St Benedict, Stoicism, & Modern Consumerism

Chapter 34 of the Rule of St Benedict concerns the rôle of property in the cœnobium. St Benedict cites Acts 4:35, modeling the monastery on the life of the early Church of Jerusalem, 'Distribution was made to every man according as he had need' (KJV). The idea is that the monks, when they are received into the community, give up their personal claims to property, and humbly receive back only what they need in order to get by (addressed also in RB 58). St Benedict then exhorts the monks not to be adversely affected by what they receive on the basis of this principle:

He that needeth less, let him thank God and not be discontented; he that needeth more, let him be humbled for his infirmity and not made proud by the mercy shown to him: so will all the members be at peace. (The Rule of St Benedict in English and Latin, ed. Abbot Justin McCann [Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic, n.d.], p. 87)

Interestingly, while much of St Benedict's Rule is either taken from or based upon the earlier Rule of the Master, this more original chapter is influenced instead by the Rule of St Augustine. Not having read the latter Rule before, I was intrigued to find in Adalbert de Vogüé's commentary on the RB (Reading Saint Benedict: Reflections on the Rule, trans. Colette Friedlander [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1994]) that St Augustine summarises his thoughts on this matter with 'an apt formula, inspired by Seneca, in which the best of pagan wisdom is enlisted in service of christian monasticism: true wealth consists in being content with little, for "it is better to have few needs than many possessions" (Praec. III.3-5)' (Vogüé, p. 188). By looking into the more extensive notes in Vogüé’s similarly brilliant The Rule of St Benedict: A Doctrinal and Spiritual Commentary, trans. John Baptist Hasbrouck (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1983), I discovered that the Senecan passage to which St Augustine refers is Epistolae ad Lucilium II.6 (published in English in Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell [London: Penguin, 1969], p. 34). Vogüé concludes that this maxim 'is the exact opposite of the agenda of our consumer society and a true digest of the philosophy of monasticism: happy are they who cut back their needs' (Vogüé, p. 189)!

Of course, I know a lot of people, from Orthodox to atheist, who are more or less rejecting consusmerism and cutting back on needs, particularly in the current economic decline in the US. But lest we get too 'excited' about discovering this principle of monastic spirituality, Michael Casey reminds us:

Monastic poverty is neither glamorous nor romantic. It is a matter of choosing to go without, to make do with less, and to be content with little. In the eyes of most of our contemporaries it is not a goal worth pursuing. It is ugly and contemptible. . . . Real poverty in buildings and their furnishings is not the same as an aesthetic minimalism, which is usually quite expensive. Rather it involves using what is plain and commonplace—sometimes, everything else being equal, deliberately opting for what is cheap. . . . What Benedict says in speaking of monastic clothing [RB 55] can be taken as indicative of a general attitude. Apart from serving its purpose and fitting those who wear it, clothing should be chosen on the basis of what is locally available and what is less expensive—not imported from afar, no status brand names and high price tags: the sort of clothes that no respected denizen of the worldly city would want to be seen wearing. Benedict and the monastic reformers who followed him sought to deprive clothes and everything else that constitutes the monastic lifestyle of secular collateral meanings. (Strangers to the City: Reflections on the Beliefs and Values of the Rule of Saint Benedict [Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2005], p. 79)

O Rex Gentium

Here is Malcolm Guite's sonnet based on the O Antiphon appointed for 21 December in the Sarum practice:

O Rex Gentium
O King of our desire whom we despise,
King of the nations never on the throne,
Unfound foundation, cast-off cornerstone,
Rejected joiner, making many one,
You have no form or beauty for our eyes,
A King who comes to give away his crown,
A King within our rags of flesh and bone.
We pierce the flesh that pierces our disguise,
For we ourselves are found in you alone.
Come to us now and find in us your throne,
O King within the child within the clay,
O hidden King who shapes us in the play
Of all creation. Shape us for the day
Your coming Kingdom comes into its own.

And here is the corresponding portion (ll. 1-17) of Cynewulf’s ‘Christ I’ Advent lyrics. The Old English text can be found in The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, Vol. III of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, A Collective Edition (Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia U, 1961), p. 3. The translation is from Kevin Crossley-Holland, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford U, 1984), p. 197. Unfortunately, the opening lines of this poem have been lost, so it begins in media res, as it were.

. . . to the King.
You are the corner-stone the builders
once discarded. It becomes you well
to stand as the head of the great hall,
to lock together the lengthy walls,
the unbreakable flint, in your firm embrace,
so that all things on earth with eyes
may marvel endlessly, O Lord of Glory.
O true, victory-bright One, reveal now your own might
through your mysterious skill, and let wall
remain upright against wall. The hall needs
the care of the Craftsman and the King Himself
to repair—it is decayed now—the house
under its roof. He created the body’s limbs
of clay. Now the Lord of Life must save
dispirited men from devils, the wretched
from damnation, as He has often done before.

Constantinople, 1652

As much as I love the New Martyrs of Russia, and believe that we should all pay very close attention to their witness, I’m afraid that we’re a bit guilty of neglecting the, admittedly, smaller choir of New Martyrs of the Turkish Yoke. Today we commemorate the New Martyr John of Thasos, and sadly, there is almost nothing to be found about him online, least of all an icon. I did discover two references on Google Books. The first was A New Dictionary of Saints East and West, by Michael Walsh (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2007). There, on page 325, we read:

John of Thasos, martyr, born Maries, Thasos, died Constantinople, 1652. Byzantine Church. He moved to Constantinople when he was 14. He was accused of mocking Islam, and was executed.

Fortunately, however, the second source provided a somewhat more substantial account. Fr Nomikos Michael Vaporis’s Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period 1437-1860 (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2000), is a one-of-a-kind resource in English. A labour of love (see the ‘Preface’ by Fr Vaporis’s son, Constantine), Witnesses for Christ is a compilation of accounts of New Martyrs of Albanian, Bulgarian, Cypriot, Egyptian, Georgian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian nationalities.

According to Fr Vaporis, the young St John was sent to Constantinople to be apprenticed to a tailor there. During the course of carrying out his duties, he quarrelled with a merchant (who happened to be of the Hebrew faith). Out of anger, the merchant told some nearby Muslims that St John had cursed their faith. He was beaten and taken before the vizier, who, moved by his young age, said, ‘Come now, become a Muslim and save your life. You will be at my side, and I shall honor you and make you rich.’

Unwavering, St John replied, ‘I will never deny my sweetest Jesus Christ even if you were to inflict upon me a myriad of torments or grant me your entire kingdom.’ Thus, the vizier ordered him to be beheaded. At first the executioner hit him very lightly on the neck in order to frighten the martyr, ‘But seeing John’s expression of joy and his fearless look, he angrily swung his sword in earnest and beheaded him’ (Fr Vaporis, p. 110). That night, the Christians collected his precious relics and buried him in Beyoğlu (Pera), a district which lay opposite the city proper across the Golden Horn (shown to the right in the map above). St John of Thasos suffered for our Lord on 20 December 1652.

Incidentally, while I’ve never been blessed to go to Constantinople, I have seen St John’s homeland of Thasos, the northernmost Greek island. It is known as one of, if not the most green of the islands, and is a truly lovely place. Here one can see some photographs taken at the Monastery of the Holy Archangel Michael there, a women’s dependency of Philotheou on the Holy Mountain (which can be seen from Thasos on a clear day!).

One by Fr Florovsky, & Τα Άπαντα of 3 Fathers

Just a quick note. First, I have long believed that everyone should read 'The Ascetic Ideal in the New Testament' by Fr Georges Florovsky (photographed here in one of Harvard's libraries).

Also, a HT to Fr Luke Hartung for pointing out to me this page, where one can download zipped files of the works of St Maximos the Confessor, St Symeon the New Theologian, and St Gregory Palamas in Greek.

O Oriens, and an Unexpected Dante Reference

Here is Malcolm Guite's sonnet based on the O Antiphon appointed for 20 December in the Sarum practice:

O Oriens

Paradiso XXX.61

First light and then first lines along the east

To touch and brush a sheen of light on water

As though behind the sky itself they traced

The shift and shimmer of another river

Flowing unbidden from its hidden source;

The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.

Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice

Are bathing in it now, away upstream…

So every trace of light begins a grace

In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam

Is somehow a beginning and a calling;

‘Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,

Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking.’

The passage referenced from the Paradiso reads:

e vidi lume in forma di rivera
fulvido di fulgore, intra due rive
dipinte di mirabil primavera.

Here is the English translation by Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise, trans. Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds [London: Penguin, 1962], p. 320):

Light I beheld which as a river flowed.
Fulgid with splendour; and on either shore
The colours of a wondrous springtime showed.

Now for Cynewulf. This is a prose translation of the section of the Advent lyrics in ‘Christ I’ that corresponds to today’s O Antiphon, ‘O Oriens’. The source is The Christ of Cynewulf, trans. Charles Huntington Whitman [Boston: Ginn & Co., 1900], available here.

Lo! Thou Splendor of the dayspring, fairest of angels sent to men upon earth, Thou Radiance of the Sun of righteousness, bright beyond the stars, Thou of Thy very self dost illumine all the tides of time! Even as Thou, God begotten of God, Son of the true Father, didst ever dwell without beginning in the glory of heaven, so Thine own handiwork in its present need imploreth Thee with confidence that Thou send us the bright sun, and come in Thy very person to enlighten those who have long been covered with murky cloud, and sitting here in darkness and eternal night, shrouded in sins, have been forced to endure the shadow of death. Now in the fulness of hope we believe in the salvation brought to men through the Word of God, who was in the beginning co-eternal with God the Father almighty, and afterward became flesh without blemish, being born of the virgin as a help for the afflicted. God appeared among us without sin; the mighty Son of God and the Son of Man dwelt together in harmony among mankind. Wherefore it is right that we should ever give thanks by our deeds unto the Lord of victory, for that He was willing to send Himself unto us.

On the Following of References

So here’s something I found frustrating. Part of my master’s thesis deals with the imagination. Naturally, I’m interested in anything the Fathers have to say about this topic—the earlier and more authoritative, the better. Well, at one point in his Συμβουλευτικόν Εγχειρίδιον, St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain quotes from St Maximus the Confessor about the imagination. In the English translation of this book, it is a long block quotation, set off from the rest of the text by indentation. The last three sentences read as follows:

He who would remove passion and suffering from the body achieves practical virtue; he who would remove forgetfulness and ignorance from the soul has properly attained the natural vision; and he who would release the mind of the many impressions, has acquired the mystery of theology. For the mind of Adam at first was not impressed by the imagination, which stands between the mind and the thoughts, setting up a wall around the mind and not allowing it to enter into the most simple and imageless reasons of created beings. The passionate physical perceptions of the visible things are scales that cover over the clairvoyance of the soul and prevent its passage over to the authentic word of truth. (Qtd. in St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, trans. Fr Peter A. Chamberas [NY: Paulist, 1989], p. 150)

Now it was the second sentence—‘For the mind of Adam . . .’—that most interested me, and I set about trying to find this passage in St Maximus. The endnote informed me that it was to be found in ‘Second Century of Theology, ch. 75’ (St Nicodemus, p. 152), apparently one of St Maximus’s Philokalic texts. Well, neither ch. 75 of the ‘Second Century on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation of the Son of God’, nor ch. 75 of the ‘Second Century of Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice’ (both of which are found in Vol. II of the English Philokalia) bore any resemblance to the passage from St Nicodemus, although the latter did mention the imagination. None of the chapters near 75 in either text matched either. Nor did a search through the index or a scan through all of St Maximus’s Philokalic writings help.

So, I thought, perhaps the translator or editor made a mistake in the citation. So I turned to the Greek edition I own (St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, Συμβουλευτικόν Εγχειρίδιον [Athens: Panagopoulos, 2001]). Well, the citation there was exactly the same as that in the English edition. But that was not the most frustrating part of it.

In Modern Greek books no one ever uses block quotes. They don’t even use quotes at the beginning of new paragraphs within a longer quotation. One must pay very close attention to the text in order to be certain where quotes begin and end. So when I came to the chapter of the Handbook in Greek that corresponded to the chapter I’d read in English, I found the following:

« . . . Ὁ τοίνυν τῆς σαρκός ἐξελών τήν ἡδονήν καί τήν ὀδύνην, τήν πρακτικήν ἀρετήν κατώρθωσεν, ὁ δέ τῆς ψυχῆς ἐξαφανίσας τήν λήθην καί τήν ἄγνοιαν, τήν φυσικήν διήνυσεν εὐπρεπῶς θεωρίαν· ὁ δέ τόν νοῦν, τῶν πολλῶν ἀπολύσας τύπων, τήν θεολογικήν ἐκτήσατο μυσταγωγίαν». Οủ γάρ ὁ νοῦς τοῦ προπάτορος ἐτυποῦτο διά τῆς φαντασίας, ἥτις ὡς μεσότειχον ἱσταμένη μεταξύ τοῦ νοῦ καί τῶν νοητῶν, διατειχίζει τόν νοῦν, καί δέν ἀφίνει τοῦτον νά εἰσέρχηται εἰς τούς ἁπλουστάτους καί ἀφαντάστους λόγους τῶν ὄντων. «Λεπίδες γάρ εἰσιν, ὡς ὁ αὐτός θεῖος Μάξιμος λέγει, ὡς ἀληθῶς ἐπικείμεναι τῷ διορατικῷ τῆς ψυχῆς καί ἀπείργουσαι τήν πρός τόν ἀκραιφνῆ τῆς ἀληθείας λόγον διάβασιν, αἱ τῶν ὁρωμένων κατ᾿ αἴσθησιν προσπαθεῖς θεωρίαι». (p. 157)

So as you can see, here the sentence in question about the mind of Adam (‘ὁ νοῦς τοῦ προπάτορος’) is not included within the quotation marks. It is almost as though that sentence alone is not part of the quote (while, curiously, the aside, ‘ὡς ὁ αὐτός θεῖος Μάξιμος λέγει’ is included!). Of course, I have no way to solve the mystery without being able to find the passage in St Maximus’s works anyway.

Finally, I asked the single person whom I know personally that is thoroughly familiar with St Nicodemus’s books, Fr George Dokos (who has translated the Exomologetarion and the Concerning Frequent Communion, both for Uncut Mountain Press), whether he had any answers. He told me he had spoken to a guy writing a paper on the imagination at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where Fr George and I have both studied, who told him about exactly the same problem! Now, at this point I could try diligently to contact the translator, Fr Peter Chamberas, or I could try to get in touch with another expert on St Nicodemus and the Fathers. Consulting the first edition is not a really feasible option. Anyway, for the time being I have decided to throw up my hands in despair. And post this on my blog.

O Clavis

Here is Malcolm Guite's sonnet based on the O Antiphon appointed for 19 December in the Sarum practice:

O Clavis
Even in the darkness where I sit
And huddle in the midst of misery
I can remember freedom, but forget
That every lock must answer to a key
That each dark clasp, sharp and intricate,
Must find a counter-clasp to meet its guard.
Particular, exact and intimate,
The clutch and catch that meshes with its ward.
I cry out for the key I threw away
That turned and over turned with certain touch
And with the lovely lifting of a latch
Opened my darkness to the light of day.
O come again, come quickly, set me free.

HT to the Confessing Reader for giving me the idea of using the Harrowing of Hell fresco (looks like a Panselinos to me) to illustrate the 'Key of David'. Actually, it makes me want to do a whole post on the Harrowing of Hell, but I don't have time at the moment!

It is now time to post the corresponding portion of Cynewulf's 'Christ I' Advent lyrics (ll. 18-49). The Old English text can be found in The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, Vol. III of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, A Collective Edition (Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia U, 1961), pp. 3-4. The translation I give here is that in Kevin Crossley-Hollan, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford U, 1984), p. 198.

You govern the locks, You open life,
O Lord and Ruler, righteous King.
Unless man's work is well done, You deny
him the paths of joy, the blessed journey.
Truly in our need we speak these words
and call upon Him who created man
that He should not consign to hell
those unhappy ones, we who sit in prison,
sorrowing. We yearn for the sun,
for the Lord of Life to show us light,
take our souls into His protection,
clothe our clouded minds in His glory;
we await the day when He will make us worthy
that He has admitted to His grace,
abject, cut off from our own country,
we who had to come to this narrow land.
Wherefore a man may say--he who speaks the truth--
that, when it was lost, He delivered
the race of man. The maid He chose
for mother was still young, a virgin
without sin. The bride grew great with child
without once entering a man's embrace.
There has not been such merit in a woman
anywhere on earth, before or since;
it was a mystery, one of God's miracles.
All the gifts of the Spirit grew on earth;
the Maker illumined many matters,
knowledge long since hidden under the soil;
the sayings of the prophets were realised
when the Ruler was born, He who fulfils
the cryptic words of those who, fittingly
and fervently, praise the name of the Creator.