Bryn Mawr Classical Review takes note of a new edition of a very ancient, and very unusual, Christian work: The Sibylline Oracles: With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on the First and Second Books (ed. J.L. Lightfoot). The Oracles are “Judaeo-Christian texts that adopt the narrator, form, and language of Greek hexameter poetry and oracles.”

L. sees the author of Books I-II unequivocally as a Christian of the second century AD (150), basing her terminus post quem on her revivification and expansion of the thesis of M.R. James that sees Books I-II (but especially II) as particularly indebted to the Apocalypse of Peter. L. brings further order to the text by convincingly showing how the borrowings of hellish scenes from Apoc. Petr. interact with the wholesale importation of the ethical teachings of ps.-Phocylides. L. shows that this section, far from being embarrassingly discrete, in fact is the “positive correlate of the depiction of hellish punishments” (147) in the “hell-tourism” of Book 2.254-283, thus bringing order and sense to what before was considered proof of the generic chaos of apocalyptic literature.

The Anglican bishop of Gibraltar, Geoffrey Rowell, writes on the relationship between Bible and Church. Hat tip: PaleoJudaica.

The Missus and I wrote an essay on breastfeeding imagery in the Fathers, “Milk and Mystery,” and it’s included in the collection Catholic for a Reason IV: Scripture and the Mystery of Marriage and Family Life. In my soon-to-be-released book, Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols, I treat the subject a bit more. On the blog, I’ve talked about it here and here and here.

Now comes the Vatican Newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, to confirm my conclusions. CNS reports:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The loving, tender images of Mary breast-feeding the baby Jesus need an artistic and spiritual rehabilitation, said the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.

A vast iconography of traditional Christian art has been “censored by the modern age” because images depicting Our Lady’s naked breast for her child were deemed too “unseemly,” the paper said June 19.

Artists began depicting a fully clothed nursing Mary in sacred art in an attempt to make her seem less “carnal,” but the depictions unfortunately also diminished her human, loving and tender side “that touches the hearts and faith of the devout,” the newspaper said.

The article, titled “Those Marys, Too Human, Censored by the Modern Age,” was written by Christian historian Lucetta Scaraffia. It was one of two articles commenting on the release of a two-volume work documenting the variety in iconography and history of Mary. The work, “The Sword and Milk,” by Tommaso Claudio Mineo, was published recently only in Italian by Rome’s Pontifical Lateran University and presented to the public at a Vatican-sponsored event June 17.

The Vatican paper published the two commentaries in its June 19 edition along with a Renaissance portrait of Mary baring her breast, nursing a swaddled baby Jesus.

Salesian Father Enrico dal Covolo, a professor of classic and Christian literature at the Pontifical Salesian University, said in his commentary that a nursing Mary represents an interesting paradox: “He who gives nourishment to all things, Mary included, now lets himself be nourished by her.

“The Virgin Mary who nurses her son Jesus is one of the most eloquent signs that the word of God truly and undoubtedly became flesh,” he wrote. And it was only by becoming fully human that the Son of God could save humanity from sin and death, the priest wrote.

Scaraffia said that when the early Christian theologians wrote about and artists represented Our Lady breast-feeding they were showing “concrete proof” of God’s incarnation.

“Jesus was a baby like all others. … His divinity does not exclude his humanity,” she wrote.

This kind of Marian iconography can be traced back to Egypt and early Christian times, but it ends around the 16th or 17th century, both authors said.

Scaraffia wrote that the Protestant movement was quite critical of “the carnality and unbecoming nature of many sacred images.” Even though Catholicism rejected this view, the condemnations still affected the church’s approach to sacred art, as evidenced by artists later covering up the naked forms in the Sistine Chapel, she wrote.

The splintered views concerning the sanctity of the human body were not repaired and therefore an “artistic and spiritual rehabilitation” of a breast-feeding baby Jesus is needed, she wrote.

She said the sacred image of Mary nursing her child is “an image so concrete and loving” that it recalls her offering her body for nourishment and giving herself completely to her son as he offers his body and blood in the Eucharist and gave himself completely for others with his death and resurrection.

The earliest images of Mary, in the Roman Catacombs and in the Egyptian desert, depict her as a nursing mother.

“In a recent interview with the German ecumenical journal Cyril and Methodius, Patriarch … Bartholomew I invited Eastern Catholic Churches to return to Orthodoxy without breaking unity with Rome … According to the Orthodox hierarch, the form of coexistence of the Byzantine Church and the Roman Church in the 1st century of Christianity should be used as a model of unity … At the same time, the patriarch made positive remarks about the idea of “dual unity” proposed by the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Archbishop Lubomyr (Husar).” Anyone know more about this?

Hat tip: Father Gregory at Koinonia.

UPDATE: CWN provides more detail.

From the Telegraph:

The Very Reverend Professor Henry Chadwick, who died on Tuesday aged 87, was one of the last great Anglican scholars.
When people said that the intellectual life of the Church of England was not what it was, it was, in correction, to the four Chadwick brothers that it was possible to turn.

They emerged from the secure professional class, sons of a barrister from Bromley in Kent, and were educated in a fashion intended to prepare them for lives of dedicated service. One became a diplomat, and three were ordained in the Established Church, in which they rose to positions both of formal distinction and of deserved respect.

But the style of churchmanship espoused by Henry Chadwick was always difficult to determine.

Born on June 23 1920, Henry Chadwick was educated at Eton, where he was a King’s Scholar in a 1930s atmosphere which did not encourage ritual inventiveness, or much inventiveness of any kind. From there he went to Magdalene College, Cambridge, on a Music Scholarship.

He was trained for ministry at the still distinctly evangelical Ridley Hall, in Cambridge, from 1942, and raised to the priesthood in 1944.

His first appointment was as an assistant master at Wellington College.

Nothing in this early ministry indicated that Chadwick was to become one of the most incorporative figures in the Church of England, a man sympathetic to, and very well acquainted with, the Roman Catholic Church; a traditionalist who appeared to adhere to no particular group within Anglicanism; and an advocate of ecumenism whose actual sympathies lay tantalisingly beyond sight.

For a person so generous in advising those who sought out his wisdom, Chadwick’s internal conclusions about the everlasting balancing act which is the essence of Anglicanism always remained uncharacteristically unarticulated. Like his brother Owen, he never seems to have sought, and certainly never accepted, ecclesiastical preferment – except in the ambiguous sense that the Deanery of Christ Church, Oxford, was, essentially, in his day (1969-79), an academic post.

He was a successor to the Victorian clerical intellectuals, a man whose involvement with the organisation of the Church was advisory rather than directive, who was never visibly partisan; he always gave to the interests of the institutions which he served both altruism and sound judgment.

After religion, the great passion of Chadwick’s life was music. Unlike those Anglicans who persist in confusing aesthetic sensation with religious experience, however, Chadwick never raised his musical interests to the level of dogma. It was a civilised entertainment shared, happily, by his wife Peggy, whom he married in 1945.

Peggy was enormously discreet, and a delightful hostess in the two master’s lodges she inhabited.

From 1946 Chadwick was Chaplain of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and he became Dean of the College in 1950. It was just the right place from which to launch an academic career, since Queens’ was friendly, not large, religiously ordinary (lacking, that is to say, any party enthusiasms) and intellectually secure.

Everyone thought the Chadwicks an ideal couple to preside over the religious life of the undergraduates who still resorted to Chapel in reasonable numbers.

Yet Chadwick’s capabilities had, of course, been known to others, especially since the publication of his work Origen, Contra Celsum in 1953 (which later went into several editions). His reputation as an expositor of the teachings of the Early Fathers became early established, and has always remained unchallenged.

Chadwick’s contribution to patristic scholarship was uncontroversially distinguished and of great utility. It seemed a natural progression, therefore, when he became Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford in 1959, and Dean of Christ Church 10 years later.

Thereafter innumerable academic distinctions were awarded by learned bodies in Europe and North America. He had moved, effortlessly, so it seemed, to the forefront of Anglican divines.

Yet a progression which in most cases would have seemed to have attained fulfilment turned out, in Chadwick’s case, to be a transit to still further dimensions of service. After retirement from Christ Church in 1979, he became a Fellow of Magdalene, Cambridge, and was then, from 1987 to 1993, Master of Peterhouse.

In each place his reputation for wisdom and courtesy to his colleagues preceded him, and in each in turn he was able to bring accumulating knowledge of the ways of academe.

Nor did the college business in which he had, all his life, been necessarily enveloped inhibit his scholarly output. Of his many publications the Pelican Early Church (1967) and Augustine (1986) have perhaps proved of greatest service to those seeking insights into early Christianty.

The Mastership of Peterhouse was a particularly revealing final distinction, since Peterhouse is also a college with an established tradition of historical scholarship. His success as Master was cogent testimony to his eirenic qualities.

At first meeting people tended to find Chadwick rather grand. This indicated, however, simply a mannerism: his kindness to those he met even quite casually, and to undergraduates, was remarkable, and his courtesy to his academic and clerical colleagues – in two professions hardly noted for emancipation from disputation – was quite extraordinary.

There hung about him a certain sense of integrity and solidity, and yet what his actual principles were was somehow always difficult to express. His churchmanship escaped categorisation: so did his political preferences and his attitudes to the moral transformations which characterised the social customs of his time.

There has always been, about the Church of England, a certain imprecision when it comes to doctrinal formulation, and those most successful as Anglican churchmen are those who know how best to devise forms of words and constructs or accommodations which allow people of otherwise plainly incompatible beliefs to inhabit the same dwelling-place.

Chadwick was a master of the art. Unlike lesser men who attempted these skills, however, his labours were inspired by honesty of purpose and an apparently genuine conviction that the Anglican Communion had an unassailable integrity.

The limits to his methods, on the other hand, became apparent at meetings of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, in its sessions between 1969 and 1981, and again from 1983 to 1990, when the Anglican penchant for resolving differences by devising accommodations based upon ambiguous verbal formulations had limited effect on the professionals of the Vatican.

Early successes at agreement were over simpler differences; when it came to ecclesiology, to the nature of religious authority, the Anglican methods proved sterile. Chadwick was personally disappointed: an important aspect of what he had correctly seen as a life’s work had driven itself into the sands. He always treasured a vestment which the Pope had given him.

Chadwick lived through huge changes in both the great institutions he served – learning and the Church. He adapted with astonishing ease, especially in view of his seemingly inherent traditionalism.

In 1968 Chadwick became vice-president of the British Academy. He was appointed KBE in 1989.

Henry Chadwick is survived by his wife and three daughters.

Pope Benedict spoke today about St. Isidore of Seville, considered by many to be the last of the Western Fathers. But, by my calculation, he still has a few important Easterners to discuss. Teresa Benedetta translated.

Dear brothers and sisters,

Today I wish to speak about St. Isidore of Seville. He was the younger brother of Leander, Bishop of Seville and a great friend of Pope Gregory the Great.

This point is important because it allows us to be aware of the cultural and spiritual closeness [with his brother] that is indispensable to understanding the personality of Isidore.

In fact, he owes much to Leander, who was very studious, demanding, and austere, creating for his younger brother a familial atmosphere characterized by ascetic requirements worthy of a monk and work rhythms appropriate to serious dedication to study.

Moreover, Leander was concerned to pre-dispose conditions necessary for facing the socio-political situation of the moment: In those decades, the Visigoths, who were barbarians and Arians, had invaded the Iberian peninsula and had taken control of territories that had belonged to the Roman empire. It was necessary to win them over to Romanness and Catholicism.

The house of Leander and Isidore was furnished with a library rich in classic, pagan and Christian works. Isidore, who felt attracted to all of them, was educated under his brother’s supervision to develop a very strong discipline of study, with dedication, discretion and discernment. But they lived in the bishop’s palace in a serene and open atmosphere.

We can deduce from the cultural and spiritual interests of Isidore – as they emerge in his own works – that they comprehended an encyclopedic knowledge of classic pagan culture and a deep knowledge of Christian culture.

This explains the eclecticism that characterizes Isidore’s literary production, which ranges with extreme facility from Martial to Augustine, from Cicero to Gregory the Great.

The interior battle sustained by the young Isidore – who succeeded his brother Leander as Bishop of Seville in 599 – could not have been easy. Perhaps it was that constant struggle within himself that gives the impression of an excess of voluntarism [a philosophical school that considers God or the ultimate nature of reality as some form of will] that one gets when reading the works of this great author, considered the last of the Christian Fathers of antiquity.

A few years after his death in 636, the Council of Toledo of 653 described him as “illustrious teacher of our epoch and glory of the Catholic Church.”

Isidore was without a doubt a man of marked dialectic positions. Even in his personal life, he underwent permanent interior conflict, similar to what Gregory the Great and Augustine had known, between a desire for solitude in order to dedicate himself only to meditating on the Word of God, and the requirements of charity towards his brothers for whose salvation he felt responsible as bishop.

For instance, he wrote about Church authorities: “A person with Church responsibility (vir ecclesiasticus – man of the Church] should on the one hand, let himself be crucified in the world with the mortification of the flesh, and on the other, accept the decision of the Church hierarchy when it comes from the will of God, and dedicate himself to governing with humility, even if he may not wish to do so” (Sententiarum liber III, 33, 1: PL 83, col 705 B).

He adds, one paragraph later: “Men of God (sancti viri – holy men) in fact do not want to dedicate themselves to secular things, and groan when, by a mysterious plan of God, they find themselves laden with certain responsibilities… They will do everything to avoid this, but they accept what they wished to escape from and do what they wished to avoid. In fact, they enter into their secret heart, and there, they seek to understand what the mysterious will of God wants of them. And when they acknowledge that they must submit to the plan of God, then they subjugate their heart to the yoke of divine decision” (Sententiarum liber III, 33, 3: PL 83, coll. 705-706).

To understand Isidore better, one must remember, above all, the complexity of the political situation in his time, which I already referred to. During his boyhood, he experienced the bitterness of exile. Despite this, he was permeated with apostolic enthusiasm. He knew the inebriation of contributing to the formation of a people who were finally finding unity on the religious and on the political levels, with the providential conversion of the heir to the Visigoth throne, Hermenegild, from Arianism to the Catholic faith.

But we must not underestimate the enormous difficulty of adequately confronting problems as serious as relationships with the heretics and with the Jews. It is a whole series of problems which appear very concrete even today, especially if one considers what is taking place in some regions today in which it is almost like witnessing a revival of situations in sixth-century Spain.

The wealth of cultural knowledge at Isidore’s disposal allowed him to continually draw comparisons between the Christian novelty and the Greco-Roman classic heritage. But more than the precious gift of synthesis, he also seemed to have that of collatio, of gathering together, which was expressed through an extraordinary personal erudition, even if it was not always ordered as one might desire.

In any case, one must admire his constant concern not to ignore anything that human experience has produced in the story of his country and of the entire world. Isidore did not want to lose anything of what man had acquired in ancient times, whether pagan, Jewish or Christian.

One should not be surprised, therefore, that in pursuing this end, he sometimes failed to adequately pass – as he might have wished – the knowledge that he possessed through the purifying waters of the Christian faith. Indeed, in his own mind, the propositions he made were always in tune with the Catholic faith, which he sustained most firmly.

In discussing various theological problems, he showed perception of complexities and often proposed, with great acuteness, solutions that bring together and express the Christian truth in its entirety. This has allowed believers through the centuries to avail gratefully of his definitions even up to our time.

One significant example is Isidore’s teaching on the relationship between the active life and the contemplative life. He writes: “Those who seek to reach the repose of contemplation should first train themselves in the stadium of active life; thus rid of the slag wastes of sin, they will be in a position to exhibit a pure heart which alone allows us to see God” (Differentiarum Lib II, 34, 133: PL 83, col 91A).

But the realism of a true pastor convinced him, nonetheless, of the risk that the faithful run of reducing themselves to beings of one dimension. Thus he adds: “The middle life, composed of both forms of living, normally results more useful to resolve those tensions that are often sharpened by choosing just one way of living, while they are tempered by alternating the two forms” (op. cit., 134: ivi, col 91B).

Isidore finds the definitive confirmation of a correct orientation in life in the example of Christ, saying: “Our Savior Jesus offers us the example of an active life in that, during the day, he devoted himself to offering signs and miracles among men, but shows us the contemplative life in that at night he retired to the mountain and spent his nights in prayer.” (op. cit. 134: ivi).

In the light of this example by the Divine Teacher, Isidore could conclude with this precise moral teaching: “Thus, the servant of God, imitating Christ, must dedicate himself to contemplation without rejecting the active life. To act otherwise would not be right. Indeed, just as one must love God in contemplation, so must one love his neighbor in action. It is therefore impossible to live without the presence of both forms of living, nor is it possible to love if one does not experience both” (op. cit. 135: ivi, col 91C).

I think that this is the synthesis of a life which seeks contemplation of God, dialog with God, in prayer and reading Sacred Scripture, along with acting in the service of the human community and one’s neighbor.

This synthesis is the lesson which the great Bishop of Seville leaves us, Christians of today, who are called to bear witness to Christ at the start of a new millennium.

Ben C. Smith has posted part 11 of his series on ancient canonical lists. He’s looking at the third council of Carthage, held in the year 397.

Don’t forget: Sister Macrina is still posting detailed reporting of that conference she attended on the Syrian Fathers. If you apply, a respectable university might give you three credits for reading her accounts of Simeon of Taibouthèh and Isaac of Nineveh.

What a pope! He’s moved on to St. Columban (or Columbanus, not to be confused with Columba, his near contemporary, or Columbus, which is in Ohio).

And Teresa Benedetta translated:

Dear brothers and sisters,

Today, I wish to speak about the sainted abbot Columban, the most famous Irishman of the Middle Ages. With good reason, he may be called a ‘European’ saint, because as monk, missionary and writer, he worked in different countries of western Europe.

Together with the Irish of this time, he was aware of the cultural unity of Europe. In a letter of his written around 600 to Pope Gregory the Great, one finds for the first time the expression ‘totius Europae – of all Europe – referring to the presence of the Church on the continent (cfr Epistula I,1).

Columban was born around 545 in the province of Leinster, southeast Ireland. Educated in his own home by the best teachers, who started him on liberal arts studies, he was later entrusted to the guidance of Abbot Sinell of the Cluain-Inis community in northern Ireland, where he was able to deepen his studies of Sacred Scriptures.

At almost twenty years of age, he entered Bangor monastery in the northeastern part of the island, under Abbot Comgall, a monk famous for his virtue and rigorous asceticism.

In full harmony with his abbot, Columban zealously practised the severe discipline of the monastery, leading a life of prayer, asceticism, and study. He was ordained a priest there.

The life in Bangor and the example of the abbot influenced the concept of monasticism that Columban matured with time and spread in the course of his life.

When he was almost 50, following the typically Irish ascetic ideal of ‘peregrinatio pro Christo’ – to be a pilgrim for Christ – Columban left Ireland with 12 companions to undertake missionary work on the European continent.

We should remeember that at that time, migrations of peoples from the north and the east had caused entire Christianized regions to fall back into paganism.

Around 590, this small missionary team landed on the Breton coast [western France]. Welcomed benevolently by the King of the Franks of Austrasia [present-day France], they asked him simply for a piece of untilled land. They were given the ancient Roman fort of Annegray, which was in ruins and abandoned, and by now, overgrown by forest.

Used to a life of extreme renunciation, the monks succeeded within a few months to build their first hermitage on the ruins. Thus, their work of re-evangelization started through the testimony of their own life. With their cultivation of the soil, they also started the cultivation of souls.

The fame of these foreign religious people who, living on prayer and in great austerity, built homes and tilled the land, quickly spread, attracting pilgrims and penitents.

Above all, many young people asked to be welcomed into their monastic community to live, as they did, this exemplary life which revived cultivation of the earth as well as of souls.

Soon, it became necessary to establish a seocnd monastery. It was built a few kilometers away on the ruins of an old thermal resort, Luxeuil. It would become the center for radiating out the monastic and missionary tradition of Ireland towards the European continent. A third monastery was erected in Fobntaine, an hour’s walk to the north.

Columban lived in Luxeuil for almost 20 years. here, the saint wrote for his followers the Regola monachorum – monastic rules – which were for some time more widespread in Europe than the Rule of St. Benedict, in which he outlined the ideal image of the monk. It is the only ancient Irish monastic rule that we now have.

Integral to it, he also elaborated the Regula coenobialis, a kind of penal code that is surprising for its modern senisbility, and which can only be explained by the mentality and cultural climate of the time.

With another famous work entitled De poenitentiarum misura taxanda, also written at Luxeuil, Columban introduced confession, with private and repeated penitence, to the continent. It was called a ‘penitence by tariff’ because of the proportion established between the gravity of the sin and the type of penitence imposed by the confessor.

This novelty aroused the suspicions of the bishops of the region, a mistrust that changed to hostility when Columban had the courage to reproach them openly for some of their practices.

An occasion for the manifestation of such a confrontation was the dispute over the date of Easter: Ireland had been following the Oriental tradition rather than the Roman. Columban was summoned in 693 to Châlon-sur-Saôn to answer to a synod about his practices regarding penitence and Easter.

Instead of presenting himself to the Synod, he sent a letter in which he minimized the issue and invited the Synod fathers to discuss not only the date for Easter, a minor problem in his view, “but also – something more serious – all the necessary canonical norms which many have not complied with” (cfr Epistula II,1).

At the same time, he wrote Pope Boniface IV – as he had written several years earlier to Pope Gregory the Great (cfr Epistula i) – to defend the Irish tradition (cfr Epistula III).

Intransigent as he was on every moral question, Columban also came into conflict with the royal house because he had sharply reproached King Theodoric for his adulterous relations.

This led to a network of intrigues and maneuvers on a personal, religious and political level which, in the year 610, resulted in a decree of expulsion from Luxeuil of Columban and all monks of Irish origin, condemning them to exile. They were escorted out to sea to be shipped back to Ireland at the expense of the court.

But the ship ran aground not far from the beach; and the captain, seeing in this a sign from heaven, gave up the undertaking, and for fear of being cursed by God, he brought back the monks to safe ground. But instead of returning to Luxeuil, they decided to start a new phase of evangelization.

They headed to the Rhine and sailed upstream. After a first stop at Tuggen near Lake Zurich, they proceeded to the Bregenz region near Lake Constance to evangelize the Germanic tribes.

Soon after, however, Columbna, because of political events which were not favorable to his work, decided to cross the Alps with most of his disciples. The only one left behind was a monk called Gallus. His hermitage eventually developed into the famous Abbey of Sankt Gallen in Switzerland.

Arriving in Italy, Columban found a benevolent welcome at the royal Lombard court, but he soon had to face remarkable difficulties: the life of the Church was being torn by the Arian heresy which was still prevalent among the Lombards, and by a shcism that had detached the greater part of the churches in northern Italy from communion with the Bishop of Rome.

Columban entered the dispute authoritatively, writing a pamphlet against Arianism and a letter to Boniface IV to convince him to take decisive steps in order to re-establish unity (cfr Epistula V).

When the king of the Lombards, in 612 o3 613, assigned him some land in Bobbio, in the valley of the Trebbia, Columban founded a new monastery whoch would later become a center of culture comparable to the famous one at Montecassino. Here he reached the end of his days. He died on November 23, 615, the day on which he is commemorated in the Roman rite up to our time.

The message of St. Columban is focused on a firm call for conversion and for detachment from earthly goods in the light of the eternal heritage. With his ascetic life and his uncompromising behavior in the face of corruption among the powerful, he evokes the severe figure of John the Baptist.

But his asceticism was never an end in itself – only the means to open himself freely to the the love of God and to respond with all his being to the gifts he received, thus reconstructing in himself the image of God while tilling the soil and renewing human society.

I cite from his Instructiones: “If man correctly uses the faculties that God has granted his spirit, then he will be similar to God. Let us remember that we must give back to him all the gifts which he endowed us with when we were in our original condition. He has taught us the way with his commandments. The first of those is to love the Lord with all our heart, because it was he who loved us first, from the beginning of time, before we even came to this world”
(cfr Instr. XI).

The Irish saint truly embodied these words in his own life. A man of great culture – he wrote poems in Latin and a book of grammar – he showed himself to be rich in gifts of grace. He was a tireless builder of monasteries as well as an intransigent preacher of penitence, spending all his energies to nourish the Christian roots of the Europe which was being born.

With his spiritual energy, his faith, his love of God and neighbor, he was truly one of the Fathers of Europe. He shows us even today the roots from which our Europe can be reborn.