A prayer for peace, from a Christian of Gaza

Today, the fourteenth of October, is the feast-day of Saint Kosmas the Poet of Gaza. It is worth remembering Saint Kosmas today, when his fellow Arabs, including Christian Arabs, are under siege in the very place where he reposed, by a hostile army of nationalists following a deluded messianic vision. As I write this, the Gazans—over one million people—are in their literal eleventh hour, having been given a twenty-four hour ultimatum to evacuate Gaza in an order that the UN has deemed ‘impossible’. This is in response to a brutal attack by Hamas on several Israeli settlements bordering Gaza. There can be no real, cogent moral defence of such a surprise attack targeting civilians. But instead of producing a rational and thoughtful response as to how we got to this juncture, the war machine is gearing up once again to grind down, not only Hamas, but Palestinians outside of Hamas who are already helpless and already without defence. This includes the Christians of Saint Porphyrios Church in Gaza, who have requested our prayers. They face a true martyrdom: sacrificial suffering on account of a crime in which they had no part.

There are few who seek understanding of this conflict. But for those who are interested, I would recommend two books in particular: the work of George Antonius, The Arab Awakening, and William Dalrymple’s travelogue From the Holy Mountain. The latter is not about the history of the Holy Land per se, but intimates many things which are relevant to the present state of affairs. The autobiography of Iraqi statesman Adnan al-Pachachi, Living to Some Purpose, may also be of some interest to readers on this question.

The land which is called ‘holy’, is crying for peace, yet peace is very far from its grasp. I find myself in deep grief for those who have lost their lives on both sides already. And I find myself deep in anger, not only at Hamas, but also (and more so) at the Israeli state and leadership who failed to prevent this attack, and who will now wreak a vengeance that will target the innocent along with the guilty. There can be no true peace without justice; and justice can only be arrived at, when the rightful claims of the Palestinian cause are acknowledged, and when the security of the Jewish people everywhere, not just in the Holy Land, is assured. I can only add Rev’d Dr John Mason Neale’s English translation of the hymn for peace from the Christmas Canon, which was authored by the holy Palestinian of Gaza whom we commemorate today:

Father of Peace, and God of Consolation!
　The Angel of the Counsel dost Thou send
To herald peace, to manifest Salvation,
　Thy Light to pour, Thy knowledge to extend;
Whence, with the morning’s earliest rays,
Lover of men! Thy Name we praise.

’Midst Caesar’s subjects Thou, at his decreeing,
　Obey’dst and was enrolled: our mortal race,
To sin and Satan slave, from bondage freeing,
　Our poverty in all points didst embrace:
And by that Union didst combine
The earthly with the All-Divine.

Behold! The virgin, prophecy sustaining,
　Incarnate Deity conceived and bore;
Virgin in birth, and virgin still remaining,
　And man to God is reconciled once more:
Wherefore in faith her name we bless,
And Mother of our God confess.

On ‘weird’ Christianity and its critics

This blog has existed for a long time – through both its Anglo-Catholic and its Orthodox phases – on the edges of the ‘weird’ Christian phenomenon, which was recently highlighted in one op-ed piece written by Tara Isabella Burton for the New York Times. I’m more heavy metal than punk, admittedly, but her characterisation of the countercultural proclivities of the segment of young and disaffected Christendom I belong to hits straight home. It’s somewhat unfortunate that this op-ed is somewhat loose and all over the place, because there is a distinct and eloquent core to it that recognises and speaks directly to the project this blog represents:

The Weird Christian movement, loose and fledgling though it is, isn’t just about its punk-traditionalist aesthetic, a valorization of a half-imagined past. It is at its most potent when it challenges the present, and reimagines the future. Its adherents are, like so many young Americans of all religious persuasions, characterized by their hunger for something more than contemporary American culture can offer, something transcendent, politically meaningful, personally challenging. Like the hipster obsession with “authenticity” that marked the mid-2010s, the rise of Weird Christianity reflects America’s unfulfilled desire for, well, something real.

I say it’s ‘somewhat unfortunate’ that this blog piece is so loosely-structured and free-form, because it opens itself up to a lot of bad-faith criticism, such as some of the criticism it got at the National Catholic Reporter from Jamie Manson – which is, in roughly equal parts: illiterate fact-free griping about Bernie Bros, Dreher-bashing and Katie Kelaidis-style fashion-shaming of women who wear veils.

I do not at all begrudge Manson her bashing of Dreher or even her defence of Pachamama-as-Marian-image – a position on which I am agnostic for Christological reasons, but to which I’m generally sympathetic on account of my antipathy to iconoclasm. But her oblique woke-liberal bellyaching about Bernie Bros (‘socialism — as we've seen in its young, white-male dominated form in the U.S. — does not inherently disassociate anyone from racism, misogyny, homophobia or transphobia’) is simply not based in facts. American socialism is predominantly young and millennial, yes, but it isn’t white-dominated or male-dominated, and it does and has dissociated itself strongly from racism, misogyny and other forms of gender discrimination, particularly after 2016. Manson’s continued use of this ideological fiction fails to indict socialism, but it does say something about her own priorities – that these identity politics issues matter more to her than œconomic inequality.

The veil-shaming crap follows from this somewhat. It’s actually no less perverse and no less purity-policing to tell women that they shouldn’t wear a veil in a church setting, than to tell them that they should. The only difference is that the mainstream norm for appropriately-feminine behaviour has changed. If, as Manson suggests, ‘head coverings were compulsory for centuries because the female body was seen as a threat to men's chastity’, and that this is a moral problem, then it is incumbent on us not to simply leave it there but to inquire why this is a moral problem. The initial, and valid, feminist reaction was against norms which policed the way a woman dresses to meet the psychosexual demands of men in their community. It placed the burden of incapably-restrained male libido unfairly on the women.

But this knife cuts both ways. Now the norm is for women to not cover their heads, anywhere. Katie Kelaidis complains about the resurgence of headscarves in Orthodox churches, at bottom because they make her feel insecure. I would argue that, if we accept it as morally axiomatic that it’s not a woman’s responsibility to restrain men’s libido for them, neither is it a woman’s responsibility to dress a certain way to suit other women’s insecurities. If my defence of veils in church sounds individualistic, that’s because to some extent it is. Call it the ‘oikonomia defence’. Outside a certain set of broad civic boundaries and strictures against lewdness common to most settled cultures past and present, I don’t believe in policing women’s dress.

But on the few occasions where she actually addresses what I take to be the ‘punchline’ of Burton’s piece, Manson misses the point and does so in profound ways that make me wonder if she actually read the piece or if she is just reacting to it. For example, when she says this:

Weird Christians claim to want a faith that is "totally demanding," but they do not seem inclined to do the demanding work of examining the relationship between the exaggerated medieval rituals they fetishize and the barbaric economic and social injustices of the Middle Ages.

I dare not speak for others in the broader ‘weird Christian’ ambit; I’m sure they’re more than capable of speaking up for themselves. But speaking for myself in my own little idiosyncratic corner of the Orthosphere, I happen to be doing exactly this, and I have been doing it for a long time. Even in the places where I tend to vaunt the Middle Ages for various reasons – particularly polities which did away with the death penalty, or banned torture of prisoners, or made it mandatory to feed the poor on public feast-days – I am not blind to the political failings of those times, which were often incurably deep. Being Orthodox, I am an intense critic of the Crusades (especially the fourth one). And being aware of the œconomic consequences of the Norman invasion, I am also intensely critical of feudalism.

Lest one think from the above descriptions that I’m being a chauvinist triumphalist convertodox here, I don’t ignore political failings and faults in our ‘holy lands’ either. Even mediæval Russia, even Kievan Rus’ with its deep-rooted Christian radicalism, was rife with princely backstabbing, and the hyperdox hang-ups of rural Russian priests of this time are more than occasionally embarrassing to read (though they did come in for some censure from their bishops, even back then). On a note of personal self-criticism, I’m well aware that there’s a certain unresolved sexual component to my own straight-Shôta yearning for green and pleasant pastoral idylls of an English and Tory flavour, and I’m doing my best to keep it in view and in check.

So it’s simply wrong – egregiously so – for Manson to allude that being drawn to the ‘smells and bells’ of mediæval ritual automatically demands that you turn off your brain or that we take refuge in ‘kitsch and camp’, particularly given the punchline of Burton’s piece which directly contradicts this point. There are certain aspects of mediævalism which we would do well to reappropriate against the new nationalist right, rather than surrendering them wholesale. A very important one of these is a certain broad sense of civilisational humility, which is missing as much on the ‘woke’ left as it is among the new nationalists.

However – and here I allow myself the conceit that my ‘weird’ Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican brothers and sisters would broadly agree with me – the point of having a prisca theologica is not to take refuge in an idealised and static imagery of the past, but instead to creatively articulate the basis for a transfigured future. That means throwing off the balance of a status quo that has little use anymore for public considerations of Christ. Are we ‘unique’ in that? Dear God, I hope not – I hope Manson’s right about that. But it behooves our critics to note that a genuine transfiguration of society in a more just direction requires a hierarchy of values – not of people, but of values – for which Christian antiquity provides a useful guidepost.

The Orthodox apprentice

On this blog I have occasionally had opportunity to make reference to the excellent Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, a series of murder mysteries set in twelfth-century Wales and the English West Country, written by Edith Pargeter under the nom de plume of Ellis Peters. These novels are charming and cleverly-crafted whodunits in their own right, with the eponymous Welsh Benedictine brother using his knowledge of medicines and herbalism, his vast and varied experience of human nature and his stores of human sympathy and patience to solve the mystery. He is aided by the wry and quick-witted Hugh Beringar, a young Norman landowner who works his way up the ranks in King Stephen’s service to become his sheriff in Shrewsbury. Even though he’s the voice of the law, he is both fair-minded enough and curious enough to be an equal partner in these endeavours rather than a rival or an adversary – even though Cadfael sometimes has to be devious in keeping the too-obvious suspects who engage his sympathy well out of Hugh’s way when he is duty-bound to find them but doesn’t want to.

I’ve been rereading these books straight through, in part inspired by this series on the English and Welsh saints that I’ve been doing – in particular Saint Gwenffrewi, who is herself something of a major character in the series. And then I stumbled back over The Heretic’s Apprentice, the sixteenth (or seventeenth, depending on which version you read) entry in the series. Quite accidentally, I seem to have unearthed one of the fragmentary signposts that has led me on my current path. Edith Pargeter seems to have given me a little nudge along the road in this direction.

Seven years before the events of The Heretic’s Apprentice, a wool merchant, William of Lythwood, left Shrewsbury and took his clerk Elave with him on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. William of Lythwood was known to have expressed certain doubts about the Trinity in the presence of a parish priest, who recommended to him that he undertake the pilgrimage for his own soul’s sake. Elave, when he went along with, kept his ears and eyes open all the way along. As The Heretic’s Apprentice begins, Elave returns from Jerusalem, pushing a cart with a coffin – containing William of Lythwood, seeking rest in the abbey graveyard after his long travels.

Elave seeks an audience with Abbot Radulfus, who is playing host to a high-ranking Augustinian canon named Gerbert, representing Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. He brings his master William’s last request before the Abbot, though Gerbert is wary of any attempt to have the merchant interred – the more so when he discovers that William had given voice to hæretical opinions in the past. Though William is discovered to have died absolved and is granted his grave in abbey ground, Elave’s troubles do not end there.

He brings back another, smaller box – this one for William’s foster-daughter Fortunata, meant to be her dowry. This box is an intricate piece, carven and inlaid with silver and ivory, and featuring a Byzantine icon on the front which Anselm, one of the abbey monks, believes may be Saint John Chrysostom. This box, brought into the merchant’s household – now run by William’s brothers Girard and Jevan – also brings covetousness and anxiety. The family’s chief shepherd, Conan, admires the box and wonders what it contains – and notes that the owner of the box, Fortunata, has eyes only on Elave when he comes back. And the family’s clerk, Aldwin, remembering Elave’s prior influence with the Lythwood family and fearing for his position, wants him driven out. Conan and Aldwin conspire to brand Elave a hæretic so Gerbert will chase him off; but Aldwin, later learning that his position was never in any danger from Elave, regrets the conspiracy and goes to Gerbert to attempt to put the record right. Aldwin never gets there – he is stabbed in the back and thrown into the Severn. Hence, the murder mystery around which the book revolves.

But what interests me particularly is that, when Conan and Aldwin attempt to get Elave to express his ‘hæretical’ opinions, he instead posits ideas which are wholly in line with Orthodox Christian thinking. This makes sense within the world of the story, as he just came back from Jerusalem and Syria. Here, though, is the relevant passage:

William’s wake was well supplied with ale, wine and mead, and went the way of most wakes, from dignified solemnity and pious remembrance to sentimental and increasingly elaborated reminiscence, while discreet voices grew louder and anecdotes borrowed as much from imagination as from memory. And since Elave had been his companion for seven year while he had been out of sight and often out of mind of these old neighbours of his, the young man found himself being plied with the best ale in the house, in exchange for the stories he had to tell of the long journey and the wonders along the way, and of William’s dignified farewell to the world.

If he had not drunk considerably more than he was accustomed to, he might not have given direct and open answers to oblique and insinuating questions…

“According to one of the brothers down there,” said Aldwin earnestly, “the little anxious grey fellow that runs so busy about the prior, it was a question whether the old man would be let in at all. Somebody there was for digging up that old scuffle he had with the missioner, to deny him a place.”

“It’s a grave matter to disagree with the Church,” agreed Conan, shaking his head. “It’s not for us to know better than the priests, not where faith’s concerned. Listen and say Amen, that’s my advice. Did ever William talk to you about such things, Elave? You travelled a long way and a good many years with him. Did he try to take you along with him down that road, too?”

“He never made any secret of what he thought,” said Elave. “He’d argue his point, and with good sense, too, even to priests, but there was none of them found any great fault with him for thinking about such things. What are wits for unless a man uses them?”

“That’s presumption,” said Aldwin, “in simple folk like us, who haven’t the learning or the calling of the church men. As the king and the sheriff have power over us in their field, so has the priest in his. It’s not for us to meddle with matters beyond us. Conan’s right, listen and say Amen!”

“How can you say Amen to damning a newborn child to hell because the little thing died before it could be baptised?” Elave asked reasonably. “It was one of the things that bothered him. He used to argue not even the worst of men could throw a child into the fire, so how could the good God? It’s against his nature.”

“And you,” said Aldwin, staring curiosity and concern, “did you agree with him? Do you say so, too?”

“Yes, I do say so. I can’t believe the reason they give us, that babes are born into the world already rotten with sin. How can that be true? A creature new and helpless, barely into this world, how can it ever have done wrong?”

“They say,” ventured Conan cautiously, “even babes unborn are rotten with the sin of Adam, and fallen with him.”

“And I say that it’s only his own deeds, bad and good, that a man will have to answer for in the judgement, and that’s what will save or damn him. Though it’s not often I’ve known a man so bad as to make me believe in damnation,” said Elave, still absorbed in his own reasoning, and intent only on expressing himself clearly and simply without suspicion of hostility or danger. “There was a father of the Church, once, as I heard tell, in Alexandria, who held that in the end everyone would find salvation. Even the fallen angels would return to their fealty, even the devil would repent and make his way back to God.”

He felt the chill and the shiver that went through his audience, but thought no more of it than that his travelled wisdom, small as it still was, had carried him out of the reach of their parochial innocence. Even Fortunata, listening silently to the talk of the menfolk, had stiffened and opened her eyes wide and round at such an utterance, startled and perhaps shocked. She said nothing in this company, but she followed every word that was spoken, and the colour ebbed and flowed in her cheeks as she glanced attentively from face to face.

“That’s blasphemous,” said Aldwin in an awed whisper. “The Church tells us there’s no salvation but by grace, not by works. A man can do nothing to save himself, being born sinful.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Elave stubbornly. “Would the good God have made a creature so imperfect that he can have no free will of his own to choose between right and wrong? We can make our own way toward salvation, or down into the muck, and at the last we must every one stand by his own acts in the judgement. If we are men we ought to make our own way towards grace, not sit on our hams and wait for it to lift us up.”

“No, no, we’re taught differently,” insisted Conan doggedly. “Men are fallen by the first fall, and incline towards evil. They can never do good but by the grace of God.”

“And I say they can and do! A man can choose to avoid sin and do justly, of his own will, and his own will is the gift of God, and meant to be used. Why should a man get credit for leaving it all to God?” said Elave, roused but reasonable. “We think about what we’re doing daily with our hands, to earn a living. What fools we should be not to give a thought to what we’re doing with our souls, to earn an eternal life. Earn it,” said Elave with emphasis, “not wait to be given it unearned.”

“It’s against the Church Fathers,” objected Aldwin just as strongly. “Our priest here preached a sermon once about Saint Augustine, how he wrote that the number of the elect is fixed and not to be changed, and all the rest are lost and damned, so how can their free will and their own acts help them? Only God’s grace can save. Everything else is vain and sinful.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Elave loudly and firmly. “Or why should we even try to deal justly? These very priests urge us to do right, and demand of us confession and penance if we fall short. Why, if the roll is already made up? Where is the sense of it? No, I do not believe it!”

Aldwin was looking at him in awed solemnity. “You do not believe even Saint Augustine?”

“If he wrote that, no, I do not believe him.”

Let’s take a look at the exact beliefs that got Elave in trouble with the Augustinian Canon Gerbert in the novel. Though there is a certain degree of anachronism in Pargeter’s ascription to concerns that are very specifically sixteenth-century in provenance to churchmen of the twelfth, the theological stakes here examined are quite real and Elave’s concerns seem to be very specific.

1. Elave disbelieves that newborn babies who die before baptism will be damned to hell, asserting that it is against God’s personality.


2. He disbelieves that babies are born rotten with the sin of Adam.


3. He considers – considers, but does not endorse – Origen’s version of apōkatastasis.


4. He believes in human free will.


5. He asserts a model of salvation in which works and grace both matter.

As stated, from an Orthodox Christian perspective of the sort he and William might very well have come across among priests in the twelfth-century Holy Land, there’s not that much wrong with what Elave gives expression to here. Elave mostly takes issue, by name, with a certain interpretation of Augustine taken to a logical extreme.

The Orthodox Church does not teach that unbaptised babies are condemned to hell. We have the iconography of the Holy Innocents to prove it, as well as the authoritative witnesses of Saint Gregory the Theologian, Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Mâr ’Afrâm as-Sûryâni. Indeed, we have also the authoritative testimony of Patriarch Dositheos II of Jerusalem attesting to the idea that God’s personality is such that He does not will anyone’s condemnation. The Orthodox Church also does not teach that babies are born rotten with Adam’s sin – a sin for which Adam and Eve only are responsible – even though all of us who are born into a fallen world must deal with the consequences of that first Fall.

It’s also interesting what Elave has to say on the subject of apōkatastasis. It’s worth noting that later in the book, when he comes before the court of Abbot Radulfus and Canon Gerbert and the witnesses to his opinions are cross-examined, that he does not endorse the teachings of Origen on salvation; he merely notes, with interest, that they exist. (It is in fact Abbot Radulfus who mentions Origen by name.)

From an Orthodox perspective Elave gets into a little bit of trouble, doctrinally speaking, when it comes to the question of grace and works – but there the whole question is framed in such a way as to make it hard for anyone to escape trouble, at least if they come at it from the perspective of human reason alone. Elave is grappling, in fact, with many of the same questions of spiritual discipline that Abba Cassian – whose leap-day feast we just celebrated! – grappled with in his entrance into the disputes between Augustine and Pelagius, and on the same grounds. Elave narrowly manages to preserve himself from the charge of Pelagianism here, by asserting that the free will by which a man can choose to cooperate with God in his own salvation is a gift of that same God. But there’s little else in the passage for Abba Cassian or for later Orthodox authorities to disagree with, unless it is that overly-hasty ‘I say they can and do!’ which is his retort to Aldwin’s exaggerated Augustinianism. There indeed he is reflecting an overly-rationalistic, Western perspective on matters of faith.

I read this book first when I was in high school, and I think Pargeter’s very Anglican objections, through her strong-minded pilgrim Elave, to an overly-zealous and -legalistic read of Augustine impacted me more than I then knew. Even as an Anglican, I had quibbles with the ideas of infant damnation and the directly-imputed model of original sin that found better articulation within the realm of Orthodox theology. Reading through this book again was like going back and excavating a part of that road.

Insist on beauty for the poor

Patriarch Pavle of Serbia

I am, and have been, a firm believer for a long time in the idea that the poorest people in our society deserve both bread and roses, that there should be space for both labour activism and Liturgy in their lives. That was, and remains, one of the most attractive things to me about the Anglo-Catholic socialist tradition which somewhat adopted me during college. It’s one of the most attractive things to me about the early Renovationists – before, and in opposition to, the hæresy of the Sergianists – and the legacy of the Vekhi group in Russia. It remains one of the most attractive things to me about the Eastern European socialism that understands proportionality, preservation both cultural and natural, physically-beautiful built space that’s friendly to young families and old folks to be vital parts of its programme, and not merely optional.

For all of this, of course, I’ve had it put to me that I’m a secret reactionary. Wait, let me put this in the most literal possible way. A certain commenter told me – because I am opposed to rule by tech-bros, mind you – that I am actually ‘an eccentric right winger whose views occasionally overlap with leftism… gung-ho about early twentieth century Marxists and rural Maoists… because they provide a leftist outlet for [my] regressive social views’.

There may be a certain grain of truth to this. I do have certain views which range quite close to classical reaction – particularly in the mode of Pobedonostsev and Leont’ev, and to stretch that definition a bit, Khomyakov and Kireevsky as well. And yet I am forced to wonder. Is it right-wing not to want to live in a world dominated by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk? Is it right-wing to want working-class people to be not merely seen but heard as well? Is it right-wing to want for those same working-class people, the same things those working-class people say they want? In many cases, that includes beauty. It’s something of a bourgeois assumption that poor people desire convenience and efficiency over elegance. This assumption is often massaged and conditioned into a belief that they deserve only those things which are convenient and efficient, and no more. As Reina Sultan puts it, writing at Intersectional Feminist Media:

Rich people in the U.S. (but also in most of the west) think that poor people cannot manage their own money — for no other reason than the fact that they are poor. I work in international development at an organization that provides unconditional cash transfers to women. This means they can spend the money however they want. It’s theirs. Without fail, we are bombarded at every conference with the same questions, “How do you ensure that the women won’t spend money on frivolous items like lipstick?” We don’t. It’s not our money. It’s theirs.

In prosaic terms, the real, physical needs of the working class often depend on more than mere convenience and efficiency. Women in particular, need to wear make-up and need to dress smartly for job interviews, if they want to get hired so they can feed themselves and their families. Oftentimes this presents a not insignificant financial hurdle for them. Efficiency is clearly not the only consideration. Of course there’s a double standard at play in this, and perhaps more than a whiff of sexism as well. But it’s hardly out of line to say that poor women – and men, for that matter – are no less apt to enjoy looking and smelling nice as much as rich women and men do. On a related sidenote: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed may be dated, but it deserves to be on every single American high-school curriculum.

But this anecdote actually reminds me of one of my very favourite CS Lewis anecdotes. On the way to an Inklings meeting Lewis stopped to give money to a street beggar, and his friend asked him if he wouldn’t merely spend it on drink. Lewis retorted: ‘Maybe – but if I had kept it, so would I.’ What this anecdote does particularly effectively, is that it eliminates the idea that the beliefs and desires of needy and stressed people are somehow of a different quality than ours, as well as the assumption that poor and wealthy people are any different in terms of what they deserve.

The spiritual needs of the poor are real and must be considered. When I was still going to S. Stephen’s Church in Providence, there was a middle-aged homeless lady who often stayed in the back pews. I was told, sotto voce, that she occasionally or more-than-occasionally struggled with bipolar or a similar disorder. But she loved coming to the church. She told me herself that she loved particularly the sensory dimension of the Mass, the approach of Christ before all five senses. It was clear to me that she felt most herself when she was in the presence of the Eucharist, listening to the hymnody of the Church, smelling the sweet smells of the censer and lifting her eyes to heaven. It would be a particularly cruel sort of person to want to take that away from her.

One of the great attractions of Orthodox Christianity, for me, is the insistence that the poor have their own sort of beauty that demands respect, even if it isn’t readily apparent. The face of Christ may be seen in the beggar at the church door, to paraphrase Chrysostom. You see this in Dostoevsky particularly – think Sonya Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment – but it’s present in Greek Orthodox theology as well. The sacrifice of Christ and the defeat of death by God was not efficient – on the contrary, it was gratuitous – but it accomplished a remarkable symmetry, even if it came at the expense of the overthrow of all worldly logic: the power of death defeated, by mere human flesh in the Resurrection. What place can austerity and the exaction of pettier debts and satisfactions have, in the light of this awesome and indescribable reality? What do we ungrateful servants mean by laying hold of our fellow-servants, by grudging the poor a moment of æsthesis, when the King of All has forgiven us everything with such wild and reckless abandon? If there is an austerity to be performed, it belongs to the self: an austerity of gratitude, the tears and toil of grace.

Holy and Glorious Sigeberht, Martyr-King of East Anglia

Saint Sigeberht of East Anglia

The twenty-ninth of October is the feast day of Sigeberht, the first successful Christian king of East Anglia, who sent for Saint Felix the Burgundian to undertake the conversion of his people.

Very little is known of Sigeberht’s early life; even his year of birth is uncertain. He was likely the foster son or stepson of the East Anglian king Rædwald, who was a scion of the Wuffingas. He spent nearly his whole early life in exile in Francia, possibly under political pressure from his stepfather in order to protect his biological son Eorpwald’s claim to the East Anglian throne. After Rædwald died, Eorpwald did take the throne, and ruled for twenty-five years. At last he converted to Christianity under Éadwine’s influence, only to be slain by a heathen zealot named Rícberht.

This last event prompted Sigeberht to return from exile, to contend for the throne of his kingdom. It is likely that he gained his sway over East Anglia not by gentle suasion but instead by force, as he was remembered as a capable leader of men in battle. He was quickly recognised and supported as such by his Christianised neighbours, Éadwine of Northumbria and Éadbald of Kent, and quickly gained the upper hand over a heathen co-king named Ecgríc – who was a rival and later ally who converted to Christianity under Sigeberht’s influence.

Sigeberht was interested in improving the state of learning in his kingdom, and therefore founded a school for boys run by Saint Felix. Felix brought thence teachers and schoolmasters from Kent, who taught Christianity after the style of the Roman mission in Canterbury. It doesn’t seem like Saint Sigeberht actively took a side in the Roman-Celtic Easter dating controversy; even though Saint Felix was loyal to Canterbury and thus also Rome, Sigeberht was equally hospitable to the Irish visionary (and Celtic partizan) Saint Fursa of Burgh, to whom he provided land for a monastery near what is now called Burgh Castle. Saint Fursa stayed as long as Sigeberht lived, but departed for Francia himself after Sigeberht’s death.

Sigeberht is remarkable among early English kings in that he willingly renounced his throne (like an English perhaps), left his kingdom in the hands of his now-Christian former rival Ecgríc, and took the tonsure at what is now Bury St Edmund’s. East Anglia was thereafter attacked by the Mercians under Penda, and defended by Ecgríc with a much smaller force of men. Ecgríc sent messengers to Sigeberht’s monastery, and they asked him to come and lead the East Anglian here in battle. They reasoned that, seeing their former king and commander at their head, their hearts would be strengthened and they would be less likely to flee. Sigeberht refused this, however, saying that he had forsaken his earthly kingdom in hopes of the heavenly one. He was nonetheless dragged forcibly from the monastery and placed at the head of the East Anglian forces, fighting alongside Ecgríc. Knowing it wrong for a monk to shed blood, he went into battle armed with nothing but a wooden staff. The Mercians carried the day – and slew both Sigeberht and Ecgríc, along with a great many East Angles. Although the kingdom was destroyed and the lands ravaged by Penda, the church in East Anglia managed to survive and thrive for two centuries afterward. Sigeberht himself was recognised quite soon thereafter as a martyr in the cause of Christ.

Sigeberht is sainted, with good cause, in all three of the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions. Among the early English princes, Sigeberht can best be compared with the Duke of Zhou, being the first to abdicate and take up the monastic life, or better yet Prince Lazar, willingly renouncing earthly victory in exchange for a heavenly one. Holy and righteous Sigeberht, who prized the martyr’s crown over any earthly glory, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

The feast of Our Lady of Walsingham

Icon of the Theotokos ‘Our Lady of Walsingham’

In the year 1061 – five years before the Norman invasion, while England could still be considered part of the Orthodox world – an English noblewoman named Richeldis de Faverches of Norfolk was taken with a peculiarly strong desire to honour the Most Holy Theotokos. In answer to her selfless prayers to this effect, the Theotokos appeared to her in a series of three visions.

In these visions, Richeldis was guided by the hand of the Theotokos and taken in spirit to the home of her youth in Nazareth, where she had received the Annunciation from the Archangel Gabriel that she was to be the mother of Jesus Christ. The Theotokos instructed the Englishwoman to take special note of the dimensions and shape and style of the house, and to build a replica in Walsingham, where it could serve as a place of pilgrimage to those who loved her, and where they could seek help and healing. ‘Whoever seeks my help there,’ said the Panagia to Richeldis, ‘will not go away empty-handed.’

The house that Richeldis de Faverches built in response to these visions was no ornate or elaborate shrine, but instead a simple wooden building measuring only twenty-four by thirteen feet. It is a testament to the authenticity of her vision that the Theotokos told her to build such a self-effacing structure – well in keeping with Mary’s own personality and humble upbringing – rather than one which might come to the mind of an English noblewoman who’d spent much of her life in luxury. She instructed the woodworkers she’d contracted, to build it on a patch of ground that size she had found by her manor, that had been left dry by the dew. The woodworkers found themselves unable to proceed, and a distraught Richeldis spent the whole of that night in prayer. The morning after, however, she found that the entirety of the work, including the foundations, had been moved. She heard singing from her garden, and saw that the whole structure had been carted off two hundred yards from where her woodworkers had started building it. When she reached it, Richeldis saw what she believed to be angels leaving the construction site, where they had left the house completed.

Lady Richeldis also carved from wood a statue of our Lady as she had appeared to her in her vision – seated, with the Christ Child upon her lap – and set it up inside the house. Lady Richeldis or her family later encased the house inside an edifice of stone in order to protect it from rain and wind. A holy well sprang up beside the house, and pilgrims soon began flocking to the site to offer prayers for the intercession of the Holy Theotokos to cure whatever ailed them. This was one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in England throughout the Middle Ages, up until the Reformation when the shrine was destroyed and the statue of our Lady burned.

The veneration of the Mother of God at Walsingham was restored in the twentieth century. At different points in the early 1900s, Roman Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox clergy all blessed the site where the original shrine stood and offered prayers that the practice of pilgrimage to Walsingham might be restored. The Roman Catholic Diocæse of King’s Lynn restored the Slipper Chapel at Houghton St Giles – originally built as a wayhouse for pilgrims in the fourteenth century – in 1897. The Anglican Vicar of Walsingham in 1922, Alfred Hope Patten, had a replica statue built of Our Lady of Walsingham that stood in the Church of Saint Mary, and placed in a new chapel in 1931. And Russian, Greek and Serbian Orthodox priests all expressed their desire that pilgrimages there would begin anew. Polish Orthodox Archbishop Sawa of Grodno established a chapel for Orthodox pilgrims at the Anglican church there during the Second World War, and after the war, one of the pilgrims to Walsingham was the Serbian Saint Nikolaj Velimirović. Regular Orthodox pilgrimages to Walsingham have been happening in Norfolk since 1961.

In the Orthodox Church, the commemoration of Our Lady of Walsingham is held on the fifteenth of October. It is a feast well worth remembering, as it reminds us of both the very human and very this-worldly life of the Mother of God, and also of her instant and far-reaching kindness even to an unlikely penitent at the bottom of the known world. Most Holy Theotokos, save us!

In ancient times thou didst bestow thy heavenly protection
Upon the island of Britain, most holy Mother of God,
By planting in Walsingham thy holy house,
Which suffered destruction at the hands of hostile men.
But now, having been restored, it is radiant with glory
And in faith thy holy ikon is venerated by thy devoted servants.
We magnify thee and, singing thy praises, we cry out unto thee:
Rejoice, most holy Lady, who didst give birth unto Christ our God.

St Seraphims Chapel, Little Walsingham, Norfolk

Happy birthday, Confucius!

Today is the 2,570^th birthday of China’s great sage and classicist, Confucius 孔丘. A massive celebration is taking place in Confucius’s hometown of Qufu 曲阜.

Anyone even the slightest bit familiar with my earlier work on this blog would be aware that I consider Confucius to be one of my most profound intellectual influences, and he has been since my college days. I was drawn in particular to the peculiar radical communitarianism and familialism of the Master’s political thought, and that unfortunately led me to embrace a certain polemicism against Western (and one or two Chinese) ‘public intellectuals’ who wanted to misrepresent and coöpt Confucius for libertarian, and liberal and neoliberal projects. I felt (and still feel) that these projects are, at a certain basic level, inimical to the entire political dimension of his philosophy. It also led me to seek out and identify with a broad range of figures in Chinese left-populist politics (Wen Yiduo 聞一多, Jimmy Yen 晏陽初, Liang Shuming 梁漱溟, Tao Xingzhi 陶行知, Fei Xiaotong 費孝通, Wang Hui 汪暉, Wen Tiejun 溫鐵軍 and Cui Zhiyuan 崔之元) as well as a range of figures in Chinese traditionalist conservatism (Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒, Hou Fangyu 侯方域, Chen Zilong 陳子龍, Gong Zizhen 龔自珍, Wei Yuan 委員, Lin Zexu 林則徐, Zhang Zhidong 張之洞, Gu Hongming 辜鴻銘 and Jiang Qing 蔣慶) who drew upon the strands in Confucius’s thought that I most strongly identified with.

There is something of a deep irony to this. I am a white Midwestern American with English, Scottish, German, Danish, Czech-Jewish and Yugoslav ancestry (albeit one married to a Chinese national and father of two mixed-race kids). I have never considered myself, rightly speaking, a Ruist. That would involve a certain religious commitment which I felt it improper for me to embrace, not least because I truly do believe that Jesus Christ was God Incarnate who came to save the world from death. And yet I still feel a certain affinity for and protectiveness toward this tradition that is not mine.

Honestly, I also think my intellectual love affaire with Ruism also impacted my Christianity in several important ways. For one thing, I was struck by the central importance of ritual (li 禮) in the thought of Confucius. Ritual figures as one of the cardinal human virtues alongside love, justice, wisdom and trustworthiness. Ritual is one of the two key implements – the other being music – of establishing the legitimacy of a political order. Ritual also plays a key rôle in mediating the self-institution dialectic, and thus is necessary to a well-ordered human life. Confucius’s reverence for ritual was one of the things that drew me to higher Liturgical forms of Christianity: first to High Church Anglo-Catholicism, and then to Orthodox Christianity.

For another thing, my Christianity has clearly been impacted by the familial-religious elements of Ruism. I do mean this in an intellectual sense, of course. Filial piety and familialism should be particularly important to Christians with a political witness, as they form an important bulwark against the pernicious ideologies that seek to supplant them: racialism, kinism and ethno-nationalism. But I also mean this in a personal sense.

The folk custom, blessed by the Ru way, of venerating ancestors has also led me to embark on a hagiographical project / series here, examining in some depth the pre-Schismatic English (and related Frisian, German and Scandinavian) saints. This is not just an intellectual exercise for me; indeed, the icon of Saint Boniface up on my wall is for this very purpose. The faith I practise is not for my benefit only; it is connected to that faith which was embraced by my forefathers, and their prayers aid me. But this hagiographical project is not only personal; it has led me to some surprising conclusions about the nature of my own cultural and temporal belonging and that of the cultural ‘moment’ in general.

At any rate, from another ‘Western Confucian’ – but not that one – many happy returns of the day, Master Zhongni!

Brat: the film that made me a critical Russophile

Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov, Jr) in Brat

Before I proceed much further in this Kazakhstani film series I seem to have touched off (and that dates back to the beginning of this blog, come to think of it), I think it’s probably worth going back and revisiting a cult film that left a fairly deep impact on me personally when I first watched it in college – even though it is very much not a Kazakh film. Having recently watched Igla I was inspired to go back and watch this film – one which I have seen before but not yet commented on. If Igla was a præmonition of Trainspotting, as I hinted in my recent piece, then this film was absolutely a deliberate echo of that film.

To demonstrate how deeply this film impacted me, let me just say this. When I was still an Episcopalian, this was one of two films that made me start to sympathise, in a critical and unromantic way, with modern Russia – the other being Kavkazskii plennik. It doubled as one of the sources, along with Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, that humanised the Russian people for me and made real to me their plight and desperation during the 1990s under Eltsin. The irony in this, is that despite this very real sympathy, it shows Russia at some of its very worst: violence – including sexual violence; drug abuse; alcoholism; escapist licence of all sorts; naked pursuit of lucre; casual racism; gharbzadegi; the ever-porous boundary (but in 1990s Russia particularly so) between biznes and gangsterism. I am talking, of course, about the low-budget crime thriller Brat by Aleksei Balabanov, starring Sergei Bodrov, Jr.

Brat deserves its place as a classic in Russian cinema, and Balabanov his reputation as a genius for having directed it. The film was shot on a shoestring budget; and the only reason it got off the ground at all was because of Balabanov’s relationships with Sergei Bodrov, Jr and the lead singer of Nautilus, Vyacheslav Butusov – whose music features prominently in the film.

The film follows the tight-lipped Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov, Jr), a young demobilised army vet who claims he only ever served at HQ, and whose favourite expression of approval is ‘нормално’. The first time we see him he’s walking onto the set of a Nautilus music video, and gets into a fight with the director and the bouncers which sees him detained and threatened with arrest if he doesn’t shape up and get a job in a week. His disappointed mother, who sees him as a disgrace to the family, tells him to go find a job like his older brother Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov), who lives in Leningrad. Danila, of course, does what he is told by his mother – like a dutiful son would.

Viktor, also known as ‘the Tatar’, is a hitman for a mobster nicknamed Krugly (Sergei Murzin) who talks seemingly only in rhyming clichés. Viktor is tasked with taking out a Chechen rival of Krugly’s, though Krugly dislikes Viktor’s cocky attitude and makes plans to eliminate Viktor at the same time. Viktor, in order to save himself, thrusts the job onto Danila when he arrives. Danila’s subsequent adventures in S. Peterburg see him attempt without success to buy Nautilus’s new album; befriend a homeless German named Hoffman (Yuri Kuznetsov) and a heartlessly-transactional bar-frequenting junkie named Kat (Mariya Zhukova). When carrying out his ‘job’, he is attacked by Krugly’s henchmen and flees in a tram operated by a married woman named Sveta (Svetlana Pismichenko), with whom he starts up a love affaire. Danila is pulled deeper and deeper into the corruptions and temptations of S. Peterburg, yet despite the brutal acts of self-preservation and temptations he is prone to, he somehow manages to hold onto a certain sense of decency and honour – something which he finds lacking in his entire body of acquaintance (except for the homeless German and Sveta). He also manages to protect the weak and outwit his enemies not only by outgunning them but also by jury-rigging together matchbox flash-bombs, pop-bottle silencers and nail-filled shotgun shells from the various dingy apartments he crashes at.

Storywise, the plot is straightforward almost to a fault; the only digressions are the ones that happen within sight or earshot of the protagonist, and these are usually dealing with the music of Nautilus. And cinematographically, Brat is a very claustrophobic film which clearly was making the best of its limited budget (and possibly making a subtle literary commentary on the setting). Most of the action takes place in cramped, narrow apartment hallways with flickering incandescent lighting. Every window and mirror is dingy. Even Krugly’s headquarters is decked out with a dusty ‘80s IBM sitting in the background, and little else. There are lots of long takes, and the film is paced specifically to deglamourise the violence of its protagonists. Despite a lot of characters being shot to death, the blood effects are minimal and usually kept in a blurry background. Balabanov is also clearly a big fan of fade-to-black transitions, with a lot of the punchlines to various story sequences being left implied.

Brat relies a great deal on filmic symbolism to establish its moral universe. Danila, with whom we are supposed to sympathise, is unassuming in appearance, and dresses in an oversized grey turtleneck sweater. The other young people around him – especially Kat – are decked out in the expressions of Western counterculture of the time: black leather, piercings, eye shadow, mohawks. The people who hold power, like Krugly, are also aficionados of Western styles. Krugly wears Versace and drinks Hennessy. ‘American’ music is associated with drugs and cheap loveless transactional sex; it is compared unfavourably to the healthier and more wholesome Russian-inflected music of Nautilus, which provides the backdrop to Danila’s affaire with Sveta.

It’s also definitely a piece which reflects its time, almost more so than its place. In fact, Brat is a mirror that’s held up to an entire generation of young Russian men caught in a struggling time, for whom Danila Bagrov became something of an instant anti-hero. Danila is not by any stretch of the imagination a ‘good man’ – this is something that Sergei Bodrov himself has made clear in his interviews, and is voiced in the film itself by Sveta. But despite his weaknesses he possesses a folksy cleverness masqued as gullibility and an innate sense of justice. It’s unclear by the end of the film as he skips town whether or not he has lost his soul entirely – although the German, the sole uncompromised voice of conscience in the film, claims he has.

Balabanov’s Brat made me a critical Russophile, not only in that it showed the depth of the œconomic woes and spiritual degradation of Russia in the lawless ‘90s, but also hailed back to a rich and vibrant literary world in historical Russia. The motif of Leningrad (and which is referred to explicitly with its præ-Communist name of S. Peterburg in the film) as a corrupting influence, an artificial city of masonry ruled by greed, a malevolent force that parasitically feeds off the strength of its residents and makes them weak. S. Peterburg as a character in her own right – that’s pure Dostoevsky.

In short, I would say that Brat is a film one needs to watch, and not only watch but feel, to get an appreciation of how Russia got here as a country. It’s not all about communism and it’s certainly not all about ‘authoritarianism’. There is a real spiritual and material struggle behind modern Russia, that is too often disregarded or sneered at in Anglophone coverage of current events there. The questions Balabanov poses to his viewers are meant to reflect this struggle and the dimension of Russia’s shared life – along cultural, political and œconomic dimensions – that was simply AWOL in the 1990s. Danila Bagrov is a cultural icon and hero for his time precisely because he is flawed, and precisely because he is fallen – but perhaps not irredeemable.

Holy Hierarch Willibald the Pilgrim of Eichstätt

Saint Willibald of Eichstätt

Today in the Orthodox Church we commemorate Saint Willibald, the venerable Benedictine and bishop of Eichstätt who wrote the Life of our great and beloved Western Church Father Saint Boniface, who was also his maternal uncle. He is also the first known hajji – the first successful pilgrim to the Holy Land – of the English folk.

Willibald was born around 703 in Southampton, the son of Richard of Wessex and his devoted wife Winna, a descendant of Cerdic and the sister of Saint Boniface. He had two siblings who also became saints: a younger sister Wealdburg of Heidenheim, and an elder brother Wynnebald of Heidenheim. As is described in the hagiography of Saint Richard, when he was only three years old, Willibald came down with a deathly illness – a spasm of the limbs and lungs that no natural means could cure. His despairing parents wrapped him in a blanket, and took the toddler Willibald out of the house in the dead of night, laying him at the foot of a rood which lay at a crossroads. Richard and Winna earnestly prayed to God for their son’s life, promising to make him a monk if his life were spared. By God’s grace Willibald did recover, and true to their word, Richard and Winna entrusted their son two years afterward as an oblate to Ecgbald, the abbot at Waltham.

Willibald was a most self-effacing, earnest and diligent student in that monastery, and his thoughts and heart were all bent upon God – still he did not become a monk, but rather Ecgbald allowed him time and space to think on his decision. At last in 721, his father embarked on a pilgrimage to Rome to visit the tombs of the Apostles, and to the Holy Land: and both of his sons, the elder Wynnebald and the younger Willibald, went with him. They set forth across the English Channel and went across France, visiting a number of holy sites along the way. Richard, however, fell ill en route, and was brought to Lucca where he succumbed to his illness and reposed. Richard of Wessex is still venerated as a saint in the Basilica di San Frediano in Italy. It was left to his sons to complete their pilgrimage.

Both sons successfully came to Rome, where they each at last took monastic vows and entered the Benedictine Order. In Rome they stayed and lived in holiness for two years further, and after that the elder brother Wynnebald was obliged to return to England. The younger, Willibald, took a couple of companions and set forth from Rome to the Levant – the blessed places in which our Lord had walked, preached, taught and healed. Willibald and his companions for the most part were fed on a sailor’s diet of hard bread and water, and to this they added the ascetic discipline of sleeping on the bare ground when they made land. They sailed first to Cyprus, and then to Syria. At Homs, Saint Willibald was taken by the Muslim soldiery as a spy, and was locked in fetters and cast into a donjon for several months. At last his Muslim captors began to admire the sweetness of his temperament and the equanimity with which he bore his treatment, and soon they were convinced of the truth of his tale. They spoke a word in the ear of the Khalif, and from him procured Saint Willibald’s release.

With due gratitude Willibald resumed his pilgrimage. He and his companions decided upon a route that followed Our Lord’s earthly course of life, and therefore began his sojourn in an-Nâsira where, as the Anglican rector Rev’d Alban Butler put it: ‘our saint passed there some days with his companions in the continual contemplation of the infinite mercies of God in the great mystery of the incarnation; and the sight of the place in which it was wrought drew from his eyes streams of devout tears during all the time of his stay in that town.’

From there he fared to Bayt Lahm and then into Ægypt, following the way by which the infant Christ fled from Herod and meditating upon our young Lord’s sufferings as a stranger there. Returning to Bayt Lahm, he ventured from there to Qana, to Kafr Nâhûm and to al-Quds. He spent a great deal of time in al-Quds meditating upon the wonders and teachings of our Lord in that city prior to His Crucifixion, in memory of which he went to Golgotha, and in memory of Whose Ascension he stayed at Jabal al-Zaytûn. Saint Willibald spent much time among the Palestinian monasteries and lavras and eremitical cells, the better to admire, study and imitate the holy ways of life he saw the Orthodox holy men following. Again in the words of Rev’d Butler: ‘ The tender and lively sentiments of devotion with which his fervent contemplation on the holy mysteries of our redemption inspired him at the sight of all those sacred places, filled his devout soul with heavenly consolations, and made on it strong and lasting impressions.’

He had sojourned seven years in the Holy Land; as he was preparing to leave from ‘Akkâ, however, his weak childhood constitution made itself felt as he again fell ill – though through patience and prayer and the grace of God he was able to recover. However, Saint Willibald and his companions arrived safe in Italy at their journey’s end in 728.

Willibald took up residence at the Abbazia di Montecassino (the very same abbey founded by Saint Benedict of Nursia), where he followed the way of life that he had observed and tried to imitate in Palestine; the abbey benefitted greatly from his hard work and humble example. The monks of Montecassino appointed him sacristan first; then dean with responsibility over ten monks; and afterwards the trusted position of abbey porter, in which office he spent eight years. In 738, Saint Boniface made his third journey to Rome to see Pope Gregory III. Upon learning that his nephew was living as a monk in Rome, he asked Gregory III to send Willibald with him to assist in his missionary efforts among the Germans. Pope Gregory III sent for Willibald and was instantly impressed with the monk, taking particular delight in hearing of his travels and his life in Rome. (Gregory himself was a Syrian by origin.) At the end of their interview, Gregory acquainted Willibald with his uncle’s request for his help in converting the German folk. Willibald wanted to tarry to inform his abbot of his mission, but Pope Gregory assured him that his word alone would suffice, and sent Willibald off with his blessing to join his uncle.

At this point, Saint Boniface was in Thüringen, and it was there that Willibald joined him. He assisted his uncle in converting (or re-converting) the populace, correcting heresies among the people, and bringing monastic communities into Germany from England and Italy. Saint Boniface’s efforts met with great success, which his nephew assuredly helped to bring about. In 746, in Salzburg, Saint Boniface made his nephew bishop of Eichstätt, somewhat against his will. However, his patience, meekness, humility and charity all made him a good match for the office. In Heidenheim, the new bishop established a double Benedictine house, over which he placed as abbot his elder brother Wynnebald. He was in particular an advocate of the Benedictine Rule as he had experienced it at Montecassino – but was also a mild, caring and fatherly archpastor to the laymen of his flock. He wandered the last forty-five years of his life, not on pilgrimage for himself, but to care for the image of Christ among the Germans under his care. He paid great attention to even the least of these, and paid little attention his own comfort, for he kept the fasts and prayer cycles of the church with great regularity and intensity. Even so, he lived to the great old age of eighty-seven. He reposed in the Lord in Eichstätt in 790.

He was buried in Eichstätt, and his tomb was the site of a number of wondrous healings. He was venerated locally almost at once as a saint, and this was recognised officially by Rome in 938. The cathedral at Eichstätt was completed in 1269, and Willibald’s relics were translated by Bishop Hildebrand into a reliquary urn in the cathedral.

Holy Hierarch Willibald, faithful monk and pilgrim and gentle archpastor of the German people, we beseech you pray to Christ our God to save our souls!

Holy Hierarch Oda of Canterbury

Saint Oda the Good

In the Orthodox Church today we commemorate another holy Archbishop of Canterbury, Auði or Oda ‘the Good’ or, in Old English, ‘Oda se Góda’. Sadly, the rhyming cognomen – which was coined by Saint Dúnstán according to the tradition – hasn’t carried down to modern times. Archbishop Saint Oda was also known by the betimes-deserved epithet ‘the Severe’.

He was born around the year 870, which means his father was all but certainly part of the Great Heathen Here led by Ívarr the Boneless and Ubba; Oda was born in East Anglia quite shortly after their landing. In what seems to have been an act of teenage rebellion, the young Oda was drawn to Christianity and spent a good deal of time in church – much to the consternation of his heathen father, who tried to hinder him from going, and even disowned him when he continued to visit the church. Oda’s longing for the Christian life was, however, wholly in earnest, and he ended up being baptised and adopted into the household of the Christian landowner Æþelhelm (who may have been a mother’s-side kinsman) who encouraged young Oda in his Churchly career. After Oda was ordained to the priesthood, he accompanied Æþelhelm on a pilgrimage to Rome, on which his adoptive father fell ill. Oda was able to cure Æþelhelm’s illness with a cup of wine which he had blessed.

The early part of Oda’s tenure as a bishop is somewhat unclear. According to William of Malmesbury he was consecrated as Bishop of Wilton in 920 (or 923); the slightly more proximate (and, according to the Catholic Encyclopædia, plausible) historian Éadmær of Canterbury has it that he was Bishop of Sherborne in 925. What is clear, though, is that he was certainly Bishop of Ramsbury by 927. He accompanied the court of Æþelstán King, and – according to one tale – was present at the Battle of Brunanburh which saw Æþelstán and the English nation pitted against an invading alliance of Vikings, Scots and Irishmen from the kingdoms of Dublin, Scotland and Alt Clut. During the battle, Æþelstán’s sword fell from its scabbard and was lost. By a wonder of God, Oda found the sword in his own hand, which he gave to the king, thus sparing him from a grim fate. This tale may or may not be pious exaggeration, but what is fact and even more significant, is that the half-Danish Oda managed to secure a truce between the Viking prince Óleifr Gúðriðarson of Dublin – who had fought against the English at Brunanburh – and Æþelstán’s half-brother and successor Éadmund Æþeling.

Éadmund Æþeling wished to promote Saint Oda to the Archbishopric of Canterbury after the repose of Archbishop Wulfhelm in 941, but Oda refused several times. He pointed out that the last Archbishops of Canterbury had all been monks, and he was not. But as Éadmund King insisted, Oda went to be tonsured a Benedictine at Abbaye Fleury and then meekly accepted the appointment. (This is the same Abbey to which he recommended his dear nephew Saint Osweald of Worcester to study and to take the Benedictine cowl.) Among the very first things that Saint Oda did upon his appointment was to order much-needed repairs to Canterbury Cathedral, and historical records relate that for three years afterward there were no storms or wind within the cathedral pale.

Oda earned his nickname ‘the Severe’, not because he was particularly tyrannical as an archbishop or as a monk, but instead because he used his archepiscopal amvon to insist firmly to the nobles that they abide to a strict rule of justice and order. To this end in particular, he assisted Éadmund in codifying a law-book for his kingdom. Oda insisted that England’s wealthy and high-born abide in regular marriages rather than keeping mistresses, uphold the cause of the powerless in courts of law, fast, give alms and pay tithes to the church. He also wrote an introduction to the Vita of the saintly (but controversial in his own lifetime) Northumbrian bishop of York, Wilfrið. He remained on good terms with the subsequent king Éadred, and struck up a strong and lasting friendship with Éadred’s trusted advisor Saint Dúnstán, who was then Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey. During Éadred’s reign, Oda – though a Benedictine himself only in a technical sense – became firmly attached to and a steadfast supporter of the order’s reform movement in England headed by Saint Dúnstán and sponsored by Éadred. It was known that Oda favoured Dúnstán to succeed him as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Oda was responsible for the coronation of the generous but ill-fated Éadwig Eallfæger, who spent the day of his feast dallying with his unfortunately-consanguine sweetheart Ælfgifu and her mother. Oda was a firm and implacable foe of this particular match: not only because of the incident at the coronation feast, but because Ælfgifu and Éadwig were second cousins – a match forbidden under the Church canons. He ultimately succeeded in having the marriage annulled, though Éadwig would die in murky circumstances some short while later.

Oda also crowned Éadwig’s successor Éadgár ‘the Frithsome’, whose rule in England was much more stable. However, Oda himself would not live much longer. Sensing his death nearing, he sent for his nephew Saint Osweald, but the younger churchman didn’t make it in time. Archbishop Oda reposed in the Lord and gained the heavenly kingdom on the second of June, 959.

Oda was succeeded, sadly, not at once by Dúnstán but instead by Ælfsige, who died of illness en route to Rome on a pass through the Alps. Byrhthelm was then sent, but he too died early – and Dúnstán then succeeded to the archbishopric. Dúnstán had a particular devotion to Saint Oda, and would never pass by his tomb without stopping first to pray there. Oda’s tomb became known for the wonders and healings wrought there. Holy Father Oda, saintly archbishop, upholder of God’s justice and rectifier of monasteries, pray to Christ our God for our salvation!

Our father among the saints Augustine of Canterbury

Saint Augustine of Canterbury

Tomorrow in the Orthodox Church, we venerate the gentle, humble academic historian whose writing was actually the most successful in leading me into the Church – I mean, of course, the Venerable Bede. Given that I have spent much of the last seven months with Bede once more in my project of the hagiographical treatments of various pre-Schismatic British, Welsh, Irish and Lowlander saints, it would seem a mark of ingratitude if I passed over his feast day in silence. Bede was a remarkably important figure in English letters and, even if one may see a certain ideological bent to his writing, was well ahead of his time in his proto-Rankean active pursuit and use of multiple (and particularly primary) source materials and his critical eye on past historical events. More than that, though, he was the ‘real deal’ in terms of holiness. He didn’t blow his own trumpet. Stern with himself and mild with others, a man who genuinely valued peace and contemplation, his accounts of the lives of past saints often reflect the virtues he successfully cultivated in his own life. Holy Bede, sweet and gentle teacher of the English folk, we sinners entreat your prayers to Christ for our salvation!

His feast day meetly follows upon that of a most distinguished Italian Benedictine : Augustine, the father of Bede’s order in Britain who, with justice, may be considered the singular and most important father of English Christianity. Saint Augustine’s early life is relatively unknown. We know little of his youth or upbringing except that he was a resident of Rome and thus probably Roman himself, and that he entered the monastic life in the Abbey of Saint Andrew (today the Chiesa di San Gregorio Magno al Celio) which had been established by the holy Pope Gregory Dialogos out of his own inheritance.

He was probably quite close to Pope Gregory, being trusted enough to be made prior of Saint Andrew’s. In 596, after Pope Gregory had formed the conviction to embark on the commission to the heathen Angles and Saxons and Jutes who had settled in Britain, Augustine was chief among the monks selected to carry out this mission. The reputation of the Teutonic peoples of the north was well-established: it was known to the monks that the people of England were rough in their manners, fell and baneful in their hearts. Moreover, the monks were worried for their safety in crossing the waters of the English Channel. By consensus, the monks of the Gregorian mission sent Augustine back to Rome to deliver to Pope Gregory their request to be recalled from the mission. The letter that Pope Gregory sent back to them by Augustine, as recounted by Holy Bede, was to this effect:

GREGORY, Servant of the servants of God, to the servants of God. My very dear sons, it is better never to undertake any high enterprise than to abandon it when once begun. So with the help of God you must carry out this holy task which you have begun. Be constant and zealous in carrying out this enterprise which, under God’s guidance, you have undertaken: and be assured that the greater the labour, the greater will be the glory of your æternal reward. When Augustine your leader returns, whom We have appointed your abbot, obey him humbly in all things, remembering that whatever he directs you to do will always be to the good of your souls. May Almighty God protect you with His grace, and grant me to see the result of your labours in our heavenly home. And although my office prevents me from working at your side, yet because I long to do so, I hope to share in your joyful reward. God keep you safe, my dearest sons.

Dated the twenty-third of July, in the fourteenth year of the reign of our most devout lord Maurice Tiberius Augustus, and the thirteenth year after the Consulship of our said Lord. The fourteenth interdiction.

Augustine having delivered this letter to his brother-monks, they continued heartened on their journey to English shores. (Pope Gregory also managed to secure along their way the assistance and hospitality of the Archbishop Ætherius of Arles for his monks’ benefit.) Once there, Augustine and his fellow monks from Rome had their famous meeting in the open at Thanet with Æþelberht King and his retinue. (Noteworthy is that Bede recounts Augustine’s procession in Thanet ‘carrying a silver cross as their standard, and the likeness of our Lord and Saviour painted on a board’!) , They also received much-needed aid from Æþelberht’s devoted wife Saint Berhte, who gifted them provisions, as well as the old Roman chapel she and her bishop Léodheard had for their personal use.

Saint Augustine remained in contact with Pope Gregory after this successful foray into Kent. He apparently wrote the Pope with a long list of questions about church administration and pastoral ethics, with particular attention to questions of how the church should address problems of cleanliness, marriage and sexual relations. Pope Gregory’s answers are a very model of pastoral understanding and what we Orthodox types nowadays somewhat pretentiously call ‘οἰκονομία’, or œconomy. He advises the English mission to follow the Book of Acts and share all property in common, but also makes provision for married clerics and allows Saint Augustine to appoint his own bishops. He advises Saint Augustine to select from the various different Liturgical settings (Roman, Gallic and British) based on what resonates with the English faithful; he gives Augustine authority over bishops in Britain, but emphatically not in Gaul. He provides a broad latitude for Saint Augustine to punish church-robbers but with a clear preference for mercy and charity for those genuinely in need. He allows for double in-law marriage and (more reluctantly, as Roman law permitted it) first-cousin marriage, but absolutely forbids other forms of incest. He gave similar guidance on other matters of sexual ethics and cleanliness – and did not forbid women to come to the chalice during their periods or after childbirth, or forbid baptism to expecting mothers.

Pope Gregory continued to take a keen and personal interest in the success of his mission to the English. He sent Saint Augustine an omophor rather than having him come to Rome to get it; and he also sent an additional four monastic clerics to aid Augustine in his labours: Mellitus, Paulinus, Justus and Rufinianus. Upon hearing that Saint Augustine was working wonders among his English flock, Gregory at once wrote him a stern letter warning him not to let it go to his head. Saint Augustine also established the Priory of Christ Church (now part of Canterbury Cathedral) and the Abbey of Saints Peter and Paul (later Saint Augustine’s Abbey) which was later consecrated by Saint Laurence. The first abbot of this Benedictine community, a holy man named Peter, was caught at sea and drowned off Ambleteuse, where he was unceremoniously buried by the locals. After a light appeared over his grave, however, the men of Ambleteuse took up his poor remains and translated them to the church at Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he now rests.

Saint Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury

Saint Augustine’s efforts at reconciling the English with their British (i.e. Welsh) neighbours were considerably less successful. He called a meeting at a place Bede calls ‘Augustine’s Oak’ on the marches of Hwicce, which nowadays probably lies somewhere in the vicinity of Gloucester. Among the issues discussed were the Easter dating issue; the laxity of Welsh missionary efforts; and possibly also church administration. Saint Augustine does not appear to have been very politick in his arguments, because the Welsh bishops refused to yield on any point. In frustration, Saint Augustine asked the British to bring forth a sick man so that a wonder from God might change their mind; they brought out a blind man whose eyes Saint Augustine promptly healed. The Welsh bishops then acknowledged Saint Augustine’s holiness but would not concede in any particular to his demands until they could confer with their own people.

A second synod was thereafter called – the infamous Synod of Urbs Legionis [Chester] which, from a standpoint of church unity, was an even bigger débâcle than the first meeting had been. Alas that Saint Augustine had not heeded better his letter from Pope Gregory cautioning against pride! The Welsh bishops and monks who met with Saint Augustine were deeply offended when the bishop did not do them the common brotherly courtesy of rising to greet them on their arrival. Saint Augustine thereafter pleaded with them on the issues of the Easter date and proselytising the English, but the damage to his own cause had already been done. The synod ended acrimoniously, with Saint Augustine shouting threats at the Welsh that the heathen English would attack and destroy them for their stubborn arrogance. (It so happened a good while afterward, that the heathen king of Northumbria Æþelfrið destroyed the Welsh armies at Chester and slaughtered nearly twelve hundred of the monks of Bangor.)

This unfortunate episode left a long divide between the British Christians who kept to their own rite and calendar, and the English Christians who held to the Roman rule. However, Saint Augustine did many other things to establish Christianity among the English people. He helped Æþelberht King draught the first written code of laws for the English folk, and also established a school to promote literacy. As among the last acts of his earthly life, Holy Father Augustine consecrated Mellitus and Justus as bishops to rule in his stead – Mellitus in London, and Justus in Rochester. When Saint Augustine blessedly reposed in the Lord on the twenty-sixth of May, 604, he was laid to rest at the threshold of the new and yet-incomplete abbey he had commissioned; after the abbey was properly consecrated, his relics were translated inside and interred under the north porch in a seat of honour. Holy Father Augustine, wonderworker and first-called among the apostles to the English, we ask your prayers to our Lord Christ that our souls may be saved!

Sent forth by thy master the great Gregory,
Thou hast marched with the holy Cross and the image of the Saviour,
Baptising the multitude with the clear waters of faith into the spiritual flock of Christ.
As thou hast enlightened and hallowed the English land,
Sowing the seed of heaven in the earth of Kent,
So do thou now enlighten and hallow us anew,
O thou boast of Canterbury, holy archpastor Augustine!