My KVSS radio interview on St. Athanasius is now available for free download. Just visit Spirit FM and scroll on down till you see the name of our man from Alexandria.

At GrailCode.com, my dear friend and co-author Chris Bailey has pointed out yet another gem from the treasury of ironies we call The Da Vinci Code. I had missed this one.

If you want the true story of the Grail, buy the book Chris and I wrote, The Grail Code. It takes you from the patristic through the medieval to the modern, with great entertainment all along the way to a profound and life-changing conclusion. OK, so I’m an enthusiast…

Like many of us, the 19th-century poet Matthew Arnold was happy that the rigorists lost the battle for the early Church — so that we sinners could have a second chance. And a third…

The Good Shepherd with the Kid

By Matthew Arnold

HE SAVES the sheep, the goats he doth not save! :
So rang Tertullian’s sentence, on the side
Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried:
‘Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,

‘Who sins, once wash’d by the baptismal wave!’
So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sigh’d,
The infant Church; of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord’s yet recent grave.

And then she smiled, and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid

Her head in ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd’s hasty image drew;
And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.

A contemporary of Ignatius and Polycarp, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus observed that some people become fearless through madness, but Christians are different. They become fearless through habit.

In his Wednesday audience talks, Pope Benedict has been unpacking a notion dear to the Fathers of the Church: the Apostolic Tradition. The talks are worth our study, especially the most recent, “The Living Gospel, Proclaimed in its Integrity” (May 3, 2006), in which he invokes characters as diverse as Tertullian of Carthage and Clement of Rome. Good stuff.

Tradition is, therefore, the living Gospel, proclaimed by the apostles in its integrity, in virtue of the plentitude of her unique and unrepeatable experience: By her work, faith is communicated to others, until it reaches us, until the end of the world. Tradition, therefore, is the history of the Spirit that acts in the history of the Church through the mediation of the Apostles and their successors, in faithful continuity with the experience of the origins.

It is what Pope St. Clement of Rome explained toward the end of the first century: “The Apostles,” he wrote, “proclaimed the Gospel to us sent by the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ was sent by God. Christ, therefore, comes from God, the Apostles from Christ: Both proceed in an orderly way from the will of God. Our Apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that disputes would arise around the episcopal function. Therefore, foreseeing the future perfectly, they established the chosen ones and ordered them that at their death other men of proven virtue assume their service” [Ad Corinthios,” 42.44: PG 1, 292.296].

This chain of service continues to our day; it will continue until the end of the world…

Read the rest at Zenit.

Spiritual writers, since the dawn of Christianity, have observed that impurity and cruelty arise as sibling vices in the soul. The elder is impurity, which reduces other people first to mere means of sensual satisfaction, and then to mere objects of sport.

It’s as true of cultures as it is of souls. Consider Rome of the late first and second century A.D. — but don’t judge by what you see in museums. Be grateful, instead, that today’s curators have some sense of decorum.

For the remains of imperial Rome could justly be rated X. The walls of Pompeii are shocking because the volcanic ash preserved them in lurid color, but their motifs are little different from those that appear on common vases, lamps, and jewelry of the time. The homes of some of the bourgeois were little different, in decoration, from the common rooms of brothels.

Families seemed unwilling or unable to preserve the innocence of children. Those who sent small boys to school assumed that the tutors would molest them. With limitless leisure time and no supervision, teenaged boys roamed the streets in gangs. They passed time in mischief, now and then assaulting a streetwalker.

Girls were married off at age 11 or 12 to a mate much older, and not of their choosing. “Friends” celebrated the wedding by singing bawdy songs. “The wedding night,” writes the French historian Paul Veyne, “took the form of legal rape.”

Marital custom meant that the newlywed girl could look forward to a predatory relationship, rife with unnatural acts, abortion and contraception. Adultery was expected of men. Infanticide was common, especially for female offspring. In one city of the empire, the census enrolled 600 families — of which only 6 had raised more than one daughter. Though most of those were large families, they had routinely killed their baby girls. In another city, a recent archeological dig turned up an ancient sewer clogged with the bones of hundreds of newborns.

But if marriage grew too miserable, at least divorce was easy. All it took was for one party to leave home with the intention of divorcing. Divorce took effect ex opere operato.

All of these mores were reflected in popular entertainment — the music business, the theatre. And when Romans tired of that sort of degradation, they flocked to the circus to see criminals tortured and killed, by beasts or by gladiators. The gladiators drew life’s blood from one another as well.

That’s the world where the first Christians raised their families. You might call it a culture of death.

Yet Christians immediately set themselves apart. They took no part in the impurity or cruelty. We have many sermons and tracts from those years, condemning the grossness of the theatre, the sickness of the circus, and the bedroom behavior of ordinary Romans. But what is more remarkable is the testimony of the pagans themselves.

The Romans were frankly astonished by the Christians, for the Christians routinely achieved something the Romans had thought impossible. Christians preached and practiced a range of virtues that involved continence — chastity, purity and even lifelong celibacy. The great pagan physician Galen wrote: “Their contempt of death is patent to us every day, and likewise their restraint in cohabitation. For they include not only men but also women who refrain from cohabiting all their lives; and they also number individuals who, in self-discipline and self-control, have attained a pitch not inferior to that of genuine philosophers.” Even most stoics, who supposedly despised human passion, believed that passions were best quelled by indulgence.

But even married Christians strove for chastity and true love. “They marry, as do all others; they beget children; but they do not commit infanticide. They share a common table, but not a common bed.”

It was Christian morality, and the evident love of Christian families, that gradually converted the Roman empire.

The brothels had exercised a certain attractive power over Rome, but those places did not satisfy. Restless pagans had indulged their cruelest blood lusts at the circus, but the circus did not satisfy.

What drew these weary citizens to the Church was the paradox evident in the family life of Christians, who were chaste, but who had found peace.

One of the many pseudo-historical howlers in Dan Brown’s pretentious potboiler is his claim that Christ’s divinity was invented by Constantine in 325 A.D. All the biblical record aside, the patristic testimonies are overwhelming. Dr. Marcellino D’Ambrosio did us the favor of cataloging the early texts at the website of the Crossroads Initiative. Catholic Answers has also posted a nice chain of early-Christian teaching.

But if you’re extremely lazy and you’d rather just look at pictures, don’t worry: God loves you, too. In fact, He arranged for an archeological dig late last year to turn up the oldest-known Christian church, and it had all its mosaics intact. One mosaic was clearly dedicated to “the God, Jesus Christ.” Visit the secular media’s news stories on the house-church at Meggido. The BBC posted pictures. You’ll find good images here, too. They’re quite beautiful — not to mention useful. Remember: with every hour that passes, another sixty suckers are born into the world, and Dan Brown probably sells another sixty books. In hardcover.

Our esteemed pastor, Father Frederick Cain — a patristic scholar himself — has the holy habit of beginning Mass on the feasts of the apostles with a rousing round of “Faith of Our Fathers.” Today, the Feast of Saints Philip and James, was one of those days.

I love the hymn, and I was much pleased when my editors at Lay Witness magazine chose it as the title of my regular patristics column. When I was a kid (the late patristic era), the hymnals carried more verses than they do today. They’re still not the original verses by its hymnographer (Faber, that other Father Frederick, who was a contemporary of Newman). But they’re grand. I post them here as a kind of anthem for this blog.

Faith of our fathers! living still
In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword;
O how our hearts beat high with joy
Whene’er we hear that glorious word!

Refrain:
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.

Our fathers, chained in prisons dark,
Were still in heart and conscience free:
And truly blest would be our fate,
If we, like them, should die for thee. [Refrain.]

Faith of our fathers! we will strive
To win all nations unto thee;
And through the truth that comes from God
Mankind shall then be truly free. [Refrain.]

Faith of our fathers! we will love
Both friend and foe in all our strife;
And preach three, too, as love knows how
By kindly words and virtuous life. [Refrain.]

I was pleased to learn, after posting yesterday, that so many others were impressed by Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity. I got a gratifying bit of mail, and a respectable amount of traffic sent here from other blogs.

Stark’s statistical analysis of the early Church bowled me over, especially his contention that Christianity grew at a rate of 40% per decade through the first 300 years. Imagine if we could replicate that, or even get halfway there, today! There must be lessons there for evangelization and for family life.

That’s what David Mills thought, anyway. David is my long-suffering editor at Touchstone. He liked the Stark interview so much that he invited me to revisit the data and draw lessons for modern Christian family life. So I did that, and Touchstone kindly published the essay as Salt of the Empire: The Role of the Christian Family in Evangelization.

Thanks to Amy Welborn for putting us onto this:

ROME (CNS) — Archaeologists repairing a Roman catacomb have discovered an unusual network of underground burial chambers containing the elegantly dressed corpses of more than 1,000 people, a Rome official said.

The rooms appear to date back to the second century and are thought to be a place of early Christian burial. Because of the large number of bodies deposited over a relatively short period, experts believe a natural disaster or epidemic may have occurred at the time.

The corpses, dressed in fine clothes embroidered with gold thread, were carefully wrapped in sheets and covered in lime. Balsamic fragrances were also applied. . .

[Raffaella Giuliani, chief inspector of the Roman catacombs] said the experts believe they were Christian burial places, in part because Christians of that time dedicated great care to burial. Early Christians buried rich and poor with great dignity, in expectation of the resurrection of the dead — a fact that helps explain the presence in Rome of more than 50 miles of underground catacombs.

Read the rest at Catholic News Service.

Tracking the growth of Christianity 2,000 years ago is an ambitious undertaking for a sociologist. But Rodney Stark found it irresistible. Reading recent histories of early Christianity, he began to do some number-crunching. Soon, he says, it was a consuming “hobby.” And, before long, he had written a best-selling book, The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

What he found in his study of the first Christian centuries was an astonishing growth rate in the number of Christians of 40 percent per decade. From a small band of twelve, the Church had grown to 6 million people by 300 A.D. Stark maintains that the Emperor Constantine did not so much ensure Christianity’s success as acknowledge it. Constantine’s edict of toleration in 313 was overdue recognition that the Church had already won the empire.

But Stark is most interested in how the West was won. Contrary to pious histories, he holds that most growth came from individual conversions, and from the merchant and upper classes rather than the poor. Contrary to secular feminist pieties, he makes the case that most converts were women, that women benefited greatly from conversion, and that women were leaders in the early Church.

He also shows the remarkable effects of charity on Church growth. Christians, he demonstrates, were much more likely to survive epidemics because they cared for one another. And the pagans who received Christian care were much more likely to become Christians. In times of epidemic, Stark says, pagan priests and doctors were among the first to leave town.

Stark’s book vividly describes the misery of ordinary citizens of the pagan world. Most lived in cramped, smoky tenements with no ventilation or plumbing. Life expectancy was around 30 years for men and perhaps much lower for women. Hygiene was minimal. Medical care was more dangerous than disease, and disease often left its victims disfigured or dead. The human body was host to countless parasites, and tenements were infested by pests. For entertainment, people thronged to the circuses to see other people mutilated and killed.

Pagan marriage was no respite. Greco-Roman women suffered in predatory relationships rife with abortion and unnatural acts. But Christian marriage was a different story. Christian husbands and wives tended to love one another, as their religion required. Their mutual affection, Stark says, and their openness to fertility led to more children, and thus to a still higher growth in converts for the early Church.

Stark demonstrates that Christian doctrine, hope and charity transformed the Roman Empire—one person at a time.

Of The Rise of Christianity, the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper said: “It is ironic yet satisfying to find sociology, so often used to attack dogmatic Christianity, now objectively confirming some of the claims that Christianity has made for itself.”

Read my Touchstone interview with Rodney Stark here.

I regularly write about the Fathers in Touchstone. You’ll find some of that work by searching Touchstone’s archive here. (Just plug in my last name: Aquilina.)

Subscribe to Touchstone here.

Happy St. Athanasius Day! Athanasius was the fourth-century Father who took on the world when, in the words of St. Jerome, “the world awoke to find itself Arian.” In his own lifetime, Athanasius was known as the Father of Orthodoxy. Get to know this guy, and you’ll always stay on the straight and narrow.

I’ll be on Spirit FM radio this morning to talk about St. Athanasius with Bruce and Kris McGregor. If you can listen online, tune in here. The McGregors are lovely people, and Spirit Morning Show is the cheeriest way to start your day. Eventually the Athanasius show will be archived here, with my other appearances on KVSS. No one is doing more to promote the Fathers via radio. You can help KVSS by donating here.

Read the works of St. Athanasius here and here.

Read his life in the old Catholic Encyclopedia here.

You’ll find a great selection of his icons here.