'The "Age of the Fathers" still continues'--10 January Menology

Today, 10 January according to the old Orthodox calendar, we commemorate St Gregory of Nyssa (†395), St Theophan the Recluse (†1894), and St Paul of Obnora (†1429), among others. I believe the first two of these are well enough known that there is no need to spend time on the details of their lives. For them, I shall confine myself to a comment or two and a quote. St Paul of Obnora, one of the many disciples of the great Russian Saint, Sergius of Radonezh, is a bit more obscure. A brief overview of his life will be in order.

In the words of Fr Georges Florovsky, St Gregory ‘grew up in an atmosphere of culture and asceticism’ (The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century, trans. Catherine Edmunds, Vol. 7 in The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky [Vaduz, Europa: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987], p. 146), and this atmosphere permeates all of his work. Although he has often been called a brilliant ‘speculative theologian’ (e.g., by Johannes Quasten, qtd. in Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism [New Haven, CT: Yale U, 1993], p. 8; Fr John Meyendorff, Preface, The Life of Moses, by St Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Everett Ferguson and Abraham J. Malherbe [NY: Paulist, 1978], p. xii; Fr Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys [Oxford: Oxford U, 1981], p. 80), St Gregory’s work is clearly grounded in prayerful communion with God, indeed, of ‘immediacy with God Himself in love’ (Fr Louth, p. 81). In the words of St Gregory Palamas, he is one of those people ‘who have been taught by experience and grace’ (The Philokalia: The Complete Text, Vol. 4, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, et al. [London: Faber, 1998], p. 342).

I believe the very first words I ever read from the pen of St Gregory of Nyssa (whose Life of Moses is today one of my absolute favourite books), were one of the many Patristic texts excerpted in Bishop Kallistos’s The Orthodox Way, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s, 1995), which Hieromonk Patapios, in his important review, has called one of its ‘attractive features’. Of course, at the time I read this I was a college freshman attending a GOA parish, and knew nothing of Hieromonk Patapios and his pesky reviews. But this passage—from the Homilies on Ecclesiastes (and which Bishop Kallistos takes from Jean Daniélou and Herbert Musurillo, trans., From Glory to Glory [Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1989], pp. 127-8)—made a profound impression on me. I recall using it once or twice in papers, including one on the language of ‘mysticism’ (yes, I know, a bit presumptuous for a new convert and undergraduate!).

Imagine a sheer, steep crag, with a projecting edge at the top. Now imagine what a person would probably feel if he put his foot on the edge of this precipice and, looking down into the chasm below, saw no solid footing nor anything to hold on to. This is what I think the soul experiences when it goes beyond its footing in material things, in its quest for that which has no dimension and which exists from all eternity. For here there is nothing it can take hold of, neither place nor time, neither measure nor anything else; our minds cannot approach it. And thus the soul, slipping at every point from what cannot be grasped, becomes dizzy and perplexed and returns once again to what is connatural to it, content now to know merely this about the Transcendent, that it is completely different from the nature of the things that the soul knows. (qtd. in Bishop Kallistos, pp. 23-4)

We can see clearly here that, in the words of St Nicholas (Velimirović) in his hymn in the Prologue for today:

St Gregory of Nyssa, because of his great faith,
To spiritual heights, like an eagle soared.

One can read the Life of St Theophan here. He is one of the great Holy Fathers of the last two hundred years—for, as Fr Florovsky has put it, ‘we are bound to say, “the Age of the Fathers” still continues’ (Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Vol. I in the Collected Works of George Florovsky [Vaduz, Europa: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987], p. 113). Here is one of St Theophan’s most important pieces of advice for people like me:

Books are only for guidance in the spiritual life. Knowledge itself is acquired through deeds. Even that which is known from reading, clear and detailed though it be, presents itself in an entirely different light when experienced through deeds. The spiritual life is such a realm into which the wisdom of this world cannot penetrate. You yourself will experience this or are already doing so. (The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It, trans. Alexandra Dockham [Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000], p. 284)

There is a brief account of the life of St Paul of Obnora here. Born in 1317, he was from a noble family of devout Muscovite Christians. Having already demonstrated in his childhood an inclination to piety and ascesis, at the age of 22 he fled in secret from an impending marriage and was tonsured at a monastery on the Volga. ‘When the good news of the great St Sergius of Radonezh reached the shores of the Volga, St Paul felt that his prayer had been answered in obtaining an experienced instructor; and he left his monastery for the Lavra of the Holy Trinity’ (The Northern Thebaid: Monastic Saints of the Russian North, comp. and trans. Hieromonks Seraphim [Rose] and Herman [Podmoshensky] [Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1995], p. 40).

St Paul became a close disciple of St Sergius, and, trained in obedience, eventually received the gift of tears. When a number of years had passed, he received a blessing to live as a recluse in the monastery, and passed fifteen years in hesychia and study of the Scriptures. Soon, however, the other brothers began to come to him for guidance, and St Paul asked for a blessing to go live in the wilderness. He visited some monasteries—

But the heart of the lover of desert-dwelling still thirsted for absolute silence, until finally he settled in a spot in the Komel forests overlooking the little river Grizovitsa, and chose for his abode the hollow of an old linden tree. Here the wondrous Paul spent three years, glorifying God together with the birds, for they alone seconded the hermit’s singing in the desolate wilds where no man had yet penetrated. Here he could pray ceaselessly to God. Who can tell of the hardships he endured? Living on grass and roots and enduring all changes of weather, in silence [hesychia] he purified his mind [nous] by meanss of spiritual combat and divine vision [theoria]. (Thebaid, p. 43)

After three years, however, the Lord guided him to another spot, where he built a small hut. Soon, another nearby anchorite, St Sergius of Nurma, who had been tonsured on the Holy Mountain, heard about St Paul. St Sergius sought him out, ‘and saw in the forest a wondrous sight:’

A flock of birds surrounded the marvellous anchorite; little birds perched on the Elder’s head and shoulders, and he fed them by hand. Nearby stood a bear, awaiting his food from the desert-dweller; foxes, rabbits and other beasts ran about, without any enmity among themselves and not fearing the bear. Behold the life of innocent Adam in Eden, the lordship of man over creation, which together with us groans because of our fall and thirsts to be delivered into the liberty of the children of God (Rom. 8:22). (Thebaid, p. 43)

Although already an old man, for a while St Paul became a spiritual child of the more experienced ascetic. Soon however, people began to seek him out, and he saw a vision of an unearthly light shining in a spot in the forest on the other side of the river Nurma. St Sergius prophesied that here St Paul would build an monastery dedicated to the Holy Trinity (like that of St Sergius of Radonezh). Soon afterward, St Sergius fell asleep in the Lord, and St Paul got a blessing to found the monastery from Metropolitan Photius—‘a man of strong moral fibre and great determination’, according to John Fennell (A History of the Russian Church to 1448 [London: Longman, 1995], p. 162), who nevertheless needed prompting from a terrifying dream to grant the request!

St Paul established the monastery according to the typica of Ss Pachomius the Great and Theodosius the Cœnobiarch. The monks lived in strict cœnobitism and ‘complete silence’. St Paul appointed his disciple, Alexis, as abbot, and retired to his old hermitage. ‘In silence his mind was constantly in prayer and heefulness toward God; gathering the light of Divine understanding in his heart, he beheld in purity the glory of the Lord, thereby becoming a chosen vessel of the Holy Spirit’ (Thebaid, p. 47). He learned clairvoyantly of the sack of Kostroma by the Tatars, and several days later summoned the monks in expectation of his passing. ‘With prayer he gave them as his testament to keep the tradition of the Fathers and the cœnobitic rule.’ His parting words to the brotherhood were, ‘Have unfeigned love among yourselves, keep the tradition, and may the God of peace be with you and confirm you in love’ (Thebaid, p. 48). Then, he received the Mysteries, blessed his monks, made the sign of the Cross—

and in quite prayer gave up his holy soul to God. His face was bright, for God glorified his Saint. (Thebaid, p. 48)

St Paul reposed on 10 January 1429. He was 112.

'Like a Pelican', Part II: 'Without God, the world becomes unintelligible'

Part II of the first 'Logismoi' book review, continued from 18 January:

Ramfos’s purpose is not to present the material like an historian, nor is it simply to draw ethical or spiritual lessons for Orthodox Christians, but to present the spiritual life of the Desert Fathers in such a way that its relevance to modern man, whether pious or even, perhaps, agnostic, is unmistakably clear. To accomplish this, Ramfos often utilises the terminology of modern psychology and secular philosophy, such as ‘Ego’ or ‘ontology’ (in the Gerontikon, 'Ego' is simply the first person singular pronoun, while I don't believe 'ontology' is used at all), and acknowledges his debt to Paul Ricoeur’s The Self as Other and Max Scheler’s Formalism in Ethics and the Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Ramfos, pp. 259-60). Fortunately, it is rare that he directly mentions these sorts of writings, and so the book is a bit more accessible than it might otherwise have been.

Nevertheless, it is still quite difficult. Actually, the average Orthodox Christian simply looking for spiritual guidance would do better to look to the Gerontikon itself, or to such modern-day figures in the Desert Fathers’ tradition as St Silouan, Elder Joseph the Hesychast (or, if you’re Christopher Orr, Elder Aimilianos!), or the elders of Optina. Like a Pelican in the Wilderness is essentially an intellectual book, but a good intellectual book with, I believe, a good purpose. Most importantly, it is not content to leave the intellectual in the world of theory, but continuously points toward and leads the reader to the putting into practice of the Fathers’ teachings—see for example, Ramfos’s response to the question ‘But how do we counter [condemnation] beyond applying the general principle of active restraint which is valid for every passion?’ (p. 134). I recommend this book for educated, intellectual-type people who are having difficulty keeping their feet on the ground, in other words, realising the importance—the full psychological, philosophical, and theological significance—of praxis and purification.

I only have one real reservation: the author appears to over-psychologise demons in a few places, in other words, to interpret them as simply aspects of the human psyche. Because of an apparent inconsistency in this regard, and because of certain other things which he makes clear about his beliefs, I don’t think he would, when he wrote the book, have denied completely the hypostatic reality of the demonic powers. Nevertheless, to say, as Ramfos does at one point, that the references to demons are ‘in fourth-century terms’ (p. 198), or to give a parenthetical aside after the word ‘demons’ saying, ‘for which read: the overweening Ego’ (p. 127), seems too great a concession to the this-worldliness of modern intellectuals. It is clear in the Gerontikon that the Fathers believe very much in the reality of the demonic powers. They see them in physical shapes, they are sometimes beaten or physically attacked by them. Ramfos chastises those who attempt to come up with scientific explanations of miracles (pp. 237-8), but he himself comes dangerously close in his tendency to psychologise demonic phenomena. For this reason, I cannot recommend the book as whole-heartedly as I otherwise would have done.

I should add, as well, that since I originally wrote this review several years ago, a friend told me that he had heard that Ramfos had become an agnostic or something similar. I cannot confirm whether this is true, although I have found that he gave a rather ambiguous interview (unfortunately, only in Greek) in 2007. While it seems to suggest he still considers himself a Christian, there is, on the other hand, his odd answer to the question, ‘Do you believe?’: ‘But certainly, I believe. I believe in the potential of man to be born again, to resurrect from the dead.’ But if he cannot be counted a Christian this is quite sad. The man clearly has a sharp intellect and a thirst for truth and meaning, and as he himself writes, ‘Without God the world becomes unintelligible, unreceptive to answers and, therefore, without meaning’ (p. 238).

Ss Hadrian of Canterbury and Fillan of Strathfillan

Today is the feastday of St Hadrian of Canterbury (c. 635-710) and St Fillan of Strathfillan. According to St Bede the Venerable, the former was ‘a man of African race and well versed in the holy Scriptures, trained both in monastic and ecclesiastical ways and equally skilled in the Greek and Latin tongues’ (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Bertram Colgrave, ed. Judith McClure & Roger Collins, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994, p. 170). Although this is all that St Bede tells us about his background, as an interesting aside Michael Lapidge has pointed out the likelihood that we can safely infer that St Hadrian was a native speaker of Greek and came from the Greek-speaking provinces of North Africa rather than the Latin-speaking ones (Introduction, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian, ed. Bernhard Bischoff and Michael Lapidge [Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1995], pp. 84-5).

At any rate, St Hadrian was at a monastery near Naples (at that time part of the East Roman empire), when Pope St Vitalian attempted to consecrate him a bishop and send him to England to take over the see of Canterbury. St Hadrian, in his humility, would not accept this honour, and proposed St Theodore of Tarsus instead. St Vitalian accepted the substitute, but only on condition that St Hadrian accompany the new bishop as an assistant (see St Bede, pp. 170-1). As it turned out, the arrangement was entirely providential. St Hadrian succeeded St Benedict Biscop as abbot of the St Peter Monastery at Canterbury—founded by St Augustine of Canterbury and later named ‘St Austin’s’ after the venerable missionary to the Anglo-Saxons—and established a school there where he and St Theodore—

attracted a crowd of students into whose minds they daily poured the streams of wholesome learning. They gave their hearers instruction not only in the books of holy Scripture but also in the art of metre, astronomy, and ecclesiastical computation. As evidence of this, some of their students still survive who know Latin and Greek just as well as their native tongue. (St Bede, p. 172)

Indeed, this pædagogical activity of the holy Fathers was responsible for an unprecedented inflow of books into England, and a number of Scriptural commentaries produced by the Canterbury school were discovered in 1936 in Milan that reveal a knowledge of the Greek Fathers extremely rare in the West at that time (see the volume by Bischoff and Lapidge cited above). As Michael Ott observed in the Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘In these schools of Adrian were educated many of the saints, scholars, and missionaries, who during the next century rekindled the waning light of faith and learning in France and Germany.’ St Hadrian laboured in Britain for thirty-nine years before falling asleep in the Lord at his monastery. According to one site, he ‘was known for miracles that helped students in trouble with their masters’.

St Fillan († c. 777) was the son of St Kentigerna, whom we commemorated two days ago. He travelled a great deal around Scotland, living in monasteries and hermitages, even in a cave (St Fillan’s cave at Pittenweem). According to Butler’s Lives:

He was buried in Strathfillan, where his relics were preserved and honoured for many years. Many miracles of healing were attributed to his intercession. More importantly, as a saint without any English associations, he belonged to the pantheon of guardians and guarantors of the Scottish national consciousness. King Robert the Bruce had a special lifelong devotion to Fillan, a saint with a suitably royal lineage who had nevertheless dedicated himself to God’s cause and could intercede for the community of the realm, which was Bruce’s guiding notion. . . . He venerated the saint’s arm bone and other relics in the charge of Abbot Maurice of Inchaffray on the eve of the battle of Bannockburn (though he would not, as is sometimes claimed, have taken them into the conflict with him: ‘As gude king Robert in that samin nicht / Befoir the field, at his devotioun / Walkit that nicht, into his orisoun / To Sanct Phelen most speciall of the laif / Becaus the Scottis was wont to haif / His richt arme bane into ane siluer cace . . .’ (Boece/Stewart). . . . Before and after the battle the Bruce attributed his victory over the English to the saint’s intercession.

Unfortunately, there is a blog called ‘Saint Fillan’, which appears to be the work of an atheist whose sole purpose in life is to mock belief in God, and Christianity in particular. Indeed, in part, I think, because so many legends have grown up around St Fillan, and partly because he was known as a powerful intercessor for the insane (and we all know ‘science’ has entirely solved the problem of mental illness), if one searches for his name he seems to turn up on a number of atheist sites as an object of ridicule. As Ioane Sabanisdze said of those who denounced St Abo and disposed of his relics, at the Final Judgement, ‘What shame for their demented frenzy will fall upon those who denied Christ and smote and persecuted and destroyed those saints of His whom then He will be admitting into His heaven!’

'Wherever your son's grave might be, it's somewhere on God's earth'

Recently, in this post from Fr Josiah Trenham’s blog, I came across the following excerpt from a pastoral letter of St Nicholas (Velimirović) to a mother who could not find the grave of her son, presumably lost in the war.

Do not grieve dear mother. Excess in sorrow is sin. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.’ Wherever your son’s grave might be, it’s somewhere on God’s earth. When you touch the ground in front of your house, you are touching the edge of your son’s grave. And the all-seeing eye of God traverses the earth and beholds the dead as well as the living. God Himself has hidden him from you that your heart might be cleansed with sorrow and that He might prepare a joyous surprise for you, a joyous meeting with your son in His eternal places. The graves of great and holy people also remain unknown. Prophet Moses’ grave [though not, as we have seen, that of his brother!] has remained unknown, as well as the graves of many Apostles and Martyrs of Christ…You ought to stop grieving and start the almsgiving for the rest of your son’s soul.

I thought this was, quite simply, wonderful.

So, I hate to do this, and particularly so soon after the ‘Flight into Egypt’ post, but this excerpt reminds me of nothing so much as Thomas Merton’s poem for his younger brother, John Paul. The latter was a crew member on a bomber shot down in the North Sea. Although John Paul survived the crash (he and the other survivors kept afloat in a rubber dinghy), he was badly injured and succumbed to his wounds shortly thereafter. His comrades consigned his remains to the sea (the story is told in The Seven Storey Mountain [Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1951], pp. 402-3). Merton wrote the following poem, which was printed without a title at the end of the account of John Paul’s death in Seven Storey Mountain (p. 404), and reprinted, with a title, in Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, enlarged ed. [NY: New Directions, 1967], pp. 12-3:

‘For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943’

Sweet brother, if I do not sleep
My eyes are flowers for your tomb;
And if I cannot eat my bread,
My fasts shall live like willows where you died.
If in the heat I find no water for my thirst,
My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller.

Where, in what desolate and smokey country,
Lies your poor body, lost and dead?
And in what landscape of disaster
Has your unhappy spirit lost its road?

Come, in my labor find a resting place
And in my sorrows lay your head,
Or rather take my life and blood
And buy yourself a better bed—
Or take my breath and take my death
And buy yourself a better rest.

When all the men of war are shot
And flags have fallen into dust,
Your cross and mine shall tell men still
Christ died on each, for both of us.

For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring:
The money of Whose tears shall fall
Into your weak and friendless hand,
And buy you back to your own land:

The silence of Whose tears shall fall
Like bells upon your alien tomb.
Hear them and come: they call you home.

Here is what Mark Van Doren had to say about this poem in the ‘Introduction’ to Selected Poetry, p. xvi-xvii:

[Having quoted ‘St Agnes: A Responsory’, Van Doren continues—] The foregoing would suggest that the special reputation of Merton’s poem ‘For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943’ is not an accident. No poem in the book is better known, and the reason may lie in the music it makes. It is the kind of music that only poetry can make: not pure sound, of course, but something buried in the words and (in this case) mourning there. The Seven-Storey Mountain tells the story of the brother’s death in prose that moves the reader too; without, however, assembling the sounds that are climaxed here in two paradoxical verses: ‘The silence of Whose tears shall fall / Like bells upon your alien tomb.’ The poem, having created its own silence in preparation for these lines, drops them into our imagination where it is possible for tears that make no noise to sound nevertheless like delicate, distinct bronze, hopelessly far away. The figures of the poem are justly celebrated: the sleepless eyes as flowers, the fasts as willows, the thirst as springs, and the money of breath and death and weeping. Yet figures alone do not make a great poem. There must be a music that absorbs them and relates them, and gives them in the end a power for which we cannot asign the cause. We can say that the very intensity of the poet’s fear that he will fail is somehow the reason for his success; we can guess that inarticulate grief manages here, simply because it must, to become articulate after all; but it is truer to say that in such a poem sadness sings—a low note, in perfect pitch, that carries around the world.

So, it is interesting to note that besides the similarity of the two reflections on the lost remains of fallen men, it is likely that both speak of men who fell in the same, terrible war, a war that bereaved poor Serbian mothers and bohemian-turned-Trappist American brothers alike.

(The painting above is 'Syksy II', 'Autumn II' (1895), by the Finnish painter, Hugo Simberg. One can view some of his work here.)

'I ran in the savour of Thy good ointments'--St Abo the Perfumer of Baghdad

Today, 8 January according to the Church’s calendar, we commemorate the Martyr Abo (აბო თბილელი, ჰაბო ტფილელი), the Perfumer of Baghdad, who suffered at Tbilisi, Georgia in 786, when that country was under the dominion of the Abbasid Caliphate. St Abo’s Martyrdom was recorded by a contemporary, John, son of Saban (Ioane Sabanisdze), who makes much of the fact that St Abo was an Arab and thus, a descendant of the Patriarch Abraham, like him, called by God to leave his native land. By trade a maker of perfumes, and ‘educated in the religion of Muhammed’, when he was 17 or 18 St Abo went as a servant to Tbilisi with Nerses, the ruler of Eastern Georgia who had been imprisoned in Baghdad by the Caliph, Muhammad ibn Mansur al-Mahdi, from 772 to 775.

In Tbilisi, St Abo learned to speak Georgian and became renowned for his virtues. Gaining more and more acquaintance with the Scriptures and Divine Services of the Orthodox Christian Faith, he at first quarrelled with the Christian clergy and teachers. But the blessed Martyr was gradually won over, ‘became estranged from the faith of Muhammad’, and ‘began to love Christ with all his heart, being inspired by the words, “They related to me the creed of the heathen; but it was not like unto Thy law.”’ He delayed baptism, however, and at first kept his faith a secret for fear of the Muslims. According to David Lang’s introduction to St Abo’s Martyrdom, ‘The Caliphs had spared no effort to turn the Georgians into Muhammadans; force, cunning and economic coercion, complains John [Sabanisdze], had all been brought into play . . .’

Soon Nerses was forced to flee the Arabs and take refuge in the land of the Khazars (featured in Milorad Pavić’s fascinating Dictionary!), bringing St Abo with him. There, the latter was able at last to receive Holy Baptism, and ‘was henceforth evermore filled by Christ's grace, and able to devote himself without hindrance to fasting and prayer’. But soon, both joined Nerses’s family in Abkhazia (at that time an autonomous principality of the East Roman Empire), where St Abo was pleased to find himself among so many Christians. According to his hagiographer:

When the blessed Abo saw the exceptional devoutness of the local people and their assiduity in prayer, he was filled with a fever of emulation, remembering the words of the holy apostle, ‘It is always good to imitate excellence.’ In that wintry season, on the 17th of January, the commemoration of our holy father Antony, he began to emulate Antony's severe exertions. Though living an urban life he struggled against man's enemy the devil as if he were out in the wilderness. By vigil and fasting he subdued his youthful flesh so that he was able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one.

In 779 or 780, the Caliph placed Nerses’s nephew, Stephen III, in charge of Eastern Georgia, and in 782, Nerses, satisfied to retire from politics, decided to return to his homeland. Before he left, however, the prince of Abkhazia told St Abo that he feared that, as a convert to Christianity, the Muslims would force him to revert back to Islam on pain of death. But St Abo zealously replied, ‘Nothing will make me hide from the risk of death, for I have learnt from the holy apostle that “the faint-hearted cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” Therefore I am not afraid of death, since I look for the kingdom of Christ.’

For a few years, all was well, but in 785 St Abo was denounced, arrested, and imprisoned. He was at first released through the intercession of Stephen, but his denouncers persisted and finally persuaded a second magistrate to attempt to force him back into Islam. St Abo was warned, but refused to be cowed. Upon finally being brought before the magistrate, the holy Martyr confessed—

‘But when the Almighty had mercy on me and selected me from among my brothers and relatives and saved me through His Son Jesus Christ my God, and granted me a more perfect understanding, then I quitted my former faith, as being a manmade creed based on fables thought up by human subtlety and invention. So now I cling to the true faith of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, as revealed to us by Jesus Christ.’

Sent back to prison on 27 December, the Feastday of St Stephen the Protomartyr, St Abo ‘stayed in his dungeon fasting and praying and singing psalms incessantly day and night’. When some of the Muslims tried to persuade him to come back to their religion, he ‘paid no attention to them, but went on praying and singing psalms silently in his mind’. Finally, after nine days of prayer, fasting, and vigil, St Abo anounced to the other Christians that the day of his martyrdom had come, and asked that prayers be said that he remain firm and not betray Christ.

Then, ‘In the reign of our Lord Jesus Christ, in that year after His Passion and Resurrection when Constantine, son of Leo, was reigning over the Christians in the great city of Constantinople, when Mousa, son of Mahdi, Commander of the Faithful, was reigning among the Saracens, in the pontificate of Samuel, Catholicos of Georgia, when Stephen, son of Gurgen, was Duke of Georgia, in the year 6424 from the Creation, on Friday, January 6th,’ the Feast of the Holy Theophany, St Abo said:

‘This is a great day for me, for I see the twofold victory of my Lord Jesus Christ, since it was on this day that He went down unclothed into the river Jordan to be baptized; and the heads of the monster hidden in those deep waters He annihilated by divine power. Now it is my turn today to vanquish the fears which beset my soul's fleshly covering, and go down into the city as into the sacred waters to be baptized in my own blood by fire and spirit, as John the Baptist preached.

. . .

‘Once upon a time I myself was a skilled perfumer and mixer of fragrant oils. But today this is my anointing for the grave. From now on I shall no longer be anointed with this perishable oil of my petty nature, but as Solomon the Wise taught me in his Song of Songs, "I ran in the savour of Thy good ointments," O Christ, who filled me with the imperishable perfume of Thy faith and love. Thou knowest, O Lord, that I have loved Thee more than I have loved myself.’

Having received the Holy Mysteries in prison, St Abo was taken once again before the magistrate. As he remained steadfast in the Faith, he was beheaded with the sword, and his precious relics were taken by his denouncers, thinking that they could destroy them and prevent their veneration. They tried to burn the body, and then tied it up and dumped it into the Mtkvari River. Our Lord, however, revealed the place where they tried to burn the relics with a ‘flaming star like a fiery torch’, and the place where the relics were dumped into the river with ‘light in the form of a pillar like a lightning flash’. As He thus honoured the earthly remains of His holy Martyr, concludes the hagiographer, ‘how much more shall we not see [the Martyr] honoured at the resurrection of the just, when he is crowned imperishably among the angels in glory and exaltation?’

On a personal note, I became interested in doing this post on St Abo when I saw him described as ‘the Perfumer of Baghdad’ on the Holy Trinity calendar (I discovered that most other sources seem to refer to him as ‘Martyr Abo of Tiflis [Tbilisi]’). I have had a sort of fascination with old Baghdad ever since high school, when I read Neil Gaiman’s story ‘Ramadan’ in the Sandman collection, Fables and Reflections (NY: DC Comics, 1993), pp. 226-58. The story concerns the legendary Caliph, Harun al-Rashid (هارون الرشيد, ‘Aaron the Just’), the ‘Golden Age’ figure who plays so prominent a rôle in many of the stories in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. It occurred to me, I know so little about the history of the Islamic world, that I had no idea when Harun’s reign was, or whether it was anywhere close in time to the martyrdom of St Abo. It turns out St Abo was martyred in January of 786, under Harun’s brother, nine months before Harun took over the Caliphate in September of that year. It’s nice to know that the second most famous ‘Aaron’ didn’t martyr St Abo.

Dr Johnson on Men without Principles

On the morning of Thursday, 21 July 1763, when James Boswell observed that a certain gentleman’s ‘principles had been poisoned by a noted infidel writer’, Dr Johnson remarked, among other things:

Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull. (James Boswell, Esq., The Life of Samuel Johnson L.L.D. [NY: The Modern Library, n.d.], p. 268)

I love this line, and to my 21st-c. sensibilities, Johnson’s wit is always made the more acerbic by his frequent use of the address, ‘Sir’. I think I first came across this in Constantine Cavarnos’s Orthodoxy and Philosophy [Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2003], p. 181, where Cavarnos quotes it while criticising modern Western European philosophy. Then, I found it again in a wonderful article by Rodney Delasanta in First Things called ‘Hume, Austen, and First Impressions’ (First Things, No. 134, June/July 2003, pp. 24-9).

But I only just tonight tracked down this quote in its context in Boswell’s Life, and I was struck perhaps even more by the comments which immediately precede this line. The paragraph begins:

Next morning I found him alone, and have preserved the following fragments of his conversation. Of a gentleman who was mentioned, he said, ‘I have not met with any man for a long time who has given me such general displeasure. He is totally unfixed in his principles, and wants to puzzle other people.’ I said his principles had been poisoned by a noted infidel writer, but that he was, nevertheless, a benevolent good man. Johnson. ‘We can have no dependance upon that instinctive, that constitutional goodness which is not founded upon principle. I grant you that such a man may be a very amiable member of society. I can conceive him placed in such a situation that he is not much tempted to deviate from what is right; and as every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incitement to transgress its precepts, I can conceive him doing nothing wrong. But if such a man stood in need of money, I should not like to trust him; and I should certainly not trust him with young ladies, for there there is always temptation. (Boswell, p. 268)

Now, this reminds me of many people, and a few in particular. In fact, I was most astonished to find how closely it resembled some comments I made about an acquaintance not so long ago at all. But interestingly, I often find myself suspended between Boswell’s optimism—‘He’s still a good man’—and Johnson’s clear certitude—‘We can’t count on natural goodness without the firm foundation of principle.’ I’m afraid my moral vision is not typically stern enough to find myself in a state of ‘general displeasure’ at a person. Still, I hope the acquaintance in question doesn’t read this, because I’m afraid he might know exactly who he is!

3 Saints of the British Isles

Today, besides the Synaxis of the Holy Forerunner and Baptist, John, we commemorate three Saints of the British Isles: St Cedd (Cedda) of Lastingham, St Brynach of Braunton, and St Kentigerna, Hermitess of Loch Lomond.

St Cedd figures prominently in Book III of St Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Judith McClure and Roger Collins [Oxford: Oxford U, 1994], pp. 108-67). He was an Englishman of Northumbria, born in the early 7th c., who was sent to the school at Lindisfarne to be taught by St Aidan with his three brothers, Cynebill, Cælin, and St Chad (Ceadda). Having been ordained a priest along with all three of his brothers, St Cedd was eventually sent as a missionary to Mercia (the Midlands), and later, after being consecrated a bishop at Lindisfarne, to Essex, where he made St Paul’s at London his main seat.

In 658, King Oethelwald of Deira, ‘seeing that Cedd was a wise, holy, and upright man’, offered him some land for a monastery ‘where he himself might frequently come to pray and hear the Word and where he might be buried’ (St Bede, p. 148). This was Lastingham, and after consecrating it himself all through Lent with fasting and prayer (except for the last 10 days, when urgent business required that his brother Cynebill should complete the task), St Cedd ‘built a monastery . . . and established in it the religious observancess according to the usage of Lindisfarne where he had been brought up’ (St Bede, pp. 148-9).

In 664, St Cedd served as an interpreter between the Celtic and Roman parties at the Synod of Whitby, and was among those who, in obedience to the Synod, reluctantly accepted the Roman dating of Pascha. According to St Bede, he was simultaneously bishop and abbot of the monastery for many years, until he contracted the plague and died, leaving the abbacy to his brother, St Chad. St Bede attributes to St Cedd at least one miracle (p. 149), and relates another, told by St Egbert of Rathmelsigi: ‘I know a man in this island [Ireland], still in the flesh, who saw the soul of Chad’s brother Cedd descend from the sky with a host of angels and return to the heavenly kingdom, taking Chad’s soul with him.’ The Venerable Bede then concludes—‘Whether he was speaking of himself or of another is uncertain, but what cannot be uncertain is that whatever such a man said must be true’ (p. 178). St Cedd was buried at Lastingham. Here is a website about the church that now stands there. Here are photographs of a church, one of the oldest in Britain, built by St Cedd. One can read about St Cedd here, here, and here.

Concerning St Kentigerna (Caintigernd), here is the entry on her in Butler’s Lives of Saints:

St Kentigerna, widow.

She is commemorated on the 7th of January, in the Aberdeen Breviary, from which we learn, that she was of royal blood, daughter of Kelly [Cellach Cualann (†715)], prince of Leinster in Ireland, as Colgan proves from ancient monuments. She was mother of the holy abbot St Fœlan, or Felan [Faelán, commonly known as St Fillan]. After the death of her husband, she left Ireland, and consecrated herself to God in a religious state, and lived in great austerity and humility, and died on the 7th of January, in the 728. Adam King informs us, that a famous parish church bears her name at Locloumont [Loch Lomond], in Inchelroch [Inchcailloch (Inis Chailligh, ‘Nun’s island’)], a small island into which she retired some time before her death, that she might with greater liberty give herself up to heavenly meditation. See Brev. Aberdon. et Colgan ad 7 Jan. p. 22.

The authoritative Celtic Culture: An Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. III, ed. John T. Koch (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), p. 1052 (available on Google Books here), dates St Kentigerna to approximately 700-34, and notes that she, ‘is unusually well documented in reliable sources and thus provides solid evidence for aristocratic Irish influence on the Scottish Church in the 8th century.’

St Brynach, born c. 500, lived as a hermit at Nevern in Pembrokeshire, Wales, and was a good friend of St David, who presented him with a stone cross. He eventually relocated to Braunton in North Devon, which takes its name from the Saint. There he is said to have fallen asleep in the Lord on 7 January, though he is commemorated on 7 April in Wales, according to David Nash Ford, ‘perhaps because this was traditionally the day on which the first cuckoo in the country is said to sing every year from the top of St. Brynach's famous cross in Nevern churchyard’ (‘EBK: St Brynach’ on Early British Kingdoms [Wokingham, UK: Nash Ford, 2005]).