No matter what day your diocese is marking today, Fr. John Zuhlsdorf has posted some wonderful and timely reflections from the Fathers, St. Leo and St. Augustine.

My co-author Chris Bailey and I had a lovely time last week, talking with Bruce and Kris McGregor of KVSS radio about our book, The Grail Code. Now KVSS has posted the interview on its special Mike Aquilina Audio page, right here.

You should get to know the McGregors. No one is doing more to promote the Fathers via radio. You can help the KVSS apostolate by donating here.

This weekend, in the United States, we mark Memorial Day, an observance that honors the dead, especially those who served and died defending the country in wartime.

How did the ancients keep this holiday? Well, they didn’t, of course, since it’s a nineteenth-century innovation of American origin.

But there’s a sense in which the early Christians kept every day as a “Memorial Day.” They called the Eucharist an anamnesis, a “memorial” of Christ’s death — a God-willed remembrance through which Jesus became really present.

And they marked not only Christ’s death, but also the days of the saints who died in Christ, especially the martyrs. Very early, the Church’s calendar began to teem with feast days honoring the dead, and the living Christians gained some notoriety for their treatment of the deceased.

Cremation had long been the norm in most societies of the pagan Roman Empire. Jews, however, followed the custom of burying their dead. Christians did, too, and looked upon “Christian burial” as an expression of their faith in the resurrection of the body. Such an oddity was this practice that, in many locales, it earned Christians a derogatory nickname: “The Diggers.”

Yet the pagans also honored their dead, often with lavish funeral rites. One common component, in Greek and Roman cultures, was the funeral banquet. The empire had many laws regulating the practice of funerary societies, clubs that would guarantee a decent send-off and a festive memorial for their members. Benign local officials sometimes chose to look upon Christian churches as funerary societies, since they seemed to fulfill the same purpose.

Roman families actually hosted severals banquets to honor their recently deceased: one at the gravesite the day of the funeral; the second at the end of nine days of mourning; others on specified religious holidays; and one major banquet on the birthday of the deceased. (See the excellent discussion of these meals in Dennis E. Smith’s From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World. It’s a fascinating study, in spite of its very low-church conclusions.)

Christians adapted the ancient rites as their own — or saw no reason to abandon them completely after conversion. Like the former pagans themselves, the pagan customs were thoroughly converted — baptized, as it were, purified and rendered a new creation. One major Christian difference was in giving bodies a decent burial. This is abundantly evident in the recently discovered catacombs in Rome, where hundreds of corpses were found well dressed and placed with reverence.

Christians also kept the custom of funerary banquets. In some places they may have taken the form of an “Agape,” or love-feast, as we find recorded in the New Testament Letter of St. Jude. Another possibility is that the funeral Eucharist was observed as part of a fuller banquet, a practice we find in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (chapter 11). In some churches the funeral was certainly marked by a Eucharist at the gravesite. We have a very early record of the graveside practice, from the mid-second century, in the apocryphal Acts of John. These funerary banquets or Masses may also be the meals we find depicted on the walls of the catacombs.

By the fourth century, the gravesite celebrations — sometimes called refrigeria, or “refreshments” — had gained a reputation in some quarters as raucous, drunken affairs. This was especially true of the festivals of popular saints, where the temptation was strong to knock one back for every glass poured out as a libation. When St. Monica moved from North Africa to Italy to be near her son Augustine, the Milanese bishop, St. Ambrose, discouraged her from observing the refrigeria at all — even in a pious way.

The great liturgical scholar Joseph Jungmann noted that the earliest recorded graveside Masses were offered on the third day after the Christian’s burial. The third day — what a stunning symbolic fulfillment of our life in Christ — how beautiful, how poignant, how utterly incarnational and sacramental! Jungmann sees this custom as the ancestor of our current practice of votive Masses for the dead. And he notes times and places where various churches traditionally observed the seventh day, the ninth, the thirtieth, and the fortieth as well.

Some people see the gorgeous farewell passage in Augustine’s Confessions as a turning point in ancient attitudes. There, Monica, who had once avidly marked the refrigerium, now asks her son to remember her in the Mass. It is, they say, at this moment in history that popular sentiment had begun to turn from the rowdy festival to the solemn Mass. That’s a nice thought, but it seems contradicted by later practice, as Christians continued to mark festive banquets at gravesites throughout the era of the Fathers.

While putting down these thoughts, I had a “Christmas Carol” moment straight out of Dickens. Googling around, I landed on one of the many lovely sites devoted to the Roman catacombs. There I learned that, in the area called St. Miltiades in the Catacombs of St. Callixtus, there is a “Crypt of Refrigerium.” It is very near, the website told me, to the so-called “Cubicle of Aquilina,” which bears the inscription “Aquilina dormit in pace” (Aquilina sleeps in peace). May that inscription one day be true of me, and may it this day be true of my ancestors, whom I remember, as the holiday requires.

How very nice. The Spurgeon Archive has posted St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation in English translation with C.S. Lewis’s introduction.

There’s a hailstorm of patristic activity in Berkeley, California. Kevin at Biblicalia — who earlier today got our attention by posting the wisdom of Father Georges Florovsky — has just released his fresh translation of the first three chapters of St. Clement of Rome’s First Letter to the Corinthians. If you accept the arguments of John A.T. Robinson, Joseph Ratzinger, and Thomas Herron (out of print, but soon to be republished), you’re looking at a text written before 70 A.D.

Kevin commented here that we should be reading more of the Fathers and maybe less about them. And he’s right, of course — though some of us do need a longer ramp than others, and most of us need a much longer ramp than Kevin! But he’s going to make the reading as easy for us as he can. Never let it be said of Mr. Edgecomb and Biblicalia: “They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger” (Mt 23:4). Kevin’s moving ten fingers, for our sake, and at a rapid clip.

UPDATE: Kevin’s on a tear and has posted chapters 4-6 as well. Remember, it was a group of Californians who wrote “Life in the Fast Lane.”

Kevin at Biblicalia gives us this from Father Georges Florovsky:

When I read … the fathers of the church, I find them more relevant to the troubles and problems of my own time than the production of modern theologians … I would risk a suggestion that St. Athanasius and St. Augustine are much more up to date than many of our theological contemporaries. The reason is very simple: they were dealing with things and not with the maps, they were concerned not so much with what man can believe as with what God had done for man. We have, “in a time such as this,” to enlarge our perspective, to acknowledge the masters of old, and to attempt for our own age an existential synthesis of Christian experience.

Read the rest at Biblicalia. Kevin has posted other good material as well: his own reflections on St. Gregory Nazianzen, a passage from Lactantius on demons, and, at long last, an answer to that perennial question: Where did the Desert Fathers go to take a leak?

UPDATE: David Mills at Mere Comments offered some further reflections on Father Florovsky’s statement.

Constantius knew that envy was the leading cause of death among Roman emperors. His father, Constantine the Great, had killed both a wife and a son whom the old man suspected of scheming after the throne. And Constantine had succeeded marvelously, managing to die serenely in his bed, quite soon after baptism, at the end of a long and prosperous reign.

Constantius decided to do one better. He would strike pre-emptively and eliminate everyone in the family who might reasonably wish for the purple robe. The closer the kinship, the greater the temptation to grab for succession. Constantius murdered nine family members, including his father’s half-brother and most of the man’s children. Two small boys were spared, one of whom was a precocious child not yet six. His name was Julian.

Constantius and his brothers were not up to the standard of their illustrious father, and they soon fell into the old habit of battering each other across the Empire. Eventually Constantius emerged as the sole Emperor. Unlike his father, he was not willing to trust the consciences of his subjects. “This accursed tolerance shall cease,” he proclaimed, and he began to issue edicts against the pagans every bit as harsh as Diocletian’s had been against the Christians. In 353, he ordered all the pagan temples closed.

Instead of destroying paganism, the edicts united the remaining pagans in their implacable hatred of Christianity. The pagan philosophers, in particular, used all their arts to make the new religion seem ridiculous to their students. One of those students was young Julian, the survivor of the imperial family’s purge.

Julian was a brilliant young man. He studied at Athens, where he was a classmate of two Fathers of the Church, St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory Nazianzen. Julian entered military and civil service, where he soon established himself as a superb general and a keener intellectual than his famous uncle. The soldiers respected him, and when, in 360, Constantius ordered all Julian’s best troops to head east to fight the unpopular Persian war, the soldiers revolted and proclaimed Julian emperor.

Julian set out at once to defeat Constantius, but while Julian was on his way Constantius conveniently died. Julian had been raised a Christian, but his pagan teachers had infected his mind with a romantic notion of the glories of the pagan past. And to all those legends of ancient honor and glory he could compare the rank behavior of his Christian cousin — his father’s murderer — Constantius.

Immediately upon taking the throne, Julian proclaimed the return of paganism as the official religion of the Empire. By turning from Christianity back to paganism, Julian earned himself the nickname “Julian the Apostate.”

It was a strange new kind of paganism, though. At first Julian contented himself with ordering the pagan temples to be reopened. But soon he began to build a pagan church modeled on the Christian Church, with its own pagan liturgy, its own philanthropic charities, and its own church administration. The true religion had so far eclipsed the false that even a confirmed pagan could not imagine returning to the old ways unaltered. He even tried to send out pagan missionaries to infuse the Empire with an enthusiasm for paganism. They only succeeded in converting the sycophants and hangers-on who wanted to get ahead at court. Still, Julian did his level best, himself composing a polemical book against the religion of “the Galileans.” It became one of the more effective anti-Christian tracts of antiquity.

At first Julian seems to have intended merely to re-enact the universal tolerance of the Edict of Milan, although with a strong official preference for paganism. But bit by bit he slid down the slope into persecution. First he prohibited the Christians from teaching classical literature — the foundation of every Roman’s education — in their schools. If the Christians didn’t believe in the gods of Homer and Virgil, he reasoned, what right did they have to teach those authors? Then he ordered the Christians to return the pagan properties that had been given to them by previous emperors. Inevitably Christians began to rebel against his administration, and inevitably he was forced to take action against them. Soon he found himself a persecutor.

Meanwhile, the Persian war continued. Julian was remarkably successful as a military leader, but the Persians had good generals too. After a number of victories, Julian suffered a humiliating defeat in 363. As his army was retreating, Julian was wounded in a cavalry battle. He looked and saw that the wound was mortal, and at that moment he must have realized that pagan Rome could not outlive him. The Christians would have the last word.

“You win, Galilean,” he said as he fell from his horse.

David Mills, the editor at Touchstone magazine, published a brilliant essay in the most recent issue on our need for the creed. I’ve said it before: Touchstone is one of the few magazines that treat the Fathers as newsworthy. If you don’t already get it, you should subscribe today. (The most recent issue carries my co-author Chris Bailey’s “leak” of the top-secret sequel to The Da Vinci Code.) David is also a frequent contributor to Mere Comments, Touchstone’s blog. Here’s just a snippet of good Mr. Mills on the relevance of the Fathers and the creed.

Binding themselves to the Creed is not only what Christians do but what Christians have done, and do now in part because our fathers did so and we trust that they set the right pattern for us to follow.

The Israelites tried hard (in their better moments) to keep themselves from taking up the beliefs of the pagans around them, and when they failed God punished their heresy with exile into slavery. “The Lord thy God is one God” (Deuteronomy 6:4) is a short creed, and it does not allow the additions “among others” or “though you may worship Ba’al if you find it helpful.”

The Apostles were just as dogmatic. The first recorded Christian creed was that blurted out by St. Peter, and approved by our Lord: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Matthew 16:16). You cannot replace any “the” in that creed with an “a” without radically changing the story it tells.

St. Paul fought desperately for the truth of “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) and his complex arguments show us how detailed and subtle he thought this faith to be. He thinks error very bad, telling Titus that a bishop must “by sound doctrine both exhort and convince the gain-sayers” and telling Timothy that those who rejected the Faith he “delivered to Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme” (I Timothy 1:19-20).

St. John, sometimes depicted as the “spiritual,” which is to say undogmatic, apostle, insists that getting the details right is essential to holiness and our relation to God. Those who change the story rebel against God. “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God,” he writes. “And every spirit that confesses not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist. . . “ (I John 4:2-3).

The Fathers, to whom many of us look as models, tolerated error no more than the Apostles, though at various times saying the Creed as it had developed so far could get them tortured to death. People who believed in “one God, the Father almighty” refused the ceremonial worship of Caesar, marked by offering a inch of incense in his honor, a refusal taken as treason. Most readers will know the famous story of St. Polycarp meeting the heretic Marcion in the street and calling him “the firstborn of Satan.”

These are the founders and the earliest heroes of our family. And so, faithful to the Apostles and the Fathers, we hold the Creed because the Church has believed since the New Testament that truth matters and that in the events recorded in the Bible God revealed himself and his will for the world; that this revelation has been reliably distilled into propositions (called doctrines); and these propositions have been provided for us in a compact statement called the Creed, which Christians should say with joy though the cross or the stake await them.

There’s something wonderful about the line: “Most readers will know the famous story of St. Polycarp…” Only in Touchstone can an author say that sort of thing. Don’t forget: subscribe today.

For the great feast of the Ascension, Pontifications gives us St. Leo the Great’s famous homily (which provides a key statement in the Catechism of the Catholic Church): “And so our Redeemer’s visible presence has passed into the sacraments.”

The translation in the CCC (n. 1115), by the way, is slightly different (and more precise): “what was visible in our Savior has passed over into his mysteries.”

St. Vincent of Lerins was an early patrologist. In fact, he laid the ground rules for the study of the Fathers. And he himself was a Church Father, so he had a leg up on the rest of us. The ever-timely Fr. John Zuhlsdorf gives us this on his blog of many wonders:

Today is the feast of St. Vincent of Lérins (5th c.).
He is the fellow who gave us a famous rule for distinguishing true Catholic teaching from heresy. In a work called the Commonitorium, written ostensibly to help us remember the ideas, he underscored the importance of Holy Scripture as a rule of faith. The first thing we do is submit our questions or doubts to Scripture. However, since people disagree about what Scripture means, we must take into consideration the interpretation of Scripture which has been held since antiquity, by the whole Church (universality) and most agreed upon by those who have the authority to interpret.
You might have heard this put in Latin as Magnopere curandum est ut id teneatur quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.

Or you might not have. But you should read St. Vincent and ask his intercession today.

My favorite review of the so-called Gospel of Judas was written by a nonbeliever, Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker. I read it in print when the apocrypha hit the fan last month, and I should have shared it with you then, but I assumed it was pay-per-view. I just found out that it’s not. Please read “Jesus Laughed.” It’s a profoundly moving testimony to the attractiveness of the Real Jesus — even for a man without faith — and Gopnik also manages to capture all the creepiness of the sneering gnostic impostor.

I’m happy to learn that there’s now a website promoting the work of my favorite contemporary artist, Lea Marie Ravotti. A native of the Czech Republic and a convert to Christianity, Lea apprenticed herself to the great traditions of Christian art, learning the techniques, the styles, and the deep devotion of the artists and movements. She has become something of an expert on ancient Christian art. Often when I point visitors to new Web resources on paleo-Christian archeology, I’m merely reporting my last exchange with Lea Ravotti. Visit her site today.

Christianity Today just published an interesting piece on the Didache, “What the Teaching Can Teach Us,” by an evangelical scholar, William Varner. Hat tip: Boar’s Head Tavern.