A reader of this blog, Paul Zalonski, is researching the third-century martyr St. Agatha of Sicily — the one mentioned in the First Eucharistic Prayer. Paul’s looking for liturgical, legendary, poetic, and historical texts. If you can help him out, contact him by email: paulzalonski@yahoo.com.

Mark Shuttleworth (who wrote the booklet on Theosis) sends word that Shroro: The Syriac Orthodox Christian Digest now posts its content online. Most of the material deals with the life of Syriac Orthodox believers today, as they’re dispersed throughout the world. But there’s also much good material on Christian antiquity. In the current issue, Susan Ashbrook Harvey discusses Women in the Syrian Tradition, with insights on the difference Christianity made by introducing the life of consecrated virginity. You’ll also find a good Life of St. Basil and much, much more. Most stories are accompanied by beautiful icons. Check it out.

This week we meet two of the great maternal figures of the patristic age. Yesterday, in the story of Pambo, we encountered Melania, the companion of St. Jerome. Today, July 19, is the memorial of St. Macrina, the big sister of two of the Cappadocian Fathers and three canonized saints: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Peter of Sebaste.

When she was twelve, her father had already arranged a marriage for her with a young lawyer. Her fiance died suddenly, however, and Macrina dedicated her life to virginity and the pursuit of Christian perfection. She exercised great influence over the religious training of her younger brothers. When her father died, she retired with their mother to a family estate on the River Iris, in Pontus, where they created a small monastic community. Macrina eventually became the head of this community, and she grew in renown for her holiness and spiritual wisdom. Many Christians came to seek her counsel. Shortly before her death in 379 A.D., she received a visit from her brother Gregory, who recorded their dialogues for posterity. Gregory’s Life of Macrina, available in translation at The Tertullian Project, is a must-read.

CLARIFICATION: Father Z has posted, as usual, an excellent profile of the day’s saint. He brings up a good point about the proliferation of Marcrinas in the rosters of the saints. I hope I made it clear which Macrina I’m dealing with. My headline is a curveball, since Macrina’s sainted grandma was also named Macrina. I wished only to emphasize the younger Macrina’s spiritual motherhood among the Fathers of the Church — and, of course, suggest the song “Mother Macree.”

Kevin at Biblicalia gives us a fresh translation of one of the earliest (and most knowledgable) Christian witnesses to Islam:

St. John of Damascus is a very important witness to early Islam. He was born into a priveleged family in Damascus (his grandfather had been the administrator of the city at the time the Muslims took it), and he grew up and served in the court of the caliph. He was entirely familiar with Islam (a name it did not yet possess, apparently), and thus what he has to say about it, and the context in which he places it, is of great historical importance. For one thing, this is a single chapter in his work “On Heresies,” part of his larger work, “The Fountain of Knowledge.” Thus, St. John did not consider Islam, as it was during his lifetime, to yet be a separate religion, but rather a Christian heresy. In any case, he mentions several suras of the Qur’an by name, and refers most interestingly to one which is no longer extant.

Read the text.

St. John is also the Church’s great defender of the use of images in worship. His Three Treatises on the Divine Images are passionate works, well grounded in Scripture, tradition, and common sense. An outstanding study of St. John’s life and work is Andrew Louth’s very recent St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. We cannot understand our own times if we don’t understand the ages that led us here. A far-sighted man, St. John wrote so that we would be able to understand our age, to live in it peacefully, and to evangelize. We have a duty to study St. John of Damascus, the “last of the Fathers.” Thanks, Kevin.

Today is the memorial of St. Pambo of the Nitrian Desert, who died at age 70 around 375 A.D.

Abba Pambo is one of the ancient “athletes of prayer” known as the Desert Fathers. The movement to the Egyptian desert began with the retirement of Anthony in the late third century. Very young and heir to a merchant’s fortune, Anthony heeded the call to sell all he had, give to the poor, and follow Christ. He went to live alone, in prayer and contemplation, in the desert. But soon he attracted others, men who sought his wise counsel, men who wanted to live as he lived. And soon many men, and then women, fled to the wilderness to live as monks and hermits. It was as if a city had sprung up in the desert. Among Anthony’s noted followers was Pambo.

Like his master, Pambo won great renown for his wisdom and for the severity of his fasting. St. Athanasius, St. Melania the Elder, and Rufinus all sought his spiritual counsel. His disciples recorded (in the oral tradition of the desert) that Pambo was “like Moses, who received the image of the glory of Adam when his face shone. His face shone like lightning and he was like a king sitting on his throne.” God glorified him so, they said, that no one could gaze steadily at him. His disciples also remembered Pambo’s lapidary teachings, like, “If you have a heart, you can be saved.”

But he won as much fame for his silence as for his speech. When he first received spiritual instruction, he stopped his teacher short after just one sentence, and then left — for several months — in order to contemplate that single line.

He prayed, and he kept his hands busy with work, usually weaving baskets.

Once Pambo was summoned to the great city of Alexandria by the archbishop, Athanasius. Arriving in the city, he saw an actress and began to weep. His companions asked him the reason for his tears, and he said, “Two things make me weep: one, the loss of this woman; and the other, that I am not so concerned to please God as she is to please wicked men.”

Palladius included Pambo’s biography in his Lives of the Fathers (known as the Lausiac History):

There were many different qualities which enabled Pambo to govern his life in an upright and virtuous fashion, among which was an ability to despise both gold and silver, according to the command of the Lord, to a greater degree than anyone else. On this subject the blessed Melania told me how she had heard about his virtues from the blessed Isodore … when she first came to Alexandria from Rome. She told me that Isodore had escorted her to Pambo’s secluded cell.

“I brought to him,” she said, “some silver vessels weighing three hundred pounds, because I wanted to share some of my wealth with him. He just kept on working, weaving rushes together, and spoke quite kindly to me in a loud voice with the words ‘May God reward you.’ He then said to Origen his steward, ‘Take them and distribute them among all the brothers in Libya and the islands, for their monasteries are very poor, but don’t give anything to the Egyptians beause they live in a much richer and more fruitful region.’ I just stood there expecting some sort of blessing, or at least praise, for giving so much. He said absolutely nothing at all, so I said to him ‘There’s three hundred pounds of silver there’ to make sure he knew exactly how much it was. Again he showed absolutely no reaction, did not even take the cover off the vessels, but simply said ‘He to whom you have given these things, my daughter, does not need you to tell Him how heavy they are. If He can weigh the mountains and forests in a balance (Is 40.12) how much more likely is He to be aware of the weight of your silver! Of course, if it is me you are giving this silver to, you are correct to have stated the weight, but if to God who values the two mites [of the widow] more than all the rest (Mk 12.42), then you had better stay silent.’ And so, by the grace of God,” she said, “this is the way he shared things out, when I visited him on the mountain.

“This man of God died a short while after this. He wasn’t ill, had no pain in any part of his body, but was just finishing off a basket when he called me. He was aware of a fatal attack coming on, and said to me ‘Let me give you this basket for you to remember me by. I don’t possess anything else that I can give you.’ And when he had said this he just passed away without any fuss, commending his spirit to God. He was seventy years old. I laid his holy body out, wrapped it in linen cloths, buried him, and departed from his retreat. I shall keep that basket till the day of my death.”

Nice profile of St. Ambrose’s sister, St. Marcellina.

Kevin at Biblicalia has been experiencing major technical difficulties. But, he says, all is well now, and the database seems to have experienced a complete healing. So if you’ve tried to visit his blog, only to experience the Screen of Death, try again.

You’ll be glad you did. Kevin brings us glad tidings of Migne’s Patrologia Gracae and Patrologia Latina now available in digital format — just images for now, but XML is soon to come. In the same post, Kevin also gives us a glimpse of his deepest aspirations for his blog and for the worldwide, webwide work of translating the Fathers.

In an email, Kevin revealed what his next translation will be. But this time I’ll resist the temptation to spill the beans (as I did on poor Brad Haas earlier this year). All I can say is it’s timely, and it’s something lots of folks want to see. In fact, one of my college buddies asked me about it this very weekend. Keep checking Biblicalia. You won’t be disappointed. If the new translation isn’t up, you can feast awhile on St. Issac of Syria.

Rogue Classicism reports on a gigantic head of Nero found in Chichester, England. At least some scholars think it’s Nero. It came from a monumental statue raised around the time of Nero’s reign. But at some point soon afterward it was so badly defaced (literally) as to be rendered unrecognizable. Yep, that would be Nero.

Leave it to journalists to summarize a man’s life in such a concise way. The London Observer described Nero as “a psychopathic, debauched, wife-beating matricide.”

We continue our series on history, encouraged by this praise from the venerable historian and bestselling author Thomas Reeves: “I have been speaking and writing about the study of history for more than forty years. But I have nothing at hand that is superior to the three selections you have chosen. Congratulations.” Tom blogs at History News Network. I hope you’ll visit him today.

The fourth installment in our series is the most profound meditation I’ve encountered on the problems of modern Christian history. “Things Hidden Since the Beginning of the World,” by James Hitchock of St. Louis University, first appeared in the July/August 2002 issue of Touchstone magazine. It is a synthesis of the thought of many great twentieth-century Christian historians, theologians, and philosophers of history — Christopher Dawson, Jacques Maritain, Jean Danielou, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Martin D’Arcy, and Herbert Butterfield, to name just a few. (It’s also a mild spanking of Lord Acton.) Hitchcock’s argument is as intricately woven as a tapestry, and so I’ve found it impossible to reduce to representative quotations, as I’ve done with the other essays in this series. But I can’t resist giving you a few appetizers, knowing that they’ll make the feast irresistible to you.

[T]he disappearance of “Christian history” in the past thirty years, while justified as a sign of a new intellectual maturity, was in fact the opposite — a panicky impulse motivated by insecurity before the larger secular culture.

The ideal of historical “objectivity,” first formulated by the “scientific” historians of the nineteenth century, was always misleading, in that such objectivity, implying the complete absence of personal feeling on the part of the scholar, would be possible only with respect to subjects that the scholar found uninteresting, even perhaps trivial. Almost by definition, an interesting and important subject calls forth a personal response from anyone who approaches it…

On one level, “Christian history” proceeds from what Jacques Maritain called connatural knowledge — the understanding of his subject that a scholar possesses by virtue of its being in some sense a part of himself. Maritain noted that, whereas a scientist is wholly detached from the physical world that he studies, a historian approaches his human subject in terms of his entire personal disposition. Great works on religious history have been written by nonbelievers, but they are required to make a prodigious imaginative leap in order to do justice to their subjects, whereas for the believer, there is an immediate sympathetic comprehension of even the subtlest dimensions of religious history.

Thus, all things being equal, the believing historian should be a better student of religious phenomena, able to penetrate its inner meaning more profoundly…

Nevertheless, Hitchcock cautions:

A peculiar temptation for believing scholars (Hilaire Belloc, for example) is to deduce reality from their principles instead of studying the empirical evidence, a habit that more than once has embarrassed Christians when a secular scholar discovers inconvenient information that the believer had neglected…

Rather, faith allows the historian to approach his subject with a certain serenity, as capable as any nonbeliever of being shocked and appalled at “man’s inhumanity to man” but ultimately hopeful nonetheless. As Butterfield said, history is indeed the war of good against evil, but the exact progress of that war is hidden from human eyes.

And among his conclusions:

If evil produces good, although such production is often hidden from human eyes, the ironic view of history that Christians must espouse shows also that good produces evil. To deny this is not to defend the orthodox doctrine of providence but the reverse — a heterodox denial of the reality of human sinfulness, which is able to pervert the most sublime truths into pernicious errors. Drawing on the parable of the wheat and the tares, Maritain recalled, as all historically minded Christians must, that good and evil exist together in the world, and there is a constant double movement, both upwards and downwards. The work of redemption proceeds only slowly, against the inertia of human affairs.

Belief in human freedom finally provides as satisfactory an explanation of evil as men will ever achieve. Most of the moral evil in history can be explained in those terms, in God’s mysterious willingness to grant this freedom and permit its full exercise, even when it is used to thwart the divine plan. As Maritain said, God’s eternal plan operates in such a way as to anticipate these human failings. Butterfield saw the action of God in history as like a composer masterfully revising his music to overcome the inadequacies of the orchestra that plays it…

Belief in providence is once again crucial. History has meaning because Christians know that God chose to reveal himself through history and that his providence works through history. Thus, even though believers cannot understand exactly how this occurs, they cannot dismiss history as unimportant. As Danielou pointed out, divine revelation reveals little about the inner nature of God; it mainly reveals his actions in history.

The Incarnation itself validates history, as the eternal descends into the temporal, and men have no way of working out their salvation except in this life. If history were solely the story of the saints, it would already be infinitely valuable. But its value lies also in the story it tells of sinners, of the entire great drama of human life.

And this:

The fact that history is problematical for Christians is also seen in the fact that, as Danielou pointed out, there can be no “progress” beyond Christ. If Christ were merely a historical figure, he would then bring history to an end. However, he is also an eternal being whose reality permeates time, giving profound meaning to history, but a meaning that is hidden from the eyes of the historian. To D’Arcy, therefore, history is actually a kind of continuous present, although it does not seem that way to human experience.

As Dawson observed, the Christian approach to history is also perplexing to the secular mind because it is not completely linear, as all history is now assumed to be, but focuses around a central date—the coming of Christ—from which time is reckoned both forwards and backwards.

Well, I said I wasn’t going to excerpt much, and look what I’ve done! God forgive me. Dr. Hitchcock forgive me. I couldn’t help myself. It’s all too good. And just wait till you read the material I didn’t reproduce here. Please read the rest now.

In the same issue of Touchstone appeared an essay titled “You Have Been Brought Near”, by R.R. Reno. It’s another one you must read in its entirety, but especially the section titled “Biblical Time & History.”

I certainly hope you’re a Touchstone subscriber. If not, what are you thinking?

Again, this is the fourth in a series of reflections on history by historians. Previous installments featured works by Victor Davis Hanson, David McCullogh, and Rabbi Ken Spiro.

The beginnings of Syriac Christianity are mostly lost in the mists of time, but among the first figures to emerge from the fog is St. James of Nisibis, whose feast is July 15 on the Roman calendar. James was a renowned ascetic who spent his youth living a severe regimen in the mountains of Kurdistan. By popular demand he was summoned to become the first (or second) bishop of Nisibis, in northeastern Mesopotamia, and he served during a period of great cultural change, from 309 until his death in 338. Among his notable accomplishments was the spiritual formation of St. Ephrem, whom James ordained a deacon. James took part in in the Council of Nicaea in 325; and, according to one history, he later distinguished himself by raising a prayer for the death of Arius, the arch-heretic — a prayer that was rather suddenly fulfilled. The Christians of Nisibis also credit James’s supplication for their protection against the advances of the Persian emperor Shapur II. For this last accomplishment he was called the “Moses of Mesopotamia.” He is among the most beloved saints of the churches of the Syriac and Armenian traditions.

The local Church saw tremendous growth under James’s leadership; and he accommodated it by establishing an excellent catechetical school and building a great basilica, whose ruins survived into modern times. It is said that he led the first Christian expedition in search of Noah’s ark, setting the long-ago precedent for very recent newsmakers. James never reached the summit of Mount Ararat; he was too old to finish the climb; but legend has it that an angel retrieved him a piece of the ark as a consolation prize.

The Syriac Fathers are too much neglected in the West. We have a duty to remedy our ignorance, if we’re to be truly catholic. Of course, there are books aplenty to help us in this pleasant task. Hubertus Drobner’s massive manual of patrology — which is due out in English any day now — includes a respectable section on the Syriac Fathers. Jesuit Father Robert Murray’s Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition is pricey, but worth it. An affordable and accessible introduction is Sebastian Brock’s Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life.