'We Long for Your Church'—Saints of Thessaloniki

Today, the Third Sunday of Pascha, besides the well-known commemoration of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, the great city of Thessaloniki also commemorates the Synaxis of her many Saints. Among these, she counts first of all the holy Apostle Paul, who exhorted the Thessalonians to ‘stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle’ (II Thess. 2:15). But immediately after St Paul comes Thessaloniki’s Great Martyr, St Demetrius the Myrrh-gusher, whose relics continue to pour forth miracles even to this day. Perhaps next in fame are the great Apostles to the Slavs, Ss Cyril and Methodius, to whom all Slavs are eternally indebted for bringing them the Gospel in their own language. Finally, we must not neglect to note the great Archbishop, St Gregory Palamas, who so courageously defended the Faith against the heresies of Barlaam and Akindynos. But these five are only the most renowned of a multitude of cœlestial luminaries standing before the throne of God in intercession for Thessaloniki. As Sophia Ahtaridis writes:

Thus, this city justifies the boast of the Apostle Paul when he wrote in his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians: ‘We are bound to thank God always for you, brethren, as it is meet, because that your faith groweth exceedingly, and the charity of every one of you all toward each other aboundeth; so that we ourselves boast of you in the churches of God for your patience and faith in all the persecutions and tribulations that ye endure’ (1:3-4). [1]

In his fascinating book on Ss Cyril and Methodius, Professor Emeritus Anthony-Emil N. Tachiaos of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki writes:

Apart from bathing in the fount of Greek education at the houses of their teachers, Drungarius Leo’s remarkable children also acquired further knowledge from their life in the ‘Thessalonians’ great and noteworthy city, protected by God’, where they gradually became acquainted with the burning issues of the Empire. Thessalonica was a school in itself—the Empire’s second city after Constantinople, with the marks of each historical epoch deeply etched upon its face. Thessalonica was Byzantium’s gateway to the West, the Empire’s eye, which was firmly fixed upon the ‘Western regions’—that is, the vast expanse of its dominions extending from the Macedonian capital to Sirmium and Dalmatia, or in other words the whole of Illyricum. Thessalonica stood upon the road which linked ancient Rome with the new Rome, Constantinople, and indeed, until 732 the city came under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Rome itself. Within its walls profound deposits and traditions had been laid down and survived at successive notional levels. Beginning at the time of the illustrious Macedonian Kings, and continuing on through the Hellenistic and Roman eras, they passed on to subsequent generations Greek and Latin memories and wisdom, which were all fused together by a common catalyst, the Greek Christian tradition. Their enduring symbols, the city’s magnificent monuments bore living witness to these traditions. All this, together with the contemporary historical events that were being acted out in the broader environs of the city, formed another kind of school for Constantine [St Cyril] and Methodius. [2]

As a resident of this God-protected city for two years, this commemoration of her Saints has special meaning for me. It was one of my great pleasures to walk up and down the streets of Thessaloniki, stopping at her many churches, old and new, [3] to venerate the relics of her Saints—St Demetrius, St Gregory Palamas, St Theodora, St David, St Basil the Confessor, and others—and to encounter there the pious clergy, monastics, and simple faithful, many of them perhaps modern Saints in their own right. Profoundly moved by these experiences, I wrote the following poem (dated 15 February 2002), which stands as my humble attempt at a tribute to the heavenly beauties of this city:

Salonika

Encircled by ancient walls,
On the slope of a hill by the sea you lie,
Your dazzling churches and ruined mosques
Sleeping in a garden of our vain edifices.
You’ve stood firm, lady,
Since the days of Philip and Alexander,
Since your Apostle’s letters,
Since your emperor’s palace,
Through invasions of Avars and Bulgars
And your fall to the Turk,
Since the welcoming of Abraham’s children
And the horrors of your occupation.
And even now the ghosts of your Roman splendour
Haunt your little old streets,
Hallowed by centuries of faith,
And the uncreated light of a spiritual aristocracy
Gleams in the eyes of your merchants,
And you live still
Under your martyred Patron’s spear
And your holy Archbishop’s prayers.

In conclusion, here are two troparia from an Old Church Slavonic canon for St Demetrius believed to have been written by St Methodius, Equal-to-the-Apostles. As Thomas Butler notes, ‘The poet is evidently a native of Thessaloniki. He is homesick for his city, as he recalls its annual celebration of Demetrius’s feast day, October 26.’ [4]

Hear now your poor supplicants, O glorious one, and heed our prayers, as we have become separated far from your radiant shrine, and our hearts burn within us as we long for your church, holy one—to worship there again some day through your prayers.

Why, O wise one, should we—your miserable slaves—alone be deprived of your beauty, travelling through foreign lands and towns for the love of the Creator, blessed one, warriors for the humiliation of the cruel trilinguals and heretics? [5]

(The painting of Byzantine Thessaloniki is the work of Thanasis Bakogiorgos, who to my knowledge still runs his beautiful shop, Porphyra, near the Plateia Navarino. Incidentally, on the right side of the centre wall, just opposite the large domed church of St George’s Rotunda, is where the modern Aristotle University of Thessaloniki is.)


[1] Sophia Ahtaridis, Foreword, Byzantine Monuments of Thessaloniki, by Constantine Cavarnos (Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies, 1995), p. x.

[2] Anthony-Emil N. Tachiaos, Cyril & Methodius of Thessalonica: The Acculturation of the Slavs (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2001), p. 6.

[3] Constantine Cavarnos notes, ‘Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece from the point of view of size and importance as an administrative and cultural center, is the most glorious one from the standpoint of Byzantine monuments. It boasts of more than a dozen beautiful, awe-inspiring Byzantine churches’ (Cavarnos, p. 19).

[4] Thomas Butler, Monumenta Bulgarica: A Bilingual Anthology of Bulgarian Texts from the 9th to the 19th Centuries (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic, 2004), p. 31.

[5] Ibid., p. 41.

'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.

'The Ideal Western Man'—St Gregory the Great, Pope of Rome

Today, 12 March on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of St Gregory the Dialogist (c. 540-604), also known as ‘St Gregory the Great’, Pope of Rome. In Book I, Chapt. 23 of his Ecclesiastical History, the Venerable Bede writes, ‘In the tenth year of his reign [i.e., that of the Emperor Maurice], Gregory, a man eminent in learning and in affairs, was elected pontiff of the apostolic see of Rome; he ruled for thirteen years, six months, and ten days’ (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Bertram Colgrave, ed. Judith McClure and Roger Collins [Oxford: Oxford U, 1994], p. 37). Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna gives the following estimate in his introduction to The Homilies of St Gregory the Great On the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, trans. Theodosia Gray, ed. Presbytera Juliana Cownie (Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1990), p. 9:

St Gregory was a man of great culture, known for his gentle nature and distinguished for his courage in confessing the Christian truth. A visionary with deep insight into the mysteries of Scripture, he represents, perhaps, the ideal Western man—steeped in the learning of the Roman society in which he lived and formed by the universal values and supreme wisdom bequeathed to that society by the Greek world.

I personally have a double veneration for St Gregory. First, I esteem him as the wise pastor who sent the first missionaries to the English, so that, as St Bede says—

We can and should by rights call him our apostle, for though he held the most important see in the whole world and was head of Churches which had long been converted to the true faith, yet he made our nation, till then enslaved to idols, into a Church of Christ, so that we may use the apostle’s words about him, ‘If he is not an apostle to others yet at least he is to us, for we are the seal of his apostleship in the Lord.’ (EH II.1, p. 65)

We may in fact attribute the remarkably peaceful conversion of the English to St Gregory’s careful guidance of the mission, which St Bede details in Bk. I, including the texts of several of St Gregory’s letters. This holy Pope had every right to take the credit when he wrote:

Lo, the mouth of Britain, which once only knew how to gnash its barbarous teeth, has long since learned to sing the praises of God with the alleluia of the Hebrews. See how the proud Ocean has become a servant, lying low now before the feet of the saints, and those barbarous motions, which earthly princes could not subdue with the sword, are now, through the fear of God, repressed with a simple word form the lips of priests; and he who, as an unbeliever, did not flinch before troops of warriors, now, as a believer, fears the words of the humble. (qtd. in St Bede, p. 69)

So great was St Gregory’s rôle as the apostle of the English, that he continued to play this rôle after his death. Thus, the righteous King Alfred the Great out of zeal for ‘wisdom and instruction’ translated St Gregory’s Pastoral Care into Old English and sent a copy, along with a fancy bookmark, ‘to every bishopric in my kingdom’ (‘Preface to St Gregory’s Pastoral Care’, The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology, trans. and ed. Kevin Crossley-Holland [Oxford: Oxford U, 1984], pp. 218, 220). It is not surprising that the earliest Life of St Gregory was written in England, at St Hilda’s monastery in Whitby.

But, as a sheep in the flock of St Benedict (to whom our parish is dedicated), I also venerate St Gregory as the man who recorded the life of this great Father of Western monasticism, and, it would seem, directly or indirectly encouraged the use of his Rule in monasteries. The first Pope to have been chosen from the monks, St Bede tells us of St Gregory—

He promptly renounced his secular habit and entered a monastery, in which he proceeded to live with such grace and perfection—as he used afterwards to declare with tears—that his soul was then above all transitory things; and that he rose superior to all things subject to change. He used to think nothing but thoughts of heaven, so that, event hough still imprisoned in the body, he was able to pass in contemplation beyond the barriers of the flesh. He loved death, which in the eyes of almost everybody is a punishment, because he held it to be the entrance to life and the reward of his labours. (p. 65)

Leonard von Matt and Dom Stephan Hilpisch mention St Gregory’s efforts as Pope on behalf of monasteries and his encouragement of monasticism, but they add, ‘But his most important work for monachism is his biography of St Benedict, whom he held in the highest esteem and veneration. . . . St Gregory’s biography of St Benedict has been of incalculable benefit to Benedictine monachism. No other Pope has excercised so profound an influence in the spiritual and ascetical sphere as this pontiff’ (Saint Benedict, trans. Dom Ernest Graf [London: Burnes & Oates, 1961], pp. 143, 144). Interestingly, it is for the Dialogues, of which the Life of St Benedict forms the second Book, that St Gregory is primarily known in the East. The complete Dialogues were translated into Greek by Pope St Zachary in the 8th century, and the Pope thus became commonly known in the Byzantine world as ‘St Gregory the Dialogist’. They can be read here, at Roger Pearse’s wondeful site, while his letters are in the NPNF series, available online here.

St Gregory’s monastery of St Andrew, founded at his family’s villa on the Caelian Hill in Rome, is now known as San Gregorio Magno al Celio. It still stands, having undergone many additions and restorations, and is now in the hands of the Camaldolese, an order founded by St Romuald of Ravenna to follow strictly St Benedict’s Rule in both eremitical and a coenobitic life.

St Bede tells us that the following epitaph was inscribed on St Gregory’s tomb:

Earth, take this corse—’tis dust of thine own dust:
When God shall give new life, restore thy trust.
Star-bound his soul: for Death’s writ does not run
Where grave’s but gateway to life new-begun.
A great high-priest this sepulchre inherits,
Who lives for ever by uncounted merits;
Hunger with meat, witner with clothes he ended,
Souls with sound learning from the foe defended;
Whate’er he taught, himself fulfilled in act—
Mystic his words, but his example fact.
Anglia to Christ at piety’s dictation
He turned, won thousands from an unknown nation.
Thus that great shepherd laboured, thus he wrought;
To increase his Master’s flock was all his thought.
Take thy reward in triumph and in joy,
Who in God’s council sit’st eternally! (p. 70)

I shall close with a brief passage from St Gregory’s Homilies on the Prophet Ezekiel (Homily X.21, Ezek. 40:44-47):

But others, free from worldly vices or already safe through long weeping, take fire with the flame of love in tears of compunction, place the rewards of the Heavenly Kingdom before the eyes of their heart, and yearn already to be among the citizens above. The servitude and length of their pilgrimage appear hard to them. They long to see the King in His glory and cease not to weep daily through love for Him. What are they if not the gold altar, they in whose hearts spices are kindled because the virtues glow? (Gray, p. 285)

'His Faith in God Shone'—St Luke the Younger

Today, 7 February on the Church’s calendar, we commemorate the Venerable Luke the Younger (896-953), also known as St Luke ‘of Mt Steirion’, ‘of Steiris’, and ‘of Hellas’. He is perhaps best remembered as the founder of the Monastery of Osios Loukas (Venerable Luke), on the slopes of ‘the great and godly mount / Of Helicon’ (Hesiod, ‘Theogony’, Hesiod and Theognis, trans. Dorothea Wender [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976], p. 23) between Delphi and Levadia near the coast of the Gulf of Corinth in Boeotia, Greece. Born quite close to Delphi and baptised ‘Stephen’, at a young age (14) St Luke secretly left home with some monks to join a monastery in Athens—according to this article from Road to Emmaus, thought to have been ‘the Monastery of Atheniotissa on the Acropolis, the formerly pagan Parthenon’, though the Vita of St Luke on the monastery’s website identifies it as Pantanassa, in Monastiraki.

The great emphasis, however, of most of the accounts of St Luke’s life that I’ve looked at—the Prologue, Bulgakov’s Handbook, and the RTE article I mentioned above—is the lesson St Luke soon learned in filial devotion. According to the latter article, which gives the fullest account of this incident:

His mother [Euphrosyne], already a widow, entreated God day and night to bring Luke back to her. Far from intending to hinder his calling, this pious woman had taught him to value God’s service above all else, but she had not expected him to leave her at such a young age and his disappearance brought her to despair. The Lord heard her prayers and for three continuous nights the abbot of the Athenian monastery was discomfited by a dream of Stephen’s mother begging for her son’s return. Finally, the abbot called Stephen to him and curtly sent him home, suggesting that he pursue a life of quiet somewhere else with the words, ‘Under the present circumstances it is quite impossible that you fail to return to your mother. . . Her prayer, it seems, is exceedingly persuasive to God and able to overpower you own . . . Depart then from us, and from the borders of Attica, and give yourself back to the person who gave you birth, and from whom, for three nights now, I have undergone ten thousand harrassments.’

Thanks to God, however, St Luke’s mother, as was said, had no intention of preventing his tonsure into the monastic life. After living ‘with her in complete humility and obedience for four months, and, asking her blessing for his ascetical efforts of monasticism, he left his parental home, intending to lead a life of a hermit’ (Bulgakov). It seems he lived in various locations around southern Greece, spending most of his time—a 7-yr stretch, and then, 10 years later, a 12-yr stretch—in ‘Ioannitzi’, where he was tonsured by some elders on pilgrimage. During his first seven years there, according to a brief life of the Saint by Photios Kontoglou, ‘Above all his faith in God shone, simple, like a tree rooted in his heart.’ St Nicholas (Velimirović) tells us, ‘At night he prayed to God and during the day he worked in the garden and in the field, not for his sake but for the sake of the indigent and the visitors. However, Luke fed only on bread made of barley.’

In 945, St Luke finally settled at the present site of the monastery, which, being near the village of Steiri, earned him the name of ‘Steirites’. According to this account: ‘Here brethren gathered to the monk, and there emerged a small monastery, the church of which was dedicated to the Great Martyress Barbara. Dwelling in the monastery, the monk worked many miracles, healing sicknesses both of soul and of body.’ Finally, he received the foreknowledge of his coming repose, and, in Kontoglou’s words, ‘Three months before his falling asleep he went round to all of the villages and places of asceticism and asked forgiveness of all.’

St Luke went to be with the Lord on 7 February 953 (there is a discrepancy on this year—I have gone with Kontoglou and the monastery). His relics were myrrh-gushing and bestowed grace and healing on all who venerated them, and the Venerable one’s disciples built a new church over them shortly after his repose. Unfortunately, sometime in the later Middle Ages they were taken elsewhere and, there being two different stories of how they came to be there (see the monastery website), ended up in Venice. Thanks be to God, in 1986 they were correctly identified and returned to the monastery, where they reside to this day.

I made a pilgrimage to Osios Loukas in May of 2004, driving there from Athens by myself. The location of the monastery on the slopes of the mountain, with a view of the distant gulf, coupled with the beautiful architecture and the absolutely stunning mosaics, made this the most beautiful monastery I have ever seen. There are some photos here, plus links to others. Also, there is a modern edition of a Byzantine Bios kai Politeia of St Luke here. Unfortunately, I discovered it rather late in the writing of this post, and this, coupled with my abysmal knowledge of Ancient Greek, precluded its use in this post. But those whose skills in that noble language exceed my own may wish to avail themselves of this source.

'The Wise Anastasius, Who Shone Like a Star from Persia'

We also commemorate today the Holy Venerable Martyr Anastasius the Persian († 628). His father was a magus, and at birth he was given the name ‘Magundat’. The young Magundat received an excellent education, showing ‘an interest in philosophical and religious problems’ (‘Οσιομάρτυς Αναστάσιος [Πέρσης]’). When the Persian king, Chosroes, conquered Jerusalem and stole the Precious and Life-giving Cross from the Christians, taking it back to Persia, this magus’s son had the opportunity to hear the story of our Lord’s saving crucifixion. Magundat was converted to the Christian Faith and travelled to Jerusalem to be baptised. Indeed, he went further, and was tonsured a monk with the name ‘Anastasius’ at a monastery between the Holy City and Mar Sabas known as the monastery ‘of Abba Anastasius’ (see Bulgakov’s Menaion).

At the monastery St Anastasius learned Greek, memorised the Psalter, served in the kitchen, worked in the garden, and participated fully in the divine services (Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire [Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1995], p. 161). Chitty tells the next part of the story wonderfully:

His concentration on the Lives of the Martyrs seemed already to indicate a desire growing in him [according to the Prologue, ‘he moistened the book with tears’]. At last a dream caused him to go out into the sacristy during the night office, and open his heart to the Abbot. With his understanding, he received Communion at the Liturgy, breakfasted with the fathers, and after a short sleep went out with nothing but the clothes he had on, down to the shrine of St George at Lydda (Diospolis), then to Garizim and the other Holy Places, then to Caesarea, where he spent two days in the house of the Theotokos before finding his opportunity to court arrest and confess his conversion. (p. 161)

While he was waiting to be taken to the king, in order to bolster his courage the abbot of the monastery, Father Justin, sent two monks to St Anastasius, one of whom accompanied him the whole way. The martyr also wrote twice to his elder during the journey, begging his intercessions (Chitty, p. 161). According to Bulgakov’s Menaion, when he was finally taken before the king:

They beat him with clubs three times for a long time and without mercy. They placed a heavy plank on his shins which crushed his legs. They hanged him by his hands, having tied a large stone to one leg. But, not looking at all the kinds of torments and tortures, the sufferer remained unshakable in faith and finally they strangled him [and, one must add, decapitated him] in 628 [on 22 January].

Interestingly, St Anastasius is one of those Saints whose relics have a history all their own. Shortly after his martyrdom, the monk that accompanied St Anastasius on his final Golgotha took the precious relics to a nearby church, just before the Emperor Heraclius arrived there with his army, 1 February 628. Chosroes was killed in March, in accordance with a prediction of the holy Martyr. In the same month, three years later, the Emperor brought the Precious Cross ‘back in great triumph to Jerusalem’ (Chitty, p. 161). On 2 November of that year, after a journey marked by numerous miracles, there took place ‘the triumphant arrival of the relics [of St Anastasius] in Jerusalem’ (Carmela Vircillo Franklin, The Latin Dossier of Anastasius the Persian: Hagiographic Translations and Transformations [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004], p. 4). In a purely literary observation, Franklin nevertheless displays some spiritual insight:

Thus, the capture of the cross by the Persians becomes the means of the Persian soldier’s conversion, the Persian magician becomes a model Christian monk and glorious martyr, and the restoration of the cross to Jerusalem is paralleled by the return of the martyr’s relics to his monastery near the holy city. The story of Anastasius thus becomes an analogue of the history of Palestine during the Persian conquest. (p. 5)

But of course, the story of the relics doesn’t stop there. They were soon taken, with an icon of the holy Martyr, to the imperial city, Constantinople, accompanied by still more miracles. It seems, however, that the head at least of the Saint was taken to Rome (perhaps by 645 [Franklin, p. 11]—Bulgakov is quite mistaken at this point), for after a short account of the martyrdom St Bede the Venerable reports that the ‘relics of the blessed martyr Anastasius’ were venerated ‘in the monastery of the blessed Apostle Paul [in Rome], called “By the Salvian Waters”’ (‘The Greater Chronicle’, trans. Judith McClure and Roger Collins, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Judith McClure and Roger Collins [Oxford: Oxford U, 1994], p. 332; McClure and Collins believe that this was the monastery where St Theodore of Tarsus had lived, and that it was he who had introduced the veneration of St Anastasius in Britain—p. 400, n. to p. 171). Later, during the Seventh Œcumenical Council at Nicea in 787, when several miracles from the Saint’s Life were being discussed, the papal legates—one of whom was the abbot of St Sabbas’s Monastery in Rome—reported the presence of the relic as well as a wonderworking icon in their city (Franklin, p. 7). Indeed, the relic remained there, constituting a significant site of pilgrimage and continuing to work miracles throughout the Middle Ages. The monastery, once known as ‘Trium Fontium ad Aquas Salvias’, ‘Tre Fontane’, or ‘Three Fountains’, is now called the Abbey of Ss Vincent and Anastasius.

I shall close with the Kontakion in honour of the venerable Martyr as well as the Apostle Timothy, chanted in Tone I:

Let us faithful sing praises to Timothy,
Divine disciple, and companion of Paul,
And with him honor the wise Anastasius,
Who shone like a star from Persia,

Driving away our spiritual passions and carnal infirmities.

Pro Arte Beuronensis

After reading Fr John Meyendorff’s article on the Orthodox Church in Funk & Wagnall’s Encyclopedia, the very first thing that I read about Orthodoxy was Photios Kontoglou’s hard-hitting, but, I felt, persuasive apologia for traditional Byzantine iconography, ‘The Hopelessness of Death in Western Religious Art and the Peace-Bestowing and Profoundly Hopeful Orthodox Iconography’ (printed in English, in, I believe, The True Vine—my own copy is buried in a box somewhere in my house). I very quickly wrote off Western religious art. If it wasn’t the fleshy naturalism of the Renaissance and Baroque eras (made for churches like this), it was the tacky, quickly dated, and hopelessly subjective modernism of the post-Vatican II years (made for churches like this). Neither one seemed right to me.

But then I was surprised to make a discovery. It was about two and a half years ago, when I was first looking into the history of the St Benedict medal. I learned somewhere (most likely here) that the medal as it’s typically produced now had been designed in something called ‘the Beuronese style of sacred art’, at the (I found here) ‘St Martin's Archabbey, Beuron, Germany’. Now, this name, ‘Beuron’, was familiar to me. In his wonderful conversion-to-Orthodoxy story, Fr Placide (Deseille) made a passing reference to this place, saying of his aunts that ‘the great abbeys of Beuron, Maredsous, and Solemnes were the high places of their Christianity’ (Archimandrite Placide [Deseille], ‘Stages of a Pilgrimage’, The Living Witness of the Holy Mountain: Contemporary Voices from Mt Athos, trans. and ed. Hieromonk Alexander [Golitzin] [South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary, 1999], p. 63). It was precisely this passage that sprang to mind when I came across that reference to the design of the medal. It sparked my curiosity as much as the expression ‘the great abbeys’ had fired my imagination.

The story I discovered is a long one, and I haven’t been able to work out all of the precise details. What I do know, is that the main figures in the development of Beuronese art were a group of German artists named Peter Lenz (1832-1928), Jakob Würger (1829-92), and Fridolin Steiner (1849-1906). The three young men went to Rome to work with some members of what had been the ‘Nazarene’ movement, a brotherhood of German artists devoted to St Luke the Evangelist (the first iconographer, according to tradition) who had lived a semi-monastic existence painting religious and neomediæval subjects in a simple, serene style. One critic in 1820 ascribed to the Nazarenes’ work the qualities of ‘simplicity, holiness, and purity’ (Fr Kenneth Novak, ‘The Art of Beuron’, Angelus Online). George Eliot referred to the Nazarenes as ‘the chief renovators of Christian art, . . . who had not only revived but expanded that grant conception of supreme events as mysteries at which the successive agess were spectators, and in relation to which the great souls of all periods became as it were contemporaries’ (George Eliot, Middlemarch I, Vol. VI in Works of George Eliot [NY: The Century, 1910], p. 310). James D. Merritt notes the Nazarenes’ influence upon and anticipation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England (Introduction, The Pre-Raphaelite Poem [NY: Dutton, 1966], pp. 9-10). A meeting with one of the Nazarenes, Peter von Cornelius, had a tremendous influence on the art of Ford Maddox Brown (1821-93), who subsequently was a mentor to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a contributor to the Pre-Raphaelite periodical, The Germ (in a letter to Maddox Brown, Rossetti apparently writes ‘that if he ever does anything on his own account, it will be under the influence of such inspiration’—Joseph Knight, Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti [London: Walter Scott, 1887], p. 22).

So, to return to Lenz, Würger, and Steiner, they were highly influenced by the Nazarene movement. But, in addition, they became fascinated with the ancient Egyptian art that had poured into Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. According to Novak:

Lenz [the primary theorist among them] thought sacred art should reflect the natural laws of aesthetics through formulae he believed were forgotten after the Greeks and Egyptians. Geometrical proportions determine ideal forms, and the result is an innate harmony comparable to the mathematical relationships in musical composition.

Believing a monastic brotherhood to be the ideal context in which to put their ideas into practice, the three talked about forming a monastery. But in 1868 they met Fr Maurus Wolter, abbot of the new Benedictine monastery of Beuron. Wolter had initiated a close relationship with the centre of the Gregorian chant revival, Solemnes, corresponding with the abbot, Dom Prosper Guéranger, and even going so far as to model Beuron on the Solemnes Congregation. The cultivation of traditional Gregorian chant at Beuron dovetailed nicely with the approach to the visual and plastic arts of Lenz, Würger, and Steiner. The three were tonsured as monks of Beuron, taking the names Desiderius, Gabriel, and Lukas. They began an art school at Beuron that—besides designing the St Benedict medal—built churches, painted murals, created mosaics, and even hand-crafted church furnishings and altar vessels in Europe and later in America, based on the principles developed by Desiderius Lenz. Novak lists a few of these (apparently taken from Lenz’s writings):

The art speaks to the mind of the viewer. The art is itself worshipful and invites the viewer to worship. It does not stand out boldly of itself but is part of an environment of worship.

Works are anonymous, done by group effort, and not for the glory of the artist, but of God.

As in icons, the Beuronese style favors imitation over originality, with freehand copying revealing an artist's true genius.

There is full integration of art and architecture. Painting and sculpture are not ‘stick-ons’ to an architectural plan but an integral part of it. Beuronese art encompasses painting, architecture, altar vessels, and furnishings.

One can see some examples of these principles in practice at the Archabbey of Beuron itself here, in the crypt of the monastery church at Monte Cassino here, at the Mauruskapelle here, in the Basilica at Conception Abbey in Missouri, at the Abbey of St Hildegard here, at Maria Laach Abbey in Germany here, and at the chapel of the Gymnázia Teplice in the Czech Republic here. There is a beautiful photo of a Beuronese chapel at Daniel Mitsui’s blog here, and a few images at ‘History and Sources’ here. The photo above is of the 'Great Hall' at St John's University in Collegeville, MN, which was apparently restored some years ago.

Happy Sylvestrovden!

Today we commemorate St Sylvester, Pope of Rome (†335), renowned for his learning ‘in worldly wisdom and in the Faith of Christ’ (Prologue, 2 Jan.). St Sylvester was pope from 314-35, and according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘Took part in the negotiations concerning Arianism and the Council of Nicæa, and the expression ‘omooúsion was probably agreed upon with him before the council. The pontiff also sent legates to the first Œcumenical Council.’ St Nicholas (Velimirović) informs us that by ‘his prayers and miracles Sylvester assisted in bringing Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena into the True Faith’ (Prologue, 2 Jan.), and in his account of St Constantine he writes that it was St Sylvester who baptised him, healing him from leprosy (Prologue, 21 May). (Modern scholars, unfortunately, always eager to debunk tradition, claim that this is as unhistorical as the infamous forgery, The Donation of Constantine, by which St Sylvester's name was sadly tainted.) At any rate, St Sylvester likely did contribute greatly to the consecration (and beautification) of Rome, as during his pontificate such buildings as the basilica of St John Lateran and the original Church of St Peter in the Vatican were built.

Apparently, ‘Sylvestrovden’ is a big day in Bulgaria, complete with its own customs. According to Plovdiv Guide—

In some villages it is also called ‘Karamanov Day’ or ‘Rinatchov Day’. On the evening before young men go to ‘propose’ to the young lasses and to demonstrate that they are capable of keeping house. They enter the stable and shovel out the garbage. The hosts leave a bag full of food–sausage, bacon and a bottle of wine as a treat, hanging the bag on a nail behind the door. The young woman secretly puts in a branch of box-tree for her beloved, tied with a bright red thread and wrapped in a multi-colored cloth–a sign that she is waiting for the matchmakers to come.

The consequences for the hosts who ‘forget’ to give them the treat are truly harsh–very often in the morning they find ther stables overflowing with dung brought over from neighboring houses. Their daughter is doomed to become the laughing stock at the horo dance because ‘the boys have shovelled her stables’. Such a girl is considered to be ‘stuck’ and it is difficult for her to find a marriage partner.

Santa Lucia!

Today we commemorate the Virgin Martyr, St Lucy of Syracuse, Sicily. According to the Prologue:

With her mother, Lucy visited the grave of St Agatha in Catania, and the saint appeared to her. Her mother [Eutychia], who had an issue of blood, was miraculously cured in the church at that time. Lucy gave away all her goods to the poor, and this embittered her betrothed, who denounced her to Paschasius the judge as a Christian. The wicked judge ordered that she be taken to a brothel and defiled, but, by the power of God, she remained immovable, as if rooted to the earth, and not even a vast number of people was able to move her from the spot. An enraged pagan then ran her through the throat with a sword, and she commended her soul to God and entered into the Kingdom of eternity. She suffered in the year 304.

Although her entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia is skeptical concerning much of this story, even there it is admitted that ‘the place and time of her death can hardly be questioned’, and the author is rather optimistic about the factuality of ‘her connexion with St Agatha and the miraculous cure of Eutychia’! ;-)

There is a tradition that she used to visit Christians in the catacombs wearing a wreath of candles (see Gordon Giles, O Come Emmanuel: A Musical Tour of Daily Readings for Advent and Christmas [Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2006], p. 50), and this coupled with her name, ‘Lucia’, meaning ‘light’, gave rise to the prominent rôle of light in some of the more well-known customs associated with St Lucy’s day in the West. In Italy, she is celebrated with torchlight processions and bonfires. In Sweden, there is the famous custom of the oldest daughter dressing in a white gown and, crowned with a wreath of greenery and lit candles, waking the family to serve them St Lucy day treats. (For these customs, and recipes for the special foods of her day, see the Fish-Eaters page.)

Of course, St Lucy is also known for the recurrence of her name in the traditional Neapolitan song, ‘Santa Lucia’, made famous by Enrico Caruso. The lyrics concern a harbour in Naples called ‘Borgo Santa Lucia’, which is dominated by Castel dell’Ovo, a site that may once have been that of a Greek monastery in the fifth century. Gordon Giles has printed one of the many versions of the song re-written as a hymn for the Saint. The second verse reads:

Deep in the northern sky

Bright stars are beaming;

Christmas is drawing nigh,

Candles are gleaming.

Welcome you vision rare,

Lights glowing in your hair.

Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia.

(Giles, p. 49)

A complete Akolouthia of the Virgin Martyr can be found here.

On Being Named for the Prophet Aaron, Part II

Well, I might have waited until my nameday next September to do these posts on St Aaron, but something very exciting happened a few days ago. I was doing a little bit of research on one of the Saints Aaron (I don’t recall which, now), when I came across this page. It’s a list of publications, lectures, etc., by an archæology group in Finland called the ‘Finnish Jabal Haroun Project’. ‘Jabal Haroun’, it turns out, is Arabic for ‘Mount Aaron’. As I scanned the titles of these articles and lectures, I became increasingly excited. Many of them directly referred to a Byzantine Monastery of St Aaron, which was cool enough in itself, as I’d never heard of anything dedicated to any St Aaron.

But then I came across this, which I shall quote at length:

Jabal an-Nabi Haroun (the mountain of the Prophet Aaron) is located about 3 miles to the southwest of Petra, Jordan. According to the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions, the mountain is the burial place of Moses’ brother Aaron. That the Mountain of Aaron was located near the Nabatean city of Petra was already mentioned by Josephus, and followed by Eusebius and Jerome in the 4th century AD. The Vita of St Stephen the Sabaite (8th century) recorded Mar Haroun; possibly a monastery on Jabal Haroun. . . . In 1217, Magister Thetmarus noted a church there, in which two Greek Christian monks still lived.

Currently, the peak of the mountain is occupied by the mid-14th century Muslim shrine (weli) with Aaron’s cenotaph. In addition to the early descriptions by Palmer and Wiegand, the most recent one is sby R. Schick, G. Peterman and K.W. Russell in 1996, which concentrated on the ruined architectural complex located on a plateau at about 4,230 feet above sea level, and about 230 feet below the peak. They concluded that the ruins should probably be identified with a monastery of Saint Aaron. This identification is also supported by the Papyrus Petra inv. 6 (AD 573), which mentions ‘the House of the Saint High-Priest Aaron’ outside Petra. . . . Combined with the religious tradition and the remains on the plateau, this would strongly suggest that the latter should be identified as the Monastery/Pilgrimage Center of Saint Aaron. . . .

. . .

Apparently, the complex represents a pilgrimage center related to the veneration of St Aaron, and associated with the monastic presence. It resembles a monatery of a cœnobium type, usually erected next to a memorial church which generally served the needs of pilgrims.

(Avraham Negev and Shimon Gibson, ed., Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land [London: Continuum, 2005], pp. 251-2)

So, I discovered, not only was the Prophet Aaron venerated actively at one point, there was a monastery dedicated to him that either housed, or was near to, his tomb. In other words, his relics were apparently preserved!

Although not possessing the complete works of Josephus (I’ve got an ancient Penguin Classics edition of The Jewish War), I looked up the Antiquities (IV.4.7) online, and found this:

Now when this purification, which their leader made upon the mourning for his sister, as it has been now described, was over, he caused the army to remove and to march through the wilderness and through Arabia; and when he came to a place which the Arabians esteem their metropolis, which was formerly called Arce, but has now the name of Petra, at this place, which was encompassed with high mountains, Aaron went up one of them in the sight of the whole army, Moses having before told him that he was to die, for this place was over against them. He put off his pontifical garments, and delivered them to Eleazar his son, to whom the high priesthood belonged, because he was the elder brother; and died while the multitude looked upon him. He died in the same year wherein he lost his sister, having lived in all a hundred twenty and three years. He died on the first day of that lunar month which is called by the Athenians Hecatombaeon, by the Macedonians Lous, but by the Hebrews Abba [a cursory look for the meaning of this date suggests the July dates for St Aaron may be closer to his actual repose than any others].

Of course, Josephus is closely basing his account on Numbers 20:22-9, but he goes further in identifying the biblical ‘Mount Hor’ with a site overlooking Petra. This identification seems to be taken for granted in the one comprehensive ‘Bible dictionary’ I possess (the limits of my library really begin to appear!), F.N. Peloubet’s apparent abridgement of that of Sir William Smith and J.M. Fuller. Peloubet’s entry has:

The mountain on which Aaron died. . . . Mount Hor is situated on the eastern side of the great valley of the Arabah, the highest and most conspicuous of the whole range of the sandstone mountains of Edom, having close beneath it on its eastern side the mysterious city of Petra. It is now the Jebel Nebi-Harûn, ‘the mountain of the prophet Aaron.’. . . The mountain is marked far and near by its double top, which rises like a huge castellated building from a lower base, and is surmounted by a circular dome of the tomb of Aaron, a distinct white spot on the dark red surface of the mountain. (F.N. Peloubet and Alice D. Adams, Peloubet’s Bible Dictionary, Based Upon the Foundation Laid by William Smith [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1974], pp. 261-2)

Well, it would be nice to know what sort of hymns and services they had for the Saint at the monastery, or to see the icons they would have had, or even to know what date they observed for the commemoration. Alas, I’m afraid all of these things ‘have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow’. But at least I’ve got just one more thing to hold onto as a token of my Saint, with whom I consent gladly to be stuck!

(The icon above is a 17th-c. work housed at the Saris Museum in Bardejov, Slovakia.)

[Read Part I of this post here.]

St Sabbas the Sanctified

Today, 5 December, is the feast of St Sabbas the Sanctified (439-532), the great Palestinian monastic founder. St Sabbas entered a Cappadocian monastery at 8 years of age, was tonsured at 17, and, with the blessing of his abbot, left for Jerusalem with ‘a desire, pleasing to God, to repair to the holy city and live in solitude in the neighboring desert’ (Cyril of Scythopolis, The Lives of the Monks of Palestine, trans. R.M. Price [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1991], p. 98). Although St Euthymius the Great did not accept him to live in his lavra, he sent him to the cœnobium of Elder Theoctistus, where St Sabbas gradually acquired more solitude and even came under the spiritual guidance of St Euthymius himself, who called him the ‘boy elder’ (Cyril, p. 103).

After the repose of St Euthymius, about whom Derwas Chitty writes that he ‘continued to reign from his tomb over the wilderness’ (The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism Under the Christian Empire [Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1995], p. 97), St Sabbas (at the age of 35) went into the Judaean desert and ‘devoted himself to solitude, fasts and ceaseless prayer, making his mind a spotless mirror of God and the things of God, in accordance with the saying, “Be still and know that I am God” [Ps. 45:11 LXX]’ (Cyril, p. 104). After four years in the desert at Roubâ, St Sabbas relocated to a cave in a gorge near Siloam, where—

he spent five years alone by himself in solitude, conversing with God and purifying the eye of his thought so as “with unveiled face to behold as in a mirror the glory of the Lord,” since the evil spirits had already been conquered by his ceaseless prayers and nearness to God. (Cyril, p. 108)

It was only then, at the age of 45, that St Sabbas was ‘entrusted by God with the charge of souls’ (Cyril, p. 108). The Great Lavra was founded (there is a nice story in Chap. 20 of Cyril’s ‘Life’ about how St Sabbas accepted Armenians ‘because of their piety’, and let them have their own services in their language [Cyril, p. 114]), the New Lavra was built, more monasteries were established, and finally our holy Father was ordained at 53 and made archimandrite of the anchorites of Palestine. The typikon of the Great Lavra, now known as 'Mar Saba', is attributed to him (and may retain ‘reminiscences’ of St Sabba’s own Rule [Chitty, p. 117]), as well as the liturgical typikon still followed in the Russian Church and many of the Greek monasteries (see Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos [Ware], trans., The Festal Menaion [South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary, 1995], p. 541-3).

Having been warned in a vision of the time of his death, St Sabbas received the holy Mysteries, and, saying the words, ‘Lord, into thy hands I shall commit my spirit’ (Cyril, p. 191), fell asleep in the Lord in 532 (Chitty, p. 213). Although his relics were stolen by the Crusaders and taken to Venice, they were returned in the last century in an ecumenical gesture and can still be venerated at the monastery he built. Chitty closes his account of St Sabbas with the troparion for his feastday:

By the channels of thy tears
Thou didst cultivate the barrenness of the Wilderness:
And by thy groanings from the depth
Thou didst bear fruit of thy toils an hundredfold;
And becamest a light unto the world,
Shining with miracle,
Sabas our father holy.
Intercede unto Christ our God
For our souls’ salvation. (Chitty, p. 118)

Interestingly, monks of the Great Lavra found themselves in Rome in the wake of the Persian plunder of the monastery in the seventh century (and perhaps at the same time that St Theodore of Canterbury had been driven to Rome from the East), and received shelter in some cells on the Aventine near the estate of Silvia, mother of St Gregory the Dialogist. Here, they built a basilica dedicated to ‘San Saba’ that still stands, and established a Greek monastic brotherhood that lasted until the 11th century, when they were replaced by Benedictines of Cluny (Rodolfo Lanciani, The Golden Days of the Renaissance in Rome, From the Pontificate of Julius II to that of Paul III [Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1906], p. 50; according to a certain reference website, however, they were replaced in the 10th century by Benedictines of Monte Cassino, and after the Cluniacs, by Cistercians and later Jesuits [gasp!], but it's 2 am and I can find no other source to back this up).

The Pantheon & the Errata of the Inept Dan Brown

Due to pressure from various persons in my life, I am unfortunately unable to claim that I have not read the wretched Dan Brown (about whom my friend Esteban has already posted, and concerning whom everyone should read these pieces as well as the comments here). Yes, I know, it is a sad fact. One rather positive by-product of this reading, however, is the notes that I was able to make on some of the pitiful Brown’s errata, particularly in the terrible Angels & Demons which has not been combed by others quite so thoroughly as its more famous cousin, the lamentable The DaVinci Code.

At one point in this atrocious novel, Angels & Demons, the renowned 2nd-c. Roman building (and now RC church) known as the Pantheon figures into the cookie-cutter plot of the thing. At that point, the pathetic author of this train-wreck makes three mutually-contradictory statements about the historic building.

Now, keep in mind that I did not actually 'read' (the printed version of) the catastrophically bad Angels & Demons. I listened to an audiobook. Thus, I had to rely on my memory of the aural presentation (not as trustworthy as my memory for printed words) to identify the following mistakes. When I later turned to the printed edition in order to confirm what I remembered, I discovered that the statements I am about to quote come from within the same 16 pages.

First, the laughable Brown writes: ‘The Venerable Bede had once written that the hole in the Pantheon’s roof had been bored by demons trying to escape the building when it was consecrated [i.e., converted into a church] by Boniface IV’ (p. 225 of the mass-market paperback).

Then, the hackneyed writer has: ‘The Vatican had all the statues in the Pantheon removed and destroyed in the late 1800s’ (p. 228). And now, I think one can begin to see the problem here. But wait! He’s not done!

Finally, the most over-rated novelist of our time ‘informs’ us: ‘...[T]he pagan sculptures had been destroyed when the Vatican converted the Pantheon to a Christian church’ (p. 241).

Now, granted the unlikelihood that the statues would have been left in the building when it was consecrated by Boniface, as well as the anachronism of referring to the ‘Vatican’ has having acted in the 7th c. (which date, admittedly, our unlearned author gets wrong), it seems to me that it is at least possible that any two of these statements can be correct simultaneously, assuming as well, of course, the law of non-contradiction. It is however, flatly impossible that all three of them could be accurate. Were the sculptures destroyed when the Pantheon was converted into a church? Or were they destroyed in the late 1800s? It is an insoluble difficulty.

But that is not all! The first statement also contains an internal error: while St Bede the Venerable does indeed mention the consecration of the monument by Boniface and the escape of the demons, he says nothing about the ‘boring’ of the hole in either the Ecclesiastical History II.4 or the Greater Chronicle, 6th Age, 4565, where the consecration is mentioned (see Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Judith McClure and Roger Collins [Oxford: Oxford U, 1994], pp. 77 & 331). The reader may well suspect that the bigoted Brown invented this detail to make Christians look stupid and benighted as well as intolerant.

To make matters even worse, the sentence immediately preceding the first one I have quoted refers to the Venerable Bede’s comments as ‘a famous sixth-century critique of the Pantheon’ (p. 225). Now first of all, the consecration took place in 609, so already we realise that no reference to that consecration could have been made in the sixth-century, except perhaps prophetically. But of course, the Venerable Bede, having referred to the 7th-c. consecration, must himself have been subsequent to that event, right? It turns out he was. He was born around 673, and finished the Ecclesiastical History in 731. So the wildly inaccurate Brown is actually two centuries off. And while St Bede refers to the idolatry once practised there with the greatest disapprobation (the words ‘abomination’ and ‘filthy’ are used in the translation), it is certainly misleading at least to call his remarks about the building per se a ‘critique’.

All of this seems to me to prove beyond reasonable doubt that when he writes, in his ‘Author’s Note’ at the beginning of the book, ‘References to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual (as are their exact locations)’, the inept Dan Brown is either perpetrating a great and largely successful hoax on the reading (or occasionally reading) public, or else he is perhaps the laziest researcher ever to have gained a publishing contract.

St Vergilius of Salzburg

One of the more obscure Saints, I believe, listed for today, 27 November on the Church’s calendar, is St Vergilius (Virgil) of Salzburg (d. 784). Like St Columbanus, whom we commemorated last week, St Vergilius represents an interesting phenomenon: the Irish Saint travelling to the European continent and becoming influential there. According to Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus, St Vergilius was probably from the Monastery of Iona, founded by St Columba (Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery [Edinburgh: Edinburgh U, 1995], p. 17). He went to the continent, and after two years in the court of Pepin, became abbot of the St Peter’s Monastery (in the foreground of the above photo) in what is now Salzburg, Austria. St Vergilius was involved in a couple of controversies with St Boniface, but was vindicated by Pope St Zachary of Rome (a Greek Calabrian, restorer of Monte Cassino, and the translator of St Gregory the Great’s Dialogues into Greek, he is an interesting figure in his own right). He was made bishop of the city of Salzburg, and consecrated its first cathedral, there transferring the relics of St Rupert. St Vergilius also sent missionaries to the Slavs, one hundred years before the Cyrillo-Methodian mission. He fell asleep in the Lord on 27 Novemer 784.

St Vergilius’s see, Salzburg is the birthplace of Mozart and former home of the Von Trapp family. It is a beautiful city with a wonderfully preserved Baroque Old Town, and there one can still see the now Benedictine (and very Baroque!) Archabbey of St Peter, where Mozart’s ‘Mass in C Minor’ (the ‘Große Messe’) was first performed. Unfortunately, after St Vergilius’s repose, the duchy of which the city was a part was conquered by Charlemagne, and the bishops of Salzburg, who had once been ascetic monks and abbots of the monastery of St Peter, eventually became secular administators (see the St Pachomios Library article). Their palace on the hill (see the above photo) still dominates the entire city. Sadly, N. Redington points out that it was the successors of St Vergilius who became the main opponents and persecutors of Ss Cyril and Methodius just one century later. But, he reassures us, ‘although Austria and Bavaria have not been Orthodox for a thousand years, the saints of the Orthodox period still live in Christ, interceding for their countries and all humanity.’