I’m pleased to see, from comments and email, that folks are interested in — or at least curious about — the Fathers of the Syriac tradition. There’s been renewed interest in these men in recent years, and it’s long overdue. The old patristics manuals tended to divide the Fathers into Greek and Latin (meaning east and west) and then lump the Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian Fathers in, almost as an afterthought, with the Greeks. But they don’t quite fit there.

The Syriac Fathers were the founders of a different Christian culture with its own literary and theological style. They used neither Greek nor Latin, but rather Syriac, which is the dialect of Aramaic used in Edessa (modern Urfa in Turkey). They spoke the language of Jesus, and their earliest writers were in close conversation with the rabbis of Babylonian Judaism. Indeed, they engaged in controversy with the rabbis. The brilliant and prolific modern rabbi Jacob Neusner finds in St. Aphrahat, for example, a model — “remarkable and exemplary” — for Jewish-Christian dialogue. Aphrahat is, says Rabbi Neusner, “an enduring voice of civility and rationality amid the cacaphony of mutual disesteem.” The Syriac Fathers preserved a semitic style of Christianity that likely was similar in many ways to the Church’s founding generation.

With the Nestorian schism in the fifth century, many disaffected Christians took refuge in the Persian East, which was beyond the political influence of Byzantium. For centuries, the East Syrians went their way, having little contact with the West, but sending missions to China and India. Along the centuries, some of these churches returned to communion with the west. And, as if to prove my recurring point that “the Fathers are news”: Rome’s ecumenical dialogue with the Syriac churches has borne more fruit than any other. In 1994, Pope John Paul II signed a “Common Christological Declaration” with Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV, essentially resolving “the main dogmatic problem between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church” — in other words, clearing up the Nestorian troubles, once and for all. In 2001, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity went a step further and approved the sharing of Communion between the (Catholic) Chaldean Church and the (so-called Nestorian) Assyrian Church of the East.

It’s good to be breathing with both lungs again. For a couple of millennia, the churches of the far east have kept a lively devotion for the Syriac Fathers. It’s great that we in the west are beginning to recover this part of the Church’s common heritage. In fact, Hubertus Drobner’s massive manual of patrology — which is due out in English any day now — includes a respectable section on the Syriac Fathers. You’ll find well-stocked online libraries at The Syriac Studies Electronic Library and Saint Ephrem the Syrian Library.

If you’re even mildly interested in an encounter with these Fathers, please dig deep and read the superlative introduction to the field by Jesuit Father Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition. It’s frightfully expensive, but worth every penny, and just out in a new, updated edition (2004). An affordable and accessible introduction is Sebastian Brock’s Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life.

If you want to learn about the plight of the Christian remnant in the lands of Aphrahat and Ephrem, read William Dalrymple’s chilling From the Holy Mountain : A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East.

OK, so the screen savers aren’t enough anymore. You want to immerse another of your senses in the world of Christian antiquity. Try hearing next. There’s a lot of ancient chant you can load into your iPod.

My personal favorite is a quirk of history. It’s a recording of Roman chant from the 7th and 8th centuries, Chants de l’Eglise de Rome. At the time, Rome’s native culture was in decline. Byzantine Greek culture was still riding fairly high. A number of the popes hailed from the eastern lands. And entire monasteries from the oriean were fleeing to Italy for refuge from various invaders. So the chant sounds Roman, but you hear deep eastern influences — and I do mean deep. One of the distinctive notes of Old Roman Chant is its sustained bass parts, which make for odd and beautiful harmonies.

Here’s a curiosity: Music from the 5th Century. It’s reconstructed from ancient Coptic manuscripts by an Armenian-American musicologist. He contends that this was the characteristic music not only of the ancient Coptic Christians, but also of the Egyptians, generations earlier, who built the pyramids. I have to admit, my ears have not quite adjusted to this sound.

And let’s not forget our old friend Ambrose, who was deeply influenced by the chant of the East, and wanted to bring something like it to his own church in 4th-century Milan. Augustine himself praised Ambrose’s church for its congregational singing. Listen to Sublime Chant: The Art of Gregorian, Ambrosian, and Gallican Chant.

Does anyone know if there’s a good recording of the ancient Syriac chants of Edessa? As Christians leave that area (in Turkey and Syria), I fear this music will be lost.

Going through Tom Lawler’s files (see below), I found a great brochure from the 1950s advertising subscriptions to the fledgling Ancient Christian Writers series. The back panel featured these quotes from Newman:

“The vision of the Fathers was always, to my imagination, I may say, a paradise of delight” (Difficulties of Anglicans, Lect. XII).

“I follow the ancient Fathers … They are witnesses of the fact of … doctrines having been received, not here or there, but everywhere … We take them as honest informants” (The Patristic Idea of Antichrist).

“I … take my stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of their times is not yet an old almanac to me … The Fathers made me a Catholic” (Letter to Pusey).

Reading Tom’s correspondence with Father Johannes Quasten is itself a paradise of delight. More to come, surely.

OK, a number of you complained that my last headline was so loaded with foul, obscure puns that you couldn’t figure out what the post was supposed to be about. Here’s the boiled-down Diatesseron version: There’s great early-Christian art at the Met’s website, on the pages I indicated with hyperlinks.

If you’re a medievalist at heart, you know to go to the Cloisters when you’re in New York. But if you’re harboring an inner patrologist, you gotta go to the Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses a stunning collection of early-Christian art — including a large room full of unusual Coptic items. Many display cases are well stocked with beautifully crafted liturgical items. There’s an early pyx, probably Syrian, made of elephant ivory, that simply must be seen up close — preferably during the Easter Octave, as it shows the women at the empty tomb. (Scott Hahn discusses this item in the last chapter of his most recent book, Letter and Spirit.) If you can’t get to NYC this week, though, you can still examine the pyx online. While you’re on the site, check out the first few pages of the medieval collection; they’re still in the patristic era. And here’s a page devoted to Byzantine and medieval art for Christian liturgy.

Penn at Thumos posted a great review of a modern patristic retrieval. Get to know the book — and the blog. I reviewed the same book here on “The Way.”

I’m fascinated by the way Origen — a brilliant thinker, but rather dull writer — can still arouse passions after, lo, these two millennia. When I wrote my first book on the Fathers, I was probably just a little too sympathetic to the guy, who did stray into some pretty weird thinking. But, on the other hand, he also willingly underwent the most severe tortures for the sake of the faith, and he died a confessor, if not a martyr. And, really, where would we be without his literary legacy, which is rather large even after the purges of the centuries. The problem boils down to this: Origen did stray into some doctrines that the Church later condemned; but he always insisted that he wanted only to hold the faith of the Catholic Church, and he urged his readers and listeners to have the same desire. Thus, sympathetic readers have judged some of his doctrine to be aberrant, but Origen himself to be “not guilty” of heresy. Giants of the twentieth century wrote studies on him, including Danielou, de Lubac, and von Balthasar. Pope John Paul II quoted him in his encyclicals, and the Church cites his authority in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The online literature on Origen is overwhelming. You’ll find, here and here, two good easy-to-read discussions of the particular problems presented by Origen. If you have an opinion, please do sound off.

Sorry for my long absence. I spent yesterday in the near presence of the Fathers. With my good friend and colleague, Rob Corzine, I trekked to Virginia to help sort out the literary estate of the great patrologist Thomas Comerford Lawler. A close associate of Johannes Quasten and a longtime (1964-1991) editor of the Ancient Christian Writers series, Tom himself produced new translations of Jerome and Augustine. And he did all this while serving as a top executive in the Central Intelligence Agency. Tom died peacefully Nov. 20, 2005, just weeks shy of his 85th birthday.

His widow donated his substantial library to the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, of which I am vice-president. Together we are also arranging for his papers to land at two research institutions. For those of us who knew Tom — and for the many more who have benefited from his work in patristics — it’s a joy to know that others will continue his work of studying and promoting the Church Fathers.

Catholic readers know Tom as the author of many books, most notably the bestselling catechism The Teaching of Christ (which he co-authored with his brother Father Ronald Lawler, O.F.M. Cap., and Bishop Donald Wuerl).

He retired from the CIA in 1977 with the United States’ Intelligence Medal of Merit.

Tom was widely acknowledged in his lifetime as one of the great scholars of the Church Fathers. Though he never finished an undergraduate degree, he received two honorary doctorates. He considered it his greatest achievement, however, to have received the award Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice from Pope John Paul II.

He and his wife Pat raised their children in Alexandria, Va. Sometimes when he identified himself on scholarly articles, he would drop the state of Virginia from his place of residence. He was Thomas of Alexandria. It had the ring of antiquity.

One of his last great projects was the fifth edition of The Teaching of Christ, completed in 2005. As he waved his final goodbye to a co-editor, he said: “It’s a wonderful life.”

His certainly was.

The Easter Vigil always bowls me over. What a beautiful recovery we made by restoring that Mass in the twentieth century. I’m pleased, too, that the new missal mandates the use of all seven readings except in the case of “grave pastoral necessity.” It’s awesome to read the Fathers’ accounts of the Vigil. In Africa of Augustine’s time, it was an all-night affair, culminating at daybreak!

It struck me last night how much we lost when we (in the English- and German-speaking worlds) stopped calling our greatest feast day “Passover,” as Christians do in almost every other language (Pesach, Pascha, Pasqua, etc.). The Easter Vigil liturgy makes the connection so clear. It really is a Christian haggadah. “This is the night” of our deliverance from Egypt. If we don’t get to the Vigil Mass, though, it’s easy to miss it.

I hope that those who couldn’t get out on Saturday still had a chance to read St. Melito, who also makes the connections between the Old Testament and the New. Also, the profound study of the Christian Passover in the patristic era, by the great Italian patrologist Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap.: Easter in the Early Church: An Anthology of Jewish and Early Christian Texts.

The monks at St. Isaac of Syria post a dazzling array of Resurrection icons. And they’re more than virtual. You can buy mounted prints for your home.

The most awesome Holy Saturday homily comes to us (we think) from Epiphanius of Cyprus.

Something strange is happening … there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him: “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying, “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light” . . .

You can read the rest by clicking here.

The Way of the Cross is the inevitable way of a Christian’s heart.

Indeed, it is almost impossible to imagine the Catholic Church without the devotion that goes by that name.

It goes by other names, too: “The Stations of the Cross,” “Via Crucis,” “Via Dolorosa” — or just “the stations.”

The practice has settled, for several centuries now, into brief meditations on 14 scenes from the suffering and death of Jesus Christ.

Why are Christians drawn so strongly to this devotion? Because Jesus wanted us to be. “Then He said to all, ‘If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me’” (Lk 9:23).

When Jesus speaks the words “if” or “unless,” Christians listen carefully. For then Our Lord is laying down the conditions of our discipleship — the prerequisites of heaven.

• • • •

The Way of the Cross developed gradually in the life of the Church. In the Roman world, the cross was a “stumbling block” (Gal 5:11). Crucifixion was a most humiliating form of execution: a man was stripped naked and suspended in a public place; he was pelted with rocks and trash and left to suffocate slowly while passersby mocked his agony.

Crucifixion was still a common occurrence during the first three centuries of Christianity, so it was not easy for believers, like St. Paul, to “boast” (Gal 6:14) of the cross. For people who had seen criminals crucified, the cross could not have been an easy thing to love.

Yet love it they did. Devotion to the cross pervades the earliest Christian writings. And the earliest records of pilgrimage show us that Christians endured great hardships — traveling thousands of miles, from France and Spain to Jerusalem — so that they could walk the streets of Jesus’ suffering: the Way of the Cross.

The Jerusalem liturgy of Holy Week memorialized the events of Jesus’ Passion. On Holy Thursday, the bishop led the procession from the Garden of Gethsemane to Calvary. The fourth-century practice is well attested by St. Cyril of Jerusalem and by Egeria, the Bordeaux Pilgrim.

After Christianity was legalized in 313 A.D., pilgrims regularly thronged Jerusalem. The Way of the Cross became one of the standard routes for pilgrims and tourists. It wound its way through narrow streets, from the site of Pilate’s Praetorium to the summit of Calvary to the sepulcher where Jesus was laid to rest.

How did they know the sites of these events? One ancient story holds that the Virgin Mary continued to visit those places, every day for the rest of her life. Surely, the apostles and the first generation would hold dear the memories of Jesus’ passion and pass them on.

Very likely, the route emerged from the oral history of Palestinian Christians and from the ambitious archeological excavations of the devout empress Helena. Along the way, pilgrims and guides paused at several places traditionally associated with biblical scenes — such as Jesus’ conversation with the women of Jerusalem (Lk 23:27-31) — as well as some scenes not recorded in the Bible. These occasional pauses were known in Latin as stationes. By the eighth century, they were a standard part of the Jerusalem pilgrimage.

Such pilgrimages grew in popularity well into the age of the crusaders. Gradually, the stations became more developed. In fact, history records many different series, varying in number, content and form.

In 1342, the Church entrusted the Franciscan order with the care of the holy sites, and it was these friars who most ardently promoted the praying of the Way of the Cross. Around this time, the Popes began to grant indulgences to anyone who devoutly prayed the stations in Jerusalem. Also at this time, the Franciscans began to spread the Marian hymn that would eventually be most closely associated with the devotion: the Latin Stabat Mater, familiarly rendered in English beginning with the words:

At the cross, her station keeping,
Stood the mournful mother weeping,
Close to Jesus to the last.

The lyric is attributed to a Franciscan, Jacopone da Todi, who died in 1306.

European pilgrims were so impressed by the Jerusalem tour that they took the Way home with them. Around the fifteenth century, they began to build symbolic replicas of the stations, in the churches and monasteries of their homelands. Eight stations had been standard in Jerusalem, but these expanded to as many as 37 in Europe.

The practice became enormously popular. Now everyone — small children, the poor, the infirm — could make their spiritual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to the Way of the Cross. In a tangible way, they could take up their cross — just as Jesus had commanded — and follow Him to the end.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Stations of the Cross, now settled at 14, were considered almost standard equipment in a church building. Some were elaborate — dramatic, life-sized wood carvings of the human figures. Others were mere roman numerals — I through XIV — carved into the church wall at intervals. The Popes extended the indulgences customary for Jerusalem pilgrims to Christians everywhere, if they prayed the stations in their own churches in the prescribed way.

The stations continued to be associated with the Franciscan order, and Church law often required that stations be installed (or at least blessed) by a Franciscan priest.

• • • • 

“If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Jesus said this to “all,” to every Christian. In the earliest days of the Church, it was perhaps easier to know the gravity of His command. The cross was not yet a symbol. It was a horror that took place, with some frequency, at the edges of town. It was the worst death they could imagine, devised by people who possessed a certain genius for torture.

When Christianity became the official religion of the empire, crucifixion was outlawed. Over time, the most basic Christian devotion — devotion to the cross of Jesus — began to require an act of imagination.

Today, our need is greater still. For we have sanitized even ordinary death: shutting it up in hospitals, silencing its agonies with drugs. The shame, the gore, and the stench — the commonplaces of public executions — have become incomprehensible. This is the cost of our everyday sins, and yet it is a sum, like the national debt, that is so remote from us that we cannot get worked up over it.

If we pray the Way of the cross, we cannot help but get worked up. Through the stations, we draw near, in our hearts and minds, our intellect and will and imagination, to the scenes beheld by our ancestors. We see a a young man scourged with coarse leather whips studded with shards of pottery. His bleeding shoulders, with every nerve raw and exposed, receive a rough wooden beam, heavy enough to hold a man’s dead weight. He totters under the weight amid a jeering crowd. Delirious, He weaves along the cobblestones and stumbles, now crushed downward by the wood on His shoulders. His fall gives him no rest, as the crowd mocks Him by kicking Him, stepping on His raw wounds, spitting in His face. He will fall again and again. When at last He reaches His destination, His torturers pierce the nerves in His hands with nails, affixing Him to the crossbeam, and then raise Him up, placing the beam atop another, thicker beam set perpendicular to the ground. His weakened torso slumps forward, compressing His diaphragm, making it impossible for Him to breathe. To take a breath, He must push up on the nail in His feet or pull up on the nails that pierce His arms. Every breath will cost Him an extremity of pain, until He succumbs to shock or suffocation or blood loss.

This is the hard part of Christianity: our faith cannot exist apart from devotion to the cross. Our ancestors longed to touch the relics of the true cross. Even our separated brethren love to survey the the old rugged cross.

It all seems unbearable. But Christ has borne it, and He insisted that we must, too. We cannot be lifted up to heaven except by way of the cross. Tradition has mapped out the way for us.

• • • • 

The Stations of the Cross
in their most popular form

1. Jesus is condemned to death;
2. the cross is laid upon him;
3. Jesus’ first fall;
4. Jesus meets His Mother, Mary;
5. Simon of Cyrene is made to bear the cross;
6. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus;
7. Jesus’ second fall;
8. Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem;
9. Jesus’ third fall;
10. Jesus is stripped of His garments;
11. the crucifixion;
12. Jesus dies on the cross;
13. His body is taken down from the cross;
14. Jesus is laid in the tomb.

Among English-speakers, the vocal prayers take this or some similar shape:

1. Recitation of the name and number of the station, for example: “The third station, Jesus falls for the first time.”

2. “We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You!
Because by Your holy cross You have redeemed the world.”

3. Reading of a brief meditation.

4. Recitation of an Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be.

5. Singing of a verse of the Stabat Mater.

Meditations on the Stations
Many great Catholics have written meditations on the Way of the Cross. I recommend those by the following authors. All can be fairly easily found on the Web:

St. Alphonsus Liguori
Ven. John Henry Newman
Father Romano Guardini
St. Josemaria Escriva
Mother Angelica
Pope John Paul II

I’m trying to track down the earliest literary reference to the “miracle of the spring” attributed to St. Peter during his stay in the Tullianum, the dungeon of what’s now known as the Mamertine. I can’t find anything earlier than the Middle Ages. But the scene appears often in early-Christian art. Anyone out there know a text in the Fathers or the Christian apocrypha?

St. Melito of Sardis is a Father worth getting to know during Holy Week. It’s a particular privilege of our time that we can get to know him. Most of his words were lost for most of Christian history. Only in the mid-twentieth century was an almost-complete text of Melito found. The rediscovered text was titled Peri Pascha — which means both “On Passover” and “On Easter,” since in the ancient languages both holidays share the same name. Melito shows us the Old Testament foreshadowing of the Christian Easter in Israel’s exodus from Egypt.

Preached around 175 A.D., Peri Pascha is the work of a man steeped in the history of Israel. Some modern readers have misunderstood and condemned Melito as anti-Jewish. One scholar I revere even referred to him as the “first poet of deicide.” But surely these accusations would have stunned and horrified Melito himself. For it is likely that he was himself a convert from Judaism. He was, in any event, a profound student of the Hebrew Scriptures, and even traveled to Palestine to study them on their home turf.

He lived in a time when rabbinic Judaism and nascent Christianity presented two different, newly emerging responses to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 A.D. It was a time of crisis. Both the ancient rabbis and the Church Fathers saw their respective traditions as a continuation of the tradition and history of Israel. Both the rabbis and the Fathers recognized that the old order was giving way to something new. Where Christians and Jews differed was on the nature and form of the new order.

Judge for yourself. Read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, numbers 128 and 130 (online here). Then go on to read Melito’s Peri Pascha. You might also read Todd Russell Hanneken’s provocative essay “A Completely Different Reading of Melito’s Peri Pascha.”

The great Robert Louis Wilken tells us that we can learn from the Fathers how to build a Christian culture on the foundations (or rubble) of a pagan one. It’s been done before. “Amo, Amas, Amat: Christianity and Culture” was delivered as the Palmer Lecture at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, NJ. If you haven’t read Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, please do. You’ll find my effusive review of it here.

I apologize for the double-posting of this information. I accidentally deleted the old posting. Newbie.