Paying Attention To The Sky

Peter Robert Lamont Brown is one of America’s major historians and certainly the dean of Late Antique studies in the American academe. Elsewhere I have reviewed and provided reading selections from his magisterial Augustine of Hippo.  This is another great read.

Monks
In 270, the year Constantine was born, Anthony (250-356) a comfortable farmer on the Egyptian Fayum, made his way out into the desert, to emerge around 310 as a famous ermites, a “man of the desert” the “model” Christian hermit of all future ages. In Syria, also, the roads had long been traveled by bands of charismatic preachers who owed nothing to the “world.”  Pointedly celibate, and filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, their traveling bands were a sight to be seen. They had to be advised not to burst into chanted psalms when passing through non-Christian villages — lest they be mistaken for traveling musicians! They were the “unique ones,” the “lonely ones.” In Egypt, the Greek word monochos, “lonely one,” from which our word “monk” derives, soon became attached to such eccentric persons. Unmarried, detached from society either by living in the desert or by their restless movement, the “wanderers” of Syria and the “men of the desert” of Egypt represented a new form of radical Christianity, henceforth associated with a new term, “monasticism” — the life of monks.

Augustine And The Pelagian Controversy
For Augustine the convert emerged as a person sheathed in the will of God “For He hath made me and not we ourselves…” indeed we had destroyed ourselves but He who made us, made us anew. Augustine never doubted this about himself or others. The grace of God worked on the heart, “as it were as speck of gold in the hands of a master craftsman, “hammering the fragile, discontinuous will into an ever firmer, finally victorious resolve. This was no abstract doctrine for Augustine. The life of the Catholic Church, as he saw it, was made up of countless small victories of grace. To those who had learned to pray with a humble heart, God would always give the grace which fired the will to follow His commands….

Not every ascetic Christian in this age of great converts was comfortable with such a view. When the Confessions were read out, in the company of Paulinus, Pelagius, a devout layman from Britain, walked out of the room. For Pelagius and his many supporters, the “grace” of God did not work in this manner. God’s “grace” consisted rather in God’s decision to create human nature in such a way that human beings could follow his commands through the exercise of their own free will.

This was grace enough. Human beings had never lost their original, good nature. Everyone was free to choose the good. Once the accretion of evil habits, contracted through contact with the “world”, had been washed away through the transformative rite of baptism, every Christian believer was both able and obliged to reach out for perfection. For Pelagius, the Christian was the master craftsman of his or her own soul.

Augustine’s Theology Of Grace
Augustine’s theology of grace embraced more believers. It had room both for acknowledged heroes and for the average Christina. Pelagius, by contrast, had little to say  to the average Christian. He insisted that all Christians were capable of being perfect and that they should become perfect. He wished  to blur the distinction between lay person and monk by making every Christian equally a convert and a devout ascetic. He seemed to leave no place for the slow and hesitant progress of the rank and file, whose “conversions” were far from dramatic and far from complete….Augustine, by contrast , accepted that the Christian Church had come to contain a large number of distinctly mediocre persons. He did not expect ever Christian to be perfect. Yet each Christian was equal to every other, because all Christians were equally dependent on the grace of God …. Augustine’s doctrine was a source of  comfort to the humble and a warning to the proud. There was no room in his view of the Church for self-created distinctions, based on the belief that some Christians could make themselves more “perfect” than others…Augustine saw the Catholic Church as a united community precisely because it was community of sinners as well as a community of heroes and of heroines.

Augustine’s City of God
Augustine’s City of God, was a book he began in 413, as an answer to pagan criticisms and to Christian disillusionment, provoked by Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410. The disaster of the sack o f Rome provided Augustine with an excuse to expatiate on a theme dear to his heart. It was summed up in the title of the book, On the City of God. For as in Psalm 86 (87), Jerusalem was the “City of our God, of which “glorious things are spoken” Like the Jerusalem of the Psalms (as Augustine read them) the Heavenly Jerusalem claimed those born in all other nations as potential citizens. A common sin had made all men and all women quite irrespective of race, of class, and of level of culture, equally aliens from that Heavenly Jerusalem. All were summoned with stark impartiality, to become Christians and so to begin the long, slow return to heaven, their true homeland…Augustine deliberately created common ground with his readers , precisely so that, all obstacles removed and all arguments vanquished, they might  have no excuse not to slip across that shared ground in order to become potential citizens of heaven by joining the Catholic Church.

Gregory The Great: Discernment In The Commentary on Job
Gregory entitle his commentary the “Mortalia of Job.” By this he meant a guide for the moral life derived from contemplation of the Book of Job…..It was the stuff of the soul that concerned him, in every situation and every turn and twist of its daily struggle with itself. Gregory was a throwback. He brought into the late sixth century an ancient strand in Roman thought — the austere tradition of ethical guidance earlier associated with the Stoic sages.. Gregory’s emphasis on the examination of ones’ motives, on the need for consideration of one’s response to every situation, the perpetual awareness of the inner self laid out before the quiet eyes of God are themes which hark back to the letters of Seneca and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelieus.

Gregory The Great: Praedicatio
“Once the world held us in its delights. Now it is so full of disasters that the world itself seems to be summoning us to God.” What mattered now was praedicatio, the gathering into the Christian Church of what remained of the human race, so as to face the dread Judgment Seat of Christ…It as a thought to greatly concentrate the mind. For Gregory the age of praedicatio was not an age of panic. It was, rather, an age of unexpected excitements. Like soft dawn creeping beneath a door, Gregory saw in his own age, a subdued recrudescent of the miraculous powers which had once accompanied the first advance of the Apostles. In 594 his Dialogues…announced to the Christian world that …his native Italy had been filled with vibrant holy men and women. They had been sent by God, in the last days of he world to warn mankind.

How The Irish Did Not Save Civilization But Did Something Greater
It is important not to exaggerate the cultural riches of sixth century Ireland. An enthusiastic nationalist tradition has claimed that an entire range of classical Latin books were transported to the island at the time of “Barbarian Invasions.” They were saved by the Irish form the barbarism into which , so these enthusiasts assert, continental Europe had irrevocably sunk. Books are still written entitled “How the Irish Saved Civilization”. This is a myth that has no scholarly support. It is also a myth that overlooks the true originality and creativity of Irish Christian culture at that time. For what Irish and West Britons lacked in books , they more than made up for though the intensity and originality with which they read what books they had, and the zest with which they applied their reading to substantially new situations, The Irish did a lot more than “save” the relics of classical civilization. They created something new.

Penance: Augustinian and Gregory the Great
Penance, for Augustine, was not a spectacular remedy for occasional great sins. It was, rather, a frame of mind. It was a lifelong process, because sin also, was the lifelong companion of the Christian.  It was Gregory the Great who added a final, distinctive tone to the Augustinian tradition of perpetual penance. His contribution derived, in many ways, from a very ancient Roman past. The aristocratic tradition of moral guidance, represented by Seneca and others, had always urged its practitioners to subject themselves to relentless inner cross-examination, so as to lay bare their failings and to correct them. To this venerable, almost instinctive tradition, maintained among the Roman elites, Gregory added the entire world of the Desert Fathers, with their unflinching emphasis on the constant inner struggle of the monk and on the need for candor in revealing all sins to a spiritual guide…all sins mattered; and all must be examined with medical precision if they were to be “healed.”  …The more Christians strove for perfection, he believed, the more clearly they would see heir own imperfection…Gregory used he word “horror”…not the fear of hell, rather, he referred to a nightmare sense of vertigo experienced by pious persons at the sight of the sheer tenacity, the insidiousness, and the minute particularity of their sins…They must look at themselves as God saw them, that is, with the divine impatience of an utterly just being, for whom a shoddy, unfinished soul was not enough.

Islam
In 610 at the age of 40, Muhammad began to see visions. They came from Allah, “The Lord of the World.” For the next 20 years, the messages came irregularly, in sudden, shattering moments, up to his death in 632. In them Muhammad believed, the same God who had spoken to Moses and to Jesus, and to many thousands of humbler prophets, now spoke again, once and for all, to himself. Vivid sequences of these words from God were carefully memorized by Muhammad’s followers. They were passed on by skilled reciters throughout the Arabic speaking world. For these were nothing less than snatches of the voice of God himself speaking to the Arabs through Muhammad. They were not written down until 660, in very different circumstances from the time of their first delivery. When written out…they came to be known as the Qur’an. What Muhammad recited was a direct rendering of the eloquence of God as he spoke to the human race…His messages declared that neglect and partisan strife had caused Jews and Christians to slip away from, even to distort the messages which they had once received from their prophets Moses and Jesus. Christians were told in, in no uncertain terms, that they had erred. They were warned by God that the Christological controversies which had absorbed their energies for so many centuries were based on a gigantic misunderstanding. Jesus had not been God and had never claimed to be treated as if he was God: “And behold God will say: “  Jesus, son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men: worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of God?” He will say:” Glory to Thee. Never could I have said what I had no right to say [Qur’an v:119]

The Dome Of The Rock
Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik had made an even more aggressive statement of the superiority of Muslims to all other religions. In 692, he began to build the Dome of the Rock on top of the deserted site of the former Jewish Temple at Jerusalem. The new dome towered above the dome of Constantine’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Inside the mosaics around the base of the dome bore inscriptions from the Qur’an. …They showed that the Caliph wished to make plain to visiting Muslim pilgrims that, in God’s definitive judgment, the entire past of Christianity had been weighed and found wanting. The inscriptions were taken from verses of the Qur’an in which Christians were rebuked: Oh People of the Book (i.e. Christians), do not go beyond the bounds of your religion….Jesus , the son of Mary, was only God’s messenger…It is not for God to take a son…The true religion with God is Islam.{ Qur’an iv:171 and iii:19]

Subordination of Christians and Jews in the Islamic Empire
Christians paid a special poll tax – the jizya – in return for the “benefaction” of being allowed to continue to practice their religion undisturbed. The jizya tax was intended to make plain their subordination. It was paid by individuals and not by communities. Its administration required an elaborate and vexatious system of registration, such as only a strong empire, backed by a professional bureaucracy, could have imposed. Event he moment of payment was supposed to emphasize the subordinate position of the “people of he book” over against Muslims. Lawyers insisted hat those who offered the jizya must be careful to present the money on their upraised palms, in such a way that their hands should never e seen to rise above those of the Muslim recipient. In return for this mark of inferiority, Christians and Jews were left free to carry on their lives under the protection of an Islamic empire.

Bands of Human Wolves: 7^th Century Ireland
The monks knew that in 7^th Century Ireland a further, concentric band of persons lurked in the moral equivalent of the wild. The worst examples of these were bands of landless, unmarried young men…who lived a wild existence in the woods and bog lands. Eating horseflesh marked by sinister tokens of their vows of vengeance, frequently employed as the powerful as “enforcers”, these groups shadowed Irish society like the grey shapes of he wolves the cu glas, the grey dogs, packs of savage creatures who had broken loose from human control. Human wolves, untamed warrior sand brigands, occupied the unchurched edges of society.

Pascha And Easter
Pascha, the Latin version of the Jewish feast of Passover, the Pasah, was still the word used in all the romance languages…but in England, Pascha became Easter. “The name was derived from Eostre, the pagan goddess form whom the month was named – the joy of a pagan spring festival became the joy of Easter

The Wisdom Of An Anglo-Saxon In 628
This is how the present life of man on earth appears to me, King, in comparison with the time that is unknown to us. You are sitting, feasting with your earldormen and thegns in winter time; the fire is burning on the hearth …and all inside is warm; while outside the wintry storm of rain and snow are raging; and a sparrow files swiftly though the hall ….it flits from your sight, out of the winter storm and back into it again. So this life of man appears but for a moment: what follows, or, indeed, what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine [Christianity] brings us more certain information, it seems right we should accept it.