Author Archives: Derek A. Olsen

A Blessed Feast of St Bede To All!

Yesterday’s First Vespers started the Feast of St Bede, patron of the breviary and my very favorite Anglo-Saxon monastic saint.

And my apologies to those who celebrated the First Vespers of St Bede at the breviary yesterday; duties at home kept me from checking the page until late last night when I discovered to my chagrin that I neglected to add the Proper readings to the Year 2 lectionary… Then this morning I discovered that the contemplative shellfish had returned; the hymn mentions the soul of the monastic saint resting in the “clam of quiet love”. Richard had mentioned this and I’d fixed it before but apparently I hadn’t changed it in the master—as has now been done…

In any case, a blessed feast to all!

Canadian Liturgical News and Downloads

The General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada has released its liturgical documents as free PDF downloads. Here’s the official announcement on the move which contains links to the Book of Alternative Services among other items. Even though this is titled “Alternative”, keep in mind that the Canadian Church follows English precedent; there is an official Canadian Book of Common Prayer released in 1962 which I understand to be a light revision of the English 1662 BCP. The BAS (from 1985) is the normative use and is quite similar to the American ’79 BCP. For whatever it’s worth, the Canadian BCP is not available at the above link but may be found online at the site of the Prayer Book Society of Canada.

One difference that I see as I scan the BAS’s section on the Daily Office is a didactic introduction before the liturgies themselves that give some information about the history and theology of the liturgy. This seems like a Good Thing (as long as it’s accurate and well done as these appear to be).

However, the news item includes this news as well:

Now General Synod is embarking on another period of liturgical revision. At the national meeting of General Synod this June, members will consider new principles for liturgical revision. They will also consider a motion asking the Faith, Worship, and Ministry (FWM) Committee to start work on the next generation of liturgical texts.

Dr. Scully notes that if General Synod gives the go-ahead, this next stage of liturgical revision will likely involve online conversation. The last FWM committee wanted to ensure that the web could be used to engage people from across the country in a participatory process. “Trial use and evaluation for new liturgies could be very lively and web-based,” said Dr. Scully.

So, the Canadians are taking the plunge towards a new official book. It’ll definitely be worth following online and through our correspondents on the ground as these matters develop as they will no doubt have an impact on future directions in American liturgical revision as well.

I, for one, will be interested to see if the Canadians will be moving towards or away from the directions that seem to be taking in the Enriching Our Worship materials…

h/t to Fr. Cody Unterseher at PrayTell

On Timing

Whoever decided that Kalamazoo should intersect with the Feast of the Ascension was in grievous error…

I owe y’all comments, posts which are in the works, and emails. None of these will be forthcoming, I’m afraid, until after the feast. Except to you, Brandon; the paper should be coming in the next few hours.

Monastic Theologies of the Trinity

I’m feverishly working away in my spare hours on a presentation for Ka’zoo. I’ll regrettably not be able to attend, but a comrade has graciously agreed to read the piece in my place. I’m writing on Ælfric’s supplemental homily XIa which I argue is a composition designed to summarize the core of the Christian message by explicating the Trinity using a life of Christ constructed through the liturgical year. Ælfric doesn’t go speculative (much), but rather chooses to go liturgical. It’s quite an interesting text and I’ve used it when I’ve taught both preaching and the Church Year.

It’s in light of this context that I was greatly amused to read the following from Br. Stephen:

And, if you were checking in today for religious insight, here’s an explanation of the Trinity given to me on last night’s walk at recreation, which perfectly encapsulates the healthy disinterest that monks generally have in systematic theology:

You have an old man with a beard, a young man with a beard, a dove, and a triangle that connects them. The Athanasian Creed explains the diagram. Go beyond that and you’ll probably get yourself into trouble.

He therefore that will be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity.

Revisiting Jerome

Who are the great Doctors of the Church in the West?

Conventionally, there are four: Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and Jerome. Boniface VIII declared them such in 1298 and was establishing by statement what had been implicit in Western practice for centuries.

Why Jerome?

It’s a simple question with an obvious answer which, I believe, is not necessarily the best answer. The simple answer is that Jerome was the translator and editor of the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Scriptures that has served as the basis for Western practice down to the Enlightenment and beyond. Indeed, one of the greatest ruptures of the Reformation was a move away from the Vulgate and back to the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible. Related to Jerome’s work on the Vulgate is his profusion of biblical commentaries and other resources, particularly his work on places names and his (often fanciful) etymologies of Hebrew names.

The knee-jerk answer, then, is that Jerome’s place is due to his biblical work. And there is a great truth to this answer—but it is incomplete.

A more complete yet disconnected answer is provided by the editor to Jerome’s work in the NPNF:

St Jerome’s importance lies in the facts: (1) That he was the author of the Vulgate Translation of the Bible into Latin, (2) That he bore the chief part in introducing the ascetic life into Western Europe, (3) That his writings more than those of any other Fathers bring before us the general as well as the ecclesiastical life of his time. (NPNF 2.6.ix)

The more I read early Western monastic sources, the more clearly I see point 2 and its wider influence. Furthermore, I think we err if we see his biblical and his monastic work as separate and not intimately related.

For one thing, a great portion of Jerome’s biblical commentaries are properly translations rather than “original” works (recognizing that the term “original” makes little sense and holds little value in the patristic/medieval world). Origen looms large throughout Jerome’s corpus.  The Origien connection in particular reminds me of points made by Jean Leclercq to which De Lubac assents:

Medieval monastic culture is based on the Latin Bible. But the Bible cannot be separated from those who commented it—that is to say, the Fathers. Often called simply the expositores, even in their writings which are not commentaries they did little else but explain Holy Scripture. Moreover, monasticism is inclined toward patristics for a very special reason: its basic text and its origins. One one hand, the Rule of St Benedict itself is, in fact, a patristic document; it assumes, it evokes an entire ancient spiritual milieu. On the other, St Benedict prescribes the reading in the Divine Office of the expositiones written by those he calls the Fathers; in his last chapter, he again urges the monks to read the Fathers. The word occurs four times in this chapter and designates more especially the Fathers of monasticism. The latter are Easterners, and this fact results in something new: Benedictine monasticism is attracted, not only to patristic sources in general, but Eastern ones in particular. (Leclercq, Love of Learning and Desire for God, 89)

If we read the introductions to the different volumes of the critical edition of the Latin Origen, we note that almost all the manuscripts are of monastic origin and that most date from the ninth and the twelfth centuries. Other indications point to the conclusion that in every period or place where there was a monastic renewal, there was a revival of Origen. It is true of the Carolingian reform; it is even more definite, or in any case more readily apparent, in the monastic revival of the twelfth century. (Leclercq, Love of Learning and Desire for God, 94)

To separate the Scripture from the commentaries from the ascetical writings is a fool’s errand and the academic balkanization of the study of religion that perpetuates it in this era obscures from the eyes of the Church important pieces which must be seen in relation.

All of Jerome’s writing is ascetical even if not all of it is explicitly so.

Speaking of the strictly and explicitly ascetical, though, there are two genres in particular where Jerome’s ascetical doctrines are most clearly laid out—the lives and the letters.

Jerome wrote three documents that fall under the category of lives: the Life of Paul the Hermit, the Life of Hilarion, and the Life of Malchus, the Captive Monk. As I’ve alluded in an earlier post, the third is more properly thought of as the first monastic novella. There is no doubt in my mind that it is a fictional vehicle for communicating Jerome’s theology of the ascetical life which is focused primarily (and perhaps overly) on the centrality of chastity. The second, the Life of St Hilarion, is a life in the conventional sense, written concerning an historical figure who lived in Palestine and Cyprus. The first is a toss-up as to the balance between empirical history, theological reification, and fiction. As the introduction to the Life of Hilarion makes quite clear, questions as tho the historicity of Paul the Hermit are not simply modern:

And so we in taking up the work begun by [Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis] do [St Hilarion] service rather than wrong: we despise the abuse of some who as they once disparaged my hero Paulus, will now perhaps disparage Hilarion; the former they censured for his solitary life; they may find fault with the latter for his intercourse with the world; the one was always out of sight, therefore they think he had no existence; the other was seen by many, therefore he is deemed of no account. It is just what their ancestors the Pharisees did of old! They were not pleased with John fasting in the desert, nor with our Lord and Saviour in the busy throng, eating and drinking. But I will put my hand to the work on which I have resolved, and go on my way closing my ears to the barking of Scylla’s hounds. (Life of Hilarion, 1; NPNF 2.6.303)

What Jerome did do—and quite cleverly—was to piggy-back on the most successful work of its kind, Athanasius’s Life of Antony. With his Life of Antony, Athanasius single-handedly created the genre of the ascetic biography and introduced the monastic way of life to the Christian world. Jerome’s one-time bishop Evagrius of Antioch (not the other Evagrius) translated Athanasius’s work into Latin and Jerome “linked” to it with a vengeance; the Life of Paul the Hermit isn’t properly a life at all, but after an introduction to Paul details a meeting between Paul and Antony. Likewise, Hilarion also meets with Antony who praises the Palestinian monk. Due to these links, Jerome’s lives are almost invariably found in western manuscripts that contain Athanasius’s Life of Anthony, then Jerome’s other three—the first two as further records of Antony, the third trailing along to round out Jerome’s set.

As far as the letters go, Jerome wrote many letters of advice to correspondents across the Mediterranean, often giving direction on living the ascetic life or raising children to be ascetics. (Yes, Jerome is the ultimate source of the comment from Benedict XVI a year or so ago when he said something to the effect that marriage is a wonderful institution because it creates people who can be celibates… [“I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins.” (Letter 22.10; NPNF 2.6.30)])

Several letters are justly famed as being central ascetical documents, especially Letters 22, 52, 107, and 130. That having been said, cherry-picking is the least pleasurable way to encounter Jerome; his letters deserve to be read through. In doing so you’ll be introduced to a man with few illusions as he looks at others, and receive confirmation that an acid and sarcastic tongue is no bar to becoming a great saint! (Come to think of it, given Luther, perhaps that’s a prerequisite for being a major biblical translator…)

Jerome deserves to be revisited and read more widely especially given his place in the ascetic life of the West. Jerome is a primary conduit for the ideals of the monastic life moving from East to West. In his transmission of Origen and Origenian spirituality, in his evocative construction of the monastic life in his Lives, and in the practical and theoretical directions found in his letters, he is truly one of the founding fathers of the ascetic life in the West and justly earns the designation Doctor of the Church.

Random Encounters of the Best Kind

The girls and I are settling in at Church of the Advent. We love the community, the liturgy, the preaching and are looking forward to pitching in and doing what we can to help the place thrive! Lil’ G in particular insisted that I speak to Father this morning about getting her trained to be a boat-girl!

At this morning’s Solemn High Coffee-Hour I spied a familiar face I hadn’t had a chance to talk to in a while and had a nice chat with Fr Griffith of hypersync whom I hadn’t seen in the flesh since M and I left General. He was filling myself and other parishioners in on the latest news from the emergent world and his Red Hook Project.

Pluralism, Christianity, and Separate Truths

There’s an article by Stephen Prothero at BU on the topic of religious pluralism that’s been making the rounds. This really is an important topic that we need to wrestle with especially as it relates to how societies negotiate pluralism and how open-minded Episcopalians comprehend and enact evangelism. I doubt much that I write here is new. Lee and others far more read in the topic than I will, I suspect, be able to trace what I write here to certain figures in the modern debate. I have no doubt many have been filtered to me by various teachers and texts. In any case…

In the main, I agree with what Prothero writes and the perspective that he takes. One of my early mentors who encouraged my academic investigations of Buddhism and Asian religion impressed upon me that if all religions are simply a path to the same thing that there was no reason for us to talk. That is and remains a fundamental principle of mine and is an important core around which to form an understand of pluralism as it exists in modern America.

Where Prothero doesn’t go is into the specifics of how Christians understand salvation and I think the specific nature of Christian salvation is what’s key. To say more, I have to back up a few steps, though.

Glancing over the comments at the Cafe, I think George Clifford makes a useful distinction (but I, no doubt, take it in some different directions from where he does). That is, human brains seem to be wired to expect and experience something beyond empirical materialism. There is an ultimate reality. I believe that we are biologically wired to experience glimpses of it and even to participate in it, but I do not believe that we have sufficient capacities to comprehended it in the fullness of what it is. In an effort to move towards comprehension, though, human societies use social constructs called religion.

Every human society that I know of has religion which, if we get reductionistic about it, tends to join notions of transcendence and experiences of the holy—those glimpses of ultimate reality. Within this group, I see two rough categories, one of which ties transcendence and holiness into ethics or some form of personal behavior which aligns humanity with transcendence and holiness, and those that do not. (Do note that under this means of describing things, a “secular humanist” does indeed fall into the first category; I do see that as a faith system even if it is a non-theistic or athiestic one.)

Furthermore, of the major ethically-connected religions, it seems to me that many of them describe ethical paths with remarkably similar outcomes. That is, the major faiths teach messages of compassion and love and avoiding unnecessary violence and exploitation. Framed another way, they encourage virtue and seek to restraint of vice in individuals and society. Framed broadly, this works. When we start looking at specifics like, oh say, sexual behavior, there may be sharp disagreements between different systems about what constitutes vice and virtue.

Within most religions, though, the ethical outcomes are the ancillary or secondary principles that derive from the primary principles which relate to deities or ultimate human purposes. Thus in Christianity, morality flows out of who we believe the Trinity to be. In Buddhism, morality flows out of an understanding of the human condition. I’m not at all using secondary to mean unimportant; rather I’m using it to designate the fact that there are other first principles from which these notion flow.

What complicates things is the principle of revelation. Most faith systems (whether theistic, nontheistic or atheistic) root their primary principles in the belief that there is a substantive shape/form/direction in/of ultimate reality that the reality itself has communicated or mediated to humanity in some way. In a less qualified means of expressing myself, [God/the gods/the universe itself] communicate(s) with us; our primary principles are rooted in this communication.

Interreligious dialogue is entirely necessary and proper—as regards secondary principles. We should talk with others to learn about the attainment of virtue, paths and practices that move us personally and as societies towards compassion, non-violence, and human flourishing. But we must be honest to ourselves and to our faith systems. Interreligious dialogue is genuine when first principles are not compromised.

Moving specifically to what Prothero writes, he approaches the question from a slightly different direction than I do. That is, he starts from the premise that religions agree that things are screwed up and that religions try to answer the question of how people and societies move to/don’t participate in the state of screwed-upness:

What the world’s religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point. And where they begin is with this simple observation: Something is wrong with the world.

I think he oversimplifies this (and that’s likely related to his venue and audience rather than full-blown imprecision on his part); I think he’d agree that what he’s saying is that the world’s religions agree that the quotidian human engagement with the world is wrong. (That is, some think that there’s nothing wrong with the world, just with how humans engage it and act within it…)

I come from a different angle. I do prefer to start from the finish line: how do we connect to and participate in ultimate reality?

Prothero and I agree that Christians have a unique answer to this drawn from our first principles. He writes:

It might seem to be an admirable act of empathy to assert that Confucians and Buddhists can be saved. But this statement is confused to the core, since salvation is not something that either Confucians or Buddhists seek. Salvation is a Christian goal, and when Christians speak of it, they are speaking of being saved from sin. But Confucians and Buddhists do not believe in sin, so it makes no sense for them to try to be saved from it. And while Muslims and Jews do speak of sin of a sort, neither Islam nor Judaism describes salvation from sin as its aim. When a jailer asks the apostle Paul, “What must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30), he is asking not a generic human question but a specifically Christian one. So while it may seem to be an act of generosity to state that Confucians and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews can also be saved, this statement is actually an act of obfuscation.

The conventional expression of this is the belief that good people will “go to heaven” even if they’re not Christians.

The problem is that this conventional sense is a fundamental misconstrual of Christian salvation as taught by the Church. I’ve talked about this before in a Cafe article (one of my favorites, actually), a bit of which I’ll quote here:

Being a Christian isn’t about getting to heaven. Being a Christian is about participating in new life, in divine life, sharing in the very life of God. In baptism we have been—in my favorite phrase from Paul—“hid with Christ in God.”

This is both the point and the purpose of Christian salvation. It’s not about waiting around to go somewhere or existing in some state after we die; it’s about participating in the life of God both now and later. Life is the point. Opening our eyes to and taking hold of what God has done for us in creation, in incarnation, in the crucifixion and the resurrection—that’s the point. The purpose is no less clear. It’s to live that life and to share it, to help it expand to others.

It’s to live a life hid with God in Christ.

This post also attempts to encapsulate it in a concise statement. That’s how I understand how Christians comprehend ultimate reality: we are joined in the sacramental, mystical, and eschatological Body of Christ within which we participate in the life of God. When viewed from this perspective, is this something that a Buddhist desires? Or a Muslim? I can’t imagine they would…

Can I say without reservation that because of this Buddhists and Muslims cannot connect into ultimate reality? That’s harder.  This is the classic: do all religions “go to the same place”/”shoot for the same goal” question, I suppose. My sense is that most religions do have a sense that we need to engage ultimate reality but we all do a have a different sense of what this is and how we do it. Ultimately, I think our answers to this relate to how we understand the human capacity to grasp and comprehend ultimate reality. Expecting it and experiencing it are not the same as comprehending it.

My Christian first principles tell me that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and that none come to the Father but through him. Or, to use the language that I’ve been using up to this point, Jesus Christ (and therefore incorporation into his sacramental, mystical, and eschatological Body) is the only means for participating within ultimate reality. I’m also told that my incorporation comes wholly through God’s grace and that the channel of this grace is normatively expressed in the sacrament of Baptism. The Tradition of the Church admits exceptions to this rule; Aquinas’s discussion on the issue shows some open doors and many Christian thinkers far better and wiser than I have wrestled with the fate of those to whom the Gospel has not been proclaimed.

One answer is that a Buddhist or Muslim may encounter ultimate reality and that the agency is Jesus Christ whether the unbeliever knows it or not, recognizes it or not. Personally, I think this leads to a road that cannot be traversed with certainty due to our human inability to comprehend the scope and nature of ultimate reality. Because here I think we run into the problem of dividing and separating that which is authentic divine revelation from what is not. Buddhists, Muslims, disagree with my grasp of first principles because of their conflict with the other believers own first principles. I think mine are right and that theirs may be a faulty human construction that miusconstrues the true nature and state of ultimate reality. Or, on the other hand, can those apparently alternate and contradictory notions be resolved a=on a plane for beyond my comprehension?

Where things become dicey, therefore, is when we start examining the line between revelation and human construction. What are the fundamental truths that [God/the gods/the universe itself] has bequeathed to us and what are human constructs built upon and around this revelation? Obviously the issue here isn’t just religions talking to one another. The proliferation of Christian denominations is intimately related to how this question is answered, into how and where we draw the lines between the divine and the human which is further blurred by the belief that God inspires humans and societies towards the fulfilling of his will and purposes.

In the clearest for-instance I can drag up, the Young Fogey and I absolutely agree that the distinction between our systems of belief rests in the principle of infallibility. The Young Fogey believes that the Church as a whole has been granted the capacity to rightly discern the fundamental divine teachings of revelation from the human constructs built upon them that may be altered. (I believe that’s a fair statement and I know he won’t hesitate to correct me if it’s inaccurate…) I have less faith in the Church as a whole. I believe that the Church as a whole is not able to infallible determine and discern the fundamental divine teachings from human constructs. I believe that the Church as a whole is on the right path and that in the great majority of things the Tradition of the Church has judged rightly,  but I do not, cannot, and will not use the word infallible to speak of the human institution of the Church. As a Body of believers we still stumble from one age to the next, sometimes correcting misapprehensions from earlier ages, sometimes creating new ones as we go. The Spirit directs us and clarifies but always through the inspirations of humans whose wiring does not have the capacity for complete comprehension due to the dual issues of material limitation and sin.

To complicate matters even more, I think that our tradition presents clear warnings against a clear and easy distinction between what is divine and what is human. Consistent wrangling on the nature of Christ and the Trinity seems to always come back to the fact there there are two distinct natures—the divine and human—which subsist in their entirety within Jesus Christ. To my unsystematic mind, this means that we recognize that there are these two different states [imprecise word, I know] but that the act of trying to separate them out from one another is fundamentally problematic.

My solution a sa an admitted unsystematic kind of guy who believes in the humani inability to fully comprehend the  divine is to throw up my hands and to retreat to ascetical theology. Thus, I say that I understand Christianity as the proper path to ultimate reality, the Triune God, as taught in the Scriptures, Tradition, and practice of the Christian faith. I really cannot say what happens to those who are not baptized, not being privy to the God’s deliberations and expressions of grace. I do know that I have been charged to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that [Jesus] has commanded [us]” and that part of being a Christian means doing this.

Another part means fussing around the dividing line of what is divine revelation and what is human construct, all the while knowing that I can never know if I’m really right but knowing that life in God and the formation of virtue are my truest guides through the mirk.

This is how I closed out the Cafe piece referenced above and, since it’s still where I come down on it, I’ll end this post that way too:

[The Christian purpose] to live a life hid with God in Christ.

And I’d tell you exactly what that phrase means, except that I’m not sure myself.

Oh, I have some ideas. One revolves around how much the New Testament uses the word “abide” as an activity that God does with Jesus and Jesus does with God and that we do with Jesus and therefore we can do with God and so on and so forth. Abide. Sometimes I think it means just lying in the presence of God in prayer and sometimes I think it means walking in love as Christ loved us and sometimes I think those are just two small parts of the fullness of what it really means. I’ll keep working on abiding…

Another idea has to do with our good ol’ Anglican worship. It’s how certain moments catch me and throw me—sometimes in church or sometimes days later—and give me a taste, a moment, that I can put my finger on and say, “Wow—that definitely connects to the life of God.” Worship doesn’t just fit us for the life of God but gives us moments and examples with which to see the slow yet steady spread of the lushness of God’s life and God’s will into our life that twines around the pillars of our hearts and with its soft, seeking roots cracks through calcified compassion.

In short, I’d tell you—but I think it’s got to be lived not told.

This Easter enjoy life, embrace life, share life, and live out a life hid with Christ in God.

Vidi Aquam at the Episcopal Cafe

My new piece is up at the Cafe. I thought I’d do a piece on one of the liturgical texts of Easter and settled on the Vidi Aquam. For a long time it’s been one of my favorite Easter texts precisely because so much biblical and theological material is packed into such a small space. So, I took a moment to unpack it.

This work is the kind of thing I love to do—demonstrating how Scripture, liturgy, hermeneutics, sacramental theology and ritual practice combine in one apparently throw-away text. And yet, so much of our liturgy is like this, deep and thickly textured.

Commemorations

I have more to say on this topic that I have the time for now but will direct your attention to a recent posting by Fr. Hunwicke on commemorations. While he’s speaking principally concerning masses—and masses conducted according to a rite with a Last Gospel, the topic he raises has implications for the Office as well.

The explosion of liturgical occasions promulgated by Holy Women, Holy Men, exposes one of the issues with both post-Vatican II principles and the rubrics of the ’79 BCP. A common goal of the Cranmerian Prayer Book reforms and Vatican II reforms is the cultivation (I won’t say “recapturing” as it’s historically tenuous…) of a “noble simplicity” both in the liturgy and in the celebration of sanctoral occasions. I agree with both to a point. However, sometimes simplicity of aim must be balanced with the complexities of life.

The ’79 BCP does not allow for commemorations, that is, a system of principles for acknowledging that one day can have more than one meaning given to it by the Church. To maintain a unitary focus on one-and-only-one theme, the options are to transfer an occasion or to suppress it. Commemoration is the third way and, I believe, more adequately captures the complications within which we dwell.

Practically, functionally, most former commemoration rules meant adding prayers and “prayer-packets” anchored by collects to the proper place for collects in the liturgy. In order to keep these from getting out of hand, there were further rules as to how many collects could be said during a liturgy. Needless to say, the liturgical powers-that-be(were) saw the whole discussion as getting too complicated and unnecessary, and axed them all.

I think that it’s time that we looked at these again…