This book is descended from the work of Thomas Cranmer in the sixteenth century, itself a reformed, Anglicised version of the mediaeval Latin Use of Sarum (from which I have my translations of the marriage ceremony and a version of Vespers available on this site).

1662 includes, for Ash Wednesday, ‘A Commination‘ (literally, ‘threatening of vengeance’), descended from 1549′s service for the First Day of Lent. This service breathes fire; those with a knee-jerk reaction to things Reformed will take one look at its preface and declare, ‘This is why I’m not Reformed!’

Here is the fiery text of 1662:

BRETHREN, in the Primitive Church there was a godly discipline, that, at the beginning of Lent, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance, and punished in this world, that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord; and that others, admonished by their example, might be the more afraid to offend.
Instead whereof, until the said discipline may be restored again, (which is much to be wished,) it is thought good, that at this time (in the presence of you all) should be read the general sentences of God’s cursing against impenitent sinners, gathered out of the seven and twentieth Chapter of Deuteronomy, and other places of Scripture; and that ye should answer to every Sentence, Amen: To the intent that, being admonished of the great indignation of God against sinners, ye may the rather be moved to earnest and true repentance; and may walk more warily in these dangerous days; fleeing from such vices, for which ye affirm with your own mouths the curse of God to be due.

The service proceeds to list various sinners the Bible calls ‘accursed’ — not just idolaters or cursers of parents, but those who move their neighbour’s landmark as well. Most of us would agree with someone who listed these sins that they are bad — those who purposefully divert the blind, adulterers, fornicators, murderers of the innocent for profit, those who trust humans rather than God and the rest.

But we are careful today to use the word ‘cursed’ of those who commit these sins. Deuteronomy isn’t, declaring a whole swathe of sinners cursed (Gk. epikataratos, Lat. maledictus)* before entering the Promised Land. And in Deuteronomy, as in 1549 and 1662, the people are to answer, ‘Amen,’ to each declaration of cursedness.

I do not think that this service is either excessively ‘Reformed’ in the most dour vision of the Reformed or ‘mediaeval’ in the most fire-and-brimstone vision of mediaeval piety.

The purpose, as with much mediaeval and Reformed proclamations of sin, is to call sinners to repentance. No doubt the Mosaic version had much the same bent. Sin is a reality and it has real consequences. Part of Lent, at least in western views since the Middle Ages, is to repent us of our sins.

If the list of sins seems a bit much to us, perhaps that is good. Perhaps we need a reminder of our own ‘wretchedness’ (to use another BCP word). Once we stand face to face with our own depravity, then can we all the more rejoice in God’s grace.

This is the end goal of healthy mediaeval and Reformed piety. Not for us to spend our lives in sack cloth and ashes, rubbing excrement on our faces like King Priam upon the death of Hector. No, rather, it is for us to acknowledge our own brokenness and to turn to the redeemer for the grace he gives and to be transformed into his likeness.

Finally, a note for those who think this sort of call against sinners is ‘Old Testament’ or ‘too mediaeval’ or ‘Reformed’, take note of the lists of sinners who will not partake in the Kingdom of God according to St. Paul, take a look at Tertullian’s work On Modesty, observe Leo the Great’s calls to sinners, read the Eastern Greek Mark the Monk’s fear for his own salvation despite his asceticism. It is a healthy balance to our joy, not something to abandon because of certain excesses in particular times, places, and traditions.

*If I can’t do Hebrew, I can at least pull out the Classical languages!

I’ve been working on them slowly, starting around November; thus, in Advent I read his sermons on Advent, at Christmas on Christmas, at Epiphany on Epiphany. Now we are at Lent, and I am savouring his Lenten offerings.

In Sermon 41, Pope Leo says:

It is indeed fitting for us at all times, dearly beloved, to live wisely and purely, and to direct our wills and actions to what we know is pleasing to divine justice. But, when those days approach which the mysteries of our salvation have made brighter for us, our hearts must be made clean with more zealous care, and the discipline of virtue must be exercised more earnestly. As these mysteries are greater than any one part of them, so our observance also should surpass in some way our usual custom, and those who celebrate the feast withmore solemnity should also find themselves so much the more elevated by it. (Trans. Freeland & Conway, p. 176)

I agree. It is time for us to prepare our hearts for the celebration of the Feast of Feasts, of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus from the dead, of the day of our salvation, of the mysteries that make us into new people.

Many of us will be giving up chocolate or meat or coffee or alcohol or television or something along those lines. Others will read a spiritual book or do a deep study of a portion of Scripture. Still others will give extra of their money to a charity.

This last is something that Leo would approve of greatly, as seen in Sermon 40, where he reminds his congregation that the Lord approves of a fast that consists of giving to the poor and clothing the naked and feeding the hungry.

What is more radical than giving of our money and giving up soda pop is giving of ourselves. Here is where I fail to live up the high falutin’ rhetoric of this blog most notably, I think. When do I give to the poor? When do I give my time and energy and skills to aid those less fortunate?

Perhaps I should take more seriously this call of Leo’s that runs back not only to Jesus in the Gospels but to YHWH in the Old Testament. Perhaps this Lent is the Lent to truly change how I live.

‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘P D James does. They’re pretty good.’ I flitted through my memory, noting that Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Sayers, and Christie are all, indeed, dead.

Then he said something along the lines of, ‘I mean no one writes actual mysteries. All people write are solutions. Everything has an explanation in what we write. People don’t write books that are about mysteries anymore.’

Something like that. It was longer, but it was also early January, so I forget. But the gist of what he and I exchanged in that moment at lunch was, indeed, that we don’t write mysteries.

If we meet a mystery, we want an explanation. We are uncomfortable with vast uncertainties, so we come up with systematic explanations of them so the mystery will go away. I recall that I pointed out that this was the key to Luther’s sacramental theology, that he did not believe in either transubstantiation or consubstantiation, yet certainly not the Zwinglian vision of a spiritual symbol. According to This Is My Body, these were all insufficient because they sought to explain with human philosophy what was ultimately a mystery to be left in reverence. Is means is. This is Christ’s body; this is Christ’s blood. End of story. Receive it in faith, do not explain it with philosophy.

God Himself(s) is a mystery as well. No matter how well an Aquinas or a Bonaventure can go into the relations of the Divine Persons, the very doctrine of the Trinity remains always beyond reach. And that is mere doctrine; FatherSonHolySpirit Themself stands beyond us in a big way.

Yet he does invite us in.

A mystery is not simply hidden. It is a hidden thing, or a hard-to-understand thing, that invites us in. We are called to go further and further in. This is how it is related to mystery cults, religions that involve secret initiation ceremonies that unite their worshippers with a god in some way. God invites us in, and we are drawn further into his mystery as we go through life with Him.

Thus the mystic enters the mystery of the Triune God through prayer, ascetic practice, meditation, contemplation, worship, sacrament, daily work, and daily life, finding These Person everywhere and pervading everything. St. Hildegard and Lady Julian are granted visions; St. Thomas Aquinas is given insight; St. Gregory Palamas enters the mystery of God and finds Him beyond articulation. Evagrius Ponticus says that contemplation of the HolyThree is the highest goal of the Christian life.

And the more we know El, the more we realise how little we know of This OneThree Who isare everywhere yet beyond everything.

And so, having delineated the boundaries of what it is safe to say in our tomes of systematic theology, having uttered the Creed with utter sincerity, having sought to see the Creator God in the face of the poor, we reach a place where only groans can express these thoughts.

We enter the cloud of unknowing, having ascended Mt. Sinai.

The apophatic takes over.

The DivinePerson(s) — ‘God’ as we like to call ‘Him’ — is without beginning and without end. Temporally and spatially.

Is not human.

Is not made of matter.

Is invisible.

Is unchangeable.

Is unchanging.

Is uncaused.

Is immortal.

Is a variety of things of which we can only really say what He is not.

He is a(3) Person(s) and ready to for us to encounter, love, and experience Him.

Are we ready to enter into this glorious mystery? Or shall we play in the shallows of definites and clear answers instead?

Genesis’ alleged ‘friends’ often do a grave disservice to the Genesis account by arguing that its theological content is meaningless without historicity attaching itself to the events portrayed there. Some go so far as to say that Christians who do not believe in a literal six-day Creation followed by 6000 years of history on this earth are not real Christians who do not take the Bible seriously. In all of this talk, the grave importance of what we are being taught about the universe in Genesis gets left at the side in favour of apatosauroi in the Congo or proving that Leviathan and Behemoth are dinosaurs (cf. Kent E Hovind).

Genesis’ critics also do a grave disservice to responsible reading. Rather than arguing, ‘Certain readings of Genesis have led to the oppression of women by men,’ Thomson Highway (who has the best name of all) says that Genesis necessarily leads to the oppression of women by men, so we should, instead tell Cree creation stories (see the closing chapter of Me Funny). Thomas King argues that believing the universe to have been created by a God who basically commands things into being inevitably leads to the sort of messed-up systems of white, western society (see the opening chapter of The Truth About Stories — both this book and Me Funny are worth reading).

Responsible reading of Genesis does not necessarily lead to a vision of a totalitarian God and women subservient to men. Bad reading of Genesis can.

There is thoughtful engagement going on in these conversations, though, as seen in this post by T. M. Law, who graciously and carefully takes on the arguments of Kevin DeYoung regarding the ‘Historical Adam.’ If more such courteous discussion could be had I think the conversation would be less vomit-inducing (the following pages, sadly, are vomit-inducing: Creation “Science” Debunked and people who give cryptozoologists a bad name).

I have one point to raise regarding Law’s post about Kevin DeYoung, and it is simply the statement that creation ex nihilo is a Patristic innovation. I’m not going to argue that this is wrong — I have not read the pre-Christian exegesis of Genesis, so I can’t say whether anyone before the Fathers believed in creation ex nihilo. And I’m not saying that Law says that the Patristic exegesis is false.

What I would like to say about creation ex nihilo is that if it is a Patristic innovation, it is a specifically Christian innovation, created as the result of prayerful, Christian reading of Sacred Scripture in response to the problems facing Christians of the day. The Fathers did nothing without a reason, and I don’t want people walking away from Law’s article thinking that they should turn away from believing in creation ex nihilo since it is a Patristic innovation.

I think, in fact, that creation ex nihilo is a quite sensible innovation. While Thomas King seems to think that it leaves the Creator at a dangerous remove from the natural world, I think it gives us a view of a Creator who is all-encompassing and bolsters a belief in an all-powerful divine Person(s). If God by speaking creates matter afresh, then we see that he is not limited in any way. The pastoral application is that the Being Who flung the stars in the sky would have no trouble dealing with one’s own illness of relationship problems or whatnot.

YHWH creating out of nothing is bigger and better than everything. Elohim making the stuff of the universe with the breaths of Their mouth also makes Him more intimately connected with us and our surroundings, I believe. All this everything was completely and utterly, down to its atoms and electrons, down to the fabric of all matter, envisioned by This Person(s) Who fashioned it by His Word.

If God fashions the universe by His Word, and if John 1 is true, then the very fashioner of all matter and energy is the Person Who has pitched His tent amongst us as the God-man Jesus Christ.

If God, like the Platonic deity, has fashioned the world out of pre-existent matter, he is still a powerful divine being, but there is limitation to him. And where did matter come from in the first place? Matter is suddenly co-terminous with the god. Matter is eternal if the god did not create it. How can we be sure of the god’s absolute almightiness if he did not create matter itself? Even a great artist working with marble can screw up. Could not a god who did not create his own matter? The pastoral implications are great.

In my opinion, creation ex nihilo preserves both God’s transcendent power as a Person(s) Worthy of our Worship and the immanent care as a Parent Who has carefully fashioned absolutely everything, right down to the electrons flitting through my brain.

This is not necessarily a part of the Genesis war, but it’s something worth thinking about as we consider our God as Creator. To believe in creation out of nothing does not require a belief in a literal six-day creation. Where did the matter come from before the Big Bang? And could it not be the Finger of God (the Holy Spirit, cf. Saint Ambrose) that caused the Bang and set forth in motion this entire universe?

When I queried Why Should Evangelicals Read the Fathers?, the third response, from a friend doing a PhD in New Testament who was once a pastor, was ‘To learn how not to do exegesis.’ (The other two were ”Cause they’re awesome‘ and ‘Because they are relevant‘.)

When we first meet patristic exegesis, it can often seem quite unfamiliar to us. And some of it is probably bogus. So why should we even try Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers? (To name a book that addresses this very issue.)

To answer this, I think I’ll use a different approach, one that will hopefully highlight those other reasons to read the Fathers — their awesomeness and relevance. I’ll talk about myself (something bloggers like to do).

My very, very first encounter with patristic exegesis was, thankfully, not the beautiful, lyrical, typological poems of St. Ephraim the Syrian. If it had been, I would have been left very puzzled and very nonplussed. No, it was with level-headed, ‘down-to-earth’, ‘Antiochene’ St. John Chrysostom.

I knew of the efforts of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, and I wished to make use of such things those few moments when people foolishly gave their pulpits to me. I also knew of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and its digital version of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF) & Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF). Not overfond of reading lengthy text online, especially if Victorian, I got my hands on St. John Chrysostom from NPNF and used him in preparing for homilies.

What I found was not merely attention to detail or the exegesis of the passage in terms of what it meant in its original, historical context. Chrysostom looked at the passage and exegeted it to bring its full weight to bear upon his congregation. He drew forth from the words of Holy Writ spiritual and ethical lessons for his congregation. He called them to lead holy lives.

When Chrysostom talks of St. Paul’s conversion, he also calls his congregation to read their Bibles for themselves. Commenting upon Philippians, he berates fathers who are angry about their sons taking up the religious life — if they are Christians, how is this a bad choice? Better than the pitfalls at the imperial court with its many opportunities for sin and worldliness! Then he says that one could be a light in the darkness at the imperial court, and it’s not a place Christians should avoid.

The Scriptures for Chrysostom and many, if not all, of the Fathers are alive. They speak here and now. They call us to holiness. They call us to contemplation (theoria) of God.* They drive us to worship. They are not objects of study — rather, they turn us into the objects of study. Patristic exegesis was not scary but exciting and invigorating with Chrysostom.

If you are cautious about patristic exegesis, start with St. John Chrysostom.

If you are curious about things less familiar, less like a Sunday-morning evangelical sermon, curious about things that will take you into the land of mystical union with the Divine and the world of the luminous eye (to cite the title of a book by Sebastian Brock), check out my second major helping of Patristic exegesis: St. Gregory of Nyssa’s The Life of Moses.

The Life of Moses starts out with Chrysostom’s familiar territory — ad litteram — the literal, historical meaning of the text. St. Gregory (Saint of the Week here) tells us the life of Moses as found in the Pentateuch. There are lessons to be found here about life, ethics, and God. Even that (in)famous allegorist Origen believes in the power and importance of the literal meaning of Scripture.

But Gregory takes us beyond the literal into the mystical world of allegory. Moses’ life is an allegory for our own spiritual world. As the Israelites were saved by crossing the Red Sea, we are saved in the waters of baptism. As Moses ascended the mountain of God into the cloud of unknowing (to borrow the title of a piece of Middle English mysticism), so too is the Christian called to ascend the mountain of God and find God in His incomprehensibility through mystical contemplation.

That’s probably more than enough to make most people uneasy about Patristic exegesis. What has Moses ascending Mt. Sinai to do with me, alone, in a dark room engaged in the ‘useless’ pursuit of omphaloskepsis (‘navel-gazing’, used as a perjorative in the Byzantine Hesychastic Controversy)?

We, as Protestants, shy away from this sort of allegorical, mystical reading, fearing that it will turn the Scriptures into a wax nose that can be twisted in any direction.

When I read The Life of Moses, I found it invigorating, in fact. Who knows if St. Gregory’s mystical allegory is true or ‘right’? What I know is that it contained truth and rightness. I mean to say that it found in all of Scripture a spiritual sense and sought to encourage Christians through the use of Scripture for understanding their special call as followers of Jesus. St. Gregory sees the events of the history of the people of Israel as more than simply the account of God’s dealing with the human race — he sees in them a vision of God’s dealings with each, individual human. God can save you and me, and draw us to Him, if we have the eyes to see and a deep faith rooted in Him and His word.

You may not like allegory. You may think it dangerous. You may confuse it with typology (if that’s the case, read my post about the usefulness of typology in Scripture-reading, as well as on the fourfold sense of Scripture). Nonetheless, I hope that encountering uncomfortable writings such as St. Gregory of Nyssa will jar you into trying to see that there is spiritual benefit in all of Scripture, that the Scriptures are not a self-help book, that the Scriptures are not there as a perfect roadmap to life, but, most importantly, that the Scriptures exist primarily as the revelation of God and as a means for us to be drawn into him.

This leaves us even with a place for the mind-bending typologies of St. Ephraim the Syrian (see this hymn on the Incarnation of his), well worth a read. And then, perhaps we can shed any vestiges that we have the perfect, historically accurate, airtight, ‘useful’ interpretation of Scripture and allow our souls to breathe.

Further Explorations

If you are curious about looking into Patristic exegesis and hermeneutics more, here are two places to start:

Hall, Christopher A. Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers. IVP. This book was my introduction to Patristic ways of reading the Bible. Worth a read.

Oden, Thomas, General Editor. The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. IVP. Hall’s book is meant to be an accompaniment to this 26-volume commentary on the whole of Scripture, including the Deuterocanonical Books, giving brief selections from the Patristic witness ranging from Origen and Athanasius to Cassian and Augustine. A fantastic resource.

*For a good article about Chrysostom and the Antiochene understanding and use of theoria in interpreting Scripture, see Bradley Nassif, “Antiochene theoria [actually in Greek] in John Chrysostom’s Exegesis,” in Ancient & Postmodern Christianity, ed. Kenneth Tanner and Christopher A. Hall. IVP.

He himself learned the art of singing, instructed ‘not by men nor through man’ (Gal 1:1), but he freely received the gift of singing from divine aid. The he could never put anything frivolous or needless in his poems, but only those things which pertained to religion were fitting for his religious tongue.

Since, indeed, he remained in the secular way of life up to the time of a more advanced age, at which time he had learned no songs. And so, sometimes at banquets because it was decreed for the sake of delight that everyone ought to sing in turm, when he saw the cithara draw near, he rose up from the middle of the dinner, left, and went home.

At a certain time when he had done this, leaving the house of the banquet, he went out to the stable of the livestock since their guardianship had been delegated to him that night. There he gave his limbs to sleep at a suitable hour. Someone came to him through a dream, greeting him and calling him by name, ‘Caedmon, sing me something.’

But he responded, ‘I don’t know how to sing; for I withdrew hither, leaving the banquet for that reason, since I could not sing.’

The one with him answered and said, ‘But, come, you can sing for me.’

‘What,’ he said, ‘ought I to sing?’

And the person said, ‘Sing of the beginning of the creatures.’

When this answer was accepted, immediately he began to sing verses in praise of the creator God which he had never heard, whose sense was:

Now we ought to praise the maker of the heavenly kingdom,
the power of the Creator and his intent,
the deeds of the Father of glory:
how he, since he is the eternal God,
has been the author of all miracles
who in the first for the sons of men
created the sky like the top of a roof,
and then the almighty preserver of human race
created the earth.

This is the sense, but not the precise order of the words, which he sang whilst asleep; for songs, although composed extremely well, cannot be translated from one language to another word-for-word without damage to their beauty and worthiness. And then, rising from sleep, he remembered all the things which he had sung whilst asleep and soon he joined many words of a song worthy of God into the same measure. (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum 4.22.1-2 [SC 490, pub. 2005] or 4.24 [all previous edd], my trans.)

Caedmon is promptly sent to St. Hilda where, in front of ‘many learned men’, he sings the song. They test him by preaching a lengthy sermon which he is committed to put to verse. He succeeds, and Hilda convinces him to leave the secular life and join the monastery at Whitby. So he does.

Caedmon spent the rest of his life composing verse based upon the Scriptures and the salvation story as well as songs written to stir people up to shun vice and love virtue. He submitted himself to the discipline of the monastery’s rule and was harsh towards those who tried to live by their own rule.

Aware of his own impending death of a prolonged weakness, he moved into the house of the sick at the monastery and shared a few laughs with the men there. Then he received the Eucharist for the last time, made sure he and his monastic brothers were at peace, laid his head on his pillow, and died.

You can read my translation of the whole of Bede’s account of Caedmon’s life here. One of the things that is notable about Caedmon is the fact that he seems to have had an entirely oral/aural skill. Bede, throughout the account, refers to the things that Caedmon has heard being turned into songs. Caedmon was a Christian scop, an Anglo-Saxon poet who used the techniques of traditional oral poetry to compose songs about Christian themes.

We see here the fostering of the arts by St. Hilda; this is a recurring theme throughout the Middle Ages. The monasteries were in favour of the arts and of putting them to use of God’s glory. A reminder for us all.

And, since Bede laments the futility of translating verse, here is Caedmon’s hymn in Anglo-Saxon (found here):

Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
metudæs mehti and his modgithanc uerc
uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs eci
dryctin or astelidæ he ærist scop aeldu
barnum hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend tha
middingard moncynnæs uard eci dryctin
æfter tiadæ firum foldu frea allmehtig.

Further Explorations (in anti-alphabetical order)

Cavill, Paul. Anglo-Saxon Christianity. A readable introduction to Christianity in Anglo-Saxon lands in the Early Middle Ages.

Bradley, S.A.J. trans. Anglo-Saxon Poetry. Everyman’s Library. A selection of a very broad swath of Anglo-Saxon verse translated into modern English.

Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Bertram Colgrave. Oxford World’s Classics. Word on the street is that this is the recommended translation of Bede.

I am auditing a class on Early North African Christianity, but can only make it to the fortnightly post-graduate seminars attached to the class. The first set of texts discussed in this class were the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs and the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity.

When these were discussed in the mixed class with both post-graduates and undergraduates, apparently some of the undergrads had decided that suspicion and mistrust were the best ways to read ancient Christian literature.

People said that Perpetua was ‘un-Christian’ for allowing her father to be beaten and her child to be raised without its mother — that she was being selfish in pursuing her desire for martyrdom at the expense of others.

As well — and this happened in the postgrad seminar as well, but more subtly — this martyrdom account was likened to militant Islamic suicide bombers. No joke.

And at the postgrad seminar, one of the people there noted that he was concerned over the fact that here we had an older, charismatic man leading a group of enthusiastic youths to their deaths in martyrdom. He also felt that the text was imbalanced and produced a troubling picture of Christianity since all it talked about was martyrdom.

So. Here’s the hermeneutic of suspicion in full swing.

As regards Perpetua being ‘un-Christian’ in allowing her father to be beaten rather than recant her Christian faith, one of my friends pointed out that, according to our earliest Christian traditions and writings, what she was doing was the most Christian thing, for Jesus said that he would divide families and that we are not to love our earthly families more than him.

I reckon that an overemphasis in certain ecclesiastical groups within Scotland on the need for social action and that social action is what makes the true Christian has produced this result.

To compare Christian martyrs with suicide bombers misses the point of each type of death. Suicide bombers seek not just their own deaths but the deaths of those around them. Theirs is a tactic of fear and terror; suicide bombing is a form of terrorism, of violence on the part of the so-called ‘martyr.’

Martyrs who die for their faith, who die because they refuse to engage in the religious practices of others or because they refuse to recant their faith or because they refuse to give up practising their own faith — whether they have sought to be killed by the authorities or not — are in an entirely different circumstance. When they die, no one else dies with them. They may choose death, but they choose death because they have been given the options of denying their religion or dying. And so they die for a very modern, contemporary reason — religious freedom, a basic human right.

Concerning the older, charismatic man leading the youths, who else in Roman society would? Saturus, Perpetua’s catechist, was a man versed in the faith and who was instructing these young people in the faith. They were arrested. Did they put themselves forward for martyrdom? Were they informed against? The text does not say. It simply says that they were arrested.

The hermeneutic of suspicion says that this charismatic man manipulated them and made them drink the Kool-Aid.

The hermeneutic of love says that they came to faith freely, and when that faith was tested, he helped them stay firm.

Finally, the criticism that the text is imbalanced is just ridiculous. All Christian texts are, therefore, imbalanced. The Rule of Benedict does not talk about evangelism; is it imbalanced? St. Leo the Great, discoursing about Christology in the Tome, does not discuss ethics; is he, on that score, imbalanced? Luther’s 95 Theses have little to do with anything other than indulgences; are they thus imbalanced? The Book of Revelation has little to give us in terms of how to live — is it imbalanced?

Books are, to borrow from Miroslav Volf’s Captive to the Word of God, social relations. Someone, somewhere, is using the medium of writing, using that particular book, to communicate something. In the Passion of Perpetua, that something is the martyrdom of Perpetua, Felicity, and their fellows. Why should we expect a full view of the Christian life, of normal ethics, of worship, of prayer, of distinct belief? I do not expect a martyr story to give me these.

In fact, apparently only spurious martyr stories give us these things because the Roman judges were not concerned with them; the martyrs had no chance to discuss the ins and outs of daily Christian life and belief.

So Perpetua. It is sad to see someone who should be an example of faith treated with such suspicion, to see a text that should give us strength scorned in such a way. If there is to be a specifically Christian reading, should it not seek to treat not just the living, but the writings of the dead, with love?

This new series claims that it is going to give us a fuller picture of the Crusades by investigating evidence beyond the usual western chronicles. We got our first taste of this in the discussion of the siege of Antioch.

If you don’t know the story, the Crusaders besieged the city for eight months and were reduced to terrible circumstances such as the eating of rodents and the bone marrow of their dead horses. When they heard that a fearsome Iraqi general with a huge army was on the move, they took the city by treachery (an Armenian Christian within betrayed it). Then the tables were turned, and the Frankish army found itself besieged in turn.

Then a peasant religious … fanatic? visionary? … named Peter Bartholomew said that St. Andrew had come to him in a vision and shown him where the Iron Lance which pierced Our Lord’s side was hid. They dug it up, made an assault, and drove off the besieging army.

However, the evidence from Matthew of Edessa’s Chronicle gives a vision that goes beyond this simple version of the unbreakable faith and fanatical piety of the western mediaeval Christian on Crusade. Matthew of Edessa reveals that shortly before Peter Bartholomew’s vision, the Crusading generals had tried seeking mercy from the Iraqi warlord outside the walls — they would surrender the city and he would let them go back to France in one piece. This failed, and the despetate Franks and Normans, holed up in a city surrounded by enemies in a foreign land, with nothing to lose, made an assault on the Islamic forces outside. Was it their desperation or the fanatical belief in the Lance that gave them the fierceness that brought victory? Perhaps both.

Perhaps also, and Dr. Asbridge did not mention the sources, the Muslims fled due to the fact that they didn’t trust their Iraqi general in the first place and felt that if they won, he would merely take Antioch as his own and lord it over them — for their army was an alliance between more than one Middle Eastern warlord.

All three, no doubt contributed to the ‘miraculous’ delivery of Antioch into the Crusaders’ hands.

Unfortunately, the usual dichotomy between the Latin accounts and Islamic calls for vengeance is drawn when Asbridge discusses the Fall of Jerusalem.

As a person with a growing interest in Eastern Christianity, I wish to know what the Byzantine chroniclers and historians thought when they heard about the bloodbath. I’d read somewhere that the indiscriminate slaughter of Jerusalem’s inhabitants also included a certain number of its Christian population — Greek and otherwise. No mention was made of this, if it really occurred. (Although it seems reasonable — could a French Crusader tell a tanned, turbanned Muslim from a tanned, turbanned Christian?)

What is the view of the Crusades given by the Matthew of Edessas of the mediaeval world? What do the Byzantine chronicles have to say? Or the Nestorian Christians? What about Coptic sources? Or Monophysite Syriac writers? These people were all crossing paths in the mediaeval Middle East, watching as Frankish warlords carved out their own kingdoms and duchies in their midst. What did the Eastern Christians think about these things?

Hopefully later episodes will tell.

You can watch The Crusades on BBC iPlayer if you live in the UK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01b3ftw/The_Crusades_Holy_War/

Given how many popes are colourful characters, it shall prove an interesting ride!

St. Peter the Apostle

St. Peter, along with his apostolic comrade St. Paul, has already been Saint of the Week here. He is a logical starting point for a discussion of papal history; the Liber Pontificalis seems to think so, as would have Pope Leo I amidst others.

Yet as soon as we look at St. Peter as a Pope, we are confronted with the questions, ‘What is a Pope? How long has there been a Pope?’

Well, the word Pope comes from the word Papa and was in olden days used of all of the ‘Patriarchs’ of the Church — that is to say, the bishops of the major cities who had jurisdiction over large geographical areas. That is why the Patriarch of the Coptic Church is ‘Pope’ Shenouda — not because he believes that he has universal jurisdiction but because he is the head Bishop of the Coptic Church.

The various roles of these Patriarchs have grown, developed, and changed over time. So when one asks, ‘What is a Pope?’ in reference to Rome, one must respond, ‘The Bishop of Rome,’ and then inquire further as to whether the question refers to the current Bishop of Rome or Innocent III or Gregory the Great or Leo the Great or Damasus or Clement or Peter.

Of course, Peter was not a Patriarch.

Peter was an Apostle.

And it seems, from what we gather in Acts, that Peter was a sort of ‘head’ Apostle, and we see in the Gospels that Peter was part of the inner circle of disciples gathered around Jesus. Of course, as an Apostle, he was still a man, and we do learn from Paul’s letter to the Galatians that Peter was open to rebuke.

Still, he seems to have been a if not the leading man of the Apostles, and was involved in the Church’s foundations in Jerusalem, Antioch, and beyond.

According to tradition, indeed, St. Peter was the first ‘bishop’ of Antioch. What we mean by bishop at this point in time is debatable. D H Williams, writing for a low-church Baptist-type audience, styles these very early Apostolic and sub-Apostolic bishops as pastors.

This is, in essence, what every bishop is meant to be. He is the shepherd of the flock in a particular city — in the earliest days of the church, this flock would have been smaller than elsewhere. It stands to reason that if you had an Apostle, someone who had walked with the Lord and heard His very words, someone commissioned by the Lord and anointed by the Holy Spirit, if you had such a person in your community, this person would have assumed a position of leadership.

Like a pastor. Or a bishop.

Thus, Peter was the first Bishop of Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians. The Liber Pontificalis says he was bishop there for seven years before joining the mission of Rome. This tradition is sensible if you ask me — many of the apostles had gone on missions to various eastern cities, and Antioch’s church seemed fairly well-established. Rome was the largest, greatest city in the world, the centre of law and politics. For an Apostle to join the Christian mission there seems very strategic, really.

And, once there, since he was a leading man amongst the Twelve, Peter would have assumed a position of leadership amongst the fledgling, persecuted Church in the City, passing along his remembrances of the Lord, helping organise the growing band of believers there.

Tradition (preserved in the Liber Pontificalis and no doubt elsewhere) tells us that St. Mark was his disciple, and that the Gospel of Mark, from which the other synoptic Gospels derive, is based upon the teachings and remembrances of St. Peter.

The dangers of life as a clergyman have always been many, none moreso than in Rome during the reign of Nero (d. 68). Under the reign of this madman (I toss the historian’s caution to the wind!), many Christians were persecuted — thrown to wild animals whilst wrapped in the skins of dead beasts (Christian burritos!), set alight like torches, crucified, beheaded.

St. Peter gained the martyr’s crown under Nero. Tradition tells us that he was crucified upside down, not considering himself worthy of the death of the Saviour. The place of Peter’s martyrdom? Vatican Hill, Rome.

The place fills one with wonder. The Gothic nature of much of the space persistently draws the eyes upward, and the grace of so much of the Roman-style Renaissance architecture keeps the observer in good cheer.

The worship is beautiful in the Latin-Italian modernish Ambrosian rite, with incense, robes, choir, acolytes, deacons, priests, bishops. The devotion of the faithful lighting candles and kneeling in prayer at side altars make one wish more Protestants were so obviously pious — and that more Catholics were as well!

This building — which is surely the largest place I have ever been barring the Skydome or Air Canada Centre, with its expansive floor below and high vaults above — was begun in 1387. Santa Maria Maggiore, the old Romanesque cathedral, was demolished, though the original facade was initially incorporated in the new structure, and a new, glorious building was begun. The final touches on this building, primarily on its Neo-Gothic (Gothic Revival?) facade were added in the 19th century.

A lot of beauty. If you’re the sort of person who is drawn to the worship of God through the arts and through architecture, this is one of your places.

But a lot of money, right?

People often complain about places like this. They say that the Church wasted so much of its money building huge cathedrals when it could have been feeding the poor. If you go to the Basilica Sant’Ambrogio here, you do wonder a little at how St. Ambrose, famous for melting the Milanese church’s silver to redeem Christian slaves, would feel about the number of gold and silver vessels when there are hungry mouths abroad in the streets of Mediolanum to this day.

In response, people usually point out that the Church has fed many poor, built many hospitals, trained many jobless people, and so forth, marching through history. How many hospitals are named St. Joseph’s? Or what about the nuns a friend of mine volunteers with, giving food and friendship to the homeless of Edinburgh?

I would like to point out something else.

The Duomo in Milan did help the poor. And I don’t mean by providing them with the spiritual benefit of so lovely a building. I mean by providing them with what poor people need most: good, solid work.

Work for: the quarrymen who got the marble out of the earth; the people who dug the canals and worked on the canals and maintained them; the people who shipped the marble; the masons who shaped the marble and put it into place; the architects who designed the structure; the artists who made statues, paintings, stained glass; silversmiths who made chalices and patens and processional crosses; ditto goldsmiths; beekeepers who made beeswax for the candles; the people involved in linen production; and all the other varieties of tradespeople involved in the building of a mediaeval/Renaissance/Baroque/19th-century cathedral.

The Duomo provided them with work. Those men and women who work at maintaining and restoring the Duomo through the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano also get work from the Duomo. The Duomo draws visitors to Milan, thus making hundreds of businesses, small and large, succeed, producing many jobs, skilled and unskilled. And when these businesses and jobs succeed, so do others.

So, yes, the Duomo cost a lot of money. But without it, there would have been more poor folk for the past 600 years than otherwise.