Author: Mike Aquilina

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The Fathers, Amplified

Those of you who can’t get enough talk about the Church Fathers — even if it’s Yours Truly doing the talking — or can’t get enough of Father Ron Lengwin — will be happy to note that my hour-and-a-half conversation with Father Ron on his radio show, Amplify, is now up on my MP3 page.

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Tomb with a View

“I am going the way of the Fathers … for I see myself being summoned by the Lord.”

I found those among the last words of the saint whose feast we celebrate today, Anthony of Egypt. They would, I think, make a good motto for this blog. (I have elsewhere taken the old guy as a sort of patron.)

The Church reveres Anthony as a model monk and hermit and a great master of the spiritual life. Anthony managed — in spite of his best efforts to live in remote seclusion — to achieve worldwide celebrity. Crowds of people sought him out, for counsel, for exorcism, for intercession and healing. Wherever he was — whether walled up in an abandoned mountain fortress or shut up in a fetid tomb — Anthony was himself a destination for pilgrims. He began his pursuit of the solitary life when he was around twenty years old, and he persevered until his death at 105 in the year 356. He emerged from his cells only when the Church required his service: once he traveled to Alexandria to fortify those who were about to die as martyrs; another time he arrived to deliver a public condemnation of the Arian heresy.

Shortly after Anthony’s death, St. Athanasius wrote a biography, The Life of Anthony, which soon became a runaway bestseller. Within a generation, the book had become one of the most quoted and most influential texts in the Christian world. Anthony’s acts affected the lives and preaching of such men as Jerome, Ephrem, Augustine, Rufinus, Gregory Nazianzen, Paulinus, Palladius, and Chrysostom. If you want to join their ranks, you can check out The Life online, and even read a detailed rundown of how the ancient world received the text. A more readable translation, though, is here, and it’s quite affordable. Anthony’s aphorisms appear also in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (a must-read).

This morning I’ll be discussing Anthony on KVSS Radio. You can listen online via live feed, or you can wait for Bruce and Kris to post an audio file. Eventually, Junior will move the file onto this site as well.

If you want to turn your listening pleasure into a multimedia experience, you can surf to the many artistic representations of Anthony’s temptations. The demons really gave it to the guy, and great artists have found the subject irresistible. The most famous rendering is by Hieronymus Bosch. My favorite, though, is this one.

The first piece I wrote for the religious press was a profile of St. Anthony. It appeared in a little magazine edited by a Mennonite gentleman and sold in his bookshop. It was 1985; and I was twenty-two years old. I dug it out of the archives this morning with the thought of posting it here, but I’m holding back. Maybe the two decades that have passed since then have made me timid. I hope not. But I don’t think I would write the piece the same way today. In illo tempore, I put the emphasis on facing temptations squarely and overcoming them with grace and grit-your-teeth effort. Now I’d qualify the statement and say that there are times to face temptation, but there are also times when it’s best to flee — to avoid the near occasion of sin, as we say in the Act of Contrition. We should know that our strength is God’s strength. But we should know, too, that our weakness is our own. I hope that’s closer to Anthony’s spirit. (I’m reassured by the knowledge that Anthony’s life underwent some drastic changes between ages twenty-two and forty-three.)

Men and women still take to the deserts of Egypt to live in Anthony’s caves and other habitats. Treat yourself to a firsthand account of this life in Father Mark Gruber’s Journey Back to Eden: My Life and Times Among the Desert Fathers. It’ll blow your mind.

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Unearthing Jerusalem

Big sixth-century find in Jerusalem, says Israel National News:

The most extensive remains are those of a Roman-Byzantine colonnaded street — the Eastern Cardo. Included in that area is a covered stoa, a row of shops and several artifacts.

The street appears on a 6th century map known as the Medaba Map and is known as the Eastern Cardo or the Valley Cardo. The lavish colonnaded street began at the Damascus Gate in the north and led south, running the length of the channel in the Tyropoeon Valley. Sections of this street were revealed in the past in the northern part of the Old City, at a depth of about four meters (12 feet) below the pavement. The full eleven-meter (33 foot) width of the original road was exposed in the present excavation for the first time.

There’s more detail in The Jerusalem Post, too.

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March in January

I think the Fathers would recognize America’s moral landscape for what it is. Our world is not so different from the world where they lived — the world they converted and healed.

But who belongs to our world? For the last generation, Americans have tried to place certain classes of humans beyond the protection of the law, outside the definition of personhood. It began with the fetus, the preborn child. Court decisions placed arbitrary limits — at the first trimester, or second, or birth. But does anyone take these seriously? What is it about a day of development — or a week — that changes the baby so radically as to make her a different sort of being? Which is the event that confers personhood?

Again, different ethicists propose different answers: self-consciousness, the ability to feel pain, sensitivity to light and sound, and so on. But these, too, fail. After all, we don’t (yet) kill older children who are blind or deaf. The most honest pro-choice thinkers put the matter baldly: what confers personhood is the will of the mother.

The Church Fathers were familiar with this line of thinking. In pagan Rome, a child did not achieve personhood until recognized by the head of the family, the father. When the mother had given birth, a midwife placed the child on the floor and summoned the father. He examined the child with his criteria of selection in mind.

Was the child his? If the man suspected his wife of adultery — ancient Rome’s favorite pastime — he might reject the child without so much as a glance.

If the child were an “odious daughter” (a common Roman phrase for female offspring), he would likely turn on his heel and leave the room.

If the child were “defective” in any way, he would do the same. As the philosopher Seneca said: “What is good must be set apart from what is good-for-nothing.”

Life or death? It all depended upon the will of a man. Human life began when the child was accepted into society. A man did not “have a child.” He “took a child.” The father “raised up” the child by picking it up from the floor.

Those non-persons who were left on the floor — while their mothers watched from a birthing chair — would be drowned immediately, or exposed to scavenging animals at the town dump.

Against these customs, the Church consistently taught that life begins at conception and should continue till natural death. In such matters, Christianity contradicted pagan mores on almost every point. What were virtuous acts to the Romans and Greeks — contraception, abortion, infanticide, suicide, euthanasia — were abominations to the Christians.

The papyrus trail is especially extensive for abortion, which is condemned by the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Apocalypse of Peter; by Justin, Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Hippolytus, Origen, and Cyprian. And that partial list takes us only to the middle of the third century.

The earliest extrabiblical document, the Didache, begins with these words: “Two Ways there are, one of Life and one of Death, and there is a great difference between the Two Ways.” The Fathers converted their world from one Way to the other, and they were judged righteous.

Our last generations have perverted our world from one Way to another, and we too will be judged. But we can still do something, as our earliest Christian ancestors did, and we must.

If you’re living in the United States and you can make a day trip to Washington, D.C., please consider making the March for Life next Monday, January 22.