Liturgical Consummation, Part I: St Ephraim the Syrian

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

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

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

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

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

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

a) St Ephrem the Syrian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[9] Ibid., p. 19.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[17] Brock, Luminous, p. 60.

Comparing the Fathers on the Cœlestial Hierarchy

In his classic paper, ‘Dionysius Areopagites in the Works of St Gregory Palamas: On the Question of a “Christological Corrective” & Related Matters’ (here), Bishop Alexander (Golitzin) of Toledo first called my attention to a passage in Palladius’s Lausiac History when he played the ultimate trump card against those who say St Dionysius derived his teaching on the cœlestial hierarchy from the 4^th-c. Platonists. First, Bishop Alexander quotes the Areopagite, Cœlestial Hierarchy 8.2 (240D): ‘The divine source of all order has established the all-embracing principle that beings of the second rank receive enlightenment from the Godhead through the beings of the first rank. This has been asserted frequently by the scripture writers, as you may discover.’ [1]

Then His Grace quotes the ‘Letter to Lausus’ appended to the beginning of Palladius’s monastic history: ‘The first order of beings have their learning from the most high Trinity, the second learns from the first, the third from the second, and so on down to the least. Those who are higher in knowledge and virtue teach the lower.’ [2] Finally, having set these two side by side, Bishop Alexander observes:

Given this passage, might we not say that the lines which I quoted above from Celestial Hierarchy 13, [3] and which both Professor Ritter and I cited from Celestial Hierarchy 8.2, are no more obviously a paraphrase of the pagan Neoplatonism of, for example, Iamblichus than they are of the Christian monk and predecessor of Dionysius, Palladius? The passages are so close as to argue for a match, down to and including an even more explicit expression of the triadic form, so dear to Dionysius, than we found in the latter's texts cited above, together with the language of ‘firsts’ (prota), ‘seconds’ (deutera), and, here, ‘thirds’ (trita).

But Robert Meyer’s translation of Palladius has an endnote to this passage—remarking the similarity to St Dionysius—that I found puzzling. He writes, ‘Palladius’ angelology is similar to that given in St John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa 2 f., and John Damascene (De cael. hier. 8.1) attributes a like opinion to Dionysius the Areopagite; but apparently there is no literary connection between the three writers.’ [4] First of all, why wouldn’t the first comment concern the similarity to St Dionysius, by most accounts a near-contemporary of Palladius, rather than to St John Damascene, who lived hundreds of years later? Second, if St John ‘attributes a like opinion’ to St Dionysius, then doesn’t it seem as though there is at least a literary connection between the latter two?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I had some difficulty finding this passage in St John, or even making sense of the citation of ‘De fide orthodox 2 f.’ in comparison with Frederic Chase’s translation of this text. My first thought was that the ‘2’ signified ‘Book 2’, a fairly large portion of text, but nothing at the beginning of Book 2 resembles this idea of hierarchy. I noticed in the table of contents, however, that each chapter number is followed by a chapter number in parentheses. The first number begins again at one at the beginning of each ‘Book’, but the numbers in parentheses are continuous throughout the Books, suggesting to me that these are an older system. At any rate, Chapter (2) also happens to be Chapter 2 of Book 1, but I saw nothing in this chapter that corresponds to St Dionysius or to Palladius.

Of course, it occurred to me that the likely place to look for the ‘angelology...given in St John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa’ would be the chapter ‘On Angels’—Chapter 3 (17) of Book 2. And there indeed, is the closest thing I can find to the other two Fathers: ‘They [the angels] illuminate one another by the excellence of their rank or nature. Moreover, it is evident that the more excellent communicate their brightness and their knowledge to them that are inferior.’ [5] So, Meyer’s citation is just very nonspecific, but furthermore, I do not find St John exactly attributing ‘a like opinion to Dionysius the Areopagite’. There is indeed a reference to St Dionysius in this chapter, but it is not directly connected to the passage just quoted at all. Here is what St John writes about the Areopagite:

As the most holy and sacred Dionysius the Areopagite, who is very well versed in theology, says, all theology, that is to say, sacred Scripture, has given the heavenly substances as nine in number. The divine initiator divides these into three orders of three. He says that the first of these is ever round about God and that to it has it been given to be united directly and immediately to Him. This is the order of the six-winged Seraphim and the many-eyed Cherubim and the most holy Thrones. The second order is that of the Dominations and the Virtues and the Powers. The third is that of the Principalities and the Archangels and the Angels. [6]

The closest this passage comes to attributing a ‘like opinion’ on the cœlestial hierarchy to St Dionysius is the comment that to the first order ‘has it been given to be united directly and immediately to Him’. But there is nothing about passing on the light to those below. Of cource, Chase has given us a couple of citations of St Dionysius in the footnotes. Footnoting St John’s ‘hierarchy’ passage, he has ‘Cf. Pseudo-Dionysius. Celestial Hierarchy 3 (PG 3.164ff.).’ [7] Footnoting St John’s reference to St Dionysius, he has ‘Pseudo-Dionysius, op. cit. 6.2 (PG 3.200D-201A).’ [8]

So the first footnote gives us all of chapter 3 of CH—slightly more than two pages in Luibheid’s translation—in which the closest comment to St John’s ‘hierarchy’ passage is ‘It [hierarchy] ensures that when its members have received this full and divine splendor they can then pass on this light generously and in accordance with God’s will to beings further down the scale.’ [9] As for the second citation, St John has essentially just paraphrased CH 6.2 (I would simply compare the Greek of the two passages to see if it is actually more a quotation than a paraphrase, but unfortunately, while I have the Greek text of the rest of the Fount of Knowledge, I am missing De fide orthodoxa).

At any rate, there is certainly a connection here between these three texts, but Meyer has rather dropped the ball in more ways than one in his footnote referring to this connection. Still, one wonders if that footnote wasn’t enough to give Bishop Alexander the idea of the monastic tradition behind St Dionysius’s notion of hierarchy. His Grace at least cites Meyer’s translation in his footnote (n. 35) to the quotation from Palladius. For more on this issue of hierarchy, with reference not only to Bishop Alexander, but to Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, and St Augustine, see this post from two years ago.

[1] St Dionysius the Areopagite, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, tr. Colm Luibheid & Paul Rorem (NY: Paulist, 1987), p. 168.

[2] Palladius, The Lausiac History, tr. Robert T. Meyer, No. 34 in Ancient Christian Writers (NY: Paulist, 1964), p. 21.

[3] This passage is in CH 13.3, 301C—p. 178 of Luibheid’s translation.

[4] Palladius, pp. 168-9, n. 11.

[5] St John Damascene, Writings, tr. Frederic H. Chase, Jr., Vol. 37 of The Fathers of the Church series (Washington, DC: Catholic U of America, 1999), p. 207.

[6] Ibid., p. 208.

[7] Ibid., p. 207, n. 3.

[8] Ibid., p. 208, n. 7.

[9] St Dionysius, p. 154; translating CH 3.2.

Enacting Hell: Comments on the Iliad

I am ashamed to admit it, but there was a time that I was not interested in Homer. Fortunately, at some point during that time, I came across the following passage in Dame Rebecca West’s Black Lamb, Grey Falcon—a passage that, as far as I can remember, was the first thing to awaken that interest. Speaking of a little girl socking away some cakes in order to preserve ‘the grand classical emotions’, West’s husband says:

Exactly similar movements must have been made a million million million times since the world began, yet the thrust of her arm seemed absolutely fresh. Well, it is so in the Iliad. When one reads of a man drawing a bow or raising a shield it is as if the dew of the world’s morning lay undisturbed on what he did. The primal stuff of humanity is very attractive. [1]

Whether I would have seen it there or not if I had not read these words in West, the ‘dew of the world’s morning’ was certainly there when finally the magnitude of my own folly was revealed to me in a blinding flash and I did read the Iliad through at last. Furthermore, something of this sense that we are coming into contact with the ‘primal stuff of humanity’ is present in some memorable words on the Iliad from two of my favourite 20^th-c. English writers: GKC and CSL. Nevertheless, their perspective on the poem is a bit darker than what we see in West’s reference. Take for instance Chesterton’s application of what one might call his typical ‘defamiliarisation’ technique [2] to a description of the Iliad in The Everlasting Man:

Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. [3] A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die. [4]

Lewis delves more deeply into the actual language and themes of the poem, and in doing so, seems to me to justify Chesterton’s final judgement as quoted above. First, Lewis begins with the diction:

The actual operation of the Homeric diction is remarkable. The unchanging recurrence of his wine-dark sea, his rosy-fingered dawn, his ships launched into the holy brine, his Poseidon shaker of earth, produce an effect which modern poetry, except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain. They emphasize the unchanging human environment. They express a feeling very profound and very frequent in real life, but elsewhere ill represented in literature....The permanence, the indifference, the heartrending or consoling fact that whether we laugh or weep the world is what it is, always enters into our experience and plays no small part in that pressure of reality which is one of the difference between life and imagined life. But in Homer the pressure is there. The sonorous syllables in which he has stereotyped the sea, the gods, the morning, or the mountains, make it appear that we are dealing not with poetry about the things, but almost with the things themselves. [5]

Already there is that sense of the repetition of timeless actions, not merely as a Romanticised dewyness, but as a ‘heartrending...fact’, a sense that Lewis develops further—‘Homeric pathos strikes hard precisely because it seems unintended and inevitable like the pathos of real life. It comes from the clash between human emotions and the large, indifferent background which the conventional epithets represent.’ [6] But then the emotional effect of all of this is described in positively infernal terms:

Much has been talked of the melancholy of Virgil; but an inch beneath the bright surface of Homer we find not melancholy but despair. ‘Hell’ was the word Goethe used of it. It is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. It comes out casually, in similes.

As when the smoke ascends to the sky from a city afar

Set in an isle, which foes have compassed round in war,

And all day long they struggle as hateful Ares birds. (IL. XVIII, 207.)

...

Notice how different this is from the sack of Troy in Aeneid II. This is a mere simile—the sort of thing that happens every day. [7]

Finally, Lewis punches us in the gut with a reference to a telling line from Book XII and the use of the full quote from Goethe, before reminding us of what we love about Homer after all:

Primary Epic is great, but not with the greatness of the later kind. In Homer, its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux. It is all the more tragic because there hangs over the heroic world a certain futility. ‘And here I sit in Troy,’ says Achilles to Priam, ‘afflicting you and your children.’ Not ‘protecting Greece’, not even ‘winning glory’, not called by any vocation to afflict Priam, but just doing it because that is the way things come about....Perhaps this was in Goethe’s mind when he said, ‘The lesson of the Iliad  is that on this earth we must enact Hell.’ [8] Only the style—the unwearying, unmoved, angelic speech of Homer—makes it endurable. Without that the Iliad would be a poem beside which the grimmest modern realism is child’s play. [9]

I have mused upon these ideas for some years now, and have found them to be more and more true, not simply as statements about Homer, but as a way of speaking about the fallen world. The deep pain we experience when, for instance, we are grieving after a death or simply the loss of a friend, seems to be mocked by the ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, by the interminable cycles of life around us. I cannot help but think of this every time I read the opening words of ‘The Waste Land’—‘April is the cruelest month’. [10] But it is really no less true of bad weather or darker months. However much the falling rain or snow may seem to mirror the pain inside of us, we soon realise that as Lewis says ‘the world is what it is’. Nature has no sympathy for us. It is thus that the Muse sings, ‘But when the tenth Dawn brought light to the mortal world / they carried gallant Hector forth, weeping tears’. [11] The Dawn brings light, but the Trojans are weeping. It will not be the last time that they do so.

[1] Dame Rebecca West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (NY: Viking, 1943), p. 1044.

[2] A technique which for him is of course very different in intent and effect than it is for Tolstoy.

[3] GKC appears to have the matter of the name not quite straight. Stephen Scully quotes Carl Blegen—‘Troy was perhaps originally the more general name, applying to the countryside—the Troad—while Ilios more specifically designated the actual city. In the Homeric poems, however, this distinction is not maintained, and either name is used without prejudice to mean the city.’ Furthermore, according to Scully himself, ‘The neuter Ilion occurs only once in Homer (Il. 15.70-71), leading Aristarchus to consider it a later interpolation.’ See Stephen Scully, Homer & the Sacred City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1994), p. 7.

[4] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (SF: Ignatius, 2008), pp. 79-80.

[5] C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (NY: Oxford, ), p. 23.

[6] Ibid., p. 24.

[7] Ibid., p. 30.

[8] The line is from Goethe’s notebook for 1860, and was famously quoted by Matthew Arnold in his essay On Translating Homer.

[9] Lewis, p. 31.

[10] T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays, 1909-1950 (NY: Harcourt, 1971), p. 37. I actually felt that I simply hadn’t yet quoted enough authors remembered for their first two initials + surname.

[11] Il. 922-3; Robert Fagles, tr., The Iliad, by Homer (NY: Penguin, 1990), p. 614.

'Wise Men Hunt after Truth'—Introducing St Eustathius of Thessalonica

In a post back in March called ‘Robert Fitzgerald on Homer’, I quoted a passage from Fitzgerald’s postscript to the Odyssey where the famous translator made a reference to ‘the twelfth century archbishop of Thessaloniki, Eustathius’. [1] I myself then added in brackets the title ‘Saint’ just before the archbishop’s name. This took a little research, as I am ashamed to admit that I knew nothing of this man despite having lived in his city for two years. The warrant for the title was discovered in this excellent article (worth looking at for the beautiful images of Vatopaidi’s frescoes) from the online edition of Pemptousia, the magazine of faith and culture published by the Athonite Monastery of Vatopaidi, where Efthymios Tsigaridas refers to St Eustathius as ‘one of the most important spiritual figures of the 12th century’. [2]

Well, in the hustle and bustle of life, I managed to forget about St Eustathius—until yesterday. I was finally reading Peter Leithart’s Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture, recommended to me by no less an authority than Esteban Vazquez, and happened to skip ahead a little bit, when I found this:

Christ was the ‘true Orpheus’, who brought his bride back from Hades, and Odysseus tied to the mast was a type of Jesus on the cross, resisting the siren temptations of the world. [3] Eustathius, twelfth-century bishop of Thessalonica, repeats a commonplace about the plant Hermes gives Odysseus to protect him from Circe’s magic:

By Hermes Homer most tellingly indicates the logos and by moly he indicates paideia, our spiritual education that is to say; for this can only be developed with great travail, ek molou, and by means of suffering and misfortune. The root of moly is black because the beginnings of paideia are always dark as shadows and extraordinarily ill-formed. Therefore our spiritual development is as the carrying of a heavy load and in no wise sweet. Yet moly has a flower and it is white as milk, for the end that paideia aims at and seeks to achieve, lies before us in a gleaming brightness and all is sweet and satisfying. Hermes it is who gives us this moly, and this is nothing less then those logos-inspired directives which do not by any means lie ready for the human understanding to grasp. For moly comes from God and is a gracious gift. [4]

At last my slumbering curiosity was aroused! Prevented by a faulty internet connection from making the mistake documented in this post, I searched through my own volumes at home until I came across the following passage in Vasiliev’s History of the Byzantine Empire:

Among the celebrated figures of the twelfth century in the field of general culture belongs also the talented teacher and friend of Michael Acominatus, the archbishop of Thessalonica, Eustathius, ‘the most brilliant luminary of the Byzantine world of learning since Michael Psellus’ (Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Athen, I, 205, 207). He received his education in Constantinople, became deacon of the church of St Sophia, and was a teacher of rhetoric. He wrote most of his works there, but his historical writings and various occasional compositions he wrote later at Thessalonica. Eustathius’ house in Constantinople was a sort of school for young students; it became a center around which the best minds of the capital and youths anxious to learn collected. As religious head of Thessalonica, the city next in importance to the capital, Eustathius devoted much of his energy to raising the spiritual and moral standard of contemporary monastic conditions, which sometimes created enemies against him among the monks. From a cultural point of view his repeated appeals to the monks not to squander the treasures of the libraries are very interesting; he wrote: ‘Woe to me! Why will you, O dunces, liken a monastic library to your souls? As you do not possess any knowledge, you are willing to deprive the library also of its scientific means? Let it preserve its treasures. After you there will come either a man of learning or an admirer of science, and the first, by spending a certain time in the libraries, will grow more clever than he was before; the other, ashamed of his complete ignorance, will, by reading books, find that which he desires’ (Migne, PG CXXXV, 836). Eustathius died between 1192 and 1194. His pupil and friend, the metropolitan of Athens, Michael Acominatus, honored his memory with a moving funeral oration. 

A thoughtful observer of the political life of his epoch, an educated theologian who boldly acknowledged the corruption of monastic life, as well as a profound scholar whose knowledge in ancient literature secured him an honorable place not only in the history of Byzantine civilization but also in the history of classical philology, Eustathius is undoubtedly a prominent personality in the cultural life of Byzantium in the twelfth century. His literary legacy may be divided into two groups: in the first group are his vast and accurate commentaries on the Iliad and Odyssey, on Pindarus, and some others; to the second group belong the works written at Thessalonica: a history of the conquest of Thessalonica by the Normans in 1185; his very important correspondence; the famous treatise on the reforms of monastic life; an oration on the occasion of the death of the Emperor Manuel, and other writings. Eustathius’ works have not yet been adequately used for the study of the political and cultural history of Byzantium. [5]

Leaving no print stone unturned, I even ransacked Lesky’s History of Greek Literature for references to Eustathius—the most interesting of which was: ‘In the commentary on the two poems compiled by Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica from 1175, a good deal of ancient criticism and exegesis survives, embedded in a prolix exposition. The work of the four men [‘scholars who were influention in transmitting Alexandrian learning to posterity’] was known to him through the commentary of Apion and Herodorus.’ [6] Stephen Scully (on whom there will be more in future posts) quotes the archbishop on the sanctity of the polis: ‘Not only is Thebes (in the Troad) called sacred [hiere], but so is every polis, as it guards those within, which [act of guarding], indeed, is divine [theion] (at Il. I.366).’ [7]

Kazhdan’s and Epstein’s Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh & Twelfth Centuries yielded a bit more. There is the remark that ‘Eustathios was one of the best-educated scholars of his time, an excellent representative of the self-conscious, intellectual elite of twelfth-century Byzantine society....Eustathios’s influence on his associates is evident in their quotations from his works and in their imitations of his literary style.’ [8] There is a longish passage on the expansion of ‘naturalistic detail...into a spacial and social dimension’ [9] in St Eustathius’s writing, [10] supplemented by a sizeable excerpt from his description of the fall of Thessaloniki to the Normans in the Appendix. [11] But more interestingly, there are the following observations concerning his Homeric criticism:

Homeric criticism became more profound and varied in the twelfth century. Though Eustathios of Thessaloniki was familiar with the ancient commentaries, now lost, his exegesis was often the fruit of his own consideration. He did not restrict himself to the interpretation of difficult words and grammatical constructions; rather he attempted to understand Homeric heros in terms of contemporary linguistic usage, ethnography, political institutions, and cultural life. Also included in his explanations of the text are popular folkloric elements—dwarfs in England (Inglika) who used arrows tiny as needles, inhabitants of Taurika, probably the Kievan Rus, who made wooden books out of boxes. [12]

When I finally exhausted the possibilities on my shelves, the internet had returned and I duly poked around a bit. From the Orthodox, there was a rather second-rate article on ‘Hellenic Paideia &Church Fathers’ by Demetrios Constantelos, author of the lamentable Marriage, Sexuality, & Celibacy: A Greek Orthodox View, in which by far the most interesting comment on St Eustathius is a quotation from the funeral oration preached for him by Michael Acominatus—‘all young students of literature sought his company, and his home was truly a shrine of the Muses, another Academy, Stoa, and Peripatos.’ [13]

More imporantly, there was a great treatment of St Eustathius in Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church (found here, at CCEL). Schaff informs us, ‘His education was carried on in the convent of St Euphemia, but he became a monk in the convent of St Florus. He early distinguished himself for learning, piety and eloquence...’ He then writes glowingly of the Saint, ‘He was a model bishop, pious faithful, unselfish, unsparing in rebuke and wise in counsel, “one of those pure characters so rarely met among the Greeks [!]—a man who well knew the failings (superstition, mock-holiness and indecorous frivolity) of his nation and his times, which he was more exempt from than any of his contemporaries” (Neander IV, 530-1).’ [14]

It took me longest to find again something I had actually seen when I originally looked into the question of St Eustathius’s sanctity—Anthony Makrinos’s faculty page at the University College London website. Makrinos specialises in St Eustathius, and has Book 1 of his commentary on the Odyssey forthcoming from Brill. I look forward to tracking down some of Makrinos’s articles.

But I have saved the best for last. At the Notre Dame library site, I found a pdf of a translation by David Jenkins, David Bachrach, and Darin Hayton of the ‘introduction’ to St Eustathius’s commentary on the Iliad. I urge all to read the entire thing, and I am tempted to repost much of it here, but this post has already become intolerably long. I will content myself with one central controversial question:

However, since this work is full of myths there is the risk of wondering whether he runs afoul. First of all, these Homeric myths are not intended to be humorous. They are instead the phantoms or veils of noble thoughts. Some are molded by him to fit his subject matter, while others naturally allegorize his themes. Finally, many of these myths that were composed by the ancients and drawn aptly into his poetry are not allegories specifically related to the Trojans at all, but rather are used as those who first composed them intended. But a man so prolific in wisdom did not delight in myths alone. For if wisdom is truthful observation, then the wise man observes truthfully. How can we say that Homer did not do the same? He performed his art by bringing together many elements and mingling them together in his work. Thus, he first entices and charms by surface appearance then captures in this net, so they say, those who shrink from the subtlety of philosophy. Then, having given them a taste of the sweetness in truth, he sends them off to proceed as wise men to hunt after truth in other places. Moreover, he becomes the model for creating credible myths in order that he mgiht lead those eager to learn in this technique just as he does in all others. But it is especially remarkable that, although his work is full of myths, he is not shunned but loved. [15]

I’d love to see more of the Homeric criticism, and I’d also like to see more research on St Eustathius from an Orthodox theological perspective (I’m not sure that there’s been any to speak of—he’s not even mentioned in Fr Meyendorff’s Byzantine Theology). I’d be particularly interested in learning more about the veneration of the Saint. Despite the icon at Vatopaidi, [16] I’ve yet to see any references to a feastday or hymnography for him.

[1] Robert Fitzgerald, ‘Postscript’, The Odyssey, by Homer, tr. Robert Fitzgerald (NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1998), p. 476.

[2] Efthymios N. Tsigaridas, ‘The Wall-paintings of the Nave’, Pemptousia—accessed 13 June 2012, here.

[3] The Christian reading of Odysseus tied to the mast goes back at least to Clement of Alexandria, whose reference to the scene I first discovered here on the late, great blog, Ora et labora (Felix Culpa, wherever you are, you are in our prayers!), and later in the source from which it’s quoted there—Alan Jacobs’s wonderful A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), p. 13. Unfortunately, however, Jacobs believes such readings are not compatible with the ‘hermeneutics of love’ (not merely his own idea, but one based on St Augustine). I think Leithart is more on target here when he observes that the Christian allegorical reading of the pagans ‘reflects a profound insight into the supremacy and universality of Christ’ (p. 181).

[4] Peter Leithart, Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture (Waco, TX: Baylor, 2009), pp. 180-1.

[5] A.A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire 324-1453, Vol. 2, tr. (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin, 1976), pp. 495-6.

[6] Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature, tr. Cornelis de Heer & James Willis (London: Duckworth, 1996), p. 77.

[7] Stephen Scully, Homer & the Sacred City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1994), p. 21.

[8] A.P. Kazhdan & Ann Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the 11^th & 12^th Centuries (Berkeley, CA: U of California, 1985), p. 218.

[9] Ibid., p. 216.

[10] Ibid., pp. 216-8.

[11] Ibid., p. 261-2.

[12] Ibid., p. 134.

[13] Demetrios J. Constantelos, ‘Hellenic Paideia & Church Fathers: Educational Principles & Cultural Heritage’, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America—accessed 13 June 2012, here.

[14] Philip Schaff, ‘Eustathius of Thessalonica’, History of the Christian Church, Vol. IV: Medieval Christianity from Gregory I to Gregory VII, AD 590-1073—accessed 13 June 2012, here.

[15] Eustathios of Thessaloniki, ‘Critical Remarks on Homer’s Iliad: Introduction’, tr. David Jenkins, David Bachrach, & Darin Hayton, Byzantine Studies Collection, Hesburgh Libraries—University of Notre Dame—accessed 13 June 2012, here.

[16] The only other reference I’ve seen to him so far as a Saint is in the title of Constantelos’s source—Agios Eustathios Praktika Theologikou Synedriou ['Saint Eustathios—Acts of the Theological Conference'], ed. Christoforos Kontakis (Thessaloniki 1989). I have of course looked in the indexes to the Prologue from Ochrid and the HTM Great Horologion.

A Defense of St Gregory the Great Against a Detractor

All the way back in 2009 I mentioned (here) my acquisition of a book by Frederick Artz called The Mind of the Middle Ages. It is an extraordinarily learned and useful book, and I have made reference to it a number of times on this blog. That said, I was disappointed recently when I happened to come across Artz’s remarks on the Latin Church Father, St Gregory the Dialogist (aka, St Gregory ‘the Great’). I shall simply quote the offending passage at some length:

Gregory’s writings, with their clumsy Latin and their poor organization and their general dimness, show the intellectual decline since Augustine. He says of his bad Latinity that he will despise the laws of case and declension because he deems it unfit ‘to submit the words of the divine oracle to the rules of Donatus.’ In the seventh century, Latin style had separated into debased provincial dialects, all of which had in common the neglect of declensions of nouns and conjugations of verbs, wretched spelling, and a messy word order. It is often difficult to make out just what the author is trying to say, and the best authors cannot put order into their ideas or clarity into their expression of them. Even the handwriting is uniform in its disorderliness. While Gregory’s learning was based on that of the greatest of the Latin Fathers, he was not able to understand much of Augustine, for he lacked the knowledge of ancient literature, of Greek philosophy, and of the Greek Fathers that Augustine possessed. His enthusiasm for far-fetched and sometimes unintelligible allegory, his tendency to moralize everything, and his superstition, as when—at least according to legend—he was convinced he had prayed the Emperor Trajan out of hell, and his uncertainty as to whether the moon received its light from the sun—all show the depths to which learning had sunk by the end of the sixth century. The Christian faith, he declared in the Moralia, is ‘a kind of river, which is both shallow and deep, wherein the lamb may find a footing and the elephant float at large’; and in the name of allegory and interpretation he sometimes introduces the most fantastic explanations of things earthly and divine. There is no originality, and sometimes very little reason, in his work. His faith is mystical, though deeply rooted in the fear of hell. Gregory had the mind neither of an ancient Roman, nor of a converted pagan, but of a mediaeval monk, and so he represents almost a complete break with ancient culture. He contributed to current ideas about angels, demons, purgatory, miracles, the use of relics, the cult of the saints, and the belief in the magical value of the sacraments. The converging currents of barbarism and classical decadence meet in him. [1]

One hardly knows where to begin responding to these remarks, but I think I would start with the observation that Artz has betrayed his unquestioned assumptions first, of the Renaissance preference for ‘classical’ Latin as opposed to that used by most subsequent Latin authors, and second, of the Enlightenment preference for a certain understanding of pagan thought as opposed to Christianity.

As for the first of these assumptions, whatever might be said for solid, classical Latin grammar and style, we can hardly expect St Gregory to have upheld them when his masters, ‘the greatest of the Latin Fathers’, upon whose learning St Gregory’s was based, repeatedly deprecated such things themselves. Even St Augustine, of course, wrote: ‘What do we care what the grammarians prefer? Better you understand through our barbarism, than get left behind [deserti] through our elevated finesse [disertitudine].’ [2] Ironically, St Gregory’s refusal ‘to submit the words of the divine oracle to the rules of Donatus’ is itself less a demonstration of his ignorance than it is of his learning (in the Fathers). Like the subject of one of his books, St Gregory is scienter nescius et sapienter indoctus. Furthermore, there is something appealingly democratic about this attitude in Christian letters. Nicholas Ostler’s ‘biography’ of Latin notes the ‘aggressively vulgar, plebeian, tone’ of Christian Latin, referring to it as ‘the Latin of the street, and perhaps especially the Latin of recent-generation speakers’, and pointing out its readiness ‘to identify itself with common speech patterns—what indeed is commonly called Vulgar Latin—and to set them down in writing’. [3] It is hard to fault the Pope of Rome if his writing happens to resemble more closely the speech of ordinary people than the stiff and affected prose of a snooty academic.

Concerning the second of Artz’s assumptions, it seems that ‘a complete break with ancient culture’, even if it is only almost complete, is a grossly absurd notion. It is hard to imagine someone with so great an acquaintance with Late Antique culture as Artz obviously has even writing such words. And what are the evidences of this break? Allegory, moralising, and ‘superstition’? Could not the pagan philosophers themselves of the first to fourth centuries AD be as justly accused of these? Surely they could if the content of the last category is to be identified with the ideas to which St Gregory supposedly contributed ‘about angels, demons, purgatory, miracles, the use of relics, the cult of the saints, and the belief in the magical value of the sacraments’, a list designed it seems for the express purpose of horrifying Protestants. [4] C.S. Lewis is worth quoting on this point:

I have read a novel which represents all the Pagans of that day as carefree sensualists, and all the Christians as savage ascetics. It is a grave error. They were in some ways far more like each other than either was like a modern man. The leaders on both sides were monotheists, and both admitted almost an infinity of supernatural beings between God and man. Both were highly intellectual, but also (by our standards) highly superstitious....A world-renouncing, ascetic, and mystical character then marked the most eminent Pagans no less than their Christian opponents. It was the spirit of the age. Everywhere, on both sides, men were turning away from the civic virtues and the sensual pleasures to seek an inner purgation and a supernatural goal. The modern who dislikes the Christian Fathers would have disliked the Pagan philosophers equally, and for similar reasons. Both alike would have embarrassed him with stories of visions, ecstasies, and apparitions. Between the lower and more violent manifestations of both religions he would have found it hard to choose. To a modern eye (and nostril) Julian with his long nails and densely populated beard might have seemed very like an unwashed monk out of the Egyptian desert. [5]

If we keep these observations solidly in mind, it is hard to see how the minds of ancient Romans, converted pagans, and mediaeval monks are so decidedly different. As Lewis so sagaciously remarks, ‘They were in some ways far more like each other than either was like a modern man.’ To Artz’s claim that ‘The converging currents of barbarism and classical decadence meet in him’, I oppose Christopher Dawson: ‘St Gregory the Great represents the highest surviving traditions of Roman society and stands head and shoulders above the average level of Lombard or Merovingian culture.’ [6]

But a number of the things Artz mentions bear closer examination. When he condemns ‘far-fetched and sometimes unintelligible allegory’ one would like to ask whether there is any allegory he would not consider far-fetched and more or less unintelligible. At any rate, whether it always goes under that name or not, allegory in one form or another is the exegetical method of the Fathers, and of Christ and the Apostles before them. By most standards, the single patristic work commonly included on the list of ‘Great Books’—St Augustine’s Confessions—could be considered as taken up largely with a ‘far-fetched and sometimes unintelligible allegory’ of Genesis. Does this show us to what depths ‘learning had sunk’ by the end of the fourth century? What of the allegorical readings associated with the pagan scholars of Alexandria ever since the Hellenistic age?

Regarding the claim that he lacks ‘originality’, I suspect that St Gregory, like most writers and thinkers before the Romantic age, would appreciate this as a compliment. It is certainly true of the Church Fathers as a whole, who hoped never to say anything ‘original’ whatsoever but to speak wholly in accordance with Tradition. [7] The lack of ‘reason’, I suppose, depends on one’s definition of this. St Gregory, as Jean Leclercq notes, writes from experience. [8] In other words, he does not speculate using rationally inferred conclusions drawn from established premises because he is describing something he has done and seen. True, this experience lies beyond that of the mundanities of the rationalist mind, but this has little to do with it lacking ‘reason’.

A similar point could be made about St Gregory’s ‘belief in the magical value of the sacraments’. This is either Protestantism or materialism (or both) coming through. I think of St Gregory’s wholly Orthodox statement that ‘In the very hour of the sacrifice...things lowest are brought into communion with the highest, things earthly are united with the heavenly, and the things that are seen and those which are unseen become one.’ [9] It is true that any pagan philosopher of the Late Antique period could have written something similar about the theurgical acts in which they engaged (and for which one wonders whether Artz would have called them ‘superstitious’). But as Fr Andrew Louth has observed, even when pagan and Christian use ‘similar language’ about such things, they do not mean the same things by it:

For a neo-Platonist, theurgy—magic—worked because of some occult sympathy between the material elements used and the constitution of the divine. Theurgy, to a neo-Platonist, is natural—even if rather odd. The use of material elements in the sacraments, however, is a matter of institution, not of occult finesse: they are vehicles of grace not because of what they are materially, but because of their use in a certain symbolic context. [10]

But apart from all of these particular problems, I think we are confronted with the general one that Artz has simply failed to read St Gregory with attention and sympathy. Jean Leclercq writes that ‘to be truly appreciated, his works must be realized and savored, a state perhaps rarely achieved in our times. They demand a certain leisure, the otium of which he so often spoke.’ [11]

Obviously, unlike Artz, Leclercq has realised and savoured St Gregory’s works, and thus he has truly appreciated. Ironically, he states what he has found there precisely in terms of the ‘originality’ Artz so sorely misses:

What is original about his contribution? Above all, his personal experience, that experience in the spiritual life and in sanctity which itself reflects his character and the circumstances of his life: a monk’s experience, as has been seen, and the experience of a cultivated man. And though Gregory is not an intellectual, he is, however, a man of learning as cultivated as any Latin who lived in sixth-century Rome could be; Rome at the time may have been decadent, but it was still Rome. Because of his extreme sensitivity, he experiences spiritual states which others had, in fact, known although they did not analyze them with the same degree of precision that he did. Thanks to the flexibility of his Latin style, he describes them with great subtlety....For him, man’s suffering is by no means a theoretical notion; he knew it from the inside at the cost of a sensitivity that was sharpened and increased by the difficulties of each day. Finally, his experience is that of a contemplative condemned to action. [12]

Leclercq’s reading of St Gregory is, I am pleased to say, a near perfect counterbalance to that of Artz. Certainly, it makes much more sense of Christopher Wickham’s recent observation near the end of an extensive survey of the years 400-1000, East and West, that St Gregory is one of the ‘remarkably few’ late antique or early mediaeval writers that he ‘could imagine meeting with any real pleasure’. [13]

[1] Frederick Artz, The Mind of the Middle Ages: An Historical Survey, AD 200-1500, 3^rd ed., rev. (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1980), pp. 192-3.

[2] Qtd. in Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin (NY: Walker, 2007), p. 118.

[3] Ibid., pp. 117, 118, 119.

[4] If his ‘superstition’ is to be illustrated solely by the story about Trajan, surely it is unfair to use as one’s example a story one considers a ‘legend’? Besides, it seems more natural to consider the anecdote—as is usually done—as an example of St Gregory’s humane qualities and his appreciation for the ancient past than as evidence of ‘superstition’.

[5] C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval & Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002), pp. 46-7.

[6] Christopher Dawson, Religion & the Rise of Western Culture (Garden City, NY: Image, 1958), p. 37.

[7] One recalls Jaroslav Pelikan’s comments in The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700), Vol. 2 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1977), pp. 8-10.

[8] On which more below.

[9] Qtd. in Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (Vancouver: Regent College, 2002), p. 114.

[10] Fr Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Oxford, 1981), p. 164.

[11] Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning & the Desire for God: A Study in Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi (NY: Fordham, 1961), p. 34.

[12] Ibid., pp. 35-6.

[13] Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 (NY: Penguin, 2009), p. 553.