Author: Mike Aquilina

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Manning the Station

The Society of St. John Chrysostom promotes ecumenical dialogue of the east-west variety. Most members belong to Orthodox or Catholic churches. I’ve had the honor of speaking twice in the lecture series of the Youngstown-Warren, Ohio Chapter.

Next up in the series is Father Pat Manning, who will speak on “John Henry Cardinal Newman and the Development of Christian Doctrine.” The talk takes place Tuesday, June 10, at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Austintown, Ohio. (For information, call 330-755-5635.)

Father Manning is Vice-Rector at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus. He holds a doctorate in systematic theology from Duquesne University and a bundle of other degrees from the Gregorian and Angelicum in Rome, from Boston College, and from the Athenaeum in Cincinnati.

Newman’s Essay On Development Of Christian Doctrine is one of the must-read works of patrology, near the top of even the shortest lists. If you can make it to Austintown, you don’t want to miss this talk.

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Memorial Days

I’ve adapted this from last year’s Memorial Day post…

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.

Two years ago, while researching these customs, 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). Last year I saw that inscription with my own eyes.

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.

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Dig These

Archeological updates…

• From Yemen: The American archeological mission has started its second season of archaeological excavation in Masnaat Mariya in Ans district of Dhamar governorate. Masnaat Mariya is one of the largest pre-Islamic archaeological site is in Yemen. The name means “Mary’s Fortress,” which much have had great significance to the early Christian community there.

• The Guardian gives us The Dustbin of History, an interesting reflection on the usefulness of the ancient Egyptian garbage dump at Oxyrhynchus (City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish). In the trash heap were half a million papyrus fragments — much of them account ledgers, grocery lists, and small-talk correspondence, but also “a treasure trove of lost classics and non-canonical gospels.”

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Rethinking Patristic Grammar School

Reviewed in Bryn Mawr Classical Review: Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World, a reconsideration of Christianity’s role in the development of education. Maybe we weren’t as bad as we supposed.

Scholarship has come a long way in thinking about late-antique education since Henri Marrou could state with unflinching certitude that, “Even the most ‘educated’ of [Christians], those who remained most faithful to classical art and classical thought … share the spontaneous reaction of the simple and the ignorant, and condemn the old culture for being an independent ideal hostile to the Christian revelation”, or by Pierre Riché that, “While this kind of learning [the commentaries of grammarians] satisfied curiosity, it did not shape the mind.” The work of Catherine Chin presently under review lays both of these misconceptions firmly to rest by demonstrating how late-antique grammatical artes did, in fact, mold the imaginative aspect of reading practices, allowing educated late-Roman Christians to generate a conceptual space within which they appropriated and reconciled themselves with the use of the secular literary tradition. This book comes as a recent addition (and one for which there is much to celebrate) to a more general field of interest in late-antique education that has been the subject of intensive study from a number of very specific directions. Chin’s contribution, however, brings to bear the resources of critical literary theory and linguistic anthropology in the service of quite a large claim, that “the teaching of language in late antiquity shaped the ability of late ancient readers and writers to have concepts that we call religious” (page 1). The following review will offer an overall assessment of that claim after summarizing its development in the course of the work…

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Do This for Your Summer Vacation

Gosh, one of my books is a finalist for the Catholic Summer Reading program at Aquinas and More. From sixty-four books, the list is down to ten — and there I am with my old friends G.K. Chesterton, Pope Benedict XVI, George Bernanos, J.R.R. Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh … You get the idea.

Runners-up include some great titles on the early Church, like We Look for a Kingdom by Carl Sommer.

A&M is also inviting people to join online discussions of their featured books, and there’s a website dedicated to those conversations. Says marketing manager Mike Davis: “The whole point of the program is to get Catholics reading during the summer, the off-season, to be more engaged with their faith during this time. We’re encouraging, once again, the formation of summer reading groups in parishes and we will be providing free downloadable book discussion guides.”

Sounds like a great way to spend a summer. I’m honored to be on the list!

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Danny Does Denis

I’ve long suspected that Pope Benedict XVI harvests material from frequent visits to Danny Garland’s blog. I wonder if he saw Danny’s paper on the authorship of the body of work attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. Danny’s paper is a nice complement to the recent papal address on Pseudo-Dionysius.

Actually, Dionysius (or Denis, or Denys) has lately been a growth industry in the blogosphere. Enter his (pseudo) name in the search block at left, and you’ll find everything from a massive series on D’s thought to a recent archeological find that may have been his home.

I agree with Danny (and the Holy Father) about the late-fifth- or early-sixth-century dating. The later Fathers and scholastics believed they were dealing with a first-century Athenian when they handled Dionysius; and I have friends today who lean the same way. But even putting all language issues aside, the thing that clinches it for me is the absolute absence of references to Dionysius in the Cappadocians. Basil and Gregory studied in Athens, where, if the Dionysian corpus had existed, it would have been revered. Yet, to paraphrase Ray Bradbury, we see it never.

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Panis What Pun Is

As if to help us celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi, archeologists in England have excavated two “massive” granaries built beside a fifth-century Christian church. I don’t think the Journal reporter intended the pun, although he labored mightily for our pun-ishment in the title of his article: Romans Were Upper Crust on Daily Bread. (Don’t you just hate it when people pun that way?)

While we’re at it, I should mention that I wrote a book about Corpus Christi, and I managed to do it without punning once. It’s Praying in the Presence of Our Lord: With St. Thomas Aquinas.

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Papal Pain Management

Bryn Mawr Classical Review published a review of Kevin Hester’s Eschatology and Pain in St. Gregory the Great: The Christological Synthesis of Gregory’s ‘Morals on the Book of Job’ (Studies in Christian History and Thought).

Gregory the Great stands virtually alone among the early medieval popes in the extent to which we are familiar with not only the events of his pontificate, but also his distinctive personality. As with Augustine of Hippo, scholars have perceived much of the man in the writings, as Gregory’s character, temperament, and concerns are revealed not only in his copious epistles but in his theological works as well. At its heart, Kevin Hester’s Eschatology and Pain in St. Gregory the Great is an attempt to clarify one particular area of the Pope’s personal Christology through a close reading of the Moralia in Iob. Specifically, Hester attempts to show how Gregory’s ideas about redemptive pain and eschatology are “connected, related, and reconciled” through the Pope’s understanding of Christ as iudex (8). Hester’s study strongly reflects the concentrated focus of the doctoral dissertation on which it is based. Readers looking for a more comprehensive introduction to Gregory’s personal theology are advised to consult Carole Straw’s masterful synthesis, whose ideas Hester draws upon in his own work.

I haven’t read this new book, but I do second the recommendation of Carole Straw’s Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, a book I found illuminating. Hester’s use of Straw makes his own book all the more promising.

Hat tip on the review: Rogue Classicism.

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Pict a Little, Copt a Little

The London Times tells of ancient Scotland’s links to Christian Egypt — and the archeological evidence.

The origins of Scotland are enveloped in the mists of antiquity. The earliest written accounts are to be found in the works of the Roman historian Tacitus, whose father-in-law invaded southern Scotland with the 9th Roman Legion in 81 AD.

At that time Scotland was inhabited by tribes of Celtic origin, notably the Picts, about whom very little is known but who left behind many distinctive stone carvings.

Around the 6th century, the Picts converted to Christianity and some of their carvings show links with the Middle Eastern Coptic church. This image (left), of two hands receiving a loaf of bread from a raven, depicts StAnthony and StPaul the Hermit in the desert. It is found on a monastery wall in Egypt and a Pictish stone at St Vigeans, Dundee.

Originally referred to as Alba or Alban, the name Scotland is said to derive from the Scots, a warlike Celtic race from Northern Ireland who invaded southwestern Scotland in the 3rd and 4th centuries and established the kingdom of Dalriada. The first king to unite Scotland was Kenneth MacAlpin, who seized power in 843 AD and ruled all the country north of the Forth.

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Showing Off Sheba

The Ethiopian Church has been much in the news lately, especially as archeologists dig to expose its most ancient roots. Smithsonian ran a big story not long ago, as did the New York Times. Italy made headlines when it sent a huge ancient obelisk back to Axum. And everybody’s talking about the discovery of the Queen of Sheba’s palace, with its supposed altar for the Ark of the Covenant.

Now, Catholic Near East Welfare Association has published a feature on the Ge’ez Church in its magazine One. If you don’t know CNEWA, you should. The folks there are working for peace, genuine ecumenism, and authentic development in the troubled lands that were once home to the Church Fathers. Donors get a subscription to the magazine, which often includes fascinating snatches of patristics and archeology — snatches that often find their way to this blog! So make a donation today and start your subscription.

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Romanus Roams Rome

Is this pope cool or what? In today’s audience, he moved on to Romanus the Melodist (whom we discussed here).

Teresa Benedetta translates:

Dear brothers and sisters,

In the series of catecheses on the Fathers of the Church, I wish to speak today about a little-known figure: Romanus the Melodist, born around 490 in Emesa (present-day Homs) in Syria.

A theologian, poet and composer, he belongs to that great line of theologians who transformed theology to poetry. We may think of his compatriot, St. Ephraim of Syria, who lived 200 years earlier than he.

But we can also think of the theologians of the West, like St. Ambrose, whose hymns still form part of our liturgy and continue to touch our hearts; or a theologian-thinker of great strength like St. Thomas, who gave us the hymns for Corpus Domini which we celebrate tomorrow. We think of St. John of the Cross and so many others.

Faith is love, and therefore, it creates poetry and music. Faith is joy, so it creates beauty.

And Romanus the Melodist is one of these – a theologian poet and composer. Having learned the first elements of Greek and Syrian culture in his native city, he transferred to Beritus (now Beirut), to complete his classical education and perfect his rhetorical skills.

Ordained a permanent deacon around 515, he became a preacher in that city for three years. He transferred to Constantinople towards the end of the reign of Anastasius I (around 518), and settled in the monastery of the Church of the Theotokos, Mother of God.

It was there that a long key episode in his life took place: the Sinassarium tells us that the Mother of God appeared to him in a dream and he received the gift of poetic charism. That Mary, in fact, asked him to swallow a rolled-up paper. When he woke up the next day – Feast of the Lord’s Nativity – Romanus preached from the pulpit: “Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent” (Hymn ‘On the Nativity’ I. Proemium). And that is how he became a homilist-cantor up to his death (after 555).

Romanus lives in history as one of the most representative authors of liturgical hymns. The homily was, for the faithful of his time, practically the only occasion for catechetical instruction.

Thus, Romanus is not only an eminent witness to the religious sentiment of his era, but also of a lively and original way of catechesis. Through his compositions, we realize the creativity of this way of catechesis, the creativity of theological thinking, and of the sacred aesthetics and hymnography of that time.

The place where Romanus preached was a shrine in the outskirts of Constantinople. He would ascend the pulpit in the center of the church and spoke to the community using a rather elaborate ‘setting’ – he used depictions on the church murals or icons decorating the pulpit to illustrate his homilies, and even used dialog.

His homilies were in sung metric verse called kontakia. The term ‘kontakion’ – a small staff – appears to refer to the rod which holds the scroll of a manuscript, liturgical or otherwise.

There are 89 kontakia that have lived to our day under the name of Romanus, but tradition attributes thousands to him.

In Romanus, every kontakion is composed of stanzas, mostly 18 or 24, with a similar number of syllables structured according to the pattern of the first stanza (irmo); the rhythmic accents of the verses in all the stanzas are modelled after the irmo. Each stanza ends with a refrain (efimnio) that is usually identical, to create poetic unity.

Moreover, the first letters of every stanza indicated acrostically the name of the author, often preceded by the adjective ‘humble’. A prayer referring to the lessons celebrated or evoked concludes the hymn.

After the Biblical reading, Romanus would sing the Proemium, often in the form of a prayer or supplication. Thus, he announced the theme of the homily and explained the refrain to be repeated together at the end of every stanza, which he recited aloud in cadence.

We are offered a significant example in the kontakion for Passion Friday: it is a dramatic dialog between Mary and her Son which takes place during the way of the Cross.

Mary says: “Where are you going, my Son? Why have you completed so quickly the course of your life?/ Never did I think, my Son, to see you in this state/ Nor ever imagine to what point of fury the wicked would come/ To lay their hands on you against everything that is just.”

Jesus responds: “Why do you cry, my mother? … Should I not suffer? Should I not die?/ How otherwise would I be able to save Adam?”

Mary’s son comforts his mother, but also reminds her of his role in the story of salvation: “Therefore, my mother, lay down your sorrow/ It is not fitting that you weep, because you have been called ‘full of grace'” [Mary at the foot of the Cross, 1-2; 4-5).

In the same hymn, regarding the sacrifice of Abraham, Sara reserves for herself the decision on Isaac’s life. Abraham says, “When Sara hears your words, my Lord/ and will have known your will, then she will tell me:/ ‘If he who gave him to you will take him back now, why did he give him, to begin with?… You, o watchful one, leave my son to me,/ and when he who called you wants him, he should say so to me” (The sacrifice of Abraham, 7).

Romanus did not use the solemn Byzantine Greek used in the imperial court, but simple Greek that was close to the language of the people. I would like to cite here an example of his lively and very personal way of speaking about the Lord Jesus: he calls him ‘the spring that does not burn and light against the shadows’, and says: “I burn to have you in my hand like a lamp;/ indeed, whoever carries an oil lamp among men is illuminated without being burned./ Illuminate me then, you who are the inextinguishable lamp” (he Presentation, or Feast of encounter, 8).

The power of conviction in his preachings was based on the great consistency between his words and his life. In one prayer he says: “Make my tongue clear, my Savior, and open my mouth/ and after having filled it, pierce my heart, so that what I do/ should be consistent with what I say” (Mission of the Apostles, 2).

Let us examine some of his principal themes. A fundamental theme of his preaching was the unity of God’s action in history, the unity between creation and the story of salvation, the unity between the Old and New Testaments.

Another important theme was pneumatology, the doctrine about the Holy Spirit. On the Feast of Pentecost, he underlined the continuity between Christ ascended to heaven, and the apostles, that is, the Church, and exalts missionary action in the world: “…with divine virtue, they have conquered all men;/ they have taken up the Cross of Christ like a pen;/ they have used words like fishnets to fish among men;/ they have used the Word of God like a sharp fish-hook/ and as bait, the flesh of the Sovereign of the Universe” ( Pentecost 2;18).

Another central theme is, of course, Christology. He does not go into difficult concepts of theology, much discussed in those days, and which had so torn apart not only the unity among theologians but also among Christians.

He preached a simple but fundamental Christology – that of the great Councils. But above all, he kept close to popular piety – after all, the concepts of the Councils were born from popular piety and knowledge of the Christian heart – and thus, Romanus underscored that Christ was true God and true man, and being the true man-God, was one person, the synthesis of creation and creature, in whose human words we hear the Word of God himself.

He said: “He was a man, Christ was, but he was also God/ though not divided in two: He is One, son of a Father who is only One” (The Passion 19).

As for Mariology, Romanus, who was grateful to her for the gift of poetic charism, remembers her at the end of almost every hymn, and dedicates to her some of his most beautiful kontakia: Nativity, Annunciation, Divine Motherhood, the New Eve.

Finally, his moral teachings have to do with the Last Judgment (The Ten Virgins [II]). He leads us to this moment of truth in our life, the confrontation with the just Judge, and so, he exhorts to conversion in penitence and fasting. Positively, the Christian must practice charity and alms.

He emphasizes the primacy of charity over chastity in two hymns, the Marriage at Cana and The Ten Virgins. Charity is the greatest of virtues: “… Ten virgins possessed the virtue of virginity intact/ but for five of them, the practice proved fruitless./ The others shone with their lamps of love for mankind/ and for this, the Bridegroom asked them in” (The Ten Virgins, 1).

A pulsing humanity, the ardor of faith and profound humility pervade the songs of Romanus the Melodist. This great poet and composer reminds us of the whole treasury of Christian culture, born of faith, born from the heart that has encountered Christ, the Son of God.

From this contact of the heart with the Truth that is Love, culture is born – the entire Christian culture was born. And if the faith remains alive, this cultural legacy will not be dead, it will remain alive and present.

Icons continue to speak today to the heart of believers – they are not things of the past. Cathedrals are not medieval monuments but houses of life, where we feel ‘at home’: where we meet God and where we meet each other.

Neither is great music – Gregorian chant, Bach or Mozart – a thing of the past. It lives in the vitality of liturgy and in our faith.

If faith is alive, Christian culture will never become ‘past’ but will remain alive and present. And if the faith is alive, even today we can respond to that command that is repeated ever anew in the Psalms: “Sing a new song to the Lord.”

Creativity, innovation, new song, new culture, and the presence of the entire cultural heritage are not mutually exclusive, but one reality: the presence of the beauty of God and the joy of being his children.

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Festal Virgins

Invoking the Fathers, Pope Benedict XVI addressed a gathering of consecrated virgins. Catholic News Service reports:

While the rest of the world may think chastity is something “unintelligible and useless,” the order of consecrated virgins is a charism that can be fruitful and beneficial to all people, Pope Benedict XVI said.

“With your righteous life, you can be the stars that guide the journey of the world,” he said in a May 15 private audience with about 500 consecrated virgins from across the globe.

He said he wished to encourage them in their vocations and hoped they would grow daily in their awareness that this charism is “as bright and fertile in the eyes of faith as it is unintelligible and useless (in the eyes) of the world.”

The women were in Rome as part of a May 14-17 international congress of consecrated virgins discussing how to foster the order and how it is lived in the world.

Consecrated by her local bishop, a consecrated virgin makes a promise of perpetual virginity, prayer and service to the church while living independently in society.

The order of virgins is one of the oldest forms of consecration in the church.

Pope Benedict said the desire to live as a consecrated virgin is linked to the desire to mirror Mary and her “loving, free choice” to do the will of God.

The pope asked that the soul of Mary be in each one of them. Quoting St. Ambrose, he said Mary “is the one mother of Christ according to the flesh, yet according to faith, Christ is the fruit of all.”

“Every soul receives the Word of God, provided that, immaculate and immune to vice, it guards its chastity with inviolate modesty,” he said, quoting the saint.

Some years back, Yours Truly interviewed Dominican Father Benedict Ashley on the ancient roots of the practice of consecrated virginity. It’s one of the most-visited pages on this site.

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Vision Test

Jim Davila points us to an intriguing article by Israel Knohl on the “Vision of Gabriel” — a messianic Jewish text from the first century before Christ. The vision speaks of a messiah who dies, rises (“by three days”), and ascends to heaven. As always, there are those who say this shows Christianity up to be history’s most successful copycat. And there are those who marvel that the prophets were so tuned-in to what was coming. For either crowd, the “Vision of Gabriel” is a fascinating read. There’s full text (PDF) of Israel Knohl’s article here. There’s a little bit of background here.

It’s amazing to me that some folks still deny that there was much in the way of messianism before Jesus.

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Musings on the Delphic Muteness

The Fathers had little good to say about the town of Delphi and its famously oracular pythoness. Delphi went mute, they said, because Christ had conquered the demons.

Well, Delphi’s back in the news as a tourist draw. Says the Miami Herald’s reporter:

I stood on the ancient ground where Agamemnon, Socrates and Cicero, among others, had humbly stood, hoping to get answers to their big questions.

I was alone outside the ruined Temple of Apollo, where for more than 1,000 years the Oracle of Delphi enigmatically answered the questions of curious pilgrims — including kings, generals and philosophers. Now, she was silent. But Zeus wasn’t. Thunder shook the ground.

Above me loomed the rain-darkened Phaedriades — or ”Bright Ones” — twin, broad-shouldered limestone cliffs that frame the sacred hollow where the temples, stadiums and shrines of Delphi were built. Once the hub of the religious life of the Greek classical world, Delphi, on a late afternoon in April, played host to one wet tourist and several bored security guards.

I’ll still side with the Fathers and recommend that you save the airfare and kneel down in the nearest parish church.