My friend Paul Crawford, titan of Templar studies, brings news that an English translation of Justinian’s Code — full text, fully annotated — is up on the Web. What an amazing accomplishment. You must read the story of how this came about.

It was Justinian, by the way, who commissioned that mosaic of the Fathers you see at the top of this page.

There’s an urban legend making the rounds about Pope Benedict’s visit to the United States. The story goes that Vice-President Cheney asked the pontiff what he’s been reading. The Holy Father replied that he’s been researching “the Arian heresy.” Cheney, thinking the pope meant “Aryan,” said, “That must be interesting for you, since you lived through it.” And Benedict responded, “I’m old, but I’m not that old.”

It’s a funny story, and I’m told it appeared in the London Times. But I’m afraid I couldn’t find confirmation anywhere on the Web.

So I went over the head of the World Wide Web and sought out an expert: the political scientist Dr. Joseph Heim of California University of Pennsylvania. And Joe put me on to the likely source. Cheney wasn’t the political figure; it was Boris Johnson, the mayor of London. And Boris didn’t flub the historical facts quite as badly as the urban-legendary Cheney; the media did. The true story is still very good, and it’s told with great theological precision by Christopher Howse in the London Telegraph, under the title “Boris Johnson and the Holy Trinity.”

Poor old Boris Johnson made a couple of jokes after his election as mayor of London that were mistaken by commentators for learned showing-off. “I am just totally fed up with this artificial distinction … this sort of Arian controversy about the old Boris and the new,” he had declared. “There is no distinction between the old Boris and the new Boris. They are indivisible, co-eternal … consubstantial.”

The Evening Standard was still quoting him on Tuesday as talking about an “Aryan” controversy, as if it were about racial theory. It was certainly “Arian”, for all he meant was that such distinctions were, as the cliché puts it, “theological”. Mr Johnson prefers avoiding clichés by making them concrete. So he jokingly pretended that his interlocutors were familiar with the Arian controversies of the fourth century.

I suspect that he himself is more familiar with Edward Gibbon’s account of the heresy promoted by the Egyptian bishop Arius, rather than with recent theological studies of Arianism. “The post-war period has been astonishingly fertile in Arius scholarship,” writes Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his controversial book Arius: Heresy and Tradition. I say “controversial”, but the book was published by Dr Williams before homosexuality and sharia distracted the world’s attention from almost anything else he said.

Gibbon’s endeavour in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been to show that the whole controversy was ludicrous. His motive was hatred for the Christianity against which he had turned after a youthful period of devotion.

In recounting the fortunes of the Arians, Gibbon mocked the terminology in which theologians of the time were entangled. “I cannot forbear reminding the reader,” he remarks in a mischievous footnote, “that the difference between the homoousion and homoiousion, is almost invisible to the nicest theological eye.”

That can hardly be a very honest judgment. There is only one letter’s difference between the two Greek words, but so there is between the English food and wood, though the latter would be a disappointing dinner. All the marvels of computer science depend on the simple distinction between the two figures 0 and 1.

I don’t want to spoil Boris Johnson’s joke, but the question of whether Arius’s followers had got it right is no trifling matter. On those obscure Greek words depends the answer as to who Jesus Christ is. That is the central point of the Christian religion.

One often hears people saying things like, “Jesus wasn’t God. It says in the Bible he was only the Son of God.” Yet to the Christians of the first centuries, it was vital to recognise the Son of God as fully God and fully man. That is why the framers of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662 included the Athanasian Creed in it.

In the 19th century there was a hot argument about whether this creed should be recited in church. (That is another story.) The Prayer Book directs that its should be recited on solemn days, such as Whitsun, which falls tomorrow. After some difficult-sounding statements about God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Creed says: “He therefore that will be saved must think thus of the Trinity.”

It is no longer the style to claim that a specified faith is necessary to salvation (that is, going to heaven). Yet believers feel that they can pray more coherently if they have some idea of whom they are praying to when they say “Our Father”, or when they hear a Collect in the Prayer Book end: “Through Jesus Christ our Lord”.

The difficulty of saying anything true about God in limited human language is nothing new. St Augustine, the great north African bishop, wrote 1,600 years ago about the three-in-oneness of the God the Holy Trinity: “Three whats?” in God he asks. Human language can hardly express any answer. “One can reply, ‘Three persons’,” says Augustine, “less in order to say what is there than in order not to be reduced to silence.”

Still, we do know a little about what a person is. We know something of the relationship that distinguishes Son from Father, and of the relationship between lover and beloved (which distinguishes the Holy Ghost).

If Boris Johnson can say of himself that he is the same person as he ever was, it is partly because theologians have sharpened the concept of what being a person means.

In this week’s Wednesday audience, Pope Benedict catches us up on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Teresa Benedetta translates:

Dear brothers and sisters,

Today, in the course of the catecheses on the Fathers of the Church, I wish to speak of a rather mysterious figure – a theologian of the sixth century whose name is unknown but who wrote under the pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite.

His pseudonym alludes to the passage of Scripture that we heard today, the episode that St. Luke narrates in Chapter XVII of the Acts of the Apostles, which says that Paul preached in Athens on the Areopagus for the elite world of Greek intellectuals, but that in the end, a great part of his listeners proved to be uninterested and walked away, deriding him.

Nonetheless, some – a few, St. Luke tells us – approached Paul and opened themselves up to the (Christian) faith. The evangelist gives us two names: Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus (circle), and a woman named Damaris.

If the author of these books chose the pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite five centuries later, it means that his intention was to place Greek wisdom in the service of the Gospel, to help the encounter between Greek intelligence and culture, on the one hand, and the good news about Christ, on the other. He wanted to do as the earlier Dionysius intended, namely, that Greek thinking should encounter St. Paul’s preaching, and as a Greek person, to become a disciple of St. Paul and therefore of Christ.

Why did he hide his true name and choose this pseudonym? One part of the answer has been given – he wished to express the fundamental intention of his thinking.

But there are two hypotheses on his (choice of) anonymity. The first one says it was a deliberate falsification, in which, by seemingly dating his works back to the first century, to St. Paul’s time, he wanted to confer on his writings an almost apostolic authority.

But better than that hypothesis – which I find barely credible – is the other: that he wished it to be an act of humility. Not to glorify his own name, not to create a monument for himself through his works, but truly to serve the Gospel, to create an ecclesial theology and not an individual theology based on himself.

In fact, he succeeded to construct a theology that we can certainly date to the sixth century but that could not be attributed to any of the figures of the time. It is a theology that is a bit ‘dis-individualized’, that is, a theology that expresses common thinking in common language.

It was a time of most bitter controversies following the Council of Chalcedon. But he, for instance, in his Seventh Epistle, says: “I do not want to create polemics: I simply speak of the truth, I seek the truth.”

The light of truth itself allows errors to fall off and whatever is good to shine. With this principle, he purified Greek thought and reconciled it with the Gospel. This principle, that he affirms in that seventh letter, is also the expression of a true spirit of dialog: to seek not the things which separate, but to seek the truth in Truth itself, which will then shine and let errors fall.

Therefore, even if the theology of this author is what we might describe as ‘supra-personal’ – in reality, ecclesial – we can situate him in the sixth century. Why? Because he encountered the Greek spirit which he placed at the service of the Gospel in the books of one Proclus, who died in Athens in 485.

Proclus belonged to late Platonism, a current of thought that had transformed Plato’s philosophy into a sort of religion, whose ultimate goal was to create a great apologia for Greek polytheism and turn back, after the success of Christianity, to the ancient Greek religion. It wanted to demonstrate that, in reality, divinities (gods) were the operating forces in the cosmos. The intended consequence was that polytheism would be considered more true than monotheism with its single Creator God.

What Proclus sought to demonstrate was a great cosmic system of divinities with mysterious powers, and that man could find access to divinity through this deified cosmos. But he distinguished between the way for simple people, those who are not able to reach the summits of truth – for whom certain rites would suffice – from the ways for wiser ones who must purify themselves in order to reach pure light.

This thinking, as we can see, is profoundly anti-Christian. It was a late reaction to the triumph of Christianity. An anti-Christian use of Plato, even while a Christian use of the great philosopher was already under way.

It is interesting that the Pseudo-Dionysius had dared to use that thinking in order to show the truth of Christ – to transform that polytheistic universe into a cosmos created by God, into the harmony of God’s cosmos where all the forces are in praise of God, and to show that great harmony itself, that symphony of the cosmos that ranges from the seraphim, angels and archangels to man and all creatures who together reflect the beauty of God and who in themselves constitute praise of God.

Thus he transformed polytheistic images into a eulogy for the Creator and his creatures. We can discover in this the essential characteristics of his thinking: it is, above all, cosmic praise.

All creation speaks of God and is a eulogy to God. Since the created being is himself a praise to God, the theology of the pseudo-Dionysius becomes a liturgical theology: God can be found above all by praising him, not merely reflecting on him. And liturgy is not something constructed by us, something invented to constitute a religious experience for a certain period of time. Liturgy is singing with the chorus of all creatures and entering into cosmic reality itself.

And that is how liturgy, apparently only ecclesiastic, becomes large and great, it becomes our union with the language of all creatures: One cannot speak of God in an abstract way, he said. To speak of God is always – he uses a Greek word – a ‘hymnein’, a singing to God with the great song of all creatures which is reflected and concretized in liturgical praise.

But although his theology is cosmic, ecclesial and liturgical, it is also profoundly personal. He created the first great mystical theology. Rather, the word ‘mystical’ acquired a new meaning with him.

Until then, this word was, for Christians, equivalent to ‘sacramental’, namely, something that belongs to the ‘mysterion’, the sacrament. But with him the word ‘mystical’ became more personal, more intimate – expressing the path of the soul towards God.

And how to find God? Here we find once more an important element in his dialog between Greek philosophy and Christianity, particularly, Biblical faith. It had been made to appear that what Plato said and what the great philosophies say about God is much more elevated and much more true. By comparison, the Bible was seen as rather ‘barbarous’, simple, pre-critical, one might say today.

But the pseudo-Dionysius observed that this was precisely what was needed, because that way, we would understand that the highest concepts about God will never really approach his true greatness – they would always be inadequate. The (Biblical) images make us understand that God is above and beyond all concepts. In the simplicity of such images, we find more truth than in grand concepts.

The face of God is our inability to really express what He is. Thus one speaks – and the Pseudo-Dionysius himself does so – of a “negative theology”: We can say more easily what God is not, rather than express what he really is.

Only through images can we guess at his true face, but on the other hand, the face of God is also very concrete: it is Jesus Christ. And although Dionysius shows us, following Proclus, the harmony of celestial choirs in which it seems that everything depends on everything else, it remains true that our path to God is often very far from him. The Pseudo-Dionysius demonstrates that ultimately, the road to God is God himself, who made himself close to us in Jesus Christ.

That is how a great and mysterious theology also becomes very concrete, whether in the interpretation of liturgy or when discussing Christ. With all this, Dionysius the Areopagite had a great influence on all of medieval theology, on all the mystical theology of the East as well as the West.

He was practically rediscovered in the 13th century, above all by St. Bonaventure, the great Franciscan theologian who in his mystical theology found the conceptual instrument to interpret the legacy of St. Francis that is at once so simple and so profound.

The Poverello said, at the end, along with Dionysius, that love sees more than reason. Where the light of love is, the shadows of reason no longer have a place. Love sees: love is seeing, and experiencing it gives us more than reflection does.

What such experience was, Bonaventure saw in St. Francis: it is the experience of a very humble, very realistic path – this day-to-day walking with Christ, accepting his Cross. In this poverty and in this humility, a humility that lives even in ecclesiality, is an experience of God that is higher than what one can reach through reflection. In it, we truly touch the heart of God.

Today there is a new relevance and actuality for Dionysius the Areopagite. He appears a great mediator in the modern dialog between Christianity and the mystical theologies of Asia, whose well-known characteristic is the belief that one cannot say who God is, that one can only talk of God in negative forms, one can only speak of what he is not, and that only by entering into this experience of what he is not, does one reach him.

So we see a kinship between the Areopagite’s thinking and that of the Asian religions, and he can be a mediator today just as he was between the Greek spirit and the Gospel.

One sees that dialog cannot accept superficiality. Precisely when one enters into the profundity of the encounter with Christ, then the vast space for dialog opens up. When one meets the light of truth, one realizes that it is a light for all; controversies disappear and it becomes possible to understand each other, or at least talk to each other, come close to each other.

The path of dialog is precisely by being near to God in Christ, in the profundity of the encounter with him, in the experience of the truth which opens to light and which helps us to go forth and encounter others – the light of truth, the light of love.

Ultimately, he tells us: take the road of experience, of humble experience of the faith, day by day. Then the heart opens up in order to see – and can therefore illuminate reason because it sees the beauty of God.

Let us pray to the Lord that he may help us even today to place the wisdom of our time in the service of the Gospel, discovering anew the beauty of faith and of the encounter with God in Christ.

Read Dionysius. At this price you can’t afford not to!

The New York Times quoted Yours Truly for the first (and surely last) time today.

Actually, the Times quoted Rock n Roll Hall-of-Famer Dion quoting me on the subject of St. Jerome.

An Italian-American bluesman records a song in Florida. An Irish-American disc jockey plays it at a radio station in Woodstock, N.Y. He tells a friend from his old neighborhood in the Bronx about the song. And before you know it, Mexican teenagers whose families replaced the Irish in the tenements and row houses of Mott Haven are tapping their toes to the tune.

Some song? You bet. Consider this: The song is “The Thunderer,” an homage to St. Jerome, an irascible scholar and a pillar of the early church. The singer? Better known for “The Wanderer.”

But Dion DiMucci, the Italian-American doo-wop legend from Belmont who goes by his first name, was only the messenger. The real link between him, the D.J. and Mott Haven is the parish church in Mott Haven, named for St. Jerome, which was the boyhood church of the Irish-American D.J., Big Joe Fitz.

Big Joe told the Rev. John Grange, a childhood friend and the current pastor of St. Jerome’s, about the song. He played it at Mass and at other events, and it caught on. Now he plans to make up shirts for the parish teams declaring themselves “The Thunderers.”

Dion, 68, who won fame early as the leader of a teenage group that toured with Buddy Holly, was touched by the gesture.

“That is amazing that a guy like St. Jerome who lived in the fourth century could bring people together,” he said. “Sometimes you think people are dead and forgotten. But they can actually bring you together in the best way.”

The song, from Dion’s 2007 album “The Son of Skip James,” is based on a poem by Phyllis McGinley, also titled “The Thunderer.” In it, Jerome emerges as difficult as he was smart:

God’s angry man,

His crotchety scholar

Was Saint Jerome,

The great name-caller

Who cared not a dime

For the laws of Libel

And in his spare time

Translated the Bible.

Dion had long been familiar with a quote of St. Jerome’s: “Ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ.” He had casually mentioned that line to a friend, Mike Aquilina. Mr. Aquilina replied, “The Thunderer.”

The what?

“I said to myself, there is no such word,” Dion recalled. “But Mike told me about the McGinley poem and who St. Jerome was, how he translated the Bible from Greek into Latin. Then he translated it from Hebrew into Latin.”

But the saint wasn’t always perfect, Dion learned.

“He was a pretty uppity guy,” Dion said. “He was intolerant. He was so bright, he was like, ‘C’mon, get over it!’ He couldn’t be around people, so he lived in this cave.”

How could he not like a person like that?

“I thought you had to be humble to become a saint, but a priest told me it takes all kinds to make it to heaven,” he said. “I figure he’s like us, a little like us. Not that I’m a scholar or an academic, but you go ‘Wow! I got a chance.’ ”

Gosh, I want one of those tee-shirts. And you want to own an MP3 of that song about St. Jerome, if you don’t own it already! You can get it on Amazon or on iTunes.

When I found out I was quoted in the New York Times, I felt like Steve Martin in that great scene in The Jerk. He gets his name in the phone book and jumps for joy, shouting, “I’m somebody! I’m somebody!” The camera then does a quick cut to a psychopathic killer, armed to the teeth, opening a phone book to a random page.

Please pray for Sister Macrina, who blogs on the Fathers at A Vow of Conversation. She’s preparing to make her final profession as a Cistercian.

Born in Jerusalem, closely connected with the royal house of Edessa, Sextus Julius Africanus served as librarian at the Pantheon in Rome during the reign of Alexander Severus (third century). Talk about your inside tracks on history! They say his Chronicles filled many volumes, though only fragments survive. He corresponded with Origen, and he was an invaluable source for Eusebius.

Now, all the fragments have been collected, with two letters by Africanus, in one volume with and English translation and footnotes. Iulius Africanus: Chronographiae: The Extant Fragments is a very valuable book, whose pricetag certainly reflects that high value. Bryn Mawr Classical Review says:

Through the Chronographiae Africanus conceived the extraordinarily ambitious plan of fitting widely disparate strands of different histories into a biblical frame of time, beginning with Adam and culminating with the Resurrection. The resultant chronological system served as a basis for universal histories of which the Eusebian-Hieronymian version proved both influential and lasting. Perhaps the success of the latter ultimately guaranteed the dispersal and fragmentary survival of the model conceived by Africanus.

Hat tip: PaleoJudaica.

Many apologies for my relative silence. I’ve been down with some mystery bug, which seems to be affecting all major systems simultaneously. Last week I could barely stay awake. My fever broke Friday, but other symptoms are lingering. Raise an Ave for a poor blogger, please.

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 Reverend Father Calinic Berger, patrologist, monk, and pastor. A visiting professor of dogmatic theology at St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary, Father Calinic got his doctorate under the generation of patristic luminaries at CUA, and it shows. The program will begin with vespers on Tuesday, May 13, at 6:30 p.m. He will speak on the subject “Priesthood: Foundations and Reflections.” The program takes place at Holy Trinity Romanian Orthodox Church, which is at 626 Wick Ave., Youngstown, Ohio. For information, call 330-755-5635.

Butler’s Lives of the Saints, all the original volumes in the late 1800s editions, are available from the Internet Archive, here.

A regular visitor, who wishes to remain anonymous, put them up. Here are the details:

(The archive can sometimes be finicky or slow, so if you get an error, just try again later.)

The four volumes are labelled there as volume 1, volume 2, volume 7, and volume 10. Volume 1 is Jan-Mar; Vol. 2 is Apr-Jun; Vol. 3 is Jul-Sep; and Vol. 4 is Oct-Dec. I think the source of the numbering confusion is that these volumes were produced just by binding the individual months’ volumes three at a time, so bound Vol. 3 begins with original Vol. 7.

Anyhow, they’re there. They’re huge and painfully slow to read because they’re all stored as graphic images. I am continuing to work on OCRing and proofing them to produce more usable versions, but I must admit I’m not working very fast. You can see from the page images why it takes so long–the print quality is abysmal, the pages are huge, and the extensive footnotes are in very tiny type!

Polish archeologists have found a patristic-era church in the Sudan.

Gashwin clarifies that Cardinal Newman isn’t quite on his way to beatification yet.

Perhaps the Alleluias were a bit premature … Basically, what’s happened is that the miracle has been officially recognized by the panel of medical experts. Or rather, they have determined that there is no natural explanation for the healing seen in this case.

There are still a few more steps before the Beatification can be officially proclaimed.

Gashwin Gomes brings us tidings of great joy: Cardinal Newman will soon be beatified.

Vatican City, Apr 23, 2008 / 03:12 am (CNA).- The Vatican has approved the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, the English convert and theologian who has had immense influence upon English-speaking Catholicism, the Birmingham Mail reports.

John Henry Newman was born in 1801. As an Anglican priest, he led the Oxford Movement that sought to return the Church of England to its Catholic roots. His conversion to Catholicism in 1845 rocked Victorian England. After becoming an Oratorian priest, he was involved in the establishment of the Birmingham Oratory.

He died in 1890 and is buried at the oratory country house Rednall Hill.

The Catholic Church has accepted as miraculous the cure of an American deacon’s crippling spinal disorder. The deacon, Jack Sullivan of Marshfield, Massachusetts, prayed for John Henry Newman’s intercession.

At his beatification ceremony later this year, John Henry Newman will receive the title “Blessed.” He will need one more recognized miracle to be canonized.

The case of a 17-year-old New Hampshire boy who survived serious head injuries from a car crash is being investigated as a possible second miracle.

Two of the fundamental texts in patrology, imho, are Newman’s Essay On Development Of Christian Doctrine and The Church of the Fathers. (Others would add The Arians Of The Fourth Century. But I’m tempted to add his collected works as well.)