'How Beautiful Is Thy Soaring, Dear Daughter of the King!'—St Scholastica

Today, 10 February on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate St Scholastica of Italy, sister of St Benedict. Everything known about St Scholastica is contained in the 2nd Book of the Dialogues of St Gregory the Great, where St Gregory narrates the Life of St Benedict. In Chapters 33 and 34 of that book, we are told the following story, which I shall quote in full because of its brevity (taken from the OSB website):

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Of a Miracle Wrought by his Sister, Scholastica.

GREGORY: Who is there, Peter, in this world, that is in greater favor with God than St. Paul? Three times he petitioned our Lord to be delivered from the thorn of the flesh, and yet he did not obtain his petition. Speaking of that, I must tell you how there was one thing which the venerable father Benedict would have liked to do, but he could not.

His sister, named Scholastica, was dedicated from her infancy to our Lord. Once a year she came to visit her brother. The man of God went to her not far from the gate of his monastery, at a place that belonged to the Abbey. It was there he would entertain her. Once upon a time she came to visit according to her custom, and her venerable brother with his monks went there to meet her.

They spent the whole day in the praises of God and spiritual talk, and when it was almost night, they dined together. As they were yet sitting at the table, talking of devout matters, it began to get dark. The holy Nun, his sister, entreated him to stay there all night that they might spend it in discoursing of the joys of heaven. By no persuasion, however, would he agree to that, saying that he might not by any means stay all night outside of his Abbey.

At that time, the sky was so clear that no cloud was to be seen. The Nun, hearing this denial of her brother, joined her hands together, laid them on the table, bowed her head on her hands, and prayed to almighty God.

Lifting her head from the table, there fell suddenly such a tempest of lightning and thundering, and such abundance of rain, that neither venerable Benedict, nor his monks that were with him, could put their heads out of doors. The holy Nun, having rested her head on her hands, poured forth such a flood of tears on the table, that she transformed the clear air to a watery sky.

After the end of her devotions, that storm of rain followed; her prayer and the rain so met together, that as she lifted up her head from the table, the thunder began. So it was that in one and the very same instant that she lifted up her head, she brought down the rain.

The man of God, seeing that he could not, in the midst of such thunder and lightning and great abundance of rain return to his Abbey, began to be heavy and to complain to his sister, saying: ‘God forgive you, what have you done?’ She answered him, ‘I desired you to stay, and you would not hear me; I have desired it of our good Lord, and he has granted my petition. Therefore if you can now depart, in God's name return to your monastery, and leave me here alone.’

But the good father, not being able to leave, tarried there against his will where before he would not have stayed willingly. By that means, they watched all night and with spiritual and heavenly talk mutually comforted one another.

Therefore, by this we see, as I said before, that he would have had one thing, but he could not effect it. For if we know the venerable man's mind, there is no question but that he would have had the same fair weather to have continued as it was when he left his monastery. He found, however, that a miracle prevented his desire. A miracle that, by the power of almighty God, a woman's prayers had wrought.

Is it not a thing to be marveled at, that a woman, who for a long time had not seen her brother, might do more in that instance than he could? She realized, according to the saying of St. John, ‘God is charity’ [1 John 4:8]. Therefore, as is right, she who loved more, did more.

PETER: I confess that I am wonderfully pleased with that which you tell me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: How Benedict Saw the Soul of his Sister Ascend into Heavenly Glory.

GREGORY: The next day the venerable woman returned to her nunnery, and the man of God to his abbey. Three days later, standing in his cell, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, he beheld the soul of his sister (which was departed from her body) ascend into heaven in the likeness of a dove.

Rejoicing much to see her great glory, with hymns and praise he gave thanks to almighty God, and imparted the news of her death to his monks. He sent them presently to bring her corpse to his Abbey, to have it buried in that grave which he had provided for himself. By this means it fell out that, as their souls were always one in God while they lived, so their bodies continued together after their death.

There aren’t many other details to add. St Demetrius of Rostov, in his Menology, adds only what we might have surmised: ‘[S]he passed her life in virtue and fasting, and was therefore pleasing unto the Lord’ (St Benedict of Nursia, trans. Rdr Isaac E. Lambertsen [Liberty, TN: St John of Kronstadt, 1989], p. 16). The OSB page tells us that the monastery where she lived was ‘Plumbariola, the first “Benedictine” convent’. That is all.

But there is a kind of consensus that this paucity of detail is rather monastic in spirit. In his commentary on this part of St Benedict’s Life (St Gregory the Great, The Life of St Benedict, comm. by Adalbert de Vogüé, trans. Hilary Costello and Eoin de Bhaldraithe [Petersham, MA: St Bede’s 1993], pp. 155-62), the infallible Adalbert de Vogüé gives us a brilliant comparison of St Gregory’s narrative with that of St Augustine in Confessions 9.10—the famous story of his conversation with his mother, St Monica (on p. 162, n. 3, de Vogüé, in his humility, admits that this was suggested to him by a 1980 German study of the Life by E. Jungclaussen and C. Pastro). In such a comparison, of course, it is obvious that St Augustine is much more forthcoming with information than St Gregory, although de Vogüé questions whether the latter ‘knew anything more about Benedict’s sister than what he has told us’ (p. 159). But he characterises St Gregory’s account of the conversation as one of ‘sobriety’ (p. 159), and of the account of St Scholastica’s repose, de Vogüé writes (pp. 159-60):

Benedict was not present at the death of his sister. He learns of it by a miracle, seeing her go up to heaven, and this news only fills him with joy, praise and thanksgiving. Death is absorbed in the victory and in the glory. Sadness, affection, affliction have no place here. Augustine’s most moving admissions give way to a stylized attitude of the man of God whose eyes, looking towards the invisible, ignore the earth.

It is an attitude reflected in the chapter on St Scholastica in Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourette’s beautiful little book, A Monastic Year: Reflections from a Monastery (Dallas: Taylor, 1996), p. 43, where he seems content to accept that she is ‘a quiet saint, for so little is known about her’, concluding, ‘Though little is known about her, the portrait that Pope Gregory gives is one of a very human and charming saint who makes the work of love and prayer the operative reasons for her life.’

It is also reflected in a wonderful post for St Scholastica for her feast on the papal calendar by the Cistercian blogger, Fr Mark Kirby of Vultus Christi. Fr Mark writes:

Apart from a few precious pages in the Dialogues of Saint Gregory, we know nothing of Saint Scholastica. The little revealed by Saint Gregory has, nonetheless, inspired an astonishing richness of liturgical texts: antiphons, responsories, hymns, and prayers. Like miners in search of a vein of pure gold, anonymous poets through the ages have extracted from Saint Gregory’s few pages the raw material of chants and prayers that, even today, delight us and draw us into the heavenward flight of Scholastica, the pure dove.

There is so much to see, to hear, to taste, to smell:

—psalms of praise sung around a table, men’s and women’s voices in antiphony;
—the breaking of bread and the fragrance of wine poured out;
—the impassioned sound of Mediterranean conversation;
—two saints locked in a holy difference of opinion;
—Scholastica’s hands folded upon the table;
—her head bowed and resting upon her hands;
—her tears flowing freely;
—the pentecostal wind, the crash of thunder and blaze of lightning;
—the torrential downpour, heaven’s answer to a woman’s tears.

Aside from this delightful post, Fr Mark has also given us a wonderful document appropriate both to the feast of St Scholastica, and this week of preparation before Clean Monday and Lent, which I shall reproduce in a second post.

In conclusion, I offer just one of the liturgical texts fashioned from the raw material of ‘St Gregory’s few pages’—a Hymn for the Feast of St Scholastica taken from Dom Laurence Shepherd’s translation of Dom Prosper Gueranger’s The Liturgical Year: Lent (Dublin: James Duffy, 1870), p. 416:

The shades of night are passing away:
the longed-for day is come,
when the virgin Scholastica
is united to her God, her Spouse.

Winter’s tedious gloom is over;
the rainy clouds are gone;
and the Spring of the starry land
yields its eternal flowers.

The God of love bids his beloved come;
and she, taking the wings of a dove,
flies swiftly to the embrace
so ardently desired.

How beautiful is thy soaring,
dear daughter of the King!
Thy Brother, the Abbot, sees thee,
and fervently thanks his God.

Scholastica receives the embrace of her Spouse,
and the crown her works have won;
inebriated with the torrent of glory,
she drinks of the joys of her Lord.

May the world-wide creation of every age,
adore thee, O Jesus,
sweet Flower of the vale,
together with the Father and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Welsh Religious Poetry

As it is a Welsh Saint that I have chosen to blog about today, I thought it would be nice to post something else from Wales in his honour, as well as in honour of my friend, Owen the Ochlophobist. In the festschrift for Bishop Kallistos (Ware), Abba: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West, ed. Fr John Behr, et al. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 2003), pp. 317-33, A.M. (Donald) Allchin, a lifelong friend of Bishop Kallistos, has contributed a wonderful article: ‘“The Heir of Resurrection”: Creation, Cross and Resurrection in Early Welsh Poetry’. By way of illustrating the work of the Gogynfeirdd, the ‘Rather Early Poets’, on p. 319 Allchin quotes an excerpt from a Marwyrsgafn, a ‘death-bed’ poem of Meilyr Brydydd (1100-1137):

I am Meilyr the Poet, pilgrim to Peter,
Gatekeeper who measures right virtue.
When the time of our resurrection comes
All who are in the grave, make me ready.
As I await the call, may my home be
The monastery where the tide rises [Bardsey],
A wilderness of enduring glory.
Around its cemetery the breast of the sea,
Island of fair Mary, sacred island of the saints,
Heir of resurrection, to be in it is lovely.
Christ of the prophesied cross, who knows me shall guide me
Past hell, the isolated abode of agony.
The Creator who made me shall receive me
Among the pure parish, the people of Enlli.

Later in the article, Allchin quotes a poem of which the date and author are unknown, but which he believes may be contemporary with Meilyr Brydydd. According to Allchin, ‘Each line in the original contains internal rhyme and alliterative devices; as we shall see its theological affirmations give proof of similar prolonged meditation on the mysteries of Christ’ (p. 325). Here it is (p. 326):

In the name of the Lord, mine to praise, of great praise,
I shall praise God, great the triumph of his love,
God who defended us, God who made us, God who saved us,
God our hope, perfect and honorable, beautiful his blessing.
We are in God’s power, God above, Trinity’s King.
God proved himself our liberation by his suffering,
God came to be imprisoned in humility.
Wise Lord, who will free us by Judgment Day,
Who will lead us to the feast through his mercy and sanctity
In paradise, in pure release from the burden of sin,
Who will bring us salvation through penance and the five wounds.
Terrible grief, God defended us when he took on flesh.
Man would be lost if the perfect rite had not redeemed him.
Through the Cross, blood-stained, came salvation to the world.
Christ, strong shepherd, his honor shall not fail.

The image at the top is the first folio of the Hendregadedd Manuscript, ‘the earliest witness of the works of the Gogynfeirdd’ (from the website of the National Library of Wales).

'Dewi Sant's Fellow Pilgrim'—St Teilo of Llandaff, Wales

Today, 22 February according to the original Orthodox calendar, we commemorate St Teilo (c. 500-560), bishop of Llandaff, Wales, a contemporary and cousin of St David (Dewi) of Wales (David Nash Ford calls them ‘close companions’). According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘Sir John Rhys thinks that his true name was Eliau or Eilliau [Eliud is also mentioned]; in Latin it usually appears as Teliarus, in Breton as Teliau, and in French as Télo.’ St Teilo received his education from St Dubricius (Dyfrig) and St Paulinus, and was placed in charge of the school at the monastery in Llandaff, a dependancy of St Dubricius’s monastery of Mochros. At some point St Teilo went with St Aeddan (brother of St Gildas the Wise), St David, and Ysfael (?) to Mynyw, where St David founded a monastery. At EBK we find the following wonderful story said to have taken place there:

An old tale is often told of how, while Teilo and Aeddan were reading in the cloister at Mynyw (St. Davids), they were called upon to replenish the monastery's fuel stores. Annoyed at having been drawn away from their studies, the two monks took their axes off to the woods; but found their task much easier than expected when two tame stags aided them in carrying the wood home.

Thanks to this story, it seems that St Teilo is often depicted in Brittany riding upon a stag (see the Breton statue above). The CE tells us that he is said to have gone with St Paternus on pilgrimage to the Holy Land c. 518 and to have been consecrated a bishop by Patriarch John III of Jerusalem (516-524), though Nash Ford claims it was Rome and the Pope. But it is true that St Teilo was consecrated at some point, because he replaced St Dubricius at his see when the latter withdrew to Bardsey Island to live in solitude and hesychia. During this period, St Teilo probably had his see at Llandeilo Fawr (‘Llandeilo’ meaning ‘Teilo’s Church’), where he founded a monastery.

In about 549, St Teilo fled with much of his flock to Brittany, where they were given hospitality by St Samson of Dol. According to Nash Ford:

From here, Teilo was persuaded by his brother-in-law, King Budic II, to join him in Cornouaille and save the country from the ravages of a winged dragon. Teilo supposedly tamed the creature and kept it tied to a rock in the sea. He stayed in Cornouaille for seven years, but eventually he felt it time to go back to Llandeilo Fawr—with his nephews, Ysfael and Tyfai—attending King Gerren upon his return.

St Teilo was away for a total of seven years and seven months before returning to Wales. After his return he acquired a reputation for exceptional holiness and attracted many disciples to Llandeilo. He reposed there around 560, and his relics were so coveted that they were said to have miraculously multiplied, being kept at Penally, Llandeilo, and Llandaff, in the cathedral of the last of which, according to Nash Ford, ‘His tomb can still be seen to the right of the high altar . . . , while his head is still kept enshrined in the south chapel.’ Unfortunately, the modern town of Llandeilo has done its Saint the terrible dishonour of posting a sceptical, condescending article on its patron Saint, more useful for illustrating the ongoing loss of Christian faith in Britain than for learning about St Teilo.

St Teilo is perhaps even more venerated in Brittany, where some of his relics were distributed. Concerning these, the CE tells us, ‘Today they are venerated at Landeleau (Finistère), Plogonnac (Finistère), and Saint Télo (Côtes-du-Nord). Five parish churches in Brittany are dedicated to him (Landeleau, Leuhan, Montertelot, Plédéliac, and Saint Télo) as well as a chapel between Plogonnac and Locronan.’

Here are a troparion and kontakion to the Saint, taken from this site:

Troparion, Tone 4: As a fountain of the true Faith, thou didst issue forth the life-giving waters of salvation, O Hierarch Teilo. Wherefore, we implore thee, intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.

Kontakion, Tone 1: O teacher of pure doctrine, joy of monastics and Dewi Sant's fellow pilgrim to Jerusalem, where thou wast elevated to the episcopate, most pious Father Teilo, we keep festival in thy honour, praying for grace to follow in thy footsteps.

Eden According to W.H. Auden

This is something I’ve had sitting around on my computer for a while. Despite, however, its tremendous appeal for me, I’ve still yet to attempt to give my own answers to the questionnaire. Perhaps I’m still just too enamoured of Auden’s. Personally, I think he should have been made dictator and given free reign (except maybe for the Roman Catholic thing). From W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 6-7:

Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures that we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else’s. All the judgments, aesthetic or moral, that we pass, however objective we try to make them, are in part a rationalization and in part a corrective discipline of our subjective wishes. So long as a man writes poetry or fiction, his dream of Eden is his own business, but the moment he starts writing literary criticism, honesty demands that he describe it to his readers, so that they may be in the position to judge his judgments. Accordingly, I must now give my answers to a questionnaire I once made up which provides the kind of information I should like to have myself when reading other critics.


Eden

Landscape: Limestone uplands like Pennines plus a small region of igneous rocks with at least one extinct volcano. A precipitous and indented sea-coast.

Climate: British.

Ethnic origin of inhabitants: Highly varied as in the United States, but with a slight Nordic predominance.

Language: Of mixed origins like English, but highly inflected.

Weights & Measures: Irregular and complicated. No decimal system.

Religion: Roman Catholic in an easygoing Mediterranean sort of way. Lots of local saints.

Size of Capital: Plato’s ideal figure, 5004, about right.

Form of Government: Absolute monarchy, elected for life by lot.

Sources of Natural Power: Wind, water, peat, coal. No oil.

Economic activities: Lead mining, coal mining, chemical factories, paper mills, sheep farming, truck farming, greenhouse horticulture.

Means of transport: Horses and horse-drawn vehicles, narrow-gauge railroads, canal barges, balloons. No automobiles or airplanes.

Architecture: State: Baroque. Ecclesiastical: Romanesque or Byzantine. Domestic: Eighteenth Century British or American Colonial.

Domestic Furniture and Equipment: Victorian except for kitchens and bathrooms which are as full of modern gadgets as possible.

Formal Dress: The fashions of Paris in the 1830’s and ‘40’s.

Sources of Public Information: Gossip. Technical and learned periodicals but no newspapers.

Public Statues: Confined to famous defunct chefs.

Public Entertainments: Religious processions, Brass Bands, Opera, Classical Ballet. No movies, radio or television.

An Obligatory Obligatory Post

Unfortunately, dear readers, I find that I’ve made plans or promises for a few different posts that I’ve not yet had time to work on. First and foremost is the post on the second lecture I saw by Fr Justin Sinaites. I’m not sure if I will be able to get all of the material I wanted, so I’m hoping to go ahead and work with what I have, sometime in the next week or so. Second, I mentioned in the ‘St Photius the Magus?’ post that I intended to post a little something from my thesis. I might actually do that before the Fr Justin post since it doesn’t involve writing anything, only formatting it and making some editorial changes.

There are probably others as well, but I recently told Andrea Elizabeth that I might post a quote which formed the nucleus of a college paper I wrote on ‘mystical language’, and I intend to fulfill that obligation now. She had expressed an interest in the paper itself, but an initial look in a box that seemed to contain most of my other college papers turned up nothing, and I’m not sure whether I would want to expose my juvenilia to the world anyway (or should I say ‘expose the world to my juvenilia’)!

At any rate, as I told Andrea Elizabeth, when I wrote the paper I was very caught up in some sort of attempt to describe aspects of the faith in highly 'intellectual' terms drawn from Russian and continental philosophy. I initially found this in Edith Wyschogrod’s very interesting Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1990), p. 49. Of course, even then I was rarely satisfied until I’d tracked down the source of an interesting quote, so using my 30% employee discount at Barnes & Noble I actually purchased the book she was quoting from (and giving the wrong page number from): the often baffling Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1997), by the French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau. According to de Certeau, ‘Mystic discourse is a modus loquendi. It is the outcome of an entire set of operations on and in the shared social text. It is an artifact (a production) created by the labor of putting language to death [italics his]’ (p. 159).

Now keep in mind that I did not read, and still have not read, the entire essay in which this passage appears. I interpreted it largely through the filter of its context in Wyschogrod, as well as my own undergraduate preoccupations, despite going through the trouble of obtaining the source.

'A Flower of Spiritual Regeneration'—St Sava II of Serbia

On this day, 8 February according to the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of our Holy and God-bearing Father, Sava II (1200-1271), Archbishop of Serbia, the nephew of the original St Sava of Serbia. St Sava II, born Predislav, was the son of the Holy King Stephen II Nemanjić, the First-Crowned, brother of St Sava the Elder. According to Fr Daniel Rogich’s Life, he ‘was surrounded by the great leaders and ascetics of the Serbian Orthodox Church, namely, his uncle Sava and the monks of Hilandar Monastery [Mt Athos] who often came to visit the Royal Court of Serbia’. Thus, it took no one by surprise when he ‘decided, at age 20, to leave the Royal Court in order to join the ranks of the pious ascetics and monastics on the Holy Mountain at the Serbian spiritual garden of Orthodoxy, Hilandar Monastery’ (Fr Daniel Rogich, Serbian Patericon: Saints of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Vol. I: January-April [Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994], pp. 165-6).

St Sava II joined Hilandar on 13 February 1220, and was soon tonsured a monk. Slavko Todorovich calls him an ‘authentic Chilandarian’ (The Chilandarians: Serbian Monks on the Green Mountain [Boulder: East European Monographs, 1989], p. 56). There, at the ‘Serbian Lavra’ this son of a king spent thirty years learning humility and obedience, performing the lowest tasks. According to Fr Rogich:

By his ascetical exercises—especially his reading of the teachings of the early Fathers and Ascetics of the Church—and by his participation in the liturgical/sacramental life of the Monastery, Sava was able to place himself in the spiritual position necessary to acquire the Holy Spirit, Who transformed him into a flower of spiritual regeneration. (p. 168)

No other outward events mark the life of St Sava II until 1250, when, at the age of 50, he received a blessing to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Returning three years later, he was told that he had been elected Bishop of Zahumlje (in Herzegovina), and was thus consecrated ‘at age 53, after many years of ascetic struggle in the Lord’ (Fr Rogich, p. 168).

Like his famous uncle before him, St Sava II truly shone in the episcopal ministry. According to Fr Rogich, his ‘pious life always preceded him, as he pastored and led more by example than by words’ (p. 168). He laboured for 13 years, caring for his flock by preaching, teaching, erecting churches, counseling the secular authorities, and establishing a school system. Todorovich gives us a glimpse of how difficult it must have been for him in Zahumlje:

There, Sava served in a double capacity: in addition to being the emissary of Archbishop Arsenije, he was the confidant of his brother, the King [Uroš I]. The Bishop was exposed to considerable pressures. On one side, he had to deal with assertive Papal missionaries in the area; on the other, there were those solidly entrenched Bosnian Bogomils. (p. 57)

But St Sava discharged his duty faithfully. He was so beloved that in 1266, St Sava was unanimously chosen the third Archbishop of Serbia, in which ministry he served the Church for five years before finally reposing in the Lord at the age of 71. Fr Rogich quotes from the Saint’s 14th-c. Life by Archbishop Daniel II—‘As everyone must give account for his talents, Holy Father Sava II can be assured of eternal glory as he unfailingly served his flock of Christ with all the gifts and talents God imparted to him’ (Fr Rogich, p. 169). Here is the lovely 'Hymn of Praise' for the Saint by St Nicholas (Velimirović) in the Prologue:

HYMN OF PRAISE
SAINT SAVA II, ARCHBISHOP OF THE SERBS

Predislav stared,
The young Predislav wept,
The Queen Mother asked him,
Where does your gaze roam?
At what are you looking, Predislav?
At Saint Sava, the face of my uncle.
King Stefan, to his son, said:
To marry you off my sweet son,
Time flows and, I am aging,
Whom do you love? Tell me the name!
And Predislav, to his father, listens
And about a wife, does not want to hear.
Predislav fashions himself as a monk
With the words of Christ, he is satisfied
And, Sava the Second, he was called,
Shedding tears and then speaks:
Saint Sava, place me
On the true Evangelical path!
The King and Queen died
And also Patriarch Arsenius,
The Church remained a widow
From honors, Sava hides
Upon him descended dual honors:
He was a bishop and also a saint.

Here are the texts of the Troparion and Kontakion in Serbian, from this site, and in English, from Fr Rogich’s book, pp. 164 and 173 respectively:

Тропар, гл. 4: Уздизање вере и образ кротости, и као дрво усред раја светим делима твојим свет си просветио, због тога ка часним моштима твојим са љубављу прилазимо, целивамо их и верно ти појемо: Буди у помоћи онима који у песмама величају свету и светлу успомену твоју, милостиви светитељу, оче Саво, и молимо те да се молиш Христу Богу да спасе душе наше.

Troparion, Tone 4: As guide of the faith and example of humility, and like a plant in the midst of Paradise, thou didst enlighten the world with thy venerable deeds, O Holy Father Sava, therefore, we lovingly venerate thy relics in thy tomb, and sing piously: come to the aid of those who praise thy holy and God-bearing memory, O Blessed Holy Father Sava; we beg thee to pray for the salvation of our souls.

Кондак, гл. 8: Као сапрестолник архијереја и изврсни поштовалац светитеља си био, светитељу Саво. Сачувај домовину, породицу, град овај и народ који те поштује са вером, и славним твојим моштима се поклања, да ти велегласно кличемо: Радуј се, Саво Богомудри!

Kontakion, Tone 8: Thou didst hold the throne of hierarch, O Holy Father Sava, and as thou wast a stronghold of the saints, thou didst protect thy homeland, habitation, city, and the people who piously honored and venerated thy precious relics; therefore, let us hymn thee in unison: Rejoice, O Sava, endowed with divine wisdom!

'The Confession of Faith is the Greatest of Virtues'

When I began to reread Fr Justin’s ‘Life of St Photios’ on Wednesday in order to write my post on that Saint, the very first paragraph I read struck me (Fr Justin [Popovich], ‘The Life of St Photios’, trans. Ronald Wertz, On the Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, by St Photius the Great, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery [NY: Studion, 1983], p. 33):

Our God-bearing Fathers, who governed all things in the Church of God in a proper and God-pleasing manner, have left to us as a sacred heritage the God-given teaching, just as they themselves had received from the Holy Apostles, that the confession and defense of the True Orthodox Faith is the greatest of virtues. No other virtue, they tell us, is so great before God and so profitable for the Church. For the Truth is God, and love and confession of God’s Truth—that is to say, the True Faith of the Church—frees, enlightens and saves us men. This holy teaching is proclaimed especially by those holy Fathers who spent their entire lives struggling to preserve Christ’s true and saving Faith, by which alone men are saved and enter eternal life. This holy tradition of the Fathers, confirmed, as it is, and testified to by their entire lives, offers the greatest lesson for our own generation, a generation which, lacking zeal ‘for the love of the Truth’, has grown cold and hardened in its indifference toward the correct Faith.

Of course, Fr Justin says this extraordinarily well, and with great boldness, but it’s something I managed to put together rather clumsily some years ago when asked to write a paper on ‘Ethos and Dogma in the Philokalia’. It seemed to me that these two categories can be seen in terms of a number of different relationships: dogma as the context of ethos, ethos as a type of dogma, dogma as a type of ethos, and ethos as a path to dogma. Fr Justin seems to be stating something like the third of these relationships. For me, this one appeared in two aspects: one of these of lesser significance, in which the ethical character of the practice of dogma is more accidental to the nature of dogma itself, and the other of greater significance, in which this ethical character is more proper to dogma.

The first aspect of this idea is in regard to ‘the confession and defense of the True Orthodox Faith’ (in Fr Justin’s words) by the average believer who is still struggling to undergo purification of the passions. For such people, the confession of the Faith, just the simple act of reciting and believing the Creed, is an ethical act exercising the virtue of humility. According to St Peter of Damascus (The Philokalia: The Complete Text, Vol. III, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, et al. [London: Faber, 1995], p. 138):

The person who has received the grace of spiritual knowledge knows that all things are ‘wholly good and beautiful’ (Gen i, 31); but he who possesses only the first glimmerings of such knowledge should recognize in all humility that he is ignorant and, as St John Chrysostom advises, he should admit on every occasion, ‘I do not know’....It is on this account that with firm faith and by questioning those with experience we should accept the doctrines of the Church and the decisions of its teachers, both concerning the Holy Scriptures and concerning the sensible and spiritual worlds.

But this is not all. According to Fr Justin ‘the confession and defense of the Truth Orthodox Faith’ is itself a virtue, not merely an act performed as an exercise of another virtue. It seems to me that this is true primarily in the sense of the second kind of faith that St Peter describes in his ‘Treasury of Divine Knowledge’, ‘the faith of contemplation [θεωρία] or spiritual knowledge [γνώσις]’ (Philokalia III, p. 213). In her wonderful book, Conversations With Children: Communicating Our Faith (Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 2001), pp. 294-295, Sister Magdalen of Essex writes:

Why do ‘I believe’ in the Creed I recite? Initially, because the saints have told me; but this answer must eventually change, so that each of you will say ‘I believe’ because you have become pure in heart, and have seen God for yourself; you have become a bearer of the Holy Tradition ‘which has been entrusted to you’, able to enrich its expression.

It seems to me that when this is attained, as it is by the Saints, the vision and knowledge of God, which is the proper activity of the intelligent part of the soul, and the confession of Faith become one, as the second flows from the first. The confession of Faith becomes the virtue of Faith itself.

Please forgive me, all, for speaking of things beyond my ken. I was really struck by the passage I quoted from Fr Justin, and wanted to post it, but I felt like I had to offer some of my own thoughts about it too, drawn from other things I’ve read.