Anglicanism and Eastern Orthodoxy

The other day, a Baptist on Twitter said he had a friend looking at Eastern Orthodoxy and was looking for recommendations. I recommended Kallistos Ware’s two book The Orthodox Church and The Orthodox Way, plus Andrew Louth, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, and then, after that, The Way of a Pilgrim and some time looking at the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom.

Another Baptist jumped in asking why I was only recommending pro-Orthodox books. My response was that I read them without converting, so I’m totally comfortable recommending them to others. I also admitted that I’ve never read a single anti-Orthodox book. Anti-Orthodox books are probably like those anti-Catholic tracts or the chapter on Roman Catholicism from Fast Facts on False Faiths — inaccurate, easily taken down by the informed Orthodox/Catholic, and sowing dissent amongst fellow believers. Just a hunch.

I also said that I have not been converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in part because I know the western tradition. I know the BCP and the Articles. I am rooted in Anglicanism such that I know what my own church (officially) teaches on a lot of disputed points.

When I first started getting to know Orthodoxy, I lived in Cyprus and was only 22. But even then I had with me my trusty 1962 BCP (a gift from Grandad on my confirmation!), and when I read a book that claimed to be “What Every Protestant Should Know about Eastern Orthodoxy”, I found myself not fitting the beliefs the author (a former Southern Baptist) touted out as “Protestant”, whether he was discussing sacraments or the Bible or the atonement. I would double check my BCP and the Articles and say, “Well, Anglicans don’t believe that!”

So this is the first point of tonight’s meditation. If ever asked why I’m not Orthodox (which would probably happen someday, given the presence of icons in my life, a komboskini in my pocket, and a few other hints), my answer would now shift from before. Before — I think I blogged about it here once — I would list things about Orthodoxy with which I disagree, most especially the fact that they claim to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church (and no one else to be).

But now, if asked, the answer is because I am convinced of the truths of Anglicanism. It is the same reason, mutatis mutandis, that I am not a Baptist, frankly. For example, one of my favourite personal quotations from a conversation long ago, and a belief I still hold, is, “I am a follower of Richard Hooker.” I embrace his articulation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone — which is not the same as the caricatures produced by many of this doctrine’s opponents and which I believe is a natural following through of the teachings of St Augustine of Hippo.

To choose a second example, I also believe in the historic articulation of the Articles that Holy Scripture contains everything necessary for salvation — but, as an Anglican, I also believe in the place of the Church’s tradition as the interpreter of Scripture as well as the provider of things that are not, strictly speaking, necessary for salvation, yet nevertheless good for us and not be set aside lightly. For example, the Book of Common Prayer! Singing the Te Deum! Facing East at prayer! Anselm on the Atonement! Thomas Aquinas on the doctrine of God! All these things are available to the Anglican, but they are not, so far as I understand it, necessary for salvation (re Anselm and Thomas, I mean in terms of the very specifics of their teaching).

Over my many years of being Anglican and praying with the BCP and learning about my English spiritual heritage, simultaneously going into the Fathers but also the monastic fathers, medieval theologians, and the Eastern Orthodox tradition, I have become rooted in seeing the BCP as a rule of life, as an ascetic system that also provides us with so much positive truth (as I blog here often).

Part of why I have become rooted in this way is precisely that dance with Eastern Orthodoxy that I began almost 19 years ago. I have had my times when I seriously considered converting, sitting with Andrew Louth in his study, drinking coffee out of Beatrix Potter mugs, or being taught about icons by Fr Ioannis, being shown how to do prostrations by Fr Raphael and being given his teaching on the Jesus Prayer.

One of the things that often bothers me when people convert from one church to another is that they don’t always seem to know what they’ve left behind. As a lifelong Anglican of a Levitical family, I made it a point to learn what Anglicanism — both in its particularities but also an expression of western, catholic Christianity — actually teaches and has taught.

One result of this is a very different response to John Zizioulas, Being As Communion, from that of the former Southern Baptist I mentioned above. He read Zizioulas and his mind was blown. “We have nothing like this in Protestantism!” I read Zizioulas, and I loved it, and I saw how the teaching on the Trinity in that book was compatible with my comfortable, disturbing Anglican heritage. Why leave?

I and many other Anglicans have benefitted so much from our engagement with Orthodoxy, our friendship with Orthodox Christians, our attendance at Orthodox services, our conversations with Orthodox clerics, and our reading of Orthodox books. As a result, I can post things like this without feeling like I’m betraying my Anglican heritage:

Posting that, amusingly, got me accused of superstition. Apparently, I am supposed to burn my Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers. Right.

But positioned within Anglicanism, I see no reason why I should not pray the prayers in that book that are beautiful expressions of orthodox faith common to all Christians. Nor why I should not use a komboskini for the Jesus Prayer. It is much easier to pray the Prayer with one than without.

To close, because I have had positive experiences with the Eastern Orthodox Church, I do hope other Anglicans encounter them and see what we have in common and what they have to offer us, especially in how they treat the Fathers as living voices for today (something classic Anglicans used to do as well!) and in the practice of the Jesus Prayer, combined with the wider Eastern hesychastic tradition.

Such encounters, I believe, will help us grow deeper in our union with Christ (itself a strong Puritan theme…). Perhaps we can see revival in our churches as a result of an Anglican hesychastic movement!

Worship in Space & Time

I’ve mentioned before that at my Anglican parish, we have a good amount of stained glass, much of it depicting our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. This physical space provides a certain head space, and I am grateful for it. In most places I turn, I am struck with a reminder of Jesus, the God-Man who became incarnate to save us, such as the trio below, St. Thomas (our patron) flanked by the Christ:

The stained glass windows serve as a visual reminder of what we’re at church to do — to worship Christ our God. It helps us gain and maintain reverence. As I say, it has an impact upon how we worship.

This is in contrast to St Columba’s Free Church of Scotland where I worshipped in Edinburgh, a building with no stained glass, no images, nothing of that sort. It still had a Victorian Gothic beauty, but a beauty undistracted by figural ornamentation. Here, the focus was on the word as heard in the big Bible on the pulpit, as preached by the teaching elders, as sung in the Psalms. The beautiful, relatively simple, space of the Free Church helped with that focus.

Neo-Gothic Pulpit, St. Columba’s Free Church of Scotland

Each is good in its own way.

In Cyprus, I met a third way that is parallel to my Anglican upbringing, at times touching it. Throughout the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus you will find a series of churches that form a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Their interiors (and one interior!) are adorned with frescoes from the late Byzantine/Venetian era, sometimes early Ottoman. Centuries old, these images depict not only Christ, but his saints as well.

Image from Panayia Podithou, Troodos, I believe

When I visited these churches with my friend Fr. Ioannis, himself an iconographer, he explained that an Orthodox Church such as these (see also St John’s Cathedral in Nicosia) are covered in images of the saints because we do not worship alone. These frescoes represent the Great Cloud of Witnesses of Hebrews 11. And on the walls of the apse of many Orthodox churches, they have icons of Sts John Chrysostom, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzus) to remind the priest that he is concelebrating holy communion with the Fathers.

Sts Nicholas, Chrysostom, Basil

These three traditions have all shaped the way I worship God. Having grown up Anglican and worshipped in churches with at least one stained window of Christ most of my life, He is enthroned in my heart as God and King and Lord of All. Having spent years with the Wee Frees, I have learned to attune my heart to the God who is beyond all images and sights, to His Word as proclaimed and sung, seeping into my heart (like a Cistercian of old). And having been in and out of Orthodox churches for the past 19 years, I have learned to keep the saints in mind, that great cloud of witnesses surrounding me at prayer, praise, worship.

These questions are permeating my mind a lot right now because I’m preparing to teach “Early Christian Worship: Ritual and Space in the Ancient Church.” I didn’t simply want to do a course on liturgical texts. I wanted to seek out a way to help students sink their teeth, hearts, minds, wills into the material of ancient worship and thence go deeper and meet the one, true, and living God in the heritage of our Church, in the life of ancient faith.

• How did coming from the Temple to the assembly of saints affect the early church?
• How did “house” churches affect worship? (What does that mean?)
• What went on in the catacombs?
• How did they adorn their earliest edifices?
• How does worship in a Christian basilica differ from in a pagan temple?

This is one angle you’ll get to explore with me! So sign up today!

The Unity of the Trinity

Some time ago, I started to read The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Lossky. I really should finish it some time, but at the time I had to stop. Early in the book, Lossky said that Augustine and Aquinas have a false vision of the Trinity that amounts to making a fourth thing, the unity, that holds the three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together. This is the sort of annoying thing that makes me put a book down for a time.

I am now in the midst of Book 1 of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the essential textbook of medieval scholasticism (upon which Aquinas and man others wrote commentaries). Book 1 deals with the mystery of the Trinity, and it is mostly systematically arranged excerpts from St Augustine, the majority of them from Augustine’s On the Trinity.

Last week, my reading brought me through questions of essence and unity.

In the twelfth-century scholastic view represented by Lombard’s arrangement of and commenting upon St Augustine, it is asserted that each person of the Trinity possesses the fulness of the divine essence/usia (medieval Latins do not transliterate ousia). There is no essence as a fourth thing which they all share. The same divine essence, that which God is, the reality of God’s own self, is the essence of each person of the Trinity, and it is not divided. There is only one essence, of course, even with three hypostases.

But this is no different from the Greek Fathers — indeed, the Lombard enlists St John Damascus in these discussions. There are three hypostases, one ousia. We can only distinguish the three hypostases through their relations to one another (see St Gregory of Nazianzus) — or, in the Lombard’s terms, their properties (he actually uses both).

Essence, as I understand it, is something that everyone and everything has, and, like nature, it requires some sort of hypostasis or subsistence or grounded reality to manifest itself. So if there is one God, as all Trinitarian Christians proclaim, then there is one essence. If there are three persons, as all Trinitarian Christians claim, but only one essence, somehow we must say that each of them has the fulness of the divine essence in himself.

The divine unity cannot be a quartum quid or fourth thing as Lossky claims, moreover, because that would break divine simplicity, something the Greek and Latin Fathers, not to mention the Scholastics, are strong on. Divine simplicity is the idea that God is not composed of parts. As soon as you ask the question what God is made of, you realise that any composition diminishes his perfections and makes him lesser. To posit the unity of the Trinity as an actual fourth thing that the other three share shatters the simplicity.

The divine unity cannot be a quartum quid because that would break divine equality — and it is in the discussions equality in Book 1, Distinction XIX of the Sentences, that many of my initial thoughts began to arise in this direction. Each of them has to be fully God. As the chapter heading of DXIX, ch. 2.1 says, “Eternity, Greatness, and Might in God Are One Thing, Although They Are Posited As If They Were Diverse.” 2.2’s heading declares, “Greatness is the essence of God.” God is his greatness. God is his justice. God is his holiness. Now, so far this is simplicity.

Simplicity secures the equality because by saying that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all one essence, then we are saying that the greatness of the Father is the same greatness as that of the Son; in God, all is essence, nothing is accident. This means that even if we were to posit “unity” as an attribute of God that is, like all truly divine attributes, common to all three persons, we would not be adding a fourth thing; that would be the same as saying God’s justice is adding a fourth thing.

Anyway, the equality of God means that the Father is not greater or more just or more holy than the Son or the Spirit, for they are all one essence. The glory of each is the glory of all.

It is also worth putting to rest the idea that perhaps lies behind this moment in Lossky, that in the West we are often mere monotheists and in the East they run the risk of becoming tritheists. This idea does not do justice to any of the traditions. Reading through the careful work of the Lombard’s Sentences shows me that the foundations of the Latin tradition, not just in Augustine but in Hilary as well, are as committed to the actual persons, or hypostases, as the Greeks such as St Gregory of Nazianzus and St John of Damascus. And my years teaching the Nicene Controversy and the Ecumenical Councils have shown that the Greeks are not social Trinitarians, let alone tritheists.

We agree on the Most Holy Trinity more than many would have us believe.

The Dogmatic Consciousness

St Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938)

I have been taking a long, disjointed journey through St. Sophrony of Essex’s St. Silouan the Athonite. One of the ideals/ideas that St. Sophrony expresses, one of St. Silouan’s teachings, is the idea of “dogmatic consciousness.” He writes:

The dogmatic consciousness I have here in mind is the fruit of spiritual experience, independent of the logical brain’s activity. The writings in which the Saints reported their experience were not cast in the form of scholastic dissertations. They were revelations of the soul. Discourse on God and on life in God comes about simply, without cogitation, born spontaneously in the soul.

…

Dogmatic knowledge, understood as spiritual knowledge, is a gift of God, like all forms of real life in God, granted by God and only possible through His coming…

St. Sophrony, St. Silouan the Athonite, pp. 186-87

I do not think that St. Sophrony is here criticising the scholarly pursuit of knowledge and structured argumentation in our thought about God. He himself uses logic in his writings, after all, as do the great fathers of the Greek church, including mystical theologians such St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Maximus the Confessor, and St. Gregory Palamas.

Rather, he describing something else — something that may even be superior (without disparaging the dialectical pursuit of theological truth). He is saying that you can, by grace, come into a consciousness, a cognizance, a true knowledge, of real theologia without reasoning yourself into it. This would be the kind of noetic knowledge that, when people try to make distinctions, is the deeper knowing, more intimate, less distanced than modern conceptions of “intellectual” knowledge.

And before anyone starts going off on or for scholastics in light of this, it is worth noting that two of the biggest and best scholastics, Sts Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, both had mystical experiences and, I would put forward, experienced this kind of dogmatic consciousness — famously, St. Thomas stopped writing because of a mystical experience (which may actually be an indictment of his works…).

Anyway, a couple of pages later, St Sophrony says:

It is clear from the Staretz’ writings that without any inconsistency he lived the One God in Three Persons. In his prayers he applied the same names — Father, Lord, Master, King, Creator, Saviour, and so on — to each separate Person of the Holy Trinity, as also to the Three in One.

The Staretz testified categorically that the Divinity of Jesus Christ is made known in the Holy Spirit. The knowledge of Christ’s Divinity thus acquired through spiritual experience enables man to comprehend in Christ the unfused union of two natures and two wills. The uncreated nature of Divine Light and the other dogmas of our faith are likewise made known through inner experience in the Holy Spirit. …

Ideal — abstract — conceptions may correspond to the facts of existence but, separated from positive experience of grace, they are not that knowledge of God which is actual life eternal. Yet they, too, are precious for at any moment they may afford help to a man in his spiritual life.

St Sophrony, St Silouoan the Athonite, p. 189

That last section of the quote is just to show you that St Sophrony is not opposed to theological writing such as what I do.

The earlier sections, on the Trinity and Christology, hit at an idea that I first found articulated by Fr. Andrew Louth, either in Discerning the Mystery or Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology. The idea is this: Although the doctrine of the Trinity was not articulated until the fourth century, and the homoousion was not a major term (indeed, even Athanasius is no big user of it at the beginning of his career), it corresponded to the experience of the church at prayer and at Holy Communion through the ages, and so when Arius challenged it, people rose up. And when the likes of Athanasius and the Cappadocians started articulating it, they were putting the formal logical/philosophical shape and articulation to what the church, the Body of Christ, had always known to be true.

And so, while I am a huge fan of theological study (come study Augustine’s preaching with me this autumn through Davenant Hall!), we need to invest ourselves in seeking God Himself and not just our ideas of Him.

Catholic Anglican thoughts (again)

13th-c mosaic on loggia, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome

I think that perhaps one of the great problems with our society is that too many of us spend time thinking about our identities. For me, I spend time thinking about my religious identity. In particular, I often find myself feeling somewhat alone as a catholic Anglican — and not an Anglo-Catholic.

Like the majority tradition of Anglicanism, I embrace the teachings of the Fathers, the 39 Articles, the BCP, and what I’ve read of the Books of Homilies so far. I agree with Richard Hooker so much I wrote an essay recommending him for a real publication (as opposed to just another blog post). Moreover, I cherish the poetry of Donne, Herbert, and Guite, as well as the hymns of Charles Wesley and JM Neale. I recently called Lancelot Andrewes a saint, so there’s that in the mix, too!

Most of this doesn’t really make me much of “catholic”, though, does it? I mean, it mostly makes me an Anglican. I reckon John Wesley liked those things, too, except for the ones from after he died.

But what if I told you, despite spending 8 years as a Presbyterian, the only other church that seemed truly enticing was the Eastern Orthodox Church? That an Orthodox priest (now bishop!) once said that I am Orthodox in all but name? Although this actually isn’t true (I don’t seek saints to intercede for me [filed under: 39 Articles] or believe in tollhouses [filed under: umm…], to grab two really quick examples), I do have enormous respect for the Eastern Church and think that we can learn a lot from them in the West after a few centuries of Enlightenment and Romanticism under our belts.

So, yeah, I read St Sophrony, St Porphyrios, Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Father Andrew Louth, The Way of a Pilgrim, and others in my devotional time. I love the Greek Fathers, and sometimes I think I’m a Palamite. Byzantine chant and Byzantine icons, yes, please. I love the Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints John Chrysostom. Once when I was in a foul mood, I read the Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints Basil the Great just to cheer me up. And it’s beautiful and rich and makes anything from the West post-Vatican II (BAS and Common Worship, I’m looking at you) look like wading in shallow water when God has given us the skills requisite and necessary for surfing (or something like that).

I embrace the ancient and medieval heritage of the church — as interpreted through the 39 Articles and the BCP. Give me St Augustine. Give St Maximus the Confessor. Give me St Anselm and St John of Damascus and the Venerable Bede and St Benedict of Nursia and St Symeon the New Theologian and St Gregory of Nyssa and The Cloud of Unknowing and St John of the Ladder and St John of the Cross and St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Gregory of Nazianzus and St Basil of Caesarea and Origen of Alexander and St Athanasius of Alexandria and St Irenaeus of Lyons and Pope St Leo the Great and Pope St Gregory the Great and St Cyprian of Carthage and St Francis of Assisi and St Bonaventure and Stephen Langton and Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton and Aelfric of Eynsham and Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl and The Dream of the Rood.

Give me the Ruthwell Cross. Give me Mt Athos. Give the Benediktinerstift Sankt Paul im Lavanttal. Give me St Paul’s in London. Give me Durham Cathedral. Give me the Durham Gospels.

Give me these things, clothe them in the music of Tallis or Purcell or Gibbons. I’ll kiss your icons. I once kissed the alleged crozier of St Gregory. Give me the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament. Give me a little incense.

Give me these things, for when I encounter these things, I find Jesus in them.

Most of all, then: give me Jesus.

And I find that Jesus is found in this catholic Anglicanism. I find him there better than elsewhere — whether because of my own temperament or something in the nature of the catholic tradition itself. But Jesus comes to me in the poetry of John Donne and the teachings of the Orthodox monks. He comes when I read Pearl and I am drawn up to him through the architecture of a place like York Minster.

IRL, one finds oneself with almost no Anglicans round about, and few digging deep into this.

But Jesus comes amidst them, anyway — of course.

This is part of the secret of the catholic tradition, that God is always right there waiting for you. If you can cultivate hesychia and find, by grace, some level of purity of heart, you will find Jesus wherever you are, and not just listening to Byzantine chant on Spotify or with fellow catholics on Twitter, but at your own local parish.

Watch out for him. He’s there. Pray the Jesus Prayer. Memorise a poem or two by John Donne. Like St Pachomius, see God wherever He is, especially in your brother in Christ. He’ll be there — he has promised he will.

Richard Hooker and Union with God

My latest YouTube video was made on the commemoration of Richard Hooker on November 3. In it, I discuss his Christology in relation to Chalcedon but most especially in relation to you and your union with God and participation in the divine life. Enjoy!

Endless distraction vs monastic simplicity

As you may see in the sidebar of this blog, I am on Twitter. I initially joined under my own name in 2017 as a means to have and control a public professional persona. This purpose remains, but, after starting to teach for Davenant Hall, this public persona has expanded to include some of my own personal religious views, including this blog. And, to be honest, this self-promotion is also aimed to hopefully gain a few students.

Twitter — and even a private Discord server such as we have for The Davenant Institute — can be a great way to meet people. I have expanded my army of friends, and I am happy for that. Twitter and other social media — Facebook, Instagram, etc. — can also be a great way to distract yourself. And be endlessly distracted.

Sometimes, it’s okay. I’m willing to concede that we need a bit of distraction sometimes. It’s part of relaxation and restoration, I think. Take your mind off the pressures of daily life by following, say, @red_loeb to see images from medieval manuscripts, to name just one example. There are some interesting, amusing, informative, entertaining Twitter accounts to add to your feed.

Sometimes, it’s less okay. Like, say, the vast eruptions that happened after the USA’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Or when you see some less-than-pleasant characters falsely characterising your own religious beliefs. Or when you watch, say, a video of a news presenter taking down a flummoxed pastor over hot-button cultural issues. You get this fire burning in you, sometimes. Or you can’t direct your energy where it should be (*glances at The Life of Saint Pachomius*), continually thinking about the assault you have levelled against your nous.

I once Tweeted that Twitter is like having your nous assaulted by all 8 Evagrian thoughts at once.

The monks of the Desert would not have appreciated something like Twitter. Tonight in my Desert Fathers course for Davenant Hall, I am teaching about Pachomius, the reputedly first abbot of a coenobium, of a monastery designed for communal living. The monks were meant to live undistracted lives. This meant that if any of them had to leave the monastery on business, they weren’t allowed to tell the brothers what they had seen or heard. If someone came to the monastery, the porter was the only person they were allowed to interact with. Tabennisi, the village where the first Pachomian monastery was founded, was an abandoned village. Even walks in the abandoned village were not allowed.

Elsewhere, of course, in the anchoritic literature, we hear of monks refusing to listen to news of the outside world. Or they ignore people from outside sometimes. They avoid talking, even if news isn’t the subject. Curiosity, even about ones family that was left behind, is considered dangerous.

The point of all this is to help cultivate a heart that is undistracted and undivided. The monk is someone who is single-minded. Monks are monomaniacs for God. They aren’t interested in the emperor’s doings. They aren’t interested in visits from the priests of the outside world. They aren’t even that interested in the inner world of their souls, except inasmuch as it can help or hinder in the raising up of the monk to God.

Now, Twitter is actually part of my livelihood, since tuition pays my salary. So I’ll stay there. But we all need to know when to logoff and unplug and sit, undistracted, pursuing God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. The simplicity of the monks and their spiritual practices, I believe, can help us there.

For me, as you no doubt know, a major monastic practice has been the Jesus Prayer — listen to my and my brother’s podcast to hear some more!

The beauty and glory of the Trinity

My latest YouTube video went up last week, entitled “The beauty and glory of the Trinity” wherein I make a contribution to some of the theological shenanigans going on on Twitter (you need not know said shenanigans to enjoy the video!). I hope you are blessed by this video.

St Romanos the Melodist

I’m writing this post on October 1, the feast of St Romanos the Melodist (or St Romanus, sometimes Melodos instead of “the Melodist”). St Romanos was born in the late 400s in Emesa, Syria, and spent his professional career in Constantinople, moving to the imperial city during the reign of Emperor Anastasius I (r. 491-518). I won’t linger on the hagiography. While there, Romanos was enlisted as a professional hymnographer by the patriarch and composed a vast number of hymns for the different feasts of the church. Verses of some of these hymns have been incorporated into the round of liturgical hymn-singing in the Eastern Orthodox Church to this day. His greatest period of activity would be during the reigns of Justin (518-527) and Justinian (527-565); he died some time after 555.

He is claimed to have written around 1500 hymns. People typically balk at numbers like this, but I learned recently that in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, they have poets who compose a new hymn every Sunday and every major feast day. Most of these hymns are not written down and preserved, but some are. Besides being evidence for something mighty in Ethiopia and the ongoing life of Ge’ez as a literary language, this parallel makes me wonder if perhaps Romanos did write 1500 hymns, but only some of them were polished and published.

His hymns are quite long, taking after the hymns of our dear friend St Ephrem the Syrian. They often include dialogue, or an address on the part of the hymnographer to a character in a biblical scene. The hymns are steeped in Scripture and bring forth, in true poetry, the theology of the drama of salvation. I feel as though St Romanos is possibly the greatest theologian of the age of Justinian, although that usually goes to Leontius of Byzantium.

Allow me to close with a sample of St Romanos’ work, taken from the translation by Archimandrite Ephrem Lash and preserved by the Wayback Machine. This is the Prooemion from Kontakion 22; the Prooemion and first Ikos are still used in the Orthodox Church on the Third Sunday in Lent.

ON THE VICTORY OF THE CROSS

Acrostic: BY THE HUMBLE ROMANOS
Proemium 1. Idiomel.
The sword of flame no longer guards the gate of Eden,
For a strange bond came upon it: the wood of the Cross.
The sting of Death and the victory of Hades were nailed to it.
But you appeared, my Saviour, crying to those in Hades:
‘Be brought back
Again to Paradise’.

Proemium 2.
Nailed to the form of the Cross
As truly a ransom for many
You redeemed us, Christ our God,
For by your precious blood in love for mankind
You snatched our souls from death.
You brought us back with you
Again to Paradise.

Proemium 3.
All things in heaven and earth rightly rejoice with Adam,
Because he has been called
Again to Paradise.

The Crucifixion, Studenica, Serbia. 1310s.

My brother and I started a podcast

My brother Jonathan and I started a podcast. It’s called “Devotion to Christ: Anglican Spirituality, a Tradition for Today.” Our discussions will be anchored in the Book of Common Prayer to prevent it from ranging everywhere and thus becoming nothing in particular. But we’ll also bring in Scripture and the Anglican divines. That said, using the first episode as evidence, when I talk off the top of my head, I bring in things like Met. Anthony Bloom’s book Living Prayer, St Seraphim of Sarov, and St Theophan the Recluse. (At least, I think I brought in St Theophan.)

Why do a new podcast when about a gazillion (give or take) already exist?

Our combination of shared personal history but differing professional expertise makes for interesting conversations, for one thing. He’s an actual minister who preaches, so he’s good at finding concrete, real life things to say to make a topic relevant. I, on the other hand, am an academic, so I tend to bring us back to the sources (in our first episode, this would be the BCP). I also have a lot of ancient and Orthodox sources informing what I say, whereas he is stronger on the actual Anglican tradition than I am.

Another reason is that people desperately need to know Jesus — they need to know Him better, or even at all. The various things our communities, lives, churches, institutions, are doing aren’t necessarily producing deeper, more, or “better” disciples, which is to say, they aren’t helping people know Jesus. We think the Anglican devotional tradition can help people know Jesus better as his disciples. So maybe, by having people listen to us talk about it for half an hour every two weeks, they’ll be strengthened and encouraged to know Jesus more.

Finally, we’re both fans of the daily office, and even started a dispersed community called The Witness Cloud to promote it — maybe our podcast will help recruit for the Witness Cloud and the daily office as a means of grace.

You can find us on the podcast website, on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on Amazon, and elsewhere as I sort out distribution. I’ll also be uploading videos of the episodes to YouTube, as you see below: