'in a bath of flambes rede'--St Cecilia's Martyrdom

I'm currently working off and on on a couple of posts, but I decided to go ahead and just squeeze one short one in tonight so I could at least have the satisfaction of seeing two posts for the month of March. Also, since I 'made my name', so to speak, with Saints, I thought it would be fitting to do something about a Saint.

On Monday I'm due to discuss Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale with my Omnibus students (Omnibus being something like a 'Great Books' class), who will have read Nevill Coghill's translation. [1] For those who do not know, this particular tale is essentially Chaucer's adaptation into Middle English verse of the Legenda aurea account of St Cecilia's martyrdom by Jacob de Voraigne. Now, as firm as I am no doubt well known for being in my belief in the basic trustworthiness of Saints' Lives, I retain a certain distrust, frequently owing to the often quite anachronistic feel of the Golden Legend, for the incredibly elabourate nature of its accounts. Fr Seraphim (Rose) has written:

The Orthodox tradition is by no means credulous in its acceptance of the miracles of saints. Great care is always taken to assure that the Lives of saints contain true accounts and not fables; for it is indeed true that, in the age of 'romance' that began in the Western Middle Ages just after Rome's final separation from the Church of Christ (1054), [2] such fables were introduced into many Lives of saints, rendering all later Latin sources especially suspect. [3]

But in the course of reading a fascinating article on the Second Nun's Tale this evening, [4] I had a pleasant surprise in the form of a vindication (in a sense) of the 'legend'. According to Chaucer's retelling, after St Cecilia has bested her judge in debate, he condemns her to death:

And he weex wroth, and bad men sholde hir lede

Hom til hir hous, and 'In hire hous,' quod he,

'Brenne hire right in a bath of flambes rede.'

And as he bad, right so was doon the ded;

For in a bath they gonne hire faste shetten,

And nyght and day greet fyr they under betten.

The longe nyght, and eek a day also,

For al the fyr, and eek the bathes heete,

She sat al coold, and feelede no wo. [5]

V.A. Kolve, in 'Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale & the Iconography of Saint Cecilia', notes that this scene is described by Chaucer and depicted in Mediaeval art as involving a 'bathtub' placed over a fire. But, 'In his recent edition John Fisher became the first to gloss the word bath in this passage in a historically accurate way, suggesting that it means "bath in the Roman sense: a hypocaust, a room with a space under the floor where the heat from the furnace accumulated to heat it."' [6] The beauty of this explanation is that it gives the story of the martyrdom some real historical weight. We then learn:

Well-born Romans condemned to death for political reasons were sometimes executed in this fashion, the heat and vapor of a bath permitting them the relative dignity of death by suffocation. The Church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, in Rome, which the saint's legend claims is built upon the house in which she was martyred, contains just such a room, its heating conduits still well preserved. [7]

[1] Nevill Coghill, tr., The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer (Harmondsworth, UK: 1985).

[2] It is of course, not at all uncharacteristic of Fr Seraphim to have been so blunt in expressing the traditional Orthodox view of the 'Great Schism'.

[3] Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose), 'A Prologue of the Orthodox Saints of the West', Vita Patrum: The Life of the Fathers, by St Gregory of Tours, tr. Fr Seraphim & Paul Bartlett, ed. Fr Seraphim (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1988), p. 20.

[4] V.A. Kolve, 'Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale & the Iconography of St Cecilia', New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism, ed. Donald M. Rose (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1981), pp. 137-74.

[5] Second Nun's Tale, ll. 513-21; The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 269.

[6] Kolve, p. 142.

[7] Ibid.

Robert Fitzgerald on Homer

It's easy for me to get caught up in the 'classicism' of Homer: I mean the questions about the oral-formulaic theory, the role of Homer as paidagogue of ancient Greece, the tradition of allegorical interpretation of the Homeric texts, and questions of that ilk. Recently, however, I was reading the story of the Odyssey (from Mary Pope Osborne's Tales from the Odyssey) to a group of third-graders (students approximately 9 years old, for those of you not familiar with the US system). There is nothing quite like such an experience for highlighting in one's mind more basic questions, like the geography of Ithaca, or the logistics of various key scenes. I became quite confused, for instance, in trying to explain and draw a picture of the bow-stringing contest in Book 21. Exactly how were the axes set up? And what part of the axes was the arrow supposed to pass through?

Enter Robert Fitzgerald. Although I was familiar with his name as a translator of the classical epics, I didn't really become interested in Fitzgerald until last summer, when I finally began studying Flannery O'Connor (I read the complete short stories--one a day--as well as some of the letters, a lecture on the Catholic writer in the South, and part of Ralph Woods's book on her). At that time, I was surprised to learn that she had lived with the Fitzgeralds at their rustic house in Connecticut for two years and been a godmother to their children. Brad Gooch's biography describes their relationship as being quite intimate:

Because of the prevailing familial tone--O'Conner dubbed the Fitzgeralds 'my adopted kin'--Robert was one of the only people she ever spoke with about her father's death; his father, too, had died when he was fifteen, and the loss had been equally devastating. 'Perhaps this ménage a trois plus provided her with an easier and freer family life,' Sally Fitzgerald surmised. [1]

Gooch also has a nice description of typical evenings with the Fitzgeralds during O'Connor's residence there:

When Fitzgerald returned from teaching, and the children were tucked into bed, the three adults re-created some of the mood of Yaddo [the writers' home in NY] by mixing a pitcher of martinis, sharing a meal, gossiping--Mary McCarthy and Randall Jarrell taught at Sarah Lawrence [the college where Robert taught], and were vital sources--and discussing books. The Fitzgeralds outdid even Flannery in the piety of their lengthy Benedictine grace, recited in Latin, as she ruefully recalled, 'while the dinner got cold'. They circulated among themselves volumes by Catholic writers--Lord Acton, John Henry Newman, a history of the Reformation by Father Philip Hughes. . . . 'They were our movies, our concerts, and our theatre,' wrote Robert Fitzgerald of these talks that often went on until midnight. [2]

At any rate, all of this was enough to get me interested in Fitzgerald, not merely as a translator, but as a man, and therefore, as a critic. I duly developed an ever-increasing craving for a copy of his Odyssey translation, first and foremost so that I could read his own postscript to it, a craving finally sated last week. As I anxiously opened the volume to the postscript, expecting to be immediately treated to deep thoughts on Homer's cultural significance and the virtues of this paradoxical story of travel and domesticity, I was surprised to find, first, the geography of Ithaca painstakingly discussed, and second, the question of the bow-stringing contest! Fitzgerald asks, 'How precisely are we to visualize the contest with Odysseus' hunting bow, announced by Penelope in Book XIX and carried out in Book XXI?...The Greek is ambiguous or sketchy.' [3]

I told the 3rd-graders that I supposed the axes had some kind of ring on them, but I couldn't begin to figure out how they would have been set up. Well, first of all, Fitzgerald points out, 'When we say "axe" we mean axehead and helve together. But it seems more likely that the word πέλεκυς to Penelope [when she describes the contest] meant "axehead" alone. In Book V when Kalypso gives Odysseus a πέλεκυς for cutting timber, she must complete the gift with a στειλειόν, or helve of olive wood (line 236).' Well then Fitzgerald goes on to point out, 'When Odysseus finally makes his prize-winning shot in XXI, 420 sqq., we hear that..."he didn't miss the πρώτης στειλειῆς of all the axeheads, ​and the arrow went clean through and out".' [4] Obviously, the word στειλειή is of a different gender to στειλειόν (feminine rather than neuter), and Fitzgerald tells us:

Professor Stanford thinks, and with excellent reason, that the difference in gender may be significant. He agrees with the twelfth century Archbishop of Thessaloniki, [Saint] Eustathius, that the feminine form, steileie, meant 'socket' as steileion meant 'helve'. What Homer intended to say was very simple: that Odysseus didn't miss the bull's eye, the first socket hole in the line of twelve. [5]

So, he's shooting through the socket holes on the axeheads! But how then are the axeheads set up? Fitzgerald translates XXI, 120 sqq., about Telemachus, as: 'first he set up the axeheads, after digging a trench through for all, a single trench, a long one, and he trued [it or them] to the line, and he pressed earth on both sides.' Obviously, to plant the axeheads in the trench would make it difficult to shoot in a line level with the sockets, but Fitzgerald argues that they weren't planted in the trench, but in the loose earth removed to make the trench. He points at that the 'verb νάσσω that appears here in the aorist active,... "pressed", had the sense "be piled" in the passive in later Greek. The very point of digging a trench could have been to supply enough earth for this purpose;....' [6] So Telemachus made a long mound of dirt, embedded one end of the axeheads in the mound, and 'trued them to the line', i.e., lined them up in a row using a stretched cord. Fitzgerald admits, 'It is a good deal to read into these lines, but I am willing to risk it because I see nothing else for it.' Finally, he asks:

One more question: if set up in this way, could the axeheads have been high enough for the bowshot from the door? Odysseus made the bowshot while seated on his stool. He held the bow horizontally in the usual ancient style. If he shot from the hip just above knee level in a flat trajectory, the axeheads as I seem them could have been at the right height. [7]

So Robert Fitzgerald has painstakingly worked out this problem that I tried unsuccessfully to explain to a group of 3rd-graders.

One last thing, while we're on the subject of the Odyssey. In his introduction to Homer, Barry Powell quotes Bk 9.5-11 as testimony to the rôle of the aoidos, 'analogous to religious leaders in other ancient societies', [8] in Homeric times. Fitzgerald renders the passage as follows:

There is no boon in life more sweet, I say,

than when a summer joy holds all the realm,

and banqueters sit listening to a harper

in a great hall, by rows of tables heaped

with bread and roast meat, while a steward goes

to dip up wine and brim your cups again.

Here is the flower of life, it seems to me! [9]

Well, Powell's analogy with 'religious leaders' reminded me strongly of John Senior's reference to this passage in his stirring The Restoration of Christian Culture:

Such a banquet in the Odyssey is in the secular order the pale reflection of an evening meal in the religious order here [at the Benedictine monastery of Fontgombault], which is not something like, but the perfection of life itself. It may be all the great events of our lives and of history--good and bad--take place at feasts. [10]

​

[1] Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (NY: Little, Brown & Co., 2009), p. 181.

[2] Ibid., p. 181.

​[3] Robert Fitzgerald, tr., The Odyssey, by Homer, (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), p. 475.

[4] Ibid., p. 476.

[5] Ibid., pp. 476-7.

[6] Ibid., p. 477.

[7] Ibid., p. 478.

[8] Barry M. Powell, Homer, Blackwell Introductions to the Classical World (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), p. 28.

[9] Fitzgerald, p. 145

[10] John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture (Norfolk, VA: IHS, 2008), p. 102.​

Coleridge's 'Imagination' Revisited

Two and a half years ago I posted an excerpt from my master's thesis in which I tried to show that the 'imagination' that the Fathers have tried to warn us about and the 'imagination' that the Romantic poets have made into a divine faculty are not, as I have heard and seen argued, two totally different things. In other words, some would follow Samuel Taylor Coleridge's (and subsequently, Wordsworth's) distinction between 'Imagination' conceived as this divine power, and 'Fancy', the mere ability to form 'mental images of things not actually present', offering the latter as the proper object of the patristic warning.

The linking point for me on this issue was J.R.R. Tolkien's essay 'On Fairy-stories'. Tolkien has a very great esteem for the power of the imagination, but without naming Coleridge, the great philologist finds 'the verbal distinction philologically inappropriate, and the analysis inaccurate': 'The perception of the image, the grasp of its implications, and the control which are necessary to a successful expression, may vary in vividness and strength: but this is a difference of degree in Imagination, not a difference in kind.' [1]

At one point since the original post, I heard a lecture by a Coleridge buff in which it was claimed that Coleridge's 'primary Imagination' was actually more akin to the 'nous' of patristic psychology, and was thus very much higher indeed than the image-making faculty. When I raised the question of Tolkien's dismissal of the Imagination/Fancy distinction, my question was not really addressed. (To be fair, I later heard the lecturer admit that he was prone to be a bit sloppy in his identifications of such things.)

So then, just last Monday, I was reading Shadows of Ecstasy, the first attempt at a novel by oddball Inkling, Charles Williams. I had the impression that Williams was likely much more of a Coleridgean than Tolkien, and my lecturer friend even suggested that 'Ecstasy' might be a reference to 'STC'. Well, imagine my astonishment when I read the following exchange:

'I hope they'll use imagination [in their government propaganda],' Sir Bernard said. '[Acknowledging] One or two planes destroyed on our side would make the bulletins credible.'

'I do wish you wouldn't say "imagination",' Roger complained. 'It isn't, you know; only the lowest kind of cunning fancy.'

'I've never been clear that Coleridge was right there,' Caithness said meditatively. 'Surely it's the same faculty--the adaptation of the world to an idea of the world.' [2]

Naturally, this got me very excited once again about the whole issue. I even recalled that I had recently purchased the critical edition of Tolkien's essay that came out four years ago. Rushing to consult that to see whether there was any discussion of Coleridge's place in Tolkien's thoughts on imagination, I was disappointed to find no mention of the Romantic in the notes on that passage of the essay (surely an oversight, one would think!). I did however find the two very interesting notes which follow:

--Fancy...the older word Fantasy. Tolkien's discussion here and in the succeeding paragraphs is essentially an expanded paraphrase of definition 4 under the entry for 'Fancy' (a contraction of 'Fantasy' as noun and adjective) in the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary. Since he drew on it so heavily, the entire definition merits inclusion here: 'In early use synonymous with Imagination: the process and faculty of forming mental representations of things not present to the senses; chiefly ​applied to the so-called creative or productive imagination, which frames images of objects, events, or conditions that have not occurred in actual experience. In later use the words "fantasy" and "imagination" (esp. as denoting attributes manifested in poetical or literary composition) are commonly distinguished: "fancy" being used to express aptitude for the invention of illustrative or decorative imagery, while "imagination" is the power of giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of realities.'

--'the power of giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of reality'. See the preceeding entry. It is worthy of note that Tolkien changes the final word from 'realities' to 'reality', thus shifting the reference from plural phenomena to a singular concept, an abstraction. The phrase 'inner consistency' is used by Aristotle in his Poetics, but not in relation to 'ideal creations'.

--a cancelled early version of Tolkien's discussion from MS C reads: I propose to use Fantasy phantasia a making visible to the mind of the operation whereby mental images 'of things not actually present' are expressed, shown forth, created. The faculty of conceiving the images is properly called Imagination. But in recent times (in technical not normal language) Imagination has often been held to be something higher than Fantasy (or the reduced and depreciatory form Fancy); to be 'the power of giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of reality'. That distinction seems to me confused. The mental part of image-making is one thing, and should naturally be called Imagination. The grasp, and vivid perception of the image, a necessary preliminary to its successful expression, is a difference not of kind but of degree. The achievement of that expression which gives, or seems to give, 'the inner consistency of reality'--that is, commands Secondary Belief--is indeed another thing: the gift of Art, the link between Imagination and the final marvel of Subcreation: Fantasy, the showing forth, that power which the Elves have to the highest degree. (Bodleian MS.Tolkien 14, folio 160 verso) [3]

On a final note, since I wrote the passage of my thesis found in the original post on Coleridge and the imagination, I've had a look at C.M. Bowra's 1948-1949 Harvard lectures, The Romantic Imagination. Although he is more concerned with the poetry itself than with analysing works like the Biographia, Bowra makes the striking point that 'Coleridge does not go so far as Blake in the claims which he makes for the imagination.' [4] To wit, 'For Blake the imagination is nothing less than God as He operates in the human soul. It follows that any act of creation performed by the imagination is divine and that in the imagination man's spiritual nature is fully and finally realized.' For Coleridge on the other hand, the imagination, while 'of first importance', merely 'partakes of the creative activity of God.' [5]

​

[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien On Fairy-stories: Expanded Edition, with Commentary & Notes, ed. Verlyn Flieger & Douglas A. Anderson (London: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 59.

[2] Charles Williams, Shadows of Ecstasy (Vancouver: Regent College, 2003), p. 167.

[3] Tolkien, pp. 110-1, n. 65.

[4] Bowra, C.M., The Romantic Imagination (London: Oxford U, 1969), p. 17.

[5] Ibid., pp. 3-4.

'A School for the Lord's Service': St Benedict's Rule & Classical Education

This was an article I wrote for our school newsletter, Remarkable Providences. I have corrected a passage which got seriously distorted in the print edition thanks to my own hasty perusal of the proofs, and also added notes and links.

In his profound critique of modern ethics, After Virtue, University of Notre Dame philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre famously wrote, ‘We are waiting, not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.’ [1] The reason for these words is that St Benedict, traditionally known as the ‘Father of Western monasticism’, was responsible for the formation of small communities committed to the cultivation and teaching of virtue even as the world around them lost all cohesion. They are communities to which we would do well to look for inspiration today.

Indeed, civilisation as a whole owes a very great debt to these monks. Benedictine monasticism, that is, monasteries which were organised and lived according to St Benedict’s Rule, were the ark in which all of the classical culture of the Latin world was preserved from the flood of barbarism and the seedbed in which germinated many of the great monuments of mediæval culture. In the words of Dom Jean Leclercq, ‘education’ in the sense of instruction in grammar, of reading and writing, ‘is not separated from spiritual effort’ in the Benedictine vision. [2] The mediæval Western theologian par excellence, Thomas Aquinas, was raised and educated in St Benedict's own monastery of Monte Cassino, [3] and in his Divine Comedy, the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri, has an important exchange with St Benedict in the heavenly sphere of the contemplatives. [4] But to produce Aquinas and Dante, Latin-speaking Christendom had to begin from the ruins of Roman civilisation. John Henry Newman emphasises the gradual nature of the great Abbot’s achievement:

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, 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 city. [5]

St Benedict’s Rule was a powerful agent in the civilisation of Europe, a project which, for the Rule’s author as well as its followers through the centuries, was explicitly educational. In his Prologue to the Rule, St Benedict quotes extensively from the Scriptures on the importance of holy living and concludes, ‘Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord's service [dominici schola servitii].’ [6] This reference to the monastery as a ‘school’ should not of course surprise us, however, since already in the opening words of the Rule, St Benedict has addressed his readers, ‘Listen, my son, to the lessons [praecepta] of the teacher [magistri].’ [7] Indeed, the Rule assumes throughout that the monks are discipuli, or ‘students’, and that the abbot is their magister, or ‘teacher’. In the words of the late Dom Adalbert de Vogüé, ‘the task of the monastic school is to educate us in the life of perfection according to the Gospel.’ [8]

But to this end, the monastic ‘school’ has need of a handbook, curriculum, and curriculum objectives, which are contained primarily in the Holy Scriptures, but also in the Rule itself and in the various writings of the Church Fathers which it recommends ‘for anyone hastening on to the perfection of the monastic life’. [9] In the Rule St Benedict lays out in painstaking detail how the ‘school’ is to be organised, even down to the exact daily schedule and arrangement of the services to be carried out and Psalms to be chanted in the church. The times for prayer, work, and individual study of Scripture, all summarised in the famous motto Ora et labora (‘Pray & work’), [9] are delineated. There are exact prescriptions of punishment for various offenses. The way in which meals are to be taken is described at length, with allowance for the different fasts of the Christian year.

This strict organisation of life as a ‘school for the Lord's service’ suggests obvious parallels to the efforts of those of us involved in classical Christian education today. In the opening lines of the Prologue, we find a beautiful distillation of what classical Christian education must assume at the outset. The late John Senior, one of the founders of the renowned [and sadly long defunct] Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, has taken each of the four imperative verbs of these opening sentences in the Latin text and shown clearly how relevant and challenging they are for both students and faculty.

The very first word, ausculta, means ‘listen’. Senior points out that this reminds us that education begins with quietly listening, for—

it is only to the just, gazing in rapt silence like a lover on his beloved at the art or thing, it is only to the patient, silent receptive listener, that the meaning of the poem, or the mystery of the number, star, chemical, plant—whatever subject the science sits at the feet of—is revealed... [10]

The next imperative is inclina—‘attend with' or ‘incline the ear of your heart’. Perhaps the most foreign concept to modern education, according to Senior:

This means students must love their teachers and teachers must be worthy of such love. Learning is a motion of the heart and not a mercenary contract in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ where the natural desires of youth to reach the stars are distracted from their aim by catalogues, orientation sessions and academic advising impelling them to marketable skills and government grants. [11]

The third imperative is excipe, that is, ‘accept’ or ‘welcome the admonition of a loving father freely’. In other words, the student must freely accept—

not just the precepts and the counsels but accept the correction and rebuke of the teacher who stands in loco parentis as the strong, gentle, pious father. Humility is a necessary condition of learning. The relationship of student to teacher is not one of equality, nor even of quantitative inequality as between those advanced and less advanced on the same plane; it is the relationship of disciple to master in which docility is an analogue of the love of man and God, from Whom all paternity in Heaven and on earth derives. [12]

Finally, the last of the four imperatives is efficaciter comple—‘faithfully put it into practice’. According to Senior, ‘The student must not only receive the knowledge, counsel and correction of the teacher, he must fulfill them . . .’ [13] To do this, the student must ultimately move beyond merely parroting or complying to truly understand what he is taught, ‘and by learning, become assimilated to the spiritual, intellectual and moral model of the teacher. . . . [Faculty and students] according to this rule should be better than the rest of the community, not only in intelligence but in manners, morals and taste as well.’ [14]

We at Providence Hall would do well to heed the teaching of St Benedict's Rule if we too wish to be ‘a school for the Lord's service’.

[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame, 1984), p. 263. I have written a post on MacIntyre's reference to St Benedict called ‘Waiting for St Benedict: MacIntyre, Monasticism, & the New Dark Ages’.

[2] Dom Jean Leclercq, OSB, The Love of Learning & the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, tr. Catharine Misrahi (NY: Fordham, 1961), p. 24.

[3] This was first called to my attention by James Taylor in Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1998), pp. 39-40: ‘It was, then, into a society, a culture, built on centuries of slow Benedictine influence so eloquently described by Newman [see above], that Aquinas was born in the thirteenth century. . . . Certainly to be considered is the fact that Thomas was placed with the Benedictines of Monte Cassino at an early age.’ But I later discovered that Taylor's teacher, John Senior, emphasises the point much more strongly: ‘St Benedict, Patron of Europe, founded Monte Cassino in 529. St Thomas as a little boy of five entered there to go to school around 1229—seven hundred years in the womb of Benedictine work and prayer and then you have St Thomas! The seedbed of theology is the Benedictine life, without which no one has the prerequisites’ (The Restoration of Christian Culture [Norfolk, VA: IHS, 2008], p. 87).

[4] Paradiso XXII. Dante’s choice of words in l. 98 to describe St Benedict rejoining the other contemplatives—Cosi mi disse, e indi si raccolse / al suo collegio, e ’l collegio si strinse (‘Thus he concluded and the voice was stilled. / Collegiate to collegium withdrew’)—seems to highlight in a fortuitous way the connection between St Benedict and education. The Italian I’ve taken from Dante, Paradise, tr. & ed. Anthony Esolen, illust. Gustave Dore (NY: Modern Library, 2007), p. 240; the translation is Dorothy L. Sayers & Barbara Reynolds, The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise (London: Penguin, 1962), p. 252.

[5] John Henry Newman, ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, {410}.

[6] Here I quote RB1980, but throughout the article I have in some cases given my own translation to emphasise the point I want to make, or I have offered alternatives from various translators. For the Latin text, I have used Abbot Justin McCann, OSB, tr. & ed., The Rule of Saint Benedict in English & Latin (Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic Books, n.d.).

[7] My own translation.

[8] Adalbert de Vogüé, OSB, Reading St Benedict: Reflections on the Rule, tr. Colette Friedlander, OCSO (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1994), p. 34.

[9] I have written on this motto in the post, ‘Ora et Labora?’

[10] Senior, p. 93.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., p. 94.

[13] Ibid., p. 95.

[14] Ibid.

St Cyril, Leisure, & the Teaching Vocation

In thinking about what I can start posting here, I realised that one order of business might be to get a few more homilies up. I intend to try posting them in chronological order, in which case I shall begin with a little talk I gave on St Cyril the Apostle-to-the-Slavs at our faculty in-service training over the summer.

I'd like to talk today about our vocation as teachers, but focusing on an often neglected dimension of that vocation.

In the mid-9th c., a young man from Thessalonica named Constantine completed his university studies in the capitol of the East Roman (or Byzantine) Empire--Constantinople. He had been a student of the empire's best teachers, including St Photius the Great, who was directly responsible for the preservation of much of the ancient Greek literature now extant. [1] Constantine received a thorough classical education. Having mastered grammar:

He studied Homer and geometry with Leo [the Mathematician], and with Photius dialectic and all the branches of philosophy, and together with these rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy, music; and all the other ancient Greek sciences. . . . Speed went hand in hand with diligence, for it is thus that knowledge and science are perfected. [2]

In a viva voce examination by Theoctistus, the imperial Logothete (i.e., 'Secretary of State'), Constantine was addressed:

'Philosopher, I should like to know what philosophy is.' To this, Constantine replied without hesitation: 'Knowledge of things human and divine, insofar as Man is able to approach God, for it teaches Man by his actions to become the image and likeness of his Creator.' [3]

Much could be said about this answer--in fact, there is a whole scholarly article about it that our future school librarian, Chris Rosser, was kind enough to obtain for me [4]--but here I shall make just a few comments (I've made others here).

First, Constantine's answer does not imply a so-called 'works-righteousness', since the 'actions' to which he refers consist first and foremost in turning to the Lord in repentance and calling on His grace. Second, the language of the response itself, is the epitome of the classical Christian tradition. Constantine is not making this up, but reciting something he has memorised. Third, the response shows the linking of knowledge and action, and, although the teacher is not mentioned, the connection of both with teaching and learning.

We shall come back to this last point later; for now, let's focus on Constantine himself. We know that the Logothete Theoctistus intended the young man for a brilliant political career--but this he flatly refused, insisting that he was interested in wisdom and knowledge alone. At this point, I should point out for all of you that Constantine went on to become famous for something very practical indeed: today he is known all over the world as St Cyril, the Apostle-to-the-Slavs. He produced the first translations of the Scriptures and Church services into the Slavonic language, bringing not only the Gospel to the Slavic peoples, Bulgarians, Serbs, Russians, etc.), but literacy itself by inventing the Glagolitic alphabet and the Old Church Slavonic literary language. For this, St Cyril has been called 'a linguistic genius' who ranks 'among the greatest philologists Europe has ever produced', [5] though his well-trained students eventually replaced the esoteric and hermetic characters of Glagolitic with an adaptation of the Greek alphabet named after their teacher.

But my point is this: St Cyril didn't set out from college to become a missionary and 'CHANGE THE WORLD!', as George Grant would say in one of his ACCS talks. Right out of college, the first thing St Cyril did was to go to a monastery for six months. He did briefly accept a position teaching philosophy, and served as a kind of missionary attaché to a diplomatic mission to the Arabs (whom he dazzled with his learning), but then he went to a second monastery where he and his brother, St Methodius, spent several years.

The real point of this talk about St Cyril is precisely these monastic interludes. Why did he do this? More importantly, what can we learn from him as educators?

In his magisterial study, The Christian Philosophy of S Thomas Aquinas, the great French historian of mediaeval philosophy, Étienne Gilson, writes:

Man can choose only between two kinds of life, the active and the contemplative. What confers special dignity on the functions of the Doctor [teacher] is that they imply both of these two kinds of life, properly subordinated the one to the other. The true function of the Doctor is to teach. Teaching (doctrina) consists in communicating to others a truth meditated beforehand. It demands of necessity both the reflection of the contemplative in order to discover the truth, and the activity of the professor in order to communicate his findings to others. But the most remarkable thing about this complex activity is that there is an exact correspondence between the higher and the lower, between contemplation and actions. . . .

In the first place, it is clear that the activity of the Doctor is not superimposed artificially upon his contemplative life. Rather, it finds its source in his contemplation and is, so to speak, its outward manifestation. [6]

I read these words while sitting on my front porch on a peaceful summer's day shortly after school ended (and before the real heat wave began!), and I've been thinking about them all summer. When Mr Carr asked me to speak at In-service on a topic of my choosing, I thought about these words, then I thought about St Cyril. St Cyril went to monasteries to engage in contemplation--which he drew upon in his active teaching among students in the capitol, among Arabs, Khazars, his close disciples and missionary companions, the Slavs, and others.

This distinction between 'action' and 'contemplation' goes back to ancient Greek philosophy. It was taken up by the Church Fathers, who saw it embodied in the story of Ss Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38-42. But the Fathers by and large seem to have used these words in a different sense to the Thomistic tradition as represented by Gilson. For the Fathers, and therefore for St Cyril who deeply imbibed them, 'action' is not merely the 'hustle and bustle' of life, but a struggle for virtue and purification from the passions. It is therefore a preparation for contemplation. According to Bl Theophylact of Ochrid, St Martha of Bethany represents 'active virtue', but so do Christ's feet at which St Mary sits, so by sitting St Mary has already attained active virtue. Furthermore, 'contemplation' is not merely 'thinking' (and I realise it is not merely this for Aquinas either), but praying and ultimately encountering God Himself, especially in 'vision'. In St Luke's Gospel, St Mary 'contemplates' Christ--she gazes at Him, listening to His words. [7]

In the Patristic sense, St Cyril is engaging in both action and contemplation at the monastery--and as Christian teachers, it is important for us as well to do both. We must struggle to acquire the virtues ourselves on the one hand, and we must pray and encounter God on the other, hoping eventually to see Him 'face to face'. Deep participation in the divine life is the goal we aim for as well as the font from which we draw in incarnating Christ in the lives of our students, in teaching the Bible, in leading prayer, in loving others, etc.

But Gilson points the way to a more prosaic interpretation of these terms, as well as of St Cyril himself, and therefore of the teaching profession. It is not fortuitous that I did this reading and thinking during the summer. The summer is a time of 'leisure' for teachers, and leisure, even a little bit, is necessary for contemplation. Another Thomist philosopher, Josef Pieper, connects the two when he points out that the 'Christian concept of the "contemplative life" was built on the Aristotelian concept of leisure'. [8] The purpose of leisure, in fact, is contemplation: ultimately, 'gazing' at God, prayer and worship (doxology, celebration of feasts), but also the more prosaic 'thinking' on truth, study, etc. We often think that the purpose of leisure is to 'unwind', 'veg out', or 'relax' after work in order to be refreshed to go back. But Pieper argues that this idea is the product of the modern materialistic culture and our slavery to work:

Now leisure is not there for the sake of work, no matter how much new strength the one who resumes working may gain from it; leisure in our sense is not justified by providing bodily renewal or even mental refreshment to lend new vigor to further work--although it does indeed bring such things!

As contemplation, so leisure is of a higher rank than the vita activa. [9]

In other words, leisure and contemplation are goods per se, they are the highest activity of man. They are good for us as human beings, making us more fully human, and not beasts of burden. But of course, they are also good for our work, and especially for teaching. Indeed, leisure and contemplation--even in the less spiritual and more intellectual or philosophical sense of just reading and thinking--are crucial to our vocation as teachers. Reading, quiet time on porches, conversation with each other, and academic conferences (especially the CiRCE Institute conference, where there were no 'workshops' on bulletin boards, just steady reflection on the theme 'What is Man?'!) need no justification. They are not work, but we draw upon them in our work.

As an illustration, and apropos of my reference to the CiRCE conference, in a session on 'Mimetic Teaching and the Cultivation of Virtue' Andrew Kern described a Christian interpretation of 'mimetic teaching':

First: Truth is the aim.

Second: the soul must be like, i.e. be conformed to, compatible with, the Truth.

Third: to be perceived the Truth must be embodied.

Fourth: this embodiment is then imitated.

Fifth: in this way Truth is known per se (the embodiment becomes transparent). [10]

The teacher's knowledge of Truth must be gained through some kind of contemplation (requiring leisure). The teacher embodies the Truth, the student imitates, the student knows the Truth. It is a pattern that can be applied to all kinds of objects and methods of contemplation, from St Paul's 'Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ' (I Cor 11:1), to using Lucy Pevensie to illustrate childlike faith, to letting Kindergarteners do arithmetic with beans.

To return at last to St Cyril, the monastery in Asia Minor was the shady porch where he spent his summer reading deep, thought-provoking books; his Glagolitic alphabet and the translations of the Gospels and liturgy he produced were the lesson plans (or in-service talk notes) born out of that deep reflection; the barbarian lands of Eastern Europe were his classroom and the barbaric Slavs themselves his students (hard to see the analogy, I know!). And what students they turned out to be! While Christians in the West have by and large remained woefully ignorant of the 1200-year Christian Tradition among the Slavs, suffice to say it has produced countless giants of the life in Christ as well as of Christian culture, art, and literature. St Cyril and his brother, St Methodius, really did 'change the world', but not by setting out to do so. They spent less time 'strategising' and more time reflecting on what man is. Theirs was an activity born out of profound contemplation.

[1] L.D. Wilson & N.G. Reynolds, Scribes & Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek & Latin Literature, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), p. 57.

[2] Qtd. in Anthony-Emil N. Tachiaos, Cyril & Methodius of Thessalonica: The Acculturation of the Slavs (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2001), p. 25.

[3] Tachiaos, p. 27.

[4] Ihor Ševčenko ‘The Definition of Philosophy in the Life of Saint Constantine [Cyril]’, For Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, 11 October, 1956, comp. Morris Halle, Horace G. Lunt, Hugh McLean, and Cornelis H. Van Schooneveld (The Hague, 1956), pp. 449-57.

[5] Sir Dimitri Obolensky, Byzantium & the Slavs (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 1994), p. 207.

[6] Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, tr. L.K. Shook, CSB (London: Victor Gollancz, 1957), pp. 3-4.

[7] Bl Theophylact of Ohrid, The Explanation by Blessed Theophylact, Archbishop of Ochrid and Bulgaria of the Holy Gospel According to St Luke, Vol. III of Bl. Theophylact’s Explanation of the New Testament, tr. Fr Christopher Stade (House Springs, MO: Chrysostom, 1997), pp. 121-2.

[8] Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, tr. Gerald Malsbary (South Bend, IN: St Augustine's Press, 1998), p. 5.

[9] Pieper, p. 34.

[10] This is based on my notes from Kern's talk.

'a lost child travelling in the snow'

All the way back in 2009 I posted one of my favourite Christmas poems, Chesterton's 'Child of the Snows' (here). Well, last year I bought a copy of Michael Patrick Hearn's Annotated Christmas Carol, and as I was reading it with my students around Christmas time, I noticed the following passage in the description of the Cratchits' Christmas celebration:

All this time the chesnuts and the jug went round and round; and bye and bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim; who had a plaintive little voice, and sang it very well indeed. [1]

For the first time, while reading this passage I thought of GKC's poem, and then I noticed Hearn's annotation:

Apparently Dickens had no specific carol in mind; no such song has been found in any old collection of Christmas carols. G.K. Chesterton realized this omission, and included in his Poems (1926) 'A Child of the Snows', which might stand for Tiny Tim's carol until another might be found. [2]

I chose the image above as a good, classic, Logismoic piece, but the image here is more of a real illustration of the poem.


[1] Charles Dickens, The Annotated Christmas Carol: A Christmas Carol in Prose, ed. Michael Patrick Hearn, illust. John Leech (NY: Norton, 2004), p. 108.

[2] Dickens, p. 108, n. 63.

Ad blogges!

A number of factors have combined recently to convince me that I should return to the practice of crafting the occasional post for this blog. Not the least of these was this stirring post at Reading the Maps, discovered via the very medium the author denigrates and in which so many of us guiltily indulge: Facebook. How can I continue to neglect Logismoi after reading the following?

Blogging may have been superseded by new and inferior innovations, but the medium need not die. Indeed, bloggers should treat the rise of alternative forms of online communication as a liberation, rather than a disaster. Freed from the curse of coolness, blogging can now develop as a literary and artistic genre, or set of genres. Blogging may have lost some of its old practitioners, but it should be able to attract writers, artists, and political thinkers dissatisfied with the short attention span of twitter and the ritualised onanism of facebook. Blogging may become an act of resistance against the dumbing down of culture and political discourse in the twenty-first century.

I am not so certain, however, that this first new post since last summer can aspire to the lofty heights called for here. Instead, I intend to ease back into the practice beginning with a simple and, for me at least, enjoyable genre: the newly acquired books overview. In my household, we exchanged gifts for the Nativity according to the Church's calendar four nights ago, and I had already previously come by a few other titles, either received as gifts or purchased with gift cards and/or money. Having forgotten the order in which I acquired them, I'll settle for the alphabetical order of the authors' last names.

1) Ibrahim S. Amin, The Monster Hunter's Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Saving Mankind from Vampires, Zombies, Hellhounds, & Other Mythical Beasts (NY: Bloomsbury, 2007). An unexpected gift from a friend, this one is a sheer delight. For a small taste, consider the author's response to the question, 'Why would anyone want to hunt monsters?'

...A hunter kills to test himself against what nature has to offer, to see if his humble human mind and body can overcome the power, quickness, and savage cunning of the beasts. Thus a true hunter will wish to pit himself against the most challenging prey--creatures that will push him to the limit. Any fool with a gun can shoot a deer, but only the greatest of sportsmen will be able to overcome a Hydra.

However, even among the most dedicated sportsmen in the field there is also a second, and perhaps far more noble concern--no less lofty a goal than the protection and preservation of the human race.

The entry on each creature even includes a citation of early, often classical, sources. My only complaint is that, despite the appropriately arcane, antique-looking cover design, the illustrations are brightly coloured, modern-looking things. They just don't do justice to the subject matter.

2) G.K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Vol. 1: Heretics, Orthodoxy, The Blatchford Controversies, ed. David Dooley (SF: Ignatius, 1986). I was excited finally to come across an inexpensive used copy of a volume of GKC's Collected Works, a set of handsomely designed, but rather pricey volumes from Ignatius Press. I hope to see more some day.

3) Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol: The Original 1843 Manuscript (Delray Beach, FL: Levenger, 2011). A gift from my always thoughtful mother-in-law, this is the first-ever full-cover facsimile of Dickens's original manuscript of A Christmas Carol. It features a facing-page transcription, a beautiful red cloth Smythe-sewn binding gold-stamped with a design from the 1st edition, a silk ribbon marker, and, it seems, 'Archival paper selected to match the color of Dickens’s manuscript paper'. It also has an introduction by the curator of Literary & Historical Manuscripts at the Dickens MS owner: The Morgan Library & Museum. See the photo above. Now I can, just barely, read my favourite lines in Dickens's own handwriting:

'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive Ocean of my business!' (p. 14)

4) David L. Edwards, OBE, Poets & God: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, WOrdsworth, Coleridge, Blake (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2005). I was off to Half Price Books to kill some time, hoping to find a copy of Gerald Basil Edwards's Book of Ebenezer Le Page. But while I saw no sign of the latter, I did discover this book by another Edwards, apparently a former Dean of King's College, Cambridge. The blurb on the back says this:

These great English poets are at the centre of a cultural heritage which goes along with the world-wide appeal of the English language, yet they have often become the object of study rather than of pleasure.

Scholarly, entertaining and often provocative, David Edwards's new book reveals their relevance to the current quest for an authentic spirituality in a mostly church-less society. Poets & God will excite the reader to rediscover and enjoy their work.

5) Thomas C. Oden, Early Libyan Christianity: Uncovering a North African Tradition (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2011). Although Tom Oden's niece, Amy Oden, was my Church history professor in college, and I myself briefly met the old fellow at a lecture about the Green Collection of Biblical artifacts here in OKC a few months ago, I've managed never to read any of his work. My father gave me this one with the explanation that he never knows what I have, and it was new enough that he could be pretty certain I didn't have it. I fully intend to read it through. I already glanced at the conclusion and found it profoundly moving. Oden is explaining how and why he is passionate about the subject, and apologising in advance for the tentative nature of his conclusions:

Why, then, have I continued to pursue this difficult task to the very end, when I had other urgent projects sitting on the shelf awaiting my attention at a late date in my life? Because so few know about this obscure area; because its role in early Christianity was so significant; because it has been so neglected as a subject of historical inquiry by Western academic colleages. These motives have been the engines of desire.

Now that I am at last ready to offer its results for scholarly and public examination, I am all the more aware that many of its conclusions may seem at first hard to defend and easy targets for academics who are working out of very different premises about reliable knowledge. I hope that someday someone will do more justice to this subject than I. But my time to do anything in this world is limited and growing more so. Hence I offer it for the reader's consideration, hoping for clemency.

6) Rob Pope, How to Study Chaucer, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 2001). I do of course enjoy reading Chaucer, but my primary motive in buying this one was that I am going to be teaching Chaucer to my 8th-grade students this Spring. As I do not know him nearly as well as most of the other books we have been reading, I need all the help I can get.

7) David Simay, Swordfishtrombones: 33 1/3 (NY: Continuum, 2008). Some of you may recall that I posted briefly about Tom Waits a few years ago (here), but if you're not aware, I am an enormous fan. My sister gave me this little book (apparently the 33 1/3 series of books about albums is all the same size), a 'study' of sorts of Waits's groundbreaking album, 1983's Swordfishtrombones. Again, the back blurb says it best:

At the end of the seventies, Tom Waits felt trapped in a stalled career: his musical persona an artistic straightjacket. At a dark, desperate time in his life he got the phone call that offered a way out and met the woman who would change his life. What followed was Swordfishtrombones, one of the most daring transformations in pop music history.

Tom Waits is an elusive subject, sly and evasive. Through extensive research and a close, playful reading of his work, David Smay unwraps the vinegar pleasures of Swordfishtrombones and creates a freewheeling portrait of an American genius. This is the album where Tom Waits beats the blues with a hammer, drags his piano into the rain and burrows deep underground. This is the story of a man who reinvented himself and changed the musical landscape forever, a love story built on exotic percussion and phantom landscapes. This is a story about crows and mules.

8) J.R.R. Tolkien, Smith of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles of Ham (NY: Del Rey, 1986). I bought this with a HP Books gift card after I had the disconcerting realisation that I didn't own a single copy of 'Smith of Wootton Major' (I had 'Farmer Giles' in the Tolkien Reader). It's such a beautiful story, and the descriptions of Smith's journeys oddly reminded me a little bit of Lovecraft's dream stories (another Tolkien/Lovecraft connection).

9) Leo Tolstoy, The Bear Hunt & Other Stories (NY: Little Leather Library Co., n.d.). I received this curious little volume only just tonight from an old family friend. I'd never seen or heard anything of this series, but according to this description the 'Little Leather Libary' books were a series of small classics bound in what was once brownish green imitation leather (mine is decidedly brown) in the early 1920's, apparently inspired by the Arts & Crafts-related Roycroft Press. The Tolstoy volume (Box 2 Volume 91 of the series) contains the stories 'The Bear Hunt', 'What Men Live By', and 'A Fairy Tale'.