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Ben on Ben

Pope Benedict has gone back to the Fathers. Here’s the audience for April 9, on the Holy Father’s ancient namesake.

Teresa Benedetta translates:

Dear brothers and sisters,

I wish to speak today about St. Benedict, founder of Western monasticism, and also the Patron of my pontificate.

I will begin with a statement by St. Gregory the Great, who wrote of St. Benedict: “The man of God who shone on this earth with so many miracles does not shine any less for the eloquence with which he knew how to present his teaching” (Dial. II, 36).

The great Pope wrote these words in 592. The sainted monk had died some 50 years earlier and was still alive in the memory of the faithful, above all, in the flourishing religious Order that he established.

St. Benedict of Norcia, with his life and his work, has exercised a fundamental influence on the development of European civilization and culture.

The most important source about his life is the second book of Dialogues by St. Gregory the Great. It is not a biography in the classical sense. According to the idea of his times, the great Pope wanted to illustrate, through the concrete example of a person – of St. Benedict’s, precisely – the ascent on the slope of meditation. Thus, he gave us a model of human life as an ascent towards the peak of perfection.

St. Gregory the Great also recounts, in this book of Dialogues, many miracles performed by the saint. Even in this, he did not simply want to narrate something wondrous, but to show how God – by admonishing, aiding and even punishing man – intervenes in the concrete situations of human life.

He wanted to show that God is not a remote hypothesis situated at the origins of the world but that he is present in the life of man, of every man.

This perspective taken by the ‘biographer’ can also be explained in the general context of Pope Gregory’s time: on the cusp of the fifth adn 6th centuries, the world was involved in a tremendous crisis of values and institutions caused by the fall of the Roman Empire, the invasion of new peoples and the decadence of customs.

By presenting St. Benedict as a ‘luminous star’, Gregory wished to show – in that grave situation, right here in the city of Rome – a way out of the ‘dark night of history’ (cfr John Paul II, Teachings, II/1, 1979, p. 1158).

In fact, the work of St. Benedict, particularly his Rule, proved to be the bearer of an authentic spiritual ferment, which, in the course of centuries – far beyond the confines of his native land and his time – changed the face of Europe, by inspiring, after the collapse of the political unity created by the Roman Empire, a new spiritual and cultural unity: that of the Christian faith shared by the peoples of the continent.

That is exactly how the reality we call Europe came into being.

St. Benedict is thought to have been born around 480, and according to St. Gregory, he came “ex provincia Nursiae” – out of the region of Nursia. His well-to-do parents sent him to Rome to be educated.

St. Gregory points out quite credibly that the young Benedict found the lifestyle of many of his schoolmates distasteful – they lived dissolutely, and he did not wish to make the same mistakes. He wanted ‘to please God only’: “soli Deo placere desiderans” (II Dial., Prol 1).

Therefore, before he could complete his studies, Benedict left Rome and retreated to the solitude of the mountains east of the city. After first staying in a village called Effide (today Affile), where he was associated for some time weith a ‘religious community’ of monks, he became a hermit in nearby Subiaco.

He lived there for three years competely alone in a cave, which since the High Middle Ages, has been the heart of the Benedictine monastery called Sacro Speco.

Benedict’s time in Subiaco, a time of solitude with God, was for him a time of maturation. Here he had to bear and overcome the three basic temptations to every human being: the temptation of self-assertion and the desire to place oneself at the center of things; the temptation of the senses; and finally, the temptation of anger and revenge.

In fact, Benedict was convinced that it was only after having conquered these temptations that he would be able to say anything useful to others who were in need.

Thus, with his soul becalmed, he became able to fully control the impulses of the ego to become a man who could create peace around him. It was only then that he decided to found his first monasteries in the Anio valley, near Subiaco.

In 529, Benedict left Subiaco to establish himself in Montecassino. Some have interpreted his move as a flight from the intrigues of an envious local prelate. But this has been shown to be unconvincing since the prelate’s sudden death did not cuase Benedict to return (II Dial. 8).

In fact, his decision came about because he had entered a new phase of interior maturation and of his monastic experience. According to Gregory the Great, Benedict’s transfer from the remote Anio valley to Monte Cassino – a height which dominates the surrounding plains and is visible from afar – had a symbolic nature: that a hidden monastic life has its reasons, but that a monastery also has a public purpose for the life of the Church and of society – it should give visibility to faith as a force of life.

In fact, when, on March 21, 547, Beneict’s earthly existence ended, he left – with his Rule and the Benedictine family he founded – a patrimony which has borne fruit throughout the world in the centuries that followed, to the present time.

In the entire second book of Dialogs, St. Gregory shows us how the life of St. Benedict was immersed in prayer, the defining foundation of his existence. Without prayer, there is no experience of God.

But Benedict’s spirituality was not an interiority remote from reality. In the unease and confusion of his time, he lived under the eye of God, and thus, he never lost sight of the duties of daily life and of man with his concrete needs.

Seeing God, he understood the reality of man and his mission. In his Rule, he desscribed monastic life as “a school in the service of the Lord” (Prol. 5) and asked his monks “not to place anything ahead of the Work of God” (that is, the Divine Office and the Liturgy of the Hours)(43,3).

But he underscored that prayer is, in the first place, an act of listening to God (Prol 9-11), which must then be translated into concrete action.

“The Lord expects us to respond daily with deeds to his holy teachings”, he says (Prol. 35). Thus, the life of a monk becomes a fruitful symbiosis between action and contemplation “so that God may be glorified in everything” (57,9).

In contrast to facile, egocentric self-realization, which is often exalted today, the first and irrenuciable commitment of a disciple of St. Benedict is the sincere quest for God (58,7) along the humble and obedient way shown by Christ (5,13), to whose love nothing and no one should come ahead (4,21; 72,11), thus becoming, in the service of others, a man of service and peace.

In the exercise of obedience as an act of faith inspired by love (5,2), the monk achieves humility (5,1), to which the Rule devotes an entire chapter (7). In this way, man conforms ever more to Christ and attains true self-realization as a creature in the image and likeness of God.

To the obedience of the disciple must correspond the wisdon of the Abbot, who, in the monastery, ‘takes the place of Christ’ (2,2; 63,13). His figure, described above all in the second chapter of the Rule, with a profile of spiritual beauty and demanding commitment, could be considered a self-portrait of Benedict since, as Gregory the Great writes – “the Saint could not teach what he himself had not lived” (Dial II,6).

The Abbot should be a tender father as well as a severe teacher (2,24), a true educator. Inflexible against vices, he is called above all to imitate the kindness of the Good Shpeherd (27,8), and “to help rather than to dominate” (64,8), “to emphasize more with deeds than with words everything that is good and holy” and to “illustrate the divine commandments with his example” (2,12).

In order to be able to decide ressponsibly, the Abbot should himself listen to “the advice of his brothers” (3,2), because “often God reveals the best solution to the youngest” (3,3). This disposition makes a Rule written almost 15 centuries ago surprisingly modern! A man with public responsibility, even in small circles, should always know how to listen and to learn from what he hears.

Benedict describes the Rule as “minimal, intended only as a beginning”(73,8). In fact, it offers instructions useful not only to monks, but to all those who seek a guide in their way towards God.

Because of its measured perspective, its humanity and its sober discernment between the essential and the secondary in spiritual life, the Rule has been able to maintain its illuminating power up to our day.

Paul VI, proclaiming St. Benedict a Patron of Europe on October 22, 1964, wished thereby t oacknowledge the marvelous work carried out by the Saint through his Rule towards the formation of European civilization and culture.

Europe today – just emerging from a century profoundly wounded by two world wars and the collapse of major ideologies that proved to be tragic utopias – is in search of its identity.

To create a new and lasting unity, political, economic and juridical instruments are certainly important, but an ethical and spiritual renewal drawing from the Christian roots of the continent must also be inspired, otherwise Europe cannot be reconstructed.

Without this vital lymph, man remains exposed to the danger of falling to the ancient temptation of self-redemption – a utopia which caused, in various ways during the 20th century, as John Paul II pointed out, “an unprecedented regression in the tormented history of mankind” (Teachings, XIII/1, 1990, p. 58).

In seeking true progress, let us heed the Rule of St. Benedict even today as a light for our way. The great monk remains a true teacher in whose school we can learn the art of living true humanism.

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Blood of the Martyrs, Stage of the Pop Stars

The London Independent reports: After 1,500 years as a ruin, gladiators’ stadium to be restored:

It still bears its thrilling ancient name, and the antique ruins on the Palatine Hill, the heart of ancient Rome and home of the Caesars, still gaze down upon it. But now it takes a feat of the imagination to see Circus Maximus as it must have been in its pomp.

Today it is little more than a long, narrow park, 340 metres in length, with a small archeological dig fitfully in progress at its south-eastern end. It can still hold a crowd: Genesis played a free concert here last year, and Bob Geldof persuaded Rome’s mayor, Walter Veltroni, to let him use it for the Italian leg of the Live-8 spectacular in 2005. The rest of the time it is the haunt of dog-walkers, joggers and the occasional conceptual artist.

But 2,000 years ago this was the most exciting spot in the city. Long before the building of the Colosseum, crowds in their hundreds of thousands packed the stands to watch 12 teams of charioteers scorch the earth. Gladiators and wild animals fought in mortal combat, and the central arena was often flooded so miniature triremes could battle it out for the Romans’ delight. If a particularly large number of people had to be crucified, Circus Maximus was the obvious place to do it.

The strip’s last big show was in AD549. Then the Barbarians arrived and laid it to waste, and for the next millenium and a half it was no more than a very large allotment with a fancy name.

But now, after the centuries of neglect and years of debate and campaigning, Circus Maximus is finally to get some attention. Beginning on 20 June, the city’s archeological authorities are to begin a careful and respectful restoration.

Eugenio La Rocca, Superintendent of Rome and lecturere in archeology at Rome’s Sapienza University, said: “We are trying to realise the old dreams that Rome has maintained from the 19th century up to the present. We will do our best to restore this site, which was of the utmost importance in our history.

“[Emperor] Tarquin drained the site 2,500 years ago, but it was Julius Caesar in 46 BC who erected the first buildings here, which were consumed by fire in AD64. With the Emperor Trajan, the performances began to assume the wondrous proportions that we only know today from films.”

Professor La Rocca stressed that he will not be attempting to restore the Circus to its former glory…. [There’s more.]

Meanwhile, this (not quite sympathetic) article gives a little background on the early Christians’ opinions about the Circus:

Not surprisingly, later Christian writers inveighed against the Circus, convinced that it was the devil’s playground, although, to be sure, it was criticized less than the gladiatorial games or the theater. In De Spectaculis, Tertullian writes (c.AD 200) with the fervor of the converted that the very attraction of the Circus is what makes it so damnable.

“Seeing then that madness is forbidden us, we keep ourselves from every public spectacle–including the circus, where madness of its own right rules. Look at the populace coming to the show–mad already! disorderly, blind, excited already about its bets!….Next taunts or mutual abuse without any warrant of hate, and applause, unsupported by affection….they are plunged in grief by another’s bad luck, high in delight at another’s success. What they long to see, what they dread to see,–neither has anything to do with them; their love is without reason, their hatred without justice” (XVI).

Three-hundred years later, Cassiodorus, in his Variae, is just as adamant.

“However, this I declare to be altogether remarkable: the fact that here, more than at other shows, dignity is forgotten, and men’s minds are carried away in frenzy. The Green chariot wins: a section of the people laments; the Blue leads, and, in their place, a part of the city is struck with grief. They hurl frantic insults, and achieve nothing; they suffer nothing, but are gravely wounded; and they engage in vain quarrels as if the state of their endangered country were in question. It is right to think that all this was dedicated to a mass superstition, when there is so clear a departure from decent behaviour (III.51.11-12).”

Ironically, in their condemnation of the Circus, the Christian apologists provide many details about it that otherwise would be unknown. Tertullian (VIII-IX) asserts that the eggs are symbolic of Castor and Pollux, twins born from Leda’s egg; the dolphins, considered by the Romans to be the fastest of creatures, in honor of Neptune, who was patron of the equestrian order and of horses and riders. The chariots are dedicated to the pagan gods: the biga to the Moon, the quadriga to the Sun, and the seiugis to Jupiter. The Whites and Reds represented winter and summer, and were dedicated to Zephyrs and Mars, as the Greens were to the earth (spring), and the Blues to the sky or sea (autumn).

Cassiodorus writes of stewards who ride out to announce the beginning of a race, the white break line, and the spina that divided the track. He also relates the origin of the mappa used to signal the start of the race: Once, when Nero had taken too long at lunch and the crowd grew restive, he threw out his napkin from the royal box to signify that he had finished and the games could begin. Cassiodorus is the last to speak of chariot racing in the west.

A century earlier, Rome had fallen to the barbarians, and increasing political instability led to more factional violence. After AD 541, no more consuls were appointed (they could no longer afford the honor in any event) and the burden of sponsoring the races fell to the emperor. But there were other demands on the imperial purse, and the last race in the Circus Maximus is recorded by Procopius to have occurred in AD 550 (Gothic Wars, III.37).

For a thousand years, horses had raced at Rome.

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Archeological Hope

If you need to boost your hopes of archeological discoveries some day filling in early Christianity’s documentary gaps, just read the news from the last few days:

The Prague Post looks back on 50 Years of Czech Egyptology and ends with a hopeful look forward, based on new excavations in the Black desert, “a virgin area archaeologically,” “where Paleolithic tools lie alongside early Christian settlements.” Said one archeologist: “When faced with this ancient and glorious civilization and the possibilities that it still offers for research today, one can’t help but feel humble. All our achievements, however great they seem to us, will one day be surpassed.”

The Jerusalem Post announces “A 2,000-year old Roman city will rise again in Tiberias as part of a new archeological park.” The remains include a large Byzantine basilica. (Who knows what’s still undergound?)

Jim Davila brings us Turkish coverage of another ancient monastery still in business: Mor Jacob, built in A.D. 419. (Just wait till they clean the attic.)

The New York Times is worrying over the Appian Way, whose roadside properties were among the earliest Roman spaces to be Christianized. (It’s the Vandals again.)

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Mary, the First Disciple

Amy Welborn‘s new book, Mary and the Christian Life: Scriptural Reflections on the First Disciple, is out. And I must say (as I said on the back cover):

Profound yet simple — and impossible to put down — this book draws God’s children into the life of our mother. All the doctrine is there, and all the history, but it’s borne along by stories from the lives of the saints and sketches from the Church’s many traditions of worship and art, music and poetry. This is a family album for Christians to treasure. Buy a copy for yourself and one for lending. You’ll want to discuss every chapter with a friend.

I like a book that leans on the Fathers.

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Chrysostom and the Mysteries of Marriage

The following is adapted from a talk I gave last September to the Youngstown, Ohio, chapter of the Society of St. John Chrysostom. It was the cover story in January’s edition of Touchstone Magazine.

If you run a Google search on the terms “John Chrysostom” and “sex,” you’ll soon find a mess of conflicting statements. Part of the problem is with the saint’s interpreters, and part of it is with his own voluminous writings — some 700 sermons, 246 letters, plus biblical commentaries, moral discourses, and theological treatises.

When a man publishes so many thousands of words, an industrious enemy can pull together enough strands to make a strong rope for his hanging. And on the subject of marriage, John made it easy for his enemies. Indeed, his paper trail is so ambiguous as to seem bipolar.

On the one hand, when libertines want to caricature Christian teaching, they inevitably quote Chrysostom. One anti-Christian website condemns him as the archvillain among “the Fathers of the Dark Age,” pronouncing him guilty of an “anti-sex, prudish, kill-joy morality.” Another site produces this gem from one of John’s homilies: “It does not profit a man to marry. For what is a woman but an enemy of friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a domestic danger, delectable mischief, a fault in nature, painted with beautiful colors?”

The sexologist Havelock Ellis judged John to be more than a little repressed. And even so great an historian as Peter Brown found Chrysostom’s vision of sexuality to be “anxious” and “bleak.”

Yet John is the Father most invoked by those who wish to exalt the Christian vision of marriage. The Orthodox theologian Vigen Guroian speaks of “Chrysostom’s virtually unique contribution” to a positive Christian understanding of family life. He quotes John’s famous description of love-making: “How do they become one flesh?” John asks. “As if she were gold receiving purest gold, the woman receives the man’s seed with rich pleasure, and within her it is nourished, cherished, and refined. It is mingled with her own substance and she then returns it as a child!”

A necessary evil … gold receiving gold . . . How do we reconcile these two sides of Chrysostom? Do we dismiss him as a hypocrite or a clericalist who held married people to a lower standard than monks?

No. Both quotations — the harangue and the poetry — make sense in the context of John’s life.

St. John was born in Antioch around 349 A.D. His father, a high-ranking civil servant named Secundus died shortly after his birth, leaving his wife Anthousa a widow at age twenty. She could have remarried, but she chose to follow the biblical counsel “to the unmarried and the widows . . . to remain single” (1 Cor 7:8), enrolling in the Church’s order of widows and committing herself to a life of prayer, continence, and service.

Anthousa’s piety made a deep impression on young John. He also lived with an aunt, Sabiniana, who served the Church of Antioch as a deaconess. Her contemporaries tell us that she “conversed intimately with God.” Needless to say, John grew up in an unusual, almost monastic household.

He seemed destined to be a civil servant like his father, but after graduation he and a friend decided to form a “brotherhood,” a household sharing a common life of voluntary poverty, prayer, and contemplation. They had gone far with their plans when John broke the news to his mother.

And she hit the roof. She begged him not to make her a widow all over again. He could not resist her pleading, so he agreed to pursue his life of renunciation at home. He adopted the dress of monks, a coarse, sleeveless garment, took up Scripture study under a renowned master, and applied himself in service to the bishop of Antioch.

After three years, he managed to break free and join the solitaries in the wilderness nearby. He read the Scriptures for hours each day until he had memorized entire books.

He lived in a cave by himself. He did not permit himself to lie down, by day or night. He slept hardly at all, and went without protection from the heat and cold. His diet was wretched. So zealous was he that he continued even after his health began to fail. After two years, he could go on no longer. He needed medical care. So he returned, disappointed, to the city.

About this time, one of his fellows in the ascetic life, Theodore, began having second thoughts. His folks needed him to run the family business. And there was a young woman beckoning, too. Her name was Hermione. He erased his name from the rolls of the brotherhood, and went home.

The situation demanded a response from John, and respond he did. His response has come down to us with the title Letter to Theodore After His Fall. We have it in two parts, totaling 24,000 words — the words of a furious man shaking his friend by the lapels.

It is an evil thing to wed a very poor wife, or a very rich one; for the former is injurious to the husband’s means, the latter to his authority and independence. It is a grievous thing to have children, still more grievous not to have any. . . . Is this then life, Theodore, when one’s soul is distracted in so many directions, when a man has to serve so many, to live for so many, and never for himself?

The rhetoric heats up and boils over, as John tries to show the transitory nature of bodily beauty, and the grossness of its constituent parts. Hermione may be beautiful, but “the groundwork of this bodily beauty is nothing but phlegm, blood, rheum, bile, and the fluid of digested food.” Consider, he continues, “what is stored inside those beautiful eyes, that straight nose, and the mouth and cheeks, and you will affirm the well-shaped body to be nothing but a whited sepulchre; the parts within are full of so much uncleanness.”

John goes on to compare such illusory and passing beauty with the true and lasting beauty of the soul of a monk steeped in prayer. Needless to say, the earthly beauty comes up the loser.

He is careful to acknowledge that marriage is an honorable estate, citing Hebrews 13:4, but insists it cannot be honorable for Theodore. “It is no longer possible for you to observe the right conditions of marriage. For if he who has been attached to a heavenly bridegroom deserts him and joins himself to a wife, the act is . . . worse than adultery in proportion as God is greater than man.”

For these passages, John has been vilified by secularists, feminists, and hedonists. But I’d like to plead his case. John was, after all, operating in crisis mode. His friend had already gone back on a lifelong commitment, checked himself out of the holy brotherhood. Theodore was breaking a promise he had made to God. John recognized this as an emergency demanding forceful intervention.

So he used his rhetoric the way some men might use their muscles. And he succeeded in talking Theodore back to the brotherhood. Theodore would go on to become one of the most influential theologians in antiquity, the celebrated theologian-bishop of Mopsuestia.

We should also recognize that John probably had, at this point, only the remotest experience of normal family life — mom, dad, and kids. His father died when he was an infant and his mother’s household was practically monastic. From this extraordinary upbringing, he proceeded to an even greater remove as he joined the mountain solitaries.

I am not saying that John’s upbringing was warped or harmful, nor am I sneering at his formation by the hermits. Both periods gave him the discipline he would need to withstand the hardships of his later life. But they were unusual circumstances, and they hardly equipped him for a realistic view of domestic life.

But that, too, would come with time.

John wrote his negative statements about marriage when he was young and inexperienced. As he emerged from relative isolation and entered the bustling life of the Church of Antioch, however, he encountered many families, real families, ordinary families, Christian families. He shared their life. He counseled them.

And he grew to appreciate marriage not as a mere concession to weakness, or a second-class citizenship in the Church, but as a distinct vocation from God and a path to holiness. Even more, he came to see it as a powerful image of God in the world: a sacrament of God.

But, again, that came only with time and experience. In 381 he was ordained a deacon and licensed to preach. It was then that he earned the nickname Chrysostom (Golden Mouth), as he drew enormous crowds to church. After five years as a deacon, he was ordained to the priesthood.

Another several years passed before John preached the first of the sermons in which we find his mature teaching on marriage: his homilies on First Corinthians. A few years later, he would return to the same themes in his homilies on Ephesians and Colossians and his sermons on vainglory. That first decade of his priesthood was a time of intense pastoral work in the second city of the empire. In a moving expression of his love, he told his congregation: “I know no other life but you and the care of souls.” And what did he learn from all that work with all those souls? “There is nothing that so welds our life together as the love of a man and his wife.” “There is nothing in the world sweeter for a man than having children and a wife.”

In that first decade of priesthood, John had come to the see that Christian marriage was as much a divine vocation as Syrian monasticism — and that Christian perfection was, by God’s grace, attainable in marriage. Indeed, he laments to his people “that you think that monks are the only persons properly concerned with decency and chastity.”

In the strongest terms, he assures his congregation that their calling is nothing less than perfection. He says: “If the beatitudes were spoken only to solitaries, and the secular person cannot fulfill them, yet [Jesus] permitted marriage anyway — then all things have perished, and Christian virtue is boxed in.” But that cannot be true, and so he continues: “If persons have been hindered by their marriage state, let them know that marriage is not the hindrance, but rather their intentions, which made an ill use of marriage.”

What caused John’s change of heart? Had he grown worldly, as pastors sometimes do, concerned as they are with budgets and leaky roofs? No. For we’re told that he continued to live by all the monastic disciplines, including fairly rigorous fasting, and that he always took his meager meals alone.

I believe that John grew deeper in his appreciation for marriage as he grew in the work of Christian initiation — as he taught group after group of new Christians to appreciate the radical transformation God was working in their lives. In a city like Antioch in the late fourth century, a pastor could prepare hundreds of adult converts every year. He would lead them to the mysteries, and he would tell them of the mysteries. In baptism God would give them new eyes of faith, and John would teach them to open those eyes.

This is what the Church calls mystagogy: the doctrine of the mysteries, guidance in things hidden since the foundation of the world (see Mt 13:35), often, in the ancient Church, in daily homilies throughout the eight days after Easter that revealed doctrines that had, till then, been kept hidden: the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and the deifying grace of baptism.

The mystagogue guides the new Christian through the external, material appearances to grasp the unseen reality that is interior, spiritual, hidden, and divine. As John told his class of new Christians: “What is performed here requires faith and the eyes of the soul: we are not merely to notice what is seen, but to go from this to imagine what cannot be seen. Such is the power of the eyes of faith. . . . For faith is the capacity to attend to the invisible as if it were visible.”

A mystagogical quality pervades John’s works. We see it in his homilies on the Letter to the Hebrews and his treatise on the priesthood. And, I contend, it is the principle that gives life to his mature doctrine of marriage.

We could honestly and accurately describe it as a mystagogy of marriage. He wants us to move from the icon to the reality. Still, he insists that we must also learn to venerate the icon. “Learn the power of the type,” he says, “so that you may learn the strength of the truth.”

It is important for us to realize that John’s mature doctrine of marriage is almost unique in ancient Christianity. His contemporaries tended to look upon marriage as an institution that was passing away, as more and more Christians turned to celibacy. The best thing Jerome could say about marriage was that it produced future celibates. In Antioch in John’s day, there were 3,000 consecrated virgins and widows in a city of perhaps 250,000, and that number does not include the celibate men in brotherhoods or the hermits who filled the nearby mountains.

Yet John glorified marriage. It pained him that Christian couples continued to practice the old, obscene pagan wedding customs. So shameful were these practices that few couples dared to invite their parish priests to attend and give a blessing.

“Is the wedding then a theater?” he told them in a sermon. “It is a sacrament, a mystery, and a model of the Church of Christ. . . . They dance at pagan ceremonies; but at ours, silence and decorum should prevail, respect and modesty. Here a great mystery is accomplished.”

This is the language of mystagogy. John is guiding us through the mystery of marriage.

His mystagogy of marriage was unusual in his day, but it had deep biblical roots. John grounded his doctrine firmly in St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 5:31-32: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.”

Paul is drawing from the first chapters of Genesis. Indeed, any preacher who memorized most of the Scriptures, as John did, would notice that marriage is a dominant theme in both the Old and New Testaments. The Bible begins with a wedding — of Adam and Eve — and ends with a wedding: the marriage supper of the Lamb. And in between, God, speaking through the Prophets, repeatedly invokes marriage as the pre-eminent symbol of his covenant.

For John, marriage is both an image of baptism, where the believer is wed to Christ, and an image of the Eucharist, which makes “one flesh” of the believer and Christ. He tells the new Christians to “Keep the marriage robe in its integrity, that with it you may enter forever into this spiritual marriage.”

Marriage, moreover, is an icon of the Trinity. “The child is a bridge connecting mother to father, so the three become one flesh. . . . And here the bridge is formed from the substance of each!” That, he continues,

is why Scripture does not say, “They shall be one flesh.” But they shall be joined together “into one flesh,” namely the child. But suppose there is no child; do they then remain two and not one? No: their intercourse effects the joining of their bodies, and they are made one, just as when perfume is mixed with ointment.

At that point, John must have looked out at a congregation full of people fanning themselves and averting their eyes, because he was moved to cry out

Why are you blushing? Leave that to the heretics and pagans, with their impure and immodest customs. For this reason I want marriage to be thoroughly purified, to bring it back again to its proper nobility. You should not be ashamed of these things. If you are ashamed, then you condemn God who made marriage. So I shall tell you how marriage is a mystery of the Church!

John did not want us to blush at the mention of married love. But, most of all, he wanted us to have no reason to blush.

Among all the ancient mystagogues, John stands out for his unique emphasis on morals. He insists that the sacraments should leave their mark on everything we do. The sacraments have consequences for every moment of every day.

Through baptism and Eucharist, we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4). John would have us, then, live our marriages purely, as Christ lives His.

And John speaks plainly. He does not care if he makes parishioners squirm. None of the Fathers preached as frankly as John did on sexual matters.

What did this mean, practically? He repeatedly condemns contraception as unworthy of Christian marriage and calls it pre-emptive murder. “Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit?” he asks.

Where there are medicines of sterility? Where there is murder before birth? Indeed, it is something worse than murder and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation. What then? Do you despise the gift of God, and fight with his law?

John saw contraception as a violation of the type, a desecration of the icon, a defiling of the sacrament. If marriage is a sacrament of God, then it should be a true communion and truly fruitful, as God is.

John also condemned adultery, domestic violence, sodomy, abortion, divorce, and other acts that are unworthy of the sacrament of Jesus Christ and His Church.

John learned to love marriage. As a celibate, he lost nothing in the bargain. For renouncing something second-rate is no big deal. But renouncing something so great as Holy Matrimony — a sign of the Trinity — in order to live with the Trinity even now as an angel in heaven, renouncing the sign in order to possess the Signified — increases the value of celibacy by orders of magnitude.

As John himself said. denigrating marriage “diminishes the glory of virginity”; and praising it “makes virginity more admirable and resplendent. What appears good only in comparison with evil would not be particularly good. It is something better than what is admitted to be good that is the most excellent good.”

Marriage cannot get any better than St. John Chrysostom, in his mature years, made it out to be. For a married man or woman to read his homilies on Colossians and Ephesians is to simultaneously be humbled and exalted. Humbled because we must confront our own sin, our own clinging to the mud of this earth. Exalted because God has lifted us up so high.

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Last of the West

Today is the memorial of St. Isidore of Seville, considered the last of the Western Fathers. His name comes up frequently (and came up recently) in these pages. He has been proposed as a patron saint for the Internet. Jeff Ziegler points us to a couple of sites.

Today is Friday of the Second Week of Easter and the optional memorial of St. Isidore of Seville, bishop and doctor of the Church, the Schoolmaster of the Middle Ages.
— St. Isidore’s Latin-language Etymologies (Origins).

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The Ministry of Piracy

I can’t dream up a patristic connection for this, but that’s probably because I can’t stop laughing. I picked it up from a longer post on pirates at the ever-fascinating blog Aliens in This World. Maureen tells us of

a French missionary, Fr. Labat, who was captured by pirates and later wrote a memoir about it. It seems that the pirate Captain Daniels had an interesting way of enforcing reverence during Mass:

“When one of his men became offensive during the Elevation and swore, Daniels shot this crew member through the head and made an oath that to any other “who showed disrespect to the ‘Sainte Sacrifice,’ he would do the same too.’”

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When the Rain Comes

A few weeks back I posted on the band Stinging Rain, describing their music as “alternative rock, with patristically informed lyrics.” Well, Stinging Rain’s full catalog is now available for digital download via MP3. All three MP3-CDs can be sampled or purchased at CD Baby. Individual songs are available — or will be available soon — from Apple iTunes and others. The band members are old friends of mine, and they do indeed know their patristics. One is doing a doctorate in theology at Fordham. Another sits with me on the board of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.

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JP2, We (Still) Love You

Today is the third anniversary of the death of Pope John Paul II; and his successor, Benedict XVI, marked the occasion with appropriate solemnity. John Paul the Great had a keen appreciation for the Fathers, which informed many documents of his pontificate. Unfortunately, only a few of his patristic-themed works have been translated into English. Here’s hoping that some enterprising patrologist will take up the task, or at least study them for a doctoral dissertation. Some samples from John Paul’s apostolic letters:

Patres Ecclesiae

Augustinum Hipponensem

On the 1700th anniversary of the “Baptism of Armenia”

A Concilio Constantinopolitano I

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Pagels Reconsidered

In the pages of the New York Sun, New Testament scholar Bruce Chilton subjected Elaine Pagels’ 1979 bestseller The Gnostic Gospels to a bright-light re-evaluation. Among his conclusions:

Ms. Pagels’s … anachronisms have undermined public understanding of early Christianity. Gnosticism proved to be the most powerful philosophical and religious movement of its time because it insisted without compromise that the only truth that matterstranscendsthiscorruptworld. Gnostics often denigrated women as creatures of corruption, condemned any disagreement with their teaching as materialist fantasy, and denied that sexuality had any place in the realm of spirit. Trying to turn this orientation into existentialism, or feminism, or an embrace of the world’s physicality, will only work with an extremely selective handling of the evidence, and deploys a laundered view of its subject … Gnosticism is a deeper and darker force than the revisionist scenario that makes it the prop of modern liberalism. After 30 years, it is time to move beyond the anachronism of The Gnostic Gospels.

He’s right, of course. Still, I have a soft spot in my heart for The Gnostic Gospels. I read it first when I was an undergrad at Penn State and it was hot off the press. The writing was so engaging — and the Nag Hammadi discovery itself was so sensational — that I undertook an independent study on gnosticism (with Gary T. Alexander, a very patient man, who’s now deputy director for academic affairs for the Illinois Board of Higher Education). It was my first exposure to Irenaeus, my first dip into patristics.

Jesuit Father Paul Mankowski, of Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, said it all very well a couple of years ago, in his brief essay The Pagels Imposture. Mankowski, who was once a boxer, took the gloves off for this round.

Hat tip on the Chilton: PaleoJudaica.