'The Servant of God / Hero Hardy'—St Guthlac of Crowland

Today, 11 April on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of St Guthlac (c. 673-714), Hermit of Crowland. I first learned of St Guthlac through Fr Andrew Phillips, who writes of ‘Guthlac, another desert-father in spirit, who lived in the marshes and lonely fenlands of Lincolnshire, and fought a great war against that ancient foe of mankind, that Old Dragon, the Adversary, and who “spoke with the angels of the heavenly mysteries”, from whose mouth there came forth “a fragrance like unto the scent of the sweetest flowers” and whose passing away was marked by the appearance of “a fiery tower, reaching from the earth to the height of heaven, turning the light of the sun itself to paleness”’ (here). Here is the account of St Guthlac’s life in the Oxford Dictionary of Saints:

Guthlac (c. 673-714), hermit of Crowland (Lincs.). Of royal blood from the Mercian tribe of Guthlacingas, he became a soldier (C.S.P. called him robustus depraedator) from the age of fifteen, but after nine successful years gave up warfare to be a monk at Repton, a double monastery where some Mercian kings were buried, rule by Abbess Ælfirth. He was rather unpopular at first because of his total abstinence from intoxicating drink; later he was better appreciated. In about 701 he moved on to the solitary life at Crowland on a site accessible only by boat. Here his life resembled the regime of the Desert Fathers; annoyances included attacks by Britons who had taken refuge in the Fens, and violent temptations by devils; consolations were visions of angels and of his patron Bartholomew the Apostle. After fifteen years as a hermit, he knew that his death was near. Edburga, abbess of Repton, sent him a shroud and a leaden coffin. His sister Pega, an anchoress at Peakirk, came to his burial with his disciples Cissa, Bettelin, Egbert, and Tatwin, who occupied cells near by. A year later the grave was opened and the body found incorrupt. The Guthlac cult began, centred on his shrine at Crowland, to which Pega had given his psalter and scourge. [1] It soon became popular, with Wiglaf, king of Mercia (827-40), and Ceolnoth, archbishop of Canterbury (who was cured of ague by the saint in 851), among its devotees. The feast soon spread through Mercia to Westminster, St Albans, and Durham and eventually became general.

. . . The cult flourished also in the 12th century. His relics were translated in 1136 in the abbey church built on the site of his cell and the shrine was embellished with gold, silver, and jewels. Yet another translation took place in 1196. [2]

St Guthlac’s Life was recorded in Latin prose, as well as in Old English prose and verse. His various hagiographers early noted the the likeness of St Guthlac’s struggles with those of St Anthony the Great, and often recorded them in nearly identical terms. Here is a passage from the Old English poem, Guthlac B:

Oft were the fens by foul fiends haunted;
Hordes of demons, dark and menacing,
Swarmed round the spot where the saint of God,
Dauntless of courage, kept his abode.
Filled was the air with uproar confused;
Riotous battle-din raised in the wilderness
The fiendish rout, bereft of all beauty,
Sundered from joy. But the servant of God,
Hero hardy, the hellish rabble
Boldly defied. They fled for a space,
Not long the delay; the loathly guests,
The trouble-smiths, quickly the turmoil renewed
With yelpings loud and long-drawn yells.
At times they would bellow like beasts of prey,
Or howl in troops; at times they would change
Into human form, the fierce man-haters,
With deafening clamor, or don the shape
Of creeping serpents, those spirits accurst,
Spewing venom, the vile deceivers.
Yet Guthlac ever on guard they found;
Watchful and wary, he waited in patience,
Though the thronging demon-bands threatened to slay him. [3]

The reference to St Guthlac’s ‘watchfulness’ is a reminder of the hesychastic nature of his struggles. Similarly, although considered a characteristic of the ‘folk psychology’ of the Anglo-Saxons and not as a universal part of the Christian ascetic lexicon, [4] it has been noted that the Old English poems on St Guthlac are explicitly concerned with what we as Orthodox can only call the Saint’s noetic activity. Antonina Harbus writes:

The narrative of Guthlac A is predicated on the ideas that the mental life is at the heart of spiritual existence, and is the site of grace and therefore of commerce with the divine. . . . In the model of faith offered in this poetic saint’s life and also in its narrative presentation, conscious mental focus on the divine is the major priority. [5]

But surely 7th- and 8th-c. English monks could have got this from St Cassian, who in Institutes 8.X speaks of how ‘the mind (that is, the nous or reason) . . . surveys all the thoughts and judgments of the heart’. [6] Unfamiliarity with the terms and theory of Christian ascetic theology has apparently even led to some outright confusion on the part of scholars of Old English hagiography whose focus is so exclusively philological. As Thomas Hill notes:

There has been some debate recently about whether the Guthlac A poet believed Guthlac was troubled by ‘real’ demons or whether the demons are in effect emblems of Guthlac’s inner conflicts. This debate seems to me misguided. I know of no early medieval Christian authority who doubted the existence and malign influence of demons, but at the same time patristic and early medieval Christians were profoundly aware that it is precisely our own inner conflicts which render us vulnerable to such forces. [7]

I myself was inspired by the Old English vernacular poems on St Guthlac’s Life, and produced my own—mercifully brief—alliterative poem several years ago. I entitled it ‘Osbeorh’, and the final revision I recorded was done on 3 April 2004 (pardon me that I can’t reproduce the characteristic caesuras):

In wilderness wild, in woods and bogs,
In deserts and fens, undredged their murks,
Those seeking virtue venture unsought,
Daring to fight the dragon in gloom;
Our foe most fearsome, the fens a-haunting,
A host he calls the hero to fell.
The dwimmer of beasts display themselves,
Framing and fashioning fiends accursed.
Battles untold in barrow are fought,
Prepared of old for pagan dead,
Hewn out of hillock, a harrowing den,
Dwelling in darkness, his deeds unknown,
A sea of mists concealing the Holy,
A stout heart might stagger, stooped under hardship.
But habit and cowl, when crossed with the rood,
Will slip from the fingers of fiendish ghosts.
Thus many a year the Mercy he delves
In chapel of green o’ergrown with soft tufts,
Till lit with light, such letters he finds
To spell with glory the God-words he heard,
Outstripping the science of senses and grammar,
Till songs of the Saint were sung by our people—
Chants now forgotten, though godly and pure,
Of sanctity’s sleep in silence now dreamed,
Long promised by prophets who passed on of old.

In conclusion, here is a troparion for St Guthlac from the canon at Matins in the Service to All Saints of Britain in Moss’s Saints of England’s Golden Age:

Thy tears in the wilderness brought forth fruit an hundredfold, O Holy Father Guthlac, and by the weapon of thy prayers thou didst conquer demons and receive from Heaven the Grace to heal the diseases of those who honour thee. [8]

[1] David Farmer notes that the scourge ‘was not for self-flagellation but for use as a defensive and offensive weapon against diabolical attacks’ (The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th ed. [Oxford: Oxford U, 2004], pp. 239-40). The incident is depicted in the image at the top taken from the late 12th-c. Harleian Roll Y.6 at the British Museum, usually called the ‘Guthlac Roll’.

[2] Ibid., p. 239.

[3] J. Duncan Spaeth, Old English Poetry: Translations into Alliterative Verse with Introductions & Notes (Princeton: Princeton U, 1922), pp. 107-8 (here).

[4] Antonina Harbus, The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (NY: Rodopi, 2002), p. 3 (here).

[5] Ibid., p. 107 (here).

[6] St John Cassian, The Institutes, tr. Boniface Ramsey, OP (NY: Newman, 2000), p. 198.

[7] Thomas D. Hill, ‘The Middle Way: Idel-Wuldor & Egesa in the Old English Guthlac A’, The Review of English Studies XXX.118 (1979), p. 182 (here).

[8] Vladimir Moss, Saints of England’s Golden Age: A Collection of the Lives of Holy Men & Women Who Flourished in Orthodox Christian Britain (Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1997), p. 242.

'The Better Swordsman'—Andrew Marvell, Part 2

Continued from this post.

The second poem I’d like to post is Marvell’s ‘The Garden’, which is probably more well known than ‘Clorinda & Damon’. Marvell wrote it while living at Appleton House (the subject of its own poem), the estate of the Commander-in-Chief of Cromwell’s armies, Lord Fairfax, tutoring the latter’s daughter. This fact causes Tillyard to note that Marvell should not be too closely associated with the Parliamentarians, for despite his support of their cause and his admiring poems on Cromwell, Fairfax was retired at Appleton at this time because ‘he could not longer co-operate with Cromwell’. In Tillyard’s words, ‘Marvell was anything but a mere partisan even though he took part in practical politics.’ [1] Here is the text:

‘The Garden’

How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays; [2]
And their uncessant labors see
Crowned from some single herb or tree:
Whose short and narrow vergèd shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid;
While all flowers and all trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men.
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow.
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen
So am’rous as this lovely green. [3]
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress’ name.
Little, alas, they know, or heed,
How far these beauties hers exceed!
Fair Trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound,
No names shall but your own be found.

When we have run our passion’s heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat:
The gods who mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race.
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow,
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph, but for a reed.

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.

Such was that happy garden-state,
While man there walked without a mate:
After a place so pure and sweet,
What other help could yet be meet!
But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share
To wander solitary there:
Two paradises ’twere in one
To live in Paradise alone.

How well the skillful gard’ner drew
Of flowers and herbs this dial new;
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And, as it works, th’ industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers! [4]

White et al comment on ‘The Garden’ and Marvell’s ‘garden poems’ generally, at some length in their brief introduction to him:

. . . The vivid immediate experience of these poems, as fresh as one of Montaigne’s explorations of himself, is set in a deep context not only moral and religious, but philosophical. Garden literature in his day [5] had roots in the Stoic-Epicurean retirement from the ambition, passion, and selfishness of the world, by the nourishment of sentimental melancholy. The French libertine poets were being read in Fairfax’s circle. In deep contrast to their view of the garden, and in profound difference of temper from the first, was a Christian devotional tradition which had from early times transformed the celebration of spring into a symbol of Easter and the Resurrection, and which read the immediately sensed beauty of nature as a book of the creatures, awaking thought and contemplation to the goodness and beauty of God. This view was closely associated with the allegorical interpretation of ‘The Song of Songs’ as an expression of the love of God and the soul. One of its most characteristic symbols was that of the soul in contemplation as a ‘hortus conclusus’ or enclosed garden. . . . [6]

For Kermode too, the ‘sensed beauty of nature’ is not sufficient by itself to recommend the enclosure of the garden:

. . . [T]he garden provides more than a mirror of creation, since it also enables the mind to withdraw from sensibilia and produce its own fantasies, establishing worlds other than the visible. Thus begins a formal garden ecstasy; but there is still an element of antithesis carried over from the earlier wit: this ascending love is traditionally, in the familiar Platonic formula, contrasted with that which descends to mere sensual contact. The soul, ascended, is as it were between the worlds, like a bird on a bough; the figure was used by Spenser, also. It is poised between the white light of eternity and the varieties of color that light assumes in the creation. . . . [7]

Although his emphasis is less on the ancient tradition and more on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, E.M.W. Tillyard is very much in line with Kermode’s (and thus, Eliot’s) approach. Tillyard refers to ‘retirement from the busy world to a retreat, preferably in the country, from which to study the glories of God as revealed in nature and to contemplate the approach of death’ as one of the great myths of English literature. [8] Of Marvell’s ‘Garden’ he says that it is ‘a typical “retirement” poem, embodying the commonplaces of the kind: the futility of the crowd of the ambitious, the barren suffering of the lover, the innocence of the country retreat, its near recapture of the innocence of Paradise, and its virtue in promoting a state of spiritual exaltation.’ [9]

In his brief comments about the unusual spectacle of a retirement poem penned by a Parliamentarian, Tillyard mentions Marvell’s close friendship with ‘a poet very much on the opposite side’—Richard Lovelace. [10] Lovelace is the addressee of a poem which I won’t post in full, but from which I’d like to excerpt some lines to conclude this post. Here are the first sixteen lines of ‘To His Noble Friend, Mr Richard Lovelace, upon His Poems’:

Sir,
Our times are much degenerate from those
Which your sweet muse, which your fair fortune chose,
And as complexions alter with the climes,
Our wits have drawn th’ infection of our times.
That candid age no other way could tell
To be ingenious, but by speaking well.
Who best could praise, had then the greatest praise,
’Twas more esteemed to give, than wear the bays;
Modest ambition studied only then
To honor not herself, but worthy men.
These virtues now are banished out of town;
Our Civil Wars have lost the civic crown.
He highest builds, who with most art destroys,
And against others’ fame his own employs.
I see the envious caterpillar sit
On the fair blossom of each growing wit. [11]

This is the note I would like to end on. I see the conscious dedication of the verbal arts to the act of praise as a sorely needed antidote to our own days of cynicism and the lowest common denominator.


[1] E.M.W. Tillyard, Myth & the English Mind: From Piers Plowman to Edward Gibbon (Being the Clark Lectures 1959-60) (NY: Collier, 1962), p. 74.

[2] Frank Kermode notes here that the foliage of the trees listed constitutes ‘rewards for achievement in war, statesmanship, [and] poetry’, respectively (Frank Kermode, ed., The Selected Poetry of Marvell [NY: New American Library, 1967], p. 107).

[3] On Marvell’s references to green, Kermode comments, ‘The poem makes the green of the garden stand for solitude against crowds, retirement against action, sensual delight free of sexual pursuit, the satisfaction of the senses against that of the mind; it is not the green of hope, the benedicta viriditas of alchemy, the green of the hermetic emerald, but the poem’s green’ (pp. xx-xxi).

[4] Ibid., pp. 107-10.

[5] Most of which was, interestingly, written by Royalists rather than supporters of Cromwell and Parliament, like Marvell. In fact, Tillyard notes that only its ‘exceptional poetic quality’ and its author’s politics make Marvell’s ‘Garden’ stand out from others of its kind (Tillyard, p. 74).

[6] Helen C. White, Ruth C. Wallerstein, & Ricardo Quintana, Seventeenth-Century Verse & Prose, Vol. 1: 1600-1660 (NY: Macmillan, 1965), p. 454.

[7] Kermode, pp. xxi-xxii.

[8] Tillyard, p. 65. I found this one of the most fascinating parts of Tillyard’s book. I may have to post on it some more. I’d forgotten how neat it was!

[9] Ibid., p. 74.

[10] Ibid., p. 74.

[11] Kermode, p. 148.

'Remember Me a Little Then I Pray'—William Morris

Now that I’ve used up much of my best hagiographical material, I’ve been trying to think of another regular ‘feature’ I could introduce so I’m not just posting on willy-nilly topics all of the time. I believe I’ve found one. A couple of times now when I’ve checked out with my purchases at Half Price Books, they’ve given me a wall calendar. Based on a polar bear theme, the aesthetics of the thing have not appealed to me much, but upon closer examination I’ve noticed two things of interest: a number of 15%-off coupons, and the names of a writer or two listed for every day—the days of their birth. Many of these are the sort that appeal to the lit majors at the typical American university these days, but others are writers of real merit.

I have decided to try posting on these whenever they interest me. I do hope that the more regular posts on literary figures won’t chase off too many Orthodox readers who are primarily interested in Orthodox matters. I hope to continue to post occasionally on Saints, and more frequently on patristic writings and moral and theological issues. I also have no intention of abandoning my occasional attempts to relate Orthodoxy and literature, whether on a superficial or a deeper level. The only question is what to do with the calendar so I can check it regularly without actually hanging it!

So the first to catch my attention after I noticed this intriguing little feature was William Morris (1834-1896), who, of all of those associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, displays to the greatest degree the sixth characteristic with which James Merritt has identified their work: ‘Deliberate “medievalism”, such as the use of vaguely medieval-sounding words, or the use of settings that, though unidentified, seem pre-Renaissance.’ [1] Peter Ackroyd notes that Morris ‘was described as possessing a “medievalised mind and turn of thought”’. [2]

In their anthology of Victorian prose and poetry, Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom observe, ‘Morris is remembered today more for his personality, energies, Socialist politics, and vision of the arts (in which he followed Ruskin) than for either his verse or prose romances, which is a pity.’ [3] Remembered, that is, among academics and intellectuals. Among most people, if Morris is known at all, I’d say he’s known almost solely for his wallpaper, which is a great pity. This is not to say that he didn’t design great wallpaper, just that he did so many other things. Here is the brief sketch of Morris’s life—by George R. Creeger—in W.H. Auden’s anthology, 19th-Century British Minor Poets:

An enormously talented individual, Morris was competent at nearly everything that excited his interest, from architecture and domestic furnishings to poetry. Born into comfortable circumstances, he was educated at Marlborough College (a relatively new public school that permitted greater intellectual freedom and experimentation than the older ones) and at Oxford, where he came into association with [Dante Gabriel] Rossetti and [Edward] Burne-Jones, and where he showed great skill in writing poetry. No sketch can do justice to the incredible diversity of his career. Even in concentrating upon its poetic aspects, one can do little more than mention the publication, in 1858, of The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems; in 1868-70, The Earthly Paradise; in 1870, his translation of the Völsunga Saga; and in 1876, Sigurd the Volsung. [4]

Morris wrote, did, and said so many things, that I am only able to mention a few of them. As his physician said after his death in 1896, the cause of death was ‘simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.’ [5] So I shall confine myself to the poetry, and the ‘vision of the arts’. Concerning the first, Trilling and Bloom write:

Morris derives from a whole series of major 19th-c. poets—Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and Rossetti—but his directness, detachment in depicting savagery, and ability to convey swiftly the effect of violent action are entirely his own, and still unique in the language . . . . Medieval poems by Morris are utterly unlike Tennyson’s; the blood shed in them is not word painting, and the freedom from intrusive moral judgments is absolute. Morris is one of the very few poets ever who can be criticized for not being ambitious enough. His poems demonstrate more genius than he was willing to concentrate. If his interests had been fewer, his poetry would have sprawled less, and meant more, but he valued his other enterprises at least as much as he cared for his poetry. [6]

Here are three examples of Morris’s verse, from shortest to longest. The first is taken from his romance, The Hollow Land, and the last from the collection, The Earthly Paradise. [7]

Song

Christ keep the Hollow Land
Through the sweet springtide,
When the apple-blossoms bless
The lowly bent hill side.

Christ keep the Hollow Land
All the summer-tide;
Still we cannot understand
Where the waters glide:

Only dimly seeing them
Coldly slipping through
Many green-lipped cavern mouths
Where the hills are blue. [8]


Summer Dawn

Pray but one prayer for me ’twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars.
The summer night waneth, the morning light slips,
Faint and grey ’twixt the leaves of the aspen, betwixt the cloud-bars,
That are patiently waiting there for the dawn:
Patient and colourless, though Heaven’s gold
Waits to float through them along with the sun.
Far out in the meadows, above the young corn,
The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold
The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;
Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn.
Round the lone house in the midst of the corn.
Speak but one word to me over the corn,
Over the tender, bowed locks of the corn. [9]


From The Earthly Paradise

Apology
Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years,
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.

But rather, when aweary of your mirth,
From full hearts still unsatisfied ye sigh,
And, feeling kindly unto all the earth,
Grudge every minute as it passes by,
Made the more mindful that the sweet days die—
Remember me a little then I pray,
The idle singer of an empty day.

The heavy trouble, the bewildering care
That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,
These idle verses have no power to bear;
So let me sing of names rememberèd,
Because they, living not, can ne’er be dead,
Or long time take their memory quite away
From us poor singers of an empty day.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

Folk say, a wizard to a northern king
At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show,
That through one window men beheld the spring,
And through another saw the summer glow,
And through a third the fruited vines a-row,
While still, unheard, but in its wonted way,
Piped the drear wind of that December day.

So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be;
Whose ravening monsters mighty men shall slay,
Not the poor singer of an empty day. [10]

Of course, I should hasten to admit that, while I am certainly a fan of Morris’s lyrics, I have not read any of his longer pieces (though at a shop near the British Museum I bought a wonderful Dover facsimile of Morris’s own Kelmscott Press edition—pictured above—of his Wood Beyond the World), and it is at least as much his ‘vision of the arts’ that interests me in him as his poetry. My introduction to this vision came primarily through a book on interior decoration—The Beautiful Necessity: Decorating with Arts & Crafts, by Bruce Smith and Yoshiko Yamamoto. In the introduction, the authors write:

Still, the true genesis of the Arts and Crafts movement was in England, not America, and primarily in the work of William Morris, the English poet, designer, and social reformer. As an undergraduate at Oxford, Morris had read and was inspired by the writings of the art critic John Ruskin, especially his influential chapter ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in The Stones of Venice, which was published during Morris’s time at Oxford. Ruskin, with his criticism of industrialization, his total rejection of the machine, and especially his belief that society could be saved only if one could change the nature of work, lit a fire in Morris that set the direction of his life’s work. Morris not only became adept at crafts, from designing wallpaper to the dyeing of cloth and the weaving of tapestries, but he preached his ideals, providing inspiration in turn for others around him and for those who followed. [11]

But there is more to Morris’s ‘vision of the arts’ than criticising the industrial revolution and learning of crafts. It is important to understand why Morris values crafts. Unlike that high ‘art’ which is largely considered the domain of snobs and geniuses in our day, Morris believed that crafts are the art that innocuously enriches—or at least should enrich—the life of ordinary people. In an 1880 lecture entitled ‘The Beauty of Life’, he writes:

So much is now known of the periods of art that have left abundant examples of their work behind them, that we can judge of the art of all periods by comparing these with the remains of times of which less has been left us; and we cannot fail to come to the conclusion that down to very recent days everything that the hand of man touched was more or less beautiful: so that in those days all people who made anything shared in art, as well as all people who used the things so made: that is, all people shared in art. [12]

To the objection that making art the business of all men was to make it too ‘intrusive’, Morris responds:

But indeed there seems no chance of art becoming universal, unless on the terms that it shall have little self-consciousness, and for the most part be done with little effort; so that the rough work of the world would be as little hindered by it, as the work of external nature is by the beauty of all her forms and moods: this was the case in the times that I have been speaking of: . . . . [13]

What Morris is talking about here, when he speaks of art having ‘little self-consciousness’, is what he calls the ‘lesser arts’—the craft of making furnishings and decorations, ‘those arts with whose products men are in touch every moment of their daily lives’, in Trilling’s and Bloom’s words. [14] Later in the same lecture I have been quoting, Morris writes:

I have spoken of the popular arts, but they might all be summed up in that one word Architecture; they are all parts of that great whole, and the art of house-building begins it all [see Morris’s ‘Red House’ to the left]: if we did not know how to dye or to weave; if we had neither gold, nor silver, nor silk; and no pigments to paint with, but half-a-dozen ochres and umbers, we might yet frame a worthy art that would lead to everything, if we had but timber, stone, and life, and a few cutting tools to make these common things not only shelter us from wind and weather, but also express the thoughts and aspirations that stir in us. [15]

It is interesting to note that in another lecture, ‘Art & the Beauty of the Earth’ (1881), Morris emphasises that when practicing such crafts, one must ‘try to get the most out of your material, but always in such a way as honours it most. Not only should it be obvious what your material is, but something should be done with it which is specially natural to it, something that could not be done with any other.’ He adds, ‘This is the very raison d’être of decorative art . . . .’ [16]


Although I’m afraid a detailed discussion and comparison might make this post a bit long, I think there is much here for Orthodox to consider. In my opinion, Morris’s ‘vision of art’ overlaps a good deal with that of the Orthodox Church, and some of these ideas remind me of specific passages in modern theologians I’ve read (I’m thinking primarily of Chrestos Yannaras and Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron).

But these last observations naturally raise the question of Morris’s religious convictions. According to Trilling and Bloom, while he had entered Exeter influenced by ‘a devout sister’ with the aim of proceeding to holy orders, ‘So far as can be discerned, once Morris had made his decision [to dedicate himself to art], religion was for him a dead issue, and the influence of its idiom is not to be traced in his prose, as it so readily is in the prose, as it so readily is in the prose of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold.’ [17] I have not read it through, but a bit of browsing through the study of William Morris by the famous Communist historian, E.P. Thompson, [18] suggests that he makes little mention of religion, as one might expect. For Thompson, it seems to have been a temptation of Morris’s youth, for, ‘Religion of all varieties was deeply compromised by the same evils’, and its ‘lure . . . began to fade’. He quotes an 1855 comment from Cormell Price that ‘Morris has become questionable in doctrinal points’, and then tells of Morris’s decision to turn to art. [19]

But I shall allow a more optimistic, if naïve, New York Times piece of 1900 (here) to have the last word. Responding to a letter from a reader asking precisely this question, and mentioning certain ‘sentences and paragraphs’ in Mackall’s 2-vol. biography, the author speaks of feeling ‘certain of the deep religious feeling underlying Morris’s nature—perhaps not the conventional ideas of an orthodox Christian, for the reason that his religious principles seem to have been so entirely expressed in deeds, not words’. The author remarks upon the great ‘influence’ of the Anglo-Catholic movement on Morris. But he tells us, unfortunately, that ‘art and literature, from being considered merely the handmaids of religion, came to be considered as worth pursuing for their own sake’, and that the young Morris had originally hoped to found a monastery and even to devote himself to a semi-monastic existence in some kind of ‘order’, but which ‘gradually broadened into . . . a social brotherhood.’ While the utopian, even chiliastic element of socialism cannot be denied, the author discerns ‘strong ethical Christianity’ in the political activity of Morris’s later years. Finally, the author concludes that ‘Morris’s desire on one occasion to be kept from the narrowing influence of the world, so that he might look at things “bigly and kindly”, was so well borne out that his whole life would seem but another and tacitly expressed proof of William Morris’s essential faith in religion.’

I for one have my doubts, but I certainly hope that it is so.

Addendum: It occurred to me that the uninitiated, reading this post, might come away not realising that all of the images here are of things that Morris himself designed or created directly. Even the book is not merely the edition of some clever publisher, but of Morris himself, who designed, illustrated, typeset, and even bound it. This is followed by a Morris tapestry, a house designed by Morris, the William Morris workshop, and a stained-glass window designed by Morris.


[1] James D. Merritt, ed., The Pre-Raphaelite Poem (NY: E.P. Dutton, 1966), p. 12.

[2] Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (NY: Doubleday, 2003), p. 185.

[3] Lionel Trilling & Harold Bloom, eds., The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Victorian Prose & Poetry (NY: Oxford U, 1974), p. 617.

[4] W.H. Auden, ed., 19th-Century British Minor Poets, notes by George R. Creeger (NY: Delacorte, 1966), pp. 373-4. The publications mentioned were early inspirations for C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The latter attended Morris’s college at Oxford—Exeter—and bought Morris’s The Life & Death of Jason, his translation of the Volsungasaga, and his prose-and-verse romance The House of the Wolfings, with prize money from an award for undergraduates (Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography [London: HarperCollins, 1995], p. 77). W.B. Yeats said of the prose romances that they were ‘so great a joy that they were the only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come quickly to the end’ (Trilling & Bloom, p. 290).

[5] Ibid., p. 290.

[6] Ibid., p. 618.

[7] E.P. Thompson’s description of the last is intriguing. In William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (NY: Monthly Review, 1961), he writes:

The Earthly Paradise is a collection of twenty-four poetic narratives, of greatly varying lengths, and from many sources, classical, Eastern, medieval, and Norse. They are grouped in pairs for each month of the year, prefaced by verses for the month. As in The Canterbury Tales, the poems are bound together by a slender narrative. (p. 144)

[8] Auden, p. 273.

[9] Trilling & Bloom, p. 648.

[10] Ibid., pp. 651-2.

[11] Bruce Smith & Yoshiko Yamamoto, The Beautiful Necessity: Decorating with Arts & Crafts (Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith, 1996), pp. 22-3.

[12] Trilling & Bloom, p. 293.

[13] Ibid., p. 293.

[14] Ibid., p. 289.

[15] Ibid., p. 306.

[16] Gillian Naylor, ed., William Morris by himself: Designs & writings (NY: Barnes & Noble, 2004), p. 153.

[17] Trilling & Bloom, p. 288.

[18] On Thompson, I really appreciated the opening paragraph of a piece by Michael Weiss at The New Criterion (here):

The late E.P. Thompson is not a man I would imagine finds much favor in these pages. The reformist Communist who needed the Soviet invasion of Hungary to give up the Party; the founding editor New Left Review, who fell out with that sodality after an arcane spat with its younger generation; the loser in a major intellectual debate with the great Polish anatomist of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski. Yet Thompson is also remembered for a phrase which conservatives might consider stealing: ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. . . .

Every historian should have as his guiding principle so generous an estimation of his subject [as Thompson’s].

[19] Thompson, p. 56.

Albion Giveaway Results!

Well, yesterday was the Sunday of St Mary of Egypt, which means the big day has arrived! It is time to announce the winner of the first-ever Logismoi book giveaway contest! Participation was not as good as I’d hoped, but there were some strong entries which actually exceeded my expectations (Jonathan Barker actually withdrew his entry when he saw some of the others!). I shall name the winner, and then explain how I went about judging (just know that any protests are at this point entirely ineffectual!), posting all of the entries beginning with the winner, and continuing in the order in which I discuss them. So without further ado, the winner is:

Subdeacon Lucas!

The good minor cleric has submitted an entry which most closely matches what I was looking for. His argument is abstruse and his conclusion humourous. There is absolutely no way that Blake intended Albion’s error to be dry humour, and yet it fits the bill. Kudos, Subdeacon Lucas!

Blake himself has cryptically supplied the answer to the question of Albion’s error in acrostic fashion within his verses. The beginning of each line spells: T-O-R-R-T-H-J-B.

Now, we understand that in Greek, ‘H’ is an eta, usually transcribed as an ‘I’, and ‘B’ is pronounced as a ‘V’; we come to the following:

‘TORRTIV’ (recall, that the Germans have caused no end of grief with transcribing ‘I’s as ‘J’s for which we have ‘J’erusalem and ‘J’acob in English. therefore, the J more properly elides into the ‘I’)

‘Torr’ is Swedish for ‘dry’, and the clear reason for his use of Swedish here is because of his connection to the work of Emanuel Swedenborg.

The second word, ‘Tiv’, is Romanian for ‘hem’. (The connection here is Romania’s inclusion of Blake on one of their stamps). ‘Hem’ is homophonic with the sound made when politely clearing one’s throat after hearing a particularly bad joke, which leads us to Blake’s own answer to the question of Albion’s (England’s) Error:

Dry humour.

Ivan Tarter was probably the 1st runnner-up on the criterion of conformity to my assignment. I also really like the pretense of consulting manuscripts. But his entry lacked the directness and firm conclusion of the winning entry. Sorry, Ivan! You can always borrow the hardcover edition from me….

After much consultation of all the primary manuscripts and extensive parlay with the world’s most prestigious scholars of eighteenth century English literature (and in particular, the Blake scholars), I have concluded the following:

Albion is fictional English fellow who has journeyed to Ulro, the mythical ‘land of clowns’ (cf. co-ulrophobia, fear of clowns). The modern circus originated in the eighteenth century in London, and this passage deals profoundly with the ethical issues raised by the existence of the ‘clown’ figure. Like the manager of the modern Western world, the clown was the figure whose societal role typified the English persona of that time. A counterbalance to the Enlightenment bourgeois university student, the clown signified accentricity, unstability, and errationality.

To interpret the passage: Albion ‘erred’ (read: wandered) into the country of Ulro, seeking, as the English are apt to do, the comforts of its married women (Beulah). However, his licentious tastes are accompanied by equally potent dangers. If he does not remove himself, a lengthy stay risks his becoming a clown himself, thus losing hope of passage to heaven (since clowns do not have souls). They are, as the passage later states, ‘dead.’

The harrow (read: ‘rake’) refers metaphorically to one of the dissolute, married women in Ulro. While her sisters are taking Albion into bed (where, with women on either side, he will be unable to reason clearly), she will run to the male clowns and rally them into a mob. By them, Albion will be captured and tortured. Their motive? Malice, I suppose.

The very name ‘Albion’ (lit. ‘I’ll be on [top]’) suggests a close relationship between a sexuality governed solely by instinct and animal desire, and the symbolic irrationality of the clown. In this passage, England’s infamous profligacy of this time period is being weighed, and found wanting (or rather, wanton). The cost is too great; the very soul of England is at stake.

Fortunately, Albion chooses to refuse the wiles of the voluptuous clown women, and instead to leave Ulro forever. He is neither captured by the clown men, nor does he become a clown himself, but rather turns away. The English writer the considers the clown’s portent and urges his countrymen to turn away and walk, in a manner of speaking, the higher road.

Fr Mark Christian’s answer should be applauded for its poetic format. But more importantly, it is his answer which resonates most with me, if I were to diregard the intentio auctoris as well as the intentio operis and simply respond honestly to the question. But it is much too serious for the purposes of this contest!

For in the Last Day his error was revealed:
Passionately aiming
For the courtly grandeur of Logres,
Once-noble Albion missed his mark
And endured great shame... reformed? renewed?
Nay, diminished and mired!
Pinned and withering in the soul-stunting
Environs of Lilliput and Blefesco...

Christopher Orr has produced more lines than Fr Mark did, and while I can’t say his response resonates with me quite as much, it cannot be denied that it is probably closer to the mark, or at least more penetrating, from a spiritual perspective. If there had been more entries, no doubt Orr’s would not have been second-to-last.

An answer, in anarchic metre, perhaps delusionalia:

Blake’s perswasive
Prophet’s voice,
Alba’s Jonah’s jeremiad.
‘Arise’, he heard, ‘and go;
‘Go to Albion and cry:
‘Against! against your wickedness
Your sin, your multitud’nous sin
It’s risen up on high!’
Blake’s prelest, accidental truth proclaims:
‘Turn, turn Brittania chosen!
One Error not remov’d
Destroys the fully human.
Believe in God,
Proclaim a fast,
From greatest to the least.
Cry to God in dynamis!
Turn ye full away
From your evil way!
Who can tell if God, yet, too,
Will turn away today;
Turn away his anger fierce
Our Judgment to allay!’
Error great and error small, errors of all kind.
Suggestion lone is error not,
Passion, Action be;
Error, e’en attachment, too,
Is error ’nough to damn;
Unremov-ed sympathy destroys humanity.
The human Soul’s destroy’d,
Dying, dead, again.
Alas, too, Nations be composite
Of her Souls she be,
Its sum of Error(s) and of Fall(s):
Last Judgments final be–
Forewarned, ye all!

Finally, last but not least, Atychi’s entry is, I am almost certain, the ‘correct’ one. I think he has discovered what Blake himself truly meant. But I’m afraid he must be disqualified for precisely that reason. Nevertheless, the entry stands as a testimony to a gifted interpreter of poetry.

I believe the answer is found at the very beginning of Chapter 2, ‘Jerusalem’ (Plate 28):

‘Every ornament of perfection, and every labour of love,
In all the Garden of Eden, & in all the golden mountains
Was become an envied horror, and a resemblance of jealousy:
And every Act a Crime, and Albion the punisher & judge.

And Albion spoke from his secret seat and said

“All these ornaments are crimes. They are made by the labours
Of loves: of unnatural consanguinities and friendships
Horrid to think of when inquired deeply into; and all
These hills and valleys are accursed witnesses of Sin.
I therefore condense them into solid rocks steadfast! . . .”’

This is his ‘Error’. He was too harsh and ripped the land out of its ‘post-lapsarian’ Edenic existence. He’s being asked to repent from his overly harsh judgment so that the hills and valleys return, so that a proper sense of sensuality can return. Away with the sublime and turn back to the Beautiful.

Thank you all for your participation. I very much enjoyed reading your entries. If I had consolation prizes, I would send them. Subdeacon Lucas, e-mail me your shipping address and I will send the book—this week, I hope!

'Of Twilight Time'—Samuel Palmer in Word & Image

I’ve mentioned English artist Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) here before: in this post about his painting, ‘Coming from Evening Church’, and in this one, where I used one of his engravings to illustrate Alcman of Sparta’s ‘Night’. Peter Ackroyd, in his enchanting Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (a copy of which I am currently looking to give away), tells us:

Samuel Palmer was decisively influenced by the poetry of John Milton, and with his etchings illustrated ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’; all his life he tried to re-create the ‘Valley of Vision’ [1] filled with the shadows cast by moonlight and the dark foliage of overhanging trees. [2]

This theme can obviously be seen in the painting above—Palmer’s ‘Cornfield in Moonlight’. But it seems he followed the same preoccupations in verse as well. A browse through W.H. Auden’s anthology, 19th-Century British Minor Poets, yielded the following delightful piece from Palmer:

Shoreham: Twilight Time

And now the trembling light
Glimmers behind the little hills and corn,
Ling’ring as loth to part; yet part thou must
And though than open day far pleasing more
(Ere yet the fields and pearlèd cups of flowers
Twinkle in the parting light; )
Thee night shall hide, sweet visionary gleam
That softly lookest through [3] the rising dew;
Till all like silver bright
The faithful witness, pure and white,
Shall look o’er yonder grassy hill,
At this village, safe and still.
All is safe and all is still,
Save what noise the watch-dog makes
Or the shrill cock the silence breaks.
Now and then—
And now and then—
Hark! Once again,
The wether’s bell [4]
To us doth tell
Some little stirring in the fold.
Methinks the ling’ring dying ray
Of twilight time, doth seem more fair,
And lights the soul up more than day
When wide-spread sultry sunshines are:
Yet all is right and all most fair,
For thou, dear God, has formèd all;
Thou deckest every little flower,
Thou girdest every planet ball,
And mark’st when sparrows fall. [5]

What I love about Palmer, aside from the beautiful portrayal of night in word and image, is the echo of a vanished world of simple, rustic pleasures. Even if we cannot completely recreate this world for ourselves, we can become attuned to its virtues, appropriate them in perhaps a limited degree, and at the very least, remind ourselves that there is another way to live than on processed foods and video games.


[1] I’m not entirely certain what Ackroyd is alluding to here. I noticed there is a book about Blake with this title, but I can’t seem to find the phrase in any of Blake’s works. Any ideas, dear readers?

[2] Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (NY: Anchor, 2004), p. 76.

[3] Auden reads ‘lookest though the rising dew’, but after checking another text, I have emended it to the more logical ‘through’.

[4] George Creeger tells us, in a note on this line, that a ‘wether’s bell’ is ‘the bell hung round the neck of the lead sheep in a flock’ (W.H. Auden, ed., 19th-Century British Minor Poets, notes by George C. Creeger (NY: Delacorte, 1966), p. 359).

[5] Auden, p. 147.

New Books & a Giveaway!

The time has come for another book update, followed by something new here at Logismoi: a book giveaway contest! I have longed to do something like this ever since I participated in—and unjustly lost—Esteban Vázquez’s contest for The Bible at Qumran: Text, Shape, & Interpretation (here), but I didn’t have the right book—until now. But first, the ones I’m keeping.

1) The one I’m most excited to have at last for myself is Columba Stewart’s magisterial Cassian the Monk. I was motivated finally to plop down $30 (including shipping) for a used copy, in large part because I am currently rereading parts of the Conferences with a friend for Lent. Stewart refers to the ‘daring scope’ of St Cassian’s ‘project: a comprehensive monastic theology’, and his book is a detailed look at what he has ‘judged to be the most central and distinctive aspects of Cassian’s monastic theology’. [1] The chapters cover St Cassian’s life, his skills and techniques as a writer, his theology (particularly of contemplation), his ascetic teachings (including an outstanding treatment of St Cassian’s much-misunderstood but Orthodox teaching on grace and free will), his use of the Bible, his teaching on unceasing prayer, his description of the experience of prayer, and an appendix on ‘Cassian on Monastic Egypt’. As a taste of what Stewart wants to say, here are the concluding words of Chapter 1:

. . . [A]s I will show, his teaching on contemplation, charity, and prayer is eminently portable, constituting a kind of ascetical breviary compiled with the conviction that charity must always prevail over personal preference, even preference for solitude and contemplation.

The corollary of such a conviction is that service of others in hospitality and teaching are a real work of the monk: after all, these are the virtues modelled by the monks to whom he attributes the Conferences. Cassian’s emphasis on experience rather than rhetoric, and the profundity and realism of his monastic theology, persuade at least this reader that in the many places he lived and in the many things he did, he was always Cassian the Monk. [2]

2) On a recent trip to Half Price Books, I picked up a $4.95 copy of Sermons for the Christian Year, by the Oxford Movement figure, John Keble. Despite what might be considered the inherent contradiction at the heart of Anglo-Catholicism, [3] it is clear that its 19th-c. exemplars were gifted writers and theologians, and worthy of Orthodox attention. Keble is no exception, and Newman gives us perhaps the best introduction to him:

I have not the skill to discriminate what is of intellectual origin in his writings from what is of ethical. All I venture to say of him in this respect is this:—that his keen religious instincts, his unworldly spirit, his delicacy of mind, his tenderness of others, his playfulness, his loyalty to the holy Fathers, and his Toryism in politics, are all ethical qualities, and by their prominence give a character of their own, or (as I have called it) personality, to what he has written; but these would not have succeeded in developing that personality into sight and shape in the medium of literature, had he not been possessed of special intellectual gifts, which they both elicited and used. [4]

But let’s have a little passage from Keble himself to show the real merits of this book. This is—appropriately—from his sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent:

Look into your own hearts and consider how much you are losing of God’s grace and blessing. You might be fervent in prayer, you might be full of good thoughts, holy seasons and communions might be a joy and a crown to you—what a pity to lose all this for want of courage and exactness in your doings! Look again towards the enemy and see how you encourage him. Depend upon it, he rejoices in every moment you lose, every opportunity you neglect. Look, above all, to that which you know, or may know, to be written in God’s book concerning your daily falls and backslidings: the positive sins of temper and will, at least, into which you are continually betrayed for want of a courageous purpose of being entirely and zealously on God’s side. O! if we will but turn our minds towards it we shall see that heaven and earth all around us are full of tokens of how blessed a thing it is to serve Christ with our whole heart, and how fatal to serve Him with half a heart. [5]

3) The next book was a gift—though not without strings attached!—from my friend, James Kelley: A.E. Taylor’s Plato: The Man & His Work. With the exception of the Symposium, I’m ashamed to admit I only began reading Plato after college. While I daresay I’ve made significant progress since then, I nevertheless remain woefully underread in the secondary sources. This is due in part to a certain wariness of Plato’s post-Enlightenment interpreters, against whom I was strongly innoculated early on by Julia Annas’s superb Platonic Ethics Old & New. [6] But I continue to be on the lookout for good, solid ‘footnotes’ to the great philosopher, to borrow Whitehead’s expression. According to Evelyn Underhill, Taylor is ‘an almost ideal interpreter of Plato’, having ‘a mind that is spiritual, supple, and critical’ and ‘a vision which looks perpetually through philosophy towards the realities which philosophy seeks’. Of this book, she writes, ‘The book, which is in arrangement, a detailed commentary on the whole of the Platonic writings, is therefore in fact far more than this. It will pilot the least experienced traveller through a great region of the spiritual life of man.’ [7] As a taste of the man himself, and at the risk of making this post too long, the opening of the chapter on the Symposium is worth quoting at length:

The Symposium is perhaps the most brilliant of all Plato’s achievements as a dramatic artist; perhaps for that very reason, it has been worse misunderstood than any other of his writings. Even in its own day it was apparently quite misapprehended by Xenophon . . . . Our own and the last generation, with the poison of Romanticism in their veins, have gone farther and discovered that the dialogue anticipates William Blake’s ‘prophecies’ by finding the key to the universe in the fact of sex. This means that such readers have sought the teaching of the Symposium in the first instance in the Rabelaisian parody of a cosmogony put very appropriately into the mouth of Aristophanes. The very fact that this famous speech is given to the great γελωτοποιός should, of course, have proved to an intelligent reader that the whole tale of the bi-sexual creatures is a piece of gracious Pantagruelism, and that Plato’s serious purpose must be looked for elsewhere. Similarly, it is more from the Symposium than from any other source that soul-sick ‘romanticists’ have drawn their glorification of the very un-Platonic thing they have named ‘platonic love’, a topic on which there is not a word in this or any other writing of Plato. We must resolutely put fancies like these out of our heads from the first if we mean to understand what the real theme of the dialogue is. We must remember that Eros, in whose honour the speeches of the dialogue are delivered, was a cosmogonic figure whose significance is hopelessly obscured by mere identification with the principle of ‘sex’. We must also remember that the scene is a festive one, and that the tone of most of the speeches is consequently more than half playful, and rightly so, as the gaiety of the company is meant to set off by contrast the high seriousness of the discourse of Socrates. It is there that we are to find Plato’s deepest meaning, and when we come to that speech we shall find that the ‘love’ of which he speaks the praises is one which has left sexuality far behind, an amor mysticus which finds its nearest modern counterpart in the writers who have employed the imagery of the Canticles to set forth the love of the soul for its Creator. [8]

3) On another trip to Half Price Books, I finally discovered an inexpensive copy of Walter Ong’s seminal Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. As near as I can remember, I first saw Ong’s name in the Eighth Day Books catalogue, in the latest edition of which we read:

One can scarcely exaggerate how profoundly the introduction of writing changed all facets of human existence. Ong lucidly documents those changes and then projects his conclusions into the age of mass electronic communications. As we leave behind (courtesy of radios, telephones, and computers) our predominately chirographic culture to enter uncharted territory, Ong is a prophetic guide, offering philosophical, social, and theological implications. [9]

But it wasn’t until I read Douglas Burton-Christie’s wonderful The Word in the Desert: Scripture & the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism that I decided I’d really like to read Ong’s work. Burton-Christie paints a vivid picture of the orality of early desert monastic culture, and draws on Ong for a couple of his deepest insights. Here is one of the passages quoted by Burton-Christie, [10] followed by the paragraph immediately after it in Ong’s text:

The fact that oral peoples commonly and in all likelihood universally consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in, at least unconsciously, with their sense of the word as necessarily spoken, sounded, and hence power-driven. Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, ‘out there’ on a flat surface. Such ‘things’ are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection.

Oral peoples commonly think of names (one kind of words) as conveying power over things. Explanations of Adam’s namingof the animals in Gensis 2:20 usually call condescending attention to this presumably quaint archaic belief. Such a belief is in fact far less quaint than it seems to unreflective chirographic and typographic folk. First of all, names do give human beings power over what they name: without learning a vast store of names, one is simply powerless to understand, for example, chemistry and to practice chemical engineering. And so with all other intellectual knowledge. Secondly, chirographic and typographic folk tend to think of names as labels, written or printed tags imaginatively affixed to an object named. Oral folk have no sense of a name as a tag, for they have no idea of a name as something that can be seen. Written or oral representations of words can be labels; real spoken words cannot be. [11]

4) On the same trip that produced Ong, I picked up the apparently delightful 365 Starry Nights: An Introduction to Astronomy for Every Night of the Year, by Chet Raymo. While currently quite ignorant of astronomy, I have long been fascinated by the stars and constellations and thought it would be cool to learn all about their names and be able to identify them in the sky. My interest has been renewed and intensified by reading Michael Ward’s captivating Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (see this post), which I am now most of the way through. A little uncertain where to start in learning about the heavens, I was drawn to this one initially because of the organisation into a ‘book of days’ and what I could see flipping through of the kind of information given (apart from the diagrams). But when I read the ‘Introduction’ at home, I was completely satisfied with my purchase:

Let it be said at once that although I have been trained as a scientist and have taught courses in descriptive astronomy, my interest in the sky is primarily esthetic rather than scientific. If I were to be exiled on a desert island and allowed to take the traditional handful of books, they would not be works of science but of poetry and natural history. . . .

This book is designed to be a kind of companion to the night. It is full of science, but only because (as the old catechisms used to say) knowledge is a prerequisite for love. Knowing the night sky is a different thing from knowing, say, the mechanism of a clock or a computer. The clock or the computer is finite, to know it is to exhaust its potential for exciting wonder. The night sky is more like a human being, inexhaustibly complex and finally beyond reach. Knowledge only whets our interest and increases our wonder. [12]

It’s almost as though Raymo had read Discerning the Mystery before penning this book!

5) Last but not least, when James Kelley gave me Taylor’s book on Plato, he also gave me a copy of a book I already owned: Peter Ackroyd’s Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. I have referred briefly to this fascinating study here and here. It is a treasure-trove of observations about English writers and artists throughout the centuries and the discernible themes that unite them and characterise their work. Here is a sample of the sort of thing Ackroyd has to say:

It would also be possible to elaborate, in this context, upon the argument which Bishop Percy advanced in one of the editorial comments in his collection of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry published in 1765. ‘It is worth attention,’ he wrote, ‘that the English have more songs and ballads on the subject of madness than any of their neighbours.’ This might be connected with the madness portrayed upon the Jacobean stage, and the popularity of the eighteenth-century ‘graveyard’ school of English poetry; but there are more elusive associations. In the nineteenth century London became known as the ‘suicide capital’ of the world, but, even before that date, there was a more general belief that the English were a race subject to melancholia. The prevailing gloom was variously ascribed to the damp climate of the island or to the diet of beef, but we need only turn to the prevalence of elegies in the English tongue to suggest that melancholy may have found its local habitation.

It has always been there. That long sweet note of pathos can be heard equally in the music of Delius and the poetry of Keats, in the plangent harmonies of Purcell and the stately threnodies of Spenser, in the funereal meditations of Donne and the lachrymose comedy of Sterne. When the Anglo-Saxon poet of ‘Judgement Day’ uttered a complaint against ‘this gloomy world’, he was the harbinger of a powerful and sustained emotion. It has often been remarked that Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’, composed fitfully between 1746 and 1750, was the most popular English poem for some two hundred years. What other nation would cherish such mournful music? [13]

As I said, I already had a copy—though mine was the trade paperback, and James had gifted me with the hardcover. Naturally, I’m keeping the latter, but fortunately for some lucky reader, I intend to share my bounty. To enter the contest, you must:

1) First, announce this giveway on your own blog, and provide a link to your announcement in the comments to this post. If you do not have a blog, post an announcement on your Facebook page and contact me on there so I can see it.

2) Second, in your comment provide your most creative response to the following question. Ackroyd tells us that ‘Albion is an ancient word for England, Albio in Celtic and Alba in Gaelic; it is mentioned in the Latin of Pliny and in the Greek of Ptolemy.’ [14] But I for one associate the name most strongly with Blake, who, oddly, barely uses it at all in ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’, but feels the need to include it in nearly every line of Jerusalem. In Plate 46, ll. 10-16, Blake has Oxford weeping over Albion and ‘speaking the words of God / In mild perswasion’:

‘Thou art in Error, Albion, the Land of Ulro.
‘One Error not remov’d will destroy a human Soul.
‘Repose in Beulah’s night till the Error is remov’d.
‘Reason not on both sides. Repose upon our bosoms
‘Till the Plow of Jehovah and the Harrow of Shaddai
‘Have passed over the Dead to awake the Dead to Judgment.’
But Albion turn’d away refusing comfort. [15]

So, without consulting any Blake scholars or their works, which I’m not so sure would be helpful anyway, give me your best answer to the question of what Albion’s ‘Error’ is. Feel free to consult the whole poem if you want the full context. Wit and humour will be preferred to real scholarly plausibility or textual defensibility. The contest begins today, and will last until the Sunday of St Mary of Egypt. I look forward to your responses and will announce the winner on the Monday following!


[1] Columba Stewart, OSB, Cassian the Monk (NY: Oxford, 1998), p. vii.

[2] Ibid., p. 26.

[3] As an Orthodox Christian, I couldn’t help but nod my head a bit to the comments on Anglo-Catholicism in the latter part of the insightful article by R.R. Reno, ‘The Radical Orthodoxy Project’, First Things 100 (February 2000), pp. 37-44 (here).

[4] Maria Poggi Johnson, ‘Introduction’, Sermons for the Christian Year, by John Keble, ed. Maria Poggi Johnson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 8.

[5] Keble, p. 81.

[6] Julia Annas, Platonic Ethics Old & New (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U, 2000).

[7] Blurb from the back cover of Alfred Edward Taylor, Plato: The Man & His Work (NY: Meridian, 1957).

[8] Ibid., p. 209.

[9] ‘Catalog 21’, Eighth Day Books—Classics in Religion, Philosophy, History & Literature, p. 145.

[10] Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture & the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford U, 1993), p. 19.

[11] Walter J. Ong, Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 32-3.

[12] Chet Raymo, 365 Starry Nights: An Introduction to Astronomy for Every Night of the Year, illust. Chet Raymo (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1982), pp. ix-x.

[13] Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (NY: Anchor, 2004), pp. 60-1.

[14] Ibid., p. xxviii.

[15] William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford U, 1969), p. 676.

'The Namesake of Blessedness'—St Benedict Biscop

Today, 12 January on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of the Holy Benedict Bischop (628-690), Abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow, Northumbria, England. The great historian, Christopher Dawson, observes that St Benedict, ‘above all, devoted himself to the development of religious art and learning’, [1] and The Oxford Dictionary of Saints describes him as ‘founder and first abbot of Wearmouth, scholar, and patron of the arts’. [2] Here is the account of his life in the 2010 St Herman Calendar:

St Benedict Biscop was born in Northumbria of a Christian family. He made numerous pilgrimages to Rome, later spending two years taking monastic instruction at Lerins, from 665 to 667, where he was tonsured with the name ‘Benedict’ (blessed). He accompanied St Theodore of Tarsus, the Greek archbishop, back to Canterbury, where Benedict was appointed abbot of the community of Sts Peter and Paul. He was invited by King Egfrith to build a monastery at Wearmouth in 674, and later erected a sister monastery at Jarrow. St Benedict made his final trip to Rome in 679 to bring back holy books and relics, as well as masons and craftsmen for the completion of the monasteries, creating a dual community which was to serve as a model for monastic life in England. He died in 690, surrounded by his monastic brethren, and was succeeded as abbot by St Ceolfrith (Geoffrey), who continued his spiritual work. [3]

Of St Benedict’s blessed repose, his most renowned disciple, the Venerable Bede, writes, ‘Benedict, who so nobly vanquished sin and wrought the deeds of virtue, yielded to the weakness of the flesh, and came to his end. Night came on chilled by the winter’s blasts, but a day of eternal felicity succeeded, of serenity and of splendour.’ [4]

Aside from the full account of his life I have just quoted, The Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth & Jarrow, St Bede also speaks movingly of his spiritual father in his homily for today. It is good and just that St Benedict is so often praised for his liturgical and aesthetic enrichment of the English Church, and even for the enormous library he bequeathed to English monasticism (see for instance, my post last year). But in this passage, commenting on the verse ‘And everyone who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands for my name’s sake will receive a hundredfold, and will come into possession of eternal life’ (Mt 19:29), St Bede reminds us that St Benedict left an even more important legacy in the people that he brought together and guided to Christ:

And it should not seem tedious to any of you, brothers, if we speak of things which are well-known, but instead you should judge it delightful that we speak the truth when we tell of the spiritual deeds of our father, to whom the Lord by a manifest miracle fulfilled what he promised to his faithful ones, that ‘everyone who has left home or brothers etc. . . .’ He left his relatives when he departed from his fatherland; he received a hundredfold, for not only was he held in deserved veneration by everyone in this land, on account of the diligence of his virtues, but even in Gaul, and in Italy, in Rome too, and in the islands of the sea, he was loved by everyone who was able to know him . . . The homes and lands which [Benedict] had possessed he left for the sake of Christ, from whom he hoped to receive the land of an ever-verdant paradise, and a home not made by hands but eternal in heaven. He left wife and children—not, to be sure, that he had taken a wife, and had children born of her, but out of love of chastity he scorned taking a wife from whom he could have children, preferring to belong to that hundred and forty-four thousand of the elect who sing before the throne of the Lamb a new song which no one except they can sing. . . . He received home and lands a hundredfold when he secured these places where he would build his monasteries. He gave up having a wife for Christ’s sake, and in this he received a hundredfold, because undoubtedly then the value of charity between the chaste would be a hundredfold greater on account of the fruit of the Spirit, than that between the lascivious, on account of the desire of the flesh, had once been. The children which he had disdained to have in a fleshly way he deserved to receive a hundredfold as spiritual children. The number one hundred, indeed, as has often been said, figuratively speaking, denotes perfection. Now we are his children, since as a pious provider he brought us into this monastic house. We are his children since he has made us to be gathered spiritually into one family of holy profession, though in terms of the flesh we were brought forth of different parents. We are his children if by imitating [him] we hold to the path of his virtues, if we are not turned aside by sluggishness from the narrow path of the rule which he taught. [5]

In conclusion, here is the doxasticon at the end of Matins from Reader Isaac Lambersen’s Akolouthia for St Benedict Biscop (here):

Come, ye Christians of these latter times, and though lacking in all zeal and every virtue, let us praise the venerable Benedict, the namesake of blessedness, who, having toiled unceasingly for his Master, hath received from Him the promised reward for his faithful service, and dwelleth now in the habitations of the just, from whence he sendeth aid upon the wretched and afflicted, and by his mediation obtaineth for us the remission of sins and great mercy.

[1] Christopher Dawson, Religion & the Rise of Western Culture (Garden City, NY: Image, 1958), p. 60.

[2] David Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford U, 2004), p. 50.

[3] St Herman Calendar 2010: Orthodox Saints of Anglo-Saxon England (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2010), p. 5.

[4] From The Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth & Jarrow, trans. J.A. Giles (here).

[5] St Bede the Venerable, Homilies on the Gospels, Book I: Advent to Lent, trans. Lawrence T. Martin & David Hurst, OSB (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1991), pp. 129-31.

The contemporary icon immediately above is by Peter Murphy, whose work can be seen here.

'A Pretty Babe All Burning Bright'—The Nativity of the Lord Jesus Christ

Today, 25 December on the Church’s calendar, we celebrated the Nativity of our Lord, God, and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Concerning the Incarnation of Christ, St Maximus the Confessor teaches:

For not as God in His essence and as coessential with God the Father was the only-begotten Son given to us; only inasmuch as by virtue of God’s providential dispensation He became man by nature and, for our sakes made coessential with us, He was given to us who have need of such grace. [1]

Archimandrite Justin (Popović) writes, ‘Therefore Nativity, the day of the birth of the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ, is the greatest and most important day in the history of all the worlds in which man moves and lives.’ [2] And Metropolitan Hierotheos observes, ‘All the other feasts of the Lord—Epiphany, the Transfiguration, the Passion, the Cross, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Christ—follow from the Nativity.’ [3] Here is the account of our Lord’s Nativity in the Prologue:

‘And when the fullness of time was come, God sent His only-begotten Son’ (Gal. 4:4), to save the human race. And when the ninth month had come after the archangel Gabriel appeared to the most holy Virgin in Nazareth, saying: ‘Hail, thou that art highly favoured . . . thou shalt conceive and bear a son’—at that time a decree went forth from Caesar Augustus that all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire be taxed. In accordance with this decree, everyone had to go to his own town and there be inscribed. Therefore righteous Joseph came with the most holy Virgin to Bethlehem, the city of David, for they were both of the royal House of David. But, there being a great many people in that small city for the census, Joseph and Mary could not find a lodging in any house, and found shelter in a cave which the shepherds used as a sheepfold. In this cave the most holy Virgin gave birth to the Saviour of the world, the Lord Jesus Christ. Bearing Him without pain, as He was conceived without sin of the Holy Spirit and not of man, she herself wrapped Him in swaddling bands, worshipped Him as God and laid Him in a manger. Then righteous Joseph drew near and worshipped Him as the divine Fruit of a virgin womb. Then the shepherds came in from the fields, directed by an angel of God, and worshipped Him as Messiah and Saviour. The shepherds had heard a multitude of angels singing: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill among men’ (Luke 2:14). At that time there also came wise men from the East, led by a wonderful star, bearing their gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh, and worshipped Him as King of kings, offering Him their gifts (Matt. 2:11). Thus He came into the world Whose coming had been foretold by the prophets and Who was born in the way that they had prophesied: of the most holy Virgin, in the city of Bethlehem, of the lineage of David according to the flesh, at the time when there was no longer in Jerusalem a king of the tribe of Judah, but Herod the stranger was on the throne. After many types and prefigurings, messengers and heralds, prophets and righteous men, wise men and kings, finally He appeared, the Lord of the world and King of kings, to perform the work of the salvation of mankind that could not be performed by His servants. May His be eternal glory and praise! Amen. [4]

The last troparion of the Second Ode of the second Canon of the Feast, written by St John of Damascus in iambic verse, beautifully summarises the wonder of Christ’s Incarnation:

He who rules the heights of heaven, in His compassion,
Has become such as we are, born of a Maiden who has not known man.
The Word who before was wholly outside matter, in these last times
Has assumed the material substance of the flesh
That so He might draw unto Himself fallen Adam, the first-formed man. [5]

Similarly, in his homily on the Nativity, the Venerable Bede tells us, ‘Hence, dearly beloved brothers, we who today recall in yearly devotion the human nativity of our Redeemer, must always embrace the divine nature as well as his human nature with a love that is not yearly, but continual . . . .’ [6] Furthermore, referring to the Epistle from today’s Liturgy—Gal. 4:4-7: ‘. . . God sent forth His Son . . . that we might receive the adoption of sons’—Archbishop Andrei of Novo-Diveevo exhorts us in his homily for the feast:

Let this Holy Day become the Holy Day of the consecration of our heart, of the acceptance of adoption, in order to perform for us this spiritual endeavor: the beginning of that which Christ gives. ‘Prepare, O Bethlehem . . . Christ shall be born to raise the image that fell of old.’ [7]

But of course, this consecration of our heart entails an interior reenacting of the Nativity, as St Maximus the Confessor teaches, ‘The divine Logos, who once for all was born in the flesh, always in His compassion desires to be born in spirit in those who desire Him. He becomes an infant and moulds Himself in them through the virtues.’ [8]

A couple of points about the calendar date of this Feast: first, all Anglophile Orthodox will of course recall that on this date, that is, specifically on the Old Calendar, the Glastonbury Thorn of St Joseph of Arimathea has traditionally bloomed. As Tennyson writes, at Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset:

. . . the winter thorn
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord. [9]

And one 17th-c. booklet on ‘The History of that Holy Disciple Joseph of Arimathea’ in the Abbey Library tells us that ‘at Glastenbury in Somersetshire . . . is still growing that noted White-Thorn, which buds every Christmas-Day in the Morning, blossoms at Noon, and fades at Night, on the Place where he pitched his Staff in the Ground.’ [10]

But another point worth noting is a Slavic term relating to Christmas. In a note at the beginning of his short story, ‘The Night Before Christmas’, Nikolai Gogol writes:

Among us [that is, Ukrainians], to go caroling [koliadovat] means to sing songs called koliadki under the windows on Christmas Eve. The master or mistress of the house, or anyone staying at home, always drops into the carolers’ sack some sausage or bread or a copper coin, whatever bounty they have. They say there used to be an idol named Koliada who was thought to be a god, and that is where the koliadki came from. Who knows? It’s not for us simple people to discuss it. Last year Father Osip forbade going caroling around the farmsteads, saying folk were pleasing Satan by it. However, to tell the truth, there’s not a word in the koliadki about Koliada. They often sing of the nativity of Christ; and in the end they wish health to the master, the mistress, the children, and the whole household. (The Beekeeper’s note.) [11]

But, noting a similar term—and similar customs—in Bulgaria, Thomas Butler doesn’t even mention a god ‘Koliada’, but offers another suggestion:

The festival of koleda (Christmas) seems to trace its origins to a pagan Roman ritual (calendae). Koledni or koledarski pesni (‘Christmas songs’) are sung by groups of village boys who go from house to house on Christmas Eve (bŭdni večer). They have a leader (tsar or vodač) who knows a large repertory of songs or refrains, many of which are designed for individual members of the household (child, wife, husband, grown son, marriageable daughter). The following song seems to be an amalgam of both pre-Christian and Christian elements, with the young God representing both the New Year and Christ.

‘The Christening of the Young God’

The Mother of God labored
From Ignatius’s Day to Christmas [Koleda]
To give birth to the young God.
Everyone came by
To have a look at the young God.
They invited Saint John
To baptize the young God.
Saint John murmured:
—But how can I baptize,
Baptize the young God?
I am the chaff—he is the fire.
The young God murmured back:
—Come here, come here, Saint John,
And fulfill God’s law.—
Saint John brightened up,
Then he rolled up his white sleeves
And tucked his silk skirts,
His silk skirts inside his belt
And he made three candles.
He took the candles in his left hand
And in his right—the young God.
The young God glows with beauty
Saint John with joy;
His hands turned to silver
His skirts to gold
His beard became golden as well.
We sing to you, we praise God.
May God grant you much health!
May the health in this house be abundant
As geraniums on the mountainside—
In this house, in this company.
O Christmas, my Christmas! [12]

H.J. Rose notes that in the Empire, Kalends gift-giving at least was not abolished until Leo I in 458. [13]

Next, I have just a few online recommendations for the Nativity:

St John Chrysostom’s Homily.

St Leo the Great’s Homilies.

St Theodore the Studite’s Catechesis.

Bishop Theophilos of Campania on the Incarnation.

Another beautiful Serbian video.

Article on Father Christmas & the Christmas Spirit.

Article on the date of Christmas.

Obviously, more than one of these is from John Sanidopoulos’s blog, Mystagogy, which consistently features fascinating posts.

In conclusion, I offer another great lyric from the golden age of English poetry: Robert Southwell’s, ‘The Burning Babe’.

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear.
Who scorchèd with exceeding heat such floods of tears did shed,
As though His floods should quench his flames with what His tears were fed;
Alas, quoth He, but newly born in fiery heats of fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I.
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals;
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defilèd souls;
For which, as now on fire I am, to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath, to wash them in my blood:
With this He vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I callèd unto mind that it was Christmas day. [14]

[1] The Philokalia, Vol. 2, trans. G.E.H. Palmer et al. (London: Faber, 1990), pp. 156-7.

[2] Archimandrite Justin (Popović), ‘Perfect God & Perfect Man: A Nativity Epistle’, trans. Rev. Todor Mika & Rev. Stevan Scott, Man & the God-Man (Alhambra, CA: Sebastian, 2009), p. 10.

[3] Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos, The Feasts of the Lord: An Introduction to the Twelve Feasts & Orthodox Christology, trans. Esther Williams (Levadia, Gr.: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 2003), p. 39.

[4] St Nicholas (Velimirović), The Prologue from Ochrid, Vol. 4, trans. Mother Maria (Birmingham: Lazarica, 1986), pp. 369-70.

[5] The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary & Archim. Kallistos (Ware) (South Canaan, PA: STS, 1998), p. 272.

[6] St Bede the Venerable, Homilies on the Gospels, Book 1: Advent to Lent, trans. Lawrence T. Martin & David Hurst, OSB (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1991), p. 82.

[7] Archbishop Andrei of Novo-Diveevo, The One Thing Needful (Liberty, TN: St John of Kronstadt, 1991), p. 14.

[8] Philokalia 2, pp. 165-6.

[9] Jerome H. Buckley, ed., Poems of Tennyson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 390.

[10] F. Vere Hodge, Glastonbury Gleanings (Norwich: The Canterbury, 1991), p. 5.

[11] Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, trans. & annot., The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (NY: Pantheon, 1998), p. 19.

[12] Thomas Butler, Monumenta Bulgarica: A Bilingual Anthology of Bulgarian Texts from the 9th to the 19th Centuries (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic, 2004), pp. 476, 479.

[13] H.J. Rose, Ancient Greek & Roman Religion, Two Volumes in One: Vol. 2 (NY: Barnes & Noble, 1995), p. 148.

[14] H.C. Beeching, ed., A Book of Christmas Verse, illust. Walter C. Crane (NY: Bonanza,1986), pp. 27-8.