‘Humble Month’?

I have seen some Orthodox Christians recently begin talking about the possibility of making June ‘Humility Month’ or ‘Humble Month’. The idea is that, as the secular culture around us is celebrating gay pride (including the advocates of secular culture from the sadly predictable usual quarters), we should seek to exalt instead the virtue of humility as an antidote to pride of all kinds. Speaking as an Orthodox Christian layman, I’m here to say that ‘Humble Month’ is a bad idea… but not for the reasons you might think.

Two days from now, in the Orthodox Church, we will celebrate the feast of the fullness of the revelation of the Holy Spirit in history. We will celebrate the Last and Great Day, the dawning of the great fire, the holy fire which descended upon the heads of the Apostles as they gathered together ‘in one place’, in the Cenacle at Jerusalem. It is the last of the great feasts in the Church, and it marks the historical beginning of the Church in the world.

Let us be absolutely clear about the meaning of this feast. It is a day upon which the Gospel of salvation went forth by grace into the hearing of all peoples. A new word, indeed the Word of Truth, was proclaimed even in the tongues of the most despised barbarians.

The Book of Acts mentions several nations which heard this word in their own native language: Parthians and Medes (speakers of Iranian languages); Elamites (speakers of an extinct language isolate); Mesopotamians (speakers of Aramaic, with Akkadian still in liturgical use); Judæa (Aramaic and Hebrew); Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia Minor (dialects of Greek); Phrygia (Phrygian); Pamphylia (Greek); Egypt (Coptic); Libya (Tamahaq, Greek and Latin); Rome (Latin); Crete (Greek); and Arabia (Arabic). These languages were all explicitly sanctified in Scripture by the Holy Spirit. And even those which were not explicitly sanctified here were blessed in the Great Commission. (As a result, it makes better sense, following the logic of Pentecost, for Orthodox Christians to celebrate June as Indigenous History Month the way they do in Canada. The languages of those who were here first are similarly blessed. But I digress.)

The fire that descended upon the Apostles at Pentecost was not a destroying fire. It was not the fire that consumes. It was the same as the fire that Moses beheld in the Burning Bush—a fire which illumines, is the essence of creativity. This is the fire of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost calls us to a creative and self-giving relationship to the world. What better evidence could there be of this, than of the Word being preached in the tongues of all the nations present in Jerusalem? It ought to go without saying, though, that Pentecost also calls us to be humble. As Saint John of Kronstadt said: ‘The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, who fills the whole universe, passes through all believing, meek, humble, good, and simple human souls, dwelling in them, vivifying and strengthening them.’ Pride has no place at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit finds no place to dwell in those who are filled up with themselves, their own ‘me’-ness.

So ‘Humility Month’ gets at least this one thing—and it is quite an important thing—right. Humility before the Holy Spirit is very much needful; without it, we are nothing. On the other hand, though, the whole ‘Humility Month’ business strikes me as a purely reactive posture. It takes as primary, not the witness of the Orthodox Calendar and the Liturgical cycle ordained by the power of the Holy Spirit… but instead the imitative liturgics of the surrounding secular culture. It bases its witness not on Pentecost, but on an evil or a privation to be opposed. This is, to put it bluntly, almost an anti-Pentecost approach.

If such reaction is at times a deep and understandable temptation in an age where identity politics and ‘woke’-ism seem to have gone completely amok, we should nonetheless understand the impulse as temptation, as a passion in the Patristic sense. Orthodox Christians should certainly not strive to mimic the culture in opposition—in other words, to posture as a set-theoretical not-X to the culture’s X. There is so much that is truly good, that is original in the Orthodox culture—what I should say is, the Orthodox cultures that were sanctified at Pentecost, be they Greek, Arabic, African, Persian, Syriac, Latin, or any of the cultures that were baptised afterward—that there should be no need for us to make a commemorative ‘Month’ that is simply the stated opposite of what a weak, shallow and exhausted consumerist culture finds ‘good’.

Let us be truly humble, then, if that is our aim. Let us proclaim the Pentecost in whatever language we can find to hand—surely that language will by no means exhaust the Holy Spirit’s glory. Let us be creative and self-giving as the Apostles were then. Let us make more than a Month of it, for the Pentecost is the fiftieth day, the fullness of time in the new creation. Let us be proclaimers of Christ Risen and Ascended. Let us be seekers of the Father’s abundant mercies. Let us be witnesses of the Holy Spirit’s work in the world.

Five points on the Ukraine conflict

1. The Russian assault on the Ukraine is morally wrong, full stop. Ukrainians do not in the least deserve what Russia is doing to them as we speak. Indeed, they have not deserved what has been done to them by multiple actors since (and including) the ouster of Yanukovych in 2014. I stand firmly with Metropolitan Onufriy of Kiev, and support and endorse his call upon President Vladimir Putin for an immediate cessation of violence.


2. This war was entirely preventable from multiple sides. It is an expression of a long-standing failure of diplomacy between NATO countries and Russia, going back at least to 2008, possibly even to 2004. Given what happened to Yugoslavia five years prior to that, Russian distrust of NATO is entirely legitimate and warranted.


3. It is also an expression of long-standing failure of peace-keeping in afflicted areas like the Donetsk Basin. The people in the Donetsk Basin have been suffering mortar attacks and wanton destruction of their schools, hospitals and homes for the past eight years, and the culprits of this waste of human life and limb have been overwhelmingly the Ukrainian Army.


4. The long ignorance of people for the humanitarian suffering in Donbass, over the past eight years, is intolerable. The people who are only now discovering that being mortared non-stop by a hostile army from across a line of control is bad, have some deep soul-searching to do.


5. Reiterate point 4, a fortiori, for Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Remember the commandment: Thou shalt give equal worth to tragedies that occur in non-English speaking countries, as to those that occur in English speaking countries.

May peace and justice prevail. May God have mercy upon the Ukraine. May God have mercy upon the Donbass. May God have mercy upon Russia. And may God have mercy upon us all.

Holy Confessors Eugenios and Makarios of Antioch

Saints Eugenios and Makarios of Antioch

The nineteenth of February in the Orthodox Church is the feast-day of the holy Antiochian confessors Eugenios and Makarios of Antioch. Saints Eugenios and Makarios were Christian priests who were tortured and exiled for their faith under the reign of Emperor Julian the Apostate of Rome.

By the year 361, Julian had begun using a threefold strategy to persecute Christians: legal disenfranchisement of Christians; active institutional support and structuring of the old Græco-Roman religion; and the promulgation of anti-Christian apologetics. This was after a brief period of religious liberalism that actually had the effect of fomenting and inflaming doctrinal conflicts within Christendom. Also, as mentioned before, during his wars with Persia Julian used Antioch and its environs as something of a ‘proving ground’ for his anti-Christian politics.

Saints Eugenios [Gk. Ευγένιος, Ar. ’Îjîn إيجين] and Makarios [Gk. Μακάριος, Ar. Maqâr مقار] were among the first victims of these policies. As Christian priests, they were arrested and brought before Julian in 361, and they were instructed to sacrifice incense to the idols of the Græco-Roman gods. However, Eugenios and Makarios steadfastly refused to renounce Christ or to acknowledge the old gods, and they further reprimanded the Emperor for his having abandoned the Christian faith of his youth in order to worship lifeless idols. Julian, incensed, gave the order for the two confessors of Christ to be tortured.

Eugenios and Makarios were bound fast with thin leather straps and hung upside down over a burning heap of dung. After having been subjected to this torture for many hours, they were taken down and made to lie naked on a red-hot cast-iron grate. Eugenios and Makarios did not flinch from these tortures, but keeping their gaze on Heaven were strengthened in soul. They did not complain or beg for mercy, but continued to rebuke the Roman Emperor for his betrayal of the Christians.

At this point Julian did not make martyrs of the two confessors, but instead pronounced upon them the doom of banishment and exile under guard, to the province of Mauretania Tingitana – in what is now Morocco. The two confessors of Christ rejoiced at having been found worthy to be exiled for Christ, and went on their way singing from the Psalter: ‘Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the LORD’. When they came into Mauretania, they began at once to preach to the Berbers who lived in that area.

The Berbers who lived in the mountains warned Saints Eugenios and Makarios that a horrible dragon lived in a cave nearby, which destroyed with fire and consumed the wealth of the people that lived in the region. Eugenios and Makarios asked their informants where they might find this cave, and they were told. They went thither with their priestly garments and their rags underneath as their armour, and with prayer as their weapon. They knelt on their knees at the mouth of the dragon’s cave and began to pray, when of a sudden the dragon swooped out of his cave into the air. A bolt of lightning from heaven drawn by their prayers struck the dragon, which fell out of the sky and burnt to foul-smelling ashes. As is common in hagiographies with such draconic appearances, the tale is a type indicating the saints’ victory over pagan gods and cult centres, and it is so here as well, for the hagiographer informs us that the pagans began to trust in Christ after the word of the saints’ triumph over the dragon spread.

Eugenios and Makarios went into the dragon’s cave to live as hermits, struggling against the passions with prayer and fasting. For thirty days they took no food and drank no drink, not even water, and for all that time they prayed continuously. At the end of their thirty days of total fasting, they heard a voice issue from heaven, bidding the servants of the true God and Lord Jesus Christ to go to the rock nearest them. As they faced the rock and touched it, a light began to pour forth from it, and the rock split in two. From the rock there gushed a holy spring of purest water, from which they drank and were sated in body and in spirit. They spent eight days further in the cave before they reposed together, and the Lord received their souls into the kingdom. Holy confessors, priests Eugenios and Makarios, who did spiritual battle with the idols both west and east, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

A radical Old English faith for an axiomodern age

Glastonbury Abbey

Following up on my slightly-renovated Saint Harold post, I feel like I need to append at least a partial justification for this hagiographical project that I kind of accidentally embarked on with a mini-bio of Saint Willibrord of Frisia.

Cataloguing and writing hagiographies for the pre-Schismatic saints of England, Frisia and northern Germany has taken me to some places I didn’t really expect to go. It has, to some degree, helped me sort out the feeling that I was merely going in circles both spiritually and intellectually – not so much by straightening me out and giving me a direction, as much as by letting me understand that going in such circles may not be such a bad thing to do. It’s also helping me sort through my Jennifer complex, this Œdipal hang-up I have over things British and old. That psycho-sexual feedback loop I’ve been caught in since my pre-teens still exercises quite a bit of power over me, but at least now I have a better sense of the shape of it. To be sure, there was a bit of navel-gazing about the whole thing. My ancestry being majority-English with infusions from Wales, southwestern Germany and Denmark, there was the danger of this turning into something of an ethnophyletist ‘vanity project’. I hope that was not the case.

This hagiographical project also, intriguingly, helped me sort out some of my hash of political convictions. It retrieved for me certain præmonitions of a democratic form of socialism ensconced within the Benedictine Rule. Though that, I could merely have gotten by way of Liz Bruenig and Chapo Trap House. The early Old English saints were rebelling, along with Saint Benedict, against an inhumane œconomic order that walled off the individual patrimonies of propertied men and proclaimed their lordship over the earth. Even more deeply than that: Benedict called for the renunciation of the individual will, particularly that will which strove to dominate others.

The socialism – I refuse to use scare quotes here; that’s what the Benedictine life was – of these early English and German saints, has some intriguing and tantalising overlaps and continuities with later developments. For example: the spirituality of Dr Lancelot Andrewes; the Platonic feminist anti-capitalism of Mary Astell; the liturgically-minded social-reformist Oxford Movement and the radical side of High Church Anglo-Catholicism in general; the religious æstheticism of John Ruskin and William Morris; the œconomic scholarship of Richard Tawney.

These unexpected eddies, visible even in the hagiographic language of the English saints, also revealed the profound receptivity of Old England to the Greek-speaking East. England, which was learning humility even in the tutelage of what Leont’ev would doubtless call its ‘primitive simplicity’, was not merely the passive pupil of Rome and Ireland. She was radically open to spiritual germination from the Eastern Christian world: from Greece (as shown in the scholarship of Saint Aldhelm and Saint Bede), from Palestine (as seen in the life of Saint Willibald), from Syria (in the person of Saint Theodore), from Ægypt (in the spirituality of Saint Gúðlác) and from Africa (in the person of Saint Hadrian). If there’s any heartening message for new, Western converts to the Orthodox faith: this is it. The Old English were every bit as foreign to that faith as we are today. Humility – personal humility and civilisational humility – is what is required of us. That civilisational humility, which came so naturally to the English of that five-hundred-year window of political independence, got very badly lost with the Hundred Years’ War and the advent of nationalism.

And then I started seeing in the context of this late-antique world these saints lived in, certain spiritual and physical challenges that we are likely to be facing again very soon, as we stand on the precipice of another climate crisis. The Old English saints lived on the very margins, at the figurative bottom of the known world. They were subject to poverty, hunger, desperation, violence which could come from anywhere. The Old English saints were called to great ascetic feats, not out of some feigned bourgeois piety, but out of love for their neighbours – deep, abiding, sincere. They suffered as their neighbours suffered. These reflections brought me back around, full circle, through the scholarly work of Dr Aleksandr Shchipkov to the wisdom of the Chinese new left.

Old English and Old Celtic spirituality offers us a great deal to learn from, if we would but listen. I’m not yet quite done with this series: the last English saint I’ll be treating here will likely come toward the end of December. But the insights – spiritual, cultural, political, even œcological – that these saints have to offer will, I am positive, take a great deal longer to unpack.

~~~

THE TWENTY-SIX NATIONAL SAINTS OF OLD ENGLAND

• Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne (31 Aug)
• Saint Alban of Britain (22 Jun)
• Saint Augustine of Canterbury (26 May)
• Saint Ælfhéah of Canterbury (19 Apr)
• Saint Æþelþrýð of Ely (23 Jun)
• Saint Æþelwold of Winchester (1 Aug)
• Saint Bede the Venerable (26 May)
• Saint Biscop of Wearmouth (12 Jan)
• Saint Boniface of Crediton (5 Jun)
• Saint Botwulf of Iken (17 Jun)
• Saint Ceadda of Lichfield (2 Mar)
• Saint Cuðberht of Lindisfarne (20 Mar)
• Saint Dúnstán of Canterbury (19 May)
• Saint Éadgýð of Wilton (16 Sep)
• Saint Éadmund of East Anglia (20 Nov)
• Saint Éadweard of England (18 Mar)
• Saint Éadwine of Northumbria (12 Oct)
• Saint Gúðlác of Crowland (11 Apr)
• Saint Hild of Whitby (17 Nov)
• Saint John of Beverley (7 May)
• Saint Óswald of Northumbria (5 Aug)
• Saint Ósweald of York (28 Feb)
• Saint Paulinus of York (10 Oct)
• Saint Swíþhún of Winchester (15 Jul)
• Saint Theodore of Tarsus (19 Sep)
• Saint Wilfrið of York (12 Oct)

Holy Hierarch Deusdedit, Archbishop of Canterbury

Peterborough Cathedral

Today in the Orthodox Church we celebrate the sixth Archbishop of Canterbury, the first native-born Englishman to hold that see. First, a note on naming. In the world Friþwine, this Archbishop of Canterbury was given a Greek name that is transcribed into Latin in various ways. In the local English sources, it is always, including by Saint Bede (who should have known better), written Deusdedit. But the name Deusdedit (‘God has given’) is an inaccurate Latinisation of the Greek name Theódotos [Θεόδοτος] (‘given by God’), which is more appositely rendered in Latin as Deodatus or Adeodatus, the ‘simple, devout, wise and shrewd’ pre-Schismatic saintly Pope of Rome for whom the English Deusdedit was likely named! In fact, the English Deusdedit is known precisely by this latter name shared with his patronal Pope (Adeodato, Adeodat) in Southern European Romance countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Romania. I use the name Deusdedit in this blog post both to avoid confusion for my primarily English-language audience as well as out of respect for the primary sources, but I do want to take the opportunity to register with firm resolution that I find this Latinisation inept and improper. Saint Iþamar, I wag my scholarly finger at you – naughty, naughty!

This is something of an opposite case from that of his predecessor Saint Mellitus, where a certain degree of etymological overcorrection led his name to be sometimes incorrectly transcribed in our iconography as Meletios [Μελέτιος] despite the two names having completely different origins. See, Greeks can get it wrong, too.

Ahem. As I was saying…

Friþwine was a South Saxon monk, probably of the first generation of insular Saxons raised by Christian eldern since the conversion of the saintly Æþelberht King by Saint Augustine of Canterbury. He was consecrated as bishop by the aforementioned Saint Iþamar of Rochester, and subsequently elevated to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the first native-born Englishman to occupy that office: his saintly predecessors –Augustine, Laurence, Mellitus, Justus and Honorius – had all been Romans of Italy, OG members of the Gregorian mission to the English.

Friþwine, who was given the name of Deusdedit at his consecration, had the misfortune – or perhaps good fortune, depending on whom you ask – of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury at a time when the power and prestige of the office was at a low ebb. There were few new consecrations of bishops under his rule – the one notable exception being the West Saxon Damian, Iþamar’s successor as Bishop of Rochester. However, Deusdedit did consecrate several new churches and monasteries during his tenure, such as Medehamstede Abbey – which is now the notable Peterborough Cathedral.

Deusdedit was Archbishop of Canterbury for, again according to Bede, nine years, four months and two days. Little else is known of him for certain, except that he seems to have lived the meek, humble and blameless life expected of a monastic, and one fit for sainthood. After an ominous solar eclipse appeared in May of 664, southern England was wracked by an episode of bubonic plague, which afflicted Saint Deusdedit. The Synod of Whitby took place during this year, though the Archbishop was too ill to attend in person.

Deusdedit reposed in the Lord on the fourteenth of July, 664, and one of his priests – a ‘good man well-fitted to be a bishop’ named Wigheard – was sent to Rome to attain the Pope’s blessing to succeed him. Sadly, Wigheard too succumbed to the plague during an outbreak in Rome; and a Greek of Asia Minor, Saint Theodore of Tarsus, was chosen instead on the recommendation of the African monk Saint Hadrian by Pope Saint Vitalian of Rome to succeed Saint Deusdedit in Canterbury. Holy Father Deusdedit, meek and loving archpastor of the Kentish folk, we ask you entreat Christ God to save our souls!

Holy Thursday – Apostle and Evangelist Mark

Holy, glorious and all-laudable Apostle and Evangelist Mark

Yesterday we commemorated Great and Holy Wednesday and the feast of Saint Mellitus of Canterbury. It seems particularly fitting that the feasts of Saint Mellitus and Saint Mark should fall so close together; and even more fitting that the feast of Saint Mark this year falls on the remembrance of the Last Supper, the night in which our Lord Jesus Christ was betrayed.

Saint Mark, a Cyrenian Second Temple Jew and a nephew of the Cypriot-Jewish Saint Yousef bar-Nehmâ of the Seventy, lived with his mother Miryam in Jerusalem when Our Lord called him out to become His disciple. A junior of Saint Peter, at the time of Christ’s death, Mark was still a very young man (νεανίσκος). On the very first Great and Holy Thursday, the night in which Christ broke bread with His disciples for the Passover and was betrayed at Gethsemane by Judas, the Roman soldiery lay hold of Mark, who was wearing a linen cloth. The soldiers tore the cloth off of his body and Mark, naked, ran away from them.

Saint Mark was very close to Apostle Peter as well as to his kinsman Saint Yousef bar-Nehmâ mentioned above. After the Ascension of Our Lord, Mark worked closely with both of them to spread the news of Christ’s Resurrection. After the conversion of Apostle Paul, Mark was one of the Christians he met with in Antioch, and the two of them also worked closely together thereafter. He returned to his kinsmen’s home in Cyprus where he traversed the island with his two companions from east to west, preaching the Gospel from the Jewish synagogues. Mark was present when Saint Paul temporarily blinded the sorcerer (mágos) and false prophet Elymas bar-Yeshua before the proconsul at Paphos, as recounted in the Book of Acts.

After this, Mark embarked on a journey to Ægypt, where he founded the church in Alexandria. He is considered the founder of the Coptic Church, as well as of the Orthodox Church there. He made additional travels to Cyprus and to Mesopotamia; from which place Saint Peter sent a letter to the Christians of Asia Minor in which he calls Mark his son. Mark was also present in Asia Minor for a time himself – he was under the rule of Saint Timothy in Ephesus, and accompanied him to Rome, from which city he is believed to have written his Gospel between 62 and 68 AD. The audience for which this Gospel was intended is disputed: Church tradition holds that it was primarily intended for an audience of Gentiles, but Mark’s use of Aramaic idioms and imagery suggest instead that it may have been meant for an audience that included Palestinian Jews.

Travelling once more to Ægypt, Mark established the catechetical school at Alexandria which produced Holy Father Athenagoras, Saint Pantainos, Clement, Origen, Pope Heraklas, Pope Saint Dionysios and Saint Gregory the Wonderworker of Neocæsarea. Mark’s school, by the way, comes in for some rather hard ribbing by my classical Hebrew instructor Dr Paul Tarazi, who is very much not a fan of the sorts of speculative philosophical and theological turns for which these Ægyptians became known. He also makes much of the irony that it is his own people, the Arabs, who with their infatuation for philosophy ‘spoiled’ us here in the West!

At any rate, according to the Orthodox hagiography, Mark did venture further into Africa, and preached the Gospel in Libya before returning to his adoptive home in Alexandria. He happened to see a cobbler named Ananias, pierce one of the fingers of his hand with an awl and exclaim, ‘O the One God!’ Saint Mark healed the cobbler’s finger, and taught Ananias about Christ the living God, to whom Ananias had called out in his pain. Ananias welcomed Mark as a guest in his home, and he and his whole household were baptised in the name of the Triune God by the Holy Apostle. His home thereafter became a house-church and Ananias himself joined Mark in converting the Alexandrians to the Faith.

For seven years, Saint Mark and Ananias worked tirelessly in Alexandria. Saint Mark appointed three priests – Malchos, Sabinos and Kerbinos – and seven deacons to help Ananias, the converted became so many. All the while, he preached against the pagan gods of the city, and aroused anger against him among the wealthy Greeks and Romans who worshipped them. In that year the Pascha fell on the feast of Serapis, the main tutelary god of the Greeks in Alexandria. As Saint Mark and Ananias were celebrating the Pascha, a mob of pagan Greeks attacked the church and captured Mark, beating him, binding him about with a rope, dragging him through the streets and finally throwing him into prison. While in prison, our Lord Jesus Christ came to Mark in a vision and strengthened him before he was to suffer martyrdom. The following day the angry mob bore Mark out of his cell – but on his way there his bodily strength faltered. He cried out: ‘Into Your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit,’ and died before he could be brought to trial.

The pagans wanted to have his body burnt and his ashes scattered in ignominy. But as they lit the fire, the skies darkened, thunder crashed and the ground split open. The pagans fled in terror. The followers of Christ, led by Ananias, took up Saint Mark’s holy relics and buried them in a stone vault, over which two and a half centuries later a church was built. The relics were translated to Venice in 820, after the Muslim conquests, for safekeeping.

I am of course utterly devoted to Holy Apostle Matthew, my namesake and patron saint. With Saint Matthew I share not only a name, a certain kinship and a general love of genealogy, but also a certain love for Persia and sub-Saharan Africa. But there is still very much a soft spot in my heart for Mark and his Gospel as well – largely on account of Ched Myers and his socio-literary reading of the Gospel of Mark. Saint Mark’s Gospel emphasises Christ’s works of healing and exorcism, preaching and teaching in an unabashedly-political context where their subversive and prophetic subtext would be clear to either a Roman or a Palestinian audience. It is therefore rightly called by Myers a ‘manifesto for radical discipleship’.

The populist potentials of the Gospel are thoroughly understood and appreciated by Myers – populist, that is, not in a nationalistic sense, but in an œconomic one. The debt and purity codes of the Second Temple religion are cancelled or inverted in such a way that allows even the worst-off members of the society to participate, through the alternative community proclaimed in the ekklesia, in political and œconomic life. Myers unfortunately succumbs a bit to a certain Protestantising sensibility, possibly implicit in his project itself, concerned as it is with the original sensibility and context of the author. But the case he presents is substantial and worthy of careful study even by Catholic and Orthodox readers.

Ironically, the case is better made from a radical position, that it would be wrong to understand the empty tomb as merely symbolic or metaphorical. The empty tomb is not a ‘symbol’: it is the punchline. The entire project of Mark’s εὐαγγέλιον as a satirical-subversive ‘news of an Imperial victory’ is predicated on the actual defeat of death by Christ. If the victory over death proclaimed by Christ’s flesh-and-blood Resurrection were not really real, there would be no such ‘good news’. Death would have the final word. There would be no overturn of the logic of Empire, and there would be no point in any radical call to renewed discipleship. This is one of several reasons why the political witness of the mainline churches tends to be so limp-wristed and focussed on gratification. One could even potentially make the case that American empire and its mouthpieces are so invested in such moralistic therapeutic deisms and ‘symbolic’ interpretations of Christ’s death, precisely because such theologies take the edge off of any sort of radical resistance to it.

Myers would have us observe that the empty tomb which greets us at the end of the Gospel is in fact a call for us to return to the beginning, to return to Galilee where the first disciples were called. Mark is calling us, in effect, to pick up again the spiritual work – both the inward work of prayer, fasting and almsgiving; and the outward work of radical political witness and service to neighbour – that was abandoned by the disciples (one of whom denied, one of whom betrayed, but all of whom fled) on the original Great and Holy Thursday after the Last Supper. Ched Myers is emphatic that those of us in the West – those of us even in the middle and lower œconomic strata who are nevertheless seated amidst the affluence of capitalist and imperial plunder and the propaganda, whether ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’, of imperial vainglory – need to ‘read’ ourselves in the Gospel narrative in the literary persons of the rich young man and the scribe who came to question Jesus about the law. But the manifesto, the call to discipleship, affects us as well. The hymns of the Church assure us we are no better off, spiritually speaking, than the disciples in today’s Gospel readings: Peter (who denied Christ), Judas (who betrayed Christ) or Mark (who fled from Christ at His arrest). But we are called all the same to witness the risen Christ and return to Galilee to begin the work again.

Holy, glorious and all-laudable Apostle and Evangelist Mark, witness among the philosophers and the workers of Alexandria, caller of all to discipleship, intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Of thy mystical supper, O Son of God,
Accept me today as a communicant.
For I will not speak of thy mystery to thine enemies,
Neither will I give thee a kiss as did Judas,
But like the thief will I confess Thee,
Remember me, O Lord, in thy kingdom.

From your childhood the light of truth enlightened you, O Mark,
And you loved the labour of Christ the Saviour.
Therefore, you followed Peter with zeal
And served Paul well as a fellow labourer,
And you enlighten the world with your holy Gospel!

Icon of the Mystical Supper

Tao Xingzhi and Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî, part 1: two ‘national’ teachers

This aims to be the first part in a multi-part blog series on two Third World educators, Tao Xingzhi 陶行知 and Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî ساطع الحصري. I have been reading William Cleveland’s biography of al-Ḥuṣrî alongside Tao Xingzhi’s book Education for Life, and am quite thunderstruck by the, as far as I know, substantial but solely serendipitous similarities between the two men. I am not aware from either of these two men’s biographies that they ever met each other, and I find it unlikely that the two of them had any direct exchanges of ideas or scholarly intercourse. But the similitude of the two men, in their biographies, in their temperaments and in their thought, I think deserves to be remarked upon.

I already get mostly-friendly ribbing on the Orthodox circles on social media for being a weeb (which, you know, fair enough). So here’s the ‘full disclosure’ from a personal standpoint. I am an Orthodox Christian largely because of Chinese and Arabic influences. Tao Xingzhi actually gives a really good voice to this, but to live in China is to live in a society where linear time has relatively little meaning, and where the most venerable traditions can live alongside and in the shadow of the gaudiest glass-and-steel high modernism; my attraction to Orthodoxy was likewise a pursuit of the traditional thread within my own culture. On the other hand, my first and strongest direct exposure to Orthodoxy was through the Antiochian tradition, through Saint Mary’s Church in Pawtucket – which is still my beloved ‘home away from home’ parish whenever I go to visit my parents. To this day, I still owe the Syrian-, Lebanese- and Armenian-American folks of that parish a great debt I can never truly repay, for legally reuniting me with my family when I came home from abroad.

I also came to an awareness of the gæopolitical, trade and cultural connexions between China and the Arab world through the Judge Dee novel Murder in Canton, and through the classes on Chinese religion and material culture at Capital Normal University taught by Dr An Yanming and Dr Ma Zhao. The Chinese Hui Muslims of today are the descendants of Persian traders along both overland and sea trade routes, as well as of Arabic cavalry sent by al-Mansûr to put down the An Lushan Rebellion, and the Nestorian Christians (including Tang general Guo Ziyi 郭子儀) who came to China to spread the Gospel, originated in the Persian and Assyrian communities of what is now Iraq. Nowadays, as I noticed when I was living next to and among Hui Muslim neighbours in Baotou, there is a conscious awareness of this history that may not have been there two or three generations ago.

The more modern connexions between China and the Arab world through the Non Aligned Movement, and the prominent friendship between Jamâl ‘Abd an-Nâsr and Mao Zedong 毛澤東, however, seem to have another basis. To explore that basis, a basis in the second-world ideology of Marxism-Leninism seems insufficient, since both Nâsr and Mao were revisionists, from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. This is why examining the similarities between the non-Marxist leftists Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî and Tao Xingzhi seems to be important. Both of them took a syncretic approach to pædagogy, œconomics and culture integrating (respectively) Islâmic and Confucian indigenous knowledge with Western methods. In al-Ḥuṣrî’s case, this involved a selective appropriation of historical and social concepts from Herder, Hegel and especially Fichte for use in a classicalist, solidarist pædagogy borrowed from ibn Khaldûn. In Tao Xingzhi’s case, this involved a selective appropriation of Dewey’s pædagogy, placed at the service of a Confucian reformism inspired by Ming dynasty neo-Confucian Wang Yangming 王陽明. More to the point, al-Ḥuṣrî’s ideas informed both Nâsrism and Ba‘athîyya; and the Mass Education Movement spearheaded by Tao Xingzhi and Jimmy Yen was a formative influence on Mao Zedong, who did a stint as a volunteer teacher.

To begin with, though, for this blog post I will note only a handful of the parallels in their biographies. The two men were contemporaries: Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî was born to wealthy Syrian parents in Yemen, in the Ottoman Empire, in 1880; Tao Xingzhi was born in Anhui to poor village schoolteachers in the Qing Empire in 1891. Both men were, for lack of a better word, cosmopolitans. Sâti‘ would always feel ‘out of place’ among his own people – his first language was Turkish and his parents had him tutored in French. He learnt Arabic later in life and always spoke with a heavy Turkish accent. He was deeply distrusted at first in Arab nationalist circles for his prior Ottoman associations and loyalties, and his later emphasis on ‘al-‘urubah’ gives credence to a certain degree of psychological compensation on his part. Xingzhi, like his Democratic League comrade Fei Xiaotong 費孝通, was educated in missionary schools and later sent to America for college at the University of Illinois and Columbia University. Like al-Ḥuṣrî to ‘al-‘urubah’, he felt ‘robbed of [his] Chineseness’ and thereafter revolted against the Western-looking elements in his own class.

Each of them also experienced a great political upheaval in his early life. Al-Ḥuṣrî lived through the constitutional upheavals, the First World War and the collapse and partition of the Ottoman Empire. The Qing Empire fell, too, when Tao Xingzhi was still a student; during much of his professional career, he lived in a country torn between various warlords in addition to the invading Japanese. The response of these two men to the social upheavals afflicting the Arab world on the one hand, and the Chinese world on the other, was to begin educating, with particular emphasis on popular self-respect, self-reliance and adoption of modern science. Both of them were committed pædagogues.

Neither of them was, to begin with, particularly political in orientation – like the Slavophils, they saw themselves not as political movers-and-shakers, but stewards and transmitters of culture. As such, even though both of them were committed at some level to egalitarianism, the cultivation of good civic habits and strident opposition to Western imperialism, neither of them was particularly attached to democracy as an ideology. Cleveland relates, in his discussion of Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî’s thought, that he is not concerned in his Arabist phase with ‘political liberties’, ‘the rights of individuals’, ‘constitutionalism’ or ‘democracy’, but instead with the historical forces that give rise to healthy polities. Likewise, even though Tao Xingzhi has deep democratic-socialist convictions about the educational potential of every student and the need for proportional œconomic outcomes, he nonetheless sharply rebukes (in a way which much more resembles the old Confucian conservatives like Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 rather than the other followers of John Dewey) the May Fourth intellectuals for their ‘lack of discipline’, their cultural deracination and their bourgeois fixation on policy-making procedure rather than content. (Tao Xingzhi’s scepticism of democratic ideology appears to be informed, interestingly enough, by both Plato and Confucius.)

Tao Xingzhi and Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî, though they belong to a younger generation, can certainly be seen to stand in the same multifaceted tradition as the modernising Asian intellectuals highlighted by Pankaj Mishra in his recent book: Sayyid Jamâl ad-Dîn, Liang Qichao 梁啓超 and Rabindranath Tagore. But there’s a great more to the similitude here than simply a shared reaction against Western imperialism – and I suspect the answer has something to do with the fact that these two were more involved in education and pædagogical pursuits than directly in politics. Thus far I’ve explored only a few points in their biographies where their experiences run parallel; in future blog posts I hope to explore more of the substantive specifics of their comparative thought, as well as their contributions to the guiding principles of the Non Aligned Movement.

How to make sense of Sayyid Jamâl ad-Dîn?

Sayyid Jamâl ad-Dîn

I have briefly mentioned Sayyid Jamâl ad-Dîn ‘al-Afghânî’ before here, particularly his contribution to the concept of wahda (‘unity’) in the discourse of early Arabic modernity. This was a topic that deeply concerned him. However, after having read some annotated primary source materials (in translation, of course) on the man himself, I confess that I could have made that case much better than I had. Iran scholar Dr Nikki R Keddie, in her study on Jamâl ad-Dîn, places him squarely between the mediæval tradition of Islamic philosophy (which includes, in ad-Dîn’s own words: al-Fârâbî, ibn Sînâ, ibn Bâjja, Suhrawardî, Mir Dâmâd and Mulla Sadrâ) and the modern tendencies of ‘political Islam’ as embodied by his students Muhammad ’Abduh and Rashîd Ridâ. Occupying this transitional position, however, he doesn’t belong entirely with either group.

To confound things even more: there is a strong dispute over the branch of Islâm and the sect of jurisprudence to which ad-Dîn belonged. Was he, as his Ægyptian one-time admirer and student ’Abduh claimed, a true blue Afghan Sunnî of the Hanafî school? Or was he, as Keddie argues and as seems more likely from the documentary evidence, a sceptical and philosophical-minded Iranian Shî‘i with Shaykhi sympathies? Certainly, ad-Dîn had no problem either acknowledging the intellectual debt the Muslim world owed to Arab Christians, Jews and Persian ‘Magians’ – or, indeed, welcoming Christian students (who themselves were embracing anti-colonialist and pan-Arab sentiments) to his lectures and speeches. In addition, ad-Dîn was clearly a dissembler when the situation demanded it, and represented himself in different ways to different audiences. He was an Iranian among the Iranians and an Indian among the Indians; however, among the Turks and Ægyptians he presented himself as an Afghan, and among the Afghans a Turk. He was a fire-breathing champion of Islâm before the masses, and a cultured critic of Islâm before European scholars like Renan. As we can see: he followed the philosophical tendency of al-Fârâbî (and possibly also Plato) in having an exoteric message for the masses and an occluded esoteric message for a select inner circle.

It would be absurd to pretend that ad-Dîn didn’t have a political agenda. He was, very forthrightly, a most bitter foe of Western imperialism and colonialism, whether in India, in Ægypt, in East Africa, or indeed anywhere else where Muslims happened to be under foreign (particularly British) administration. And he always seemed to have a certain problem with authority – not just British. Unlike Philo, who also hated authority but knew when to bite his tongue, it seems ad-Dîn couldn’t resist poking the eyes of the rich and pompous. (I say this with the deepest endearment.) His magnetic personality seems to have bred in him a certain megálothūmía. He almost invariably became involved in intrigues and assassination attempts against truculent or corrupt princes, and was banished multiple times from multiple different Muslim polities.

Clearly there is much that is contradictory and enigmatic about the life and thought of Jamâl ad-Dîn, despite his outsized impact on the development of political Islâm on the one hand, and Arab nationalism on the other. His stances on power, on sæcularism, on ‘Western thought’, are all complex and resist easy ideological classification. But Keddie argues forcefully against the interpretation of Jamâl ad-Dîn as a political opportunist. He does have a distinct religious-political orientation, in despite of the effusions of Islamic piety aimed at the masses and the religious scepticism aimed at fellow-scholars. Keddie, as the title of her book indicates, argues that his positive religious-political stance is one of anti-imperialism and self-strengthening. Jamâl ad-Dîn did indeed want the British out of India and Ægypt, and generally off the necks of Muslims everywhere; and he did encourage Muslims to acquire some forms of Western knowledge, science and technology. Surprisingly, the terms of this anti-imperialism correspond rather well to similar doctrines in other parts of the world.

There is in fact a direct relationship between Jamâl ad-Dîn and the Russian Slavophils – or at least, some of those associated with the Aksakov circle. During his stay in Russia he met, for example, with Oberprokurator Pobedonostsev, who treated him with a surprising degree of cordiality. During this time Jamâl ad-Din published a number of anti-British, anti-imperialist editorials in the Moscow Gazette, which actually seem to have garnered some sympathy among the Slavophils but which failed to ‘move the needle’ of Russian policy in a more anti-British direction as ad-Dîn had intended.

Intriguing – though much more difficult to prove, given that ad-Dîn never went to China – is Keddie’s use of ‘self-strengthening’ as a descriptor for Jamâl ad-Dîn’s ideology, and the apparent overlap between ad-Dîn’s highly-selective advocacy for Western knowledge, and the contemporary enthusiasm in China for the doctrine of zhongti xiyong 中體西用 (‘Chinese [learning for] principles; Western [learning for] application’) first propounded by conservative-reformist Chinese statesman Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 in the wake of the First Opium War. Zhang was the first to come up with the phrase ‘中學爲題，西學為用’, but the idea and its application had long been practised by reformers in China such as Lin Zexu 林則徐 and Wei Yuan 魏源. All of these political figures were directly reacting to the brutal realities of British capitalist rapine in China and attempting to chart a different way forward with (some of) the tools at hand. Pankaj Mishra makes a much more, in my view, intellectually-daring linkage between Jamâl ad-Dîn and Liang Qichao 梁啓超 – the one-time student of Kang Youwei 康有爲 and progressive political reformer in China – and Indian reformer Rabindranath Tagore, following a similar theme, and his thesis should be heeded carefully. As an internationally-minded philosopher and anti-imperialist himself, I cannot help but think Jamâl ad-Dîn himself would deeply approve of such a reading of his work.

Still, I have to wonder. Since the Arab Spring (if not long before), the Arab world at large has witnessed a resurgence of fundamentalism on the one hand and obsequiousness to the West on the other – the two as often as not going hand-in-hand. With the exception of one nation – Tunisia, which has already had a long tradition of reformist post-imperial rule in Bourguibism – the revolution has everywhere failed to bring what it had promised: it sold out everything, and got nothing in return. The clarion calls of warning, from the likes of worthy luminaries such as the late great Samîr Amîn, have been notable for their rarity as well as their clarity. Arab nationalist ideas seem petered out… the era of despair having given way to an era of confusion.

Speaking as a sympathetic observer, it is in precisely such times of crisis as this one that a return ad fontes is desperately needed. The thinkers of the Arab world would do well to put old hatreds to bed, and consider from the very same classically-rooted virtue-ethical philosophical perspective their relationships with the various political powers in the world. The example of Sayyid Jamâl ad-Dîn, whose knowledge of the entire tradition of Islamic neo-Platonism and Peripateticism is demonstrably as profound as any of his contemporaries’, is instructive in numerous ways. Some later Arab nationalist presumptions about the fundamental character of Western sæcularism and political science need to be carefully re-examined in light of Jamâl ad-Dîn’s cautions against the ‘neicheri’ and his admonitions about the telos of religious belief. And the passions of the very recent Arab youth movements, though the initial justice of many of these movements is beyond reproach, need to be tempered by certain Socratic-Platonic doubts (which were all too near the forefront of Jamâl ad-Dîn’s mind) about the fundamental character of mass movements, and the movements of the human soul by which they are aroused. It is only under the shelter of such doubts that the valuable kernel of these movements’ initial radicalism can be preserved long enough to sprout and bear good fruit. Perhaps this is a good admonition in general for political organisers of any stripe, in any polity!

In any event, the life and political-philosophical work of Sayyid Jamâl ad-Dîn, though not without serious flaws, are worthy of deep consideration and reflection. Even, and perhaps especially, for those of us Christians in the West who oppose the continuing violence of the American state against the Middle East; and even more, those of us who share communion with Arabic brothers and sisters, and deeply and genuinely desire their good.

Saints Hadrian and Beorhtwald of Canterbury

Venerable Hadrian the Abbot and Holy Hierarch Beorhtwald of Canterbury

Two saints, contemporaries and friends, one English and the other African, who nonetheless share the same town and the same feast day – Holy Hadrian the Abbot and Holy Beorhtwald the Bishop, we ask for your prayers today!

When Wigheard, the Archbishop of Canterbury who had been appointed in the wake of the Synod at Whitby, reposed in the Lord in 667, Vitalian, then the Pope of Rome, was tasked with finding a replacement bishop for the Church in England. He approached Hadrian, a humble and self-effacing monk then living in a monastery outside Naples, with an offer for the position – but Hadrian recommended Saint Theodore of Tarsus instead. Pope Vitalian agreed to appoint Saint Theodore to the office, but on the condition that Hadrian accompany him there as legate, given that Hadrian was a skilled seafarer and knew the routes from Africa to Gaul and from there to England. Hearing Pope Vitalian’s reasons, Hadrian accepted this charge.

Saint Theodore and Saint Hadrian were already firm friends, steadfast and spiritually-supportive of one another, when they set out together for England. On their travels through France, they agreed to take separate lodgings for the winter – Saint Theodore would stay in Paris, while Saint Hadrian stayed in Sens and later Meaux. Saint Theodore was allowed to go on his way northward to Kent. However, Saint Hadrian was detained by Ebroin, the evil-minded and paranoid majordomo of Frankish Neustria. The wicked tyrant suspected the Berber monk of being an agent of Emperor Constans II of Eastern Rome (then living in Syracuse), sent to plot against his rule. Saint Hadrian was unjustly held prisoner, and was in peril of his life. However, God so arranged it that Ebroin softened in his paranoid delusions, and he eventually released Hadrian and permitted him to continue on his faring northward.

When Hadrian arrived in Kent, Saint Theodore of Tarsus gifted him the abbacy of St Peter’s in Canterbury, as Pope Vitalian had so arranged it. As Abbot of St Peter’s, Saint Hadrian used his great store of wisdom to make that house of God into a bright and luminous school of theological wisdom, and also of sæcular philosophy and learning in both Greek and Latin, a task in which he was gladly aided by his friend the learned Archbishop of Canterbury. Saint Theodore and Saint Hadrian drew throngs of scholars to Kent. The Abbey of St Peter’s soon became a true school of the liberal arts: not only theology was taught there, but also grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, astronomy and the metrical arts. It was boasted by students of St Peter’s that the pupils of Saint Theodore and Saint Hadrian could speak Greek and Latin both as fluently as they could English! In a later era, King Ælfrǽd the Great of Wessex would complain that though in former ages men of Saint Theodore’s and Saint Hadrian’s stature could be found in England, in his own day he had to send Englishmen of scholarly talents abroad.

Saint Theodore of Tarsus did many more good and holy deeds in England before he reposed in the Lord in September 690, but it would be nearly two years before the infighting among the royal family in Kent would permit another Archbishop to take his place. Another reason for the long delay may have been the ambitions of Saint Wilfrið for the position, which were thwarted by circumstances nearer home in Northumbria. In the end, it was settled to make another local Abbot, Beorhtwald of Saint Mary’s of Reculver, Archbishop of Canterbury. The meek, humble and scholarly Saint Hadrian was likely all too glad not to have been appointed to the position himself, and was content to continue as the Abbot of St Peter’s and headmaster of his flourishing monastic school there – which he did until his own blessed repose on 9 January 710.

For his part, Saint Beorhtwald proved to be a more-than-competent archpastor for the English flock. He oversaw at last the Christianisation of the stubborn South Saxons – the last holdout of heathenry in England; and he also managed to secure tax exemptions for the church from the king of Kent at the time, Wihtred. Beorhtwald also attempted to mediate and broker the old dispute left to him over church offices between Saint Theodore and Saint Wilfrid, while representing his own office and the charge left to him by the saintly Theodore as best he could. In addition, from his letters we can see that Saint Berhtwold encouraged the clergy to buy slaves and set them free, and sæcular owners of slaves to manumit them. Though his own stance against slavery was not as strident as later churchmen in his office, it is still worthy of note that the men of the Church were working against the heathen holdover. Although Beorhtwald reposed in the Lord on 13 January 731, he was commemorated by the Church in England on the same day as his contemporary Saint Hadrian: 9 January.

Venerable Hadrian and Holy Hierarch Beorhtwald of Canterbury, pray to God for us sinners!

The loudest yelps for liberty

The fact that the slave trade is alive again in Libya is now rightfully turning heads, with government figures and international celebrities issuing calls for action. But at the same time, with most of the mainstream media ignoring the elephant in the room, it took a rapper – T.I. – to point it out:

So… I'm wondering if Khadafi was such a horrible dictator why wasn't this happening when HE WAS in power? One has no choice but to conclude his absence made this possible.

T.I. is absolutely right, of course. Let’s be honest: it was the intervention in Libya – the removal and brutal killing of Gadhafi – that destroyed the country and all state apparatus, leaving the power vacuum in which these slavers are free to operate. But even further than that, NATO as a whole was responsible for dæmonising and dehumanising black Libyans based on their race. The insidious canard that black Libyans were ‘foreign mercenaries’ operating on Gadhafi’s behalf was invented specifically as a pretext for ousting Gadhafi, and was spread assiduously by NATO organs and spokesmen, and their respective governments, both for domestic manufacture of consent and for propaganda purposes within Libya itself.

It is only in the context of the removal of Gadhafi, and of the ‘black mercenary’ myth that accompanied his removal, that the modern slave trade in Libya can be rightly understood. Black people in Libya are seen as chattel because Western media, NGOs and the NATO alliance all did their level best to dehumanise them, and then to remove from them the most secure legal protection they had. What threat Gadhafi ever posed to trans-Atlantic security eludes me – and this led me to ask some questions about NATO’s mission creep and its remarkably-quick transformation away from being a defensive alliance into an offensive instrument of American imperium in, in this case, Africa. Which, in this case, perpetuates itself at the expense of black lives and black freedom.

Ironically, merely for pointing all of this out on Facebook, I was immediately attacked as a ‘Russophile’ and a ‘geopolitical fundamentalist’ by certain of NATO’s defenders. The greater cause of keeping Russia down and answering the ‘yelps for liberty’ from places like the Ukraine, apparently, has to take precedence over actual black lives and black freedom. Samuel Johnson is still right, in this case both about NATO itself and about the lawless, brutal beneficiaries of its Libyan largesse.

A few words on Empress Saint Theodōra

Holy and Right-Believing Empress Theodōra of Constantinople

Yesterday (pardon my negligence) was the feast day of the Holy Right-Believing Empress Theodōra of Constantinople, a royal saint of the Holy Orthodox Church who ought by no means to be overlooked! A working-class woman who toiled in a low-end brothel and performed on stage in her youth, she rose to become a respected and feared stateswoman, second only, if not equal, to her husband the Emperor of the most powerful empire on earth at the time. How she got there, what she did in respect of her office, and how she became a saint are all very much worthy of our attention as Christians.

Yes, Empress Saint Theodōra did begin her life as a ‘woman of ill repute’. A Cypriot by descent if not by birthplace, she was born to the very lowest class of Byzantine society. Both of her parents were ‘entertainers’; her mother, like her, made a living by her body. Her father having died when she was four, she entered the brothel as one of the few avenues open to her to support herself. When she was sixteen she entered the company of a Syrian-Greek official named Hekēbolos who had been appointed as governor of Libya; she stayed with him for four years, but left him on account of his neglectful and abusive behaviour to her. Travelling back to Constantinople, she made the acquaintance of Pope Timothy III of Alexandria, who apparently left a deep religious impression on her and steered her toward a more pious life.

It is here that the historical accounts tend to diverge. Prokopios, a hostile and rather unreliable historiographer, asserts that her conversion experience was fake, and that she met the Emperor Justinian while continuing as an actress and prostitute, after a performance of the parody Leda and the Swan. John of Ephesos, on the other hand, relates that she took up a job in the capital as a manual labourer, a wool-spinner, who caught the attention of the Emperor. In any event, Justinian was not able to marry her due to the class restrictions then in place; only when his uncle repealed the law was Justinian able to marry Theodōra. By that time, Theodōra already had an illegitimate daughter, whose father was likely Saint Justinian.

Saint Justinian and Saint Theodōra were an odd case at the time, having married for affection rather than for political reasons. At the same time, though, Saint Theodōra was quite politically-active. She broke with Roman convention by offering advice to the Emperor directly, and in so doing saved Emperor Saint Justinian’s throne, his life, and possibly the empire itself during the Nika riots. At the time, Saint Justinian and his closest advisers were preparing to flee the city, which was then under siege by the rioters. In her own words:

My lords, the present occasion is too serious to allow me to follow the convention that a woman should not speak in a man’s council. Those whose interests are threatened by extreme danger should think only of the wisest course of action, not of conventions. In my opinion, flight is not the right course, even if it should bring us to safety. It is impossible for a person, having been born into this world, not to die; but for one who has reigned it is intolerable to be a fugitive. May I never be deprived of this purple robe, and may I never see the day when those who meet me do not call me empress. If you wish to save yourself, my lord, there is no difficulty. We are rich; over there is the sea, and yonder are the ships. Yet reflect for a moment whether, when you have once escaped to a place of security, you would not gladly exchange such safety for death. As for me, I agree with the adage that the royal purple is the noblest shroud.

Thereupon Saint Justinian broke up the riots – bloodily, according to Prokopios – and restored his hold on power. In the wake of that event, Justinian and Theodōra began to rebuild the royal city. They established vital infrastructure and public works (aqueducts, roads, bridges), built twenty-five churches (including the great Agia Sophia!), and spent a great deal on social welfare also, particularly public hospitals. Saint Theodōra, remembering perhaps her unfortunate youth and her ill-treatment at the hands of Hekebolos, was also an advocate against prostitution and in favour of women’s rights – including lower-class women’s right to work and feed themselves without having to marry or enter a brothel. She established a convent named Metanoia (or Holy Repentance), which catered specifically to ex-brothel girls and street prostitutes, giving them shelter, a space for reflection and the possibility – an all-too-attractive possibility at the time for many such women – of becoming a nun. As the folks at In Communion put it:

She made it legal to marry across class lines, gave women inheritance rights, gave women custody rights in the case of divorce, increased the penalty for rape, and outlawed the practice of infanticide whereby the father would decide whether a newborn would live and which often was committed against baby girls. She also opened many convents and saved many women from prostitution. Convents gave women of the time a way to support themselves without having to marry.

Saint Theodōra began her life of religious piety as a Miaphysite follower of Pope Timothy III, but after her marriage to Saint Justinian it appears she embraced Chalcedonian Christianity. At the same time, her sympathies were deeply engaged toward the Miaphysites, and she exerted tremendous political and spiritual energies in the attempt to heal the breach between the two confessions. The right-believing Empress reposed at the age of forty-eight, succumbing to an illness which was likely breast cancer. However, she would leave a deep impression on Saint Justinian’s reign even after her death, as he would continue to pass laws and institute social services for lower-class people, and particularly lower-class women, for the remainder of his reign. Empress Saint Theodōra, pray to God for us!

The fruits of Libyan régime change

This is Africa. This is chattel slavery. This is happening today:

A day after reaching safety aboard a humanitarian ship, migrants on Friday told of arbitrary detention, slavery and beatings in Libya as Europe seeks to build up the Tripoli-based coastguard.

“Libya is crazy. They arrest us, the police ... They put us in some place ... two, three days no eat, no drink. They beat us,” said Alseer Issa Ibrahim, 28, from the Darfur region of Sudan.

Ibrahim is one of almost 600 people on the Aquarius, a rescue ship operated by Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and SOS Mediterranee, now heading toward an Italian port.

Six years after the fall of strongman Muammar Gaddafi, Libya appears to be sliding deeper into lawlessness. Smugglers are packing record numbers of people onto unsafe boats, with sea arrivals to Italy up 35 percent so far this year. More than 1,300 have died.

John Osifo, a 29-year-old Nigerian, spent 11 months in Libya. He said he did not plan to go to Europe, but after a few months working at a car wash, a local man destroyed his passport and work permit, making him an irregular migrant, and he was forced into hard labour.

In Libya “they believe blacks are slaves. That is what they call us. When they want to beat us, they beat us with pipes,” he said, showing a scar on his left hand.

“They take us to jobs, force us to do hard labour without payment ... Sometimes they take you to a prison where you'll be kept and beaten up,” he said, as the Aquarius’s crew served tea and bread to the migrants ...

“We are always suffering in Libya from hunger, and the Libyan people hate us. They don't look at us like people, they look at us like animals,” said Yagob Mobark Ibrahim, 21, from Sudan.

Remember clearly that no such conditions existed for black Libyans under Gadhafi’s régime. Remember that the accusations of atrocities against Colonel Gadhafi were fabricated whole cloth. Remember that ‘dark heart’ propaganda depicting black Africans as Gadhafi’s ‘mercenaries’ and ‘rapists’ was part-and-parcel of NATO’s information war in Libya that sparked off a race war, turning Arabs against their black neighbours in heinous acts of democide (like at Tawergha). Remember all of this historical background when you read these stories of dehumanisation of people on the basis of their skin colour, in a country which was considered a ‘model humanitarian intervention’ by some very important American and European politicians. As Our Lord Christ taught us, ‘ye shall know them by their fruits’; NATO’s strange fruits on display now in Libya are quite bitter. As that great anti-slavery Tory Dr Johnson would no doubt tartly observe, it is still the case that those yelping loudest for ‘liberty’ (and ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’) are drivers of Negroes.