Author Archives: Derek A. Olsen

On John Cassian’s Method of Reading Scripture

I’m jumping around quite a bit in the Cassiodorus books as I write them… This is a section of what I believe is going to be Chapter 3. Basically, in Chapter 3, I’m going to be diving directly into Cassiodorus’s great Psalm commentary and discussing what he thought a commentary was for, our stereotypical view of allegorical interpretation  (based largely in the High Medieval period with extra fuel on the fire a la De Lubac), and then an investigation of how Cassiodorus actually read, focusing on methods from Classical Antiquity, Augustine, and John Cassian. Here’s the Cassian bit… So, yes, it starts in the middle of a larger argument that isn;t conclude here either, but I think is sufficiently robust to stand on its own as well.

John Cassian’s Conferences are a strange and wonderful collection of conversations. The story goes that John Cassian and his friend Germanus, after spending some time in a monastery in Bethlehem, took the theological equivalent of a Gap Year trek and set off to see the sites—in the Egyptian deserts. They hiked around the wastelands of Northern Egypt, meeting and interviewing the famous hermits of the desert and gaining wisdom from them about the spiritual life. Many years later—probably in the opening decades of the fifth century—after founding two monasteries around modern day Marseilles, Cassian wrote down the conversation as the Conferences and, in so doing, created the first great work on the nuts and bolts of Christian spirituality in the West.

Translating and transmitting a spirituality born of experience in the desert, rooted in the teachings of Origen, Cassian’s writings were invaluable to the emerging monastic movement in the West. Benedict praises him, and advises his monks to read Cassian (RB 73.5). As monastic reformations periodically swept through the Church in the course of the Middle Ages, John Cassian’s books in general and the Conferences in particular are cited again and again with approval.

John Cassian’s fourteenth conference portrays a conversation between Cassian, Germanus, and an old man known as Abba Nesteros which is focused on the topic of spiritual knowledge. As they delve into the topic, Abba Nesteros begins talking about the ways to interpret and understand the Scriptures. First, he separates spirituality in general into two parts. The words that he uses are the “practical” and the “theoretical,” but it’s better to say that one part is the active external part while the other is the internal meditative part. That is, the central task of the active/practical part is the control of the body and mind—built on a foundation of fasting and self-mortification—whereby one focuses on sinning less. Once that has task has been fully engaged and some progress has been made will the turn to the interior life bear fruit. This is where he gets to the Scriptures.

Abba Nesteros explains that the study of Scripture is divided into two main parts: “historical interpretation and spiritual understanding.” In making this division, he lays down the two major modes of interpreting that writers of the early medieval period will prefer. He splits the spiritual interpretations into three subcategories: tropology, allegory, and anagogy. After identifying these, he explains them a bit. The historical sense is not just about the past but includes what we would consider the literal meaning of the text. In particular, the Abba says that history pertains both to things that happened in the past and to visible things. Hence, an interpretation relating to natural science would be an historical reading in the sense of the phrase “natural history.” Allegory is the mystery that is prefigured by the historical/literal events. Said another way, allegory is the means “by which the things that the historical interpretation conceals are laid bare by a spiritual understanding and explanation.” Anagogy “mounts from spiritual mysteries to certain more sublime and sacred heavenly secrets.” This is restated a little better to clarify that it is the means “by which words are directed to the invisible and what lies in the future.” Tropology, at least, is more clear: “moral explanation pertaining to correction of life and to practical instruction.” More helpful than his definitions, though is his example where he demonstrates what these four look like in practice:

The four figures that have been mentioned converge in such a way that, if we want, one and the same Jerusalem can be understood in a fourfold manner. According to history it is the city of the Jews. According to allegory it is the church of Christ. According to anagogy it is that heavenly city of God ‘which is the mother of us all.’ According to tropology it is the soul of the human being, which under this name is frequently reproached or praised by the Lord.

While a theoretical distinction is made between these four senses, as far as early medieval writers are concerned, there are two broad sense: the historical and the spiritual. Only rarely will an early medieval author specify what kind of spiritual interpretation they are using and, in practice, the categories are very fluid. Indeed the fact that only three kinds of spiritual understanding are described seems to have more to do with scriptural prooftexts than actual practice. Abba Nesteros cites two different biblical texts, one which refers to three things, Proverbs 22:20 (”…have I not written for you [three] sayings of admonition and knowledge…”), and one that refers to four, 1 Corinthians 14:6 (”…if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I speak to you in some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching…”). In each case, you get the sense that the numbers recorded in Scripture are driving the enumeration of elements rather than the methods themselves. In practice, there are many more modes of spiritual interpretation than three, and not all of them are clearly defined or delineated. We will come back to this point a little later as we discuss how we actually see spiritual interpretation happening in Cassiodorus and other authors.

Modern readers—and especially biblical scholars looking for the history of the discipline—tend to focus in on this section of this conference. However, this is just one part of a larger argument, and it deserves to be put into the proper context. Again, this whole conference begins with the idea that first step of proper interpretatin is the purification of the body, mind, and spirit. The undisciplined who persists in their sin simply cannot read the Scriptures rightly—they don’t yet have the right frame of mind to read what is found there. As a result, after talking interpretive method, Abba Nesteros returns to hammer this point again:

Maintaining the diligence in reading that I think you have, then, make every effort to get a complete grasp of practical—that is, ethical—discipline as soon as possible. For without this the theoretical purity that we have spoken of cannot be acquired. The only people who attain to it, possessing it as a reward after the expenditure of much toil and labor, are those who have found perfection not in the words of other teachers but in the virtuousness of their own acts.

This is a key point and leads to an emphasis on doing rather than teaching. Scripture must be put into practice; any one who wishes to teach it must first demonstrate with their actions their deep grasp of its teachings. Knowing with the mind is not enough; no one should presume to teach Scripture until its truths have been—literally—embodied in their habits and actions. Abba Nesteros explains that this is essential for two reasons. First, because you cannot presume to teach what you do not know and knowledge only comes by putting it in action. Second, because putting the teaching of Scripture into action is itself a sign of the converting presence of the Holy Spirit—the true guide to right reading and interpretation: “For it is one thing to speak with ease and beauty and another to enter deeply into heavenly sayings and to contemplate profound and hidden mysteries with the most pure eye of the heart, because certainly neither human teaching nor worldly learning but only purity of mind will possess this, through the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.”

Humility and the other virtues, then, are the central prerequisites to reading Scripture well. From that point, Abba Nesteros describes the proper practice of engaging Scripture. While he had talked about technical matters of interpretation in the earlier part of the dialogue, he now turns to what this looks like in day-to-day experience:

Then, once all worldly cares and preoccupations have been cast out, you must strive in every respect to give yourself assiduously and even constantly to sacred reading. Do this until continual meditation fills your mind and as it were forms it in its likeness, making it a kind of ark of the covenant . . . All of these are guarded by two cherubim—that is, by the fullness of historical and spiritual knowledge, for the cherubim are interpreted as the breadth of knowledge. . . . Hence the successive books of Holy Scripture must be diligently committed to memory and ceaselessly reviewed. This continual meditation will bestow on us double fruit. First, inasmuch as the mind’s attention in occupied with reading and with preparing to read, it cannot be taken captive in the entrapments of harmful thoughts. Then, the things that we have not been able to understand because our mind was busy at the time, things that we have gone through repeatedly and are laboring to memorize, we shall see more clearly afterward when we are free from every seductive deed and sight, and especially when we are silently meditating at night. Thus, while we are at rest and as it were immersed in the stupor of sleep, there will be revealed an understanding of hidden meanings that we did not grasp even slightly when we were awake. But as our mind is increasingly renewed by this study, the face of Scripture will also begin to be renewed, and the beauty of a more sacred understanding will somehow grow with the person who is making progress.

In this set of statements, Abba Nesteros speaking to us through John Cassian reveals the incredible profoundity that we encounter again and again in the wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers: they have a remarkable grasp of the habits of the mind, displayed here in the discussion of the processing power of the subconscious mind, that seems amazingly modern—yet is centuries old. In the spiritual laboratory of the desert, these hermits and anchorites observed and taught about the power of habit and the functions of the conscious and subconscious mind in ways that would not be replicated again until the rise of psychology in the twentieth century.

The pattern, then, is clear: memorize and rehearse. Soak the soul in Scripture, and Scripture itself would transform the soul to be more like Scripture. In so doing, the soul’s perception of Scripture will be transformed and freed to perceive more and deeper meanings within Scripture.

 

Brain Foggy

Between things at work, things at home, trying to promote a book, trying to write two books, and fulfilling other writing/programming obligations, my brain hurts…  I owe a number of people emails as well that I’m very behind on. If you’re one of them, I apologize!

I have things to say on a number of church-related links floating around right now, but don’t have the time to actually say them. So let me issue this as a general thought on things in the church right now.

If you see something that needs doing, don’t wait on a committee or a process. Just do it. Some of the very best stuff for the church that I’ve seen in the last decade or two wasn’t produced by committees, dioceses, study groups, or well-funded organizational structures.

 

They were all done by regular people and their friends who gave a crap.

 

It’s your turn.

 

Dinner Table Verbatim

Setting: The family dinner table with reference to the girls’ school, a nondenominational Christian school populated largely populated by Roman Catholics and conservative Evangelicals with a sprinkling of mainliners and two hardcore Catholic Anglicans. H is now in 5th grade; G is in 8th (!).

H: Dad, do the Roman Catholics have Rite I and Rite II?

Me: Umm… Not really, what do you mean?

H: Well, when we did class prayer in 3rd grade we used Rite I, in 4th grade we used Rite II, and now in 5th grade we use Rite I again.

Me: Oh, and your 3rd and 5th grade teachers are Roman Catholic while your 4th was nondenominational, right?

H: Right. Before we started class I asked [teacher] if we were going to use Rite I or II and he didn’t seem to know what I meant.

Me: [Realizing that she was referring to the Lord’s Prayer] Ah—no. They don’t call things Rite I and II. We do that. They’d call Rite I “traditional language” and Rite II “contemporary language.”

H: Oh. Why are Rite I services usually the early services?

Me: Well, usually the people who go to the early service are older people. There’s this idea that Rite I is for the older people and they’re more comfortable with it since it’s closer to the sound of the ’28 prayer book that a lot of them grew up with. I think some people in the Church were hoping that Rite I would just die out as the people who grew up under ’28 did, but I’m not sure that’s what we’re seeing…

G: So—as the people Grandmommy’s age [Baby Boomers] become the old people does that mean that we can make the early service Rite II because that’s what they like, and we can have Rite I back for the main service?

 

For the record, the church the girls and I attend now uses a mix of Rite II and EOW (we’re currently slogging through “EOW 3 season”). However, when we go to M’s church the first service is Rite I and that tends to be their preference. This isn’t something that we have consciously directed them towards—it just seems to be what they like…

The Amazon Edition!

People have been asking about an ebook version of the new book and it now exists—at least on the Kindle platform. You can get Inwardly Digest on the Kindle now from Amazon. The Forward Movement folks have entered the paperback version into the Amazon catalog as well, but apparently Amazon hasn’t figured out that they’re linked yet and that the information on the two formats should be shared… I guess these are the hoops and perils of the new publishing environment!

Interview and Giveaway on GrowChristians

So—the new book (Inwardly Digest: The Prayer Book as Guide to a Spiritual Life) is out now, and Forward Movement is shipping physical copies. To promote it, I’ve got an interview up on GrowChristians. I’ve been writing with them for a while now, posting in an on-going series called “Secrets of a Pew-Whisperer,” and Nurya and I did an email interview on how my book connects with the work I’ve been doing over there.

Also, they’re giving away a free copy! All you have to do is comment on the thread to be entered.

Daily Regula

An important part of any decent, sustainable Rule of Life is its regular review. You gotta keep checking in to make sure everything is still working. In my case, given my home situation and the age of my kids, there are two points of the year where I review my schedule, my regula, and take another shot at getting it right. They are—predictably—when the girls get out of school and when they go back to school. Well—they’re back! This week was the first half-week of school consisting only of half-days is it was a weird liminal period that was neither fully on or off. The other piece of this is that Mother M is now a rector. (Yay!!) Since she’s got her fulltime work schedule and the girls have a new schedule and their activities have new schedules, I have to sit down and figure out how to make everything work again… (And this will take a little bit to come up with something fully functional…)

A Rule of Life or regula to me is fundamentally about living out (or attempting to) what we ask help doing in Ps 90:12: “So teach us to number (or, maybe, “reckon” and hence “organize”?) our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” It’s making sure that the things that I say matter are actually present in the things that I do and the way I arrange my daily schedule. Of course, doing all of the crazy things I do, there’s *never* enough hours in the day to do all of the things I want to do balanced against the things I must do including the day-job, the extra work, the books, driving to and from ballet, and giving my wonderful wife the attention she deserves.

Typically in churchy circles regula is about fitting in “spiritual” stuff. And—yeah—it is. Prayer, meditation, and lectio certainly are included here. But the physical stuff has got to be included here too. Not being disembodied souls, maintenance of the body is simultaneously care of the soul. Not only that, some of the things I do, like tai chi and running, are definitely part of my spiritual life. My focus, attention, and clarity suffer when I’m not doing them.

One interesting aspect of all of this—how I set up my time, how I give daily progressive time to those activities that maintain and improve physical and spiritual health, and the relation between the physical and the spiritual—has been given new energy from an unusual direction… For my birthday, M gave me a book I’ve been lusting after for a while, Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals: A Historical Survey.  It’s got a fascinating discussion of the importance and ubiquity of weigong training which is quite frequently forgotten in many modern western interpretations of the classical Chinese martial arts. To clarify, weigong is the “external” physical muscular strength/aerobic capacity training stuff while neigong is the “internal” training. The latter gets a lot of press especially in the so-called Internal Styles (particularly in some of the more New Age-y Western interpretations of tai chi) because this is where qi gong and meditative practices and other exercises to develop the qi, the body’s internal power, fit into the schema. The authors emphasize, though, that this is a fundamentally skewed perspective:

Neigong and weigong are the two halves that when put together equal achievement in the Chinese martial arts. All skilled Chinese martial artists have both weigong and neigong abilities, and well-designed Chinese martial arts systems make use of both categories of training exercises. Oftentimes, especially in the West, there is an overemphasis on the more esoteric neigong side of training, but without a weigong basis, neigong is largely useless. (pp. 18-20)

Physical conditioning, basic technique practice, set routines, and sparring are the four corner-posts of traditional Chinese martial arts practice. (p. 26)

(And I’ll just note here that the principal author of this section is a xingyi practitioner and thus hardly in the anti-internal camp!) Too, I’m reminded here of the great discussion in Paul Gallagher’s Drawing Silk where he expresses his bewilderment at those who want to study aspects of a pretty effective and hardcore martial art (tai chi) without doing or having the physical cultivation in terms of strength, power, and flexibility that are proper prerequisites. (If you just want to do qi gong, just do qi gong—don’t do qi gong and call it tai chi!)

((It’s also occurred to me recently how good moving qi gong exercises (like the Eight Pieces of Brocade or the Five Animal Frolics) are for either cultivating and retaining basic mobility and flexibility. Whether you believe in qi or not,  the gentle movement and joint work is becoming increasingly more important to me as my body continues its slide into middle age!))

This trap—of isolating one aspect of training, especially the one that seems the most interesting and the most cool—isn’t just a phenomenon in the Chinese martial arts… I suspect we do it quite a bit in our spiritual lives too. And this, again, is why the concept of regula—patterned, disciplined habits—is so important. We have to take the periodic opportunity to stop, step back, and assess what we’re up to to make sure we’re not skewing our practice. Or, better yet, we make sure that we are adjusting our practice as needed (with the help of a spiritual director as needed?) to realize the long-term goal of a perspective that is healthy, mature, and well-grounded.

Conveying Psalm Commentary?

Ok, y’all—I need your help…

As I’ve been saying, I’m working on this book on the Psalm commentary of Cassiodorus. Right now I’m wrestling with how to present the way that he structures his commentary and give readers a sense of the experience of reading his commentary. He goes about things in a very novel way (especially for an early medieval exegete!) in that he has a four-part structure that he always uses: an introduction that discusses the superscription, then a breakdown of the psalm into its divisions (often grouped by speaker), then a phrase-by-phrase analysis (which is all that most typical patristic/early medieval exegetes do), then a summary that often underscores a moral or doctrinal point.

In particular, I want to make sure that readers get a flavor of the phrase-by-phrase process, but—honestly—I think people are only going to want a limited taste of this stuff. I’m intending to do a fairly close reading/exposition of five or six psalms to convey a complete sense of what he’s doing. Right now I’m trying to gauge how in-depth to go on each one.

So, I could do this a couple of ways. The one I’m leaning towards is to take a “representative” psalm and do a really thorough breakdown of it in excruciating detail to give my readers a sense of how he does what he does. Then, when I discuss other psalms just do a summary of the main points. However, another option would be to do something like that but also to include a chart on the 5-6 psalms that show what he’s doing with each phrase and then the narrative summary.

What do you think—do the extra psalm structure charts/outlines sound like overkill or a helpful way to grasp this rather alien reading strategy to modern lay readers?

The Famous or the Holy?

The editing work is done on A Great Cloud of Witness (hence AGCW) and it is off getting printed. I believe it will be available from Church Publishing next month. Once again, the Official Calendar of the Episcopal Church is Lesser Feasts & Fasts 2006. AGCW has no official standing in the Church. It is merely a devotional resource that can be used or not as a person or parish wills. It is incorrect and misleading to say “Today the Church celebrates…” referencing contents of AGCW. And yet, it is still under discussion within the SCLM as we try to work through what an Episcopal Calendar is and is for.

I have ranted before that the post-Vatican II reworking of the “new” Book of Common Prayer give us in some places—like the Calendar—the appearance of catholicity but without the substance. No where is this more obvious to me than the Calendar. What we have in the Calendar section looks like a sanctoral kalendar, and there are many who use it that way. However, the broad majority of the Episcopal Church does not interact with or utilize the Calendar as a sanctoral kalendar in the Catholic fashion.

Now—clearly—I don’t know the mind of the whole church. What I’m going by here are recent debates I’ve had over individuals in the Calendar and applications—formal or informal—for additions to the Calendar.

I was having a discussion with one senior clergyman formerly on the SCLM over John Calvin (May 28th in AGCW). The most telling moment was when he responded to one of my queries with “I don’t care if people don’t like him—he’s important!”

I’m currently in discussions with a liaison from my diocese to include Origen of Alexandria into one of our calendrical lists. The case being put forward recognizes that Origen was a very important early Christian figure and theologian who has been unfairly treated over the centuries and who deserves to receive his due. I’m largely sympathetic here. Origen got dragged into a complicated tangle of theological and personality conflicts a couple of centuries after his death and was judged as a result of how that played out. De Lubac is absolutely right on the importance of Origen to Christian spirituality and especially Origen being at the heart of most renewals of monastic/ascetic theology.

Not to pick on anyone, but a comment here exemplifies the logic that I’m seeing—wondering about Stephen Langton who gets the credit for the modern scheme of chapter divisions that we use in our modern Bibles.

Do we select individuals because they are “important” or because we think or hope that they should be “famous” or do we select them because they are holy? (And what is or should be the relationship between the two?) And that—right there—is what I would point to as the difference between a catholic perspective on the kalendar versus a protestant one.

I believe that a catholic perspective looks on the names in the kalendar chiefly as examples of lives living out Christian maturity, exemplifying the sacramental path of discipleship. These are our very present fellow members of the Body of Christ who strengthen us with their prayers now and who give us direction and encouragement by their lives and how they participated within the mysteries of Christ. Holiness therefore is the primary consideration and criterion.

A protestant perspective identifies the people who church folk should know. The folks we want to be famous (whether they are currently or not). Importance is therefore the primary consideration and criterion.

So—what is it that we have? Or, what is it that we think we have? Honestly, I think that our first efforts towards the Calendar that we currently have reflect a confusion on this point. Take a look at these two paragraphs. They come from Prayer Book Studies IX (1957), the first published work on the Calendar as the SLC considered revising things…

The choice of commemorations in the proposed Calendar of this Study has been made primarily on the basis of selecting men and women of outstanding holiness, heroism, and teaching in the cause of Christ, whose lives and deaths have been a continuing, conscious influence upon the on-going life of the Church in notable and well-recognized ways. There are included martyrs, theologians, statesmen, missionaries, reformers, mystics, and exemplars of prayer and charitable service. In every instance, care has been taken to list persons whose life and work are capable of interpretation in terms morally and spiritually edifying to the Church of our own generation.

In the list of primary criteria, holiness receives top billing. Importance is in here—as to some degree it must—but the ranking places holiness over importance.

The next page, though, has this:

It has often been remarked that the Prayer Book provides the parish priest with an excellent teaching manual for the study of the Bible, the doctrines and ethics of the Church, and, of course, the principles and practices of worship and prayer. It has lacked but one thing, an adequate instrument for teaching the history of the Church. The present proposal should do much to meet this need. With the names on this Calendar arranged in a historical, or topical order, the parish priest or teacher will have a convenient guide and outline of Church History from its beginnings to the present time. Such a study should greatly reinforce the other teachings of the Prayer Book, as they are exemplified in the lives of the saints.

This is fundamentally an argument for importance. This is Calendar as tool for catechesis, not tool for mystagogy. This is a tool for teaching dates and individuals, not for presenting paths of holiness. What if this paragraph had been written differently to say something like this:

The Prayer Book contains liturgies and provides directions for the worship of the Church. It provides texts for the Church’s daily praise of God and for the celebration of the sacraments as the God-given means of grace. However, what it did not contain up until this point is how this pattern of worship creates and molds lives that are lived primarily outside of churches. The Calendar that we present here teaches Church doctrine and sacramental theology by the ways that these people lived out their lives in the world, conforming their hearts, minds, spirits, and bodies to the call to die daily to self, to daily take up the cross, and follow Christ.

Now that would be Calendar as mystagogy rather than Calendar for catechesis. But that’s not what we got, and that’s not how we see it now.

When I was faced with the dilemma of the Calendar, I saw a cross-road with two major choices. First, try to change the perspective of the Episcopal Church to understand the Calendar as a mystagogical tool first. Second, meet the Church where it was but try to direct it towards what I understand to be the more complete understanding. AGCW goes the second route. It foregrounds the important and significant but also states quite clearly that it is not and is not intended to be a sanctoral kalendar. It embraces the catechetical role. Had it been approved, it would have much more clearly put the responsibility for sanctoral recognition and use at the local level, not the Church-wide level. But it wasn’t. And now we need to figure out where to go next…

Thinking about Saints on Kalendars

When I was a pious young Lutheran lad, some elderly person at our church gave away their library piece-meal. They’d leave books on a table to be picked through and taken by anyone who wanted them. Through this means, my parents inherited a whole bunch of books that they likely never expected to have…

One of the treasures that I scavenged was The Lives of the Saints by Omer Englebert, a work that fed into my growing interest in the medieval Church and pre-Lutheran Christianity that would eventually take me down the Canterbury Trail. Organized by day, this book introduced me to a whole host of figures I had never heard of who lived in ways that were utterly unfamiliar to a 20th century suburban protestant.

I would dip into the book every once in a while, look up the day’s date and see what saints were listed there, reading about them and wondering at them. Even now after who knows how many moves around the country, it’s still one of the books on my bookshelf—one quite close to my computer in fact. (The value/utility quotient of books in my office can be directly calculated by their distance from my computer…)

Looking back at this book from where I stand now, most of the saints in the book fall within a fairly defined set of strata. There is an Early Martyr strata. These were the martyrs of the 1st through the 4th centuries who were persecuted, tortured, and executed by the state—usually the Roman state. There are literally several of these provided for every day of the year.

Then there is an Ascetic strata. There’s a band of folks who fell from around the 5th century to the 11th century who were mostly monks, hermits, or founders of monastic orders. You get some ascetic bishops sprinkled in there too. You usually see at least one of these a day.

Then there’s the Teachers strata. From the 12th through the 15th centuries there are theologians and mystics of various sorts. They tend to pop up a few every week.

Last, and most sparsely, you have the Counter-Reformers. These are folks from the 16th and 17th centuries who were Jesuits or something similar who fought the spread of the Reformation in various ways. You get one or two of these a week.

I gained a sense of the scope of the Church Catholic from this book, and I think it’s one that still shapes me today. First, what I learned from this book is that you can’t talk about the history of the Church or its past without stumbling over the bones of martyrs. Before anything else is said and done, there are multiple martyrs every day of the year: that’s a basic reality of who the church is (as sketched by this book…). The perennial drumbeat that underscored every reading for every day is that the faith was worth dying for—and there were the names and dates to prove it.

Second, another daily reminder was that faith in the gospel led lots and lots of people to embrace a kind of life that I couldn’t even contemplate. A young suburbanite couldn’t comprehend the life of a hermit; it wasn’t on the radar for me. But the fact that so many people chose it as a means of expressing the gospel in their lives made me sit up and take notice: truly engaging this gospel thing made people make some really hard and uncomfortable decisions. Fidelity to the gospel takes precedence over creature comforts.

Martyrs and hermits are not part of contemporary American life. However, encountering them so frequently in this book put them into my mental map and, in doing so, taught me some very important things about the Church and about the demands of the Gospel.

Turning from this kalendar, then, to something like Holy Women, Holy Men or the soon-to-be-issued A Great Cloud of Witnesses gives me something of a sense of spiritual whiplash. There are a whole lot fewer martyrs and not terribly many hermits. A whole different set of strata appear here. More “19th century founders of Dioceses” and “Progressive Pioneers.”

I’m not judging—I’m just noticing.

One of the drivers of recent kalendar revisions in the Episcopal Church is something that I’ll call “relatability.” You won’t find this in the official list of criteria, but it’s the notion that there should be sufficient people in the sanctoral kalendar who act and live like me. Martyrs and hermits may be great and all, but what about doctors and lawyers and professionals? Accordingly, the single greatest influx of people into a trial kalendar was the add of 2009 that introduced 117 new individuals. In line with the “relatability” criterion, 79 were from the 19th and 20th centuries. To be completely clear, over half of these (42) were clergy falling either into the “missionary” or “pastor” categories, but it also added 11 “prophetic witnesses,” 8 “artist/writers,” and 5 unallocated “saints.” Accordingly we now have modern doctors and teachers and bureaucrats in the collection. (I haven’t seen any secretaries or construction workers or cooks or janitors.)

One of the central functions of a sanctoral kalendar is the notion of social memory. Social memory is the phenomenon by which a group’s present social identity is shaped by the way that it chooses to remember the past. It’s like Collective memory as described here, but this entry doesn’t make the clear connection to how this memory is linked to present identity formation and identity politics. My thinking around this issue was sparked by Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making by Elizabeth Castelli (who argues that the Early Church talked more about martyrdom than practiced it).

One of the criticisms that I heard of Holy Women, Holy Men when we were rethinking it and working towards A Great Cloud of Witnesses was that it was engaging in identity politics. I do think that’s true. I also think that it’s completely unavoidable. All kalendars are engaged in identity politics. That’s what social memory is about: leveraging the past to talk abut our present identity. There is no way to disentangle identity politics from a kalendar. Some kalendars are more aware of it than others, perhaps. Some are more overt about it than others.

Creating, maintaining, and using a sanctoral kalendar is a formal act of social memory. Putting together a list of people from the past says something about us now, about who we look up to, about what kinds of qualities, characteristics, and charisms we think are important. My old Lives of the Saints does that in one way; I think that A Great Cloud of Witnesses does it in a rather different way.

Or, rather, they hit us in different directions. They approach the goal from different paths. Lives of the Saints takes a “volume” approach. That is, I learned about the shape of sanctity and gospel fidelity by the sheer number of examples of certain kinds of witnesses. A Great Cloud of Witnesses takes a more “individual” approach—look here’s a person we remember.

Again, I’m not advocating one way or the other at the moment, I’m noticing.

 

Jerome and the Two Paulas

I’m picking up where I left off with Caesaria and Radegund, but going back in time, heading to the beginning of the 5th century…

Radegund and Caesaria were part of a larger movement sweeping through the church, a movement that would shape the contours of the Western Church for several centuries. The principles of this monastic movement were forged in the deserts of the East, in Egypt and Palestine. Their communication to the Latin-speaking West begins with the great translator Jerome. Jerome is one of those teachers known as the “Church Fathers”; from this term, “Fathers” (pater in Latin) we derive the label for both the kind of theology that they did and the period in which they wrote: patristic. The patristic period is usually defined as the first five or six centuries after Christ and these writers receive special emphasis in certain church circles because they lived within the same fundamental thought-world as the very first Christians. They existed within that Greco-Roman milieu that brought the church to birth and were native inhabitants of the languages and customs in which the church arose. For centuries, then, especially since the rise of historical consciousness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Church Fathers have held a special status because they still lived on the far side of what Lessing referred to as the great ditch of history that separates our present age from the time of Jesus, his disciples, and the first generations of the Church.

One of the questions that has arisen in recent years, though, asks the very obvious question: where were the women? If we revere the writing and thinking of the Church Fathers—where were the Church Mothers? What were they writing or thinking or doing? Despite some of our conceptions about the place of women in the Late Antique world, there were women writing works of theology and spirituality; one of them—Proba—will appear later within the circle of Cassiodorus. What we learn from Jerome and his letters, though, is that large sections of the work of the Church Fathers would never have been accomplished if it were not for the encouragement, support, and considerable financial assistance of the Church Mothers.

In particular, Jerome lived and worked in close relationship with a set of interrelated families guided by wealthy Roman matriarchs. While we have letters that Jerome wrote to popes and theologians, most of his letters were written to these women and their relations. He served them as a spiritual advisor and as a translator. Most of the biblical commentaries for which Jerome is known were either written by him or translated from Greek sources at the behest of three women in particular, Paula, Eustochium, and Marcella. Paula was the great matriarch of the XXX clan. Widowed at age ? After bearing five children, she embraced the new ascetic spirituality coming from the East, fostering it among her children and grandchildren, before embracing it wholeheartedly to the point where she moved to Bethlehem to build and then rule the women in the double monastery where Jerome would also live and work.

One of our best windows into the lives of the Church Mothers are the letters of Jerome where he described how they served God. Among his many letters, some are explicitly formational. In these works he lays out a vision for how exemplary members of the various roles within the church ought to be educated and behave. Other letters are encomia, letters of praise written to grieving family members on the death of a loved one, recounting their fame, their virtues, and their qualities. These tend to be somewhat idealized portraits—Jerome is likely exaggerating to a degree—but still provide valuable insights into how the devout women of the period lived and served. The letters that appear back-to-back with modern editions of Jerome’s letters neatly encapsulate the advice he gave and what he witnessed in the lives of the great Mothers of the Church and the emphasis that he and they placed upon the psalms. The three themes we found in Caesaria’s letter to Radegund, the centrality of the psalms, the importance of literacy, and the connection between the psalms and the gospels are found within these letters as well. The first is Letter 107, written to Laeta, the daughter-in-law of the matriarch Paula who wishes to raise her daughter (also named Paula after her grandmother) as a virgin of the church. The second is Letter 108 is his encomium of Paula upon her death, written to her grieving daughter Eustochium.

Letter 107 is a broadly directive letter giving Laeta directions in a host of areas about the best way to raise her little daughter for her role as a virgin within the church. He gives instruction on what sort of friends and maids she is to have, and what kinds of toys she is to be given to play with. In particular, Jerome is very insistent upon the importance of literacy—literacy with a clear purpose:

Get for her a set of letters made of boxwood or of ivory and called each by its proper name. Let her play with these, so that even her play may teach her something. And not only make her grasp the right order of the letters and see that she forms their names into a rhyme, but constantly disarrange their order and put the last letters in the middle and the middle ones at the beginning that she may know them all by sight as well as by sound. Moreover, so soon as she begins to use the styl[us] upon the wax, and her hand is still faltering, either guide her soft fingers by laying your hand upon hers, or else have simple copies cut upon a tablet; so that her efforts confined within these limits may keep to the lines traced out for her and not stray outside of these. Offer prizes for good spelling and draw her onwards with little gifts such as children of her age delight in. . . . The very words which she tries bit by bit to put together and to pronounce ought not to be chance ones, but names specially fixed upon and heaped together for the purpose, those for example of the prophets or the apostles or the list of patriarchs from Adam downwards as it is given by Matthew and Luke. In this way while her tongue will be well-trained, her memory will be likewise developed.

Jerome advises that the young Paula be taught to read and write from the earliest age, and focused upon the Scriptures. The training of the memory is important and Jerome will become even more specific about how that facility ought to be put to use: “And let it be her task daily to bring to you the flowers which she has culled from scripture. Let her learn by heart so many verses in the Greek, but let her be instructed in the Latin also.” Because the Scriptures were found in Latin and Greek, Jerome thinks it best for her to have equal command of both languages.

While Jerome wants little Paula to memorize pieces of Scripture every day, this discovery ought to take place within a clear program for biblical knowledge. There is a specific order that Jerome believes best for encountering and understanding the many parts of Scripture:

Let her treasures be not silks or gems but manuscripts of the holy scriptures; and in these let her think less of gilding, and Babylonian parchment, and arabesque patterns, than of correctness and accurate punctuation. Let her begin by learning the psalter, and then let her gather rules of life out of the proverbs of Solomon. From the Preacher [Ecclesiastes] let her gain the habit of despising the world and its vanities. Let her follow the example set in Job of virtue and of patience. Then let her pass on to the gospels never to be laid aside when once they have been taken in hand. Let her also drink in with a willing heart the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles. As soon as she has enriched the storehouse of her mind with these treasures, let her commit to memory the prophets, the heptateuch [the first seven books of the Bible], the books of Kings and of Chronicles, the rolls also of Ezra and Esther. When she has done all these she may safely read the Song of Songs but not before: for, were she to read it at the beginning, she would fail to perceive that, though it is written in fleshly words, it is a marriage song of a spiritual bridal. And not understanding this she would suffer hurt from it. Let her avoid all apocryphal writings, and if she is led to read such not by the truth of the doctrines which they contain but out of respect for the miracles contained in them; let her understand that they are not really written by those to whom they are ascribed, that many faulty elements have been introduced into them, and that it requires infinite discretion to look for gold in the midst of dirt. Cyprian’s writings let her have always in her hands. The letters of Athanasius and the treatises of Hilary she may go through without fear of stumbling. Let her take pleasure in the works and wits of all in whose books a due regard for the faith is not neglected. But if she reads the works of others let it be rather to judge them than to follow them.

This is nothing less than a full program of instruction, moving through the Scriptures and also through the most important writings of the orthodox Church Fathers. Many clergy have a worse education than that which Jerome prescribes for this little girl! Note, though, the sequence in which the Bible is studied. Jerome insists that she begin with the Psalms. After the Psalm come the wisdom literature of the Old Testament; immediately thereafter she is presented with the Gospels “never to be laid aside.” Let’s also note his intention in directing her to these books. As he mentions in connection with the prophets, he is not intend solely that she read them—he expects that large portions (if not the totality) be committed to memory.

The Psalms are the first books to be encountered, the first books to be learned. That is because they will form a central aspect of little Paula’s devotions for the rest of her life. Jerome prescribes the round of what would become the standardized Divine Office as the monastic movement matured:

She ought to rise at night to recite prayers and psalms; to sing hymns in the morning; at the third, sixth, and ninth hours to take her place in the line to do battle for Christ; and, lastly, to kindle her lamp and to offer her evening sacrifice. In these occupations let her pass the day, and when night comes let it find her still engaged in them. Let reading follow prayer with her, and prayer again succeed to reading. Time will seem short when employed on tasks so many and so varied.

All of these hours of prayer are, as the first mention intimates, sessions with the Psalms. Every day, at every point of the day, she is to pause and sing psalms to God. Not only will this habit form her in worship, it will also ensure that the psalms become a central vocabulary of both thought and praise.

If Jerome’s Letter 107 describes what he thinks the ideal monastic upbringing looks like, Letter 108 is an ideal depiction of the monastic life well lived. He describes the elder Paula’s life in glowing terms and, though no doubt exaggerating a bit, cannot be too far from the mark as he writes to her own daughter who lived with her and succeeded her as head of the women’s monastery in Bethlehem. This is a very lengthy letter not least because he gives a description of Paula’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land in excruciating detail. After describing this journey, and the generosity of Paula, he describes how she ordered the double monastery that she built. Although the women were dived into three groups along class lines, they all worshiped together: “At dawn, at the third, sixth, and ninth hours, at evening, and at midnight they recited the psalter each in turn. No sister was allowed to be ignorant of the psalms, and all had every day to learn a certain portion of the holy scriptures.” The memorization that Jerome enjoined on the younger Paula is affirmed in his depiction of the elder Paula: “The holy scriptures she knew by heart, and said of the history contained in them that it was the foundation of the truth; but, though she loved even this, she still preferred to seek for the underlying spiritual meaning and made this the keystone of the spiritual building raised within her soul.” At the center of these remained the Psalms. While the memorization of Scripture in both Latin and Greek is mention in the Letter 107, both Paula and her daughter Eustochium took it one step further when it came to the Psalms. Jerome writes:

I will mention here another fact which to those who are envious may well seem incredible. While I myself beginning as a young man have with much toil and effort partially acquired the Hebrew tongue and study it now unceasingly lest if I leave it, it also may leave me; Paula, on making up her mind that she too would learn it, succeeded so well that she could chant the psalms in Hebrew and could speak the language without a trace of the pronunciation peculiar to Latin. The same accomplishment can be seen to this day in her daughter Eustochium. . .

Jerome could hardly be exaggerating here; as he was writing the letter to Eustochium herself (as well as for a larger audience), he could hardly make up the fact that she and her mother both had the psalms memorized in Hebrew!

Jerome’s letters 107 and 108 became important sources for the monastic movement in the West. The educational program and the ideal of the ascetic life that he puts forth in his directions for the younger Paula and the depiction of the life of the elder Paula were to inspire generations of Christians for centuries. It’s quite likely that these very letters gave inspiration to Caesaria and Radegund as they administered convents of their own. And, again, at the center is the constant experience of the psalms, the literacy necessary to dig the most out of them, and the connection between the psalms and the person of Jesus revealed in the gospels.