'All Things That Are Done on Earth' -- Cicero's Somnium Scipionis

Although I still can’t recall what sparked the conversation in the first place, or what precisely got said on the subject in the second, a few weeks ago during #porchtime at my house some reference was made to Cicero’s now little-known ‘Dream of Scipio’, for centuries nearly the sole-surviving portion of a larger work, De Republica. [1] A very brief description was given for the benefit of those who had not read or heard of it, and a friend of mine who works as a curator of mediaeval manuscripts mentioned that her only familiarity with Cicero’s text was through the famed Late Antique commentator, Macrobius, whose commentary on Scipio helped to preserve the latter text throughout the Middle Ages as well as to insure its influence on the mediaeval worldview.

One of the more interesting questions to me with regard to Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero is the former’s interpretation of a single, at first quite plain passage in the original text. Having appeared in a dream to his adopted grandson, Scipio Africanus the younger, Scipio Africanus the elder tells him:

Every man who has preserved or helped his country, or has made its greatness even greater, is reserved a special place in heaven, where he may enjoy an eternal life of happiness. For of all things that are done on earth nothing is more acceptable to the Supreme God, who rules the whole universe, than those gatherings and assemblages of men who are bound together by law, the communities which are known as states. [2]

...omnibus qui patriam conservaverint, adiuverint, auxerint, certum esse in caelo definitum locum, ubi beati aevo sempiterno fruantur; nihil est enim illi principi deo qui omnem mundum regit, quod quidem in terris fiat, acceptius quam concilia coetusque hominum iure sociati, quae civitates appellantur;... [3]

To the casual reader, it appears of course that Cicero is glorifying the political life of civil service, that of all human activities it is that which is highest and most pleasing to God. This is not of course the Christian view, but we do not expect Cicero to exhibit Christian views. Neither, however, is it the view of Late Antique pagans like Macrobius or the so-called ‘Neoplatonists’ (I shall leave aside for the moment the question of whether it is the view of earlier pagan philosophers before Cicero). For both Christians and Late Antique pagans, however they may differ on the details of what it might mean, the highest human activity is the contemplative, and the most divine life is the ‘philosophical’ one. [4] But Macrobius reveres Cicero [5] and holds him to be in essential agreement with himself and the later Platonic tradition, so he has to figure out what Cicero means here. Here is Macrobius’s conclusion:

Now if the function and office of the virtues is to bless, and, moreover, if it is agreed that political virtues do exist, then political virtues do make men blessed. And so Cicero is right in claiming for the rulers of commonwealths a place where they may enjoy a blessed existence forever. In order to show that some men become blessed by the exercise of virtues at leisure and others by virtues exercised in active careers, he did not say with finality that nothing is more gratifying to that supreme God than commonwealths, but added a qualification, nothing that occurs on earth is more gratifying. His purpose was to distinguish those who are primarily concerned with divine matters from the rulers of commonwealths, whose earthly achievements prepare their way to the sky. [6] 

In other words, of ‘the things that are done on earth’, nothing of course is more pleasing to God than politics, but the contemplative, philosophical life is not really something ‘done on earth’. Since it lifts the mind and soul to God, it is a heavenly activity, not an earthly one. Macrobius refers to philosophers as ‘those who are primarily concerned with divine matters’, reminding us of the definition of philosophy of St Cyril the Apostle-to-the-Slavs: ‘Knowledge of things divine and human, as much as man is able to approach God, for it teaches man by deeds to be in the image and after the likeness of the One who created him.’ [7] Here is William Harris Stahl’s take on Macrobius’s interpretation: 

Cicero implies in Scipio’s Dream that the efforts of statesmen and military leaders are most gratifying to the Ruler of the universe. Macrobius cites Plotinus’ treatise On the Virtues--although he is probably more dependent upon Porphyry--and points out that Plotinus admitted political virtues into his scheme. Political virtues have their rightful place, although they are not on as high a plane as the contemplative virtues. Hereupon it is revealed that this truth was apparent to the profoundly wise Cicero, for in his statement that ‘nothing that occurs on earth is more gratifying to that supreme God than the establishment of commonwealths’ the words on earth allude to the practical virtues and at the same time intimate that there are other types of virtues. [8] 

C.S. Lewis says something very similar in his treatment of Macrobius in The Discarded Image: 

What Cicero meant by his parenthetical reservation [quod quidem in terris fiat] I am not sure; probably he was distinguishing earthly affairs from the motions of the heavenly bodies, which God would undoubtedly prize more highly. But Macrobius (I, viii) regards this saving clause as Cicero’s way of leaving room for a whole system of ethics which Cicero might have strongly repudiated: a system which is religious, not secular; individual, not social; occupied not with the outer but with the inner life. [9] 

Indeed, earlier in this section, Lewis had written, ‘Cicero, as we have seen, devised a heaven for statesmen. He looks no higher than public life and the virtues which that life demands.’ [10] But is this really quite fair? I’m no expert on Cicero, but recall that previously I left open the question of whether earlier philosophy had prized the active, political life quite as much as the Roman statesman appears to do here. I think I can confidently answer that in the negative. Plato certainly insists that the philosopher imitate the divine (Theaetetus 176 AB), and Aristotle finds that the ‘intellect’ is the highest and most divine faculty, and therefore that ‘contemplation’ is ‘the highest form of activity’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1177a). [11] We know that Cicero looked to the Greeks for his philosophical learning, and although the Roman mind is always noted for its practicality in comparison to the Greeks, it seems unlikely that Cicero would have directly reversed the judgement of the two greatest of the Hellenes. Is it possible Macrobius’s reading of Cicero is not so very far-fetched? 

[1] Michael Grant points out that about a third of the original work was discovered by Cardinal Mai at the Vatican in 1820 (Michael Grant, tr., On the Good Life, by Cicero [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971], p. 337). 

[2] Ibid., p. 344. 

[3] Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, I and Scipio’s Dream, ed. by Frank Ernest Rockwood (Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma, 1970), p. 6. 

[4] In a passage I like to quote often from C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval & Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 2002), he writes: A world-renouncing, ascetic, and mystical character then marked the most eminent Pagans no less than their Christian opponents. It was the spirit of the age. Everywhere, on both sides, men were turning away from the civic virtues and the sensual pleasures to seek an inner purgation and a supernatural goal. (47) 

[5] Indeed, William Harris Stahl notes, ‘To Macrobius, Cicero is incapable of error; his wisdom, often concealed in subtle language, will be discovered upon careful examination of his words (or through the assistance of the commentator)’ (Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, tr. William Harris Stahl [NY: Columbia U, 1966], p. 14). 

[6] Ibid., pp. 123-4. 

[7] Ihor Ševčenko, ‘The Definition of Philosophy in the Life of Saint Constantine’, For Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, 11 October 1956 (The Hague: 1966), p. 450. 

[8] Macrobius, p. 14. 

[9] Lewis, p. 68. 

[10] Ibid., p. 65. 

[11] Aristotle, Ethics, tr. J.A.K. Thomson, rev. Hugh Tredennick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), p. 328.

Liturgical Consummation, Part I: St Ephraim the Syrian

As a few readers may know, I spent the first couple of weeks after school got out for the summer working on an expansion and revision of the paper I presented at the C.S. Lewis & Inklings Society Conference (held here in OKC at Oklahoma City University two years ago) and posted here. The original paper was a very short, informal essay into the topic written quickly and intended to be read to about five or ten people in less than 20 minutes. But when it was considered for inclusion in an anthology of papers from the conference, the editors asked me to bring it a bit more up to snuff. The result is now entitled ‘Likeness & Approach: M.M. Bakhtin, C.S. Lewis, & the Liturgical Consummation of Literary Genre’.

One of the things that I did was to take the suggestion at the end that liturgical poetry could be read as a reconciliation of the virtues of both the novel (as described by Bakhtin) and epic poetry (as described by Lewis) and expand that into a full-fledged thesis, complete with an analysis of three examples of such poetry. Well, this didn’t go over as well with the editors as I’d hoped—at least the analysis didn’t—but since I was loathe to let something on which I’d expended some effort go entirely to waste, I thought I’d at least post it here, in three parts since it is longish. Now, I was never entirely happy with these analyses myself, and at one point was in utter despair that they were even coherent at all. Of course, taken out of context of the entire paper, they will likely be even less coherent. But perhaps someone will get something out of it.

I have included the paragraph—some form of which will still appear in the final paper—immediately preceding the analysis sections to give at least a little bit of context, but maybe I should add one more thing. The distinction between ‘nearness to God by likeness’ and ‘nearness to God by approach’ is one that I have taken from Lewis’s The Four Loves and used as a framework for my analyses of Bakhtin and Lewis on genre. Earlier in the paper I wrote:

He [Lewis] uses the analogy of walking down a mountain towards a village—at any point, one may be quite near the village in the sense of being on a cliff directly above it (corresponding to  ‘nearness by likeness’), but the only way actually to approach the village is by means of the apparently greater distance constituted by a winding path (corresponding to  ‘nearness by approach’). [1] According to this distinction, examples of nearness by likeness would be qualities like beauty, strength, majesty, but nearness of approach would be characterised first and foremost by humility and obedience.

So, hopefully that will be sufficient background for most readers to get some idea of what I’m up to here. Now, back to the lecture at hand:

That said, exactly how does liturgical poetry constitute the ‘consummation’ of literature? The short answer, as should be apparent by now, is that it possesses and communicates not only the virtues of Bakhtinian pre-novelistic and novelistic literature, i.e., nearness to God by approach, but also the virtues of Lewisian, ritualistic epic literature, i.e., nearness to God by likeness. While the latter quality, however, is inherent in the poetic form and liturgical setting of the poetry—it is a ritual genre after all—the nearness of approach in liturgical poetry may require a few examples to be clearly seen. This paper will focus on three, one from each of the three major cultural divisions of ancient Christendom: from the Syriac, the hymn de Fide 31 of St Ephrem the Syrian referred to above; from the Latin, St Venantius Fortunatus’s famous Vexilla Regis; and from the Greek, the Paschal Canon of St John Damascene.

a) St Ephrem the Syrian

In his journal entry for Ash Wednesday, 1747, John Wesley famously wrote of St Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-373), ‘Surely never did any man, since David, give us such a picture of a broken and contrite heart’, [2] while Robert Murray has called the Syriac Father ‘the greatest poet of the patristic age and, perhaps, the only theologian-poet to rank beside Dante’. [3] St Ephrem is firmly within the Christian liturgical-poetic tradition of approach/likeness. Although he ‘probably did not know Greek’, Sebastian Brock points out that ‘by the fourth century AD, Greek and Semitic cultures had already been interacting in the Middle East for over half a millennium: no Syriac writer of Ephrem’s time is going to be purely Semitic in character or totally unhellenized…’. [4] Thus, St Ephrem’s poetry certainly does not belong with the truly ‘monoglot’ classical genres. That said, St Ephrem worked primarily within two poetic genres peculiar to the Syriac language: the madrasha and the memra. The former—from which genre the present example is chosen—is a stanzaic form, punctuated by a refrain and based on repeating syllabic patterns, that is, regular numbers of syllables. [5] The intermingled faithful of a Syrian congregation—a local gathering of what St Ephrem calls ‘the Church of the Nations’ [6]—would have participated in St Ephrem’s madrasha by singing the refrain, anticipating the kind of ‘call and response’ performance that Mara Scanlon identifies with Bakhtin’s ‘polyglossia’ and ‘dialogism’. [7]

St Ephrem’s cycle ‘On Faith’ includes a madrasha particularly germane to the present thesis—Hymn 31. [8] After an initial stanza calling for thanksgiving for the various anthropomorphisms of Scriptural language about God, the second stanza of this hymn reads:

We should realize that, had He not put on the namesof such things, it would not have been possible for Himto speak with us humans. By means of what belongs to us did He draw close to us.He clothed Himself in our language, so that He might clothe usin His mode of life. He asked for our form and put this on,and then, as a father with his children, He spoke with our childish state. [9]

The virtues of God being celebrated here, then, are not epic qualities like His majesty and power—in 4.2, it is said that God ‘became like a Hero, a Valiant Warrior’, but the mutability suggested by the verb and the comparative ‘like’ demonstrate that this is every bit as metaphoric as the other ‘terms that He has put on’ in 3.1. [10] Rather than praising God’s ‘likeness’ attributes, this hymn is celebrating precisely God’s condescension: God is the Hero Who drew ‘close to us’ and ‘spoke with our childish state.’ It is a celebration, moreover, in which all strata of society could participate, and thus the hymn exalts ‘them of low degree’ (Luke 1:52), to borrow the language of the Authorised Version. Kathleen McVey has noted that St Ephrem incorporated into the praise of God a class certainly not to be identified with ‘the ruling social group’ [11]—women. [12] In the words of a memra on St Ephrem by Jacob of Sarug:

By you even the sisters are strengthened to speak.
Your instruction has opened the closed mouth of the daughters of Eve,
and with their voices throngs of crowned women are singing out,
and women teachers are being called into the congregations—
a new vision that women will speak the Gospel! [13]

This opening of ‘the closed mouth of the daughters of Eve’ surely belongs with the ‘scandal scenes, eccentric behavior, inappropriate speeches and performances’ that characterize pre-novelistic discourse, [14] and it reminds the modern reader that St Ephrem’s voice is not merely his own, but ‘a voice that feels a possible choral support outside itself’. [15] Finally, the irony that Bakhtin considers inimical to the ancient genres and crucial to the pre-novelistic ones, the ‘laughter that destroys the epic’ [16] can be found in the sixth and seventh stanzas of St Ephrem’s hymn, where Brock notes ‘an undertone of subtle humour, [as St Ephrem] compares God’s efforts to teach humanity about himself to those of someone who is attempting, with the aid of a mirror, to teach a parrot to talk’. [17] A poetry of humor, however subtle, gives voice to the consciousness of human beings who must cease taking themselves too seriously in order to draw near to God by approach.

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Orlando: Harcourt, 1988), p. 5.

[2] John Wesley, Journals and Diaries III (1743-54), ed. W. Reginald Ward & Richard P. Heitzenrater, Vol. 20 of The Works of John Wesley (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), p. 162.

[3] Robert Murray, ‘Ephrem Syrus, St’, A Catholic Dictionary of Theology, Vol. 2: Catechism—Heaven (London: Nelson, 1967), p. 222.

[4] Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1992), pp. 17, 143.

[5] Sebastian Brock & George A. Kiraz, ‘Introduction’, Select Poems, by St Ephrem the Syrian, ed. & tr. Sebastian P. Brock and George A. Kiraz (Provo, UT: Brigham Young, 2006), p. xiii.

[6] Qtd. in Brock, Luminous, p. 119.

[7] Mara Scanlon, ‘Ethics and the Lyric: Form, Dialogue, Answerability’, College Literature 31.1 (2007), p. 16.

[8] St Ephrem the Syrian, Select Poems, ed. & tr. Sebastian P. Brock & George A. Kiraz (Provo, UT: Brigham Young, 2006), pp. 18-27.

[9] Ibid., p. 19.

[10] Ibid., p. 21. Obviously, I am more than a little hampered in analysing the diction of St Ephrem’s poetry by my complete lack of Syriac!

[11] Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas, 1998), p. 4.

[12] Kathleen McVey, ‘Ephraem the Syrian (ca. 306-373)’, Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, Vol. 2, 2^nd ed., ed. Everett Ferguson, 2 vols. (NY: Garland, 1997), p. 376. Brock refers to St Ephrem as ‘a poet who wrote specifically for women’ (‘Introduction’, Hymns on Paradise, by St Ephrem the Syrian, tr. Sebastian Brock (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 1990], p. 22).

[13] Kathleen McVey, ‘Jacob of Saruge on Ephrem and the Singing Women’, American Foundation for Syriac Studies, n.p., n.d., Web, 1 June 2012. Jacob’s memra is also quoted at length by Brock (‘Introduction’, pp. 22-5).

[14] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. & tr. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1994), p. 117.

[15] Mikhail Bakhtin, Art & Answerability, eds. Michael Holquist & Vadim Liapunov, tr. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: U of Texas, 1995), p. 170.

[16] Bakhtin, Dialogic, p. 7, 23.

[17] Brock, Luminous, p. 60.

'Making our oars wings'—Dante on the Flight of the Soul

One of the great joys of this last school year has been the opportunity to teach some of my favourite books—St Benedict’s Rule and Life, St Basil’s homilies On Social Justice, St Anthony’s Life by St Athanasius, Beowulf, the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Sir Gawain & the Green Knight and Pearl, The Canterbury Tales, and Dante’s Inferno (unfortunately not the whole Divine Comedy). This opportunity has of course allowed me to delve more deeply into some of these myself. Particularly with regard to Dante, while I had read the Comedy and read bits and pieces of a few secondary sources on it, I’d never read it in the kind of detail and intensity I had to devote to it—to the first cantica at least—for my class. I learned a lot, and I’d like to share one of the more fascinating things I came across.

In Canto XXVI, lines 19-24, the poet writes (at least in Dorothy Sayers’s translation):

I sorrowed then; I sorrow now again,

Pondering the things I saw, and curb my hot

Spirit with an unwontedly strong rein

For fear it run where virtue guide it not,

Lest, if kind star or greater grace have blest

Me with good gifts, I mar my own fair lot. [1]

The ‘things I saw’ is a glance backwards at the horrific metamorphoses of Canto XXV, where Dante self-consciously outdoes Lucan (in the Pharsalia) and Ovid (in the Metamorphoses) in his description of the various transmogrifications of the souls. [2] The poet’s ‘Spirit’ is lo ’ngegno, his ‘genius’, which must be curbed lest he indulge his vanity in his poetic gift and risk the damnation of his own soul.

But the ‘fear [that] it run where virtue guide it not’ is also a look ahead at the central encounter of this canto—that with the shade of Ulysses. In recounting his ‘little speech’ to his mariners, [3] Ulysses exhorts them, ‘you were made men, / To follow after knowledge and excellence [virtute e canoscenza—literally ‘virtue and knowledge’].’ [4] Yet this is not virtue in the Christian sense, but in a sense more akin to the original proud glory of the Homeric heroes. Dante’s prudent curbing of his genius is foreign to Ulysses. The latter tells the two pilgrims:

No tenderness for my son, nor piety

To my old father, nor the wedded love

That should have comforted Penelope

Could conquer in me the restless itch to rove

And rummage through the world exploring it,

All human worth and wickedness to prove. [5]

On the basis of these lines, Anthony Esolen writes of Ulysses, ‘Proud, avaricious for knowledge, he abandons his legitimate ties in Ithaca (unlike Dante, he is not exiled) and thinks to gain experience (the lowest form of knowledge) of the other hemisphere all by himself’, but that ‘is a realm opened by the will of God and not by human intelligence’. [6] Furthermore, John Freccero points out that the insistence of Dante the poet on—

the distinction between ingegno and virtù, between the motive power of his journey and his guide, contrasts sharply with the speech of Ulysses, in which ‘virtute e canoscenza’ (v. 120) seem almost synonymous, the single, somewhat exterior objective of the ‘folle volo’. Just as the ancients equated knowledge and virtue, so too Ulysses seems to equate them, making no provision in his calculations for the journey within, the personal askesis upon which all such attempts at transcendence must be based. [7]

More interesting than all of this, however, is the expression Ulysses uses to describe their embarking on the folle volo: ‘we plied, / Making our oars wings [de’ remi facemmo ali] to the witless flight’ (XXVI.124-5). [8] In an astonishing analysis of the expression de’ remi facemmo ali, Freccero has demonstrated that Dante is quite certainly drawing on a tradition of allegorical interpretation of the flight of Daedelus. [9] In the Aeneid, Book VI, lines 18-9, Virgil writes:

redditus his primum terris tibi, Phoebe, sacravit

remigium alarum posuitque immania templa.

Here first restored to earth, to you, O Phoebus, he consecrated

the oarage of his wings and built a vast temple. [10]

One can of course recognise the remigium alarum in Dante’s remi...ali, though of course Virgil is using the metaphor of a sea voyage for Daedelus’s flight through the air while Dante is using the metaphor of a flight through the air to describe a sea voyage. But it is not only the expression that the Florentine has inherited from his masters. Freccero notes that Pierre Courcelle has shown ‘both the story of Ulysses and the flight of Daedelus were interpreted by neoplatonists to signify the flight of the soul’. [11] Both St Ambrose and St Augustine use the Daedelus myth ‘to describe the liberation of the soul from matter’, even including the phrase remigium alarum. To these Freccero adds the following statement from Bernardus Silvestris’s Commentum super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii, by which the tradition associating remigium alarum with reason was ‘probably made...directly accessible to Dante’:

Daedalus came to the temple of Apollo, that is, to the contemplation of sublime things with the reason. And journeying with the intellect he turned his attention completely to the study of philosophy, and there he dedicated the oarage of his wings, that is, the exercise of his reason and intellect (alarum remigium i.e. rationis et intellectus exercitium sacravit). [12]

Of course, in the original sources of this tradition concerning Daedelus, this flight is not ‘witless’, and Ulysses’s shipwreck seems more akin to Icarus’s fate than his fathers. In Freccero’s words, ‘If Ulysses is shipwrecked and if the wings of Daedelus seem rather to recall Icarus, it is because the regressus that both stories represent is, in Dante’s view, philosophical presumption that is bound to end in failure.’ [13] Freccero then grounds Dante’s view in his Augustinianism:

For Plotinus the power of intellect was a sufficient vehicle for the flight to the truth; the great neoplatonist specifically denied the need for any guide on such a journey. For Augustine, on the contrary, and for all Christian thinkers thereafter, the journey had to be accomplished ‘et per intellectum et per affectum.’ [14] Such insistence on the volitive power of the soul is the constant theme of Augustine’s polemic against neoplatonism in the Confessions. This polemic, I believe, lies at the heart of Dante’s representation in the canto of Ulysses. [15]

Of course, Freccero goes on to look at how this theme plays out in several passages of the Confessions, but I’ll stop there.

[1] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy—1: Hell, tr. Dorothy Sayers (London: Penguin, 1949), p. 233.

[2] Inferno, Canto XXV.94-102.

[3] This is of course the origin of Tennyson’s much longer speech, ‘Ulysses’, where the hero would ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star’. Charles Singleton compares it to Aeneas’s speech in Aen. I.198-203, one in Lucan, Phars. I, and Horace’s Odes I.vii.25-6—see Charles Singleton, tr., The Divine Comedy I, Inferno: Commentary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1991), pp. 466-7.

[4] Dante, p. 236.

[5] Ibid., p. 235.

[6] Anthony Esolen, tr. & ed., Inferno, by Dante (NY: Modern Library, 2002), p. 470, n. to p. 271, l. 84.

[7] John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1986), p. 18.

[8] Dante, p. 236.

[9] Freccero, pp. 15-24.

[10] The Virgilian text is from P. Vergili Maronis Opera, ed. Frederic Arthur Hirtzel (Oxford: Oxford, 1966); the English translation is my tampering with that of Freccero, p. 16, to make it follow the Latin syntax a bit more closely.

[11] Freccero, p. 16.

[12] Freccero, p. 17.

[13] Freccero, p. 18.

[14] Freccero notes, ‘See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, In IV Sent. d. XVII, q.1 a.3, sol.3, quoting Augustine’s Enar. in Psalm. Ps. CXVIII, 14, 8’ (p. 277, n. 42).

[15] Freccero, pp. 18-9.

'Holy Russia Does Not Stand Empty'—St Ilya Muromets

Today, 19 December on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of St Ilya Muromets [1], ‘Elijah of Murom’ (1188). Here is the account of his life in the Prologue:

He was a monk of the Kiev Caves, and died in 1188. His uncorrupt relics have wonderworking power. Three fingers of his right hand are to this day raised in prayer, whence it is seen that he died at prayer. This is a commentary on those who do not make the sign of the Cross with three fingers. [2]

It seems that St Ilya is popularly identified with a legendary Russian bogatyr, or mediæval hero, to whom James Billington refers as ‘perhaps the most popular hero of Christianized epic folklore’, linking him with the Prophet Elijah the Tishbite. [3] Sir Dimitri Obolensky has published a text with prose translation of one of the byliny (‘oral heroic poems of medieval Russia’ sung in recent centuries ‘by peasant bards’ [4]) about St Ilya. Here is part of the translation:

It is not a green oak tree bending low to the earth, nor paper leaves fluttering down to the ground—a son is falling down before his father, and begging his blessing: ‘O dear father mine, give me your blessing, that I may go to glorious and royal Kiev town, there to pray to the wonder-workers of Kiev, to do fealty to Prince Vladimir, to serve him in truth and honour, to defend the Christian faith.’

The old peasant Ivan Timofeevich replied: ‘I will give you my blessing that you may perform good deeds, but you have not my blessing for evil ones. When you go on your way, do not harbour evil designs against any Tatar, nor kill any Christian man in the open plain.’

Il´ya of Murom bowed to the ground before his father, mounted his good steed and rode out into the open plain. He strikes the horse on its steep flanks, he strikes through the hide to the black flesh; his fiery steed grows angry, frees itself from the ground, and leaps higher than the standing trees and only a little lower than the passing clouds. At its first leap, it leapt fifteen versts; at its second leap, a well sprung up; by the well he felled a green oak and built a chapel; on the chapel he inscribed his name: ‘A strong and mighty hero rode by here—Il´ya of Murom, son of Ivan.’ The third leap brought him to the neighbourhood of Chernigov town. At the approaches to Chernigov stood a numberless host, at the approaches to Chernigov there stood three [Tatar] princes, each with an army of forty thousand men. The hero’s heart is ardent and impetuous: it flared up hotter than fire, hotter than burning frost.

Then Il´ya of Murom spoke these words: ‘I did not want to oppose my father nor indeed to break his commandment.’

He seized his battle saber and began to walk through the host: wherever he wheeled, he hacked out streets, wherever he turned round, [public] squares appeared; he slashed his way through to the three princes. Then Il´ya of Murom spoke these words: ‘O my three princes! Shall I take you prisoners, or shall I cut off your unruly heads? If I take you prisoners I shall have roads for people to ride along and bring me bread. But if I cut off your heads I shall destroy the seed of kings. Go back to your homes and spread the report everywhere that Holy Russia does not stand empty, and that there are strong and mighty heroes in Holy Russia.’

The governor of Chernigov caught sight of him: ‘What a messenger the Lord has sent us! He has liberated our glorious Chernigov town.’ [5]

There is a brief prose account of some of St Ilya’s more famous adventures here. The comparison of him there to the Arthurian knight, Sir Launcelot, whether or not it is an apt one, reminds me of a wonderful 1940 essay by C.S. Lewis called ‘The Necessity of Chivalry’. [6] There Lewis, in an attempt ‘to isolate that particular conception of the man comme il faut which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture’ [7], cites Malory’s Morte Darthur, Bk. XXI:

‘A, Launcelot!’ he sayd, ‘thou were hede of al Crysten knyghtes! And now I dare say,’ sayd syr Ector, ‘thou sir Launcelot, there thou lyest, that thou were never matched of erthely knyghtes hande. And thou were the curtest knight that ever bare shelde! And . . . thou were the kindest man that ever strake with swerde. And thou were the godelyest persone that ever cam emonge prees of kynghtes, and thou was the meekest man and the jentyllest that ever ete in halle emonge ladyes, and thou were the sternest knyght to thy mortal foo that ever put spere in the reeste.’ [8]

Lewis observes:

The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. [9]

Of course, Lewis argues that this ideal is as important today as ever:

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed the lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. [10]

I recommend that all read this essay in full.


[1] I use the transliteration of the Russian form of this name rather than ‘Elijah’ because it is under the former that St Ilya is most widely known. My standard policy has long been that of thoroughly Anglicising names, but this seems a worthwhile exception.

[2] St Nicholas (Velimirović), The Prologue from Ochrid, Vol. 4, trans. Mother Maria (Birmingham: Lazarica, 1986), p. 346.

[3] James H. Billington, The Icon & the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (NY: Vintage, 1970), p. 24.

[4] Sir Dimitri Obolensky, ed., The Heritage of Russian Verse (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U, 1976), p. xi.

[5] Ibid., pp. 23-5.

[6] C.S. Lewis, ‘The Necessity of Chivalry’, Present Concerns: Essays by C.S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper (San Diego: Harcourt, 1986), pp. 13-6.

[7] Ibid., p. 13.

[8] Sir Thomas Malory, Works, 2nd ed., ed. Eugène Vinaver (NY: Oxford U, 1978), p. 725. Lewis quotes only the last lines of this passage, but I thought it worthwhile to give a bit more of Sir Ector's description of the chivalric ideal.

[9] Lewis, p. 13.

[10] Ibid., p. 14.

'Manduca, Iam Coctum Est'—Holy Martyr Laurence the Archdeacon

Today, 10 August on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of the Holy Martyr Archdeacon Laurence of Rome (c. 225 – 258). As an overview of what is known about his life and sufferings, I offer the account in the Prologue (St Nicholas [Velimirović], The Prologue from Ochrid: Vol. 3, trans. Mother Maria [Birmingham: Lazarica, 1986], p. 177):

When Pope Stephen (see August 2nd) was killed, St Sixtus was installed in his place. St Sixtus was an Athenian, first a philosopher and later a Christian. At that time, the Roman bishops were being killed one after the other in such quick succession that to be made Bishop of Rome was tantamount to a death sentence. The Emperor Valerian was determined to stamp out Christianity, and Pope Sixtus was quickly brought to trial with two of his deacons, Felicicius and Agapitus. When they were being taken off to prison, Laurence said to the Pope: ‘Where are you going, Father, without your son? Whither, O Bishop, without your archdeacon?’ The Pope consoled him with the prophecy that he would undergo yet greater suffering for Christ, and follow him very soon. And indeed, as soon as Sixtus and the two deacons had been beheaded, Laurence was arrested. He had been inspired to set in order both his own affairs and those of the Church. As treasurer, he had taken all the Church’s valuables to the house of a widower, Cyriacus. At that time, he healed Cyriacus of terrible pains in the head by the touch of his hand, and restored the sight of a blind man, Crescention. Thrown into prison, Laurence healed there an elderly prisoner, Lucillus, of blindness and baptised him. Seeing this, the warder, Hippolytus, also received baptism, and later suffered for Christ (see August 13th). As Laurence would not deny Christ, but strongly counselled the Emperor Valerian to abandon his false gods, he was beaten on the face with stones and on his body with scorpions (chains with poisoned teeth). A soldier, Romanus, who was present at the torture, came to belief in Christ and was immediately beheaded. They finally put Laurence on an iron grid and lit a fire underneath. Roasting in the fire, Laurence gave thanks to God, and mocked the Emperor for his paganism. When he had given his pure and heroic soul to God, Hippolytus took his body by night, first to the house of Cyriacus and then to a cave, where he buried it. St Laurence suffered, together with the others, in 258.

The Holy Fathers laud St Laurence as an exemplar of the cardinal virtue of fortitude. In his Sermon LXXXV.2, St Leo the Great says that St Laurence’s persecutors ‘found that his wondrous courage, born principally of love for Christ, not only did not yield itself, but also strengthened others by the example of his endurance’ (here). Citing the example of the Righteous Martyr Jonathan Maccabaeus in I Macc. 11, St Ambrose writes in his treatise On the Duties of the Clergy I.41, ‘Here, then, is fortitude in war, which bears no light impress of what is virtuous and seemly upon it, for it prefers death to slavery and disgrace. But what am I to say of the sufferings of the martyrs?’ And after describing some of these, he says, ‘And let us not pass by St Lawrence . . . [who after three days of torture] was placed on the gridiron by the tyrant whom he mocked, and was burnt. He said: “The flesh is roasted, turn it and eat.” So by the courage of his mind he overcame the power of fire’ (here).

Umberto Eco has cited this last story in his incredible novel, The Name of the Rose. William of Baskerville and Jorge the blind librarian are debating on the admissibility of laughter, when we read (The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver [Orlando, FL: Harvest, 1994], pp. 95-6):

‘Manduca, iam coctum est,’ William murmured. ‘Eat, for it is well done.’

‘What?’ asked Jorge, thinking he referred to some dish that was being brought him.

‘Those are the words that, according to Ambrose, were uttered by Saint Lawrence on the gridiron, when he invited his executioners to turn him over, as Prudentius also recalls in the Peristephanon,’ William said with a saintly air. ‘Saint Lawrence therefore knew how to laugh and say ridiculous things, even if it was to humiliate his enemies.’

‘Which proves that laughter is something very close to death and to the corruption of the body,’ Jorge replied with a snarl; and I must admit that he spoke like a good logician.

The hymn of the Peristephanon to which William refers can be read in Latin here. Unfortunately, I can’t find a translation, and my Latin is far too paltry to produce my own. If only some pious soul, learned in the Latin tongue, would honour the Holy Martyr by producing a translation of this ancient hymn! Here, however, is the hymn written by St Nicholas for today’s Prologue:

Lawrence, the evil emperor asks:
‘Where are you from? What is your rank?’
Lawrence, to the emperor replies:
‘From Spain, educated in Rome,
And of the One God, a servant, I am.’
‘Of the Church's treasure, are you the guardian?’
‘Of that good treasure, I am, O emperor.’
Give us the treasure and your life, save!
The treasure of the Church, in heaven, is,
In the Lord Jesus, believe ye also,
And, of that treasure, an heir, you will be.’
Lawrence, deny Christ!
‘You, O Emperor, deny the idols!’
And the Emperor became infuriated and to the servants motioned,
Lawrence, they beat and crushed,
And on a fiery gridiron, they placed him.
This fire to me, it is cool,
And [the fire] for you in the midst of
Hades is prepared!
Lawrence, deny Christ!
Are you not sorry, to die young?
Christ, on the Cross, suffered for me,
For me, He died; I, for Him, die
One side of the body, entirely burned,
Lawrence, to the executioners, speaks:
Half of the body is roasted,
Turn it over, behold food for you,
Turn it over, let the other side roast!
This said, he flew away
Into the sweet heavenly mansions.

In chapter II.28 of the same work quoted above, St Ambrose tells another edifying story, concerning St Lawrence’s praiseworthy actions as treasurer of the Roman Church. Between this duty and his famous suffering and quip on the gridiron, the West came to honour him as patron Saint of archivists and librarians, on the one hand (making William’s quotation to Jorge the librarian somewhat ironic—and this observation of mine, in turn, a delightful pun!), and of comedians and cooks on the other. He is also patron of Amarillo, TX, and of the Benedictine Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire, England. According to Fish Eaters, the occurrence of the Perseid meteor shower around the feast of St Laurence has given the phenomenon the name ‘tears of St Laurence’. Finally, I advise everyone to read this awesome post at the hitherto unknown (to me) blog, Varieties of unreligious Experience, demonstrating what even the OED did not know: that the expression ‘as happy as Larry’ was originally a reference to St Laurence, dating back at least to the following passage in John Scotus Eriugena’s Periphyseon:

Quam igitur felices erant Beati Laurentius Stephanusque, & nullis agitabantur perturbationibus animorum: tam felix universa societas esset humana.

Therefore, [if it hadn’t been for the Ancestral Sin] all human society would have been as happy as Saints Lawrence and Stephen, who were troubled by no perturbations in their souls.

In conclusion, here is the final paragraph of St Leo’s sermon on St Laurence:

Thou gainest nothing, thou prevailest nothing, O savage cruelty. His mortal frame is released from thy devices, and, when Laurentius departs to heaven, thou art vanquished. The flame of Christ’s love could not be overcome by thy flames, and the fire which burnt outside was less keen than that which blazed within. Thou didst but serve the martyr in thy rage, O persecutor: thou didst but swell the reward in adding to the pain. For what did thy cunning devise, which did not redound to the conqueror’s glory, when even the instruments of torture were counted as part of the triumph? Let us rejoice, then, dearly-beloved, with spiritual joy, and make our boast over the happy end of this illustrious man in the Lord, Who is ‘wonderful in His saints’ (Ps 68:35, LXX), in whom He has given us a support and an example, and has so spread abroad his glory throughout the world, that, from the rising of the sun to its going down, the brightness of his deacon’s light doth shine, and Rome is become as famous in Laurentius as Jerusalem was ennobled by Stephen. By his prayer and intercession (cf. Sermon LXXXII. c. 7.) we trust at all times to be assisted; that, because all, as the Apostle says, ‘who wish to live holily in Christ, suffer persecution’ (II Tim 3:12), we may be strengthened with the spirit of love, and be fortified to overcome all temptations by the perseverance of steadfast faith.

Fr Thornton on Judging

I don’t get many readers over the weekend, and consequently I’ve begun to feel like some of my more elabourately wrought posts are a bit wasted of a Saturday or Sunday. That feeling, coupled with the fact that this has been one of the busiest Sundays of recent memory, preceded by a Saturday that didn’t allow enough time to prepare a post ahead of time, has conspired to produce this: a simple reposting of something I found interesting and spiritually beneficial on another website. From Fr James Thornton, ‘Who Art Thou That Judgest?: Sermon on the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans (13:11-14:4), Forgiveness Sunday (Cheesefare Sunday)’ (here; from Quickened with Christ: Sermons on the Sunday Epistle Readings of the Orthodox Year [Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2004], pp. 51-56):

We are repeatedly warned as Christians not to judge other men and women. Does this require that we completely abandon our critical faculties when it comes to our dealings with other people? If we should know of a man who is a notorious embezzler, do we do right in judging him unfit to be the custodian of the public treasury? If we should encounter a man whom we know to be a psychopathic murderer, do we properly judge it unwise to invite him over to dinner? The answer to both questions, obviously, is yes.

Let us take some less extreme and more likely examples. If we learn that a particular friend or companion exerts an unhealthy influence on us as Christians, or if we believe that a friend or companion of our children may lead those children astray, may we make the appropriate judgment in those cases and terminate such associations? Again, the answer is yes. Of course we may do that. We would be held accountable by Christ for not making these kinds of judgments.

What we are forbidden as Christians to do is to judge another person's ultimate state before God, or to employ our critical faculties to enhance, in our own minds, our own rank or station or footing, in what we fancy are the eyes of God, at the expense of another human being. We are forbidden, in other words, to regard ourselves as ‘holy’ by comparison with someone we regard as ‘sinful’.

Waiting for St Benedict—MacIntyre, Monasticism, & the New Dark Ages

Judging by the fruits of a Google search, the last sentence of Alisdair MacIntyre’s already classic work on moral philosophy, After Virtue, is extremely well known and often quoted. In fact, I may be wrong about this, but I would venture to say it is the most famous part of the book. For those who don’t know, MacIntyre writes, ‘We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict’ (After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. [Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame, 1984], p. 263).

Now, two thoughts frequently pop into my mind, unbidden, whenever I think about this statement, one having more to do with wording of the statement itself, and the other having more to do with its context. First of all, whenever I stop to think about this, without fail the idea occurs to me, ‘Why would our new St Benedict have to be “very different” from the first one?’ I’ve never come to a conclusion about this, but I do have a thought that first reared its head today which I will share a bit further down, after I have offered a bit more of the context of MacIntyre’s statement.

Because in order properly to convey the second thought, it strikes me as best to quote the entire final paragraph of the book. It’s a long one, but this is something that I think bears doing anyway, just because that last line, or at least the last couple of sentences, are so often quoted by themselves. So here goes:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire eclined into the Dark Ages [incidentally, I vividly recall this parallel being drawn by Jello Biafra in a bit-too-clever take on the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ during a live performance with Ministry about 20 years ago]. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict. (p. 263)

The funny thing is, whenever I read this, and especially when I read the last line or two in isolation, I have to remind myself that in context MacIntyre is speaking first and foremost of the decline of the virtues and the rôle of Benedictine monasticism precisely in preventing that decline. At some point, although I’ve long known better, I had gotten used to thinking of Benedictine monasteries as engaged primarily in the business of preserving the ancient culture of the arts and sciences, the learning and literature of the ancient world, in the face of their decline in the cities. In his fascinating published Gifford Lectures (typeset by Edward Gorey!), Christopher Dawson even quotes a passage from Newman that might give one this impression, but for a slight caveat. First, Dawson himself writes, ‘It was the disciplined and tireless labour of the monks which turned the tide of barbarism in Western Europe and brought back into cultivation the lands which had been deserted and depopulated in the age of the invasions’ (Religion and the Rise of Western Culture: Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh 1948-1949 [Garden City, NY: Image, 1958], p. 53). Then the Newman quote:

St Benedict found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it [the caveat], not professing to do it by any set time, or by any rare specific, or by any series of strokes, but so quietly, patiently, gradually, that often till the work was done, it was not known to be doing. It was a restoration rather than a visitation, correction or conversion. The new work which he helped to create was a growth rather than a structure. Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully copied and recopied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one who contended or cried out, or drew attention to what was going on, but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning and a city. (pp. 53-4)

I do not say that there is anything wrong with this. Indeed, in my more apocalyptic moments (to which, as a ‘Romantic Orthodox’, I am terribly prone), I am sometimes overcome by a temptation toward hubristic self-justification in which I see my own ongoing acquisition of books and the learning that goes with them, as playing a somewhat analogous rôle to that of the Benedictines, as the night of traditional Western culture falls and barbarism—in the form of fashion magazines and video games—begins to claim all.

Furthermore, while Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern) laments the stress on agriculture in the Orthodox monasteries he knew, and the apparent absence of ‘a quiet monastery environment of a Benedictine monastery, with its library, with its scholars and intelligent priors, and with its own journal, a seminary within the same monastery, visits by intelligent and scholarly prelates, abbots, and so on’ (‘On Metropolitan Anthony [Khrapovitsky]’, trans. Fr Alexander Lisenko, Divine Ascent [No. 9, 2004], p. 152), historically speaking there is actually a great analogy here between Russian monasticism and Benedictinism as described by Newman. Thus, James Billington, while acknowledging that most of the Russian monastic founders of the 15th c. ‘were strongly influenced by Hesychasm’,—Billington’s description of which I thought quite poor—adds, ‘they were also, like the Cistercians [strict Benedictines, after all] of the medieval West, hard-working pioneers opening up new and forbidding lands for cultivation and colonization’ (The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture [NY: Vintage, 1970], p. 52). Of course, Billington goes on to note the stimulus provided by monasticism in the visual arts and literary culture, and in this way the picture of the monastery as a preserver of ‘culture’ in the midst of barbarism is rounded out a bit.

So what is the difference? Why did Fr Cyprian not find the sort of monastery in Orthodoxy that would appeal to him? Surely today, especially, our Orthodox monasteries are not filled exclusively with rude peasants who know more about shoeing a horse than using a lexicon? I would venture to suggest that Orthodox monasteries, more than Benedictine ones as they developed later in the West, have preserved the emphasis on hesychasm that was originally the raison d’être of both. Although the Benedictines have preserved their founder’s well-known saying in RB 43, Ergo nihil operi Dei praeponatur, ‘Let nothing, therefore, be put before the Work of God’ (The Rule of St Benedict in English and Latin, trans. Justin McCann, OSB [Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic Books, n.d.], pp. 102, 103), they seem largely to have forgotten that, as the infallible Adalbert de Vogüé points out, the purpose of the ‘Work of God’, i.e., the Prayer of the Hours, was to ‘encourage and entertain’ ‘the personal striving to pray without ceasing’: ‘Like the piles of a brige, the hours of common prayer punctuate the course of time. It is up to each monk to connect them by the causeway of his unceasing prayer, so as to answer the Lord’s call’ (Reading St Benedict: Reflections on the Rule, trans. Colette Friedlander, OCSO [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1994], pp. 127-8).

I think all of this is to say that it seems a step in the right direction, a good thing, that MacIntyre reminds us that at their inception, it was the practice of the virtues (of which prayer without ceasing is surely one of the greatest) in community that Benedictine monasteries sought to preserve, and not the outward trappings of culture, whether ‘ecclesiastical’ or ‘secular’, whether agricultural or intellectual.

But this brings me back to my first point, the question which I’ve delayed answering. If what we are really hoping to preserve in the coming of barbarism is virtues like unceasing prayer, why must our new St Benedict by ‘very different’? In fact, it seems to me that another St Benedict very much like the old one would be the perfect project coordinator for such a thing.

While I may be giving him too much credit, here I think MacIntyre is thinking primarily in terms of his own call for all of those who value the old virtue morality to turn ‘aside from the task of shoring up the [modern] imperium’ and cease ‘to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium’, whereas St Benedict, and monasticism in general, is traditionally perceived as a special calling to certain persons within the Church. One wonders if he is not looking for a non-‘monastic’ St Benedict who does not require celibacy and absolute obedience, perhaps something like the ‘new monasticism’ (on which see this great triple review by Alan Jacobs). But again, while there is certainly a delicate balance that must be maintained in the Church between the very real obligation of all Christians to carry out the Gospel, including St Paul’s command to ‘pray without ceasing’, and the special calling of traditional monasticism, a balance that Orthodoxy has never perfectly encapsulated in an institution or formula, I can’t help but think that ‘new monasticism’, and insofar as he is advocating something like it, MacIntyre, are reinventing the wheel. Even if authentic Church life might have to take on slightly new forms—as evidenced by Fr Vladimir Vorobeyov’s fascinating article, ‘Russian Orthodox Pastoral Ministry in the 20th Century’ (Divine Ascent [No. 7, Presentation of the Theotokos, November 2001], pp. 15-40)—in our ever more anti-Christian milieu, it seems to me that our Saints have remained almost exactly the same for the last two thousand years, and will likely continue to do so.

Returning to Books

Well, we bid Memphis a fond ‘adieu’ Monday, hit the road, and arrived back in the comforting familiarity of Oklahoma City that night. It was a wonderful experience, and my wife and I can’t wait to go back. Aside from witnessing the wedding of our friend, Sally Anna (now) Boyle, and seeing some of the city, we had the wonderful opportunity to reunite with our good friend, Herman Middleton (with whom I’ve maintained a lively telephone correspondence but haven’t seen in 5 years), and to meet the infamous Ochlophobist, a warm and welcoming fellow with a great sense of humour whose blog may be the most unique in the Orthodox world, along with various friends of Sally Anna and member’s of St John’s Orthodox Church in Memphis. Och has already expressed his own thoughts about the weekend here (along with some inordinately kind words about yours truly), and I believe he captures well something of the warm feeling of the events. My wife and I too owe a special debt of gratitude to the Hodges for their hospitality, which we hope to enjoy again, perhaps with our kids in tow, soon.

I apologise for the long delay in posting, even after my return. I honestly tried to write a post yesterday but wound up not having time, and I’m afraid today’s may be disappointing. But I’m planning to focus my energies on a post for Friday (a post I’ve already anticipated here). For now, I shall simply note a few recent acquisitions.

To take them in chronological order, I finally got round to ordering Alan Jacobs’s A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001). It was first brought to my attention, I believe, by the author himself when I briefly corresponded with him a few years ago, and I was delayed only by the price of the book (I finally purchased a copy of the pb edition for $18). Of course, I was encouraged too by Felix Culpa’s mention of it here, where, referring to the Alexandrian Clement’s allegorical reading of the Odyssey, he writes, ‘I found this passage in Alan Jacobs’s marvelous study, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, which I whole-heartedly recommend. (You might know Dr Jacobs as the author of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis.)’ Here as well is the description from Eighth Day Books:

‘Art and morals are one’, wrote Iris Murdoch, and ‘love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ With this prelude, Alan Jacobs embarks on an investigation of charitable reading, showing how ‘a genuinely Christian notion of love requires among other things a deep commitment to discriminating judgment’ void of mushy sentimentality. Taking his cue from Augustine, Jacobs posits that the purpose of interpretation is the generation of love, grounded in an intelligent charity that has the capacity to avoid error without ruining the reader’s delight. Jacobs’ proposed hermeneutic gains even more nuance in its warning against intellectual curiosity as an end in itself rather than a means of understanding the truth we are meant to incarnate. Charting his course through the works of George Eliot, Shakespeare, Henry James, Cervantes, Nabokov, Updike, Steiner, Dickinson, Auden and Dickens, Jacobs fleshes out examples in absorbing fashion. Of particular note is his treatment of St. Basil’s oration on Greek literature—a framework constructed in the fourth century that advocates a faithful obedience to the Gospel, through which the reader is liberated to read more generously, ‘according to the spirit rather than the letter’. And though Jacobs notes this particular hermeneutic may never be accepted in the halls of academia—its tendency being to ‘spill over into territory where it does not belong and where often it is not welcome’—we are left with plenty to contemplate and work of our own to do.

Already in the ‘Prelude’, Jacobs convinced me to buy—perhaps rashly—a cheap used copy of Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (NY: Oxford U, 1992), which Wayne Booth’s blurb calls, ‘The best modern discussion of the ways in which what we call philosophy and what we call literature interrelate’. It promises to be difficult, and perhaps I shouldn’t try to delve into it too deeply before I finish my thesis! Here, however, is the passage in Jacobs that gave me my first substantial taste of Nussbaum:

At this point the English language, as it does so rarely, fails us: Whereas it enables, as French does not, Claudio’s distinction between liking and loving, it cannot offer us what we need here, which is the distinction between connaître and savoir—roughly, ‘knowledge of’ rather than ‘knowledge about’. One of the most important and productive elements of the work of Martha Nussbaum has been her insistence, deriving from Aristotle, that love—especially philia, the kind of love that Beatrice and Hero feel for each other—is productive of this intimate knowledge, this connaissance. (Jacobs, p. 6)

He then gives this passage from the opening essay in Love’s Knowledge, ‘Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature’:

The Aristotelian view stresses that bonds of close friendship or love . . . are extremely important in the whole business of becoming a good perceiver. Trusting the guidance of a friend and allowing one’s feelings to be engaged with that other person’s life and choices, one learns to see aspects of the world that one had previously missed. One’s desire to share a form of life with the friend motivates this process. (Nussbaum, p. 44)

I have of course much more to say about these ideas, but perhaps I had better save them until I’ve completed my obligatory Papadiamandis review (projected date: tomorrow). In the meantime, I’ll move on to the third book of this post, a purchase made at the parish in Memphis on Sunday—Four Desert Fathers: Pambo, Evagrius, Macarius of Egypt & Macarius of Alexandria, trans. Tim Vivian, assist. Rowan A. Greer (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2004). I had fairly made up my mind to get one of the Popular Patristics titles (since I was trying to spend less than $20!), and settled on this one because of my penchant for hagiography as well as the surprise Preface by the infallible Adalbert de Vogüé, OSB. The accounts here presented are translated from Coptic and bear an ambiguous relationship—promised to be explained by Vivian’s introduction—to the Lausiac History. Here is a little bit of de Vogüé’s Preface:

Another tendency which foreshadows the practice of future centuries is that of the fairly numerous ‘Virtues’ in which Macarius recommends invoking the name of Jesus. But even this advice is given less frequently than calls to humility. This virtue, the only one which radically distinguishes between the holy man and the Devil, is not only the main theme of the teaching of Macarius, it is also reflected by several episodes in his life. . . .

In Cassian, this virtue of humility, which makes one resemble Christ, was soon to become the heart of the cenobitic doctrine professed by Pinuphius, which in turn was to constitute the core of the Rules of the Master and of St Benedict. A modern Benedictine can only rejoice to find that it is already acclaimed in this way in the Sayings and Virtues of Macarius the Great.

Another useful lesson given in these pages is that of bodily asceticism, which has, alas, so strangely disappeared from modern monasticism, as from Christianity as a whole. . . . When Macarius recalled with great moderation that ‘it is fitting to fast until the ninth hour’, this is simply a forerunner to the directions of Benedict’s Rule, which
have lost nothing of their importance today.

In this book, Tim Vivian transmits to us this ever-relevant message of the early monks. Once more, we would like to thank him for doing so. (p. 15)

Furthermore, here is a passage from the ‘Life of Evagrius’ on humility and purity:

25 He used to say that humility leads the intellect into right knowledge, drawing it upward, for it is written, ‘He shall teach the humble their paths’ (Ps 24:9). Indeed, this virtue is one that angels possess. Concerning the purity of the body, he used to say that ‘the monks are not alone with the virgins in possessing it. This virtue is theirs but it is also a virtue that numerous lay persons have who maintain purity, but since not all of them possess purity of body, ‘seek out’, it says, ‘peace with everyone, and purity, without which no one will see the Lord’ (Heb 12:14). (p. 87)

Finally, when I arrived home from Memphis Monday night, I found a package lying inside the screen door and I thought I must have forgotten ordering a book. I opened it up to find The Orthodox Ethos: Essays in honour of the Centenary of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, ed. A.J. Philippou (Oxford: Holywell, 1964). At first I continued to think that perhaps I had simply forgotten ordering it, when, examining the table of contents, I saw Elder Sophrony’s ‘Principles of Orthodox Asceticism’ (pp. 259-86), and I remembered my parenthetical question here. Suddenly, I felt rather like Henry II on learning of Becket’s murder, the difference lying mainly in being happy that a good deed had been done rather than a vicious one. The invoice, although it omitted the price, gave a buyer name which was the same as that on the e-mail address attached to the comment that once informed me I was to receive a gift of St Anastasius of Sinai’s Hexaemeron (see the original comments here and the subsequent explanatory post here). So, I’m afraid I must admit that I myself now know with certainty and am thus able to pray for the name of my anonymous benefactor, who has now added once again to his storehouse of merits. I will however, continue to honour his own wishes and protect him against vainglory by not announcing his name to Orthodox blogdom.

The book is something of a ‘Who’s Who’ of Greek theologians of its day, as well as a few other figures like Nicholas Zernov (on ‘The Worship of the Orthodox Church and Its Message’) Philip Sherrard (on ‘The Sacrament’), Leonid Ouspensky (on ‘The Symbolism of the Church’), and—according to the 'Ad hoc volumen contribuerunt', p. 288—a young ‘lay theologian of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, now working in the Archdiocese of Canada, and a member of Magdalen College, Oxford’, named Mr Timothy Ware (on ‘The Communion of Saints’). The Greeks who excite me most here are Constantine Cavarnos (on ‘Iconographic Decoration in the Orthodox Church’) and Panagiotis K. Chrestou of blessed memory (on ‘The Monastic Life in the Eastern Orthodox Church’). The book would have been a treasure to me for Elder Sophrony’s essay alone, but add to that the others I have mentioned here, plus the many other undoubtedly valuable essays in this sizeable volume, and I am cognizant once again of my great indebtedness to the kind reader who found and purchased it for me.

As a little taste of the great things here, I offer this paragraph from Elder Sophrony, where he himself reflects on the virtue for which he is named (a subject on which I have previously blogged here):

Chastity—σωφροσύνη—as the word itself shows, signifies integrity or fulness of wisdom. In the Church the conception embodies not only mastery over sexual impulses or the complex of the flesh in general, and, in this sense, ‘victory over nature’, but the acquisition of the combination of perfections proper to wisdom, which will be expressed by a constant dwelling in God ‘with all one’s mind and with all one’s heart’. In its most complete realization the ascetic feat of chastity may restore a man in the spirit to his virginal state. (p. 278)

'Rage—Goddess, Sing the Rage': Leon Podles & St Isaiah on Just Anger

Earlier today, I posted on St Isaiah the Solitary, including a small chapter from his treatise ‘On Guarding the Intellect’, included in the Philokalia. Here is the opening chapter of that treatise, which I thought deserved a separate treatment (The Philokalia: The Complete Text, Vol. 1, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, et al. [London: Faber, 1983], p. 22):

1. There is among the passions an anger of the intellect [nous], and this anger is in accordance with nature. Without anger a man cannot attain purity: he has to feel angry with all that is sown in him by the enemy. When Job felt this anger he reviled his enemies, calling them ‘dishonourable men of no repute, lacking everything good, whom I would not consider fit to live with the dogs that guard my flocks’ (cf. Job 30:1, 4. LXXX). He who wishes to acquire the anger that is in accordance with nature must uproot all self-will, until he establishes within himself the state natural to the intellect.

Even so ‘Stoic’ a teacher as Evagrius refers to the anger ‘in accordance with nature’: ’24. Anger is given to us so that we might fight against the demons and strive against every pleasure. Now it happens that the angels suggest spiritual pleasure to us and the beatitude that is consequent upon it so as to encourage us and to turn our anger against the demons’ (Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer, trans. John Eudes Bamberger, OCSO [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1981], p. 23). In Institutes VII.iii.3, Evagrius’s disciple, St John Cassian, has bequeathed this teaching to the Latin world (of course, Aquinas could also find it in St Augustine, De civ. Dei IX.5): ‘Do we not understand that the stings of anger have also been given to us for a very good reason, so that we might be displeased with our vices and errors and occupy ourselves instead with virtue and spiritual pursuits by being most loving to God and patient to our brothers?’ (The Institutes, trans. Boniface Ramsey [NY: Newman, 2000], p. 170). Finally, St Gregory of Sinai has elabourated on this somewhat in his 137 texts ‘On Commandments & Doctrines’ (Philokalia, Vol. 4 [London: Faber, 1998], p. 236):

109. . . . Once our conscience is active, what some call righteous indignation and others natural wrath is roused in three ways—against the demons, against our nature and against our own soul; for such indignation or wrath impels us to sharpen our conscience like a keen-bladed sword against our enemies. If this righteous indignation triumphs and subjects sin and our unregenerate self to the soul, then it is transmuted into the loftiest courage and leads us to God. . . .

I paid especial attention when I reread that first passage in St Isaiah yesterday—and tracked down the other passages—because it reminded me immediately of an article just published on this subject in the latest Touchstone (July/August 2009). In ‘Unhappy Fault’ (billed as ‘Leon Podles on the Integration of Anger into the Virtuous Life’), Leon Podles brings up the traditional teaching on ‘righteous indignation’ apropos of the sexual abuse scandals that have shaken his church in the last several years, citing the Summa Theologica II, II, 158, 1, as well as Josef Pieper’s discussion of the issue in ‘Fortitude’, trans. Daniel F. Coogan, The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame, 1966), which of course also cites Aquinas (particularly on p. 130, where Pieper points out how ‘the Dumb Ox’ specifically addresses the ‘turn the other cheek’ saying of Matt. 5:39). Here is an enlightening passage from Pieper, quoted by Podles:

The fact, however, that Thomas assigns to (just) wrath a positive relation to the virtue of fortitude [cf. St Gregory of Sinai, above] has become largely unintelligible and unacceptable to present-day Christianity and its non-Christian critics. This lack of comprehension may be explained partly by the exclusion, from Christian ethics, of the component of passion (with its inevitably physical aspect) as something alien and incongruous—an exclusion due to a kind of intellectual stoicism—and partly by the fact that the explosive activity which reveals itself in wrath is naturally repugnant to good behavior regulated by ‘bourgeois’ standards. (p. 130)

I would point out that Constantine Cavarnos has noted in the Orthodox—as opposed to the Stoic—use of the term ‘passion’ the lack of connotation of any emotions, pleasures, or desires that could be deemed legitimate or according to nature in the light of the Gospel (The Hellenic-Christian Philosophical Tradition [Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies, 1989], pp. 83-5; I also can’t help but feel that Pseudo-Chrysostom might be overstating the case in the line Podles has selected from him, quoted by Aquinas in the Summa passage mentioned above). But essentially I find here a tremendous overlap between Orthodox and post-Schism RC ethics.

It is a helpful reminder to me personally. Although I have an oddly pronounced sense of justice, and indeed am sometimes capable of being worked into a trembling, unbalanced rage, my strongest temptation is probably to repress and forget feelings of anger, no matter how just they may be. It seems to have become an almost subconscious habit. Recently I actually had the experience of wondering whether someone I knew didn’t want me to become angry about something for them, despite their being unable to produce the called-for passion on their own behalf. But while I agree with Podles on the importance of anger in a case like sexual abuse and the unnatural response of the RC bishops, for my own part I’m always afraid that my own wrath could turn into a volatile mixture of uncontrolled rage and almost self-conscious posturing, before subconsciously quaffing nepenthe and subsiding into a complacent daze. Am I too bourgeois, or is my own problem more complex than that?

By the way, my apologies to anyone that saw the title and hoped this post would be about the Iliad. I just thought it was a nice, poetic title for a post on anger.

The photo above is by Sergey Sosnovskiy, and shows a mosaic from Pompeii at the National Archeological Museum, Naples (here).