Bibliomania Satisfied, For Now

I have been blessed with a good couple of weeks, bibliophilically speaking that is. First, through the kindness of a Cypriot friend who recently visited Athens, I have finally acquired the hard-to-find, out-of-print volume 2 of the edition of the Philokalia published in Greek by Astir (with whom readers may be familiar as a publisher of Kontoglou and Cavarnos), thus completing the entire 5-volume set. There is an edition currently in print by the Thessaloniki publisher, Το Περιβόλι της Παναγίας (The Garden of the Panagia), but translated into Modern Greek. The Astir edition is in the original language, besides featuring beautiful line drawings of each of the authors by Kontoglou’s student, Rallis Kopsidis. I am very pleased to have all five at last!

My second, nearly as exquisite acquisition is the Hexaemeron of St Anastasius of Sinai. I’m not certain how many readers of Logismoi will have noticed, but I received some comments on my post for St Anastasius concerning the 2007 text and translation of the Hexaemeron published as part of the Orientalia Christiana Analecta (Anastasius of Sinai, Hexaemeron, ed. and trans. Clement A. Kuehn and John D. Baggarly, SJ, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 278 [Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute, 2007]). My commentor first kindly pointed out the availability of the edition at a healthy discount from Amazon.com, but when I replied that even with the discount it was still too expensive for me he asked for my shipping address, and informed me by e-mail that he had decided to send me the book as a gift! Here is this kind gentleman’s explanation of what made him decide to do this:

Your comment somehow alerted my conscience to the fact that I who am single with no dependents and very little mandatory expenses had just ordered this book for myself, along with many others, and I realized I was in the position to offer something from my means, to you who have, as I have gathered, a wife and little ones depending on you and so less money perhaps to play around with.

I consider all of the insights and recommendations I've received from your blogging efforts, which have been so far gratis, and a labor of love on your part to be a more than an equal trade, so to speak. Besides, money is for spending, as St John Chrysostom notes somewhere in his homilies on St John's gospel (but I guess we Americans better be careful with that one!)

Needless to say, I was positively moved to tears by this! In return, I have promised to pray that the Mother of God guides my benefactor in discerning a calling to the monastic life.

A hefty volume with a grey paper cover bespeaking serious scholarship, the book features a foreword by Joseph Munitiz, SJ, an introduction dealing with author, date, manuscript history, and printed editions, a select bibliography, and an index of names. The Greek text is footnoted with variant MS readings, while the translation is footnoted with Scriptural citations and allusions. On the right margin of the Greek text is the location of the corresponding passage in Migne, while on the left is the line number of the OCA edition, beginning again with each ‘book’ of the text.

Last but not least, I have just purchased six used books from the newly opened Oklahoma City store of Half-Price Books, all at 20%-off of already wonderful prices. The books are as follows:

1) Montague Summers, The History of Witchcraft (London: Senate, 1994). A paperback reprint of a 1926 study, by the purported Catholic cleric and erudite expert on vampires.

2) Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame, 1984). A modern classic of moral philosophy, I’ve been meaning to acquire a copy of this ever since I read the first two chapters, ‘A Disquieting Suggestion’ and ‘The Nature of Moral Disagreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism’, at the house of a professor of philosophy at the American College of Thessaloniki in 2003.

3) Robert Irwin, ed., Night & Horse & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (NY: Anchor, 2001). An anthology covering the fifth to the sixteenth centuries, this was admittedly kind of an impulse buy. My visit to the Turkish cultural centre got me in an ‘Oriental’ mood, and then the description on the back won me over. Try this out:

In Night & Horse & the Desert we encounter the dashing Byronic poetry of Imru’ al-Qays and a treatise on bibliomania by Al-Jahiz, possibly the only writer to have been killed by books. There’s a sorcerer’s manual from eleventh-century Spain and an allegory by the mysterious ‘Brethren of Purity’, in which animals argue their case against humanity. Encompassing piety and profanity, fables and philosophy, this volume is a thrilling and invaluable introduction to one of the world’s great bodies of literature.

4) C.S. Lewis, Narrative Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (NY: HBJ, 1979). Lewis’s little-known narrative poetry: ‘Dymer’, ‘Launcelot’, ‘The Nameless Isle’, and ‘The Queen of Drum’. Only $3.98 before the discount!

5) Francis Spufford, ed., The Vintage Book of the Devil (London: Vintage, 1997). An anthology of excerpts about the devil from classic works of literature, Church Fathers, poets, apocryphal texts, and novelists, this one features a fascinating and witty introduction by the Prince of Darkness himself (or maybe it’s just Spufford).

6) Martin Biddle, The Tomb of Christ (Thrupp, UK: Sutton, 1999). A glossy, coffee table-type book featuring lots of great photographs and a scholarly yet readable study of the Holy Sepulchre by an Oxford archaeologist, focusing mostly on the Edicule (κουβούκλιον) and the Tomb itself. According to the dust jacket, among other things Biddle ‘shows how a tomb found in AD 325/6 under a Roman temple in Jerusalem has a good claim to be the tomb in which the body of Christ was laid on the evening of the crucifixion in AD 30 or 33’.

I’m seriously thinking about posting short excerpts from all of these books (well, except the Philokalia) in the next few days!

‘Flee, Be Silent, Be Still’—St Arsenius the Great

Today, 8 May on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of St Arsenius the Great of Scetis (c. 360-449). According to Helen Waddell, St Arsenius was ‘reckoned a scholar both in Constantinople and Rome, a master of both Greek and Latin’, and a ‘haunted aristocrat’ (The Desert Fathers, trans. Helen Waddell [NY: Vintage, 1998], pp. 64, 65). Benedicta Ward gives the following summary of the life of St Arsenios (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed., trans. Benedicta Ward [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1984], p. 9):

Arsenius was born in Rome about 360 [Stelios Ramfos suggests 354]. A well-educated man, of senatorial rank, he was appointed by the Emperor Theodosius I as tutor to the princes Arcadius and Honorius. He left the palace in 394 and sailed secretly to Alexandria. From there he went to Scetis and placed himself under the guidance of Abba John the Dwarf. He became an anchorite near Petra in Scetis. He seems to have had only three disciples, Alexander, Zoïlus and Daniel. He was renowned for his austerity and silence and this combined with his learning made him seem somewhat forbidding to the Coptic monks. After the second devastation of Scetis in 434 he went to the mountain of Troë [‘above Babylon, opposite Memphis’, according to Abba Daniel, Arsenius 42; Ward, p. 19] where he died in 449.

His disciple Abba Daniel gives a rare physical description, ‘His appearance was angelic, like that of Jacob. His body was graceful and slender; his long beard reached down to his waist. Through much weeping his eye-lashes had fallen out. Tall of stature, he was bent with old age’ (Arsenius 42; Ward, p. 19). Although little is known about Abba Arsenius’s life before his withdrawal, he was clearly a member of the ‘cultivated intelligentsia’, as Stelios Ramfos calls them (Like a Pelican in the Wilderness: Reflections on the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. and abgd. Norman Russell [Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox, 2000], p. 213).

The bulk of the sayings associated with St Arsenius concern his asceticism and his extreme reticence in receiving visitors, the spiritual tools he used to purge his pride and reliance on his own intelligence. Thus St Arsenius says, ‘Strive with all your might to bring your interior activity into accord with God, and you will over come exterior passions’ (Arsenius 9; Ward, p. 10). Likewise, in discourse with others Abba Arsenius is diverted from the simple perception of the will of God—‘The thousands and ten thousands of the heavenly hosts have but one will, while men have many’ (Arsenius 13; Ward, p. 11)—while alone with the ‘Spirit of God’ he is ‘in perfect peace’ (Arsenius 38; Ward, p. 18). Indeed, in the first two sayings we see that it is by direct commandment of God that he maintains this goal:

1. While still living in the palace, Abba Arsenius prayed to God in these words, ‘Lord, lead me in the way of salvation.’ And a voice came saying to him, ‘Arsenius, flee from men and you will be saved.’

2. Having withdrawn to the solitary life he made the same prayer again and he heard a voice saying to him, ‘Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always, for these are the source of sinlessness.’ (Ward, p. 9)

Thus St Arsenius becomes like the angels as described by St Dionysius the Areopagite in his treatise On the Divine Names, VII.2: through his physical asceticism he is freed from matter as ‘burden’, while through withdrawal from social contact, he becomes—again like the angels—free from ‘multiplicity’ (Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid [NY: Paulist, 1987], p. 106). Indeed, he is so angelic that one brother ‘saw the old man entirely like a flame’ (Arsenius 27; Ward, p. 13).

But I would venture to say that this could not be achieved without the practice of obedience. St Arsenius is not θεοδίδακτος, or ‘taught by God’ like St Anthony, who has described this kind of calling in his first letter (Derwas J. Chitty, trans., The Letters of St Anthony the Great [Fairacres, UK: SLG, 1995], p. 1; see also the 3rd letter of Elder Joseph the Hesychast in Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast [Florence, AZ: St Anthony’s, 1998], p. 49, for the actual term θεοδίδακτος). In fact, there are only two references to St Arsenius’s vast learning within the body of the sayings, and both of these concern his dedication to learning the spiritual life from the other elders.

5. Someone said to blessed Arsenius, ‘How is it that we, with all our education and our wide knowledge get no-where, while these Egyptian peasants acquire so many virtues?’ Abba Arsenius said to him, ‘We indeed get nothing from our secular education, but these Egyptian peasants acquire the virtues by hard work.’ [Interestingly, William Harmless points out that in the Systematic Collection, this questioner is identified as Evagrius Ponticus (Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism [Oxford: Oxford U, 2004], p. 312).]

6. One day Abba Arsenius consulted an old Egyptian monk about his own thoughts. Someone noticed this and said to him, ‘Abba Arsenius, how is it that you with such a good Latin and Greek education, ask this peasant about your thoughts?’ He replied, ‘I have indeed been taught Latin and Greek, but I do not know even the alphabet of this peasant.’ (Ward, p. 10)

Commenting on these sayings, Ramfos writes, ‘The desert has its own education, an education imparted by peasants and illiterates, that is to say, by people who wish to change themselves rather than satisy their intellectual curiosity or unease. A true education is serious work’ (pp. 207-8). As Elias Matsagouras has written, ‘[I]t was the aim of monastic education to help the novice reach his goals [the natural condition of government by reason, ἡσυχία, ἀπάθεια, etc.] as quickly as possible’ (The Early Church Fathers as Educators [Minneapolis: Light & Life, 1977, p. 41). Ramfos goes on to say of ‘Latin and Greek education’ that it—

bears real fruit when it is founded on spiritual values, when it obeys the divine commandments. This obedience turns the theoretical education of classical antiquity into the ascetical education of practical life, an education to do with how life is lived, not the principles by which it is to be understood. The stronger theoretical thought becomes, the greater the potentiality for radical simplicity to atrophy...The practical character of the education of the desert fathers connects it with the therapy of the soul’s passions. (pp. 212-3)

On one final note, Ramfos has made some quite helpful and relevant comments on St Arsenius’s social withdrawal. They are particularly apropos in our day, when many seem to believe there is something atomistic and even selfish about strict solitude. Commenting on Arsenius 1 and 2, he writes:

The saint was consequently not a misanthrope. He thirsted for true communion and sought it in the desert, in the observance of the three-fold divine commandment: ‘Flee, be silent, be still.’ And indeed he attained it in the highest degree, even to the point of causing misunderstanding, by appearing on the one hand unyieldingly unsociable and inhospitable (Arsenius 7, 104AB; Ward, p. 10), and yet on the other weeping immoderately over the destruction of Scetis: ‘They said of him that his cell was thirty-two miles away. He did not readily emerge from it. For others performed for him the services he needed. But when Scetis was devastated, he came out in tears and said, “The world has lost Rome, and the monks Scetis” (Arsenius 21, 93A; Ward, p. 12). Arsenius would not open his door to visitors and yet he was with everybody. Perhaps they saw him at the katholikon only at rare intervals, but to him it was a place of unity, a center of community. Just as Rome united the citizens of the empire, however far they were from the capital, so Scetis united the monks. In his solitude Arsenius sought true communion and he achieved it. (Ramfos, p. 90)

Fun With Etymology

I’ve worn myself out with the Righteous Job posts and the ‘Venerable Sinaites’, so I’ve just got one little thing today. There’s a neat book by Robert Claiborne called The Roots of English: A Reader’s Handbook of Word Origins (NY: Times, 1989)—sort of a layman’s dictionary of Indo-European etymological roots. There’s a lot of fascinating stuff in there, but some time ago I found one that is not only fascinating to me, but also, for the non-linguist, a wonderful example of the surprises of etymology and semantic history:

SKEI-, to cut or split, Gk skhizein, whence SCHIZO- and SCHISM—a ‘split’ in a church. L relatives all come < scire, to know—‘tell [split] one thing from another’—whence SCIENCE, CONSCIOUS (‘knowing’—aware), and the ‘inner knowledge’ of CONSCIENCE. NICE is nescius, not knowing, ignorant, its present sense is idiomatic (see OEtD).

Gc members of the tribe refer to things cut or split, hence detached (‘cut away’), as are SHIT and the tears we SHED. The SHIN was originally a cut-away piece of a carcass, SKIS were made of split boards, and a SHEATH was ? made from a split stick. (p. 216)

So if you'll pardon the vulgarism, the way that I like to set this up, when I tell people about it, is simply to state that the words ‘shit’ and ‘science’ come from the same root. It makes an even bigger impression than the Welsh/Vlach connection.

The Venerable Sinaites of Serbia

This morning, 6 May on the Church’s calendar, apart from Righteous Job the Long-suffering my favourite online Orthodox calendar listed a group of Saints as follows: ‘Venerable Sinaites [Синајци] of Serbia: Romil of Ravanica, Romanos of Ravanica, Sisoje of Sinai and Sisojevac, Martirije of Rukumije, Grigorije of Gornjak, Zosim of Tuman and Gregory of Sinai’.

I suppose, knowing that St Gregory of Sinai himself, the last named of the group (if this does not refer to another Gregory), really was from Sinai, and remembering that at least Romil and Romanos were his direct or indirect disciples, I might have surmised that here the term ‘Sinaites’ is referring to a group of hesychastic disciples of St Gregory of Sinai. But still, it was neat to have only just come across a reference to them in an article I had long planned to read but finally acquired only last Thursday: Anthony-Emil Tachiaos’s ‘Gregory Sinaites’ Legacy to the Slavs: Preliminary Remarks’, Cyrillomethodianum 7, 1983, pp. 113-65. I shall simply give in full the paragraph where Tachiaos explains the background to the ‘Venerable Sinaites of Serbia’:

We have specific evidence that Gregory of Sinai’s Hesychast spirituality penetrated into Serbia from the Life of Romylos the monk, a testimony that goes back to the time of Prince Lazarus (1371-1389). Romylos was born in Vidin of a Greek father and a Bulgarian mother. At an early age he became a monk in the Monastery of the Hodegetria in Tirnovo, and it was while he was there that he heard about Gregory of Sinai, who was then in Paroria for the second time. Struck by Gregory’s wide renown and in the face of his abbot’s objections, Romylos went to Paroria and was accompanied by another monk, named Hilarion. There they remained until Gregory’s death in 1364, after which they want to Zagora in the district of Tirnovo. The rest of Romylos’ life is a saga of ceaseless wandering. He returned to Paroria, as Gregory’s biographer also did from Constantinople, and later the two of them, with Hilarion, set off once more for Zagora. But again they did not remain there long, and we see them moving backwards and forwards between Paroria, Zagora and Athos. They stayed on Athos for a fairly lengthy period. To begin with, Romylos lived in the Melana region, near Lavra Monastery, subsequently moving to the foot of Athos mountain, where his disciple and biographer Gregory helped him to build a cell. he lived a hermit’s life there until the death of the despot John Uglješa in 1371, which was followed by a Turkish attack on Mount Athos. This sent Romylos to the town of Valona on the Adriatic coast, where he lived for a short time; but later, disappointed by the low moral standards prevailing there, he set off with his disciples for Serbia. He selected the environs of Ravanica Monastery for his place of ascesis, a monastery founded by Prince Lazarus in 1376 or 1377. It would seem that, since Ravanica Monastery had maintained close relations with Mount Athos from the time of its foundation, it offered Romylos a familiar environment. It was also his last home. After his death, his pupil and biographer Gregory went to Serbia, where, together with the monks who went with him, he settled in Gornjak Monastery, which Prince Lazarus had set apart especially for him. There Gregory built up a monastic centre of upholders of Gregory of Sinai’s Hesychast tradition, and these monks became known in Serbian history as ‘Sinaites’. It may have been due to these Hesychasts that during the time of Prince Lazarus the elements of Byzantine Orthodoxy gained strength in the spiritual life of Serbia, whereas western trends suffered the opposite effect. Thus the Hesychast mystic tradition of Gregory of Sinai came into Serbia during the time of Prince Lazarus, and to a probably limited extent. As a dogma and philosophical conviction, on the other hand, Hesychasm prevailed utterly in the Serbian Church during the XIVth century.

Incidentally, I came across a passage in Tachiaos’s article that reminded me a bit of Elizabeth Kostova’s vampire novel, The Historian (NY: Back Bay, 2006), which I’ve a mentioned a time or two. Tachiaos, an historian no less (!), quotes a study by G. Gorov entitled ‘Местонахождението на средневековната Парория и Синаитовия монастир’ in Исторически преглед, 28.1 (1972), p. 75:

Paroria is none other than the frontier mountain range of Bosna-Živak-Ugraš-Hadzijka Athman in present-day Inner Strandža, and . . . the Sinaite’s monastery was on the site of the present-day chapel of Sveta Petka (Balaklija), in the locality of Manastirăt, on the right-hand bank of the mountain river Zaberska reka, between the villages of Zbernovo and Kalovo. (qtd. in Tachiaos, p. 117)

The interesting thing is that the ‘Sveti Georgi’ monastery that the charactres in The Historian are looking for is gone, and its old church has now become ‘the Church of Sveti Petko the Martyr’ (the more recent name is mentioned in p. 568, the revelation of its former identity on p. 586; it would take some serious rereading to determine, but there may also be a demonstrable geographic link involving, among other things, the river Gorov mentions). A search for ‘Saint Petko’ turned up the following from this website:

There is another, parallel line in the meaning of Saint Petka’s day [in Bulgaria]. According to popular belief, there is a male-saint by the same name—Saint Petko, who is patron of this day. This saint takes the guise of a wolf—probably a leftover from the ancient cult of the wolf as a sacred animal. Saint Petka’s day, and the whole month of October as well as November are considered to be a transition from autumn to winter. That is why people in villages harboured great fears about the coming months of snow and cold. Winter was regarded as the time of wild animals. In their honour, these transition months are rich in long ritual periods and all kinds of days—like Beast days, Wolf days, Mouse days. Bear days. In the past, people were acutely aware of the presence of forest beasts. And the rituals and feast days, preceding the winter were a magic charm to ward off these fears. Through ritual taboos and sacrifices, the animals of danger to man were neutralized and sent far away.

It is also worth noting that the protagonists are assisted in attempting to locate Sveti Georgi by a pious Bulgarian scholar—Anton Stoichev—with an expertise in the wanderings of 15th-c. (not 14th-c., since it had to coincide with the end of Vlad’s life) Orthodox monks. Perhaps Stoichev owes something to Gorov? Unfortunately I know nothing about the latter!

Genre & the Book of Job

In his treatise, The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty, John Milton makes a passing reference to Job, calling it ‘a brief model’, as contrasted with Homer, Virgil, and Tasso, of the ‘epic form’ (Complete Poems & Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes [NY: Odyssey, 1957], p. 668). It is not quite clear to me whether he believes Job to follow ‘the rules of Aristotle’ or ‘nature’ (ibid.), although Lewis seems to think ‘there was only one thing known to Milton which bore the name of epic and also differed in kind from the work of Homer and Virgil—the romantic or chivalrous epic of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Spenser’ (A Preface to Paradise Lost [NY: Oxford U, 1965], p. 5-6).

In a fascinating study of Job from a Bakhtinian perspective, Walter Reed has referred to the ‘ingenious’ and ‘suggestive solution to the problem of literary genre of Job . . . offered by Richard Moulton in his Literary Study of the Bible’, in which he argues that Job ‘is not contained by any’ one genre, whether history, philosophy, rhetoric, epic, drama, or lyric, ‘but incorporates them all within its aesthetic boundaries’ (Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin [NY: Oxford U, 1993], p. 115). Reed acknowledges, ‘The idea that Job is polygeneric or many-voiced is plausible enough’ (p. 116), and Moulton’s is a tempting suggestion for a Bakhtinian reader, making Job ‘a special case of heteroglossia, an encyclopedic or Menippean aggregation of genres that are themselves more single-voiced or limited in scope’ (p. 115-6). But ultimately Reed argues that the Bakhtinian reader cannot help but notice its ‘anachronistic nature’—‘It too clearly reads back into an ancient Hebrew text of uncertain date and provenance an arbitrarily limited set of classical genres and disciplines first recognized as such in Greece in the fifth century B.C.E.’ (p. 116). For Reed, the various parts of Job ‘and the way in which they are orchestrated in the book as a whole can be better appreciated by situating Job in its biblical—and prebiblical—literary context’ (p. 116).

What this means for Milton, I think, should be clear. If it is anachronistic to call Job an ‘aggregation of genres’, then it is surely anachronistic simply to call it an epic, to be placed alongside Homer and Virgil. From this point, however, I’m not quite sure I can continue to follow Reed, or, it would seem, Bakhtin. Here are some of his conclusions on this issue of Job’s biblical literary context:

From the Bakhtinian perspective of the present study, it is not too much to claim that Job offers a critique of the Hebrew Bible as a whole. It calls into question the authority of this Bible’s generic paradigms of law, prophecy, and wisdom, at least wisdom in its more traditional, practical form. This critique is not a simple rejection, a parody, or an alternative scheme of revelation. Nor does it represent the biblical paradigms accurately, in all their flexibility and variety, especially the paradigm of wisdom, which after all managed to include Job itself within its canonical embrace. It is rather a literarily fictive critique of a historically realistic literature, a literature in the process of becoming scripture by fixing and restricting its play of possibilities in its presentation of the dialogue of God and his people. In Bakhtin’s terms, Job is a self-consciously dialogical reflection on a literature that was becoming, or that its author thought was in danger of being perceived as, monologic. (p. 120)

I must admit, I’m really not sure what I make of this. I will say one thing though, as uncomfortable as I find the idea of a biblical book ‘critiquing’ another biblical book, Reed’s reading leads to an interesting vindication of the epilogue. It strikes me that the latter receives short schrift in our day, a reaction to the older tendency to focus on the ‘story’ to the detriment of the poetry. But it goes a bit far it seems. By and large, we postmoderns have become so cynical and ironic that a ‘happy ending’ has become supremely distasteful. Even Bakhtin has expressed a similar opinion of Crime and Punishment, grumbling about its ‘conventionally monologic ending’ (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1984], p. 39). We would do well to emulate Metropolitan Augoustinos’s simple joy when he tells us, ‘Finally God gave him an answer to his anxious question of why he is suffering. He honored Job for his patience and blessed his house. Thus Job returned to his former happiness, and to even greater, glorifying God’ (Metropolitan Augoustinos N. Kantiotes, A Panoramic View of Holy Scripture, Vol. 1: Orthodox Homilies Introducing All the Books of the Old Testament, trans. Fr Asterios Gerostergios [Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies, 2001], p. 152).

But if we find this difficult, perhaps we can at least follow Reed once more when he writes:

Indeed, what this final turn of the screw in the epilogue suggests is that God is an author and finisher of human plots who is so free that he can follow the traditional rules as well as break them. He is not finally bound by his people’s expectations concerning his behavior, even when these expectations are based on a careful reading of the record of his actions on their behalf. But neither is he bound not to satisfy these expectations. The discourse of justice, which for the author of the Book of Job represents the essence of Hebrew Scriptures as a whole, is ironically reinstated in a place of honor in the story of the righteous and pious man, but its authority is no longer absolute. God’s covenant with the chosen people at the center must be read against his providential relationship with other people—individuals rather than ethnic groups—at the margins of biblical awareness. (p. 135)

Comments or objections, anyone?

'Blessed Be the Name of the Lord'—Righteous Job the Long-suffering

Today, 6 May on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of the Righteous Job the Long-suffering. There is a brief and useful account of St Job’s life in the Prologue for today:

Job was a descendant of Esau the grandson of Abraham and lived in Arabia about 2,000 years before Christ. His father's name was Zareth and his mother's name was Bosora. However, his full name was Jobab. Job was an honorable, god-fearing man and very wealthy. In the seventy-ninth year of his life, God permitted difficult temptations to befall him through Satan as it is written in detail in the Book of Job. In one day, Job lost all his enormous estates, his sons and his daughters. After that a terrible disease befell him and his entire body was covered with sores from his head to his feet and Job lay on the rubbish heap outside the town and with a piece of potsherd scrapped away the pus from his wounds. Job did not murmur against God, but patiently endured all sufferings to the end. That is why God restored his health, gave him much greater riches than that which he had before and seven sons and three daughters were born to him as many as he previously had. Job lived for a total of two-hundred forty-eight years always glorifying and praising God. Job is considered to be the model of patient endurance of every suffering which God sends upon us and Job is a proto-type of the suffering of the Lord Jesus.

The renowned Metropolitan of Florina, Augoustinos (Kantiotes), has expanded on the basic plot with an uplifting consideration of St Job’s charactre before his virtue of ‘patient endurance’ had become necessary (A Panoramic View of Holy Scripture, Vol. 1: Orthodox Homilies Introducing All the Books of the Old Testament, trans. Fr Asterios Gerostergios [Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies, 2001], p. 150):

The goods that he possessed he did not keep only for himself, but gave of it liberally too those in need. He was hospitable. The door of his house was always open to every stranger. He was the eye of the blind, the leg for the lame, the support of the poor, and the defender of all those who were wronged. He was the protector of all of his servants, none of whom had any complaint against him, but saw him as a loving father. He was the ideal leader of a society which consisted of hundreds of souls, an example of how people must be led. Everyone wished to see him and associate with him. He was also the head of a family. He had seven boys and three girls.

But of course St Nicholas has entirely skipped over the part that makes the Book of Job itself, rather than a summary of the story, so very worth reading. (To be fair, in her article on Job for the Eerdmans Commentary, Katherine Dell points out that ‘centuries of interpretation of the book have also done so’ [Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible, ed. James D. G. Dunn and John William Rogerson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 340].) It is true that, as we moderns are apt, we mustn’t miss the moral that St Nicholas articulates in his ‘Hymn of Praise’ for ‘Job, the Suffering Servant’:

Tell me brother, what you are able to endure,
And how much of a man you are, I will tell you.

But as is well known, chapters 3-41 contain what is widely considered some of the greatest poetry in human history, but also a penetrating philosophical meditation on the meaning of suffering. Metropolitan Augoustinos mentions the book’s poetic value in a brief statement: ‘The book of Job, written in poetic language, overflows with lyric expressions of moving grandeur, and is characterized by the experts as the greatest poem of ancient times’ (p. 148). Similarly, in regard to the ‘philosophy’ of Job, he writes, ‘Because of its philosophical content, even though it is a poem, this book is a grand description of the inner life of mankind, which tries to solve the great problems of the world and especially the problems of suffering’ (p. 149). But for eloquence, we can do no better, I think, than G.K. Chesterton’s appreciation (Everlasting Man [SF: Ignatius, 2008], p. 98):

Apart from more disputed matters, there were things in the tradition of Israel which belong to all humanity now, and might have belonged to all humanity then. They had one of the colossal corner-stones of the world: the Book of Job. It obviously stands over against the Iliad and the Greek tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and parting of poetry and philosophy in the morning of the world. It is a solemn and uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really perfects the pagan tragic irony, precisely because it is more monotheistic and therefore more mystical. Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say ‘I do not understand’, it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding. But this mighty monotheistic poem remained unremarked by the whole world of antiquity, which was thronged with polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the way in which the Jews stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, that they should have kept a thing like the Book of Job out of the whole intellectual world of antiquity. It is as if the Egyptians had modestly concealed the Great Pyramid.

The French-Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, argues in a compelling way that ‘Scripture reproaches Job’ for reasoning ‘in the name of the freedom of the ego—as though I had witnessed the creation of the world, and as though I could only have been in charge of a world that would have issued out of my free will’ (‘Substitution’, The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand [Oxford: Blackwell, 1997], p. 111). It seems to me that this take could be permissible within the context of St Gregory the Great’s reading in the Moralia, VI.28.1 (St Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, Part I of Vol. III [Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1847], p. 260):

After the loss of his goods, the death of his children, the wounds of his body, the words of his wife persuading him to evil, the insulting language of his comforters, and the darts of so many sorrows boldly received, blessed Job ought to have been praised by his Judge for such great power of constancy, if he had been now going to be called out of this present world. But after he is here about to receive back yet two-fold, after he is restored to his former health, to enjoy longer his restored possessions, Almighty God is obliged to reprove with strict justice him, whom he preserves alive, lest his very victory should lay him low with the sword of pride. For what commonly slays a soul more fatally than consciousness of virtue? For while it puffs it up with self-consideration, it deprives it of the fulness of truth; and while it suggests that it is sufficient of itself for the attainment of rewards, it diverts it from the intention of improvement. Job, therefore, was just before his scourges; and, having been praised before by the voice of God, he afterwards increased from the blow. For as a ductile tube is lengthened by being hammered, so was he raised the higher in praise of God, as he was smitten with heavier chastisement.

Of course the final note is indeed this being ‘raised the higher in praise of God’ rather than the chastisement. Thus, as Metropolitan Augoustinos points out (p. 153):

Our Church honors Job in a fitting way. At the end of every Divine Liturgy his voice is heard saying: ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever’ (1:21).

Thus Job concelebrates with the angels and archangels and with the Lord Himself, of whom he is a type.

Let us too, my beloved, be faithful and brave in every sorrow and misfortune, and kneel before the grandeur of the Lord, and like Job say: ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever’ (1:21).

A brief comment on the icon above: it reminds me a little of the recent Russian film, Kolchak. There is a fascinating scene where the Tsar-Martyr gives Admiral Kolchak an icon of Righteous Job the Long-suffering that it seems was pretty similar to the one I've posted. He tells Kolchak that he hopes it will give him comfort in the struggles ahead, and then, as the latter walks away, makes the sign of the cross over him.

'Archbishop of what?'—Robert Curzon & Patriarch Gregory VI

One of my more prized books, and perhaps the oldest in my collection (1856), is a volume called Monasteries of the East: Embracing Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, by the Hon. Robert Curzon, Jun. (NY: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1856). As Curzon explains in the Preface, the book is an ‘account of the most curious’ manuscripts he collected in the East, ‘and the places in which they were found, as well as some of the adventures which I encountered in the pursuit of my venerable game’ (pp. iii-iv). It is the very epitome of 19th-c. British attitudes to the ‘Orient’, and can thus be quite amusing. One of my favourite anecdotes concerns Curzon’s visit to the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1837. He begins as follows:

I had been for some time enjoying the hospitality of Lord and Lady Ponsonby at the British palace at Therapia, when I determined to put into execution a project I had long entertained of examining the libraries in the monasteries of Mount Athos. As no traveller had been there since the days of Dr Clarke, I could obtain but little information about the place before I left England. But the Archbishop of Canterbury was kind enough to give me a letter to the Patriarch of Constantinople, in which he requested him to furnish me with any facilities in his power in my researches among the Greek monasteries which owned his sway. (p. 282)

Thus armed, the inimitable Englishman proceeds to the Phanar, where he is received hospitably and the following exchange takes place (pp. 289-91):

When we had smoked our pipes for awhile, and all the servants had gone away, I presented the letter of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was received in due form; and, after a short explanatory exordium, was read aloud to the Patriarch, first in English, aand then translated into Greek.

‘And who,’ quoth the Patriarch of Constantinople, the supreme head and primate of the Greek Church of Asia—‘who is the Archbishop of Canterbury?’

‘What?’ said I, a little astonished at the question.

‘Who,’ said he, ‘is this Archbishop?’

‘Why, the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

‘Archbishop of what?’ said the Patriarch.

‘Canterbury,’ said I.

‘Oh,’ said the Patriarch. ‘Ah! yes! and who is he?’

Here all my English friends and myself were taken aback sadly; we had not imagined that the high-priest before us could be ignorant of such a matter as the one in question. The Patriarch of the Greek church, the successor of Gregory Nazianzen, St John Chrysostom, and the heresiarch Nestorius, seemed not to be aware that there were any other denominations of Christians besides those of his own church and the Church of Rome. But the fact is that the Patriarch of Constantinople is merely the puppet of an intriguing faction of the Greek bankers aand usurers of the Fanar, who select for the office some man of straw who they feel secure they can rule, and whose appointment they obtaian by a heavy bribe paid to the Sultan; for the head of the Christian Church is appointed by the Mahomedan Emperor!

We explained, and said that the Archbishop of Canterbury was a man eminent for his great learning and his Christian virtues; that he was the primate and chief of the great reformed Church of England, and a personage of such high degree, that he ranked next to the blood-royal; that from time immemorial the Archbishop of Canterbury was the great dignitary who placed the crown upon the head of our kings—those kings whose power swayed the destinies of Europe and of the world; and that this present Archbishop and Primate had himself placed the crown upon the head of King William IV, aand that he would also soon crown our young Queen.

‘Well,’ replied the Patriarch, ‘but how is that? how can it happen that the head of your Church is only an Archbishop? whereas I, the Patriarch, command other patriarchs, and under them archbishops, archimandrites, and other dignitaries of the Church? How can these things be? I cannot write an answer to the letter of the Archbishop of—of—’

‘Of Canterbury,’ said I.

‘Yes! of Canterbury; for I do not see how he who is only an archbishop can by any possibility be the head of a Christian hierarchy; but as you come from the British embassy I will give my letters as you desire, which will ensure your reception into every monastery which acknowledges the supremacy of the orthodox faith of the Patriarch of Constantinople.’ (pp. 289-91)

A quick glance at the full list of Ecumenical Patriarchs revealed that the Primate in question was Gregory VI. Here is my translation of the Greek Wikipedia article on him:

Gregory VI (in the world George Phourtouniades) was an Ecumenical Patriarch.

He was born 1 March 1798 in the Phanar district of the Bosporus. In 1815, he was ordained deacon of the Metropolis of Derkai, taking the name ‘Gregory’. In 1825 he was made a great archdeacon of the Patriarchate by Patriarch Chrysanthus and, in the same year, was subsequently ordained great protosyngelos of the Metropolitan of Pelagonia. In August of 1833 he was chosen Metropolitan of Serres. After vehement debates and recriminations and with the backing of the guilds, he was elected Ecumenical Patriarch on 26 September 1835.

He was exceptionally moral and reverent, but tenacious in his ideas. He published canonical provisions which concerned marriage (arranged marriages, dowry), the education of monks, and dogmatic differences with the Catholic Church and the Protestants. He prohibited entombment in a church and condemned the translation of Holy Scripture into a simpler form of language.

He was dismissed by Sultan Abdülmecid I on 20 February 1840 and removed from his house in the Arnavutköy district. He was elected again 27 years later, after the resignation of Patriarch Sophronius on 10 February 1867 and resigned on 10 June 1871. He died on 8 June 1881. He was buried in the forecourt of the Church of the Bodiless Powers in Arnavutköy and in 1906 his bones were disinterred.

That Patriarch Gregory published decisions concerning the ‘dogmatic differences with the Catholic Church and the Protestants’ suggests to me that Curzon may be exaggerating his ignorance of the Church of England. But allowing for the possibility that he really was so uninformed, I got to thinking. It’s true that it would be preferable for the Ecumenical Patriarch to know something about those nations and religions that are most influential by worldly standards, but to me it is equally if not more significant that in England Curzon ‘could obtain but little information’ about the Holy Mountain, surely one of the most important places on Earth by spiritual standards. It is telling that the English were so convinced of the absolute centrality of the Church of England to Christendom, but hadn’t the faintest notion of the geography and spiritual life of the Garden of the Theotokos herself. Note too how Curzon attempts to demonstrate the importance of his Archbishop by pointing out his relatively close relationship to the wielders of worldly power, the purported ‘Christian virtues’ of the man (who was in fact a prominent Freemason) being hardly compelling to a Patriarch who has known holy ascetics and seen the sufferings of New Martyrs.

Basically, I hope that the story is true. In 1837 it may have seemed that the Phanar could not even hope to compete with Canterbury in ‘importance’. But it is not ‘the blood-royal’ that matters to the Lord, but purity of faith. By this standard, Patriarch Gregory VI was by far the more important.