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Thanks!

Thanks to all of you who prayed for Gracie on the day of her first Communion. The Mass was beautiful. She was, as always, an angel. And, though the weather stations all predicted fierce thunderstorms over our picnic celebration, it could not have been a more perfect, sunny day at the park.

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Dule-ly Noted, Clast Dismissed

It’s not often, at art exhibits, that you see passersby moved to tears, bowing in prayer, crossing themselves or whispering devotions.

Yet so it was at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, as thousands filed past the images of Christ and the Virgin, the saints and the angels, showing in “The Glory of Byzantium,” which I visited with my buddy David Scott back in 1997.

Though the exhibit included works of pottery, sculpture, tapestry and bookbinding, the dominant form, by far, was the icon, the traditional type of sacred image in Eastern Christianity.

Indeed, many of those who filed through, rapt in prayer, seem to be Eastern Christians — Orthodox or Catholics of the Eastern Rites. While a museum docent led groups through and spoke with erudition of a mosaic’s “evocation of the numinous,” her onlookers themselves appeared to be caught up in the numinous.

For icons are more than art. In the Eastern Church, they are central to the practice of the faith. One saint called them “open books that remind us of God.” Tradition refers to them as “windows on another world.”

The term “icon” properly refers to works produced by certain formal techniques, hallowed by almost 2,000 years of tradition in the East. The Middle Byzantine period, the time covered by the Met’s exhibit, is known as the golden age of icon production.

Icons range in style, though they share some common characteristics: a two-dimensional quality, symbolic use of color and shape, and surreal, slightly distorted bodily and facial features: elongated fingers, impossibly large eyes, long necks.

They are essentially different from Western religious art, which is almost always associated with an individual creative genius: Giotto, say, or Michelangelo or Rembrandt. Not so with iconography: Most Middle Byzantine iconographers remained anonymous. Their work is impersonal, adhering to strict forms that manifest the heavenly archetypes. In some monasteries, painters specialized — one monk for eyes, another for hands, another for hair — so that no single artist could claim a work for his own.

Still, such work required a high level of technical skill. Icons speak a rich, symbolic language. Every color, gesture, garment, shadow and prop is significant … The oversized eyes? They represent the beatific vision of God that a saint enjoys in heaven. A sideward gaze? The aloofness and peace of someone who has left behind the cares of the world. The bright gold background? The divine aura, the glorious atmosphere of heaven.

In any good library you’ll find thick volumes that explain how to “read” icons. But no one really needs a lexicon. For two millennia, icons have served as the theology textbook of the saints, the catechism of the unlettered, and the pauper’s psalter.

From the icon of the Pantocrator (Lord of the Universe), the faithful gain confidence to abandon themselves to a Will that is all-powerful and all-good. From the Eleousa (Virgin of Tenderness), they learn of humility, selflessness and the maternal care of the Mother of God. From the Man of Sorrows, they see the redemptive value of suffering.

The saints of the East bring up another important lesson taught by icons: that every man and woman is an icon of God — made in the divine image and likeness.

That’s the sort of radical doctrine that has made icons the target of puritan purges down through the ages. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the puritans were running the Byzantine Empire. They called themselves iconoclasts (“icon-smashers”), because they believed that the veneration of icons violated the first commandment’s prohibition of “graven images.” They accused their opponents of worshiping wood and pigment. And they had other items on their agenda: Some iconoclasts believed that all matter was contemptible and so doubted that Christ was truly human, as the Bible and the Church Fathers had taught.

A holy monk, St. John of Damascus (675-749) — the last of the eastern Fathers — wrote a devastating refutation of the iconoclasts’ position, showing that it opposed Scripture, tradition and good sense. A capsule of his hundred or so pages: “In former times, God, being without form or body, could in no way be represented. But today, since God has appeared in the flesh and lived among men, I can represent what is visible in God. I do not worship matter, but I worship the creator of matter who became matter for my sake . . . and who, through matter, accomplished my salvation. Never will I cease to honor the matter which brought about my salvation!”

With the Council of Nicea, in 787, the Church declared definitively in favor of icons: “Holy icons ought to be exposed to view, since the more Jesus Christ, His mother and the saints are seen in their likeness, the more will people be led to think of the originals and to love them. Honor is paid to icons, but not worship, which belongs to God alone. Honor paid to images is directed to the original which they represent.”

Yet the prohibition of images continued until the rise of the “iconodule” (image-loving) regent Theodora. Her proclamation restoring icons in 843 is today commemorated in the Eastern Church by a special feast day.

The Second-Nicene Fathers, like John of Damascus before them, were always careful to remind us that in icons we see “as through a glass, darkly.”

(Here’s a portal to more information on Byzantine art and history.)

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By George, He’s History

I live across the street from a beautiful Antiochene Orthodox Church that goes by the name of St. George’s. It used to have, front and center, a cool stained-glass window depicting a gigantic eye, which was underscored by the words “The Eye of God Is on You.” Alas, several years ago, the church replaced the eye with a nice cross. I keep a color photo of the old window above my desk, just to remind me.

April 23 is St. George’s feast day, so it’s good for us to remember him, even though he’s trumped this year, among us Romans, by Mercy Sunday. St. George was a soldier and a martyr, and he’s usually depicted making shish-kebab out of dragon meat. The old Catholic Encyclopedia has this to say about him:

Martyr, patron of England, suffered at or near Lydda, also known as Diospolis, in Palestine, probably before the time of Constantine. According to the very careful investigation of the whole question recently instituted by Father Delehaye, the Bollandist, … the above statement sums up all that can safely be affirmed about St. George, despite his early cultus and pre-eminent renown both in East and West … This, however, by no means implies that the martyr St. George never existed. An ancient cultus, going back to a very early epoch and connected with a definite locality, in itself constitutes a strong historical argument. Such we have in the case of St. George. The narratives of the early pilgrims … from the sixth to the eighth century, all speak of Lydda or Diospolis as the seat of the veneration of St. George, and as the resting-place of his remains. The early date of the dedications to the saint is attested by existing inscriptions of ruined churches in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and the church of St. George at Thessalonica is also considered by some authorities to belong to the fourth century. Further the famous decree “De Libris recipiendis,” attributed to Pope Gelasius in 495, attests that certain apocryphal Acts of St. George were already in existence, but includes him among those saints “whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose actions are only known to God.”

More here.

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What the Taxman Can’t Take Away

Still smarting from April 15? Consider the words of St. John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on 1 Corinthians (somewhat adapted).

Christ says, “I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man shall take from you” (Jn 16:22). A brief saying, but one that has much consolation in it. What then is this, “your joy no man shall take from you”?

If you have money, many are able to take away the joy that comes from your wealth — for instance, a thief, by digging through the wall; a servant by carrying off what was entrusted to him; an emperor by confiscation; and the envious man by insolence. Should you possess power, there are many who can deprive you of the joy of it. For when the conditions of office are at an end, the conditions of pleasure will also be ended. In the exercise of office itself, too, accidents happen, which, by bringing difficulty and care, strike at the root of your satisfaction. If you have bodily strength, the assaults of disease put a stop to joy from that source. If you have beauty and bloom, the approach of old age withers it and takes away that joy. Or if you enjoy a sumptuous table, when evening comes on the joy of the banquet is at an end. For everything belonging to this life is liable to damage, and is unable to afford us a lasting pleasure.

But piety and the virtue of the soul are altogether the reverse of this. If you have done alms, no one is able to take away this good work. Though an army or kings or myriads of calumniators and conspirators were to best you on all sides, they could not take away the possession, once deposited in heaven. But the joy continually lives on, for it is said, “He has dispersed, he has given to the poor, his righteousness endures forever” (Ps 112:9).

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If It’s All Greek to You…

The only thing cooler than struggling through the Fathers in Greek and Latin is struggling through the Scriptures in Greek or Latin. If you’re interested in learning these mother tongues, check out Textkit.

It’s a collection of good, clear PDF files of old (out-of-copyright) Latin and Greek textbooks and grammars. There are several introductory Greek books, along with keys to the exercises. (You have to register for the newsletter to get the keys.)

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Diognetus, Don’t Ya Get Us?

“Come, then, after you have freed yourself from all the prejudices possessing your mind.”

We can take that line, from the second-century “Letter to Diognetus,” as evidence that anti-Christian prejudice has been with the Church from Day One. In the Roman Empire of those days, pagans caricatured Christian morality as prudery and mocked its mysteries as nonsense. Christian religion was often confused and conflated, in Roman and Greek accounts, with Judaism and the myriad “mystery cults” thriving in Asia Minor at the time.

But amid the babble and bigotry came a group of early Church Fathers known as “the apologists.” Following St. Peter’s counsel, they sought always to “be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks for a reason for your hope” (1 Pt 3:15). Some, like Justin Martyr (c. 100-c.165), spoke the highly technical language of the Platonist philosophers, who were somewhat confused about the Christianity they sought to refute. Others spoke to Jews, and still others to the devotees of the mystery cults.

But one apologist offered a different method. He produced a documentary of sorts — a vivid, impressionistic account of how the earliest Christians REALLY behaved. In the face of hatred, he showed a community that lived in true love.

We don’t know his name, the author who wrote the stunning “Letter to Diognetus.” But he was addressing a high Roman official, and deferentially, assuming that the great Diognetus was intelligent and open-minded (and, certainly, that God’s grace was all-powerful).

“I see thee, most excellent Diognetus, exceedingly desirous to learn the mode of worshiping God prevalent among the Christians, and inquiring very carefully and earnestly concerning them, what God they trust in, and what form of religion they observe,”

Christianity was a curiosity then, when this author set his stylus to parchment. He refers to the Faith as “this new kind of practice [that] has only now entered into the world.” Most scholars say the “Letter to Diognetus” was composed in the first half of the second century in Athens, Greece.

The most venturesome scholars dare to attribute the letter to the first known Christian apologist, St. Quadratus (died c. 129), a bishop of Athens and a disciple of the Apostles. There is almost no documentary evidence for this claim, except that early Christian writers refer to a brilliant letter that St. Quadratus wrote to the Roman Emperor Hadrian around 124, in defense of the Faith.

And the “Letter to Diognetus” is nothing if not brilliant, in both style and substance.

The letter assumes that its reader has heard, and perhaps believes, many of the common rumors and misunderstandings about Christianity. So the author is careful to distinguish Christianity, first from the other pagan religions, then from Judaism.

One obvious belief that set Christians apart from ordinary Roman citizens was monotheism. Our first forebears in the Faith steadfastly refused to worship idols. Yet other citizens of the empire, the “Letter” points out were only too willing to bow down before gods of silver, gold, brass, wood and earthenware. In describing these idols, the writer goes into some detail about six shrines, perhaps describing specific temples in the city of Athens.

“Are they not all liable to rot?” he concludes. “Are they not all corruptible, these things you call gods?” The author points out that such polymorphous polytheism had become a cynical and even contemptuous practice for the Romans. Yet, he goes on, “you (Romans) hate the Christians because they do not deem as gods” the idols in the pagan shrines.

For their intransigent monotheism, and their reverence for the Hebrew Scriptures, Christians were often called a Jewish sect. The writer of the “Letter” acknowledges this and praises the Jews for resisting pagan temptations. Yet, he insists, Christians are NOT Jews. First, he says, the “blood and the smoke” of the Temple sacrifices has been surpassed by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Next, he points out that the prescriptions of the Law and the rabbinical tradition — regarding circumcision, diet and Sabbath observance — were considered obsolete by Christians.

Yet, if Christians were not pagans and not Jews, who were they? That is the subject of the final section of the epistle.

In this section the author overwhelms his reader, not so much with dogma, but with small glimpses of the everyday life of the Church’s founding families.

First of all, he says, you can’t tell a Christian just by looking. “For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. They neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity . . . [They follow] the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food and the rest of their ordinary conduct.”

Christians blend in, he says — to a point.

Where they are set apart is in their charity for each other and their upright moral behavior. Here, the “Letter” writer makes more important distinctions.

Christianity did not, as some rumors claimed, entail severe asceticism and universal celibacy. The “Letter” explains that Christians, like everyone else, “marry and beget children.” Yet they differ essentially from the merely worldly because Christians reject immoral pagan practices, such as abortion and infanticide. Christians “do not destroy their offspring,” the letter states. Nor did Christians sleep around, as the pagans did: “They have a common table, but not a common bed.”

Christians are good for the economy and the social order, the “Letter” claims. Believers, after all, “obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives . . . They are poor, yet make many rich.” And good Christians don’t make trouble for the pagans, the “Letter” writer seems to say, even though pagans often make trouble for Christians. “They love all men, and are persecuted by all. . . . they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour. . . . When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life.”

Our author follows this with his most remarkable statement: “To sum it up — what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world.” According to this ancient Athenian, Christians, then, are the life-giving principle in the world. You can’t see them — but without them, the whole human enterprise is doomed.

“The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body; and Christians dwell in the world, yet are not of the world. . . . The soul, when but ill-provided with food and drink, becomes better; in like manner, Christians, though subjected day by day to punishment, increase the more in number.”

What gives Christians strength to live this way? The “Letter” writer gives a brief, but breathless testimony to the divine origin of the Christian faith. Without this faith, he demonstrates, all humankind, through all history, has dwelt in misery.

Then the “Letter” ends in the only way such a Christian testimony can, with a plea to Diognetus (the debauched, homosexual Emperor Hadrian?) for personal conversion.

“With what joy do you think you will be filled? Or how will you love Him who has first so loved you? If you love Him, you will be an imitator of His kindness. And do not wonder that a man may become an imitator of God. He can, if he is willing. For it is not by ruling over his neighbours, . . . that happiness is found. . . . On the contrary he who takes upon himself the burden of his neighbour . . . by distributing to the needy, becomes a god to those who receive.”

If Diognetus or Hadrian were not convinced, many more would be. If not by a letter, then by the lives of so many anonymous Christians. Just a few centuries after the “Letter to Diognetus” was composed, the pagan West passed away. Yet the “Letter,” providentially, lived on till very recently.

Then, in 1870, the only surviving manuscript of the “Letter” was destroyed. Today, perhaps the pagan West is returning, and a billion invisible Catholics — the soul of the modern world — must write the letter anew, now as then, in the everyday details of their ordinary lives.

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But Syriously, Folks

I’m pleased to see, from comments and email, that folks are interested in — or at least curious about — the Fathers of the Syriac tradition. There’s been renewed interest in these men in recent years, and it’s long overdue. The old patristics manuals tended to divide the Fathers into Greek and Latin (meaning east and west) and then lump the Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian Fathers in, almost as an afterthought, with the Greeks. But they don’t quite fit there.

The Syriac Fathers were the founders of a different Christian culture with its own literary and theological style. They used neither Greek nor Latin, but rather Syriac, which is the dialect of Aramaic used in Edessa (modern Urfa in Turkey). They spoke the language of Jesus, and their earliest writers were in close conversation with the rabbis of Babylonian Judaism. Indeed, they engaged in controversy with the rabbis. The brilliant and prolific modern rabbi Jacob Neusner finds in St. Aphrahat, for example, a model — “remarkable and exemplary” — for Jewish-Christian dialogue. Aphrahat is, says Rabbi Neusner, “an enduring voice of civility and rationality amid the cacaphony of mutual disesteem.” The Syriac Fathers preserved a semitic style of Christianity that likely was similar in many ways to the Church’s founding generation.

With the Nestorian schism in the fifth century, many disaffected Christians took refuge in the Persian East, which was beyond the political influence of Byzantium. For centuries, the East Syrians went their way, having little contact with the West, but sending missions to China and India. Along the centuries, some of these churches returned to communion with the west. And, as if to prove my recurring point that “the Fathers are news”: Rome’s ecumenical dialogue with the Syriac churches has borne more fruit than any other. In 1994, Pope John Paul II signed a “Common Christological Declaration” with Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV, essentially resolving “the main dogmatic problem between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church” — in other words, clearing up the Nestorian troubles, once and for all. In 2001, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity went a step further and approved the sharing of Communion between the (Catholic) Chaldean Church and the (so-called Nestorian) Assyrian Church of the East.

It’s good to be breathing with both lungs again. For a couple of millennia, the churches of the far east have kept a lively devotion for the Syriac Fathers. It’s great that we in the west are beginning to recover this part of the Church’s common heritage. In fact, Hubertus Drobner’s massive manual of patrology — which is due out in English any day now — includes a respectable section on the Syriac Fathers. You’ll find well-stocked online libraries at The Syriac Studies Electronic Library and Saint Ephrem the Syrian Library.

If you’re even mildly interested in an encounter with these Fathers, please dig deep and read the superlative introduction to the field by Jesuit Father Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition. It’s frightfully expensive, but worth every penny, and just out in a new, updated edition (2004). An affordable and accessible introduction is Sebastian Brock’s Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life.

If you want to learn about the plight of the Christian remnant in the lands of Aphrahat and Ephrem, read William Dalrymple’s chilling From the Holy Mountain : A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East.

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Chants Encounters

OK, so the screen savers aren’t enough anymore. You want to immerse another of your senses in the world of Christian antiquity. Try hearing next. There’s a lot of ancient chant you can load into your iPod.

My personal favorite is a quirk of history. It’s a recording of Roman chant from the 7th and 8th centuries, Chants de l’Eglise de Rome. At the time, Rome’s native culture was in decline. Byzantine Greek culture was still riding fairly high. A number of the popes hailed from the eastern lands. And entire monasteries from the oriean were fleeing to Italy for refuge from various invaders. So the chant sounds Roman, but you hear deep eastern influences — and I do mean deep. One of the distinctive notes of Old Roman Chant is its sustained bass parts, which make for odd and beautiful harmonies.

Here’s a curiosity: Music from the 5th Century. It’s reconstructed from ancient Coptic manuscripts by an Armenian-American musicologist. He contends that this was the characteristic music not only of the ancient Coptic Christians, but also of the Egyptians, generations earlier, who built the pyramids. I have to admit, my ears have not quite adjusted to this sound.

And let’s not forget our old friend Ambrose, who was deeply influenced by the chant of the East, and wanted to bring something like it to his own church in 4th-century Milan. Augustine himself praised Ambrose’s church for its congregational singing. Listen to Sublime Chant: The Art of Gregorian, Ambrosian, and Gallican Chant.

Does anyone know if there’s a good recording of the ancient Syriac chants of Edessa? As Christians leave that area (in Turkey and Syria), I fear this music will be lost.

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“A Paradise of Delight”

Going through Tom Lawler’s files (see below), I found a great brochure from the 1950s advertising subscriptions to the fledgling Ancient Christian Writers series. The back panel featured these quotes from Newman:

“The vision of the Fathers was always, to my imagination, I may say, a paradise of delight” (Difficulties of Anglicans, Lect. XII).

“I follow the ancient Fathers … They are witnesses of the fact of … doctrines having been received, not here or there, but everywhere … We take them as honest informants” (The Patristic Idea of Antichrist).

“I … take my stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of their times is not yet an old almanac to me … The Fathers made me a Catholic” (Letter to Pusey).

Reading Tom’s correspondence with Father Johannes Quasten is itself a paradise of delight. More to come, surely.

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Hottest Pyx You’ll Have Met Online

If you’re a medievalist at heart, you know to go to the Cloisters when you’re in New York. But if you’re harboring an inner patrologist, you gotta go to the Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses a stunning collection of early-Christian art — including a large room full of unusual Coptic items. Many display cases are well stocked with beautifully crafted liturgical items. There’s an early pyx, probably Syrian, made of elephant ivory, that simply must be seen up close — preferably during the Easter Octave, as it shows the women at the empty tomb. (Scott Hahn discusses this item in the last chapter of his most recent book, Letter and Spirit.) If you can’t get to NYC this week, though, you can still examine the pyx online. While you’re on the site, check out the first few pages of the medieval collection; they’re still in the patristic era. And here’s a page devoted to Byzantine and medieval art for Christian liturgy.

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Your Place of Origen

I’m fascinated by the way Origen — a brilliant thinker, but rather dull writer — can still arouse passions after, lo, these two millennia. When I wrote my first book on the Fathers, I was probably just a little too sympathetic to the guy, who did stray into some pretty weird thinking. But, on the other hand, he also willingly underwent the most severe tortures for the sake of the faith, and he died a confessor, if not a martyr. And, really, where would we be without his literary legacy, which is rather large even after the purges of the centuries. The problem boils down to this: Origen did stray into some doctrines that the Church later condemned; but he always insisted that he wanted only to hold the faith of the Catholic Church, and he urged his readers and listeners to have the same desire. Thus, sympathetic readers have judged some of his doctrine to be aberrant, but Origen himself to be “not guilty” of heresy. Giants of the twentieth century wrote studies on him, including Danielou, de Lubac, and von Balthasar. Pope John Paul II quoted him in his encyclicals, and the Church cites his authority in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The online literature on Origen is overwhelming. You’ll find, here and here, two good easy-to-read discussions of the particular problems presented by Origen. If you have an opinion, please do sound off.