Fascinating interview on scholarly trends in the study of what we, on this blog, call the late patristic era. With special emphasis on the Fall of Rome.

Hat tip: MercatorNet.

Dion: He’s one of those Italians — like Madonna and Fabian — whose listening public knows him on a first-name basis. But, if you must know, his full name is Dion DiMucci. He’s from the Bronx. And he was baptized Francis because his parish priest wasn’t sure that the name his parents had chosen — Dion — was a saint’s name.

He was still in his mid-teens when he cut his first million-selling record, and he would cut many more in the years to come: “Teenager in Love,” “Runaround Sue,” “Ruby, Ruby,” “The Wanderer,” “I Wonder Why,” and “Abraham, Martin, and John” (to name just a few).

So what’s he doing on a blog about the Church Fathers?

He’s here because he’s probably the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame’s resident expert on patristics. Dion’s still recording original music to critical acclaim. Back in 2000, the New York Times featured his latest release, and quoted fulsome praise from Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Billy Joel, and other notables. But the Times’ reporter fixated not so much on the songs as on the books Dion carried with him when they met: St. Augustine’s Confessions and the Navarre Bible volume for St. Matthew’s Gospel (the Navarre commentaries go heavy on the Fathers).

Later the same year, my friend David Scott gave the backstory. Dion’s fame had soared through his teen years. He got heavily into heroin and booze, and his life and career bottomed out. Then he found his way back to faith through the influence of his wife and father-in-law. He attended a number of storefront churches, looking for the truth. One Sunday he heard a sermon that startled him.

One of his pastors quoted St. Augustine, the fifth-century North African bishop who was a spiritual and intellectual giant of the early Church. So, Dion began reading Augustine. He was amazed to discover that Augustine had been instrumental in drawing up the list of books to be included in the Bible that Protestants now relied on solely as “the inerrant Word of God.”

More eye-opening, he says, was the fact that Augustine had “Catholic beliefs” — including the belief that the Eucharist is truly the body and blood of Christ, and that the Holy Spirit guides the Catholic Church and guarantees the truth of its teachings.

When he confronted his pastor and friends with his findings, “they all just tossed it off,” Dion says. “They told me it’s all according to the way you see truth. I said, ‘Exactly! You it hit it right on the head!’ And I started to see truth differently.”

For a couple of years he continued what he describes as “reading myself back into the Church.” He read the writings of the so-called early Church fathers, the first and second generation of Church leaders, some of whom had been disciples of Jesus’s original 12 apostles.

Dion’s most recent disk, like his spiritual journey, has brought him back to his roots. Now he’s doing pre-rock blues — and the critics, once again, love it. Yet even the blues, for Dion, is a religious experience. In January of this year, the Times asked him about his first exposure to bluesman Robert Johnson. Way back in the 1950s, rock impresario John Hammond gave Dion a copy of Johnson’s posthumously released recordings: “I listened to it and it got me excited, too. Some of the guys I played it for couldn’t hear it, but I heard it. It’s the naked cry of the human heart apart from God, wanting to feel at home.”

Dion, the Wanderer, found his way home — thanks be to God, and to the Fathers.

Last year, Dion joined the St. Paul Center’s pilgrimage to Rome. We saw St. Peter’s together, St. John Lateran, the catacombs. He was clearly in his element. So was I. I even got him to sign my 45-rpm record of “Abraham, Martin, and John.” If you’re interested in following in the footsteps of the Fathers and martyrs — and the more recent footsteps of Dion DiMucci — check into next year’s pilgrimage, before it fills up!

While I was out of town, the New York Times ran a long and fascinating travel piece on Christian Ethiopia, “Ethiopia Opens Its Doors, Slowly,” by Joshua Hammer. It ran on September 17, so it will only be free for a couple more days. Check it out.

Hammer takes us on “what Ethiopians call ‘the historic tour’ — a several-day circuit through ancient Christian kingdoms that flourished in the northern highlands beginning in the fourth century A.D. According to legend, Syrian monks crossed the Red Sea then and converted the Aksumite king, Ezana, from paganism to Christianity.”

He visits sites whose religious significance goes back even further than that. Ethiopia’s Jewish community traces its origins to Solomon’s philosophical dalliance with the Queen of Sheba. And that was a full millennium before the Ethiopian eunuch made his remarkable appearance in the Acts of the Apostles.

Our guide treks to sixth-century monasteries as well as the country’s famous monolithic churches — carved out of a single mass of rock. He even hovers near “The Treasury,” where Ethiopian monks claim to house the real Ark of the Covenant (pace Indiana Jones). “No one but a single monk is allowed to see the sacred artifact — and few people are permitted to see him — though replicas, known as tabots, are brought out once a year for the Timkat celebration of Christ’s baptism on Jan. 19.”

Hammer describes the liturgy and architecture with respect, if not quite reverence. Do you remember Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”? Well, Hammer’s tone reminded me, just a little, of Marlin Perkins’ voice-over explanation of the mating rituals of caribou. But, for the New York Times on religion, that’s pretty good. I found only one real groaner, in the author’s description of “Ethiopian Christianity, which combines belief in the Holy Trinity with some of the myths and the symbols of the Old Testament.” I mean, don’t all Christians do that? (Pace Marcion.)

The story‘s worth the trip. A pilgrimage would be even better.

Today’s the feast of St. Matthew, the evangelist who got the New Testament off to a royal start. The Fathers testify, overwhelmingly, that Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew (or maybe an Aramaic dialect). A witness of Matthew’s own generation, Papias said: “Matthew composed the oracles in the Hebrew dialect, and everyone interpreted them as he was able.” Irenaeus echoes: “Matthew among the Hebrews did also publish a Gospel in writing in their own language.” The Sicilian Bee, St. Pantaenus, went to India, where he found converted Jews who read “the writing of Matthew in Hebrew letters.” In the third century, the critical scholar Origen gave his two cents: “the first Gospel was written by Matthew … who delivered it to the Jewish believers, composed in the Hebrew language.”

Here’s Jerome’s entry on Matthew, from his profiles of illustrious men:

Matthew, also called Levi, apostle and aforetimes publican, composed a gospel of Christ at first published in Judea in Hebrew for the sake of those of the circumcision who believed, but this was afterwards translated into Greek though by what author is uncertain. The Hebrew itself has been preserved until the present day in the library at Caesarea which Pamphilus so diligently gathered. I have also had the opportunity of having the volume described to me by the Nazarenes of Beroea, a city of Syria, who use it. In this it is to be noted that wherever the Evangelist, whether on his own account or in the person of our Lord the Savior, quotes the testimony of the Old Testament he does not follow the authority of the translators of the Septuagint but the Hebrew. Wherefore these two forms exist “Out of Egypt have I called my son, ” and “for he shall be called a Nazarene.”

If you’re looking for an excellent, short study edition of Matthew, with ample light from the Fathers, try this one.

I’ve posted audio of my KVSS interview on St. John Chrysostom (scroll way down the page). There was a lot of life to pack into that little interview!

Kevin at Biblicalia has posted all his translations of St. Jerome’s Vulgate Prologues, with a helpful introduction.

Maria Lectrix has been a busy little Buckeye, posting audio files of St. Gregory the Great’s “Pastoral Care” and St. Augustine’s “On Catechizing the Unlearned” — not to mention her ongoing Aswan Dam-sized project of reading St. Irenaeus’s “Against Heresies.” The iPod was made for this.

She has also transcribed several dozen more pages of Thomas Livius’s great work on The Blessed Virgin in the Fathers of the First Six Centuries.

This lady is, without a doubt, the Cassiodorus of western Ohio.

Phil awaits your thoughts on sacred tradition and canon.

I just returned from vacation to find plenty of good entertainment at Adrian Murdoch’s excellent blog, Bread and Circuses.

He points to an online translation of a sixth-century life of Joshua the Stylite.

He treats us to St. Gregory Nazianzen’s splenetic description of the emperor Julian the Apostate.

And he piles on more archeological evidence for Roman trade with India in the first centuries A.D. See here, too.

Some years ago, Scott Hahn and I put together a guided anthology of the Church Fathers titled Living the Mysteries: A Guide for Unfinished Christians. We culled 50 meditations from the works of eight Fathers — six of those Fathers were also Doctors of the Church — and all of our selections had something in common.

What was that something? (Take a deep breath now.) They were mystagogical.

That’s a big word, and it’s unfamiliar to many modern Catholics. But both the word and the thing it represents were an integral part of the life of the early Christians.

The early Church had a clear process by which seekers found a teacher, and the teacher guided them gradually through stages of inquiry, purification, and illumination. The process could take several years, and it culminated in a final phase called mystagogy (pronounced MIST-uh-go-gee), which literaly means the “revelation of the mysteries.” What are the “mysteries” revealed in mystagogy? The mysteries are the sacraments, which are themselves revelations of God’s eternal mystery that surpasses all understanding (see Eph 3:19). Everything in the earthly life of Jesus was a sign of that mystery (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 515); and now, in the age of the Church, the mysteries of Christ’s life have passed over into the sacramental mysteries.

In the process of initiation, the goal was divinization through the sacraments, but doctrine was an indispensable means to that end. St. Basil defined out goal this way: “as far as humanly possible, to be made like God. Without knowledge, though, we cannot be made like Him; and knowledge cannot be achieved without lessons.”

As the last phase of initiation, mystagogy came only after the seeker was no longer a seeker, but a Christian — newborn to divine life in baptism and made one with Christ in Holy Communion. Indeed, all the previous stages served as needed preparation for the last. Only a purified mind and body could be worthy vessels of the mysteries. Only an enlightened soul could “see” the invisible reality that is present in every sacrament.

Yet it was the promise of this end that drew the seekers onward through the long and sometimes grueling course of learning and purification. The mystery of God, after all, is ultimately what attracted them to the faith, though it had been only glimpsed — as through a glass, darkly — in the rites and prayers of the Church.

Even today, what draws many people to the faith is the very stuff of mystagogy: the Church’s rituals, its ancient tradition, its mystical life, its rich interpretation of the Bible, and the bold promise of communion with God. Mystagogy, then, is the fulfillment of all the teaching that has gone before, and is the only suitable conclusion to that teaching.

Yet mystagogy is also the work of a lifetime, and the words of the Church Fathers are always timely witnesses to the Christian meaning of current events, of the sacraments, and of our own inner lives.

In the mystagogical homilies of the great doctors of the early Church — Basil, Ambrose, Cyril, Chrysostom, and Augustine — we recognize the sacramental rites of our own times. There is little difference between the prayers explicated by St. Ambrose, for example, and the prayer we today call the Roman Canon.

And these Father-Doctors preached with the grace to stir our souls, even after more than a millennium and a half. In the fourth century, a pilgrim from Spain witnessed the mystagogy in St. Cyril’s church, and she wrote down what she saw for her friends at home: “While the bishop discusses and sets forth each point, the voices of those who applaud are so loud that they can be heard outside the church. And truly the mysteries are so unfolded that there is no one unmoved at the things that he hears to be so explained.”

Read St. Cyril today, and see if you can hold back the applause. Then move on to Ambrose, Chrysostom, Augustine …

It’s all conveniently packaged for you in Living the Mysteries: A Guide for Unfinished Christians.