured fugitive. And Christ will be unable to suffer more for him because “having risen from the dead He dies no now more” (Rom. 6:9).

Therefore, my dearly beloved brethren, we are washed but once; we are only liberated once; we are only received once into the immortal kingdom. It is only once that “Happy is he whose fault is taken away, whose sin is covered” (Ps. 31:1). Hold firm, then, to the gift received, safeguard your joy, and do not commit further sin. Preserve yourselves pure and innocent for the day of the Lord. The rewards which await the faithful are great and unlimited: “eye has not seen or ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man” (1 Cor. 2:9). Await these rewards, strive to obtain them by the works of justice and the longings of your soul. Amen.

*Reproduced from Baptism: Ancient Liturgies and Patristic Texts , edited by André Hamman (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1967), pp. 67-73.

Microsynaxis

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﻿

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