Danny Garland has posted his excellent paper on The Church Fathers’ Marian Interpretation of the Old Testament.

The Wall Street Journal ran a fine appreciation of Hagia Sophia, A Beautiful Confusion. Excerpts:

The great Byzantine Emperor Justinian — who smote the barbarians, codified the laws and secured the empire’s borders — built the church from 532 to 537. (Actually, he rebuilt on the site of one recently destroyed by riots and fire.) He fully purposed that it stand as a formidable emblem of faith and power, proclaiming Eastern Orthodoxy as the inheritor of the mantle of Rome in the city of Constantine…

Justinian manifestly never intended Hagia Sophia to have a human scale and informally user-friendly feel. The main communicants, after all, were monks, priests, bureaucrats, noblemen and the royal retinue. He did, however, envision it as magnificently monumental, which is precisely how it feels even today in its deracinated, tourist-infested incarnation. In our time, we often see lofty atriums around us in hotels and office buildings, but the size and height of Justinian’s dome was unprecedented, remained unparalleled for a millennium until Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s, and still seems astonishing at some 15 stories high.

One’s first impression upon entering the central nave (the main space) is of Rembrandt-hued cavernous gloom paneled by shades of marble and studded with huge looming pillars, some borrowed from pagan sites. Veined gray marble, pocked greenish marble, pietra dure in walls and floors, pillars whose marble seems to have flowed with time like thick antique glass, surround the onlooker. Airy radiance dissipates the gloom as the eye travels up past the windowed galleries to the gold-painted ceiling, to the great dome raised on semidomes and arches, finally to the sun-trap of the cupola. One contemporary observed that it all seemed “not illuminated by the sun from outside, but by glow generated from within, so great an abundance of light bathes this shrine all about.” Light symbolized holy wisdom and celestial truth and was intentionally curated into the design, one of the Almighty’s own special effects.

Gold mosaic covered the entire dome-face in Justinian’s time, multiplying the shimmer. An earthquake later shook off much of that mosaic. Also, silver sheeting covered numerous surfaces, such as the bishop’s pulpit, while high officials wore gold ceremonial garb — so one imagines how exquisitely light scintillated about during Byzantine services.

The Way of the Fathers, of course, was way out front on this story, which also crops up in my book The Resilient Church: The Glory, the Shame, and the Hope for Tomorrow.

Touchstone has posted my review of Adrian Murdoch’s two recent histories.

The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World
by Adrian Murdoch
Sutton, 2005
(260 pages, $29.95, hardcover)

The Last Roman: Romulus Augustulus and the Decline of the West
by Adrian Murdoch
Sutton, 2006
(190 pages, $29.95, hardcover)

reviewed by Mike Aquilina

Julian, known as “the Apostate” (who ruled from 361–363), was arguably the last Roman emperor to cling to Rome’s classical heritage. Romulus Augustulus (475–476) was simply the last Roman emperor. The Scottish historian Adrian Murdoch’s two most recent books, The Last Pagan and The Last Roman, examine these two very different emperors, both of whom ruled after Christianity’s “triumph.”

A member of the British Royal Historical Society, Murdoch is also a prominent journalist, covering international affairs and economics in the mainstream press, and he brings to his books the depth of a professional historian and the readability of a newspaper’s front page. His books are not confessionally Christian histories—not in the least—but neither are they the hatchet jobs Christians have come to expect from secular historians in recent centuries.

A Puny Rome

Hollywood has just released its own version of the story of Romulus, The Last Legion, so perhaps it is best to begin with a discussion of The Last Roman.

Barely pubescent, Romulus ruled for only ten months as a mouthpiece for his father, a power-brokering general in the Roman army. The child-emperor, easily removed by a barbarian warlord, is an apt image of the empire at its end. Even his nickname—Augustulus, “little Augustus”—suggests the puniness of fifth-century Rome compared to its first-century glory.

Murdoch traces Romulus’s movements through the rest of his probably long life. The former emperor seems to have retired to a monastery well stocked with books, ending his life as “an old man in a library in Campania, corresponding with leading intellectuals of the day, his early life and elevation to power becoming an increasingly indistinct memory.”

Since so little is known about Romulus, Murdoch must sketch his life in chiaroscuro, finding the boy’s life, and then the man’s, in the shadows of the barbarian conquerors Odovacer and Theoderic. And the shadows are dark indeed. Against recent historians who argue that the transition from Roman to barbarian rule went fairly smoothly for common folk, Murdoch counters that it was close to catastrophic, beginning with pillage and ending in lawlessness.

Murdoch is at his best when describing battles, raids, campaigns, and diplomatic missions. Religion he declares beyond the scope of his study, though he does touch lightly on the differences between the Arian barbarians and the Catholic Romans, and how these played out in the decades after the fall. Along the way he tells the tragic story of Boethius, the most famous victim of Theoderic’s growing suspicion of Nicene Christians.

All the ancient voices in this book sound human, a rare quality attributable to Murdoch’s ease with ancient languages and his ability to turn a phrase in English. He manages even to replicate wordplay: “Cattily, the poet Martial wrote that women would arrive in the region as a Penelope, the famously chaste wife of Odysseus, and leave a Helen, the much chased wife of Menelaus.”

The Potent Apostate

The Last Roman is an important book for its development of the symbol of Rome’s fall in the boy-emperor Romulus. But the more potent book by far is the biography of the more potent ruler, Julian, The Last Pagan.

Though he ruled for less than three years, Julian looms colossal in memory and imagination. He was born in 331 (or 332) into a brutal family and a bloody business. His father was Emperor Constantine’s half-brother. Murdoch notes that, after Diocletian’s retirement in 305, “Julian’s family spent a great deal of the next fifty years developing ingenious ways to kill each other.” The motive was usually intrigue, plots for accession, or just the suspicion bred by such an atmosphere.

In 326, one year after the Council of Nicaea, Constantine ordered the execution of his wife and eldest son. The three remaining sons succeeded their father in 337 and rather quickly dispatched almost all their male relatives. Two young boys were spared, five-year-old Julian and his teenage brother Gallus. Julian was too young to be a threat and Gallus too sickly.

Though Julian continued to live the privileged life of the imperial family, he kept the memory of that purge, whose victims included his own father. The imperial family was officially Christian by this time, and the hypocrisy was not lost on Julian, who was himself raised a Christian, and was a schoolmate of St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory Nazianzen. His cousin the emperor Constantius, the murderer of his family, professed the doctrine of Jesus Christ.

Julian learned to keep his thoughts to himself. Constantius was his patron, and alienation from him meant certain death. Julian studied philosophy and rhetoric at Athens and secretly investigated the “old religion,” the pagan mysteries. Though he kept up his exterior practice of Christianity, his mind and heart belonged to the old gods.

Appointed to leadership in the military, he rose rapidly with some stunning campaigns in the western provinces and barbarian lands. He gained a reputation for toughness; for, unlike other generals, he shared the hardships of his troops and rewarded them handsomely. All this made for tenacious loyalty. Not surprisingly, in 360 they declared him emperor.

Julian’s Mirror Image

Julian began his march toward Byzantium to confront Constantius. But Constantius died in 361, before their forces could meet.

Then began the reign that gave Julian his place in history. Murdoch notes that Julian did some things extremely well—tax reform, for example, and military leadership. But no one remembers Julian as a tax reformer or even much as a general.

He is remembered as “the Apostate,” and Murdoch gives a fascinating analysis of his religious ideas and practical reforms. He made vast sums available to restore temples that had fallen into disrepair over a generation of Christian hegemony. He promoted pagans to prominent positions in the capital and boosted the wages of the pagan priesthoods.

He tried, at least in the beginning, to include Christians in his dawning era of toleration, but the Church’s big names were wary. Pagan restoration became the keynote of Julian’s rule.

Yet, as Murdoch makes clear, Julian’s paganism was not really the old religion. It was, rather, a mirror image of Christianity. It was an anti-Church, a reactionary project.

Julian himself recognized Christianity’s influence on his ideas. You can take the emperor out of the Church, but you can’t take the Church out of the emperor. Murdoch says: “Julian’s attempts at creating a pagan doctrine betray his Christian upbringing. . . . By the very fact of his early education, he was already, as he would have put it, polluted.”

Whereas the old religion had been a riot of gods, cults, and feasts, Julian strove, in a very Roman way, to impose unity and uniformity on worldwide polytheism. It was the religious equivalent of herding cats.

In Julian’s schema, the emperor himself served as a sort of pope over a hierarchy that mirrored the Catholic structure of metropolitans, bishops, and priests. He set up pagan philanthropies in imitation of Catholic charities. He urged his clergy to lead lives of virtue and preach philosophy to the people. Julian himself had chosen to lead a celibate life after the death of his wife. As Murdoch puts it: “He wanted the pagans to out-Christian the Christians.”

Julian’s Coming Out

His pagan “coming out” climaxed during an extended stay in Syrian Antioch, a city of a half-million people situated en route to the battlegrounds where he would meet the Persians.

While in Antioch, he renewed the pagan practices, though he was hardly satisfied with the priests’ performance and showed himself to be as prissy and uptight as the most over-educated diocesan liturgist. And if the pagans were tepid in their response to Julian, the Christians were downright contemptuous. Murdoch does not miss the irony of a pagan prig enraged by his encounter with a city full of Christian sensualists.

Julian’s experience in Antioch led to harsher strictures on Christians. He banned believers from teaching grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy. This, says Murdoch, was Julian’s “master stroke.” Banished from the public square, Christianity could be minimized as a cultural force. He “had marginalised Christianity to the point where it could potentially have vanished within a generation or two, and without the need for physical coercion.”

It was not to last, however. As Julian shook the dust of Antioch from his feet, he marched his troops to their devastating defeat at the hands of Shapur II of Persia. Murdoch is superb in his systematic yet suspenseful narrative of that miserable campaign.

On that battlefield at the Persian frontier, Julian fell, and with him the eastern empire began to crumble. Some (Christian) histories portray the emperor struck by a spear and crying out, “Thou hast won, O Galilean!”

Yet Julian the Apostate lives in our collective memory. For some, he is the archetype of the ideological dictator, the bloodless wonk whose ideas justify his bloodletting. For others, he is a romantic anti-hero—the rebel against the inevitable.

He survives in spite of his utter lack of the qualities that make Nero and Caligula—and even Constantine—perennial subjects of potboiler novels and gory flicks. In contrast to other emperors, Murdoch says, Julian’s story usually bogs down with “an excess of philosophy and too little sex.” To Murdoch’s credit, the story never bogs down in his telling.

For Murdoch, Julian’s death was—like the deposition of Romulus—a critical moment in the fall of the empire: “To all intents and purposes we can say that paganism died as a credible political and social force in the last days of June 363.”

In ends such as these, Christians found their beginnings.

Adrian Murdoch’s weblog is Bread and Circuses.

Roger Pearse is inviting those of you who know a bit of Latin or German to join his online collaboration to translate Eusebius’s Chronicle into English. Once complete, this will be a valuable online resource. Do your part!

Now this look’s fascinating: Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea, by Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams. Here’s the review in Bryn Mawr.

Yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI continued his series of addresses on the Church Fathers, with this little number on St. Basil the Great. Here’s the Zenit translation:

Dear Brothers and Sisters!

Today we remember one of the great Fathers of the Church, St. Basil, defined by Byzantine liturgical texts as a “light of the Church.” He was a great bishop of the fourth century, to whom the Churches of the East and West look with great admiration because of his sanctity of life, the excellence of his doctrine and the harmonious synthesis of his speculative and practical skills.

He was born around the year 330 to a family of saints, “a true domestic Church,” who lived in an atmosphere of profound faith. He carried out his studies with the best teachers of Athens and Constantinople. Unfulfilled by his worldly successes, and aware of having lost much time in vain pursuits, he himself confesses: “One day, waking up from a deep sleep, I turned to the wonderful light of the truth of the Gospels … and cried over my miserable life” (cf. Letters 223: PG 32, 824a). Attracted by Christ, I began to look to him and listen to him alone (cf. “Moralia” 80, 1: PG 31, 860bc).

He dedicated himself with determination to the monastic life in prayer, meditation on the sacred Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers of the Church, and to the exercise of charity (cf. Letters 2 and 22), following the example of his sister, St. Macrina, who was already living monastic asceticism. He was later ordained a priest and then, in 370, bishop of Caesarea of Cappadocia in what is present day Turkey.

Through preaching and writing, he carried out intense pastoral, theological and literary activities. With wise balance, he was able to blend service to souls with dedication to prayer and meditation in solitude. Taking advantage of his own personal experience, he favored the foundation of many “fraternities” or Christian communities consecrated to God, which he frequently visited (cf. Gregory of Nazianzus. “Oratio 43,29 in Laudem Basilii”: PG 36,536b). Through his words and his writings, many of which still exist today (cf. “Regulae Brevius Tractatae, Proemio”: PG 31,1080ab), he exhorted them to live and to grow in perfection. Many drew from his writings to establish norms of ancient monasticism, including St. Benedict, who considered St. Basil his teacher (cf. “Regula” 73:5).

In reality, St. Basil created a special kind of monasticism, not closed off from the local Church, but open to it. His monks were part of the local Church, they were its animating nucleus. Preceding others of the faithful in following Christ and not merely in having faith, they showed firm devotion to him — love for him — above all in works of charity. These monks, who established schools and hospitals, were at the service of the poor and showed Christian life in its fullness. The Servant of God, John Paul II, speaking about monasticism, wrote: “Many believe that monasticism, an institution so important for the whole Church, was established for all times principally by St. Basil — or that, at least, the nature of monasticism would not have been so well defined without Basil’s decisive contribution” (“Patres Ecclesiae,” 2).

As bishop and pastor of his vast diocese, Basil constantly worried about the difficult material conditions in which the faithful lived; he firmly condemned evils; he worked in favor of the poor and marginalized; he spoke to rulers in order to relieve the sufferings of the people, above all in moments of disaster; he looked out for the freedom of the Church, going up against those in power to defend the right to profess the true faith (cf. Gregory of Nazianzus, “Oratio 43: 48-51 in Laudem Basilii”: PG 36,557c-561c). To God, who is love and charity, Basil gave witness by building hospitals for the needy (cf. Basil, Letters 94: PG 32,488bc), much like a city of mercy, that took its name from him “Basiliade” (cf. Sozomeno, “Historia Eccl.” 6,34: PG 67, 1387a). It has been the inspiration for modern hospital institutions of recovery and cure of the sick.

Aware that “the liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows” (“Sacrosanctum Concilium,” 10), Basil, though he was concerned with charity, the sign of faith, was also a wise “liturgical reformer” (cf. Gregory of Nazianzus, “Oratio 43,34 in Laudem Basilii”: PG 36,541c). He left us a wonderful Eucharistic prayer (or anaphora) which is named after him, and helped to organize the prayer and the psalmody:

Because of him the people loved and knew the Psalms, and came to pray them even during the night (cf. Basil, “In Psalmum” 1,1: PG 29,212a-213c). In this way we can see how liturgy, adoration and prayer come together with charity, and depend upon each other.

With zeal and courage, Basil opposed heretics, who denied that Jesus Christ is God like the Father (cf. Basil, Letters 9,3: PG 32,272a; “Ep.” 52: 1-3: PG 32,392b-396a; “Adv. Eunomium” 1,20: PG 29,556c). In the same way, contrary to those who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, he taught that the Spirit is also God, and “must be numbered and glorified with the Father and the Son” (cf. “De Spiritu Sancto”: SC 17bis, 348). Because of this, Basil is one of the great Fathers that formulated the doctrine of the Trinity: one God, because he is love, he is God in three persons, who form the most profound unity in existence, divine unity.

In his love for Christ and his Gospel, the great Cappadocian also worked to heal the divisions within the Church (cf. Letters 70 and 243), working so that all might be converted to Christ and his word (cf. “De Iudicio” 4: PG 31,660b-661a), a unifying force, which all believers must obey (cf. ibid. 1-3: PG 31,653a-656c).

In conclusion, Basil spent himself completely in faithful service to the Church in his multifaceted episcopal ministry. According to the program laid out by him, he became “apostle and minister of Christ, dispenser of the mysteries of God, herald of the kingdom, model and rule of piety, eye of the body of the Church, pastor of Christ’s sheep, merciful physician, father and nurturer, cooperator with God, God’s farmer and builder of God’s temple” (cf. “Moralia” 80: 11-20: PG 31: 864b-868b).

This is the program that the holy bishop gives to those who proclaim the word — yesterday like today — a program that he himself generously put into practice. In 379, Basil, not yet 50 years old, consumed by hard work and asceticism, returned to God, “in the hope of eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ” (“On Baptism” 1,2,9). He was a man who truly lived with his gaze fixed on Christ, a man of love for his neighbor. Full of the hope and the joy of faith, Basil shows us how to be real Christians.

See also Zenit’s news coverage.

Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at BU, wrote an excellent review of Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King. Some outtakes…

In the New Testament, Judas Iscariot is a Satan-possessed traitor who turns Jesus in for 30 pieces of silver; the other disciples are the heroic founders of the church. In the topsy-turvy Gospel of Judas, branded heretical in A.D. 180 by the church father Irenaeus, the disciples play the goats and Judas the hero. The other disciples, who go by the ganglandish name “the 12,” are murderers and fools. Judas is Jesus’ closest confidante, the one man who truly understands “the mysteries which are beyond the world and the things which will occur at the end.” …

I prefer to take my religious history free from demands for contemporary relevance, so whenever someone in the historical-Jesus fraternity makes Jesus mutter moral maxims that might as easily have been uttered by President Bush or Oprah Winfrey, my anachronism antenna goes up. In this case, Pagels and King massage the multicultural sensibilities of their readers by opining that the Gospel of Judas represents a “sharp, dissenting voice” against the “single, static, universal system of beliefs” of official Christianity. Preaching to the “spiritual but not religious” choir, they tell us that, like other noncanonical texts they have championed elsewhere, this gospel aims to “encourage believers to seek God within themselves, with no mention of churches, much less of clergy.” …

Although Pagels and King attend with care to the ironies of a text that both attacks Christian martyrdom and sets Judas up as the first Christian martyr, they are less effective in dealing with the most disturbing feature of this gospel: Jesus’ sarcastic laughter. In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus laughs no fewer than four times. He laughs not with his disciples but at them — for worshiping incorrectly and for misunderstanding his teachings. “Teacher, why are you laughing at us?” Judas asks. Good question. Pagels and King devote scant attention to it, responding simply that this laughter is intended to spur Jesus’ disciples on to “higher spiritual vision.” To me, however, it just sounds mean-spirited, turning Jesus into the sort of person you wouldn’t like, much less worship.

The Gospel of Judas will have its champions, not least Pagels and King, who laud its hero for inspiring a text that makes early Christianity look like contemporary American religion — more pluralistic, more wild and more contested than most imagine. But this gospel is not long for the world, or at least the American corner of it. Most Americans will rightly prefer Luke’s Jesus, whose heart breaks over the oppression of women and the poor, to a smart-aleck Jesus who guffaws at the stupidity of his listeners. America is supposed to be a happy place. Americans want their Jesus to channel Paula Abdul rather than Simon Cowell, Dorothy rather than the Wicked Witch of the West.

Maureen gives us a new translation of a poem by Elpis, the wife of Boethius.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review reviews Adam H. Becker’s Fear of God And the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis And the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia.

Nisibis was home to many great lights of Syriac Christianity. The city’s theological school flourished until the province was handed over to the Persians in 363 A.D. St. Ephrem reestablished it on Roman soil at Edessa. (Hat tip on the book: Rogue Classicism.)

The Apostle Thomas is a figure of fascination for both believers and doubters. Since the Enlightenment, he’s been a sort of patron saint for the “seeing is believing” crowd. The ancient world celebrated him as the apostle of the East, the man who seeded India with a mystical Christianity and an enduring willingness for martyrdom. He is for the East what Peter and Paul are for the West. Alas, for us in the West, the story of Thomas’s apostolate remains little more than a rumor, sometimes further obscured by the New Age fascination for the heretical Gospel of Thomas. Some day I hope to draw together the story — from scriptural, historical, archeological, ritual, and legendary sources. Pray that I get the opportunity. In the meantime, celebrate the feast of St. Thomas by reading these posts:

Without a Doubt

Hindu Traditions of St. Thomas

Spice and Spirit

Friends, Romans, Christians … in Ancient India?

If you’d like to learn more, try to track down a copy of this book or this one.

Last year I posted on the “evil eye” (malocchio), drawing not only from my childhood in a Sicilian-American ghetto, but also from recent scholarship on the Fathers — Chrysostom, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome, Eusebius, and Tertullian. Rabbi Ari Kahn offers a study of biblical and rabbinic sources on the same subject.

Andrew Louth of Durham is justly renowned for his many outstanding patristic studies.

Now, from my friend Vito of Youngstown, comes word of Reverend Doctor Louth viva voce on the Web. A young student of philosophy and theology — and recent convert to Orthodoxy — Daniel Greeson has posted two lectures, The Relevance of the Fathers and St. Maximus the Confessor and Modern Science. Go get ’em.