Monthly Archives: September 2007

Busy…

Life is extremely busy and will be for some time to continue.

In the meantime, here’s a random collection of quotes worth pondering:

“The principle literary sources of monastic culture may be reduced to three: Holy Scripture, the patristic tradition, and classical literature. The liturgy. . . is the medium through which the Bible and the patristic tradition are received, and it is the liturgy that gives unity to all the manifestations of monastic culture.”
Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (trans. Catharine Misrahi, New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 71.

“The various [monastic] rules were merely so many individual expressions of the tradition. All the ancient monks considered their real rule, in the sense of the ultimate determinant of their lives, to be not some product of human effort but the Word of God himself as contained in the Scriptures. Monasticism was simply a form of the Christian life itself, and hence it drew its inspiration from divine revelation.”
Claude Peifer, “The Rule of St. Benedict”, pp. 65-112 in RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in English and Latin with Notes, Edited by Timothy Fry, (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1980), 85.

…[W]hen a monk is endeavouring after the plan of monastic life to reach the heights of a more advanced perfection, and, having learned the consideration of discretion, is able to arrive at the very summit of the anchorite’s life, he ought by no means to seek for all kinds of virtues from one man however excellent. For one is adorned with flowers of knowledge, another is more strongly fortified with methods of discretion, another is established in the dignity of patience, another excels in the virtue of humility, another in that of continence, another is decked with the grace of simplicity. . . . And therefore the monk who desires to gather spiritual honey, ought like a most careful bee, to suck out virtue from those who specially possess it, and should diligently store it up in the vessel of his own breast; nor should he investigate what any one is lacking in, but only regard and gather whatever virtue he has. For if we want to gain all virtues from some one person, we shall with great difficulty or perhaps never at all find suitable examples for us to imitate. For though we do not as yet see that even Christ is made “all things in all” as the Apostle says; still in this way we can find Him bit by bit in all. For it is said of Him, “Who was made of God to you wisdom and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption.” While then in one there is found wisdom, in another righteousness, in another sanctification, in another kindness, in another chastity, in another humility, in another patience, Christ is at the present time divided, member by member, among all the saints. But when all come together into the unity of the faith and virtue, He is formed into the “perfect man,” completing the fullness of His body, in the joints and properties of all His members.
John Cassian, Inst. 5.4; NPNF 2.11.234-235.

Benedict XVI on the Daily Office

There’s a full transcript here of B16’s remarks on the Daily Office made at an Austrian Abbey. My only disappointment in these remarks is that he seems to address them specifically to the ordained and the consecrated. The steady procession through Scripture as mediated by the liturgical year and the constant repetition of the Psalms does not belong only to the consecrated and ordained—it belongs to all Christians and should be encouraged among all Christians.

Even if the pattern presented is less than the 7+1 offices of the monastic rota, I encourage you to make the discipline your own. Posted on my side-bar are links to Anglican and Roman sources for the hours, both contemporary and traditional. Too, the purpose of this page is promoting the Office.

Lastly, here’s a little taste of the Pope’s comments:

Our light, our truth, our goal, our fulfilment, our life – all this is
not a religious doctrine but a person: Jesus Christ. Over and above any
ability of our own to seek and to desire God, we ourselves have already
been sought and desired, and indeed, found and redeemed by him! The
roving gaze of people of every time and nation, of all the
philosophies, religions and cultures, encounters the wide open eyes of
the crucified and risen Son of God; his open heart is the fullness of
love. The eyes of Christ are the eyes of a loving God. The image of the
Crucified Lord above the altar, whose romanesque original is found in
the Cathedral of Sarzano, shows that this gaze is turned to every man
and woman. The Lord, in truth, looks into the hearts of each of us.
The core of monasticism is worship – living like the angels. But since
monks are people of flesh and blood on this earth, Saint Benedict and
Saint Bernardo added to the central command: “pray”, a second command:
“work”. In the mind of Saint Benedict, part of monastic life, along
with prayer, is work: the cultivation of the land in accordance with
the Creator’s will. Thus in every age monks, setting out from their
gaze upon God, have made the earth live-giving and lovely. Their
protection and renewal of creation derived precisely from their looking
to God. In the rhythm of the ora et labora, the community of
consecrated persons bears witness to the God who, in Christ, looks upon
us, while human beings and the world, as God looks upon them, become
good.

Kalendrical Calculations

Caelius has a nice post up on the Golden Number and calculations for Easter and such.

Kalendar arithmetic (the art of the computus) was an important part of the liturgical arts back in the day. Isidore includes astronomy in Book 3 on Mathematics along with music and geometry but puts his section on the Paschal Cycle in Book 6 where he talks about the book and services of the Church. (Here’s a handy fully hyperlinked table of contents for the whole Etymologiae.) Bede wrote two books on time, De Temporibus and the later De Temporum Ratione (see the table of contents here), that teach calendar calculations. The second is the more complete treatment.

Furthermore, this was an important enough matter that the two great English translators of things ecclesiastical into the vernacular—Ælfric and Bryhtferth—both tackled the topic. Indeed, Bryhtferth’s Enchiridion is theoretically a work focused on the calendar and computus but he meanders through all sorts of areas to get there. Ælfric’s De Temporibus Anni is far more lucid, drawing primarily from Bede and supplementing with Isidore.

Where the rubber really hits the road, though are the tables like those that begin on folio 45v of the Leofric Missal… And, hey, as long as you’re poking around those parts of that manuscript, check out the Christ and Satan pictures too.

No More

More news . . . the retired bishop of Newark has decided to send a calculatedly insulting letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The incessant politicking, posturing, and rhetoric will only escalate from here.

I will be posting no more material on the current Anglican Unpleasantness until Martinmas at the earliest. There are plenty of voices of sanity and credibility out there to whom one should listen for such news—just don’t expect any here.

My time and energy will be much better spent in the 10th century. . .

Three More Bishops…

Rwanda’s Anglican Church has just elected three more Americans to be bishops. They are the Rev. Terrell Glenn, the Rev. Philip Jones and the Rev. John Miller. [h/t Thinking Anglicans]

I don’t know any of these folks–but you know who they’re not?

the Reverend William Ilgenfritz

Does that name ring a bell? No? He was the candidate that Forward in Faith put forward to become a bishop by some cooperative foreign Anglican body back in 2002 along with Fr. David Moyer. The call was re-iterated in 2007 when five years later Fr. Ilgenfritz was still not consecrated… (Fr. Moyer was consecrated a while ago by the Traditional Anglican Communion, a group not in communion with Canterbury.)

So—however many American bishops later and Fr. Ilgenfritz has not received the nod. I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t seem to bode well for the place of FiF and traditional Anglo-Catholics in the coming realignment.

[To clarify the confused, I know members of FiFNA and the SSC, have cordidal relationships with them, have learned much from them, but do not agree with them concerning the ordination of women.]

Short Celtic Christianity Rant

The Episcopal Cafe has been running a number of things on Pelagius recently on Speaking to the Soul. I have thus far refrained from making any comments on the subject. But today’s passage made me comment.

I’m intrigued by Celtic Christianity; I think it’s a fascinating topic. But so much of the material published as “Celtic Christianity” is a shallow artifice that skims a bit from some sources and grafts it onto a model that owes more to 1970’s Earth spirituality and modern liberal protestant theology than it does anything truly and historically Celtic. Furthermore, it participates in a similar sort of project that Elaine Pagel’s did with the Gnostic Gospels—accuse Christian orthodoxy of being the repressive patriarchal bad guy, take a few isolated items from some texts and spin them off in your own direction that may or may not have any correlation to the historical movement.

One of the favorite ways to do this is to lionize those condemned by orthodoxy. But there’s a problem here easily identified as a lack of clear sources. More often than not, we don’t have the actual texts of those condemned by the Church. As a result, recovering these people and their thought can only happen by looking at what their opponents said. So, to learn about Pelagius, you read Augustine and Jerome where they criticize him. But, if you’re not being rigorous, this is where the potential for all kinds of abuse crops up. The parts that you like, you proclaim genuine; the parts you don’t, you call slander… Furthermore, you indulge in mirror reading—(If the orthodox source argues X, my guy must have taught the exact opposite [anti-X])—but that’s not always (or even often) accurate. What really comes out is little data that provides the opportunity for a great amount of personal pontification safely stuck under an historical label.

I’m saying these are trends I’ve seen–I’m not accusing Newell (the guy being excerpted at the Cafe) of this, because I don’t know him or his work. He may well not be doing this–but I’d want to see his sources and methodologies instead of blanket accusations like the first one raised at today’s post.

Saying that Pelagius was condemned for suggesting that women should read Scripture sounds fishy to me for two reasons: 1) it completely matches modern liberal expectations of the “mean patriarchal orthodox Fathers” and 2) it contradicts actual evidence that we have of those same “mean patriarchal orthodox Fathers”…

To counteract some of the stuff out there, I recommend reading some real Celtic Christianity—which tends to be quite ascetic and apocalyptic in ways that discomfits moderns—and here’s a short taster: The Confession of Patrick, Patrick’s Letter to Coroticus, The Life of St Columba, and The Fifteen Tokens of Doomsday

Great New(?) Blog

I’ve just discovered a great new(?) blog, East to West that will be of interest to some readers of this site. Its author is a PhD student at the University of Wales who writes on patristics, early medieval matters, and the like with an emphasis both on Anglo-Saxon England and the Eastern Church. His current set of posts is exploring the most natural link between the two which occures in the person of Theodore of Tarsus.