'Stat crux dum volvitur orbis' - The Sunday of the Cross

Today, the 3rd Sunday of Great Lent, we celebrate the veneration of the precious and Life-giving Cross, about which the Apostle Paul wrote, ‘But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world’ (Galatians 6:14). The hymnography for this Sunday refers to the Cross as ‘the fair paradise of the Church’ and the ‘Tree of incorruption that brings us the enjoyment of eternal glory’, ‘an invincible weapon, an unbroken stronghold’, the ‘unconquerable tropy of the true faith, door to Paradise, succour of the faithful, [and] rampart set about the Church.’ [1] 

It may seem curious to note that this commemoration is something distinct from the commemoration of ‘Good Friday’—that is, the commemoration of the Passion and Death of our Lord on the Cross. The two are, of course, directly connected though. The Cross does not have some kind of magical potency apart from its role as the instrument of our Lord’s Passion. As the Synaxarion for this Sunday states, ‘The Cross reminds us of the Passion of our Lord, and by presenting to us His example, it encourages us to follow Him in struggle and sacrifice, being refreshed, assured, and comforted.’ [2] 

Furthermore, it is not accidental that the Life-giving Cross is commemorated half-way through Lent. The Synaxarion tells us: 

As they who walk on a long and hard way and are bowed down by fatigue find great relief and strengthening under the cool shade of a leafy tree, so do we find comfort, refreshment, and rejuvenation under the Life-giving Cross, which our Holy Fathers “planted” on this Sunday. Thus, we are fortified and enabled to continue our Lenten journey with a light step, rested and encouraged. [3] 

It is important to note that this Cross in which we find comfort and refreshment is not merely an historical object or event, but something fundamental to the cosmos itself. I was struck several years ago by an observation in Fr John Behr’s profound little book, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death: 

Theologically speaking, creation and its history begins with the Passion of Christ and from this ‘once for all’ work looks backwards and forwards to see everything in this light, making everything new. Christian cosmology, elaborated as it must be from the perspective of the Cross, sees the Cross as impregnated in the very structure of creation: stat crux dum volvitur orbis—the Cross stands, while the earth revolves. [4] 

Fr John then quotes from the ‘Second Part’ of St Isaac the Syrian to support his point: 

We do not speak of a power in the Cross that is any different from that through which the worlds came into being, [a power] which is eternal and without beginning and which guides creation all the time without any break, in a divine way and beyond the understanding of all, in accordance with the will of his divinity. [5] 

Thus, it is no surprise that the Holy Fathers discover the Cross throughout all of Scripture, prefigured in the Old Testament and gazed back at in the Book of Revelation. Indeed, it can fairly be said that the pattern of the Cross, or what St Gregory Palamas calls ‘the mystery of the Cross’, is fundamental to patristic exegesis. [6] Thus, St Gregory begins his homily for this Sunday with the characteristic comment, ‘The Cross of Christ was mysteriously proclaimed in advance and foreshadowed from generations of old and no one was ever reconciled with God except by the power of the Cross.’ [7] As Fr Georges Florovsky has put it, ‘The mystery of the Cross begins in eternity, “in the sanctuary of the Holy Trinity, unapproachable for creatures.”’ [8] 

The Latin phrase Fr John qutoes above is the motto of the Roman Catholic ‘Carthusian’ Order, an order of semi-erimitic contemplative monks that originated in the mountains of France [9] whose symbol is a sphere surmounted by a Cross. The same symbol, whether a nod toward the Carthusians or not, forms the central image of G.K. Chesterton’s fascinating novel, The Ball & the Cross, where the ‘ball’ atop St Paul’s Cathedral in London is claimed by Lucifer as the symbol of rationalism, while the ‘cross’ is claimed by the old Bulgarian monk, Fr Michael as the symbol of Christianity. At one point, Fr Michael tells a ‘parable’ to illustrate the folly of Lucifer’s hatred of the cross: 

‘I once knew a man like you, Lucifer,’ he said, with a maddening monotony and slowness of articulation. ‘He took this----’

‘There is no man like me,’ cried Lucifer, with a violence that shook the ship.

‘As I was observing,’ continued Michael, ‘this man also took the view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and all unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect allegory of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began, of course, by refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round his wife's neck, or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that it was an arbitrary and fantastic shape, that it was a monstrosity, loved because it was paradoxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would batter the crosses by the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic country. Finally in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of the Parish Church and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and uttering wild soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still summer evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration which changes the world. He was standing smoking, for a moment, in the front of an interminable line of palings, when his eyes were opened. Not a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked together over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick and went at it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path he broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every paling is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was a literal madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image. He flung himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too, like all workmanlike things, was constructed on the accursed plan. He broke his furniture because it was made of crosses. He burnt his house because it was made of crosses. He was found in the river.’ [10] 

Interestingly, The Ball & the Cross turns up a bit unexpectedly in an Orthodox reflection on the Cross: in a 1977 article entitled ‘From the Perspective of the Cross’, Hieromonk Roman (Braga) talks about the very shape of the Cross as indicative of man’s place in the universe. It is worth quoting at some length: 

The cross is the axis of two coordinates that establishes man’s place in the universe. Man is at the point of intersection between the vertical plane, which is transcendent, and the horizontal one, which is limited, historic, inherent. 

Man is the theandric mode of existence in which God and nature must be combined in a harmonious synthesis. But at the same time, man’s being on the cross is a paradox, an enigma—not for the Creator, Who knew what He did when He created man, but for himself. 

If we think of the cross, this imaginary axis, as the intersection of two existential planes completely different from one another—matter and spirit, existence and nonexistence, God and nothingness—then surely at the intersection point, that is, in man, any kind of logic becomes impossible and absurd. Nevertheless, man is the only thinking reality in the world. Why? Because true thinking is in a way paradoxical; it is born of contradictory situations. Once G.K. Chesterton, looking at the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London where the cross is atop a sphere, made a remark that can be considered to be the foundation of the theology of the cross. He said that the sphere, which is the Greek symbol of perfection, is limited to itself. Traveling around the sphere, one reaches nowhere. This is the image of philosophy—it is a closed system, it cannot go out of its dogmatic antithesis. On the other hand, developing a mode of thinking in a cross-like manner gives the world an infinite freedom—on the one hand, growing in God, or ascending on the vertical plane, and on the other hand, the freedom of descending into the total abyss, into total negativism. [11] 

These are just a few thoughts about the centrality of the Cross to our faith. Unfortunately, time does not suffice for me to begin to delve into the coincidence of the Sunday of the Cross with the Feast of the Annunciation this year, so I shall simply conclude with the tenth stanza of St Ephraim the Syrian’s Hymn XII on Paradise: 

Because Adam touched the Tree
he had to run to the fig;
he became like the fig tree,
being clothed in its vesture:
Adam, like some tree,
blossomed with leaves.
Then he came to that glorious
tree of the Cross,
put on glory from it,
acquired radiance from it,
heard from it the truth
that he would return to Eden once more. [12] 

[1] From the Stichera in Tone Five at Lord, I have cried at Great Vespers, in The Lenten Triodion, tr. Mother Maria & Archimandrite [now Metropolitan] Kallistos (Ware) (South Canaan, PA: STOTS, 1994), pp. 334-335. 

[2] Synaxarion of the Lenten Triodion & Pentecostarion, ed. Fr David (Kidd) & Mother Gabriella (Ursache) (Rives Junction, MI: HDM, 1999), p. 78. 

[3] Ibid., p. 79. 

[4] Fr John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2006), p. 90. 

[5] Qtd. in ibid., p. 90. 

[6] St Gregory Palamas, The Homilies, ed. & tr. Christopher Veniamin, with The Monastery of St John the Baptist (Waymart, PA: Mount Thabor, 2009), p. 79. 

[7] Ibid., p. 74. 

[8] Protopresbyter Georges Florovsky, Creation & Redemption, Vol. 3 in the Collected Works of Georges Florovsky (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976), p. 100. 

[9] I’m not certain of the origin of the motto, however. 

[10] G.K. Chesterton, The Ball & the Cross (NY: Dover, 1995), p. 6. 

[11] Hieromonk Roman (Braga), ‘From the Perspective of the Cross’, Divine Ascent: A Journal of Orthodox Faith 1:2 (Exaltation of the Holy Cross 1997), pp. 69-70. I must admit that I am not completely certain of precisely to what passage in GKC Fr Roman is referring. His comments are reminiscent of the conversation between Lucifer and Fr Michael, but not an exact match.

For those unfamiliar with this 20th-c. Romanian confessor for the faith, I highly recommend this interview with him from PBS’s Frontline. 

[12] St Ephraim the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, tr. Sebastian Brock (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 1990), p. 164.

'I Am a Writer's Tablet'—The Feast of the Annunciation

Today, 25 March on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary. Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos has called it ‘the beginning of all the feasts of the Lord’. [1] Concerning this day, St Nicholas (Cabasilas) has written:

If there is ever a time when a man should rejoice, exult, and cry out with gladness, when he should go off and search for what great and brilliant statements he might utter, when he should wish to be vouchsafed sublimity of ideas, beauty of diction, and powerful oratory, I see no other occasion than this day, on which an Angel came to earth from Heaven bearing every good tiding. [2]

I posted a couple of links and comments here last year, as well as John Donne’s beautiful sonnet, ‘Annunciation’. Today, I will post a couple of passages from patristic homilies, part of a poem by an Orthodox writer, and a brief hymn from the Matins of the Feast. First, here is the account of this miraculous event from the Prologue:

When the most holy Virgin had lived and served in the Temple at Jerusalem for eleven years, and was by then fourteen years old—when, that is, she was entering on her fifteenth year—the priests informed her that, according to the Law, she could no longer remain in the Temple but must be betrothed and marry. But, to the great surprise of all the priests, the most holy Virgin replied that she had dedicated herself to God and wished to a maiden remain till death and enter into wedlock with no-one. Then, by God's providence and under His inspiration, Zacharias, the high priest and father of the Forerunner, in consultation with the other priests, chose twelve unmarried men from the tribe of David so that they might entrust the Virgin Mary to one of them to preserve her virginity and care for her. She was thus entrusted to Joseph, an old man from Nazareth and a kinsman of hers. In his house, the most holy Virgin continued to live in the same manner as in the Temple of Solomon, passing her time in the reading of the sacred Scriptures, in prayer, in pondering on the works of God, in fasting and in handwork. She scarcely ever left the house, nor took an interest in worldly matters or events. She generally conversed very little with anyone, and never without a particular need. She was intimate only with the two daughters of Joseph. But when the time prophesied by the Prophet Daniel had come and when God was pleased to fulfil the promise made to Adam when He drove him out of Paradise, and to the prophets, the mighty Archangel Gabriel appeared in the chamber of the most holy Virgin, at the precise moment (as some priestly writers have related) that she was holding open on her lap the book of the Prophet Isaiah and pondering on his great prophecy: ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son’. Gabriel appeared to her in angelic light and said to her: ‘Rejoice, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee!’, and so forth, just as is related in the Gospel of the divine Luke. With this angelic greeting and the descent of the Holy Spirit, the salvation of mankind and the renewal of creation were set in motion. The Archangel turned the first page of the story of the New Testament with the word ‘Rejoice!’, to show by this the joy that the New Testament signifies for mankind and for all things created. And therefore the Annunciation is looked upon as a joyous, as well as a great, feast. [3]

I for one have always been moved by the simplicity of the Panagia’s final response—‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word’ (Lk 1:38), which Blessed Theophylact of Ochrid has paraphrased as, ‘I am a writer’s tablet; let the Writer write upon it whatever He wishes. Let the Lord do as He wills.’ [4] It is this that I’d like to focus on in my choices of material here. First, from the homily on today’s Feast by St Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessaloniki:

How did the highly favoured Virgin, with her unrivalled and holy understanding, respond to these words? She ran to God and reached out to Him in prayer, saying to the Archangel, ‘If, as you tell me, the Holy Spirit shall come upon me, purifying my nature still further and strengthening me to receive the unborn Saviour; if the power of the Highest shall overshadow me, forming Him Who is in the form of God as man within me and bringing about a Birth without seed; if the holy Child which shall be born is to be the Son of God and God and the everlasting King, since with God nothing is impossible’, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word’ (Luke 1:38). And the angel departed from her, leaving the Maker of all united with a bodywithin her womb. By means of this union, which was the object of his ministry, he had procured salvation for the world. Isaiah clearly revealed all this beforehand by what he was so blessed as to be counted worthy to experience. He did not see the Seraphim take the live coal directly off the heavenly, spiritual altar. The Seraphim took it with tongs, and it was by means of these that he touched the Prophet’s lips to purify him (Isa. 6:5-7). The tongs were the same as the burning bush which was not consumed by the fire, in that great vision seen by Moses (Exod.3:2-6).

Surely it is obvious to anyone that the Virgin Mother is both the burning bush and the tongs. She conceived the divine fire within her and was not burnt, and an Archangel ministered at the conception, and through her the Bearer of the sins of the wold was united with the human race, purifying us thoroughly by means of this indescribable bond. The Virgin Mother, and she alone, is the frontier between created and uncreated nature. All who know God will recognize her as the one who contained Him Who cannot be contained. All who sing hymns to God will praise her next after Him. She is the cause of the benefits which preceded her, the protectress of those which came after, and through her those good things which are eternal shall be received. She is the theme of the prophets, the first of the Apostles, the support of the martyrs, the dais of the teachers. She is the glory of those on earth, the delight of those in heaven, the adornment of the whole Creation. She is the beginning, fount and root of the hope stored up for us in heaven. [5]

Next, another hesychast Father of 14th-c. Thessaloniki, St Nicholas (Cabasilas), has written very movingly indeed on the Panagia’s momentous fiat:

5. Having in this way taught and persuaded her, God made her His Mother and borrowed flesh from her with her knowledge and consent, in order that, just as He was conceived voluntarily, it might equally come about for His Mother that she should conceive voluntarily and become His Mother willingly and by her own free decision; and so that, even more importantly, she might not simply contribute to the Oeconomy of the Incarnation as one who had been conscripted like some puppet, but might herself offer her own self and become a fellow-worker with God in His Providence for the human race and, thereby, be made a partaker and sharer with Him of the glory deriving therefrom; and so that, furthermore, just a s the Savior Himself became man and the Son of man not only for the sake of the flesh, but also had a soul, a mind, and a will, and everything else that is human, He might in the same way obtain a perfect Mother who would minister to His Nativity not only through the nature of her body, but also through her mind, her will, and all that she possessed, and that the Virgin might thus be His Mother in both flesh and soul and might endow the ineffable birthgiving with human nature in its totality.

. . .

9. . . . And so it was that with a blessed tongue, an unperturbed soul, and thoughts full of tranquility she said: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word’ (Lk 1:38).

10. These were the words that she said, and they were fulfilled at once: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’ (John 1:14); and, after giving her reply to God, she received the Spirit that created from her that flesh which was one with God. . . . O sacred voice! O words of great power! O blessed tongue, which restored the entire inhabited earth in one fell swoop! O treasury of a heart which, by a few words, poured out upon us an abundance of good things! These w ords made the earth Heaven, emptied Hades of its prisoners, caused Heaven to be inhabited by men, joined Angles with men, and formed the Heavenly and earthly races into a single chorus around Him who is both, being God but becoming man.

What gratitude could we express to you for these words? What should we call you, of whom nothing human is worthy? Our words derive from existing things, whereas you surpass the whole world beyond every sublimity. If words are to be offered to you, this, I ween, is a task for Angels, for a Cherubic mind, for a fiery tongue. Hence, having mentioned, as far as we are able, those things which redound to your praise, and having chanted hymns to you, our salvation, to the best of our ability, we ask next for an Angelic voice. We will conclude with the salutation of Gabriel, adorning the sum of our oration with this additament: ‘Rejoice, thou who art full of Grace, the Lord is with thee’ (Luke 1:28). May you prepare us to make a habitation for Him within ourselves, for this is conducive to His glory and to the laudation of you who gave birth to Him, when we not only talk about it, but also put it into practice, for unto Him belongs glory unto the ages. Amen. [6]

And now for a telling in verse of this very event. Whatever one may think of the presentation of the teaching of Lao Tzu in Hieromonk Damascene’s Christ the Eternal Tao [7], I for one found the poem which forms the centrepiece of the book quite lovely in places. I have long been particularly struck by a passage dealing with the subject of today’s Feast, hearing a reading of which lodged it into my brain and rather guided this post all along (Second Ennead, Chapter 15, ll. 7-30):

The Mind spoke, and through His Word
Answered the earth’s elemental moan.
Above that roaring cry
He answered with a still, small voice:
I will come. Will you receive me, then?
But no man heard that voice.
Only a small, young woman,
Who had lived, unknown, in silence and purity in the Great Temple
Was given to hear it.
And in a still, small voice She gave voice to the whole earth.
She answered for all those beings and created forms who could not speak;
She answered for all the people who could not hear.
And to the question of the Uncreated Mind,
She answered: Yes,
I will receive You.
Be it unto me according to Your Word.

In Her the Way had found the lowest place in the entire earth—
The nadir of the Valley,
The supreme humility, lowliness—
And there He came and made His abode.
He took flesh of Her whom He loved above all others who dwelled on the earth,
Who was meek and humble like Himself.
And lowering Himself, emptying Himself, in His love, to the lowest place,
He became a tiny child within Her, the Mystic Mother. [8]

Finally, while most of the hymns for the Feast focus on words of the Archangel Gabriel, at last, in the final Theotokion of the eighth ode of the Canon of the Feast, we read:

‘Thou dost appear to me to speak the truth’, answered the Virgin. ‘For thou hast come as an angel messenger, bringing joy to all. Since, then, I am purified in soul and body by the Spirit, be it unto me according to thy word: may God dwell in me. Unto Him I cry aloud with thee: O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord.’ [9]

One last bit of ‘good news’ on this Feast of the Ευαγγελισμός: Felix Culpa of the original ‘flagship Orthodox blog’ has returned. See his bevy of posts today, and offer a prayer of thanks to God for his health.

[1] Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos, The Feasts of the Lord: An Introduction to the Twelve Feasts & Orthodox Christology, tr. Esther Williams (Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 2003), p. 24.

[2] St Nicholas (Cabasilas), ‘Homily on the Annunciation’, Orthodox Tradition XXII.2, 2005, p. 3.

[3] St Nicholas (Velimirović), The Prologue from Ochrid, Vol. 1, trans. Mother Maria (Birmingham: Lazarica, 1986), pp. 326-7.

[4] Bl Theophylact of Ochrid, The Explanation by Bl Theophylact of the Holy Gospel According to St Luke, tr. Fr Christopher Stade (House Springs, MO: Chrysostom, 1997), p. 18.

[5] St Gregory Palamas, Mary the Mother of God: Sermons by St Gregory Palamas, ed. Christopher Veniamin (South Canaan, PA: Mt Thabor, 2005), pp. 58-9.

[6] St Nicholas (Cabasilas), pp. 6, 11-2.

[7] There is a critical response, for instance, by Dr Jeremias Norman, Professor Emeritus, Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle—‘The Daode Jing from an Orthodox Perspective’, Orthodox Tradition XXII.1, 2005, pp. 17-23.

[8] Hieromonk Damascene (Christensen), Christ the Eternal Tao, illust. Lou Shibai & You Shan Tang (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1999), pp. 84-5.

[9] The Festal Menaion, tr. Mother Mary & Archim. Kallistos (Ware) (South Canaan, PA: STS, 1998), p. 457.

Embodying Christian Truth—On Gandalf's Resurrection

In honour of Bright Week, and since the C.S. Lewis & Inklings Society conference will be going on this weekend here in Oklahoma City (see here for four lectures open to the public, including those of Michael Ward!), I was toying with the idea of posting something on the theme of resurrection in Tolkien’s works. Then I remembered that I’d already written something that touches on this—in my thesis. In context it was meant as an illustration of how literature can be used to ‘embody’ Christian truth (the illustration above is by Peter Xavier Price):

The clearest manifestation of this ‘religious element’ lies in what Tolkien, in his essay ‘On Fairy-stories’, has famously called ‘eucatastrophe’, [1] ‘the sudden joyous “turn”’:

[Eucatastrophe] is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. [2]

Tolkien goes on to say that the Gospels tell the story of ‘the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe’: ‘The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation.’ [3]

The Lord of the Rings contains a number of eucatastrophes, which occur at various magnitudes at different parts of the story. Perhaps the most obvious example of the eucatastrophe as an embodiment of Christian truth, however, occurs in The Two Towers, Book III, Chapter 5, ‘The White Rider’. The Fellowship of the Ring have been split up: two of the nine are dead, two taken captive, and two have gone East with the Ring, into the dark land of Mordor. Of the two who have perished, one is the wise and powerful wizard Gandalf (aka ‘Mithrandir’), who in Tolkien’s mythology is one of the Istari [4]—members of an angelic order who have appeared in ‘the likeness of Men’ and come to Middle-earth ‘to contest the power of [the evil fallen angel] Sauron . . . and to move Elves and Men and all living things of good will to valiant deeds.’ [5]

The three who remain free and without the Ring have gone into the forest of Fangorn, tracking their captive friends there. In the forest, they encounter an old man in a grey cloak, and, suspecting that he is the evil wizard Saruman, speak to him cautiously. When Gimli the dwarf threatens him, we read:

The old man was too quick for him. He sprang to his feet and leaped to the top of a large rock. There he stood, grown suddenly tall, towering above them. His hood and grey rags were flung away. His white garments shone. . . .

They all gazed at him. His hair was white as snow in the sunshine; and gleaming white was his robe; the eyes under his deep brows were bright, piercing as the rays of the sun; power was in his hand. Between wonder, joy, and fear they stood and found no words to say.

At last Aragorn stirred. ‘Gandalf!’ he said. ‘Beyond all hope you return to us in our need! What veil was over my sight? Gandalf!’ Gimli said nothing, but sank to his knees, shading his eyes. . . .

He stepped down from the rock, and picking up his grey cloak wrapped it about him: it seemed as if the sun had been shining, but now was hid in cloud again. . . . ‘Get up, my good Gimli! . . . Be merry! We meet again. At the turn of the tide. The great storm is coming, but the tide has turned.’ [6]

There are several obvious parallels to Christ here, conflated from different passages in Scripture. To take them in the chronological order that we find them in Tolkien: 1) the encounter in the woods where the three do not recognise their resurrected leader is of course strikingly similar to the story of the appearance of Christ to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Lk 24:13-35, where ‘their eyes were holden that they should not know Him’ (Lk 24:16); 2) the description of Gandalf standing on the rock, shining ‘as the rays of the sun’ so that Gimli is forced to his knees, ‘shading his eyes’, cannot help but recall the accounts of the Transfiguration in the Synoptic Gospels (Mt 17:1-9, Mk 9:2-10, and Lk 9:28-36), where three disciples see ‘the kingdom of God come with power’ (Mk 9:1); 3) Gandalf’s appearance is also quite similar to the appearance of Christ to St John the Theologian on Patmos (as recorded in Rev 1:12-18), where we read:

His head and His hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire . . . and His countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. And He laid His right Hand upon me, saying unto me, ‘Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.’ (Rev 1:14, 16-18)

Finally, 4) the entire encounter is dependent upon the great eucatastrophe which has taken place offstage, as it were: the resurrection of Gandalf from the dead. [7] Pressed by the awe-struck company, he tells them of how he fought with a terrible fiery demon called a Balrog, plunging into a deep abyss. ‘We fought far under the living earth, where time is not counted.’ [8] Emerging from a cave, he says ‘I threw down my enemy’ and then ‘darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell. Naked I was sent back—for a brief time, until my task is done.’ [9]

Although the order of these events in Tolkien does not quite match up to the events of Holy Saturday and Pascha, it is clear that the battle with the demon in the abyss ‘far under the living earth’ is a parallel with Christ’s descent into Hades, that the emerging from the cave corresponds to Christ’s coming forth from the tomb, and that Gandalf’s death and resurrection ‘for a brief time’, although separate from the abyss and the cave, are the most obvious (though not necessarily the most important) type of Christ in the entire novel. [10] The light with which Gandalf shines, while framed by that of the Transfiguration and that of the eschaton, is most immediately ‘the unapproachable light of the Resurrection’. [11] Gandalf’s ‘Be merry!’ reminds us that ‘we shall clearly hear Him say: Rejoice!’ [12] His appearance is ‘as the rays of the sun’ to remind us that ‘from the grave the beautiful Sun of Righteousness shone forth again upon us.’ [13]

It is important to note that Gandalf is only a type of Christ, not, like C.S. Lewis’s Aslan, an appearance of Christ Himself, nor an allegory of Christ, like Pan in English pastoral poetry such as Edmund Spenser’s ‘Shepheardes Calendar’ or Andrew Marvell’s ‘Clorinda and Damon’. Ralph Wood astutely observes, ‘Neither are we meant to identify Gandalf as Christ . . . Nor does Gandalf alone possess Christ-like qualities.’ [14] But as I have suggested, Gandalf is part of the whole embodiment of Christian truth in the novel, the truth of the eucatastrophe of our salvation in Christ.

The effect of this embodiment of Christian truth on readers has been very real, and Tolkien himself was quite conscious of and delighted by it. Richard Purtill has pointed out [15] a letter of Tolkien to a Miss Carole Batten-Phelps (Letter 328) where he writes concerning precisely this effect:

You speak of ‘a sanity and sanctity’ in the L.R. ‘which is a power in itself’. I was deeply moved. Nothing of the kind had been said to me before. But by a strange chance, just as I was beginning this letter, I had one from a man, who classified himself as ‘an unbeliever, or at best a man of belatedly and dimly dawning religious feeling . . . but you’, he said, ‘create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp’. I can only answer: ‘Of his own sanity no man can securely judge. If sanctity inhabits his work or as a pervading light illumines it then it does not come from him but through him. And neither of you would perceive it in these terms unless it was with you also. Otherwise you would see and feel nothing, or (if some other spirit was present) you would be filled with contempt, nausea, hatred. ‘Leaves out of the elf-country, gah!’ ‘Lembas—dust and ashes, we don’t eat that.’ [16]

The occasional presence of this ‘sanity and sanctity’ is one of the most important potential benefits of reading imaginative literature.


[1] For Tolkien, the eucatastrophe is closely bound up with the genre of the fairy-tale (‘Fairy-stories’, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien [London: HarperCollins, 1997], pp. 85-6). But while I have consulted an article on Greek fairy-tales, the author says nothing about a feature that would correspond with this notion (Angeliki Lalou, ‘Παραμύθι, Ταξίδι στον κόσμο της Φαντασίας’ [Fairy-tale: A Journey to the world of the Imagination], Πεμπτουσία 7, Dec.-Mar. 2002, pp. 62-5). It would be an interesting subject for a study to look for examples of Tolkienian eucatastrophe in Greek fairy-tales.

[2] Tolkien, ‘Fairy-stories’, p. 86.

[3] Tolkien, ‘Fairy-stories’, pp. 88-9. T.A. Shippey has noted that the Fellowship leaves Rivendell on its quest on 25 December, the feast of the Nativity, and the Ring is destroyed on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, but also, ‘in old English tradition . . . the date of the Crucifixion . . . . The main action of The Lord of the Rings takes place, then, in the mythic space between Christmas, Christ’s birth, and the crucifixion, Christ’s death’ (J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001], pp. 208-9).

[4] Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), p. 300.

[5] Tolkien, Silmarillion, p. 299.

[6] Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, collector’s edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), pp. 97-8.

[7] Though Gandalf has obviously risen prior to the encounter with him in the woods, the story is not told by the narrator at the time that it happens, but by Gandalf himself after he has again covered the brilliant light of his appearance.

[8] Tolkien, LOTR, p. 105.

[9] Tolkien, LOTR, pp. 105-6.

[10] While I am here treating Gandalf’s resurrection as an embodiment of ‘the True’, meaning the truth of the Gospel, Mark Eddy Smith has written an enlightening moral account of this event, reading it as an embodiment of ‘the Good’, in his inspiring, Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of The Lord of the Rings (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), pp. 70-3.

[11] Paschal canon, Ode I, first troparion, in A Prayer Book for Orthodox Christians, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston: HTM, 1995), p. 164.

[ 2] Ibid., pp. 164-5.

[ 3] Paschal canon, Ode 4, second troparion, in ibid., p. 167.

[14] Ralph C. Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (Lousiville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003), pp. 5, 6.

[15] Richard Purtill, J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, & Religion (SF: Ignatius, 2003), p. 188.

[16] Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, selected & ed. Humphrey Carpenter, asst. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 413.

Pascha & Unceasing Prayer—An Epistle of Met. Laurus

I recently came across this beautiful Paschal Epistle by Metropolitan Laurus of blessed memory in Orthodox Life No. 3, 2005, pp. 3-4. I thought it a beautiful meditation on this holiest of days:

In these Paschal days of spring, when nature is awakening from the snows of winter, these words of the Paschal canon become particularly meaningful. ‘Let every breath praise the Lord,’ God says through the mouth of King David [Ps. 150, 5]. And, ‘Тhe heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaimeth the work of His hands’ [Ps. 18, 1].

During these days, we sense with new strength that even inanimate, unconscious creation unceasingly offers up praise to its Creator.

But what of man, the reason-endowed crown of creation? The overwhelming majority of men have rejected their Creator, have perverted the divine gift of reason, turning it into something to advance their own glorification, and not the name of God.

We have been created to love and glorify the Lord willingly and consciously, as the Apostle Paul says: ‘Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks’ (I Thess. 5, 17-18). Extending His great love toward us, to set aright what had been trampled underfoot, the Lord sent His only-begotten Son, Who has shown us that only through the voluntary bearing of our cross are we able to restore within ourselves the fallen image of man.

He came to adopt us, that we might become Christians, people of Christ, not only in name, but in deed, in our manner of life.

Water mingles with water, and oil with oil; and for us to become one with Christ we must become like unto Him.

And for this it is essential that we constantly uplift ourselves to Him in spirit, that we pray to Him, that we always remember Him, not only during Great Lent and Pascha, but continually.

And for this we must, from one year to the next, connect this Paschal joy to the next Paschal joy, until, by the mercy of God, we reach the eternal Pascha and enter into the never-ending joy of our Lord.

One may reduce the meaning of any given prayer of ours to the words of the Paschal canon: ‘Grant that we may truly partake of Thee in the never-waning day of Thy kingdom.’

It is my earnest desire that the risen Lord grant this to all of us.

We greet our beloved archpastors, pastors, and our whole God-loving flock on these great and saving days of the radiant Resurrection of Christ.

Truly Christ is risen!
Amen.

+Metropolitan Laurus

On the Feast of Pascha

Christ is risen! Tonight death is vanquished, and human nature is restored. We celebrate the Feast of Feasts, and Festival of Festivals. We pass from death to life, and from earth to Heaven. We chant the hymn of victory. As Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos writes, ‘The Resurrection of Christ is the greatest event in history.’ [1]

I will not comment at length about this great Feast of Pascha, the beauty and significance of which are well beyond my ability to put into words. But there are a few things I’d like to share with those looking for a little Paschal reading. First, the lovely poem, ‘Easter’, by the 17th-c. English poet, George Herbert:

RISE heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long:
Or since all music is but three parts vied,
And multiplied;
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sunne arising in the East,
Though he give light, and th’ East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever. [2]

Second, I would like to offer a passage from the First Festal Oration of St Gregory the Theologian, ‘On Pascha & on His Slowness’, wherein St Gregory relates the event of Christ’s Resurrection directly to our salvation:

5. Let us become like Christ, since Christ also became like us; let us become gods because of him, since he also because of us became human. He assumed what is worse that he might give what is better. He became poor that we through his poverty might become rich (2 Cor 8.9). He took the form of a slave (Phil 2.7), that we might regain freedom (Rom 8.21). He descended that we might be lifted up, he was tempted that we might be victorious, he was dishonored to glorify us, he died to save us, he ascended to draw to himself us who lay below in the Fall of sin. Let us give everything, offer everything, to the one who gave himself as a ranson and an exchange for us. But one can give nothing comparable to oneself, understanding the mystery and becoming because of him everything that he became because of us. [3]

Third, in a fascinating article on the mythological theme of the ‘dying god’, associated with Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the Christian historian Henry Chadwick has argued against those who believe the observance of Easter to be some sort of thinly Christianised pagan festival:

The Christians simply took over from the Jews the feasts of Passover and Pentecost: why they did not also take the autumn festival of Tabernacles is a puzzle for the solution of which only very tenuous scraps of evidence survive. The origins of Easter as an annual festival lie simply in the continuing observance of the Passover meal among the Christian communities. Nothing could have been more natural. In this traditional form the rite was practised by the Christians before it acquired its full weight of interpretation as the unique annual festival of the resurrection of Christ. But in New Testament times, as can be seen from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the resurrection was being celebrated each week on the f irst day of ‘Lord’s Day’, dominica as the Latin Christians soon called it. It was not difficult to hold a special commemoration once a year on the Lord’s day which fell nearest to the Jewish Passover. Late in the 2nd century AD after some difficult controversy, the annual Easter festival was transferred from the original date, which always coincided with the synagogue Passover, to the following Sunday—that is, to the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

The myths of Attis, Adonis and Osiris were intended to explain the rites of the cult by referring to ‘events’ of immemorial antiquity; and by the 1st century BC they were generally understood as allegorical myths with a cosmological or psychological meaning. The Christians startled the contemporary world by declaring as sober record that their master who lived recently, and died under Pilate the governor, had risen again and was now living. It is evident from Paul’s dry catalogue in 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, that they would not have existed as a community if they had not believed themselves to be reporting a fact. [4]

Finally, I urge all to read the wonderful short story, ‘A Village Easter: Memories of Childhood’, by the pious Greek writer, Alexandros Papadiamandis. [5] It will touch your heart and soul.


[1] Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos, The Feasts of the Lord: An Introduction to the Twelve Feasts & Orthodox Christology, tr. Esther Williams (Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 2003), p. 241.

[2] The Works of George Herbert, in Prose & Verse, ed. Rev. Robert Aris Willmott (NY: D. Appleton & Co. 1857), pp. 34-5.

[3] St Gregory the Theologian, Festal Orations, tr. Nonna Verna Harrison (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2008), p. 59.

[4] Henry Chadwick, ‘Dying God’, Man, Myth, & Magic 26 (Maple Plain, MN: Purnell, 1971), p. 744.

[5] Alexandros Papadiamandis, ‘A Village Easter: Memories of Childhood’, tr. Andrew Watson, The Boundless Garden: Selected Short Stories, Vol. 1, ed. Fr Lambros Kamperidis & Denise Harvey (Limni, Evia, Greece: 2007), pp. 21-30.

'The Water Washd by Washing In't'—Holy Theophany

Today, 6 January on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the Holy Theophany of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ. In the prayer of St Sophronius of Jerusalem at the Great Blessing of the Waters, we read, ‘In the preceding feast we saw Thee as a child, while in the present we behold Thee full-grown, our God made manifest perfect God from perfect God.’ [1] In the words of Archbishop Andrei of Novo-Diveevo, ‘And here, for these past days, the Holy Church has been calling us to the shores of the Jordan, and today, on the day of the Baptism of the Lord, she reveals to us a great mystery—the Manifestation of God.’ [2] St Diadochus of Photiki teaches that ‘the holy Logos of God took flesh and, being God, He bestowed on us through His own baptism the water of salvation, so that we might be reborn.’ [3] Here is the reading from the Prologue for today’s Feast:

When the Lord Jesus had lived for thirty years from His birth in the flesh, He began His teaching and saving work. He marked this very beginning of the beginning by His Baptism in the Jordan. St Cyril of Jerusalem says: ‘The beginning of the world—water; the beginning of the Gospel—the Jordan.’ At the Baptism of the Lord in the water, that mystery was revealed to the world that was predicted in the Old Testament and fabled in ancient Egypt and India—the mystery of the Holy Trinity of God. The Father revealed Himself to the sense of hearing, the Spirit to the sense of sight and the Son, further beyond these, to the sense of touch. The Father gave His testimony of the Son, the Son was baptised in the waters and the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, hovered over the waters. And when John the Baptist bore witness of Christ and said: ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world’ (Jn. 1:29), and when he immersed the Lord in the Jordan and baptised Him, there were thus revealed both the mission of Christ in the world and the path of our salvation. That is to say: Christ takes upon Himself the sin of the whole human race. He dies under it (the immersion) and rises again (the coming up out of the water), and we must die to the old, sinful man and rise again, cleansed, renewed and re-born. Here is the Saviour and here is the way of salvation. The Feast of the Theophany is also called the Illuminating, for in the Jordan there is given to us an illumining, revealing God to us as Trinity, consubstantial and undivided. That is one thing. And the other is that each of us baptised in the water is illumined by the Father of lights, through the merits of the Son and in the power of the Holy Spirit. [4]

Archbishop Andrei’s emphasis on ‘the Manifestation of God’, the literal meaning of ‘Theophany’, and St Nicholas’s reference to the revelation of ‘the mystery of the Holy Trinity of God’ both get to the very heart of this feast as expressed in the festal Troparion:

When Thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan, the worship of the Trinity was made manifest. For the voice of the Father bore witness unto Thee, calling Thee the beloved Son, and the Spirit in the form of a dove confirmed His word as sure and steadfast. O Christ our God who hast appeared and enlightened the world, glory to Thee. [5]

Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos comments on this understanding of the Feast as a revelation of the Trinity:

During Christ’s Baptism the Holy Trinity appeared. One of the purposes of the divine incarnation, as well as of the Baptism of Christ was the revelation of the Trinitarian God, that although God has one essence and nature, yet He is off three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So the voice of the Father is heard witnessing and giving assurance that He who is in the Jordan at that moment is His Son, while the Holy Spirit also appears ‘like a dove’, as a dove. [6]

Furthermore, as God Himself it is not Christ who is blessed by the waters of Baptism, but rather the waters are blessed by Him. For, as the Venerable Bede says, ‘He deigned to be washed in the waters of the Jordan although he was clean of all stains, so that he might sanctify the flowing of water for the washing away of the stains of all of our wicked deeds.’ [7] Richard Crashaw has treated this in one of his ‘Divine Epigrams’:

On the water of our Lord’s Baptism.

Each blest drop, on each blest limb,
Is washt itself, in washing him:
’Tis a Gem while it stays here,
While it falls hence ’tis a Tear. [8]

Similarly, Giles Fletcher says in some lines to accompany an engraving of Christ’s Baptism, ‘I see the water wa[s]hd by washing in’t.’ [9]

Indeed, many of the liturgical texts for the Feast emphasise the fear of the waters before Christ and speak of them ‘turning back’ before Him. Psalm 76:17 is used as a Prokeimenon verse in the Royal Hours on the Eve of the Feast: ‘The waters saw Thee, O God, the waters saw Thee and were afraid.’ [10] Similarly, Psalm 113:3 is used in the first Antiphon at the Liturgy for the Feast: ‘The sea saw it and fled: Jordan was driven back.’ [11] A number of the hymns comment and elabourate upon these verses, such as this sticheron in Tone 8 from the Great Blessing of the Waters: ‘Today the nature of the waters is sanctified, and the Jordan is parted in two; it holds back the stream of its own waters, seeing the Master wash Himself.’ [12] Lest this be thought a ‘mere’ poetic image, see this post by Fr Milovan Katanić giving testimony of a recurring miracle which repeats this response of the creation to its Creator.

For more theological, historical, and literary reflection on the significance of the Feast, see:

My post of last year, in which I discuss the ‘crushing of the heads of dragons’ motif

This post by Brigit at Under the Oak on ‘Irish High Crosses & the Baptism of Christ’

This homily of St John Chrysostom on the Theophany

This explanation of the blessing of homes by Fr David Moser

This documentary on ‘the true site of Jesus’s Baptism’

And this poem by the inimitable Fr Jonathan Tobias

In conclusion, here is Hymn IX on the Epiphany by St Ephraim the Syrian (from the NPNF series, here):

Hymn IX.

(Resp., Blessed is He Who came down, and sanctified water for the remission of the sins of the children of Adam!)

1. O John, who sawest the Spirit,—that abode on the head of the Son,—to show how the Head of the Highest—went down and was baptized—and came up to be Head on earth!—Children of the Spirit ye have thus become,—and Christ has become for you the Head:—ye also have become His members.

2. Consider and see how exalted ye are;—how instead of the river Jordan—ye have glorious Baptism, wherein is peace;—spreading her wings to shade your bodies.—In the wilderness John baptized:—in Her pure flood of Baptism,—purely are ye baptized therein.

3. Infants think when they see its glory,—that by its pomp its might is enhanced.—But it is the same, and within itself—is not divided.—But the might which never waxes less or greater—in us is little or again great;—and he in whom is great understanding,—great in him is Baptism.

4. A man’s knowledge, if it be exalted,—exalted also is his degree above his brethren;—and he whose faith is great,—so also is his promise;—and as is his wisdom, so also his crowning.—As is the light, which though it be all goodly—and equal all of it with itself,—yet goodlier is one eye than another.

5. Jesus mingled His might in the water:—put ye Him on my brethren as discerning men!—For there are that in the water merely—perceive that they are washed. With our body be our soul washed!—The manifest water let the body perceive,—and the soul the secret might;—that both to the manifest and to the secret ye may be made like!

6. How beautiful is Baptism—in the eye of the heart; come, let us gaze on it!—Like as by a seal ye have been moulded;—receive ye its image,—that nought may be lacking to us of our image!—For the sheep that are white of heart—gaze on the glory that is in the water:—in your souls reflect ye it!

7. Water is by nature as a mirror,—for one who in it examines himself.—Stir up thy soul, thou that discernest,—and be like unto it!—For it in its midst reflects thy image;—from it, on it, find an example;—gaze in it on Baptism,—and put on the beauty that is hidden therein!

8. What profits it him that hears—a voice and knows not its significance?—Whoso hears a voice and is devoid—of the understanding thereof,—his ear is filled but his soul is empty.—Lo! since the gift is abundant,—with discernment receive ye it.

9. Baptism that is with understanding—is the conjunction of two lights,—and rich are the fountains of its rays.—……—And the darkness that is on the mind departs,—and the soul beholds Him in beauty,—the hidden Christ of glory,—and grieves when the glory fails.

10. Baptism without understanding—is a treasure full yet empty;—since he that receives it is poor in it,—for he understands not—how great are its riches into which he enters and dwells.—For great is the gift within it,—though the mean man perceives not—that he is exalted even as it.

11. Open wide your minds and see, my brethren,—the secret column in the air, whose base is fixed from the midst of the water—unto the door of the Highest Place, like the ladder that Jacob saw.—Lo! by it came down the light unto Baptism,—and by it the soul goes up to Heaven,—that in one love we may be mingled.

12. Our Lord when he was baptized by John—sent forth twelve fountains;—and they issued forth and cleansed by their streams—the defilement of the peoples.—His worshippers are made white like His garments,—the garments in Tabor and the body in the water.—Instead of the garments the peoples are made white,—and have become for Him a clothing of glory.

13. From your garments learn, my brethren,—how your members should be kept.—For if the garment, which ever so many times—may be made clean,—is duly kept for the sake of its comeliness,—the body which has but one baptism—manifold more exceeding is the care of its keeping,—for manifold are its dangers.

14. Again the sun in a house that is strait,—is straitened therein though he be great:—but in a house that is goodly and large,—when he rises thereon—far and wide in it he spreads his rays;—and though the sun is one and the same in his nature,—in divers houses he undergoes changes:—Even so our Lord in divers men. [13]

[1] The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary & Archim. Kallistos (Ware) (South Canaan, PA: STS, 1998), p. 354.

[2] Archbishop Andrei of Novo-Diveevo, The One Thing Needful (Liberty, TN: St John of Kronstadt, 1991), p. 21.

[3] The Philokalia, Vol. 1, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, et al. (London: Faber, 1983), p. 280.

[4] St Nicholas (Velimirović), The Prologue from Ochrid, Vol. 1, trans. Mother Maria (Birmingham: Lazarica, 1986), p. 31.

[5] Menaion, p. 363.

[6] 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. 105.

[7] 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. 114.

[8] The Verse in English of Richard Crashaw (NY: Grove, 1949), p. 39.

[9] William B. Hunter, Jr., ed., The English Spenserians: The Poetry of Giles Fletcher, George Wither, Michael Drayton, Phineas Fletcher & Henry More (Salt Lake City: U of Utah, 1977), p. 48.

[10] Menaion, p. 316.

[11] Ibid., p. 384.

[12] Ibid., p. 348.

'Prepare Thyself'—The Entry of the Theotokos & Advent

Today, 25 November on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the Apodosis of the Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple (see last year’s post here). Now, I don’t normally venture much into the realm of offering my own thoughts on spiritual matters, but I was struck by something I heard during the Vigil for the Feast last week. The second Apostichon in Tone 5 from Great Vespers (The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary & Archim. Kallistos [Ware] [South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary, 1998], p. 171) reads:

Ann, truly blessed by God’s grace, led with gladness into the temple of the Lord the pure and ever-Virgin, who is full of grace, and she called the young girls to go before her, lamps in hand. ‘Go, Child’, she said, ‘to Him who gave thee unto me; be unto Him an offering and a sweet smelling incense. Go into the place which none may enter: learn its mysteries and prepare thyself to become the pleasing and beautiful dwelling-place of Jesus, who grants the world great mercy.’

This last line in particular—‘prepare thyself to become the pleasing and beautiful dwelling-place of Jesus’—strikes me as an appropriate thing to apply to ourselves as part of our inward observance of the Advent season. Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos notes (The Feasts of the Lord: An Introduction to the Twelve Feasts & Orthodox Christology, trans. Esther Williams [Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 2003], pp. 36-7):

According to the holy Fathers (St Gregory of Nyssa, St Maximos the Confessor, St Symeon the New Theologian, St Niketas Stethatos, etc.), what happened physically in the Panagia happens spiritually in everyone whose soul is living in virginity, that is to say, is purified of passions. Christ, who was once born in the flesh, always wants to be born in the spirit in those who wish it, and so He becomes an infant, forming Himself in them through the virtues.

. . . This conception and birth is acquired through following God’s commandments, mainly through the return of the nous to the heart and the unceasing prayer of a single word. Then the person becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Another thought that occurred to me is that much of this preparation must involve listening to God’s Word (at least partly in the sense described in this post). As the first verse at the Alleluia in Tone 8 after the Epistle in the Liturgy for the Feast says, ‘Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear (Ps. 44:11)’ (Menaion, p. 197). Then of course there follows the reading from Luke 10:38-42, 11:27-28, where is emphasised the virtue of St Mary of Bethany ‘which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard His word (Lk 10:39)’ (Menaion, p. 129). It seems to me, of course, that this is greatly assisted by, if it does not require, the observation of Advent in the spirit that I have suggested here—i.e., lessening our activity and turning off our televisions, even postponing the Marthan hospitality (in the form of premature ‘Christmas parties’) that Bl Theophylact calls ‘a great virtue which ought not to be scorned’ because ‘it is even greater to give heed to spiritual words’ like St Mary (The Explanation by Blessed Theophylact, Archbishop of Ochrid and Bulgaria of the Holy Gospel According to St Luke, Vol. III of Bl Theophylact’s Explanation of the New Testament, trans. Fr Christopher Stade [House Springs, MO: Chrysostom, 1997], p. 121). As Bl Jerome says (The Orthodox New Testament, Vol. 1: The Holy Gospels, trans. Holy Apostles Convent [Buena Vista, CO: Holy Apostles Convent, 1999], p. 333, n. 222):

Be then like Mary; prefer the food of the soul to that of the body. Leave it to thy sister to run to and from and to seek how she may fitly welcome Christ. But do thou, having once and for all cast away the burden of the world, sit at the Lord’s feet and say, ‘I have found Him Whom my soul loves: I held Him, and did not let Him go’ [Song 3:4].

It is interesting to note that this theme of the coming of Christ into the individual soul as a parallel to Advent is not unknown to the West, where it is particularly associated with those strict observers of St Benedict’s Rule, the early Cistercians. Here, for example, is an insightful passage from the Second Sermon for Advent of Guerric of Igny (The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century, trans. Pauline Matarasso [London: Penguin, 1993], pp. 133-2):

It may now happen, therefore, that the Lord will come to you before his actual advent; he may visit you in person before he arrives for all the world to see. . . . And whether to reward desert or ardent striving, this coming of the Lord to the individual soul is frequent in this middle time between his first and final comings, conforming us to the first and preparing us for the last. Assuredly he comes to us now to ensure that his first coming will not have been in vain, and to avoid having to meet us at the last in wrath. In this middle advent he is intent on reforming our spirit of pride and patterning us anew on the humility he showed forth at his first coming, so that one day he may also transfigure our lowly body into the likeness of his glorious body which he will reveal when he comes again. This personal visitation, which imparts to us the grace of the first advent and holds promise of the glory of the last, should be the object of our heart’s desire, the goal of all our striving. And because God loves mercy and truth, he, the Lord, will give grace and glory, bestowing grace on us through his mercy and through truth restoring glory.

Moreover, just as the spiritual advent falls in time midway between the two corporeal comings, so too in essence it partakes equally in each, poised like a mediator between the two. The first coming was hidden and humble; the last will be manifest and marvelous this one indeed is hidden, but also wonderful. We call it hidden, not because the one who is visited is unaware, but because the Lord comes secretly. . . . Unseen and unperceived he comes and goes, he who alone, while present, is the light of the soul and mind, the light by which, invisible, he is seen and, inconceivable, perceived.

'The Saviour Has Transfigured Disfigured Man'—The Feast of the Transfiguration

Today, 6 August on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the Holy Transfiguration of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ. I don’t intend to offer my own comments on this Great Feast of the Church, as the awesomeness of Christ’s manifest glory is so far beyond my experience. I will confine myself to offering a few appropriate texts, in this way making a small beginning of following the words of the first sticheron (in Tone 4) at ‘Lord, I have cried’ at Small Vespers for the Feast (The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Archim. [Metropolitan] Kallistos [Ware] [South Canaan, PA: STS, 1998], p. 468):

Come, let us rejoice, mounting up from the earth to the highest contemplation of the virtues: let us be transformed this day into a better state and direct our minds to heavenly things, being shaped anew in piety according to the form of Christ. For in His mercy the Saviour of our souls has transfigured disfigured man and made him shine with light upon Mount Tabor.

First of all, it strikes me that perhaps the definitive word on the Holy Transfiguration has been spoken by St Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessaloniki, in the text he drafted as a statement on behalf of the entire Holy Mountain concerning the controversy with the notorious heretic Barlaam (The Philokalia: The Complete Text, Vol. 4, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, et al. [London: Faber, 1998], p. 422):

4. If anyone maintains that the light which shone about the disciples on Mount Tabor was an apparition and a symbol of the kind that now is and now is not, but has no real being and is an effect that not only does not surpass comprehension, but is inferior to it, he clearly contends against the doctrines of the saints. For the saints both in hymns and in their writings call this light ineffable, uncreated, eternal, timeless, unapproachable, boundless, infinite, limitless, invisible to angels and men, archetypal and unchanging beauty, the glory of God, the glory of Christ, the glory of the Spirit, the ray of Divinity and so forth. The flesh of Christ, it is said, is glorified at the moment of its assumption and the glory of the Godhead becomes the body’s glory. But this glory was invisible in His visible body to those unable to perceive that upon which even angels cannot gaze. Thus Christ was transfigured, not by the addition of something He was not, nor by a transformation into something He was not, but by the manifestation to His disciples of what He really was. He opened their eyes so that instead of being blind they could see. While He Himself remained the same, they could now see Him as other than He had appeared to them formerly. For He is ‘the true light’ (Jn 1:9), the beauty of divine glory, and He shone forth like the sun—though this image is imperfect, since what is uncreated cannot be imaged in creation without some diminution.

Second, Met. Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos, following St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, emphasises that the ‘second sun [of Christ’s divinity] was incomparably higher than the sensible sun, which rose from the heavens’, adding that ‘just as with the rising of the sensible sun all the stars in the sky disappear, so too the rays of the sensible sun disappeared with the rising of the sun of righteousness’ (The Feasts of the Lord: An Introduction to the Twelve Feasts and Orthodox Christology, trans. Esther Williams [Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 2003], p. 150). In reference to this, His Eminence sites the second troparion from Canticle 4 of the second canon at Matins: ‘The visible sun was eclipsed by the rays of Thy divinity, when it saw Thee transfigured on Mount Tabor, O my Jesus. Glory to Thy power, O Lord’ (Menaion, p. 486).

Furthermore, in keeping with the words of the first troparion I quoted (above), Met. Hierotheos also writes:

It says repeatedly in Holy Scripture that Christ is the new Adam, who became man in order to correct the error of the ancestral Adam. The first Adam in Paradise, although he was still inexperienced, was in a state of illumination of his nous because that in him which was in the image was pure and received the rays of the divine light. But after his sin, he was darkened, he lost the likeness, but did not lose the image entirely. . . . Through the incarnation of Christ and the deification of human nature Adam came back to his former glory, and indeed rose still higher.

Thus on Tabor Christ showed what the prototype of the creation of man was like and what the first state of Adam was like in Paradise before the fall. (p. 154)

St Maximus the Confessor has composed an interesting interpretation of the Holy Transfiguration in his ‘Second Century on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation of the Son of God’, in which he touches on the appearance of the Prophets Moses and Elijah on the mountain with Christ (The Philokalia: The Complete Text, Vol. 2, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, et al. [London: Faber, 1990], pp. 140-1):

14. When the Logos of God becomes manifest and radiant in us, and His face shines like the sun, then His clothes will also look white (cf. Mt 17:2). That is to say, the words of the Gospels will then be clear and distinct, with nothing concealed. And Moses and Elijah—the more spiritual principles of the Law and the prophets—will also be present with Him.

15. It is written that the Son of Man is coming ‘with His angels in the glory of the Father’ (Mt 16:27). Similarly, in those found worthy, the Logos of God is transfigured to the degree to which each has advanced in holiness, and He comes to them with His angels in the glory of the Father. For the more spiritual principles in the Law and the prophets—symbolized by Moses and Elijah when they appeared with the Lord at His transfiguration—manifest their glory according to the actual receptive capacity of those to whom it is revealed.

16. He who to some degree has been initiated into the inner principle of the divine unity invariably discovers the inner principles of divine providence and judgment conjoined with it. That is why, like St Peter, he thinks it good that three tabernacles should be made within himself for those who have appeared to him (cf. Mt 17:4). These tabernacles represent three stages of salvation, namely that of virtue, that of spiritual knowledge and that of theology. The first requires fortitude and self-restraint [σωφροσύνη] in the practice of the virtues: of this the type was Elijah. The second requires right discernment in natural contemplation: Moses disclosed this in his own person. The third requires consummate perfection of wisdom: this was revealed by the Lord. They were called tabernacles, or temporary dwellings, because beyond them are other still more excellent and splendid stages, through which those found worthy will pass in the age to be.

Finally, Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette, OSB, in his charming little book, A Monastic Year: Reflections from a Monastery (Dallas: Taylor, 1996), reminds us:

In the Eastern Christian tradition, the feast of the Transfiguration is also the feast of the harvest. On this day Eastern Christians keep the old custom of rendering thanks to the Lord of the harvest by bringing to the church and offering him their first vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers. Here in the monastery, after the Liturgy we have the traditional blessing of the produce of our garden. This is a symbol of the earth itself being made new by the presence of Christ, rendering in homage its first fruits to its Lord and Master. (p. 128)

Joseph Brodsky's 'Nunc Dimittis'

There is a remarkable poem by the Russian poet of Jewish descent, Joseph Brodsky, that relates the events commemorated today—‘Cретенье’, that is, ‘The Meeting’ (the title in English translations, however, is ‘Nunc Dimittis’). Written in 1972, it is dedicated to the great poet, Anna Akhmatova, a friend and supporter of Brodsky. Akhmatova celebrated her nameday on the Feast of the Prophetess Anna, the day after the Meeting in the Temple, and was considered to have been endowed in some sense with a prophetic gift (see Tomas Venclova, ‘A Meeting of Two Poets: Joseph Brodsky’s “Nunc Dimittis”’, p. 10). According to Venclova, who knew both poets, Brodsky’s religious temperament was similar to that of Søren Kierkegaard and Lev Shestov. Having a greater appreciation for the Old Testament, he was drawn to those parts of the New Testament where there is a sort of overt connection to the Old (Venclova, p. 11). Brodsky claimed the poem had been inspired in part by Rembrandt’s depiction of the Meeting, ‘Symeon in the Temple’ (Venclova, p. 12), though Venclova has shown it is also heavily indebted to Akhmatova and her work.

Here is George L. Kline’s translation of the poem, from Joseph Brodsky, A Part of Speech (NY: Noonday, 1996), pp. 55-7:

‘Nunc Dimittis’

When Mary first came to present the Christ Child

to God in His temple, she found—of those few

who fasted and prayed there, departing not from it—

devout Simeon and the prophetess Anna.

The holy man took the Babe up in his arms.

The three of them, lost in the grayness of dawn,

now stood like a small shifting frame that surrounded

the Child in the palpable dark of the temple.

The temple enclosed them in forests of stone.

Its lofty vaults stooped as though trying to cloak

the prophetess Anna, and Simeon, and Mary—

to hide them from men and to hide them from Heaven.

And only a chance ray of light struck the hair

of that sleeping Infant, who stirred but as yet

was conscious of nothing and blew drowsy bubbles;

old Simeon's arms held him like a stout cradle.

It had been revealed to this upright old man

that he would not die until his eyes had seen

the Son of the Lord. And it thus came to pass. And

he said: ‘Now, O Lord, lettest thou thy poor servant,

according to thy holy word, leave in peace,

for mine eyes have witnessed thine offspring: he is

thy continuation and also the source of

thy Light for idolatrous tribes, and the glory

of Israel as well.' The old Simeon paused.

The silence, regaining the temple's clear space

oozed from all its corners and almost engulfed them,

and only his echoing words grazed the rafters,

to spin for a moment, with faint rustling sounds,

high over their heads in the tall temple's vaults,

akin to a bird that can soar, yet that cannot

return to the earth, even if it should want to.

A strangeness engulfed them. The silence now seemed

as strange as the words of old Simeon's speech.

And Mary, confused and bewildered, said nothing—

so strange had his words been. He added, while turning

directly to Mary: ‘Behold, in this Child,

now close to thy breast, is concealed the great fall

of many, the great elevation of others,

a subject of strife and a source of dissension,

and that very steel which will torture his flesh

shall pierce through thine own soul as well. And that wound

will show to thee, Mary, as in a new vision

what lies hidden, deep in the hearts of all people.’

He ended and moved toward the temple's great door.

Old Anna, bent down with the weight of her years,

and Mary, now stooping gazed after him, silent.

He moved and grew smaller, in size and in meaning,

to these two frail women who stood in the gloom.

As though driven on by the force of their looks,

he strode through the cold empty space of the temple

and moved toward the whitening blur of the doorway.

The stride of his old legs was steady and firm.

When Anna's voice sounded behind him, he slowed

his step for a moment. But she was not calling

to him; she had started to bless God and praise Him.

The door came still closer. The wind stirred his robe

and fanned at his forehead; the roar of the street,

exploding in life by the door of the temple,

beat stubbornly into old Simeon's hearing.

He went forth to die. It was not the loud din

of streets that he faced when he flung the door wide,

but rather the deaf-and-dumb fields of death's kingdom.

He strode through a space that was no longer solid.

The rustle of time ebbed away in his ears.

And Simeon's soul held the form of the Child—

its feathery crown now enveloped in glory—

aloft, like a torch, pressing back the black shadows,

to light up the path that leads into death's realm,

where never before until this present hour

had any man managed to lighten his pathway.

The old man's torch glowed and the pathway grew wider.

The Russian poem (it can be read here) is written in strict amphibrachic tetrameter, and while I haven’t read Kline’s rendering out loud to verify his fidelity, he seems to have attempted to follow the original rather closely in this regard. As I have mentioned previously, my Russian is quite poor, but I can point out two things about the diction. The first, suggested by Venclova, is merely the interesting fact that Brodsky, who was of Jewish decent and did not convert to Christianity so far as I know, uses the word церковь for the Temple in the first line rather than the rather expected храм, which makes it first appearance in the last line of the second stanza. In this way, Venclova suggests, he ‘seems to shift the location of the event from Jerusalem to Russia’ (which reminds me of an observation by Leonard Stanton I shall have to post about soon concerning Dostoevsky’s use of the Life of Elder Leonid of Optina), and, ‘The opposition between Judaism and Orthodoxy, between the Old and the New Testament is thus cancelled out’ (p. 19).

The second interesting point is that he repeatedly refers to St Symeon as старец, a decision that produces an effect similar, it seems to me, to the use of церковь, especially in light of Dostoevsky’s famous description of the ‘institution’ of старцы in The Brothers Karamazov. Unfortunately, the connotations of neither of these dictional choices seem to be reflected in Kline’s translation.

'Thou hast crushed the heads of the dragons'

Today, 6 January on the Church’s calendar, Orthodox around the world celebrate the Holy Theophany of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Unfortunately in Oklahoma we don’t have any freezing water to dive into, but we did have our own, modest Blessing of the Waters. This to me has always been one of the more distinctively Orthodox aspects of the feast, and it is very well summarised in the introductory material to Mother Mary’s and Archimandrite [now Metropolitan] Kallistos’s translation of the Menaion of the Great Feasts (The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos [Ware] [South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary, 1998], p. 58):

When Christ went down into the water, not only did He carry us down with Him and make us clean, but He also made clean the nature of the waters themselves. As the troparion of the forefeast puts it, ‘Christ has appeared in the Jordan to sanctify the waters’. The feast of Theophany has thus a cosmic aspect. The fall of the angelic orders, and after it the fall of man, involved the whole universe. All God’s creation was thereby warped and disfigured: to use the symbolism of the liturgical texts, the waters were made a ‘lair of dragons’. Christ came on earth to redeem not only man, but—through man—the entire material creation. When He entered the water, besides effecting by anticipation our rebirth in the font, He likewise effected the cleansing of the waters, their transfiguration into an organ of healing and grace.

This idea that the waters were a ‘lair of dragons’ is especially interesting to me, due in no small part to the whole legendary status of dragons. Metropolitan Hierotheos writes that ‘according to St John of Damaskos, Christ was baptised in order to crush the heads of the dragons in the water, for there was a conception that the demons dwell in the water’ (Metropolitan Hierotheos [Vlachos] of Nafpaktos, The feasts of the Lord: An introduction to the twelve feasts and Orthodox Christology, trans. Esther Williams [Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 2003], p. 102).

Most especially, it calls to my mind the great Old English poem, Beowulf. In the episode of Beowulf’s descent into the ‘mere’ to fight Grendel's mother (ll. 1422-1631), many readers have seen echoes of Christ’s baptism and the harrowing of Hell, as well as the baptism of all Christian faithful. According to Howell Chickering’s translation (Howell D. Chickering, Jr., ed. and trans., Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition [NY: Anchor, 1989], p. 131), when Beowulf and his men tracked Grendel's mother to the mere—

They saw strange serpents,
dragonish shapes, swimming through the water.
Water-beasts, too, lay curled on the cliff-shelves,
that often slither off at dark daybreak
to attend men’s sorrow upon the sail-roads,
sea-beasts and serpents. (ll. 1425-30)

Quoting from the Latin prayers of blessing said for new baptismal water on Holy Saturday, M.B. McNamee points out:

To an audience familiar with this symbolic meaning of immersion into and emersion from waters infested by the powers of hell and purified by the powers of God, it would have been natural to see in Beowulf’s descent into the serpent-infested mere and his triumphant ascent from those waters purified of their serpents a symbolic representation of the death and burial and of the resurrection of Christ, and, in the purification of the waters, a symbol of the redemption of man from the poisonous powers of evil. (M.B. McNamee, SJ, ‘Beowulf—An Allegory of Salvation?’, An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson [Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame, 1963], pp. 340-1)

Even the motif of light that we find in the texts of the Theophany services—the last sticheron from Vespers for the feast reads, ‘Thou . . . hast crushed the heads of the dragons. Thou hast descended into the waters and hast given light to all things’ (Menaion, p. 339)—is echoed in the poem. In his article on the parallels between Beowulf and baptism (‘Beowulf and the Liturgy’, Nicholson, p. 223-32), Allen Cabaniss has called attention (on p. 224) to the ‘beam of preternatural light' in ll. 1570-2:

Then the cave-light shone out, a gleam from within,
even as from heaven comes the shining light
of God’s candle. (Chickering, pp. 139, 141)

Of course, it’s too bad that it is Grendel's mother and not the dragon himself that is killed in the mere. But still, the connection with baptism, and especially, to me, with Theophany, seems rather striking. I shall close with the final stanza, the 18th, of St Romanos’s full Kontakion for the feast (from St Romanos the Melodist, Kontakia on the Life of Christ, trans. Archimandrite Ephrem [Lash] [San Francisco: HarperCollins, n.d.], p. 47):

At the divine command, Zachary’s offspring raises his mind on high,
and stretching out his palm places it on the King,
washes in the streams, then leads back to land the Lord of land and sky,
whom the One who cried, ‘This is my beloved Son’
pointed out from heaven by a voice as by a finger.
To the Father himself then and to the Son
who was baptized and to his Spirit I cry,
‘Crush those who afflict my soul;
end my errors, my Redeemer,
the unapproachable Light.'

Twelfth Night

Although we Orthodox celebrate the Magi with the Feast of the Nativity and focus on the Baptism of our Lord on Theophany (see here for an article by Fr George Dragas on this difference in the Eastern and Western traditions), tonight can still rightly be called our ‘Twelfth Night’ simply by virtue of its being the twelfth night since Christmas. Unfortunately, my wife and I were forced by schedules to have our annual Twelfth Night party on Friday evening, making it technically ‘Tenth Night’. But we did have a ‘Galette des Rois’, a Queen of the Day, and a bowl of wassail (though, sadly, sans ‘Lamb’s Wool’). Also, a friend and I adopted Cockney accents to perform a rousing rendition of ‘I Saw Three Ships’ (the ships were originally those that brought the relics of the Magi to Cologne, Germany in 1163, but the story was changed to refer to Christ, the Theotokos, and St Joseph going to Bethlehem). One can find nearly all of the Twelfth Night info one needs for a Western-style celebration here, but just for good measure, here is what St Nicholas (Velimirović) has to say about the Magi, Ss Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, under the ‘Reflection’ for 25 December:

The Lord Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was first worshiped by shepherds and wise men (astrologers) from the east-the simplest and the wisest of this world. Even today, those who most sincerely worship the Lord Jesus as God and Savior are the simplest and the wisest of this world. Perverted simplicity and half-learned wisdom were always the enemies of Christ's divinity and His Gospel. But who were these wise men from the east? This question was especially studied by St Dimitri of Rostov. He claims that they were kings of certain smaller regions or individual towns in Persia, Arabia and Egypt. At the same time, they were erudite in the knowledge of astronomy. This wondrous star appeared to them, which announced the birth of the New King. According to St Dimitri, this star appeared to them nine months before the birth of the Lord Jesus, i.e., at the time of His conception by the Most-holy Theotokos. They spent nine months in studying this star, in preparing for the journey and in traveling. They arrived in Bethlehem shortly after the birth of the Savior of the world. One of them was called Melchior. He was old, with long white hair and beard. He offered the Lord the gift of gold. The second was called Caspar, of ruddy face, young and beardless. He offered the Lord the gift of frankincense. The third was called Balthasar, of dark complexion and a very heavy beard. He offered the Lord the gift of myrrh. After their deaths, their bodies were taken to Constantinople, from Constantinople to Milan, and from Milan to Cologne. It can be added that these three wise men were representatives of the three main races of men that descended from Noah's three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth. The Persian represented the Japhethites, the Arabian represented the Semites, and the Egyptian represented the Hamites. Thus it can be said that, through these three, the whole human race worshiped the Incarnate Lord and God.