Phil has decided to launch his fulltime patristiblogging like a ballistic missile, with St. John Chrysostom: Headship and the Culture Wars. Don’t just visit. Say something.

A pile of links on the Emperor Constantine.

A little bit of Jerome should serve to prepare the candidates well for election day. Thanks to Bread and Circuses.

The treasures of St. Catherine’s have come down from Mount Sinai and crossed over to L.A. The International Herald Tribune reports on a long-running exhibit of St. Catherine’s icons at the Getty Museum. Patrologists of the Left Coast, make time for this. (Hat tip: PhDiva.)

Mount Sinai in Egypt is perhaps best known as the site where Moses encountered the burning bush and received the Ten Commandments.

But also in this desolate desert landscape, Justinian, the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, in the middle of the sixth century ordered the construction of a monastery, St. Catherine’s, that has become the oldest continuously operating Christian monastic community. Over the 1,400 years of its existence, St. Catherine’s has accumulated one of the finest and most extensive collections of religious icons in the world.

Now, many sacred treasures from the Greek Orthodox monastery are to be shown for the first time abroad. The exhibition “Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai” will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from Nov. 14 to March 4…

The exhibition will feature approximately 43 icons – holy images regarded as sacred in the Eastern Orthodox church – including some of the oldest surviving Byzantine examples, as well as illuminated manuscripts and liturgical objects…

The highlight of the exhibition is a sixth-century icon of the apostle Peter, notable for both its antiquity and its realistic portrait style. A wave of iconoclastic zeal in the eighth and ninth centuries led to the destruction by the Byzantine emperors and their forces of almost all icons in Constantinople, and few examples predating that period have survived. But because of its remote location, St. Catherine’s was unaffected by the upheaval.

Interesting piece from The Daily Star (Egypt) on the survival of the ancient Coptic language in Christian culture. (If you want to hear it in the liturgies, visit here. If you want to buy recordings, click here.)

Considered an extinct language, the Coptic language is believed to exist only in the liturgical language of the Coptic Church in Egypt. The ancient language that lost in prominence thanks largely to the Arab incursion into Egypt over 1300 years ago remains the spoken language of the church and only two families in Egypt.

Coptic is a combination of the ancient Egyptian languages Demotic, Hieroglyphic and Hieratic, and was the language used by the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt following the spread of Greek culture throughout much of the Near East. In essence, it is the language of the ancient Egyptians themselves.

Mona Zaki is one of only a handful of people that continue to use the language in everyday conversation. She speaks a colloquial form of Coptic with her parents and a few relatives …

Weary of the recent unpleasantness in the Anglican world, Phil has decided to blog full-time on the Fathers. This is very good news. He’s currently trying to compile a list of patristiblogs, and he’s talking about maybe starting up a patristics carnival. These efforts are to be encouraged. Please do your part, and send him names, ranks, serial numbers of all your favorite Church-fatherly weblogs.

Also: make sure to congratulate Phil, as his first child is due on the feast of St. Ambrose — the birthday of my third child.

Run, don’t walk, to your newsstand to pick up the November edition of First Things. Its lead essay is “The Return of the Fathers, by R.R. Reno. Gosh, he makes it sound cool and even postmodern to do patristic studies. Read it and see if it’s your patriotic (and patrologic) duty to pursue that doctorate.

More on this as I give the essay the closer study it deserves (possibly early November).

For the feast of St. Luke, Evangelist: Jerome, from his work On Illustrious Men.

Luke, a physician of Antioch as his writings indicate, was not unskilled in the Greek language. An adherent of the apostle Paul, and companion of all his journeying, he wrote a Gospel, concerning which the same Paul says, “We send with him a brother whose praise in the gospel is among all the churches,” and to the Colossians, “Luke the beloved physician salutes you,” and to Timothy, “Luke only is with me.” He also wrote another excellent volume to which he prefixed the title Acts of the Apostles, a history which extends to the second year of Paul’s sojourn at Rome, that is to the fourth year of Nero, from which we learn that the book was composed in that same city. Therefore the Acts of Paul and Thecla and all the fable about the lion baptized by him we reckon among the apocryphal writings, for how is it possible that the inseparable companion of the apostle in his other affairs, alone should have been ignorant of this thing. Moreover Tertullian who lived near those times, mentions a certain presbyter in Asia, an adherent of the apostle Paul, who was convicted by John of having been the author of the book, and who, confessing that he did this for love of Paul, resigned his office of presbyter. Some suppose that whenever Paul in his epistle says “according to my gospel” he means the book of Luke and that Luke not only was taught the gospel history by the apostle Paul who was not with the Lord in the flesh, but also by other apostles. This he too at the beginning of his work declares, saying, “Even as they delivered unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.” So he wrote the gospel as he had heard it, but composed the Acts of the Apostles as he himself had seen. He was buried at Constantinople to which city, in the twentieth year of Constantius, his bones together with the remains of Andrew the apostle were transferred.

Ben C. Smith continues his series on the early Christian canons with a second entry on The Origenic Canon. This one’s particularly interesting, as he must assemble Origen’s “list” from several different sources. Ben considers Origen’s treatment of much pseudepigrapha, the Gnostic and other fringey gospels, and the works of the Apostolic Fathers. If you haven’t been following this series, go back and read the whole thing.

I’m just now in the middle of Darrell Bock’s The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities — and I’m loving it. It’s (so far) a concise, readable, orthodox, and sane introduction to the Gnostic gospels. I hope to post my own review in November. Such a book is long overdue.

Adrian Murdoch finds it hard to warm to Ambrose of Milan, or at least to Ambrose’s writings. And he calls Jerome to witness.

Ambrose does come across as stodgy in his addresses, but a little bit warmer in his letters and his mystagogical sermons (which were probably taken down by a scribe). Nowhere, though, is he as approachable as in Augustine’s various reminiscences and in the biography written by his secretary Paulinus. The spiritual direction Ambrose gave to Augustine and Monica is some of the best we’ll find this side of purgatory — for example, the advice usually summarized as “In essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity.” That line is usually attributed to Augustine, and it is indeed a summary of his famous Letter to Januarius. But the Bishop of Hippo was merely passing on the advice Ambrose had given to Augustine’s scrupulous mother.

Adrian’s right in saying that Ambrose was a politician — and maybe even an operator. (So was Cyril of Alexandria, to name just one other shrewd saint of the patristic era.) But it’s arguable that we needed a politically savvy bishop in that key city at that time. Ambrose had been governor of Liguria and Aemilia before he was bishop. He knew how to work with the mighty, and he knew how to work them. In his Milanese standoffs with the emperors, Ambrose set the West’s agenda for throne-altar relations. And it’s served us fairly well, preserving us, at least to some degree, from manipulation by the state. Yes, our record has been far from spotless; but not every episcopal operator is a saint, like Ambrose.

Look for more Ambrosian material at Bread and Circuses in the coming weeks, as Adrian continues his research on Gratian.

Today’s the feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch, who died around 107 A.D. On his way to martyrdom in Rome, he wrote seven letters that have survived for us, thanks to the good offices of his friend St. Polycarp of Smyrna (who was himself a disciple of the Apostle John). St. Ignatius is an early and eloquent witness to traditional Christian doctrines of the divinity of Christ and His humanity, baptism and the Eucharist, the hieararchy (bishop, priest, deacon), and Roman primacy. His letters preserve the earliest recorded use of the term “the Catholic Church.” I’ll be talking about him with Bruce and Kris McGregor at Spirit Radio. You can tune in 7:20 to 8 a.m. (Central Time) at KVSS’s website. Just click the “listen live” button. I hope to have the interview posted on the blog tonight. Maria Lectrix has podcasted audio of all of Ignatius’s letters. And they’re available in text in lots of translations. (For those of you who prefer a good, solid book, see here.)

Study up, this weekend, on the Christianity of ancient Egypt.

Al Ahram reports on the neglect of Coptic monuments in Egypt.

Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, gives us a trove of Coptic links, including ancient texts, lives of the saints, archeological updates, everything!

More links, though not well maintenanced, from the St. Shenouda Coptic Society.

This one’s beautiful, the fruit of eighteen years of research on Coptic paintings.

The so-called pythoness of Delphi was, for many centuries, the world’s most renowned oracle. Generals and statesmen and ordinary folks traveled to Greece to gain her counsel — or, rather, the counsel of the god Apollo, who spoke through her. She guided the course of conquests and commerce, marriage and monarchy. She presided at the Temple of Apollo, which was adorned by two famous inscriptions: “Know Thyself” and “Nothing Too Much” — sound enough advice, echoed often by the saints.

St. Athanasius tells us that, upon the coming of Jesus Christ, the oracle at Delphi fell permanently silent. Indeed, the Pythia does seem to have clammed up around the beginning of the Common Era. The pagans, however, gave the credit to the Emperor Hadrian, who put a plug in the place after 117 A.D. The oracle had assisted him in his accession to the purple. He wanted to make sure no one followed too closely in his soothseeking footsteps.

The prophetess may have fallen silent, but perhaps it was from a longish case of laryngitis, because we know that at least one late emperor consulted her, and with calamitous effect. In 303 A.D., Diocletian asked her why the utterances had declined, and she replied that it was the fault of the Christians. Historians say this was one of the precipitating causes of Diocletian’s ruthless persecution. Much later in the fourth century, the emperor Julian (“the Apostate”) restored the shrine and its oracle as part of his program of re-paganizing the Roman world. But, by then, the old oracle just sounded tired: “Tell the King,” she said, “that the curiously built temple has fallen to the ground, that bright Apollo no longer has a roof over his head, or prophetic laurel, or babbling spring. Yes, even the murmuring water has dried up.” The Christian Emperor Theodosius shut the place down for good in the 393.

Now scientific research adds insult to injury. Researchers now claim that the oracle got her enlightenment from inhaling gases that seeped upward from the bowels of the earth. Methane, ethylene, and carbon dioxide are contenders.

It’s kind of sad to think that Rome’s final, brutal persecution of the Church resulted from the same process that produced the lyrics of Donovan, Pink Floyd, and Yes. But, whatever.

If only the Pythia could speak to us today, what might she say?

“Dude, did you ever think about your hand? I mean, really think about your hand?”

Maybe the stoners were on to something. Knowing thyself might as well begin with, like, really knowing thy hand. But, even then, one shouldn’t let one’s self-contemplation get out of hand. Nothing too much, after all.

Adrian Murdoch gives us a wonderful anecdote about Ambrose’s successful intervention on behalf of a pagan sentenced to death. (Don’t miss this one. It’s unforgettable.) He also takes us back to Ravenna.